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Time to examine the Daley departure. Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor kicks it off.

Bill Daley was demoted back in November, a move that had Valerie Jarrett’s fingerprints all over it.   Now Daley is gone altogether, resigning from the White House to return to Chicago to “spend more time with his family” (cue the Dirge of the Political Dead).

Daley and Jarrett (and Michelle Obama, not to mention the president) are Chicago Democrats, but just as in Russia there are vicious rivalries among clans that are ostensibly part of the same governing elite, there are deep-seated hatreds and rivalries within the one party of the One Party State that is Chicago.  Anyone who lived, as I did, through the Byrne-Daley-Washington election, the subsequent election of Harold Washington, Council Wars, and the open warfare that followed Washington’s death understands that.  The rule of Daley II had some similarities with Putinism, with Richie Daley–Bill Daley’s brother–running a natural (city) state, and dividing the spoils among the factions to maintain a semblance of peace.  But the hostilities never went away, and hands always rest on dagger handles.

Jarrett and Bill Daley belonged to different factions in Chicago.  Moreover, whereas Daley was and is a practitioner of crony capitalism who intermediated between government and heavily regulated businesses, Jarrett is and was more ideological, and her ideology is hard core progressive class warrior.

Bringing both factions so close within the White House was a recipe for conflict, and it is pretty clear that such conflicts indeed continued unabated, with Rahm Emanuel (another Chicagoan) and then Daley arrayed against Jarrett and Michelle Obama.  Obama’s political travails starting in 2009, culminating with the election of Scott Brown in early 2010, led to a fundamental divide over what path to pursue: a more accommodating traditional political course (the Emanuel then Daley position) or a more ideological, progressive one (Jarrett and Michelle Obama).

We now know who prevailed. …

Tom Elia at New Editor sums it up.

Daley will step down at the end of the month and will be replaced by current budget director Jack Lew.

Update: Does anyone else find it as interesting as I do that President Obama’s first two chiefs of staff, both very important Chicago Democrats, chose to resign their positions — one right before a big midterm election, and the other before a big presidential election campaign?

Perhaps it’s best explained by an old Chicago Democratic Party political maxim, first uttered by West Side ward boss Bernie Neistein: “Don’t make no waves, don’t back no losers.”

Charlie Gasparino says the moderates have been shellacked.

… Daley thought he had the president’s blessing to move the Obama economic agenda to the center, but that support quickly evaporated as the ideologues and the spin masters like Valerie Jarrett and David Plouffe assumed bigger roles in the administration’s daily affairs.

As I reported on the Fox Business Network back in September, Daley grew increasingly agitated about his role. He openly complained that he was being isolated by Jarrett, Obama’s friend and personal adviser, who’s been at the forefront of Obama’s most recent leftward tilt, and let it be known that he wanted to do something else — maybe serve as treasury secretary, given his banking background at JP Morgan.

At the time, I received an interesting phone call from Daley himself, grousing about my report without offering any specific complaints. When I asked him if he wanted the treasury, he told me he didn’t “lust” for the job. He issued a similar nondenial when I asked him about his issues with Jarrett.

Those issues were obviously too much for Daley to overcome; he had no choice but to resign and “spend more time with his family.”

One thing is certain: Bill Daley may want to spend more time back in his native Chicago, but the president’s ultraliberal handlers clearly wanted him to spend less time with the man in the White House.

Seth Mandel has more.

The resignation of White House chief of staff Bill Daley must be frustrating to President Obama because it–with some help from the well-timed release of Jodi Kantor’s new book on the Obama White House–reveals the extent to which Obama has succeeded not in creating a no-drama administration (an impossible goal in the Washington of 2012 anyway), but rather in creating the impression of one.

The New York Times? tries admirably to parrot the administration line, calling Daley’s departure a “distracting shake-up in a White House that has prided itself on a lack of internal drama, with a tightly knit circle of loyal senior advisers playing a steadying role.” But the paper is forced to give away the game later on in the story, revealing the Obama White House for what it is: the Hotel California of presidential administrations:

“While the president said he asked Mr. Daley to reconsider his decision, he did not apply the kind of pressure he brought to bear on Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who has for several months been eager to return to New York.”

The Times is right; Geithner has been begging to leave. And far from being chock full of “loyal senior advisers,” the White House is made up of people trying desperately to get out before their term is up (Daley, Geithner) and comically disastrous hires to which Obama has shown a generous amount of loyalty (Eric Holder?, former press secretary Bob Gibbs). …

Jennifer Rubin.

… In the wake of the president’s extra-constitutional power grab on recess appointments and his demonization of the Republican Party, it would seem the president’s leftist instincts and advisors are fully in command. There is no pretense of trying to reach deals with the Republicans on entitlement or tax reform. The Defense Department’s budget, if the president has his way, will be cut. The base extols in the showing of no-holds-barred leftism. But now that everything is subsumed to the goal of re-election, how exactly does the undisguised lurch to the left help Obama?

Obama’s blank slate, on which moderate voters projected their aspirations, is now filled in. The resulting portrait is of a president unwilling to talk turkey to his own base, unwilling to address our debt and convinced that vilification and name calling is the key to success. Comity, the constitution or governance? Forget it. In both Obama and Newt Gingrich you now see the crystallization of lowest-common denominator politics. The politics of personal destruction? They are a matched pair, perfect practitioners of that game. Alas, the country is not better off. But boy do they feel good showing who is a force to be reckoned with.

The Hill Blog has a post on the subject.

… Daley was only ineffective because his boss would not let him be effective.

Bill Daley is a political pragmatist. He cuts deals. Like his father and his brother, he is not a left-wing ideologue; nor is he a Republican in Democratic clothing.

He is a pro-business Democrat, an increasingly rare breed these days in Washington.

Obama is not a pro-business Democrat. His wife is not a pro-business Democrat. They don’t like the business community. They don’t trust the free market. They want to spread wealth around (other people’s wealth, I might add).

Jennifer Rubin reports David Brooks went to confession on the Laura Ingraham show.

Politico reports that moderate New York Times columnist David Brooks confessed to radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, regarding President Obama:

‘ I still like him and admire him personally, but he’s certainly more liberal than I thought he was. He’s more liberal than he thinks he is. He thinks he’s just slightly center-left, but when you get down to his instincts, they’re pretty left. And his problem is that he can’t really act on them, because it would be political disaster. And so that means, I think right now he’s doing very little, proposing very little.” ‘

I’ll put aside for now whether he should turn in his pundit badge after misjudging a liberal president so badly, for so long and with so much certitude.

But for now, let’s consider carefully what Brooks is saying. He contends in essence that the entire 2008 campaign was a canard and, worse, that Obama is so politically tone-deaf and insulated that he doesn’t recognize that he is badly out of step with a center-right country. No wonder Obama imagines the Republicans who decry his liberal statism are acting out of malice. If he’s the personification of reasoned centrism, then they must be extreme and irrational. …

Jennifer also looks into the background of the foolish Gingrich attacks on Romney.

The decision by Newt Gingrich to go anti-Bain — and those ostensibly trying to help him — are in some ways inexplicably stupid. Why would Gingrich, who already has a reputation as a thorn in the side of the right and a malicious self-promoter, attack Mitt Romney on free-market capitalism, which is at the center of the modern Republican Party?

Gingrich has never been known as one to distinguish good ideas from bad, but consider the other Republicans who have involved themselves in an endeavor which will likely go down as a text-book example of political stupidity.

There is Barry Bennett, the longtime establishment Republican operative from Ohio, who supposedly paid for the anti-Bain film. Did he think this was smart Republican political strategy? A longtime Ohio Republican activist and national Republican fundraiser who knows Bennett said, “I’m shocked.” He acknowledged, “Barry is a gun for hire,” but said that mainstream Republicans would find the attack piece repulsive. …

The Occupiers in DC are getting some of their natural allies.

The rat population around the two Occupy D.C. camps at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza has “exploded”since protesters began their vigil in October, according to Mohammad N. Akhter, the director of the District’s Department of Health.

Akhter said in an interview Monday that city health inspectors have seen rats running openly through both camps and spotted numerous new burrows and nests underneath hay-stuffed pallets occupiers are using for beds. Both campsites had working kitchens for weeks until last week, but protesters at McPherson Square voluntarily closed down theirs after health inspectors pointed out unsanitary conditions during an informal monitoring visit. …

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It is tiring to forever follow the mess in DC, so today is politics free day! First, our favorite from the NY Times, John Tierney as he tells us how we might manage our new year’s resolutions better.

IT’S still early in 2012, so let’s be optimistic. Let’s assume you have made a New Year’s resolution and have not yet broken it. Based on studies of past resolutions, here are some uplifting predictions:

1) Whatever you hope for this year — to lose weight, to exercise more, to spend less money — you’re much more likely to make improvements than someone who hasn’t made a formal resolution.

2) If you can make it through the rest of January, you have a good chance of lasting a lot longer.

3) With a few relatively painless strategies and new digital tools, you can significantly boost your odds of success.

Now for a not-so-uplifting prediction: Most people are not going to keep their resolutions all year long. They’ll start out with the best of intentions but the worst of strategies, expecting that they’ll somehow find the willpower to resist temptation after temptation. By the end of January, a third will have broken their resolutions, and by July more than half will have lapsed.

They’ll fail because they’ll eventually run out of willpower, which social scientists no longer regard as simply a metaphor. They’ve recently reported that willpower is a real form of mental energy, powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control.

The result is “ego depletion,” as this state of mental fatigue was named by Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University (and my co-author of a book on willpower). He and many of his colleagues have concluded that the way to keep a New Year’s resolution is to anticipate the limits of your willpower.

One of their newest studies, published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, tracked people’s reactions to temptations throughout the day. The study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Chicago, showed that the people with the best self-control, paradoxically, are the ones who use their willpower less often. Instead of fending off one urge after another, these people set up their lives to minimize temptations. They play offense, not defense, using their willpower in advance so that they avoid crises, conserve their energy and outsource as much self-control as they can.

These strategies are particularly important if you’re trying to lose weight, which is the most typical New Year’s resolution as well as the most difficult. …

Believe it or not, the iPhone is now five years old. Wired has the story of how it has changed in just that short period of time.

Gadget fans may be focused on the CES trade show this week, but there’s something else notable going on today: It’s the iPhone’s fifth birthday.

Five years ago today, Apple unveiled the original iPhone to the world. It wasn’t a tightly kept secret, shrouded in mystery and speculation like more recent Apple announcements, but it was arguably the world’s most anticipated gadget launch.

Although its form factor — a capacitive touchscreen candy bar — hasn’t dramatically changed over the years, each iteration of the iPhone has yielded important improvements. Let’s take a look back at how the iPhone revolutionized what we thought a phone could be.

The iPhone Is Revealed
“An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator,” Jobs said when preparing to introduce the iPhone in January 2007. “An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator…. These are not three separate devices!” …

Wired also tells us drones now make up one third of our country’s military aircraft.

Remember when the military actually put human beings in the cockpits of its planes? They still do, but in far fewer numbers. According to a new congressional report acquired by Danger Room, drones now account for 31 percent of all military aircraft.

To be fair, lots of those drones are tiny flying spies, like the Army’s Raven, that could never accommodate even the most diminutive pilot. (Specifically, the Army has 5,346 Ravens, making it the most numerous military drone by far.) But in 2005, only five percent of military aircraft were robots, a report by the Congressional Research Service notes. Barely seven years later, the military has 7,494 drones. Total number of old school, manned aircraft: 10,767 planes.

A small sliver of those nearly 7,500 drones gets all of the attention. The military owns 161 Predators — the iconic flying strike drone used over Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere — and Reapers, the Predator’s bigger, better-armed brother.

But even as the military’s bought a ton of drones in the past few years, the Pentagon spends much, much more money on planes with people in them. Manned aircraft still get 92 percent of the Pentagon’s aircraft procurement money. Still, since 2001, the military has spent $26 billion on drones, the report — our Document of the Day — finds.

The drones are also getting safer. …

Dilbert’s Scott Adams just got addicted to golf. He tries to understand why.

I have a hypothesis that the things we do for recreation are usually metaphors that allow us to express our caveman instincts in socially appropriate ways. The nearer an activity is to our basic hunting and gathering nature, the more we like it.

Consider golf. Until recently, I had never golfed, and was baffled by its appeal. On the surface, the game is nothing but random rules about the proper way to put a round object in a hole in the ground. I have a good imagination, but prior to taking up golf, I couldn’t imagine enjoying the so-called sport. That said, as part of my “Year of Trying New Things” (more on that another day), I leapt into golf with both feet. Result: Instant addiction.

What the hell??? How could such a bizarre activity be so appealing? I needed to understand this thing. I started by mapping the components of golf to their caveman origins:

          Using clubs (Okay, that one is obvious. Humans are tool users.)

          Problem solving (Every hole is different.)

          Hunting (Locate your ball)

         Killing (Whack the ball when you find it.) …

Popular Science tells how 100 year old Scotch was created from Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic stash.

In 1907, Ernest Shackleton and crew set out on the ship Nimrod to visit Antarctica and, they hoped, the South Pole. The good news was, the entire party survived the trip, thanks in part to the Rare Old Highland Whisky they brought to the frozen continent. But the expedition was forced to evacuate in 1909, some 100 miles short of the Pole they sought. And, as winter ice encroached and the men hurried home, they left behind three cases of the choice whisky.

In 2007, just about a century later, the whisky was found, intact, at the expedition’s hut at Cape Royds in Antarctica.

The stuff was made by Mackinlay & Co at the Glen Mhor distillery in 1896 or thereabouts. Mackinlay hasn’t been an active brand for a while now, but the current owner of the Mackinlay name, Whyte and Mackay, obtained a few of the precious bottles and set out to do what any right-thinking Scot would do: first, taste the whisky; and second, attempt to analyze and re-create it. The result, a product called Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky, is, as of this writing, buyable in stores.

How was the re-creation carried out? Dr. James Pryde, chief chemist at Whyte and Mackay, subjected the samples to a comprehensive chemical analysis, in conjunction with a rigorous sensory analysis (that is, sniffing and tasting). Firstly, it was established that the alcoholic strength of the whisky was high enough that it very likely never froze over the years it spent interred in Antarctica. In winter, the hut reached a minimum temperature of -32.5°C, but, at 47 percent alcohol, the whisky remained liquid down to a couple of degrees cooler than that extreme. This eliminated what had been a significant source of concern about the quality of the sample, that decades of freezing and thawing had altered or ruined it. Carbon dating verified that the whisky did indeed date from the Shackleton era. …

We learn from Entertainment Weekly Lily on ‘Modern Family’ will drop the F-bomb in next week’s episode.

On next week’s Modern Family, toddler Lily is going to use one of the worst of George Carlin’s famous Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.

The adopted two-and-a-half year-old character somehow picks up the profanity “f–k.” This naturally horrifies her parents, Cam and Mitchell, who in particular fear she’ll blurt it at an upcoming wedding. Lily is shown saying the word, but it’s not audible to the viewer. The episode’s title: “Little Bo Bleep.”

It might be the first time in a scripted family broadcast TV series where a child has said the f-word. …

That was fun! Tomorrow we’ll get back to finding ways to save our country by ridding ourselves of Valerie Jarrett’s Washington stooge.

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Debra Saunders says the president doesn’t work well with others.

President Obama is running for re-election with an unusual pitch: He can’t work with others.

He only gets along with yes-men. “I refuse to take no for an answer,” Obama said Wednesday of his decision to make a “recess” appointment that placed Richard Cordray as head of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Constitution, of course, gives the president the power to make appointments during Senate recesses. Technically, however, the Senate was in session. The imperial president bypassed Senate rules and years of precedent, because he wouldn’t or couldn’t cut a deal.

Later Wednesday, the White House announced three more recess appointments for vacant seats on the National Labor Relations Board. Obama explained: “When Congress refuses to act, and as a result, hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them.”

Obama, a former constitutional law professor, just kicked the Constitution’s delicate balance of powers by using the executive boot to step on the Senate’s power to advise and consent.

I understand the president’s frustration with the system. In December, 53 senators voted in Cordray’s favor, but under Senate rules, 60 votes are needed to bring his confirmation to an up-or-down floor vote. (Republican senators don’t have a problem with Cordray, per se. They used his nomination in an attempt to roll back some of the regulatory powers and increase congressional oversight of the new consumer bureau, created in the Dodd-Frank law.)

The 60-vote threshold may not seem fair. But in his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote, “To me, the threat to eliminate the filibuster on judicial nominations was just one more example of the Republicans changing the rules in the middle of the game.” He was angry at Republicans for thinking about flouting precedent.

Obama, however, didn’t seem to mind when Democrats changed the rules during George W. Bush’s presidency. On Nov. 16, 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the Senate would hold pro forma sessions – that could involve little more than gavel rattling – during the Thanksgiving holiday “to prevent recess appointments.” …

Interesting historical comparison from John Steele Gordon.

I agree with Pete and Alana–and many others around the blogosphere–that Obama’s mini-Putsch two days ago was both lawless and typical of this administration. Obama only cares about his re-election at this point, and if that requires the Constitution to be trashed in the process, well, so be it.

As Alana pointed out, Charles Krauthammer thinks it might be clever politics, however cynical, because the president is arguing he has to get things done and it’s all the Senate’s fault for being obstructionist. I’m not so sure. The American people take the Constitution seriously and have a limited tolerance for politicians who try to evade it for political purposes. FDR, just off a triumphant re-election (46 of 48 states), tried in 1937 to “pack” the Supreme Court that had been obstructing his programs by adding an extra justice for every justice over 70 years of age. That would have been perfectly constitutional, as Congress has the power to set the number of justices. (There were originally six, and there were 10 after 1863. The number has been fixed at nine since 1869.) But the people would have none of it, and Congress, responding to public opinion, refused to act. It was a devastating political defeat for FDR. …

American.com notes the demise of another anti-fracking study.

Opponents of “fracking,” the use of hydraulic fracturing technology to liberate natural gas from shale formations (among other things) are desperate to tar the new technology before free-energy markets can undermine the green-power revolution with abundant flows of affordable natural gas.

Most recently, some Cornell researchers made the claim that gas produced by fracking would cause more climate change than would the continued use of coal:

Compared to coal, the footprint of shale gas is at least 20% greater and perhaps more than twice as great on the 20-year horizon and is comparable when compared over 100 years.

Apparently, they had to go to some great, and completely unrealistic, lengths to manufacture this conclusion, as a commentary points out in Climatic Change (emphasis mine):

High leakage rates, a short methane GWP [Global Warming Potential], and comparison in terms of heat content are the inappropriate bases upon which Howarth et al. ground their claim that gas could be twice as bad as coal in its greenhouse impact. Using more reasonable leakage rates and bases of comparison, shale gas has a GHG footprint that is half and perhaps a third that of coal.

The anti-frackers will keep trying though—they have little choice. Cheap, abundant natural gas could undercut their ability to drive the energy policy agenda (not to mention transportation policy, housing policy, industrial policy, etc.) by simultaneously pushing coal out of the market, cleaning the air, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And all without a grand government-driven energy policy. Imagine that.

A peek into the coming turmoil in the legal profession can be gleaned from a post from Inside The Law School Scam Blog. This post is a reaction to the head of the ABA expressing little concern over the lack of jobs for recent law grads.

… You really couldn’t ask for a better illustration of how untethered our profession’s powers that be have gotten from basic social and economic reality.  Does Robinson actually think that, under present conditions and into the foreseeable future, an annual tuition of $25,000 would make the average law school a good deal?  Is he aware that this number is 70% higher, in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, than what the average private law school cost 25 years ago?  Does he understand that a $25,000 annual tuition translates into an average of $80,000 of law school debt for students who attend such institutions? Does he have any idea how many current law graduates have career prospects that justify taking on that amount of high-interest non-dischargeable debt?

These are not “complex questions.”  A complex question is whether you’d rather have Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady as your quarterback with the score tied in the fourth quarter, or whether the universe is ultimately a meaningless void, or whether Beggars Banquet is a better album than Abbey Road.  A simple question is whether the current cost of legal education is justified by the likely return on investment it produces.

So here’s to you, Mr. Robinson. You’ve provided a perfect illustration of why Congress needs to take a regulatory flamethrower to your clueless organization, at least to the extent it continues to enable a system of professional accreditation that has degenerated into the smuggest and slackest of cartels — one which benefits law schools, while doing serious damage to lawyers, law students, and, not least, the public at large, which will be picking up the tab for all the selfishness and stupidity that fuels this system.

Slate pays tribute to a new U. S. map.

… American mapmaking’s most prestigious honor is the “Best of Show” award at the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. The five most recent winners were all maps designed by large, well-known institutions: National Geographic (three times), the Central Intelligence Agency Cartography Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau. But earlier this year, the 38th annual Best of Show award went to a map created by Imus Geographics—which is basically one dude named David Imus working in a farmhouse outside Eugene, Ore.

At first glance, Imus’ “The Essential Geography of the United States of America” may look like any other U.S. wall map. It’s about 4 feet by 3 feet. It uses a standard, two-dimensional conic projection. It has place names. Political boundaries. Lakes, rivers, highways.

So what makes this map different from the Rand McNally version you can buy at a bookstore? Or from the dusty National Geographic pull-down mounted in your child’s elementary school classroom? Can one paper wall map really outshine all others—so definitively that it becomes award-worthy?

I’m here to tell you it can. This is a masterful map. And the secret is in its careful attention to design. …

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Chip Mellor of the Institute for Justice was the WSJ’s weekend interviewee. 

The Republican presidential campaign is at full boil, and among the biggest players are so-called super PACs, political-action committees that can raise and spend as much money as they like. Mitt Romney’s version helped ruin Newt Gingrich in Iowa, for example. For that right to free speech (not the ads), you can thank or blame Chip Mellor, who runs the most influential legal shop that most people have never heard of.

Mr. Mellor is the 61-year-old chief of the Institute for Justice, which has been celebrating its 20th anniversary of guerrilla legal warfare on behalf of individual freedom. He’s worth getting to know because he and his fellow legal battlers are behind a larger campaign to restore some of the Constitution’s lost rights. And they’re often succeeding.

Take political speech. The Supreme Court’s January 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC restored the First Amendment rights of corporations and unions to assemble to influence elections. That was followed in March 2010 by SpeechNow v. FEC, in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said that political committees may accept unlimited contributions for the purpose of independent political spending.

“That’s not to downplay the importance of Citizens United,” Mr. Mellor says, “but SpeechNow is the decision that lets people (and corporations and unions) pool their money in Super PACs.” Mr. Mellor’s outfit represented SpeechNow with the Center for Competitive Politics and IJ argued the case before the court.

The campaign finance reform lobby is going to fight relentlessly, Mr. Mellor says. “There continues to be the false premise that the problem in politics is too much money, when in fact the problem is too much government for sale.” Besides, he points out, “these campaign finance laws are really treating only a symptom, not the disease. Until you get to the root cause, which is too much government, you are really not doing anything productive and in many cases you are doing harm.” …

More on an IJ triumph from George Will.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is famously liberal and frequently reversed. Recently, however, a unanimous three-judge panel of this court did something right when it held that bone marrow donors can be compensated. In effect, it revised a law, the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) of 1984, because of a medical technique developed since then.

Was this “judicial activism” — judges acting as legislators, imposing social policies they prefer? Or was it proper judicial engagement — performance of the judicial duty to ensure that the law is applied in conformity with the actual facts of the case? Herewith an example of a court’s conscientious application of law in light of a pertinent change — a technological change — in a medical sphere the law regulates.

NOTA made it a felony to sell human organs for transplants. This codified two moral judgments. One is that there is wisdom in an instinctive repugnance about the commodification of the human body, or at least of body parts that are not renewable. The other judgment is that a market for organs — offering perhaps $50,000 for a kidney — would usually, and troublingly, involve affluent people buying from low-income people whose consent is influenced by their neediness.

Here, however, is another moral dilemma resulting from NOTA’s codification of moral impulses: Potentially deadly blood diseases strike tens of thousands of Americans each year. For example, of the 44,000 who will be diagnosed with leukemia, including 3,500 children, half the adults and 700 of the children will die from it. Nearly 3,000 Americans die of various blood diseases because they cannot find matching bone marrow donors. Compensation would substantially increase the number of lifesaving donors. Unfortunately, NOTA classifies as an organ the bone marrow that is the source of lifesaving stem cells that generate white and red blood cells, and platelets.

The 9th Circuit panel ruled this month that a new medical technique has made the phrase “bone marrow transplant” anachronistic. When NOTA was written, extracting bone marrow involved a protracted, painful and risky semi-surgical procedure in which long needles were inserted into the hip bones of anesthetized donors.

Now, however, there is an essentially risk-free technique — called apheresis — for obtaining the stem cells not from hip bones but from the arms — the blood streams — of donors as they rest for six or so hours in a recliner. …

Jennifer Rubin is looking forward to Huntsman’s defeat in New Hampshire.

Jon Huntsman is going nowhere in this presidential race. In the must-win state of New Hampshire, where he has spent virtually all his time, he risks coming in next-to-last, ahead of only the faltering Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

It might have been different, if not for his decision to run as combatively anti-conservative and to throw his lot in with the isolationists.

His key strategist John Weaver, who led the presidential campaign for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) before being dumped in 2007, learned the wrong lesson from McCain. Certainly McCain had been a thorn in the side of conservatives, but when running for president he did his best to convince them of his social conservative bona fides and mend fences. He didn’t stick his finger in their eye and then ask for their vote.

Huntsman, on the other hand, has gratuitously played to the mainstream media and dumped on conservatives. In an ABC interview, he told Jake Tapper:

“The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party — the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012. When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science — Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.” …

The Telegraph, UK profiles trackers employed by Homeland Security.

In the seemingly endless desert wasteland of the Arizona-Mexico border, amid 30ft high cacti and thorny mesquite trees, an eagle-eyed Native American scout has found what he is looking for.

A freshly dislodged leaf from a Creosote bush is his first sign, followed by a snapped branch still wet to the touch. Nearby, a shiny patch of dirt shows where suspected drug smugglers have tried to evade his ancient skills by brushing over their vehicle’s tyre tracks with a tree limb.

Unfortunately for the smugglers Jason Garcia, 38, a modern day Tohono O’odham Indian, is hot on their trail. Mr Garcia is a member of an elite group called the “Shadow Wolves,” the US Department of Homeland Security’s only Native American tracking unit. The squad also includes members of the Navajo, Lakota and Blackfoot tribes, and they are considered by some the best hunters of human beings in the world.

While a giant multi-billion dollar fence, unmanned Predator drones and electronic sensors are being touted as the way to seal this porous section of the border, Mr Garcia uses the same methods his ancestors developed over centuries to catch deer and peccary.

He and eight other Shadow Wolves operate in the Tohono O’odham Nation, a vast Indian reservation roughly the size of Northern Ireland. The O’odham have inhabited the area for thousands of years and their name translates as “Desert People.”. Some 20,000 of them now live in scattered villages. …

Big football game tonight and there might be some drinking of adult beverages. The Wall Street Journal says it is hard to spell “lush” without the letters LSU.

This weekend, thousands of Louisiana State fans will swarm New Orleans to watch the Tigers take on Alabama in Monday’s BCS Championship game. But before, during and after the contest, these celebrants will gather in the French Quarter to engage in the one activity they’re better at than perhaps any other group of football fans: drinking.

Year in and year out, regardless of how well their team is playing, LSU supporters make other college tailgating crews look like Baptist choirs.

All six games at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, La. this season drew more than 90,000 fans. While beer isn’t sold inside, the parking lots remain jammed during the action.

It’s not uncommon for tailgates to have full bars—with some stations serving as many as 200 guests with bourbon, gin, vodka, scotch, Bloody Marys, mimosas and up to 25 cases of beer. …

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Here is Mark Steyn’s take down of Newt that appeared in the National Review in December.

I was wrong about Newt. Or, as Newt would say, I was fundamentally wrong. Fundamentally and profoundly wrong. I was as adverbially wrong about Newt as it’s possible to be. Back in the spring, during an analysis of the presidential field, I was asked by Sean Hannity what I thought of Gingrich. If memory serves, I guffawed. I suggested he was this season’s Alan Keyes — a guy running for president to boost his speaking fees but whose candidacy was otherwise irrelevant. I said I liked the cut of this Tim Pawlenty fellow, who promptly self-destructed. There would be a lot of that in the months ahead: Michele Bachmann ODing on Gardasil, Rick Perry floating the trial balloon of his candidacy all year long, only to puncture it with the jaunty swing of his spur ten minutes into the first debate. And when all the other Un-Romney of the Week candidates were gone, there was Newt, the last man standing, smirking, waddling to the debate podium. Unlike the niche candidates, he offers all the faults of his predecessors rolled into one: Like Michele Bachmann, his staffers quit; like Herman Cain, he spent the latter decades of the last century making anonymous women uncomfortable, mainly through being married to them; like Mitt Romney, he was a flip-flopper, being in favor of government mandates on health care before he was against them, and in favor of big-government climate-change “solutions” before he was against them, and in favor of putting giant mirrors in space to light American highways by night before he was agai . . . oh, wait, that one he may still be in favor of. So, if you live in the I-95 corridor, you might want to buy blackout curtains. …

Jennifer Rubin rounds out the Newt stuff for today.

It is symptomatic of Newt Gingrich’s ego and the distorted view of the world which accompanies it that he is convinced his woes are traceable to ideological enemies who lie and cheat to prevent his wonderfulness from becoming available to the American people. It was Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s fault he was brought up on ethics charges. It is the mainstream media that distorts his own words. And it is Mitt Romney who had the temerity to point out Gingrich’s own record and embarrass him, which has robbed him of his golden opportunity.

Sound farfetched? Well, if you saw his post-caucus speech, filled with venom, and watched his behavior thereafter you’ll come to see, I think, that he is now motivated purely by anger and spite. His ire is directed specifically at Romney (not Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.)) for reasons not entirely clear, although the notion of a viable candidate besting him for the nomination is probably too much for him to bear. …

Speaking of arrogant people, WSJ OpEd comments on the president’s latest stunt. 

President Obama’s appointments of Richard Cordray as head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and of three new members of the National Labor Relations Board, are all unconstitutional.

Each of these jobs requires Senate confirmation. The president’s ability to fill them without that confirmation, using his constitutional power to “fill up vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate,” depends upon there actually being a recess. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate are open for business. The new appointees can pocket their government paychecks, but all their official acts will be void as a matter of law and will likely be struck down by the courts in legal challenges that are certain to come. …

… The president has done his new appointees and the public no favors. Both the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are regulatory agencies with profound real-world impact. Those individuals and businesses subject to regulations and rulings adopted during the tenure of Mr. Obama’s recess appointees can challenge the legality of those measures in the courts, and they will very likely succeed.

Only two years ago in New Process Steel v. NLRB, the Supreme Court undercut hundreds of NLRB decisions by ruling that the board had not lawfully organized itself after the terms of two recess appointee members expired, leaving it without a quorum. Similar issues will arise when both the new financial bureau and the NLRB begin to act with members whose appointments are constitutionally insupportable.

The fact that the president has apparently triggered the constitutional crisis without really expecting to produce any lasting policy impact, and for no better reason than to bolster his claim of running against a “do-nothing” Congress (the key part of his re-election campaign), makes his behavior all the more reprehensible.

More from Nile Gardiner.

In December Barack Obama vainly declared himself the fourth best president in American history, up there with the likes of Abraham Lincoln and FDR, just three years into his first term. In an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS he observed:

“The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president – with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln – just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do. And we’re gonna keep on at it.”

Perhaps this display of self-importance is not surprising, coming from a president who enthusiastically accepted the Nobel Peace Prize after just a few months in the job, and even campaigned thousands of miles across the Atlantic in Berlin while running for office. This is a leader who thinks nothing of taking a $4 million, taxpayer-subsidised vacation in Hawaii – nearly 100 times the average annual salary of an American worker, which currently stands at $41,673.

And upon his return from the sun-swept beaches of the Pacific, the president decided to bypass the elected representatives of the US Congress on Wednesday by unilaterally installing “three members of the National Labor Relations Board as well as a director for the controversial new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” (Richard Cordray), in a huge sop to the powerful Left-wing labour unions. The move has been condemned on Capitol Hill and described by a prominent legal scholar as “a tyrannical abuse of power”.

There is something rotten at the heart of the White House when the President ignores the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution and rules with impunity. Not only is it an unhealthy power play by executive authority in the freest nation on earth, but it is also a display of extraordinary contempt for the American people 14 months after the US mid-terms where voters emphatically rejected the president’s agenda. Despite his self-proclaimed “shellacking” at the hands of the US electorate, President Obama continues to behave with impunity, in the belief that most Americans are wrong and that he is right. His approach is remarkably lacking in humility and empathy at a time of tremendous public dissatisfaction with the state of the nation. …

Jennifer Rubin says even the left is troubled by the latest Obama outrage.

… But on the left there is a growing sense of queasiness. Do they really want to set the precedent for President Romney or Santorum? And really, with this ploy why would the president ever submit to the ordinary confirmation process? The left-leaning Bloomberg View editorial board writes:

“We understand why the president, out of deep frustration, went around Republican senators. .. Nevertheless, our desire to have effective regulation doesn’t trump our reservations over the president’s unusual methods. .”.

We think the president, who is making confrontation with congressional Republicans a major theme of his re-election effort, is choosing politics over principle, and playing dangerously with the Constitution’s checks and balances, in choosing to tell the Senate when it is and is not in session.”

Tim Noah at the New Republic likewise grasps the lack of legal support for the president’s action: “I’m having trouble understanding how the recess appointment of Cordray can possibly withstand a legal challenge. And I’m really having trouble understanding why Obama didn’t take advantage of his constitutional window [January 3], when the Senate was inarguably in recess.” Because he wants the fight, not the appointees.

Obama is playing to the very worst inclinations on the left — the contempt for the strictures of precedent and the Constitution, which act as a check on needless confrontation, government overreach and legal chaos. Obama has made worse decisions in his presidency (putting the Afghanistan war on an election timetable), but he has never made one so destructive of the fabric of the Constitution and the comity that is essential for productive governance.

American.com says we have more ethanol regs to repeal. 

Deficit hawks, environmentalists, and food processors are celebrating the expiration of the ethanol tax credit. This corporate handout gave $0.45 to ethanol producers for every gallon they produced and cost taxpayers $6 billion in 2011. So why did the powerful corn ethanol lobby let it expire without an apparent fight? The answer lies in legislation known as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which creates government-guaranteed demand that keeps corn prices high and generates massive farm profits. Removing the tax credit but keeping the RFS is like scraping a little frosting from the ethanol-boondoggle cake.

The RFS mandates that at least 37 percent of the 2011-12 corn crop be converted to ethanol and blended with the gasoline that powers our cars. The ethanol mandate is causing corn demand to outstrip supply by more and more each year, creating a vulnerable market in which even the slightest production disturbance will have devastating consequences for the world’s poor. It is time for the federal government to stop requiring cars to burn food.

Human mouths and motor engines provide the main sources of demand for corn. …

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The president went to Ohio yesterday and Andrew Malcolm caught something new. The hand-picked Dem crowd laughed at Obama. Not with him, at him.   Warms Pickerhead’s heart.

… Before you get into the guts of the speech, the part about how much you care about the economy and creating jobs and protecting the middle class and how screwed up Washington is because of other people and their sadly chronic partisan ways, you set up the audience with some genuine sappiness.

It’s worked every time. Something seasonal that allows you to show, seemingly offhand, how regular you are and how dedicated to the job you are. And really caring.

“I want to wish everybody a happy New Year,” Obama told the Ohio crowd Wednesday afternoon. “2012 is going to be a good year. (Applause.) It’s going to be a good year.”

“And one of my New Year’s resolutions is to make sure that I get out of Washington and spend time with folks like you. (Applause.) Because folks here in Ohio and all across the country — I want you to know you’re the reason why I ran for this office in the first place. You remind me what we are still fighting for.”

Then, out of the blue Wednesday, came a tiny incident. A minute moment. There had been no signs of trouble, nothing to reveal that the Real Good Talker’s real good talking had lost his touch or control of his sitting subjects. The rest of the speech continued normally. Many there probably didn’t even notice.

The president of the United States has said the next line so many times over these 1,080 days of his reign. He says it as a kind of democratic gesture, a compliment to a crowd of American citizens, a public obeisance that the most powerful man in the world is profoundly connected to them.

Obama said, “You inspire me.”

And you know how the members of that crowd in the most Democratic district of Ohio responded to that campaigning Democratic president’s professed sincerity this time?

They laughed at him. 

“Okay,” Obama insisted, “you do.”

And the president, like a pro pol, continued with his speech, as if nothing had happened.

Writing in Bloomberg, Clive Crook says it is not a failure of capitalism in the West, but a failure of leadership.

With the world’s rich economies struggling and the leaders of the European Union intent on making things worse, the gravity of the economic crisis still confronting the West is hard to exaggerate. Nonetheless, it can be done.

According to what I read, we face not just the worst recession since the 1930s, but a challenge to the West’s entire economic order. The Great Recession exposes the poverty of orthodox economics. It constitutes an ideological crisis. It shows that capitalism itself is “fundamentally” flawed. If all this were true, I’d be a lot more worried about the coming year than I am — which is saying something.

A new year’s corrective is in order. Reports of the death of capitalism are greatly exaggerated.

What’s surprising is just how wrong those reports have been. Perhaps, as I write, the revolutionaries are organizing in secret, but I see no signs of a popular uprising. Please don’t say Occupy Wall Street, that risible stirring of the perpetually discontented whose principal goal seems to be “a general assembly in every backyard, on every street corner” (not all at once, I assume). It is a movement, if you can call it that, without an agenda, and as soon as it tries to get one, if not before, it will sputter out.

Where, meanwhile, is the revival of the organized Left? America’s Democrats are not exactly riding a surge of support. They are worried that Republicans — who brought the country to the brink of default last summer, and whose contest for the presidential nomination has shown their party at its most shambolic — might regain control of the Senate and send Barack Obama packing. Recent Gallup polls show a fall to barely 41 percent in the number of Americans who see their county as divided into “haves” and “have-nots.” Some 64 percent of Americans — and 48 percent of Democrats — see “big government” as a greater threat to the country than “big business,” a number near record levels. …

Jennifer Rubin has words for Newt.

Their speeches last night could not have been more different. Rick Santorum was humble and high-minded. Newt Gingrich was snide and angry. Santorum talked about America. Gingrich talked about negative ads. Santorum’s message was aimed at working-class voters, social conservatives, disillusioned independents and hawks. In other words, it’s a broad-based message. Gingrich’s message was entirely negative: anti-Ron Paul and anti-Mitt Romney (asking if voters really wanted “a Massachusetts moderate”). Santorum was glowing and smiling. Gingrich was unsmiling.

Gingrich certainly appeared angry last night, as if he’d been denied something rightfully his. He had expected to win, and finishing behind a candidate who thinks we brought 9/11 on ourselves and wants to take us back to the gold standard must sting.

But conservatives who vouched for him and ignored his egomania are seeing what that entails. In search of personal vindication, Gingrich will stay in the race, making it that more difficult for Santorum to mount a challenge to Mitt Romney. The new Newt? Not remotely. It has always been and will always be only about Newt. …

The Obama administration is again beating on lenders to make sub-prime loans. John Lott has the story.

Just days before Christmas, the Obama administration gave Bank of America a big lump of coal, levying a hefty $335 million dollar fine on the company for discriminating against minorities in its lending practices. 

Supposedly Countrywide, a mortgage company bought by Bank of America in 2008, had not given out enough low interest rate loans to minorities from 2004 to 2008.

What the large fine reveals is that President Obama hasn’t learned anything from the recent financial crisis. 

What the president sees as discrimination in awarding a mortgage, lenders saw as wise business decisions. 

If a borrower can’t afford a down payment, Obama appears to view charging a higher interest rate as discrimination. Lenders also think that they shouldn’t treat borrowers whose sole source of income is welfare or unemployment insurance, the same as those applicants who have a job. But Obama, again, appears to view this as discrimination.

There is obviously a problem with no down payments: if the price of the house falls so that it is worth less than the loan, people will default and walk away. Similarly, when unemployment insurance or welfare runs out, borrowers might find they can’t keep paying their mortgage.

The Equal Credit Opportunity Act the Obama administration used to impose this fine was exactly what helped cause the mortgage crisis by forcing lenders to make risky loans that they didn’t want to make. 

Yet, just last month, Obama put the blame for these risky loans going bad on banks for their “breathtaking greed” that “plunged our economy and the world into a crisis.” …

David Harsanyi is not sure he likes what Santorum represents.

Rick Santorum, like most Republican candidates, fashions himself the one true conservative running in 2012. If the thought of big, intrusive liberal government offends you, he might just be your man. And if you favor a big, intrusive Republican government, he’s unquestionably your candidate.

People are taking a look at Santorum. Important people. People in Iowa. Even New York Times columnist David Brooks recently celebrated his working-class appeal, newfound viability and economic populism, noting that the former Pennsylvania senator’s book “It Takes a Family“ was a ”broadside against Barry Goldwater-style conservatism” — or, in other words, a rejection of that Neanderthal fealty for liberty and free markets that has yet to be put down. Santorum’s book is crammed with an array of ideas for technocratic meddling; even the author acknowledges that some people “will reject” what he has to say “as a kind of ‘Big Government’ conservatism.”

Santorum grumbles about too many conservatives believing in unbridled “personal autonomy” and subscribing to the “idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do … that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom (and) we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues.” …

 New York’s rent control is about to get to the Supreme Court. Richard Epstein has the story. 

People who don’t live in New York City probably haven’t confronted the market-distorting injustices of rent control and similar rent-stabilization laws. But they may recall their outrage in 2008 upon reading that New York Rep. Charles Rangel worked the system by paying a total of $3,894 a month for four rent-stabilized luxury apartments in Harlem, about half the market price.

Remarkably, a serious constitutional challenge to rent-control and stabilization laws may finally be in the works. The challenge arises from James and Jeanne Harmon, who own a town house on West 76th Street in New York City. The upper floors are occupied by tenants who are entrenched under New York’s rent-stabilization law, paying rents at only a fraction of the value of their units. Mr. Harmon, a most persistent man whom I have from time to time advised, is attempting to strike down this law.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals blew off his suit in March, but Mr. Harmon has filed petition for certiorari in the Supreme Court, and, miracles of miracles, the high court has asked New York City and the tenants to respond. His story has been sympathetically featured in the New York Times, the Daily News and the New York Post. Perhaps there is still some life in the challenge to rent controls. There darn well ought to be. …

Here is the NY Times rent control article mentioned by Epstein.

James D. Harmon Jr. learned the value of a house as a child, shoveling coal into the furnace of one of two Upper West Side buildings owned by his grandfather, a French immigrant who worked as a waiter. “Jimmy, you take care of your building and your building will take care of you,” his grandfather told him.

“But the word he used in French wasn’t building” Mr. Harmon recalled the other day. “The word he used in French was ‘maison,’ which means home.”

Now Mr. Harmon, 68, who grew up in one of those buildings — a bow-fronted town house on West 76th Street near Central Park — has gone to the United States Supreme Court contending that New York City’s rent laws constitute a “taking” of his property without just compensation, a violation of his constitutional rights.

The regulations are meant to support the government’s goal of maintaining affordable housing for its citizens. Instead, he says, the laws have forced him and his family to shoulder the government’s burden and extend what is essentially “privatized welfare” to rent-stabilized tenants who are paying rent 59 percent below market rates and who have rights of succession to their lodgings in his house.

“Put yourself in our position,” Mr. Harmon, a former federal prosecutor, said of himself and his wife, Jeanne. “Suppose somebody told you, you’ve got an extra bedroom, we’d like to put someone in there for as long as they want to stay, and you have to take care of them for the rest of their lives and the rest of your life. That’s really what this is like.” …

Andrew Malcolm with late-night humor.

Conan: Kobe Bryant’s wife could make as much as $75 million from their divorce. In other words, Kobe’s wife can now afford Lakers’ tickets.

Conan: Dunkin’ Donuts is opening all over the Mideast. That’s good news because one day the Israelis and Palestinians will be too fat to fight with each other.

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In his first column for the new year, Mark Steyn wonders when the spending will stop.

… The year began with a tea-powered Republican caucus taking control of the House of Representatives and pledging to rein in spendaholic government. It ended with President Obama making a pro forma request for a mere $1.2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling. This will raise government debt to $16.4 trillion – a new world record! If only until he demands the next debt-ceiling increase in three months’ time.

At the end of 2011, America, like much of the rest of the Western world, has dug deeper into a cocoon of denial. Tens of millions of Americans remain unaware that this nation is broke – broker than any nation has ever been. A few days before Christmas, we sailed across the psychological Rubicon and joined the club of nations whose government debt now exceeds their total GDP. It barely raised a murmur – and those who took the trouble to address the issue noted complacently that our 100 percent debt-to-GDP ratio is a mere two-thirds of Greece’s. That’s true, but at a certain point per capita comparisons are less relevant than the sheer hard dollar sums: Greece owes a few rinky-dink billions; America owes more money than anyone has ever owed anybody ever.

Public debt has increased by 67 percent over the past three years, and too many Americans refuse even to see it as a problem. For most of us, “$16.4 trillion” has no real meaning, any more than “$17.9 trillion” or “$28.3 trillion” or “$147.8 bazillion.” It doesn’t even have much meaning for the guys spending the dough: Look into the eyes of Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Barney Frank, and you realize that, even as they’re borrowing all this money, they have no serious intention of paying any of it back. That’s to say, there is no politically plausible scenario under which the 16.4 trillion is reduced to 13.7 trillion, and then 7.9 trillion and, eventually, 173 dollars and 48 cents. At the deepest levels within our governing structures, we are committed to living beyond our means on a scale no civilization has ever done.

Our most enlightened citizens think it’s rather vulgar and boorish to obsess about debt. The urbane, educated, Western progressive would rather “save the planet,” a cause which offers the grandiose narcissism that, say, reforming Medicare lacks. …

Scott Adams of Dilbert decided at the beginning of 2011 to take more risks. The first was on a trip to Costa Rica with wife Shelly.

.. As 2011 approached, I wondered what would happen if, for the next 12 months, I said yes to any opportunity that was new or dangerous or embarrassing or unwise. I decided to find out.

Shelly quickly embraced my new attitude and booked us on a trip to Costa Rica. That country has a huge population of monkeys and no military whatsoever—an obvious recipe for disaster. But my immediate problem was surviving Shelly’s idea of fun. This, as it turned out, included zip lining (less scary than it looked), an ATV trek through a dangerous and muddy jungle (nearly lost a leg) and, finally, a whitewater excursion down a canyon river in the rain forest.

I should pause here to explain that though I have many rational fears in life—all the usual stuff—I have only one special fear: drowning. So for me, whitewater rafting pins the needle on the fear-o-meter. But this was my year to face my fears. I was all in.

The first sign of trouble came when the more experienced of the two guides said that Shelly would be with him in his two-person kayak and I would ride with the new guy. This worried me because most reports of accidental deaths include the words “and then the new guy….” The second red flag appeared as the guide explained that when we hit the rapids through the waterfalls, we civilians should hold our oars above our heads and let the guides do the steering. My follow-up question went something like this: “Waterfalls?”

Things went smoothly for Shelly and her expert river guide. I watched them slalom down an S-shaped, 12-foot drop. Shelly might have said something like “Wheeee!”

My experience differed. My guide (the new guy) steered my half of the kayak directly into the huge rock at the top of the water hazard. My next memory involves being at the bottom of a Costa Rican river wondering which direction was up and holding my breath while I waited for my life-preserver to sort things out—which it did. Somehow, my guide and I got back into the kayak, only to repeat the scenario at another rocky waterfall five minutes later. If you think this sort of thing gets more fun on the second try, you might be a bad guesser.

Our guides brought the kayaks to a resting area midway through the excursion. I crawled to shore like a rat that had been trapped in a washing machine. You know how people say you shouldn’t drink the local water in some places? Well, apparently you should also avoid snorting a gallon of bacteria-laden Costa Rican river water. I woke up the next morning hosting an exotic-microbe cage match in my stomach followed by an hour-long trip over winding jungle roads to the airport for home. I’ll summarize the two weeks that followed as “not good.” On the plus side, I didn’t gain weight on that vacation.

So far, my strategy of being more adventurous was producing mixed results. My life seemed richer and more interesting—but it also involved a lot more groaning, clutching my sides and intermittently praying for death.

It was time to dial back the risk-taking a notch. …

Houston econ prof, Paul Gregory, uses a NY Times article to illustrate how the left creates bias in the media.

The Democratic Party and their media enablers, such as the New York Times, slaughter the Republicans when it comes to economic reporting. The public discussion of social security taxes, unemployment benefits, and stimulus takes place in the language of Keynesian multipliers and stimulus counterfactuals. He who controls the language of debate has already won, no matter how inappropriate or ridiculous. (I cite as an example of the latter the discussion of unemployment benefits as a form of stimulus that will restore the economy to health).

The Democrats and their media enablers use a tried-and-true template to dominate the debate. I use the New York Times article, “Analysts Say Economic Recovery Might Suffer if Tax Break Is Allowed to Expire,” to illustrate how it works.

The article’s objective is to convince readers that all right-thinking people know that the economy will go down the toilet if there is no agreement on extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits. They claim that “economists” or “analysts” agree on this. They then interview four economists/economic organizations that support this conclusion and they cite one senior White House official who warns of dire consequences. They then dismiss one skeptic, who makes a technical point the average reader will not understand.

Voila! “Economists” agree with the Democrat position.

There is no reason why two cannot tango.

I have taken the liberty to rewrite the Times article to prove the opposite case. I use four respected economists and one respected media outlet and cite only one supporter of the administration case.

Here is my version, new headline and all. I preserve as much of the original Times language as possible: …

American.com blog with an unbelievable statement from Barney Frank.

Soon-to-be former Congressman Barney Frank continues to try to defend his record on Fannie and Freddie by distorting, or simply reversing, the truth. Here he is in the TheAtlantic.com today on his history as he hopes we will remember it:

“In 2004, the administration of President George W. Bush began a conscious plan of trying to increase levels of homeownership as part of its ‘Ownership Society,’ raising affordable housing targets for Fannie and Freddie. I opposed this policy because I thought people could end up with mortgages they could not afford.”

A pretty categorical statement, right? Replete with context that makes it sound as though it actually happened. Unfortunately for him, there’s a written record—a letter to President Bush, dated June 28, 2004, that he authored for 76 colleagues, including minority leader Nancy Pelosi:

“We write as members of the House of Representatives who continually press the GSEs to do more in affordable housing. Until recently, we have been disappointed that the administration has not been more supportive of our efforts to press the GSEs to do more. We have been concerned that the administration’s legislative proposal regarding the GSEs would weaken affordable housing performance by the GSEs, by emphasizing only safety and soundness. While the GSEs’ affordable housing mission is not in any way incompatible with their safety and soundness, an exclusive focus on safety and soundness is likely to come, in practice, at the expense of affordable housing.

We have been led to conclude that the administration does not appreciate the importance of the GSE’s affordable housing mission, as evidenced by its refusal to work with the House and Senate on this important legislation. It now appears that, because Congress has not been willing to jeopardize the GSE’s mission, the administration has turned to attacking the GSEs publicly. We are very concerned that the administration would work to foster negative opinions in the financial markets regarding the GSEs, raising their cost of financing. If the intent is to get prohousing members of Congress to weaken their support of the GSEs’ mission, it is a mistaken strategy.

Our position is not based on institutional loyalty, but on concern for the GSE’s affordable housing function. We appeal to you to agree to work on legislative proposals that foster sound oversight and vigorous affordable housing efforts instead of mounting assaults in the press. We also ask you to support our efforts to push the GSEs to do more affordable housing.”

If Barney Frank has any credibility after this, it will only be with those who—for ideological reasons—support him in his efforts to distance himself from the government’s affordable housing requirements, which were so destructive to Fannie and Freddie and the financial system as a whole.

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Craig Pirrong in Streetwise Professor says if “libertarian” is what Ron Paul is, then maybe he’d like to find something else to call himself.

In 1960 Hayek wrote an essay titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”  In it, Hayek pondered the conundrum that many Americans like me have struggled with since: What should we call ourselves?  This is not a problem in Europe: I would be a liberal.  Adam Smith is the quintessential liberal, in the European sense.  But as Schumpeter noted, in the US, those who supported big government and wanted to limit and control the free market started calling themselves liberal:  ”[a]s a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.”  So unhyphenated liberal means “progressive” or the like in the US, and that is definitely not an accurate label for a believer in a minimal state.  Say “classical liberal” in the US and people just hear “liberal” and think “progressive”: confusion still reigns.  ”Conservatives” in the European sense, as Hayek argued, are primarily traditionalists, and hostile to many economic, personal, and civil liberties.

So what is the alternative?  By default, “libertarian”–a word that Hayek said “[f]or my taste . . . carries too much the flavor of a manufactured term and of a substitute”–is pretty much all that is left.  Again quoting Hayek: “But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.”  So libertarian has pretty much become the default term to describe someone in the US who is not a liberal/progressive, traditional conservative, socialist, communist, or what have you.

But the “libertarian” label has been claimed by myriad people whom Hayek, and Friedman, and Richard Epstein–and Adam Smith–would find repulsive and decidedly unliberal, in the classical sense.  The most prominent of these today is presidential candidate Ron Paul.  Another is Paul’s former chief of staff Lew Rockwell.  Yet another is radio ranter Alex Jones.  (Sort of working my way down the food chain here.)

As Paul has made a serious challenge in Iowa, he and these others, and his supporters, have attracted much more scrutiny.  And what is revealed is not pretty.  Actually, ugly would be the proper word. …

Mark Steyn in The Corner has Randy thoughts.

Like many chaps round these parts, my general line on Ron Paul was that, as much as I think he’s out of his gourd on Iran et al, he performs a useful role in the GOP line-up talking up the virtues of constitutional conservatism. But this Weekly Standard piece by John McCormack suggests Paul is a humbug even on his core domestic turf: The entitlement state is the single biggest deformation to the Founders’ republic, and it downgrades not only America’s finances but its citizenry. Yet Paul has no serious proposal for dealing with it, and indeed promises voters that we won’t have to as long as we cut “overseas spending”.

This is hooey. As I point out in my book, well before the end of this decade interest payments on the debt will consume more of the federal budget than military spending. …

Toby Harnden writes on the luck of Mitt Romney.

… Romney has certainly been fortunate with his opponents – and those who ducked the chance to take him on. On paper, Rick Perry should be the nominee. The longest-serving governor in Texas history, chief executive of a huge, job-creating state, an evangelical Christian with an easy charm and the looks of the Marlboro Man, Perry seemed to be everything a Republican nominee should be.

But Perry turned out to be an abysmal candidate. Whether handicapped by pain medicine for his bad back, a lack of fire in his belly or the fact that his luck finally ran out after a charmed political career in Texas, Perry was  a dud – his “Oops” moment in a November debate a cruel epitaph for his candidacy.

Each time a new rival rose in the polls, they wilted under the fresh scrutiny and highlighted Romney’s strengths in the process. With Herman Cain gone and Michele Bachmann in the doldrums, in early December Romney found himself facing a resurgent Newt Gingrich.

If Romney could have invented a man he would like to duke it out for the nomination, he couldn’t have done better than Gingrich – a lobbyist in all but name, a creature of Washington, thrice-married and with no money or campaign structure.  Gingrich’s policy apostasies, including an embrace of elements of Obamacare, innoculated Romney.

Throw into the mix the maverick libertarian Ron Paul – a man with no chance of winning the Republican nomination but a possible Iowa victor – and the scenarios got even better. A Paul win would do little to damage Romney but would stifle any chance of his rivals building momentum.

But the position Romney finds himself in is not accidental. He is a vastly improved candidate from the Romney of 2008. …

Peggy Noonan says Romney gets stronger in this years strange nomination process.

… The most memorable line of the first phase? There’s “9-9-9″ and “Oops,” but the best came from Mitt Romney when he was asked about the Gingrich campaign’s failure to qualify for the Virginia ballot. Mr. Gingrich had compared it to Pearl Harbor, a setback, but we’ll recover. Mr. Romney, breezily, to a reporter: “I think it’s more like Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory.”

It made people laugh. It made them want to repeat it, which is the best free media of all, the line people can’t resist saying in the office. And they laughed because it pinged off a truth: Gingrich is ad hoc, disorganized.

The put-down underscored Romney’s polite little zinger of a week before, that Mr. Gingrich was “zany.” And it was a multi-generationally effective: People who are 70-years-old remember “I Love Lucy,” but so do people who are 30 and grew up with its reruns. Mr. Romney’s known for being organized but not for being deft. This was deft. It’s an old commonplace in politics that if you’re explaining you’re losing, but it’s also true that if they’re laughing you’re losing. The campaign trail has been pretty much a wit-free zone. It’s odd that people who care so much about politics rarely use one of politics’ biggest tools, humor. Mr. Romney did and scored. More please, from everyone.

Newt Gingrich in the end will likely prove to be a gift to Mitt Romney. He was a heavyweight. This isn’t Herman Cain, this is a guy everyone on the ground in every primary state knows and has seen on TV and remembers from the past. But his emergence scared a lot of people—”Not him!’—and made some of them think, ‘OK, I guess I better get off the sidelines and make a decision. Compared to Newt, Romney looks pretty reasonable.”

Mr. Gingrich took some of the sting out of Romney-as-flip-flopper because he is a flip flopper too. He also, for a few weeks there, made Mr. Romney look like he might be over. He made Mr. Romney fight for it, not against an unknown businessman but against a serious political figure whose face and persona said: “I mean business.” In the end it will turn out he was a gift to the Romney campaign, a foe big enough that when you beat him it means something.

If it is Mitt, and if he wins, we’ll have our work cut out for us if he brings along advisors like John Sununu. Weekly Standard Blog has that thought.

As Jonathan Last pointed out, John H. Sununu, the former chief of staff for President George H.W. Bush and a top adviser for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, recently told the New Hampshire Union Leader that “Iowans pick corn and New Hampshire picks Presidents.” 

A friend of THE WEEKLY STANDARD and proud Hawkeye responded succinctly: “Yes, and Sununus pick Souters.” And another friend notes, for the record, that the last three presidents, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, all lost the New Hampshire primary. The last “first in the nation” primary winner to continue to the presidency was George H.W. Bush in 1988—whose presidency lasted only one term, thanks in part to…John H. Sununu. …

James Pethokoukis picks 2011′s Economic HEROS and zeros.

HEROS – 5. Erskine Bowles and Senator Alan Simpson. 4. Herman Cain. 3. Steve Jobs. 2. Scott Walker. 1. Paul Ryan.

zeros – 5. Lafe Solomon. 4. The Occupy movement. 3. Elizabeth Warren. 2. The White House. 1. Kim Jong-il. 

Pethokoukis also blogs on the fact too many kids are going to college.

As I mentioned earlier, I am currently reading Real Education by Charles Murray. In the book, Murray makes four big points: a) Ability varies; b) half of the children are below average; c) too many people are going to college; and d) America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted. It’s the third point I am concerned about for the moment. Here is President Obama is his recent Osawatomie, Kansas, speech:

“But we need to meet the moment. We’ve got to up our game. We need to remember that we can only do that together. It starts by making education a national mission — a national mission. Government and businesses, parents and citizens. In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class. The unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average. And their incomes are twice as high as those who don’t have a high school diploma. Which means we shouldn’t be laying off good teachers right now — we should be hiring them. We shouldn’t be expecting less of our schools –- we should be demanding more. We shouldn’t be making it harder to afford college — we should be a country where everyone has a chance to go and doesn’t rack up $100,000 of debt just because they went.”

Obama’s words remind me of this passage in the book:

“The problem begins with the message sent to young people that they should aspire to college no matter what. Some politicians are among the most visible offenders, treating every failure to go to college as an injustice that can be remedied by increasing government help.”

Murray makes several points that dispute Obama: …

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Charles Krauthammer wonders if we are alone in the universe.

… And at just the right time. As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?

It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”  …

And WSJ Reviews a book claiming we are alone.

… Recent discoveries might seem to boost the likelihood of life elsewhere in the galaxy. We have confirmed the stunning ubiquity of extrasolar planets in other star systems, the latest a possible Earth-analog orbiting right in the habitable sweet spot—not too close, not too far—from its central sun. Biologists have encountered bacteria underneath a mile of Antarctic ice and nestled within rocks in a Yellowstone geyser; it’s only a modest stretch to imagine that the next generation of robotic spacecraft might find simple biota in equally hostile havens on Mars or on one of Jupiter’s moons.

But as John Gribbin points out in his grimly plausible book, “Alone in the Universe,” there is a world of difference between habitable planets and inhabited planets. Mr. Gribbin’s narrative reduces the vision of Disney’s documentary into the counterfactual fever-dream it really is. The author’s conclusion: Earth is the sole abode of intelligent life in the galaxy, the product of a profoundly improbable sequence of cosmic, geologic and climatic events—some thoroughly documented, some inferable from fragmentary evidence—that allowed our planet to become a unique refuge where life could develop to its full potential.

Chief among these, paradoxically, was a near-cataclysmic planetary collision during Earth’s infancy, which gave birth to the moon. Such encounters were relatively common in the harum-scarum chaos of an early solar system that teemed with veering planets and asteroids. In its suicidal blow against our world, the Mars-size impactor generated enough heat to liquefy both itself and Earth’s exterior. Its dense, metallic core plunged inward to join our planet’s existing metallic center, while the rest swept up part of the fiery terrestrial shell to form the moon. …

Karl Rove makes predictions. 

As New Year’s approaches, here are a baker’s dozen predictions for 2012.

• Republicans will keep the U.S. House, albeit with their 25-seat majority slightly reduced. In the 10 presidential re-elections since 1936, the party in control of the White House has added House seats in seven contests and lost them in three. The average gain has been 12 seats. The largest pickup was 24 seats in 1944—but President Barack Obama is no FDR, despite what he said in his recent “60 Minutes” interview.

• Republicans will take the U.S. Senate. Of the 23 Democratic seats up in 2012, there are at least five vulnerable incumbents (Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Pennsylvania): The GOP takes two or three of these. With the announcement on Tuesday that Nebraska’s Ben Nelson will retire, there are now seven open Democratic seats (Connecticut, Hawaii, North Dakota, New Mexico, Virginia, Wisconsin): The GOP takes three or four. Even if Republicans lose one of the 10 seats they have up, they will have a net pickup of four to six seats, for a majority of 51 to 53.

• Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Harry Reid or both will leave the Democratic leadership by the end of 2012. Speaker John Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell will continue directing the GOP in their respective chambers.

• This will be the fourth presidential election in a row in which turnout increases. This has happened just once since 1828, from 1928 through 1940. …

Jennifer Rubin lists the year’s disasters for the president.

President Obama has had the worst year of his presidency. Or, to be more precise, his performance this year has been the worst of his presidency. Pundits and pollsters will say that his “numbers are up,” but let’s look at what he’s done or not done.

If you can recall, back in February his State of the Union address was a bore-a-thon stocked with spending ideas (on everything from light rail to salmon), with only glancing reference to the debt. His grand proposal: Freeze discretionary spending at the astronomically high level he had presided over in his first two years.

The next few months were spent bashing the only man to author a serious budget plan and put real Medicare reform on the table. He not only rebuffed Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposals but invited him to a speech, put him in the first row and then delivered a hyper-partisan attack, accusing the Republicans of taking Pell grants from college kids so fat cats could get a break on corporate jets.

Throughout the spring and summer the president failed to present his own entitlement reform plans. …

Here’s a myth that is a delight to have debunked; by a translator who was on the scene, no less. Media Myth Alert blog has the story.

The nod for the most notable debunking of 2011 goes to retired U.S. diplomat Charles W. (Chas) Freeman Jr. for puncturing the popular tale about Zhou Enlai’s remark in 1972 that it was “too early to say” what the effects would be of the French Revolution.

Freeman told a panel in Washington, D.C., in June that the Chinese premier was referring to the turmoil in France in 1968, not the years of revolutionary upheaval that began in 1789.

His remarks debunking the Zhou misinterpretation were first published by London’s Financial Times.

Zhou’s “too early” comment was made during President Richard M. Nixon’s historic visit to China in February 1972. Freeman, then 28-years-old, was the president’s interpreter on the trip and heard Zhou’s remark.

Freeman said during the panel discussion in June that the misinterpretation “was too delightful to set straight” at the time.

In a subsequent interview with me, Freeman said it was “absolutely clear” from the context of the conversation that Zhou’s comment was a reference to the turmoil of 1968.

Freeman described Zhou’s remark as “a classic of the genre of a constantly repeated misunderstanding that has taken on a life of its own.”

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Dave Barry rings out the old year.

It was the kind of year that made a person look back fondly on the gulf oil spill. …

January  saw a change of power in the House of Representatives, as outgoing Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi hands the gavel over to Republican John Boehner, who, in the new spirit of Washington bipartisanship, has it checked for explosives. …

February  a massive snowstorm paralyzes the Midwest, forcing a shutdown of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport after more than a dozen planes are attacked by yetis. President Obama responds with a nationally televised speech pointing out that the storm was caused by a weather system inherited from a previous administration. …

March  On the national political front, Newt Gingrich, responding to a groundswell of encouragement from the voices in his head, reveals that he is considering seeking the Republican presidential nomination. He quickly gains the support of the voter who had been leaning toward Ross Perot. …

April  a major crisis is barely avoided when Congress, after frantic negotiations, reaches a last-minute agreement on the federal budget, thereby averting a government shutdown that would have had a devastating effect on the ability of Congress to continue spending insanely more money than it actually has. …

May  As the month draws to a close, a Twitter account belonging to Anthony Weiner — a feisty, ambitious Democratic up-and-comer who managed to get elected to Congress despite looking like a nocturnal rodent that somehow got a full-body wax and acquired a gym membership — tweets a link to a photograph of a pair of briefs containing what appears to be a congressional member rarin’ to filibuster, if you catch my drift. This member immediately captivates the nation, although, surprisingly, President Obama fails to deliver a nationally televised address about it. …

June  the Republican field does in fact continue to grow as Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum,Mitt Romney, the late Sonny Bono and somebody calling himself “Jon Huntsman” all enter the race, bringing the Republican contender total to roughly 125. …

July  Speaking of drama: In Washington, as the deadline for raising the federal debt limit nears, Congress and the Obama administration work themselves into a frenzy trying to figure out what to do about the fact that the government is spending insanely more money than it actually has. After hours of intense negotiations, several walkouts, countless press releases and of course a nationally televised address by the president, the Democrats and the Republicans are finally able to announce, at the last possible minute, that they have hammered out a historic agreement under which the government will continue to spend insanely more money than it actually has while a very special congressional committee — A SUPER committee! — comes up with a plan, by a later date, that will solve this pesky problem once and for all. Everybody involved heaves a sigh of relief and basks in the feeling of satisfaction that comes from handling yet another crisis, Washington-style. …

August  With the stock market in a steep nosedive, economic growth stagnant and unemployment relentlessly high, the White House, moving swiftly to prevent panic, reassures a worried nation that President Obama will once again be vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, where he will recharge his batteries in preparation for what White House press secretary Jay Carney promises will be “a real humdinger of a nationally televised address.” …

September  In domestic news, President Obama returns from his Martha’s Vineyard getaway refreshed and ready to tackle the job he was elected by the American people to do: seek reelection. Focusing on unemployment, the president delivers a nationally televised address laying out his plan for creating jobs, which consists of traveling around the nation tirelessly delivering job-creation addresses until it’s time for another presidential getaway. …

October  On the domestic protest front, Occupy Wall Street spreads to many more cities, its initially vague goals now replaced by a clear sense of purpose as occupiers focus on the single issue that is most important to the 99 percent:bathrooms. Some cities seek to shut down the protests, but the occupiers vow to remain until there is a reawakening of the national consciousness. Or, winter. …

November  the congressional Supercommittee, after months of pondering what to do about the fact that the federal government is spending insanely more money than it actually has, announces that, in the true “can-do” bipartisan Washington spirit, it is giving up. This means the government will continue spending insanely more money than it actually has until 2013, at which time there are supposed to be automatic spending cuts, except Congress would never let that happen, and even if it did happen, the federal government would still be spending insanely more money than it actually has. …

December  The economic outlook is also brighter in Washington, where congressional leaders, still working night and day to find a solution to the problem of the federal government spending insanely more money than it actually has, announce that they have a bold new plan: They will form another committee. But this one will be even better than the Supercommittee, because it will be a SuperDUPERcommittee, and it will possess what House and Senate leaders describe, in a joint statement, as “magical powers.”