LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: America’s red state crisis: There is growing evidence that many Americans – particularly working-class whites in red states – are struggling to survive and have lost faith in the American government’s ability to help.

BUS DRIVER SUFFERS PERMANENT EYE DAMAGE from kid’s laser toy. “According to Live Science, the poor driver had blurry vision for six months before finally going to an eye doctor, who discovered he had a ‘subtle’ injury to his retina. The injury affects the center of the driver’s field of vision, and not much can be done to fix it. If hit at the right angle, lasers can cause small burns when they are absorbed by structures in the retina and generate heat. The bus driver apparently increased his likelihood of injury by looking in the rearview mirror multiple times to figure out who was shining a laser around.”

CHRISTIAN ADAMS: The Truth About Ben Carson and West Point:

By the age when an adult Ben Carson wrote this book, he should have learned to be more precise in his language. It seems that Dr. Carson hasn’t found a remedy to what ails him: he doesn’t seem to have any idea what he is talking about — not in his book about West Point, and not now while he is running for president. In instance after instance, Carson just doesn’t seem ready for the spotlight. Perhaps he should run for a county council seat somewhere first to hone his tongue and bone up on basic skills besides opening up someone’s skull.

Worse, Carson had layers of editors who would have asked him about this statement in his book. At some point, the statement “I was offered a scholarship to West Point” would leap from the page and he would have been asked about it. By the time Carson wrote these words, he should have known that there are no such things of offers of a scholarship to West Point unless one is accepted to West Point.

That might be a distinction Team Carson dismisses as insignificant. Sure enough, defenders like Dave Weigel (who loves when the left engages in word trickery to get themselves out of a jam) are defending Carson. That’s a bad sign.

Other bad signs continue to mount for Ben Carson that the presidency simply isn’t the office he should be seeking. Adults writing books should know enough about their country to know that everyone in West Point is on scholarship. That if one is offered a “scholarship” to West Point, it means they have been accepted as a student.

The threat from the Politico story to Carson isn’t that he tells tall tales, but rather that it reinforces the idea that he simply doesn’t understand the complexities of his newfound profession.

Or perhaps he simply underestimated how much the long-knives* would come out for anyone daring to stand in the way of another DNC-MSM coronation. But it does demonstrate the excruciating standards to which a Republican candidate is vetted versus a Democrat — reporters actually read the GOP candidates’ biographies.

*Pun not intended, given the other biographical question the MSM is currently pressing Carson on.

By the way, note that Politico has already airbrushed its story after Carson’s team pushed back — “Politico changes headline and lede on Ben Carson piece — removes line that his campaign admitted to ‘fabrication,'” Alex Pappas of the Daily Caller tweets. In any case, as Allahpundit quips, “So Ben Carson’s going to spend the next week or two running against the media. Think that’ll work in a GOP primary?”

Allah also asks a very good question: “Who ordered the code red on Ben Carson?”

Update: Politico stealth edits Carson story.

AT AMAZON, the new ScanNCut2 from Brother.

HOW BRYAN CRANSTON’S ‘TRUMBO’ WHITEWASHES STALINISM: “Blacklisting was and is a terrible thing — but we do a disservice to history when we unthinkingly celebrate Stalinists as heroes,” Sonny Bunch writes at the Daily Beast:

Yes, there’s no excuse for the blacklisting of communists by Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. Just as Scott Eckern, Orson Scott Card, and Brendan Eich should not be deprived of their livelihood for their political views—and those on the right should think twice before launching a boycott of Quentin Tarantino for his recent comments about police—the Hollywood Ten and other Communists should not have been shut out of the studio system for arguing in favor of an unpopular ideology.

But it wasn’t just an unpopular ideology that Dalton Trumbo and his fellow blacklistees were supporting with their membership in the Communist Party: They were backing Stalin and a murderous, totalitarian regime dedicated to bringing America into the Communist fold. And to overlook this fact, as Trumbo does, is to do a real disservice to history.

And then there was Trumbo’s novel, Johnny Got His Gun, on the surface a cri de coeur for pacifism, but in actuality, a classic case of, as Glenn would say, Trumbo not being anti-war, but merely on the other side. In this case, Stalin’s side, during the period while Stalin and the Nazis were carving up Poland during while operating together under their non-aggression pact. Its publication and afterlife had some fascinating twists and turns, particularly once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Or as Bunch writes, “a funny thing happened after Hitler turned on Stalin a few years later and the Communists desperately sought American entry into the war: Trumbo suddenly become much less committed to pacifism.”

That’s a topic I explored earlier this year, exploring how Trumbo, Pete Seeger and Charlie Chapin were all perfectly willing, to invert the self-serving quote from Lillian Hellman, another pro-Soviet apologist, to cut their conscience to fit this year’s fashion.

OOPS: Stand More At Work, Sit More At Home. “Using a standing desk at the office may adversely influence how much time you spend lounging in a chair at home, according to a new study of sedentary behavior. . . . The net effect of giving people sit-stand desks, in other words, was to decrease the total amount of time they sat each day but nudge them toward sitting more at home. These dynamics were evident and accelerated throughout the three months of the study.”

VIDEO: Arguing With Idiots, Carly Fiorina Spars with the Women of The View.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How I Sound to Myself vs. How I Sound to Everyone Else When I Talk About My Little Angel.

WHY BATHROOMS MATTER: “There is a lesson in this, especially for Republicans,” Jonathan Last writes at the Weekly Standard:

The left is in the process of overreaching on an issue that the average voter cares about, deeply. People might be able to rationalize supporting same-sex marriage by telling themselves that, even if it’s not their thing, it makes no difference to them what gay couples do. But if you’re a woman using the locker room at the gym, it might matter quite a lot if a man who says he’s a woman on the inside is using the shower next to you.

We have reached a bizarre moment in our politics, where the “progressive” left resists having conservative speakers on a college campus because they make students feel “unsafe,” but insists that boys who identify as girls be allowed to shower with girls in the public schools, and misgivings must be educated away, or litigated into submission.

Plus some advice on getting Hillary and Bernie on the record on this topic. Read the whole thing.

Related: “This Isn’t A Culture War. It’s A War On Culture.”

CAUGHT BLACK-HANDED: Why Did Volkswagen Cheat? “The perpetrators likely believed they wouldn’t be caught, as self-certification is the norm under the EPA, which is too cash-strapped to test but 15 percent of the powertrains on the market and is perennially threatened with extinction by Congress. (Independent researchers discovered the ploy.) And if they were caught, VW probably figured, the penalty and market fallout would be small. Perhaps it was an easy choice to cheat. The European competitive environment is rife with deception. Just look at FIFA soccer, where officials are under indictment by U.S. prosecutors. Europeans have a win-by-any-means streak that sometimes emerges under intense pressure. There certainly was pressure. Then-CEO Martin Winterkorn, who took over Volkswagen AG in 2007 determined to make VW the world leader in volume and profit, ordered his staff to deliver a clean diesel that could be sold worldwide and could carry VW’s diesel religion to the New World to convert nonbelievers. And they did deliver. Did Winterkorn know the details? Maybe he didn’t want to. He has denied any knowledge of the deceit.”

CHUTZPAH ALERT: ‘Give me a break’: CNN reporter welcomes Ben Carson ‘to the big leagues’ on candidate vetting.

That’s pretty rich coming from a spokesperson for the network that created “the Wright-Free Zone” to give Obama a get out of media jail free card in 2008 — and in November of that year, after his election was secured — admitted “The Americans who are comparing [Obama] to those remarkable predecessors [who once occupied the White House] are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.”

Related: No, Ben Carson Didn’t Lie About West Point. It’s Another Media Hit Job.

UPDATE [From Glenn]: Heh.

Indeed.

FASTER, PLEASE: New Sepsis Detector Shrinks the Diagnosis from Days to Hours.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Make Sure You Always Get the Best Rental Car.

DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES ALL THE WAY DOWN: NBCUniversal Executive Hosts Fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.

MEANWHILE, BACK ON SHAKEDOWN STREET:  Exxon Mobil Investigated for Possible Climate Change Lies by New York Attorney General.

The first comment on Tom Maguire’s Just One Minute blog nails the backstory: “Exxon’s true crime? Stopped giving to the Clinton Foundation.”

IT’S POTEMKIN VEHICLES ALL THE WAY DOWN: VW Emissions Cheating Scandal Spreads to Sports Cars.

AND TO THINK I STARTED THE WEEK COMPLAINING ABOUT 12-TONE SERIAL MUSIC: Video: Feminism Scream Singing.

It’s just warned over Yoko Ono — and Yoko was singing like this nearly half a century ago.

FINALLY, A 21ST CENTURY HEADLINE LIKE THE ONES I EXPECTED AS A KID: Two jetpackers fly along side an A380 that is also flying.

WHO’S BURNING BLACK CHURCHES? OH. Michelle Malkin exposes the media myth that angry, racist white folks have been burning down black churches:

Over a two-week period in October, an arsonist targeted seven churches in the St. Louis area — including several in Black Lives Matter protest hotspot Ferguson, Missouri.

The Atlantic magazine, invoking the “long history of terrorism against black churches in America,” lamented that the crime spree had been “slow to get the same attention” in the local and national media as another string of church arsons that occurred earlier this summer.

Reminder: Several of those hyped hate crimes against “black churches” had been committed by black suspects; a significant number of the “black churches” were, in fact, white churches; and the complex motives behind the crimes included mental illness, vandalism and concealment of theft.

Reminder: The same hyperventilators who stoked fears about this summer’s church incidents had also stoked hysteria about the 1990s black church arson “epidemic” that fell apart under scrutiny and ended with USA Today admitting that “analysis of the 64 fires since 1995 shows only four can be conclusively shown to be racially motivated.”

Undaunted, agitators did their best to fan the flames over the latest alleged wave of race-based black church burnings in October. On Twitter, social justice activists resurrected the #WhosBurningBlackChurches hashtag. “Black churches are burning again,” Oklahoma State University professor Lawrence Ware lamented in Counterpunch. The far left propaganda outfit U.S. Uncut concluded unequivocally: “Racists in Ferguson Burn Down 5 Black Churches in 9 Days.”

Except, they didn’t. Again.

Last week, police charged 35-year-old David Lopez Jackson, who is black, with setting two of the fires. “Forensic evidence linked him to the fire on Oct. 18 at Ebenezer Lutheran Church, 1011 Theobald Street,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, and “video of his car near New Life Missionary Baptist Church, 4569 Plover Avenue, links him to the fire there on Oct. 17, police Chief Sam Dotson said.” Jackson is a suspect in the other fires and additional charges are pending.

The arrest follows another black church hate crime spree-gone-bust in my adopted hometown of Colorado Springs. In late June, after a pair of churches received menacing notices (“Black men, be aware, you are the target,” read one), black suspect Vincent Broughton admitted to posting the ugly signs.

And yes, Colorado Springs is also the home of the January 2015 NAACP office bombing that wasn’t.

Why is it that liberals/progressives–whose ideological core is defined by its adamant belief in various -isms (e.g., racism, sexism)–feel compelled to create examples of -ist actions? Logic suggests that if American society is so racist or sexist, liberals/progressives would not be compelled to invent these faux -ist incidents to justify their own hateful worldview.

Can you imagine conservatives purposefully engaging in activities they condemn, to “prove” that such activities are ubiquitous? Would conservatives obtain an abortion in the sixth month of pregnancy and inform the media that they did so because they decided they just didn’t want the inconvenience and expense of a child, hoping reporters would write stories about the moral/ethical hazards of late abortions? Would a conservative ever bomb or deface a church and spray paint “Christians beware–your faith is a lie!,” to trigger media reports about “hate” crimes and discrimination against Christians by atheists or non-Christians?

And even if conservatives did violate their own principles in a desperate attempt to keep a narrative alive, would the liberal/progressive media even bother writing a story to “highlight” such “hateful” or “disturbing” behavior?

IS BIPARTISANSHIP EVEN POSSIBLE ANYMORE?

BRUCE THORNTON: The Religion Of Environmentalism. Like many religions, it demands sacrifices.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 911.

YOU KNOW, IT MIGHT BE A GOOD TIME TO START THINKING ABOUT SOME CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS: The 2015 election tightened the Republican stranglehold on state government.

Perhaps I should reread Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments.

I should also note that the Tennessee Law Review published a special symposium issue on constitutional conventions a few years ago. I wrote the Foreword, Sandy Levinson wrote the Afterword, and an all-star cast including Randy Barnett, Brannon Denning, Richard Epstein, Tim Lynch, Rob Natelson, and too many other luminaries to mention contributed the stuff in between. Here’s my contribution, which focuses specifically on spending. And here’s video of me talking about it at the Harvard Law School conference on constitutional conventions.