WHAT HAPPENS when you flush a toilet full of mercury?

YES: A Close Election Could Expose Risky Electronic Voting Machines.

You know what can’t be hacked from overseas? Paper ballots.

TROLL LEVEL: SUPREME GALACTIC OVERLORD. American Hero Heckles Europeans, Sinks Their Putt, Then Takes Their Money.

WOULDN’T A PAY INCREASE DRAW MORE PEOPLE IN? Trucker shortage prompts calls for driverless big rigs.

HILLARY CLINTON: Sanders’ revolution is a ‘false promise’ of free everything for the inexperienced.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Anti-Semitism at My University, Hidden in Plain Sight.

SO THE BURKA IS BASICALLY MENTAL SELF-PROTECTION FOR UNATTRACTIVE MEN: Beautiful Women Can Be Bad For Your Health, According To Scientists. “Just five minutes alone with an attractive female raise the levels of cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, according to a study from the University of Valencia. The effects are heightened in men who believe that the woman in question is ‘out of their league’.”

SHOT: NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER MICHAEL BARBARO ASKED IF DONALD TRUMP WAS JUST TONY SOPRANO WITH BETTER CLOTHES.

Chaser: Media Admire ‘Beauty’ of NYTimes Book Review Comparing Trump to Hitler.

Wait, is he one of history’s greatest monsters*, or a smalltime Tri-State Mafioso? Make up your mind, Gray Lady.

* No, not Jimmy Carter.

BASEMENT DWELLERS: CLINTON ATTACKS MILLENNIAL BERNIE BACKERS IN LEAKED AUDIO.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1242.

THAT’S NOT FUNNY:

Contra [clapter jockey Samantha Bee], the fact that late-night television is full of so-called comedians launching into political rants is a big problem for political discourse in the era of Trump. For instance, it was quickly pointed out that in 2012 Richter was making jokes, if you’d call them that, about Mitt Romney being racist. It’s the boy who cried “wolf.” Even when there are legitimate objections to Trump, it’s hard to take them seriously coming from people who slandered a good man as racist without cause in 2012.

It’s pretty indisputable that rebellion against the mocking of politically correct scolds is a significant part of Trump’s appeal. The likes of Bee and Richter and the rest of the late-night lefty -comedian industrial complex will never admit it, but the more rabid their attempts to discredit Trump, the more they help him.

And make no mistake, Bee’s job is helping a small audience of liberal elites to blur the line between self-righteousness and humor.

As John Podhoretz tweeted last week, “Late-night ‘comedy’ on HBO and Comedy Central is for liberals what televangelism was for born-agains in the 1980s and 1990s.” Spot-on, especially considering how “Progressivism” is a 150-year old enterprise to replace God with politics and aesthetics.

And given the headline of the above Weekly Standard article and the left’s self-righteousness and unending smug, this Photoshop by Jon Gabriel seems apropos:

JACOB SULLUM: No More Accidental Criminals: Why does Hillary get credit for good intentions, while the rest of us get condemned for honest mistakes?

Hillary Clinton supporters should have a new appreciation for the legal concept of mens rea—usually translated as “guilty mind”—because it saved her from federal prosecution for using a personal email server as secretary of state. In recommending that the Justice Department not bring charges against the former first lady, FBI Director James Comey differentiated her “extremely careless” handling of “very sensitive, highly classified information” from other cases involving “intentional and willful mishandling.”

Not everyone gets the benefit of such distinctions. Consider the retiree on a snowmobile outing in Colorado who got lost in a blizzard and unwittingly crossed into a National Forest Wilderness Area; the Native Alaskan trapper who sold 10 sea otters to a buyer he mistakenly believed was also a Native Alaskan; and the 11-year-old Virginia girl who rescued a baby woodpecker from her cat.

The first two incidents resulted in misdemeanor and felony convictions, respectively, while the third led to a fine (later rescinded) and threats of prosecution. All three qualify as federal crimes, even though the perpetrators had no idea they were breaking the law.

The federal code contains something like 5,000 criminal statutes and describes an estimated 30,000 regulatory violations that can be treated as crimes. The fact that no one knows the precise numbers is itself a scandal, compounded by the fact that many of these provisions include minimal or no mens rea requirements, which ask prosecutors to demonstrate that an offender knew he was doing something wrong.

The upshot is that innocent acts, honest mistakes, and simple accidents can lead to criminal convictions that deprive people of their liberty and property, ruin their reputations, and carry lifelong collateral consequences ranging from impaired occupational opportunities to the loss of constitutional rights. That’s a serious problem, which is why mens rea reform has garnered bipartisan support in the House of Representatives.

Yet Senate Democrats dismiss the proposed changes as “corporate protection.” Their chief complaint is that requiring the government to prove a defendant knew he was breaking the law will make it harder to convict people.

No kidding. The same could be said of many safeguards widely supported by civil libertarians, including the presumption of innocence, the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and the ban on double jeopardy.

Guilty people, including violent criminals, surely escape conviction because of these rules. Likewise, if Congress beefed up federal mens rea requirements, some white-collar malefactors and felonious fat cats probably would escape criminal punishment as a result. But that prospect should not deter Congress from doing what’s right.

“They’re saying, ‘It would be a terrible thing, because the people we don’t like—corporate executives—they will be able to get off by arguing that there’s absolutely no criminal intent on their part,'” attorney Harvey Silverglate, a leading critic of overcriminalization, told Reason TV. “So you want absolute criminal liability for people you don’t like. However, when they come at you, suddenly you say, ‘Well, I didn’t intend to break the law.'”

Yes, and it works for them, to judge from Hillary’s example.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: University Offers Costume Review to Combat Accidental Halloween Microaggressions.

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

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CNN HYPOCRISY: Flashback to when network fat shamed Miss Universe Alicia Machado.

Related: Trump stumbles into Clinton’s trap by feuding with Latina beauty queen.

DAN MARKEL UPDATE: Katherine Magbanua (Mother Of Hit Man’s Children, Receptionist In Adelson Dental Practice, Former Girlfriend Of Charlie Adelson) Charged With Murder of Dan Markel.

HMM: Trump Winning Ohio, One Yard Sign at a Time. There’s an old political saying that “yard signs don’t vote.” But what’s striking to me about this election season is how few signs and bumper stickers I see for anyone. However, the biggest indicator that Trump is doing well in Ohio is the New York Times’ newfound conviction that Ohio’s not that important, you guys.

BALANCED REBELLION matches Democrats who pledge to vote for Gary Johnson with Republicans who pledge to vote for Gary Johnson. The idea is that their non-vote for Hillary won’t wind up helping Trump because it’s offset by a non-vote for Trump that goes to Johnson.

It’s ingenious, though I doubt the system has enough trust to actually work.

QUESTION ASKED: Does Trump Really Want to Win?

BRUH, JOE THE PLUMBER WAS RIGHT: Obamacare Just Spread $11 Billion of Wealth Around.

As Lord Melbourne (1779-1848) would say, “What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.”

QUESTION ASKED: Did I miss Hillary’s vehement opposition to stop-and-frisk when she was Senator from NY and crime was dropping?

ANNALS OF CENSORSHIP: FEC Dems lay groundwork to ban Fox, WSJ political coverage.

In their biggest threat yet to conservative media, Democrats on the Federal Election Commission are laying the groundwork to bar companies with even the tiniest foreign ownership from American politics, a move that could ban Fox, the Wall Street Journal and even the New York Times from covering political races or giving endorsements.

In a last-minute submission Wednesday, a top Democrat on the evenly split FEC proposed that the Thursday meeting of the commission begin the process to prohibit companies with foreign ownership as small as 5 percent “from funding expenditures, independent expenditures, or electioneering communications.”

Democratic Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said in her submission, “Given everything we have learned this year, it blinks reality to suggest that that there is no risk of foreign nationals taking advantage of current loopholes to intercede invisibly in American elections. This is a risk no member of the Federal Election Commission should be willing to tolerate.”

Under Weintraub’s proposal, entities that reach her foreign ownership target would conceivably be banned from advocating for a candidate’s election or defeat.

So they’ve gone full-blown McCarthyite now. And, no doubt, the rule will be carefully tailored to exclude Carlos Slim’s investment in the New York Times. . .

WHEN PEOPLE’S IDEAS CAN’T STAND CRITICISM, THEY BAN CRITICS: Les Déplorables: The French right is discovering that there are more and more things you can’t say.

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