MASS HYSTERIA IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Kemper County (Miss.) bans clown costumes, likely violates the First Amendment.

WELL, GOOD: GOP rebuffs Obama’s entreaties to fix health law.

President Barack Obama on Thursday called for Republicans next year to pass legislation to repair Obamacare. The GOP response? No.

Democrats have long held out hope that with a new president, the political winds would shift, creating an opening to pass badly needed legislative repairs.

But Republicans have been bashing Obamacare for more than six years and there is no sign that they’re going to break that habit — let alone vote for legislative repairs. House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that the law “can’t be fixed.”

Obamacare is the reason “we’ve seen record premium hikes,” Ryan said in a statement. “That’s why millions of people—including millennials—have lost their plans, or been forced to buy plans they don’t like. That’s why we’ve seen waste, fraud, and abuse. And at this point, one thing is clear: This law can’t be fixed.”

It’s like what I tell my young sons almost every day: “This is your mess; you clean it up.”

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: On Patrol with America’s Top Bioterror Cop. “The challenge is that the same germs, techniques, and skills needed to study disease can also be used as weapons. The result: potentially dangerous technology is freely available.”

NOW OUT FROM JOSH BLACKMAN: Unraveled: Obamacare, Religious Liberty, and Executive Power.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Crisis of the Conservative Intellectual.

Just click. Too lengthy to properly excerpt, too important to miss.

CHANGE: Reported Cases of Sexually Transmitted Diseases Are on Rise. “Progress in the fight against S.T.D.s has ‘unraveled,’ according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Young people, members of racial minorities and men who have sex with other men are at most risk of getting an S.T.D.”

CUE THE DISCRIMINATION SUITS: Emory University’s Campus Life Department will soon host an event that it hopes will develop into a regular social hour, but invitations will only be extended to students and staff “of color.”

DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVE WITH A BYLINE: Andrea Mitchell Falsely Claims Donna Brazile Leak Story Has Been ‘Completely Knocked Down’

CONSERVATION, CONSERVATIVE, WHO CAN BE BOTHERED TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE?

A woman was arrested on Monday after allegedly smearing peanut butter on 30 cars parked outside what she believed was a pro-Donald Trump rally.

Christina Ferguson was arrested in Amherst Junction, Wisconsin after interrupting what turned out to be a meeting of a local environmental organisation, Tomorrow River Conservation Club.

Witnesses claimed the 32-year-old entered the meeting at 9:30pm holding a “family-size jar of low-sodium, creamy natural Jif” peanut butter, shouting about how much she hated the Republican candidate.

Best quote: “‘Fortunately it wasn’t chunky peanut butter, so vehicles didn’t get scratched,’ said police.”

SIRTE NEIGHBORHOOD UPDATE: In mid-September the Libyan military reported that its militia coalition had taken the city of Sirte — with the exception of one neighborhood. Islamic State fighters were surrounded in the neighborhood. The neighborhood has proved to be one big bunker.

Abandoned houses have revealed some of their defenses: Household fridges packed with earth act as reinforcements, and bunkers dug under foundations offer protection from air strikes. Last week, Misrata forces (pro-Libyan government militia) found improvised tunnels and a makeshift field hospital. A Reuters witness said that in one house graffiti on the walls indicated a quick escape route for the next fighter to use that hideout.

The Reuters report has some casualty figures for the pro-government Misrata brigades.

IN WITH THE OUTLIERS: Over at VodkaPundit, it’s time to see what those funky “outlier” polls do to the Electoral College math.

DEATH SPIRAL: Obamacare Premiums Up 30% In TX, MS, KS; 50% In IL, AZ, PA; 93% In NM.

To be clear, these are approved rate hikes, not mere rate-hike requests from the dwindling number of ObamaCare insurers.

More:

President Obama calls this a “transition” because insurers aggressively priced too low to get healthy people to sign up.

It’s a transition all right, to hell, for those watching rates skyrocket.

Meanwhile, young and healthy millennials have decided it is ridiculous to overpay for healthcare with $5,000 deductibles to support chronically ill smokers with cancer.

Who says Millennials are innumerate?

COLLEGE SEX MEETS THE STAR CHAMBER: At Yale’s sexual misconduct tribunals, defendants can’t even cross-examine witnesses.

Under Yale’s sexual misconduct policy, sexual harassment includes verbal statements that have the “effect” of creating an “intimidating” environment. Sexual assault includes any contact without “positive, unambiguous, and voluntary” consent. According to Yale, consent must be “ongoing” at each stage of an encounter but “cannot be inferred from the absence of a ‘no’ ” or presumed from “contextual factors.”

With these expanded definitions in hand, “independent investigators”—eager to justify their employment by a university desperate to appear tough on sexual misconduct—rush off to find evidence of violations. They build dossiers on professors’ offhand comments made decades earlier. They probe the murky “he said-she said” of drunken hook-ups seeking to prove that consent was not freely given, irrespective of whether a crime has been committed. Administrative tribunals, lacking due process protections provided in a court of law, determine guilt and mete out punishments that forever label people misogynists, harassers, or perpetrators of sexual assault.

The “intimidating environment” is the one Yale men are studying and working in.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1261.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Duterte’s Flip-Flop Into Bed With China Is a Disaster for the United States.

Max Boot:

From the American viewpoint, Duterte’s flip-flop — assuming it leads to a lasting strategic shift — is a potential disaster. Aligned with the United States and its regional allies, the Philippines can provide a vital platform to oppose Chinese aggression in the South China and East China seas.

If the Philippines becomes a Chinese satrapy, by contrast, Washington will find itself hard-pressed to hold the “first island chain” in the Western Pacific that encompasses “the Japanese archipelago, the Ryukyus, Taiwan, and the Philippine archipelago.” Defending that line of island barriers has been a linchpin of U.S. strategy since the Cold War. It now could be undone because of the whims of one unhinged leader.

China could either neutralize this vital American ally or even potentially turn the Philippines into a PLA Navy base for menacing U.S. allies such as Taiwan, Japan, and Australia. At the very least, the U.S. Navy will find it much harder to protect the most important sea lanes in the world; each year $5.3 trillion in goods passes through the South China Sea, including $1.2 trillion in U.S. trade.

Boot notes that this “massive geopolitical shift is entirely Duterte’s doing,” and that “the Philippine people remain largely pro-American.” With any luck, Duterte’s rule will be short, and the Philippines will return to the fold before any lasting damage is done.

JACK DUNPHY: OH, THAT WAR ON COPS.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: What Politicians Mean When They Ask for More Education Spending.

Per-student spending on K-12 education has risen steadily over the last two decades, but student test scores, and teacher salaries, are stagnant. Why hasn’t this massive increase in investment produced better teachers and better opportunity for students? The short-answer, according to a new Manhattan Institute report by Josh McGee: State and local governments have catastrophically mismanaged their teacher pension systems. The cash infusion to K-12 has been used largely to pay for irresponsible pension promises politicians made to teachers’ unions and justified to the public with shoddy accounting. . . .

In other words, to cover benefits for retirees, states need to dig into education funds that might otherwise be used to attract and retain good teachers or buy better textbooks and build new facilities. So long as state governments are unwilling to reform the blue model pension-for-life civil service system, and so long as teachers unions continue to wield outsized influence in so many state legislatures, this pattern seems likely to continue indefinitely.

Campaigns to increase spending on schools are always popular, and understandably so: Education ought to be a great equalizing force in our society and, in theory, an efficient way to invest in the future. The problem is that in many states, new “K-12 spending” isn’t really an investment so much as a transfer payment to retired employees of the public schools who have been promised untenable lifetime pension benefits.

Well, you can generally figure out which policy elites will favor based on what’s more conducive to graft.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Amid ‘rigged’ election charges, Russia wants to monitor U.S. vote.

REWIND: Clinton Foundation Subsidized Now-Imprisoned Senior Muslim Brotherhood Official.

SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Woman Backtracks on Assault Claim After O’Keefe Video. “A woman who accused a Donald Trump supporter of punching her outside a Trump rally in North Carolina is backtracking after James O’Keefe and Project Veritas released video showing Democrat operatives claiming she was a trained activist. 69-year-old Shirley Teter of Asheville now says it is possible that 73-year-old Richard L. Campbell merely touched her accidentally, as his attorney had claimed all along.”

How about that.

IT’S NICE THAT THESE PEOPLE RECOGNIZE REALITY, EVEN IF THEY WON’T ADMIT IT IN PUBLIC: WikiLeaks: Donna Brazile Shreds Obama Economy: Acting DNC chair says ‘people are more in despair about how things are.’