SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET: 

NOTHING TO SEE, NOTHING TO SEE – FROM CBS CHICAGO:   CHICAGO (CBS) — Susie Sallee was buried in 1998. Yet records show she voted in Chicago 12 years later.  Victor Crosswell died in 1994, but records show he’s voted six times since then.  And then there’s Floyd Stevens. Records show he’s voted 11 times since his death in 1993.  “It’s crazy,” Sharon Stevens Anderson, Stevens’ daughter, tells CBS 2’s Pam Zekman. “I don’t see how people can be able to do something like that and get away with it.”  Those are just a few of the cases CBS 2 Investigators found by merging Chicago Board of Election voter histories with the death master file from the Social Security Administration.  In all, the analysis showed 119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade.  And I say their citizenship should be praised.

HUMA AT HOME – FROM THE DAILY MAIL:   One day after Hillary Clinton's campaign was rocked after the FBI sensationally reopened its investigation during its probe of Anthony Weiner sexting a 15-year-old girl, his estranged wife was huddled up at her New York City apartment.  Huma Abedin remained home on Saturday, after the online sexting habits of her husband, Anthony Weiner, upended her longtime boss's presidential campaign.   A solemn-looking Abedin could be seen inside her Gramercy Park apartment in loungewear as she spent time with her mother and sister.  On Friday, the FBI revealed that it had found government-related emails on a laptop Abedin shared with her disgraced, former Congressman husband Weiner.  Detectives had seized the laptop, which contains 'tens of thousands of emails', in a separate investigation involving alleged sexts Weiner sent to a 15-year-old, first exposed by DailyMail.com.  A quiet New York weekend planning her legal defense.  How liberal.

COMMON SENSE – FROM CAMPUS REFORM:   Bucking the free-speech zone trend, Kansas State University is telling students they are legally permitted to demonstrate or protest anywhere they want for any cause they want.  “The whole campus is a free speech area,” the K-State Office of General Counsel states in its October legal briefing, noting that as a public university, the school cannot and will not require anyone to register with the university prior to having a public demonstration or protest.  “As a general rule, there is no right to not be offended.”  Even when the speech in question is “controversial or offending,” such as a speaker shouting derogatory remarks at passersby, the school’s attorneys declare emphatically that only behaviors rising to the level of criminality are subject to intervention.  “As a general rule, there is no right to not be offended,” they point out, arguing that “if the government started shutting down speech that is offensive to some, it would end up shutting down all speech, because virtually everything can be offensive to some.”  “As the U.S. Supreme Court stated in 1989 in Texas v. Johnson: ‘If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because it finds it offensive or disagreeable,’” the briefing notes.  A rare moment of clarity in the academic world.

October 29, 2016