TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1250.

HEATHER MAC DONALD ON TRUMPED-UP OUTRAGE: The Left condemns the GOP candidate even as it celebrates crudity and sexual exhibitionism throughout the culture.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Anti-Trump Hypocrites Of The Left.

SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIA: Twitter’s shares slump on report that bids are unlikely.

VIDEO: WHAT IF THE NAZIS WON WWII? The New York Post talks with cast members from The Man in the High Castle.

Flashback: The Nazis didn’t win, but as Allan Bloom noted 35 years ago in The Closing of the American Mind, the Weimar Republic certainly did. (See also: baggage and worldviews being dragged around by our two presidential candidates this year.)

DONALD TRUMP’S MISSION: Make Clinton’s life hell for the next month.

CNN says that like it’s a bad thing.

PENSION TSUNAMI UPDATE: Unions Ask Court To Rule Against Math:

Pension hawks celebrated in August when a California appeals court upheld a state law limiting the ability of public employees to spike their pensions late in their careers. But with the case possibly headed to the state’s Supreme Court, the battle isn’t over yet. . . .

The so-called “California rule” has historically prohibited the state from reducing pension benefits over time. So when union-dominated public pension funds would purposefully conceal the costs of their liabilities and eventually run up a huge shortfall, the state would be unable to do anything except increase its own contributions even further. The California appeals court ruling from this summer modified this precedent by holding that, “while a public employee does have a ‘vested right’ to a pension, that right is only to a ‘reasonable’ pension—not an immutable entitlement to the most optimal formula of calculating the pension.”

It’s no surprise that the unions are looking to get the ruling tossed.

Hopefully the California Supreme Court won’t give more cover for more can-kicking and phony accounting. Municipalities in the Golden State and across the country are facing deep fiscal holes that they will not emerge from without either adjustments to pension guarantees or draconian cuts to vital public services like education or public safety. As more and more cities start to feel the tremors of the coming avalanche of defaults and credit downgrades, judges need to give local governments more fiscal flexibility than they have had in the past. Without that flexibility, more municipalities are headed for bankruptcy. And once they file for Chapter 9, all bets are off, and pensioners could face an even worse haircut than anything being discussed today.

Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debts that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be. Plan accordingly.

JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Hillary Campaign E-Mails Singled Out NYT’s Maggie Haberman for ‘A Very Good Relationship’ for Spin Help.

JACOB SULLUM: Clinton Shows How She Manages to Be Less Trusted Than Trump: The Democratic nominee continues to minimize her email “mistake” and misrepresents what she said about the disadvantages of truth in politics.

ROGER SIMON: Panicky GOP Leaders Should Come Home after Trump Wins Debate #2.

LAWRENCE SUMMERS EXPLAINS THE NEW NORMAL ANEMIA: The global economy has entered unexplored, dangerous territory.

The International Monetary Fund’s growth forecast released just before the meeting was once again revised downward. While recession does not impend in any major region, growth is expected at rates dangerously close to stall speed. Worse is the spreading realization that the central banks have little fuel left in their tanks. Recessions come intermittently and unpredictably. Containing them generally requires 5 percentage points of rate cuts. Nowhere in the industrial world do central banks have anything like this kind of room, even allowing for the effects of unconventional policies such as quantitative easing. Market expectations suggest that it is unlikely they will gain much room for years.

Summers adds that “It can hardly come as a great surprise that when economic growth falls short year after year, and when its beneficiaries are a small subset of the population, electorates turn surly.”

In this country, the regulatory state has never been so intrusive or capricious, entitlements and disability payments dwarf the Great Depression’s New Deal, deficits are set to explode again even without a recession, and our public debt is at levels unprecedented without a global war. Perhaps worst of all, not even nine trillion in new debt and a multitrillion dollar expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet could buy us a “recovery” with GDP growth close to the postwar average.

That’s some bad luck making voters so surly.

WELL, IT’S DONE BETTER THAN THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, THAT’S FOR SURE: How The Nobel Prize in Economics has Legitimized Free-Market Thought.

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A NEW EDITION OF EMBRACE THE SUCK IS IN THE WORKS: It’s the pamphlet of military idioms and colorful acronyms — at least that’s one way to describe FUBAR. I’ll be working with Adam Bellow again, this time through Liberty Island. We’re asking veterans to contribute new favorite phrases and acronyms. Please send contributions through Liberty Island (at the link, ).

QUESTION ASKED: Trump bounces back, but back to where?

WIKILEAKS: Clinton team instructed DNC with strategic goal of “elevating” Trump two months before he declared his candidacy.

Related: Leaked Emails Show That Trump Was a Tool Used by the Hillary Campaign From Day One.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot: Consider Arnold Schwarzenegger’s streak of voting for the Republican candidate terminated.

—Twitchy, this past Saturday.

Chaser: Schwarzenegger’s Words About Women Are at Issue.

—The L.A. Times, September 16, 2003.

WELL, JUDGES HAVE LIFE TENURE: Subtle Age Discrimination Gets a Court’s Blessing.

Overturning a half-century of practice, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit held that job applicants can’t benefit from the disparate-impact provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act — only employees can. The decision, based on a literal reading of the text, flies in the face of logic and common sense. Other circuits won’t agree — and the U.S. Supreme Court should take the case and reverse the holding.

The employment act expressly prohibits intentional age discrimination both in hiring job applicants and in firing employees. The case decided by the appeals court arises from a separate provision of the law that says employers can’t adopt policies that have the effect of treating people disparately based on age.

That provision, Section 4(a)2, says it’s unlawful for an employer to “limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s age.”

You’ll notice the provision doesn’t specifically mention job applicants. But Congress pretty clearly meant to prohibit hiring policies that have discriminatory effects. And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission long ago adopted a rule interpreting the law to extend to age-discriminatory hiring practices.

Richard Villarreal, then 49, encountered exactly that kind of discriminatory hiring policy when he applied for a job as a territorial manager with tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds. RJR outsourced its hiring, but provided discriminatory guidelines. It told the human resources company that its “targeted candidate” would be a person “2–3 years out of college” who “adjusts easily to changes.” The guidelines said to “stay away from” applicants who had been “in sales for 8–10 years.”

That’s classic disparate-impact discrimination. The guidelines don’t say “no older people.” Instead they create conditions that seem neutral — you can graduate from college at any age — but as applied will lead to hiring almost all young people. The EEOC told Villarreal he could go ahead and sue RJR.

But the 11th Circuit, sitting en banc, threw out Villarreal’s claim. It held that the language of the disparate-impact provision in the age-discrimination act excludes job hiring.

There’s a huge amount of age discrimination in hiring. You see it even in higher education. Law schools, for example, notoriously tend to regard people with more than 2 or 3 years practice experience as “tainted” and thus insufficiently intellectual, and it’s much harder to get hired in general if you’re over 35 or so. At Tennessee we’ve made some excellent hires by ignoring that practice, getting people that other schools overlooked, or deliberately wrote off.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON The so-called “town hall” debate.

It wasn’t much of a “town hall” debate was it? I felt sorry for those people who had to sit and be background for 90 minutes. There were so few of them. Each one stood out and had to sit still and look alive, but though they were few, most never got called on. Those who did get a shot asked the most simple, pathetic questions. As I try to recall the questions this morning, they all seemed to be a short plea: What will you do to encourage people like me?

America in 2016.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Yale’s Jason Stanley Spirals Ever Downward.

US NAVY WRITES LATEST UPDATES TO NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY:

And the same word-blind stupidity is spreading to our armed forces. As of last week, the U.S. Navy is dropping all job titles that include the word “man.” A chief yeoman will become just a chief. “Fire Controlmen” will become nondescript “Petty Officers.” To avoid insult, “sailors will no longer be identified by their job title,” says the Navy Times; the titles “airman, fireman, constructionman and hospitalman” will be “replaced by job codes”; “B320” or “B450” or some other colorless non-word.

All this because no one has told Navy secretary, Ray Mabus, that the suffix “man” does not necessarily mean male.

And all this while the size and readiness of the military are plummeting to pre–Second World War levels. To boot, all this during the same week that Russia threatened to shoot down American planes over Syria; an implicit threat from Russia that it’s ready to go to war with us over Middle East hegemony. This just months after the U.S. did nothing in response to Iran’s navy’s capturing and humiliating ten American sailors (seamen?). This after many, many implicit and explicit red lines have been crossed in Syria, Ukraine, and the South China sea without any meaningful American reaction.

Better dead than rude.

THE HILL: Bill Clinton stops campaign rally to respond to heckler who calls him a ‘rapist.’

Plus: “‘Actions speak louder than words,’ Juanita Broaddrick tweeted. ‘[Donald Trump] said bad things! [Hillary Clinton] threatened me after [Bill Clinton] raped me.'”

Worst election ever.

BILLY BUSH, EMBROILED IN TRUMP TAPE SCANDAL, SUSPENDED FROM TODAY SHOW:

After 12 years as co-host of “Access,”  Bush moved his family from Los Angeles to New York City to join “Today” in August.

Bush’s arrival led to speculation that he is being groomed to eventually succeed long-time “Today” stalwart Matt Lauer, who has been in the 7 to 9 a.m. co-anchor chair since 1997.

Bush’s misogynistic repartee with Trump will likely put that job out of his reach.

Just a minor bit of collateral damage for DNC-NBC on the way to electing another Clinton to the White House.  But why are Democrat-controlled media institutions such cesspits of misogyny?

IF YOU THINK DONALD TRUMP’S COMMENTS ARE VULGAR, CHECK OUT HILLARY’S POTTY MOUTH.

As Glenn would say, when men swear like sailors, it’s crude and vulgar. When women do it, it’s empowering!

JOHN SCHINDLER: WELCOME TO THE BALTIC VERSION OF THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, as Putin seeks one last, grand strategic humiliation for Obama before he leaves office.