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Plus, Outlet Deals on Computer Components & Storage.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Blow Up The Administrative State. “A smaller government would mean fewer phony-baloney jobs for college graduates with few marketable skills but demonstrated political loyalty. It would mean fewer opportunities for tax dollars to be directed to people and entities with close ties to people in power. It would mean less ability to engage in social engineering and “nudges” aimed at what are all-too-often seen as those dumb rubes in flyover country. The smaller the government, the fewer the opportunities for graft and self-aggrandizement — and graft and self-aggrandizement are what our political class is all about.”

VIDEO: Larry Elder: Is America Racist?

TRUMP RENTS OUT IOWA THEATER FOR FREE SHOWINGS OF 13 HOURS: “This is a clever move by Trump,” Betsy Newmark writes. “It sets him up as going against Hillary rather than other GOP candidates, something he wasn’t doing earlier in the campaign. I do wonder how much the makers of the film like seeing it being co-opted into GOP politics and Trump’s campaign…I was thinking of how this movie joins another, ‘Black Hawk Down,’ to create bookends films that illustrate Clinton foreign policy failures.”

Plus additional thoughts and links regarding last night’s little-watched DNC debate.

“NEW YORK VALUES” DON’T INCLUDE PRIVACY: NEW YORK CONSIDERS MANDATING BACK DOORS INTO PHONES.

KARMA: NYT REPORTER COMPLAINS ABOUT BEING EJECTED FROM TRUMP EVENT. “The DC Media created a world that allows politicians to treat them like garbage, and only now are they complaining about it. But it is too late, because in the world they created, hearing The Corrupt moan about Karma is music to the ears of every red-blooded American…Reminder: Back in July, New York Times reporter Maggie Habermann allowed herself to be literally roped by the Hillary Clinton campaign.”

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: More people in Europe are dying than are being born. “The researchers find that 17 European nations have more people dying in them than are being born (natural decrease), including three of Europe’s more populous nations: Russia, Germany and Italy. In contrast, in the U.S. and in the state of Texas, births exceed deaths by a substantial margin. . . . Findings reveal that 58 percent of the 1,391 counties of Europe had more deaths than births compared to just 28 percent of the 3,141 counties of the U.S.”

I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: Does new Top Gear presenter Chris Evans suffer from car sickness?

“WHOA. THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN EVERY DAY – OR EVER:” NBC’s Gifford Blames Abortionist Kermit Gosnell for Real ‘War on Women.’

I’M SO OLD I CAN REMEMBER WHEN IT WAS RACIST TO ASK THIS ABOUT A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Is Senator Ted Cruz a “Natural Born Citizen”? Yes.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Molecular arm grabs, transports, releases molecular cargo.

SAYING NO TO KING CORN: Ted Cruz’s Ethanol Stand Defies Industry, Bipartisan Tradition of Sucking Up.

“NO INDIVIDUAL TOO BIG TO JAIL:” Hillary’s subconscious acts up in Dem debate, provides 6 words that will haunt her.

EZRA KLEIN (DEMOCRAT-GE) SLAMS COMRADE BERNIE SANDERS.

That’s odd. I’m old enough to remember when Young Ezra Klein was rather gung-ho on a populist brand of ultra-big government that similarly combined elements of both nationalism and socialism.

REALITY WINS: The Air Force Gives Up On Its Plan To Retire The A-10.

SALENA ZITO: Obama Sired America’s Discontent.

In the Obama economy, wages have not improved; in fact, they have created great unease and not inspired the confidence Americans once had in work — which is why the president has responded by pushing higher wages for service jobs once meant to be temporary bridges from high school and college to adult life.

He needed a straw man for his climate-change regulations that closed manufacturing industries, nearly made coal production extinct and clobbered the shale industry. So he blames companies like McDonald’s for not doubling the hourly pay for entry-level jobs to mask his inability to address the economic setbacks caused by his politics.

The economy is dismal not just in the old Rust Belt but nationwide. On Tuesday, the National Association of Counties released its gold-standard study that shows, six years after the economic expansion began, 93 percent of U.S. counties have failed to fully recover from the devastating contraction they suffered during the recession.

Only 7 percent, or 214 out of 3,069 counties nationwide, recovered by 2015 to their pre-2008 numbers on total employment, economic expansion, home values and unemployment.

Mr. President, the only person peddling fiction appears to be you.

Related: Obama orchestrated a massive transfer of wealth to the 1 percent.

THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD: Mark Steyn draws upon his interview with British pop singer Lulu to explore both the origins of Bowie’s song and why he insisted that it would be a hit for her as well. Plus a look at a far stranger Bowie duet — his appearance with Bing Crosby in Der Bingle’s final Christmas special.

I’M NOT AT ALL SURE HOW HE’LL DO AGAINST THE PATRIOTS IN THE AFC CHAMPIONSHIP, but Peyton Manning is certainly on a roll, taking out both the Steelers and Al Jazeera America in less than a week.

ANN ALTHOUSE: Bernie Sanders sure was rude to Hillary Clinton. “The power lust has welled up. We saw it last night. The lovable old Larry-David-befuddled-grandpa image can only protect him so long. Once we can visualize Bernie Sanders as winning, it’s not cute anymore, and Hillary has an opportunity she can use.”

Related: Bernie mopped the floor with Hillary. Well, Bernie did better in the post-debate snap polls. Or as IowaHawk put it:

UPDATE: From the comments: “If Hillary is forced out and the Dems try to shoehorn Biden in, the choice for the D voter will be between Alzheimer’s and aneurysms…”

Also: Heh:

BRINGING NEW MEANING TO THE CONCEPT OF “PUTTING OUT THE FIRE:” Italian woman asks for help from firefighters after losing keys to her chastity belt.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Blow Up The Administrative State: Constitutional convention could wrest power from political class and return it to states and people.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 984.

WHO KIDNAPPED CHARLES BLOW? “Is Charles Blow’s latest column some sort of coded hostage message?”, asks Tom Maguire. “His topic is guns and he actually makes some sense. Yes, I wrote that, and he wrote this…”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A “Poverty Preference” in College Admissions?

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, a philanthropic organization that awards scholarships to low-income, high-achieving high school students, is earning some well-deserved media attention for its comprehensive report on how and why colleges should attract more kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. . . .

The report draws attention to some very important defects in the way opportunities and benefits are distributed in this country. There really are structural barriers in place that prevent poor students from accessing elite education. And a “poverty preference” is a much more coherent way to level the playing field than affirmative action, at least as affirmative action is currently practiced by campus diversity bureaucracies.

At the same time, we worry that philanthropic efforts to expand opportunity for poor people often focus too narrowly on funneling them into elite colleges. To be sure, this is a worthwhile effort—we should be focused on making college admissions as fair as possible. But we should also be approaching a problem for the other end—that is, making an elite education matter less when it comes to determining a person’s life prospects.

As we’ve written before, the existing college-to-employment pipeline is deeply unfair. Many of the biggest employers, in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, use university prestige as a proxy for intellectual ability, severely harming the prospects of students who either weren’t academically focused at age 17, or who, for personal or financial reasons, didn’t want to be a part of the elite education bubble. There are a number of ways to take on this problem, including creating a system of post-college national exams, or changing corporate recruitment policies, so that students from West Texas University and Chico State have a fair shot at competing with students from Princeton and Yale.

Yes.