ELECTION INTEGRITY: PA Supreme Court Rules Incorrectly Dated Absentee Ballots Can’t Be Counted.

HOLIDAY DEAL: ecozy Portable Ice Maker Countertop. #CommissionEarned

“REPUBLICAN ELECTION PROSPECTS RISE AS INFLATION OVERSHADOWS ABORTION, WSJ POLL FINDS.” Judging by the ads running here in the Raleigh area, the Democrats are running a single-issue campaign, directed solely at women, about how the GOP is going to flatly ban abortion. I am not exaggerating when I say it’s the main focus of 95% of Democrat (and liberal–I was a bit surprised to see the ACLU directly paying for what appeared to be a Planned Parenthood abortion ad) messaging I have seen. I’ve never seen anything like it.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: American Rescue Plan funded writing fellowship for ‘non-binary’ 13-year-olds, Muslim jazz series in NYC.

MICHAEL WALSH: To Save America, Repeal the 18th Amendment (Again).

This week, we come not only to bury the 18th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, known as Prohibition, but also to praise the 21st, which put a stake through the 18th’s nasty dark heart just 14 years after its passage in 1919. Prohibition was enforced by a singularly bad piece of legislation called the Volstead Act which, although vetoed by Woodrow Wilson, was nevertheless overridden by a Republican congress, and which thus put D.C. muscle behind the “Noble Experiment” (Herbert Hoover’s words) in bossing the American people around for their own good.

The 18th was the third of the four so-called “Progressive Era” amendments, which began in 1913 with the 16th (income tax) amendment and continued down its gruesome anti-freedom path that same year with the 17th amendment. As is typical of a Leftist policy mandate, the amendments purported to solve a relatively minor problem by creating an ongoing and very destructive large one.

After all, the country had managed very well during the first century of its existence by limiting the reach of the federal government into the states’ prerogatives and the citizens’ lives by restricting its access to revenue to excise duties and tariffs; similarly there was no urgent need to tinker with the Founders’ carefully wrought structure of the Senate by effectively nationalizing the upper chamber via popular election rather than appointment by the state legislatures. In a single year, the entire relationship of both the states and the citizenry vis-a-vis the federal government had changed utterly and irrevocably.

Pour yourself a cold one, and read the whole thing.

Related: Jon Gabriel interviews Walsh on “The Great Reset” in a Ricochet podcast.

IMPROVING HIGHER ED THROUGH BETTER OPEN-RECORDS LAWS. Colleges too often make a joke of these, perhaps inspired to so do by the federal government, which never met a FOIA record it found inconvenient or embarassing that it couldn’t find a reason to redact or refuse.

WRONGTHINK: Instagram bans Auburn club after it promotes March for Life.

MISSED THE SUPREME COURT ORAL ARGUMENTS IN THE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION CASES ON MONDAY?:  Here’s a video of  the Manhattan Institute’s post-argument analysis.

NEW VIDEO FROM AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Democrat Midterm Ad: Vote For The Status Quo.

DOWN EAST PORNO:  Should elementary schools in Maine carry pornographic comic books like Gender Queer that depict oral sex between boys?  Is that really a hard question?

THE JOKES WRITE THEMSELVES: German Energy Company Demolishes Wind Turbines to Ramp Up Coal Mining.

THE HIGHER EDUCATION RECONQUISTA ADVANCES: Board of Trustees unanimously votes to affirm Ben Sasse for university president. Not my favorite conservative politician, but an improvement on your usual college president.

WHY WAS JOE BIDEN DOING GET-OUT-THE-VOTE CAMPAIGNING IN CHICAGO YESTERDAY? MAYBE THIS HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH IT: Oak Park trustees looking to expand ban on 24-hour gas stations and impacted 7-Eleven store owners want it: ‘It’s constant crime … I can’t even keep an employee.’

VANISHED: Elderly Georgia Democrat Rep. David Scott has made no public appearance for several weeks, and his younger Republican rival wants to know where he is hiding.

I AGREE: We Need Pandemic Accountability, Not “Pandemic Amnesty.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Ford’s October sales slide 10% amid supply chain issues.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Liz Cheney Completes Her Pathetic Transition to the Dark Side. “When last we encountered Elizabeth Cheney here in the Morning Briefing she was comparing herself to Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, and, if I’m not mistaken, Pope Saint Gregory the Great. She’s a smidge delusional these days, after all.”

THE DEMOCRATS’ GOAL IS TO CRIMINALIZE POLITICAL OPPOSITION:

And they want to ban criticism because everything they do is awful and they don’t want it pointed out.

DON’T GET COCKY: Stunner for Democrats Drops in New Hampshire and Scrambles the Election Map.

Hold on a second. Is New Hampshire actually in play for Republicans on November 8th? That’s the story from a stunning new poll that shows that Don Bolduc is leading Democrat incumbent Sen. Maggie Hassan.

Bolduc, a Donald Trump-endorsed candidate, was left for dead after winning the primary, with the assumption being that his negatives were too high and that he couldn’t draw support in a blue state. His fundraising was lackluster, and the national groups have been spending their finite resources in more “competitive” states.

Recently, though, it was revealed that Republicans were going back into New Hampshire to make last-minute ad buys for Bolduc, again putting the race on the table. That surprised a lot of election onlookers, but this new poll from St. Anselm says it’s the right move.

There will be surprises on election night, but it sure feels like most of the surprises will be unpleasant ones for the Democrats.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Texas is running out of pipeline at the worst possible time.

As the IER report reminds us, Joe Biden came into office on a promise to “end fossil fuels.” He pushed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to make changes to the permitting and approval process for new pipeline construction. The end result was “increasing delays and costs on natural gas projects.”

The latest FERC proposal has undergone many revisions and challenges, both from the industry and even from Congress. But the end result is the same. Any new or proposed natural gas infrastructure is going to cost a lot more to bring online and the environmental regulatory hoops companies will have to jump through are discouraging the industry from moving forward.

Crisis by design.

PREACHING IS EASIER, AND LEFTIES ARE HYPOCRITES: Flashback: RBG didn’t practice her affirmative action preaching.

On a week when the conservative Supreme Court addressed affirmative action programs that provide racial preferences in college applications, liberals felt the impact of the loss of a giant who backed the favoritism, the late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In her years as a judge, the celebrated “RBG” fought for affirmative action and kept critics such as those now on the court off to the sidelines.

She talked about it and gave speeches on it, once telling a Paris political school, “We will all profit from a more diverse, inclusive society, understanding, accommodating, even celebrating our differences, while pulling together for the common good.”

But one thing she didn’t do much of as a judge was practice what she preached. And as affirmative action proponents criticize conservative justices such as Clarence Thomas for casting doubt on the policy during this week’s court case hearing, their supporters are highlighting Ginsburg’s lack of minority hiring.

Mark Paoletta, who worked on Thomas’s confirmation and is the co-author of a new book, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in his Own Words, said examples date to before Ginsburg’s 1993 Senate confirmation in a 96-3 vote.

A clip from CSPAN’s archives shows her being questioned about her lack of a diverse staff by then Sen. Orrin Hatch. He noted that in her 13 years as a lower court judge, she had never hired a black law clerk, secretary, or intern. Over that time, she had 57 employees as a judge.

Her response to the sympathetic Republican was, “I have tried, and I’m going to try harder, and if you confirm me for this job, my attractiveness to black candidates is going to improve.”

But according to Paoletta’s count and those done by others, she hired just one black clerk.

It’s “diversity” for the serfs, and something else for the nomenklatura.

I’D RATHER HAVE A SISTER IN A WHOREHOUSE THAN A BROTHER IN THE FBI: Coinky-dink: FBI agent involved in torpedoing Hunter laptop story also working on “disinformation” policing.

Laura Dehmlow was involved in conversations between the FBI and Facebook ahead of the social media company’s decision to censor the story surrounding the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, the Washington Free Beacon reported. She was later involved in the Biden administration’s efforts to suppress and censor content on social media platforms for misinformation-related purposes, according to The Intercept.

“We need a media infrastructure that is held accountable,” she said during a March meeting attended by Twitter executives and executives from JP Morgan Chase, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. She also said subversive content on social media could weaken public support for the U.S. government.

With people like her in the U.S. government, maybe it should.

Related: Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.

Also: Is FBI using security clearances to muzzle critics? Whistleblower’s lawyer says yes.

MARK PULLIAM: Citizens or Subjects? “Correcting the Court’s current excesses will require discipline that even some celebrated ‘originalist’ Justices may lack.”

WOKE POLICIES ARE SUPPOSED TO MAKE RICH WHITE PEOPLE FEEL GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES. THIS IS THE COST: Grieving Buffalo mother blames Kathy Hochul’s no-cash bail for daughter’s murder.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Illegals Bearing Giant Venezuelan Flag Attack Border Patrol.