ANOTHER PROGRESSIVE MYTH DEBUNKED: What the Prescription Drug Debate Gets Wrong. If we want new drugs for Alzheimer’s and the other ravages of old age, the last thing we need is European-style price controls at the pharmacy. But that’s the dream of Democrats, and the Trump administration is unfortunately threatening to go along with it.

This campaign is based on the same myth that was used to sell Obamacare: Americans are dying because their health-care system is an international disgrace. While it’s true that Canadians’ and western Europeans’ life expectancy is higher than Americans’, it’s not because of their price-controlled drugs and government health services. As I write in City Journal, the gap is due to variables that have nothing to do with health-care systems: the higher rates in America of poverty, obesity, smoking, homicide, fatal accidents and other factors.

The gap would be even larger if it weren’t for the fact that Americans receive better health care, particularly for heart disease and cancer. And the chief reason that American patients fare better than European patients is that they get earlier access to more new drugs. A dollar spent on drugs does more to combat disease and disability than a dollar spent anywhere else.

Yes, Canadians and Europeans pay less at the pharmacy, but they’re getting what they pay for. Why would Trump want to copy them? He should look at the numbers. Americans already get a much better deal.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Current State of U.S. Midterm Elections as of November 18, 2018.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: “The headlong rush to judgment by so many well-educated, middle-class women in the #MeToo movement has been startling and dismaying. Their elevation of emotion and group solidarity over fact and logic has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality that were once used to deny us the vote.”

AT AMAZON, gifts in Health and Beauty.

Plus, deals on Furniture and Bedding.

IT’S OFFICIAL: Florida recount: Rick Scott defeats Sen. Bill Nelson after manual recount.

HARVARD’S ANTI-ASIAN ADMISSIONS POLICY: At the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers’ Convention on Friday, the Civil Rights Practice Group (which I chair) presented a panel discussion of Harvard’s discrimination in admissions against Asian Americans. Thank you to the Honorable James C. Ho, Professor Andrew Koppelman, Dr. Althea Nagai, Patrick Strawbridge, and Professor John Yoo for the lively discussion.

As always, I remind everyone that colleges and universities are not doing affirmative action beneficiaries any favors by admitting them to academic programs where their academic credentials are toward the bottom of the class. Students learn more in programs where they are competitive with other students. So if we want more African American, American Indian or Hispanic doctors, engineers, college professors, and lawyers, we should put the brakes on affirmative action preferences and put a stop to discrimination against Asian Americans. See Want to Be a Doctor? A Scientist? An Engineer? An Affirmative Action Leg Up May Hurt Your Chances and A “Dubious Expediency”: How Race-Preferential Admissions Policies on Campus Hurt Minority Students.

EXCELLENT: Rapid Cure Approved for Sleeping Sickness, a Horrific Illness.

The disease, also called human African trypanosomiasis, is transmitted by tsetse flies. The protozoan parasites, injected as the flies suck blood, burrow into the brain. Before they kill, drive their victims mad in ways that resemble the last stages of rabies.

The personalities of the infected change. They have terrifying hallucinations and fly into rages; they have been known to beat their children and even attack family members with machetes.

They may become ravenous and scream with pain if water touches their skin. Only in the end, do they lapse into a long coma and die.

The new drug, fexinidazole, cures all stages of the disease within 10 days.

Really good news.

WELL, GOOD: Vapers may influence smokers to quit lighting up, study says.

IT’S ALMOST AS IF FEMINISM IS MORE ABOUT HATING MEN THAN ABOUT SEEKING EQUALITY: Boys left to fail at school because attempts to help them earn wrath of feminists, says ex-Ucas chief.

PAPER BALLOTS HAVE FAILED. It’s obvious that our election “system” cannot be trusted with either paper ballots or hackable computer voting machines. I have a solution: mechanical voting machines. 1. You can’t steal them, as they are huge and obvious. 2. You can’t hack them (without a machinist) and you certainly can’t hack them systematically. 3. It is hard to miscount with them – you literally look at the wheels on the back at the end of the night, add them up with a calculator, and call in the numbers. Done. Want a recount? Have someone else grab a calculator and look at the wheels. And don’t give me this “but they can break” stuff – if we can put in odometer in every car, I think we can handle this, and it’s not like the scanners and electronic machines aren’t breaking all the time.

UPDATE: Commenters are right that they cannot absolutely be protected from fraud committed by the actual election authorities. Even minimal procedures would make this pretty difficult, but yeah, I was probably not cynical enough here.

STACEY ABRAMS REFUSES TO CALL BRIAN KEMP THE ‘LEGITIMATE’ GOVERNOR-ELECT OF GEORGIA.

How odd, when fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton says that refusing to respect US election results is a “direct threat to our democracy.”

ON THIS DAY IN 1872, SUSAN B. ANTHONY WAS ARRESTED FOR ILLEGAL VOTING: She took the position that the recently-ratified Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause gave all women the right to vote. The argument went like this: Women had always been citizens.   The Fourteenth Amendment made it clear that no citizen should be denied the privileges or immunities of citizenship, so that conferred on women the right to vote.

On Election Day, to her surprise, she was permitted to cast a ballot. Her victory was, however, short-lived. Two weeks after the election she was arrested. Her predicament made news around the world.

Despite her argument about the significance of the Fourteenth Amendment, she was convicted and fined $100 (which she never paid). Meanwhile, in Missouri, Virginia Minor had also attempted to register to vote, but had been refused. She launched her own lawsuit also citing the Fourteenth Amendment. In Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875), the Supreme Court rejected the argument, holding that while women were citizens within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship alone did not confer the right to vote.

At that point, the women’s suffrage movement changed its strategy and began to advocate a constitutional amendment specifically focused on a woman’s right to vote. Meanwhile, out on the Western Frontier, where women were scarce, the women’s suffrage movement was succeeding. Among other things, it was thought to be a way to attract more women.  By the turn of the century, women in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Colorado had the vote.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: This Flu Season, Consider Whiskey over Modern Medicine.

THE BLOOMBERG SYNDROME: How Misguided Environmentalism Is To Blame For California’s Wildfires.

(Classical reference in headline.)

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Student Govt Official Faces Impeachment for Writing “Illegal Aliens” in Social Media Post. “Which term sounds worse to you, illegal aliens or Diversity and Inclusion Committee? Orwell could not have dreamed up a name like ‘Diversity and Inclusion Committee’ if he tried.”

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: To deter China, India joins the “Nuclear Triad” Club. My latest Creators Syndicate column. My new book, Cocktails from Hell, has a chapter on China which includes a discussion of an emerging security quasi-alliance called “the Quad”: India, Australia, Japan and the U.S. The book will be published in December.

NIGHT MORTAR ACTION, SOMEWHERE IN IRAQ OR SYRIA: Marines from Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment fire 81mm mortars in support of night operations against Islamic State forces. Photo taken September 10, 2018.

‘ROBBED:’ Dem Gil Cisneros defeats Repub Young Kim proving Orange Cty. CA is sexist AND racist (that’s how this works, right?).

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Occasional-Cortex prepares for war… on her own party.

DEMOCRATS CONTINUE TO KEEP ASIANS DOWN: At last minute, Democrat Cisneros pulls ahead of Republican woman Young Kim.

THE ACLU TURNED INTO A DEMOCRATIC SUPER-PAC SO QUICKLY THAT EVERYONE NOTICED:

Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.

First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn’t actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.

Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, “Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?”

Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU’s long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due proess protections “inappropriately favor the accuse.”

The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former.

They chose . . . poorly.

ALL THE BEST PEOPLE HAVE INFORMED ME THAT USING WORDS LIKE “TSUNAMI” TO DESCRIBE AN INFLUX OF MIGRANTS IS RACIST: Tijuana mayor on arriving migrant caravan: ‘It’s a tsunami.’

MANDATORY INDOCTRINATION: Georgia Southern University mandates ‘all students’ take ‘diversity and inclusion’ courses.