SUPREME COURT AND FEDERAL COURT VOTING RIGHTS DECISIONS UPDATE: Saturday reverses Friday.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday restored a Republican-supported Arizona law that makes it a crime for get-out-the-vote operatives to collect and deliver absentee ballots filled out by voters.

The court’s action was one of two notable election law matters Saturday in which the GOP prevailed. A federal judge in New Jersey, ruling on a complaint brought by the Democratic National Committee, declined to find that the Republican National Committee had violated a longstanding legal settlement barring it from engaging in certain poll monitoring and ballot security activities.

As for the link: I went through a search engine and did not encounter a paywall. That noted, last time I used a search engine to access a Journal article for a blog post, a few readers reported they hit the wall anyway. If you can reach the article, read the whole thing.

WELL, COMMUNISTS USUALLY LIE: A Communist NYU Professor Says He Was Ousted for Mocking Political Correctness. Was He? “At the very least, setting aside the other ambiguities here, it appears to be the case that Rectenwald was offered a chance to return to the classroom and turned it down.”

Plus: “A seemingly ironclad law of the current campus culture wars is that for every dumb act of played-out conservative provocation in which an anti-p.c. warrior claims that oversensitive liberals get triggered too easily, there is a response from progressives that … well, basically fits that stereotype. So it was here.”

IT’S ALWAYS NICE TO MAKE THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES.

Related: Roger Simon’s article, for which I produced the artwork above, Nixon II, the Sequel — It’s Not Just a Movie.

SO BACK DURING THE LAST EBOLA OUTBREAK, SOME OF US (INCLUDING ME) SPECULATED THAT THE DISEASE HAD EVOLVED INTO A MORE DANGEROUS FORM, and some people called that irresponsible scaremongering. But now there’s this: Ebola Evolved Into Deadlier Enemy During the African Epidemic.

The Ebola epidemic that tore through West Africa in 2014 claimed 11,310 lives, far more than any previous outbreak. A combination of factors contributed to its savagery, among them a mobile population, crumbling public health systems, official neglect and hazardous burial practices.

But new research suggests another impetus: The virus may have evolved a new weapon against its human hosts. In studies published on Thursday in the journal Cell, two teams of scientists report that a genetic mutation may have made Ebola more deadly by improving the virus’s ability to enter human cells.

The researchers do not yet understand exactly how it works, but several lines of evidence suggest it helped expand the scope of the epidemic. One alarming finding: Patients infected with the mutated version of Ebola were significantly more likely to die.

“It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s an adaptation to the human host,” said Dr. Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and an author of one of the new studies. . . . Collectively, Dr. Luban said, the evidence points strongly to the conclusion that Ebola’s mutation helped it spread more effectively in people.

Unlike Rush Limbaugh, I don’t say “Don’t doubt me!” In fact, I encourage people to doubt what I say here, just as they should be skeptical of every information source. On the other hand, I thought my speculation here was reasonable and supported by the evidence, and it has turned out to be correct.

And I’m also right about the need for agencies like the CDC to focus on infectious disease threats instead of fashionable social engineering.

BARRICADED STREETS IN MOSUL: Via the BBC. The photos show some of the Islamic State’s defensive preparations — barricades, cleared fields of fire.

IT’S PROBABLY ALREADY TOO LATE, IF THEY’RE THERE: Stephen Hawking warns us to stop reaching out to aliens before it’s too late.

I’ve actually been reading an interesting piece by James Miller on just this subject. I think it’ll be a column, post-election.

VOICE OF AMERICA’S NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT JIM MALONE: Mr. Malone says character is a “center stage” 2016 campaign issue. Well, yes. Malone employs a “trust versus temperament” frame. OK, but trust is a pulled punch. A frame I used in a recent essay, “her crimes, his words” doesn’t pull the punch.

ROGER SIMON: Is America on the Brink of Civil War?

GANGSTA RAP MEETS GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Trump is having a field day with Jay Z’s obscenities. Rapper “Jay Z repeatedly used the n-word and dropped f-bombs while rapping for a get out the vote effort Friday night in Ohio.”

Yup, helping Hillary get out the vote. Hillary was there. (Note the linked NBC report does not mention Jay Z’s language.)

Today, Trump told a campaign crowd in Florida:

…then Hillary said, ‘I did not like Donald Trump’s lewd language.’ My lewd language! I’ll tell you what: I’ve never said what he (Jay Z) said in my life! But that shows you the phoniness of politicians and the phoniness of the whole system, folks.”

Where’s the media outrage? Oh, there isn’t any. What Trump said in 2005 was indefensibly foul, but he thought he was having a private conversation with Billy Bush, then of Access Hollywood. Jay Z’s gangsta rap at Hillary’s campaign rally gave Trump an opportunity to slam both Hillary’s and the mainstream media’s hypocrisy. Gangsta meets gangster.

IN 2011 LAWYERS WARNED CLINTONS THAT THE CLINTON FOUNDATION WAS “MORE LIKE A POLITICAL OPERATION” THAN PHILANTHROPY:

A third-party review of the Clinton Foundation found the charity operated “more like a political operation” than a philanthropy in Nov. 2011 — just a few months before the end of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

The revelation was included in a “confidential” memo prepared by Kumiki Gibson, then a lawyer at Williams & Connolly, the firm that has represented Clinton throughout her email controversy. That memo was published Saturday by WikiLeaks, along with hundreds of other emails taken from the inbox of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.

“The Foundation (as opposed to its initiatives, which I have not reviewed) operates more like a political operation focused on immediate situations, tasks, and events, as opposed to a professional, strategic, and sustainable corporation committed to advancing its overall mission,” the review stated.

ATTENTION ATTENTION ATTENTION: Scientists pinpoint when a woman’s sex drive declines.

Except: “It’s worth noting that the study relies on self-reporting…”

IRISH DEMOCRACY: Obamacare Is Being Repealed by Consumers, Providers and Insurers.

HMM: Erik Prince: NYPD Ready to Make Arrests in Anthony Weiner Case. Well, stay tuned.

SOUTH KOREA: Pressure to resign increases on President Park Geun-hye. Demonstrators use a couple of phrases Americans might need in a Hillary Administration: “Step down, criminal,” and “Treason by a secret government.”

Park’s close friend, Choi Soon-sil, and two former Park aides allegedly “pressured businesses into giving $70 million to two foundations Choi controlled.”

Shades of a Clinton Foundation shakedown?

Mishandling of classified information is another allegation:

There are also allegations that Choi, despite having no government job, regularly received classified information and meddled in various state affairs, including the appointment of ministers and policy decisions.

South Koreans are rejecting gangster government.

BILL MURRAY: World’s Coolest Guy.

JOURNALISM: ABC News staged crime-scene shot, photograph shows.

THEY SERVE THE IMPORTANT PURPOSE OF MAKING THE INTERVIEWERS FEEL IMPORTANT: Job Interviews Are Useless. “Unstructured interviews have been found to have surprisingly little value in a variety of areas. For medical school interviews, for example, they appear to have no predictive power at all: in terms of academic or clinical performance, those accepted on the basis of interviews do no better than those who are rejected. In law schools, my own experience is that faculties emphasize how aspiring law professors do in one-on-one interviews — which usually provide no information at all about how they will do as teachers or researchers.”

THE WORLD’S FIRST MANNED ELECTRIC HELICOPTER.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Clinton’s charity confirms Qatar’s $1 million gift while she was at State Dept.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT THE WAY I HAD HOPED: Law Enforcement Warns Parents About Predators Using Smartphones for “Bunny Hunting.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1276.

OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE MAY JUST BE BEGINNING: Dems’ war on the FBI is a preview of a Hillary presidency.

Vote wisely — as Glenn noted late last month in USA Today, Trump isn’t “any less arrogant than Clinton (though it would be hard to be more arrogant).” But far more people would be willing “to tell Trump no. The civil service, which leans overwhelmingly Democratic, won’t be bending over backwards to do his will. The press can’t stand him. And Congress, even if controlled by the GOP, won’t support him if he misbehaves because so many Republicans dislike him, too. The truth is, neither one of our leading candidates for president is a paragon of virtue. But only one of them has already made a habit of flouting the law while in office, selling favors and escaping the consequences, and only one of them is likely to be able to pull it off from the White House.”

TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: Anthem Threat Highlights Obamacare’s Big Test.

Anthem Inc. is threatening to leave the Obamacare exchanges.

“If we do not see clear evidence of an improving environment and a path towards sustainability in the marketplace, we will likely modify our strategy in 2018,” Anthem Chief Executive Officer Joseph Swedish said on a call Wednesday discussing his company’s third-quarter results. “Clearly, 2017 is a critical year as we continue to assess the long-term viability of our exchange footprint.”

But in fact, this is huge news, because Anthem runs the Blue Cross/Blue Shield organizations in 14 states. And though Anthem doesn’t appear to be the sole company offering exchange coverage in any of those states, the Blues are generally the backbone of the exchanges. Where others have quailed, the Blues have by and large stuck with Obamacare. If they pull out, then it’s likely that we’ll see more counties, and possibly entire states, with no Obamacare policies on offer.

Anthem doesn’t run all the Blue Cross organizations. But it’s still a bellwether for what may be happening in other markets. Whether the Blues pull back — and how far — will tell us a lot about how Obamacare is going to go.

One of my friends on Facebook was lamenting yesterday that her family’s health insurance premiums just increased by 60% even as the deductibles climbed high. This is happening all over the country, despite the lies that premiums would go down, and people could keep their doctors. If Trump wins, it’ll be a big reason.

BRINGING A GUN TO A KNIFE ATTACK: Cedar Falls stabbing suspect was stopped by citizen with gun permit.