TIMEO PROFESSORES DONA FERENTES: U of Illiniois Professor claims teaching the Pythagorean Theorem and Pi promotes white privilege. Doesn’t she know the Ancient Greeks were Afroasiatic? Send her a copy of Black Athena, stat.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: ABA Notices To Law Schools About Potential Non-Compliance With Accreditation Standards.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, GENDER HATRED EDITION: A feminist professor at Occidental College recently argued that men must renounce their masculinity and “denounce anyone who chooses to identify with it.”

“isa Wade rejects the notion of ‘toxic masculinity,’ saying it is time to recognize that ‘it is masculinity itself that has become the problem.'” Remember a few years ago when they were still trying to claim that feminism was just about equality?

Cost of attending Occidental College: $69,442 per year.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, Updated Hourly.

Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.

And, today’s Digital Deals.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS: My USA Today column: Where were Hollywood and D.C. truth tellers with Harvey Weinstein and Mark Halperin? For people who keep telling us how fearlessly truthful they are, they sure have a lot of ugly “open secrets.”

LIZ SHELD’S HALLOWEEN BRIEFING: First Blood, Who’s Next and Much, Much More.

OFF THE COAST OF WAKE ISLAND: It’s a Navy public relations photo with an explicit World War 2 link. (Attacking Wake Island proved to be a mistake.) The photo also shows three F-18 variants in formation: an F/A-18F, and F/A-18E and an EA-18G electronic attack plane.

TO BE FAIR, THAT’S HOW DEMOCRATS, AND THEIR MEDIA ALLIES, ALWAYS DEPICT REPUBLICANS: Virginia Governor’s Race Turns Ugly With Ad Depicting Republicans As Racist Predators.

MORGAN FREEMAN: ‘Jailing Hillary’ Best Way To ‘Restore Public Faith In Govt.’

“Hillary should be in jail for her unlawful deeds and President Trump should absolutely, absolutely make sure this happens to send the very strong message that no-one, and I mean no-one, is above the law in the United States of America,” Morgan Freeman said in New York while promoting National Geographic’s new docu-series The Story of Us.

Responding to a question about why he thinks President Trump has not yet fulfilled this particular campaign promise, Freeman laughed and said and looked up at the heavens before saying, “Goddamnit man, you were elected for this very reason, lock that bitch up!”

After being accused of political incorrectness, Freeman laughed again, saying “It’s all about being loving and caring these days, isn’t it?“

“The most loving and caring thing we as a society can do for Hillary Clinton is lock her up where she can get professional and institutional help and prevent her hurting herself or anyone else.”

Indeed.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): This story appears to be fake.

UPDATE (FROM STEVE): I haven’t been snookered this badly since the first time I came across Duffel Blog. Apologies!

MICHAEL BARONE: Window of opportunity still mostly open on state and local tax deductibility.

Sometimes in legislation you get closer to a goal by taking a step away. That’s what I think House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady did by coming out today for a tax deduction for state and local property taxes. That looks like a step back from the goal set forth by the Trump administration and congressional Republican leaders: eliminating the deduction for state and local taxes altogether, about which I wrote last week.

The subject there was the victory of the administration and the Republican leadership last Friday in the House passage, by a 216-212 vote, of the Senate budget resolution, which includes elimination of the state and local tax deduction. Passage means the Senate can pass such a bill with 50 Republican votes; Senate leaders don’t have to fear defections by Republican senators from the super-high-tax states (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, California) because all those states’ senators are Democrats. However, there are 28 House Republicans from those states — more than enough, theoretically, to prevent the leadership from getting a majority for a bill eliminating the state and local tax deduction.

But not all those 28 House Republicans voted against the budget resolution: As my Washington Examiner colleague Tim Carney points out, 11 of the 20 Republican votes against the resolution were cast by members from New York and New Jersey. But note that only one of them, Dan Donovan of Staten Island, comes from a district in New York City, where the combined state and city income tax rate is very high and property taxes are surprisingly low. The other 10 come from suburban or Upstate districts, like Peter King and Lee Zeldin from Long Island.

State income tax rates in New York and New Jersey are high, but property taxes in Long Island and Upstate New York are among the highest in the country, and in much of New Jersey they’re even higher. That means that for many of these 10 Republicans’ constituents, deductibility of the property tax means much more than deductibility of the state income taxes. And many of those high earners (like Lee Zeldin’s Hamptons constituents) are liberal Democrats anyway.

Maintaining property tax deductibility will reduce the pressure on local governments to reduce spending and crack down on public employee union bonanzas. But eliminating state and local income tax liability will put huge pressure on the public employee unions, because about one-third of state and local income tax revenue comes from the top 1 percent of earners.

Sounds good to me.

YEP: Kevin Spacey proves Trump was right about the media.

FUNNYMAN JIMMY KIMMEL: “I go to bed worried, and I wake up worried, and I honestly don’t know if things are going to be okay.”

You’ve been showing up, anyway. Do you have a sense of what your life after the show might be?

Some days I think about it 100 times. If you have a great show, you feel like you could do it forever, and if you have a bad show, you feel like you want to go home and never come back. It’s really just as simple as that, you know? If those 140 people sitting in front of me in the audience are laughing and enjoying the show, it makes it easier to imagine doing it for a long time. With the celebrity guests, I’m not of that mentality where it’s like, Oh, I have no interest in this person. It’s not like I’m going on a cruise with them. Realistically, I’m talking to them for 11 minutes. I can talk to anyone for 11 minutes. That’s not the part of the job that gets me down. It’s the relentlessness. It’s a grind.

Johnny Carson wasn’t a happy (or even nice) man, but he didn’t allow that to dominate his stage persona.

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND THE CONSTITUTIONAL BULLET CONSERVATIVES DODGED BY ELECTING TRUMP, read this 2016 piece from Mark Tushnet. (Via Ted Frank on Facebook).

WELL: Podesta Group one of the companies mentioned in Manafort indictment: report.

The Podesta Group, a prominent lobbying and public relations firm, is one of the two unidentified companies mentioned in the grand jury indictment of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Richard Gates, NBC News reported Monday.

Manafort and Gates approached “Company A” and “Company B” in 2012 about lobbying on behalf of the Ukrainian government, according to the indictment that was unsealed Monday.

Company A refers to Mercury Public Affairs and Company B refers to the Podesta Group, three sources with knowledge of the investigation told the news outlet.

The Podesta Group and Mercury both did work to benefit a pro-Russia Ukrainian party through Brussels-based nonprofit European Centre for a Modern Ukraine.

Hmm.

WHITE HOUSE STATEMENT: Advisor Who Admitted Perjury Played ‘Extremely Limited’ Role in Campaign.. Trump attorney says president “not interfering with special counsel Mueller’s position; he’s not firing the special counsel.”

NORMA DESMOND IS STILL NOT READY FOR HER CLOSE-UP. ‘Beyond pathetic’: Hillary says she’ll ‘go as the president’ this Halloween.

Lefties really had the measure of Hillary when they were busy destroying her to clear a path for Obama in 2008:

TAXING WAIT: House Panel’s Talk of Phased-in Tax Cut Counters Trump’s Wishes.

House tax writers are discussing a gradual phase-in for President Donald Trump and Republican leaders’ proposed corporate tax-rate cut — on a schedule that would put the rate at 20 percent in 2022, according to a member of the chamber’s tax-writing committee and a person familiar with the discussions.

The phase-in plan is under discussion, but isn’t yet final, said a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Other members said they planned to discuss the proposal during a private meeting Monday afternoon.

House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady told reporters Monday that there hasn’t been a decision yet. When asked whether a phase in was being considered, he said only: “We want to get the growth up front.”

Faster, please.

THIS IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG. Time: Trump’s Cabinet ‘Wrecking Crew’ Is ‘Dismantling Government As We Know It.’ 

Not surprisingly, just as they didn’t realize that comparing Obama to FDR and “The New, New Deal” in November of 2008 was in reality quite a damning statement, Time doesn’t understand that “dismantling government as we know it” is exactly what Trump was elected to do – and in Betsy DeVos’s case, it’s even Jerry Brown-approved.

Faster, please.

IRREPLACEABLE: Silicon Valley historians saddened over loss of Hewlett Packard archive in fire.

More than 100 boxes containing letters and other documents from Hewlett-Packard founders William Hewlett and David Packard were incinerated when the Tubbs Fire tore through one building on the campus of Keysight Technologies headquarters in Santa Rosa.

Corporate historians say the loss goes far beyond the estimated $2 million value of the collection. That’s because it contained thousands of pages of history documenting the firsthand thoughts and strategies of the two tech pioneers who formed the electronics company in Palo Alto.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Karen Lewis, a former HP archivist who pored through each of those boxes in the 1980s, cataloging each document to help preserve that rich record for future researchers and historians.

While it isn’t a perfect solution, and daunting project to start, make a digital archive of all your records, photos, etc. You’d be amazed at what you can fit on an inexpensive external hard drive of just a few terabytes, kept in a safe deposit box or at a family member’s house.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Philosophy Professor Tells Bisexual Student Who Criticized Islam ‘We’re Not Going to Let You Damage the Program.’

A bisexual male student at the University of Texas–San Antonio said during an informal conversation outside class that he was uncomfortable with Islam because people still receive the death penalty for being gay in 10 Muslim-majority countries.

For expressing this thought, the student—Alfred MacDonald, who no longer attends the school—was instructed to meet with the chair of the philosophy department, Eve Browning. Prof. Browning told MacDonald in no uncertain terms that he had committed the crime of “offending” someone, and she warned him that his habit of saying what he thinks could bring down the entire program. She threatened to call the Behavior Intervention Team and refer MacDonald to counseling. She did everything but send him to Room 101.

Unfortunately for Browning, MacDonald secretly recorded their conversation. The transcript, first publicized by Gay Star News, is incredible.

Well, Eve Browning certainly damaged the program far more than anything this student could have. Of what use is an academic philosophy program whose chief concern is avoiding ideas that might offend? “That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Private Law School Tuition Discount Rate Rose To 39% In 2016.

BUT OF COURSE: The Iconoclasts Come For George Washington.

By now we should all be familiar with the inexorable logic of the iconoclasts, which goes like this. Lee, having fought for the slave-owning Confederacy in the Civil War, is more offensive than Washington, who merely owned slaves. Abraham Lincoln didn’t own slaves but he did sentence a couple dozen Dakota Indians to death in 1862 for war crimes against defenseless men, women, and children on the Minnesota frontier. For that, student activists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have demanded the removal of Lincoln’s statue from their campus. Frank Rizzo, the mayor of Philadelphia in the 1970s, didn’t own slaves or sentence any Indians to death, but he was insufficiently supportive of the civil rights movement in his day, so his statue must come down, too.

Once it takes hold, iconoclasm knows no distinctions or subtleties. It sweeps everything away. When progressive activists began clamoring for the immediate removal of Confederate monuments across the country, I and others noted that since this wasn’t really about the historical legacy of slavery but the imperatives of identity politics, there was no limiting principle to ensure that once they had finished with the Confederates they would not move on to the Founding Fathers, or Lincoln, or even the hapless Rizzo.

Of course, they came for them all. It wasn’t hard to see it coming.

The irony is that the iconoclasts can’t see the backlash coming, even though it started almost exactly one year ago.

THE KANSAS CITY STAR DOESN’T MENTION THAT HE’S A DEMOCRAT, BUT HE IS: Former KC Mayor Sly James spokesman charged with assault in domestic violence case.

STEVEN HAYWARD: Explaining The Liberal Cesspool. “Why is it, Glenn Reynolds likes to ask, that liberal-run cities and institutions all seem to be hotbeds of sexism and racism? To adapt this slightly, maybe there’s a reason the left is so obsessed with sexual harassment and racism, because it is practiced so much in their communities and institutions.”

Plus:

But slow down a moment: why would Weinstein—and the culture of sexual harassment apparently widespread in Democrat-run institutions (like the California state legislature, according to the New York Times this morning)—have remained unchallenged if Hillary was in the White House? Probably for the same reason that Bill Clinton got a pass for his relentless behavior 20 years ago: power is the most important thing to liberals. And if the dignity and safety of a few women have to be sacrificed, well, broken omelets and all that. After all, as we now know, everyone knew about Weinstein. But did nothing about it. And according to Tamblyn, still wouldn’t today if their person was in power.

Indeed.

Flashback: “Not that being an environmentalist makes a guy a saint, but Gore seemed almost desperate to have us see him as more moral than the average Al. . . . The greenest of the green people I talked to felt betrayed. Gore was their leader and the movement is now, um, stained. The woman even said, according to the transcript of her interview with Portland, Ore., police made public on the Internet, that her ‘Birkenstock Tribe’ friends told her to ‘suck it up’ and not tell anyone or the ‘world’s going to be destroyed from global warming.’”