IT’S A PITY THEY CAN’T ALL LOSE: Journalists Trash Porn Star Attorney For His Dubious Kavanaugh Allegations.

YES: War on Vaping Threatens Public Health.

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration announced “historic action” against e-cigarette manufacturers for what it sees as an “epidemic” of vaping among teenagers. E-cigarette makers have 60 days to come up with plans to mitigate teenage use of their products or face civil or criminal prosecution as well as new regulations such as sales bans on some of their products.

Such a move could reverse recent stop-smoking achievements. While smoking rates have been declining steadily over the last half century, the pace has dramatically picked up in recent years as e-cigarettes have gained popularity.

If regulators don’t get in the way, e-cigarettes can continue to chip away at the one-in-six Americans who still smoke. This would be a major victory for public health.

Vaping doesn’t enrich the correct vested interests, so the public health be damned.

CHANGE: Used-Car Sales Boom as New Cars Get Too Pricey for Many.

Demand for used cars was unusually strong this summer and will remain at elevated levels through the year’s end as higher interest rates and rising prices on new cars continue to stretch buyers’ wallets, industry analysts said.

Used-car buyers are finding a growing selection of low-mileage vehicles that are only a few years old.

While used-car values have also increased in recent years, the gap between the price of a new and preowned car has also widened and is now at one of its largest points in more than a decade, according to car-shopping website Edmunds.com.

New-car prices have steadily climbed in the years following the recession as companies packed vehicles with more expensive technology and buyers shifted away from lower-priced cars to bigger and more expensive sport-utility vehicles and trucks. The average price paid for a car hit an all-time high of $36,848 in December of 2017 and remains at near-record levels, according to Edmunds.com.

It’s good news that more Americans can afford to spend more on new cars, but things would be better still if over-regulation weren’t pricing so many Americans out of the new-car market.

GROPEY JOE: Biden Predicts Dems Capture House, Senate; Floats Harris, Booker as 2020 Contenders. “Instead of running for the White House, former veep says he ‘desperately want to change the landscape and there is more than one way to do it.'”

MICHAEL WALSH: Missing Melania Trump. “Have you seen this woman? No Vogue, no Cosmo — not even a milk carton for the First Lady.”

SICK: Saving pets without a permit: Good Samaritan arrested after helping animals survive Florence.

As Hurricane Florence barreled toward the Carolina coast, Tammie Hedges took action to protect pets that might have otherwise been caught in the storm – a decision that led to her arrest.

Hedges, a resident of Wayne County, North Carolina, was taken into custody Friday after providing care to more than two dozen animals – 17 cats and 10 dogs – for owners who had to evacuate before the storm hit.

“The owners got to evacuate. They got to save themselves. But who’s going to save those animals? That’s what we did,” Hedges said. “We saved them.”

The owner of Crazy’s Claws N Paws, a donation-based animal rescue center, was in the process of converting a warehouse space into a proper animal shelter when she decided to use the building to help keep pets dry. However, her facility was not legally registered as a shelter.

“Our mission was to save as many animals from the flood that we could,” Hedges said. “We went through Hurricane Matthew and it was horrible. There were many preventable deaths.”

She said an elderly couple dropped off 18 of the animals, some of which were sick and injured, just before the storm.

On Monday, after Florence passed, Hedges got a call from Wayne County Animal Control regarding the animals.

“He basically told me, ‘You can voluntarily hand over the animals, or I can go get a warrant,’ ” Hedges said.

She willingly surrendered the animals.

“A few days later they called me in for questioning and yesterday they arrested me,” Hedges said.

Anything not compulsory is forbidden, comrade.

Related: Why We Shouldn’t “Just Enforce the Law.”

DIESEL SUBMARINES: The Game Changer the U.S. Navy Needs.

SSKs have no need to match SSNs; they need to be good enough for the job, and cheap enough to buy in bulk. In effect champions of nuclear submarines deny that diesel boats can do what they have done for many decades. The U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet sub force tormented the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II, including along the island chain. Undersea warfare could have proved decisive in that conflict. The JMSDF unleashed similar tactics vis-à-vis Soviet and Chinese shipping during the Cold War. Both navies prosecuted an island-chain strategy to good effect, and with more rudimentary diesel boats than today’s to boot. Denying historical fact doesn’t add up to a terribly convincing case against SSKs.

An allied sub squadron wouldn’t need SSNs with breakneck speed and unlimited underwater endurance to defend a static island perimeter. SSNs excel at open-ocean combat, but they represent excess capacity and expense—and thus waste—for sentry duty. A U.S.-Japanese squadron would need subs to man the barricade in concert with surface craft, missile-armed troops on the islands, aircraft roving overhead, and well-placed minefields. Picket subs thus need to hover silently and stealthily along the island chain, awaiting their chance to strike.

Diesels can do that.

This is all true. Manning up a large number of new subs might prove to be a problem, however.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Surprise Kavanaugh Accusations and Much, Much More. Kavanaugh responded: “This alleged event from 35 years ago did not happen. The people who knew me then know that this did not happen, and have said so. This is a smear, plain and simple. I look forward to testifying on Thursday about the truth, and defending my good name—and the reputation for character and integrity I have spent a lifetime building—against these last-minute allegations.”

VENEZUELA HAS NOT ALWAYS DEPENDED ON THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS: Chinese hospital ship docks for a week. “A Chinese hospital ship has docked in Venezuela, where for the next week it will provide free health care to local patients.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The drive to sink Kavanaugh is liberal totalitarianism.

Sohrab Ahmari:

I don’t use the “T”-word lightly. I’ve spent years pushing back against those who fling it about in free societies like ours. But totalitarianism doesn’t require cartoonish, 1984-style secret police and Big Brother. The classical definition is a society where everything — ethical norms and moral principles and truth itself — is subjugated to political ends.

By that measure, the Democratic campaign to block Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, based on a hazy, uncorroborated, decades-old assault allegation, tends toward the totalitarian. Certainly, it has many of the elements of abusive politics that Americans normally associate with foreign lands untouched by the light of liberty and reason.

Read the whole thing, although to be fair, the Left’s totalitarian instincts go back at least as far as the French Revolution.

I THOUGHT BIG MONEY IN POLITICS WAS EVIL OR SOMETHING: George Soros’s Son Pours Nearly $3 Million Into Democratic Coffers for Midterms.

OH: Advisor to Kavanaugh’s accuser was caught on audio in July predicting a coming plot to destroy nomination.

A Democratic operative and former Clinton White House official who is now an advisor to Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser, predicted a “strategy” to defeat the US Supreme Court nominee months ago.

Ricki Seidman spoke about a plot to take down Kavanaugh in a conference call with the American Constitution Society in July, suggesting a “strategy will emerge” that would destroy the nomination of President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick.

“I do think that over the coming days and weeks there will be a strategy that will emerge, and I think it’s possible that strategy might ultimately defeat the nominee,” Seidman said in audio that was recorded by the Republican National Committee’s War Room. “And whether or not it ultimately defeats the nominee it will, I think, help people understand why it’s so important that they vote.”

“Stop fooling around and take the vote,” the wise man said.

DAN WALTERS: California an economic model of green prosperity? Not quite.

The contentions that going green has been an economic positive are unproven. The cheerleaders for that claim notoriously overcount “green jobs,” including many that would exist regardless and discounting the jobs that might be lost in the conversion.

The biggest negative about the state’s economic standing, however, came in a new report issued by the Census Bureau as Brown’s conference was underway.

It was the bureau’s updated report on poverty and once again, California found itself in the unenviable position of being No. 1 in that category when all economic factors are included in the calculation.

While the state’s poverty rate by the Census Bureau’s “supplemental” method declined slightly since the previous report, it still is the nation’s highest at 19 percent and that’s because of California’s very high cost of living, particularly for housing.

That means 7.5 million Californians, more than the population of most states, are counted as poor. And the situation is even darker when other data are put into the mix.

Going back at least to the New Deal, it’s been a Progressive conceit that the way to prosperity is to make everything more expensive.

“How’s that workin’ out for ya?” the wise woman once asked.

BOOM: PayPal bans Alex Jones, saying he “promoted hate.” “Most technology platforms have insisted that these Jones bans are not about fake news but rather about Jones’ hate speech. However, the platforms have not always been very specific about which of Jones’ many inflammatory comments have crossed the line into hate speech.”

JOHN HAWKINS: Christine Blasey Ford’s Accusation Is the Definition of a Non-Credible Sexual Assault Allegation. “Do you believe Ford or Kavanaugh and why?”

HMM: This soon-to-open brewery is betting big that Denver will learn to love beer made out of grapes.

I’ll try almost anything once.

GOOD BOY: Wounded Soldier & His Injured Military Dog Awarded Purple Hearts, Reunited in Texas.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Will getting a lobster stoned cut the pain of boiling it alive?

JUNIOR ANTI-SEX LEAGUE: Yandy Pulls Its ‘Sexy’ Handmaid’s Tale Costume After a Swift Backlash.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. “If you’re an attorney who can’t figure out how to defend a client from a 35-year-old allegation of sexual assault with no physical evidence, corroborating witnesses, and major gaps in the accuser’s statement, you’re incompetent or have an ulterior agenda.”

Read the whole Twitter thread.

SCRAPPLEFACE: Kavanaugh Victim Asks Delay to Finish Final Draft.

VIDEO: CNN asked women if they believe Judge Kavanaugh. This was not the response they were expecting.

OVER AT THE FEDERALIST: This is insane, Apple. You’ve gone and ruined my perfectly curated playlists.

SPACE RACE II: Long March 9 will take 140 tons to low-earth orbit starting 2028.

Li Guoping, director of the Department of System Engineering of the CNSA, said that the length of the Long March-9 will exceed 90 meters, and the rocket would have a core stage with a diameter of 10 meters.

It would be able to carry a payload of 140 tonnes into low-Earth orbit, five times that of the Long March-5, said Li.

The first version of the SpaceX BFR has been re-designed to carry 100 tons to low-earth orbit. Later upgrades will enable 150 tons or more to low-earth orbit.

If SpaceX BFR and NASA Space Launch System have delays then the Long March 9 will be the most powerful rocket in 2028.

I have a lot more faith in SpaceX’s BFR than in NASA’s SLS, but I’d love to see both beat China into the heavy lift category.

MICHAEL SCHWARTZ: Censure Dianne Feinstein.

In substance, she “deliberately misled and deceived” her fellow senators, with the “effect of impeding discovery of evidence” relevant to the performance of their constitutional duties. No one should know better than Feinstein herself that such deceptive and obstructive conduct, widely regarded as “unacceptable,” “fully deserves censure,” so that “future generations of Americans . . . know that such behavior is not only unacceptable but also bears grave consequences,” bringing “shame and dishonor” to the person guilty of it and to the office that person holds, who has “violated the trust of the American people.” These quoted words all come from the resolution of censure Feinstein herself introduced concerning President Bill Clinton’s behavior in connection with his sex scandal. She can hardly be heard to complain if she is held to the same standard.

Comparison with other past censure cases only makes Feinstein’s situation look worse. The last three senators censured, Thomas Dodd, Herman Talmadge, and Dave Durenberger, were all condemned for financial hanky-panky: converting campaign contributions to personal use and the like. They were all found to have brought the Senate into “dishonor and disrepute” even though nothing they had done implicated the Senate’s performance of its constitutional duties. Feinstein, in sharpest contrast, sought to keep her committee from timely and properly investigating an apparently serious charge of misconduct, and is still doing so, even in the face of criticism from all (or most) quarters.

As the second-richest member of the Senate, with a net worth of $94 million, Feinstein is presumably above the temptations to which Dodd, Talmadge, and Durenberger succumbed. She does, however, face a difficult reelection campaign, with a serious enthusiasm gap on her left, the California Democratic party having refused to endorse her bid for a sixth term in office. Her conduct in arranging matters to make her appear the champion of an allegedly abused constituent, and perhaps positioning herself as the woman who sank the Kavanaugh nomination, can only help on that flank. Is a nakedly political motive for senatorial misbehavior any less reprehensible than a financial one?

No.