AGRICULTURE DRONES ARE FINALLY CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF. “Tech-savvy farmers have been some of the earliest commercial adopters of drone technology, purchasing 45,000 drones last year alone. But if they were using the drones to check on the condition of their fields, spraying their crops, or keeping tabs on livestock, most of them were technically breaking the law. New U.S. federal rules that went into effect this summer, however, should make it easier for farmers to get a drone’s-eye view of their fields.”

I think you should be able to fly a drone over your own property without permission from the feds, at least as long as you stay below 500 feet.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: “Eager to increase the number of black and Latino teachers, the U.S. Education Department wants teacher education programs to keep entry standards low. . . . It’s OK to be unselective, under new federal rules, as long as teacher education programs ‘maintain a high bar to exit.'”

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: We’re Losing the War and We’re Paying for It.

EXERCISING WHILE YOU’RE ANGRY could be bad for your heart. “Compared to how they felt the day before the heart attack, people had about twice the risk of a heart attack when they were extremely active and about the same risk when they were feeling very emotional. Combining those states and exercising while upset tripled someone’s risk of a heart attack compared to their risk the day before.” Hmm.

QUESTION ASKED: Is Trump’s refusal to say he’d accept the results of the election the only thing that happened on earth today?

UH-HUH: DNC boss Brazile claims WikiLeaks emails ‘doctored’ in contentious interview.

Watch the video at the link. Brazile doesn’t look quite as unconvincing as Nathan Thurm — but it’s close.

PREHISTORIC SEXYTIME: We caught modern genital warts because our ancestors were banging Neanderthals. “Researchers have found evidence that modern genital warts – otherwise known as the human papillomavirus (HPV) – were sexually transmitted to Homo sapiens after our ancestors slept with Neanderthals and Denisovans roughly around 100,000 years ago.”

STEPHEN L. CARTER: Trump Or No Trump, Elections Have Been Stolen. “The principal charge against Trump is that merely suggesting the possibility of unfairness in the election outcome constitutes an offense against our democracy. If that’s so, then lots of us are guilty.”

THE MEDIA WILL LEARN TO LOVE TRUMP IN DUE TIME:

He is the worst major-party candidate in history.

He’s a gaffe machine. He’s an evil racist who wants to return black people to slavery.

He’s a brutal sexist who wants to return women to the subservience of the 1950s.

He’s a nasty warmonger who doesn’t get the fundamental intricacies of modern foreign policy, with the Manichean worldview to match. He’s an old homophobe with a history of cruelty to workers.

Think we’re talking about Donald Trump?

No, we’re talking about Mitt Romney circa 2012. That’s how the media painted one of the most honorable men ever to run for the White House, the creator of Romneycare, a northeastern Republican with a penchant for compromise and negotiation. Mitt Romney, the left claimed, was no John McCain — that halcyon of moderation and decency.

Now, of course, the media tells us that Donald Trump is a massive departure from the legacy of John McCain and Mitt Romney. He’s beyond the pale! He panders to racists! He’s a vicious sexist and sexual assaulter! He’s uninformed, unstable, ignorant, stupid! Why, compared to Mitt Romney, the man’s a monster!

Much of this may be true in a way it simply wasn’t about Romney. But by 2020, Donald Trump will be the new standard of civility and decency according to the Left.

See also strange new respect the left has granted Nixon, Reagan – and even Dubya.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: A surface vessel just commanded a submarine to launch an aircraft—all unmanned.

HILLARY IN 2002: George W. Bush Was ‘Selected, Not Elected.’

UPDATE: Wasserman Schultz Says Al Gore Won Florida in 2000, MSNBC Reporter Agrees.

DAVID HARSANYI: The 5 Most Outrageous Hillary Clinton Lies From The Last Debate.

It couldn’t have been easy narrowing it down to five.

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: “Clinton’s Choice to Wear White at Debate Conveys Struggle of Suffragettes,” “Expert” tells ABC.

Hillary Clinton: Building a bridge to 1920.

(Classical reference in headline.)

PODESTA WIKILEAKS HORROR: Voter ID Doesn’t Stop Alien Voting.

J. Christian Adams:

Podesta’s right. Alien registration and voting is the next big battle for election integrity, because federal mandates created vulnerabilities in our election process.

Here’s how it works.

Under Motor Voter, registrants can get registered to vote while they get their driver’s license or “photo ID.” How? Well, getting registered to vote is as easy as marking “YES” to the question: “Are you a citizen of the United States?”

As Podesta notes, when you attest you are a citizen, you get registered. It’s automatic. It’s mandated under federal law.

The registrant then signs the form, stating under “penalty of perjury” that the answers are correct. It’s an honor system — but only four states engage in citizenship verification.

And three of those four states are currently entangled in litigation with leftist groups trying to end that verification: Kansas, Alabama, and Georgia.

These leftist groups have allies in the Justice Department, which has also fought citizenship verification measures ferociously.

They’re playing for keeps.

Read the whole thing.

NOAH ROTHMAN: Clinton’s Mandateless Presidency.

Too late, however, Democrats are beginning to realize that winning by substantial margins is not itself enough to claim a mandate to pursue sweeping legislative reform. That will be particularly true if Clinton manages to win the White House by a substantial margin and Republicans retain control of one or both chambers of Congress. That mixed message would (rightly, as the Founders would have had it) yield gridlock. Clinton ran a campaign predicated on the dual notions that her place in the waiting line entitled her to the presidency and that she was not Donald Trump. That’s a winning message, but it does not a mandate make. Unable to conjure up a rationale for Clinton’s presidency, Democrats have taken to mocking Republicans who believe that they have their own obligations to their voters.
…
Others have noted that this election will be the sixth out of the last seven presidential elections in which Democrats will have won the popular vote. That, too, should incent some bipartisanship on the part of defeated Republicans, Democrats say. It will also likely be a year in which the House remains in Republican hands. That means that the Republican Party will have controlled the most responsive legislative chamber for 18 of the last 22 years. Rarely do you hear opinion makers marvel at the mandate conferred upon Republicans’ control over the first branch of government, the body the Founders insisted was the very embodiment of representative democracy. I wonder why.

I can live with gridlock — it’s far preferable to the next most-likely result, the kind we got from 2009-2011.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1260.

WHAT’S OUTRAGEOUS ABOUT TRUMP IS THAT HE’S RUNNING LIKE A REPUBLICAN, BUT CAMPAIGNING LIKE A DEMOCRAT, AND THAT’S NOT ALLOWED: On not accepting the results of the election: Let’s hear from Russ Feingold: “This game’s not over until we win.”

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Fewer Americans Have Private Health Insurance Now Than In 2007.

ED MORRISSEY SUMS UP THE FINAL DEBATE: Last opportunity, lost opportunity?

Trump — after the first 30 minutes in which he dominated — had a good debate, in terms of campaigning to the Right.

Hillary, on the other hand, had difficulty finding a consistent voice. Thanks to Chris Wallace’s adept moderation, she had to argue within a ten-minute period that the 2nd Amendment’s right to bear arms can be subject to “reasonable” restrictions, but that the derived “right” to abortion has to be completely unencumbered by any regulations. She sputtered when Wallace contradicted her claim to be opposed to open borders by reading directly from one of her own speeches. Like so many other occasions in which she gets openly challenged, Hillary sounded shrill and strident at times, and evasive at others.

However, Hillary did accomplish two key things. First, she campaigned to the center rather than to the Left (after the Supreme Court and abortion discussions). Even on guns, Hillary tried to frame herself as a moderate, even while making an absurd claim that Heller was wrongly decided because of toddlers — a clear reference to a new Brady Campaign effort. Because she didn’t need to shore up her base, Hillary could work toward the center and position herself as the reasonable and rational choice, a task made a little easier with Trump’s answer on the election and a couple of his late personal insults.

Second, Hillary didn’t screw up. That was her real mission last night — not to make a fatal mistake.

Trump had a higher bar to clear, and today of course the usual worrywarts are raising it even higher because of his answer about accepting the election results.

THE SLOW, PAINFUL DEATH of the media’s cash cow.

At its most basic, this sort of existential crisis presents companies with a very unpalatable choice. In the long run, your revenue will, to a virtual certainty, fall to $0. But in the meantime, you have a cash cow that will still throw off income for quite a while. Do you milk your cows until the last of the herd falls over dead? Or do you take some of your revenue and invest it in a flock of goats, allowing you to pursue exciting new opportunities in the field of goat-cheese manufacturing?

There are always good arguments on both sides. On the one hand, you’re probably not very good with goats. You have a large staff of highly competent dairymen and milkmaids, who probably aren’t much interested in goats, don’t have many goat-related skills, and, in part due to the aforementioned lack of interest, may never develop the world-class talents needed to beat out competitors in the cutthroat goat-cheese business.

If you were a brand-new entrepreneur looking to get into goat-related enterprises, you probably would not decide to buy a dairy farm and retool the whole thing for goats; you’d probably get some nice hilly land somewhere and populate it with workers who were, so to speak, goat-native. Dairy operations, many economists might argue, should look at the problem as if they were considering entering the marketplace for the first time — or, in econo-jargon: Ignore sunk costs. In plain English, this means: Don’t try to turn yourself into something you’re not. Milk the cows until they die, then walk away with whatever profits you have stashed in the shed.

These critics will be inevitably be vindicated. Most of the dairy farms that attempt the conversion will founder and fail, beaten by newer and, er, nimbler operations that aren’t weighed down with all their legacy costs.

On the other hand: $0. A 100 percent chance of $0 in revenue doesn’t necessarily look better than a 5 percent chance of a profitable goat business. Especially if you can turn some of your pasturage over to goats while still getting some milk out of the old cows.

I’m afraid the metaphor for today’s media has less to do with livestock than with certain livestock byproducts.

A DISH BEST SERVED COLD: Kerry Warns Russia Bombing Will Trigger ‘Revenge’

“If they destroy most of Aleppo in order to ‘take’ it, what will that taking produce? Will it change the attitude of the people who have been driven out and the people who have been radicalized?” he asked at a press conference in Washington, D.C. “No. They will be even more determined to seek revenge and even less inclined to come to the table to negotiate.”

Hamburg and Hiroshima could not be reached for comment.

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE EVIDENCE, IT’S ABOUT THE POLITICAL PROTECTION: Jill Stein On Wikileaks: How Much More Evidence Does Govt Need To Press Charges Against Hillary?

JEFF REYNOLDS: Trump Eviscerated Hillary in Debate #3. What Difference, at This Point, Does It Make?

Or as I noted last night, if this Trump had shown up for the first two debates, “we might be talking about the Trump-Rubio rapprochement in a solidly red Florida, and how Clinton was barely hanging on in Nevada, Colorado, and Wisconsin.”

DO TELL: Despite Clinton’s claims, DC gun ban did little to ‘protect toddlers.’