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Mark Steyn is back with a sobering discussion of British and American decline.

…It’s interesting to learn that “anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups” litany of evil—“the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. Before William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky. Britain expunged it from most of the globe.

…When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia. As I always try to tell my American neighbors, national decline is at least partly psychological—and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Thus, Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom, which he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944:

“…The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.”

Within little more than half a century, almost every item on the list had been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (some 40 percent of Britons receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority”—the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something.” …

This has consequences. …In cutting off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, the British state has engaged in what we will one day come to see as a form of child abuse, one that puts a huge question mark over the future. Why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it’s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that’s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country? And what if you don’t have Islam to turn to? The transformation of the British people is, in its own malign way, a remarkable achievement. Raised in schools that teach them nothing, they nevertheless pick up the gist of the matter, which is that their society is a racket founded on various historical injustices. The virtues Hayek admired? Ha! Strictly for suckers. …

…Does the fate of the other senior Anglophone power hold broader lessons for the United States? …you cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without profound consequence. Without serious course correction, we will see the end of the Anglo-American era, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world. Even as America’s spendaholic government outspends not only America’s ability to pay for itself but, by some measures, the world’s; even as it follows Britain into the dank pit of transgenerational dependency, a failed education system, and unsustainable entitlements; even as it makes less and less and mortgages its future to its rivals for cheap Chinese trinkets, most Americans assume that simply because they’re American they will be insulated from the consequences. …

David Harsanyi laughs at the absurdity of President Obama claiming he’s going to simplify regulations.

…I can’t recall a single federal program, legislation or proposal in the past two years that was initiated to ease the burden on consumers or businesses. (If you know of any, please send specifics to sorry@dowelooklikesuckers.com.)

Obama doesn’t have to look far, if he’s serious. Nor does he need an executive order. Right now the EPA is drafting carbon rules to force on states, even though a similarly torturous 2,000 pages on a cap-and-trade scheme intending to make power more expensive was rejected. …

Right now, the FCC is shoving net neutrality in the pipeline — again, bypassing Congress — so government can regulate the Internet for the first time in history, though the commissioners themselves admit that, as of now, any need for rules are based on the what-ifs of their imaginations.

There exists no legislation more burdensome and expensive than the “job-crushing”  “Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act,” formerly known as Obamacare and presently being symbolically repealed by House Republicans. …

And the WSJ editors are also skeptical of Obama’s lip service to more balanced regulation.

…Sarbanes-Oxley delegated 16 rule-makings to the executive branch, yet the Dodd-Frank financial law calls for literally hundreds of new rules by dozens of agencies, and two entirely new agencies. The Congressional Research Service reports that ObamaCare “gives federal agencies substantial responsibility and authority to ‘fill in the details’ of the legislation,” a process that may take “years, or even decades” to complete.

Other hyperactive regulators include the Federal Communications Commission (net neutrality), the Food and Drug Administration (food safety, medical devices) and the Labor Department (the SEIU’s wish list). But the worst offender is the Environmental Protection Agency, which is rewriting environmental law with almost no scrutiny.

The EPA’s goal is to impose carbon emissions limits that even Democrats in Congress rejected, in particular through its “endangerment finding”—which unless Congress intervenes will become the costliest regulation in government history. EPA is also re-regulating conventional air pollutants, often bypassing the usual notice and public comment. It isn’t a good omen that Mr. Obama singled out the EPA and its carbon-emissions rules (as related to auto fuel efficiency) as a model of “smart” regulation. …

Robert Samuelson was in November 2nd’s Pickings writing on the waste from “high speed” rail. Michael Barone does the same today saying it is a fast way to waste money.

…Take the $2.7 billion, 84-mile line connecting Orlando and Tampa that incoming Florida Gov. Rick Scott is mulling over.

It would connect two highly decentralized metro areas that are already connected by Interstate 4. Urban scholar Wendell Cox, writing for the Reason Foundation, found that just about any door-to-door trip between the two metro areas would actually take longer by train than by auto, and would cost more. Why would any business traveler take the train?

…So we are spending billions on high-speed rail that isn’t really high-speed, that will serve largely affluent business travelers and that will need taxpayer subsidies forever. This should be a no-brainer for a Congress bent on cutting spending.

Scott Adams shares his adventures in yoga.

I’ve heard good things about yoga. People say it’s an excellent way to manage stress. I convinced my wife, Shelly, to try it with me.

Shelly sensibly suggested that we try a yoga video at home before we sign up for classes. Let me tell you how well the yoga video managed my stress.

…I suggested that we randomly select one of the classes and just see what happens. But this, my friends, is not how shopping is done. First you read each of the descriptions then you read them again. Then you read them aloud. Then you discuss. Then you narrow it down to two. Then you forget what the other three were, and wonder if maybe they were better than the two you had first selected, so you start over. Halfway through this process, my tension could have powered a Chevy Volt. I was red and vibrating. I wasn’t getting any of my cartooning work done, we would be late for the Apple Genius Bar, and I was shopping in my own home.  I was so tense that I worried I would actually snap in half if I tried anything bendy.

Eventually we picked the class we wanted. It only took a few minutes, but in shopping years, I was 106. We fired up the DVD menu and looked for the class we had selected on the DVD cover.

…A granola-eating, bare-chested yoga dude appeared on screen. He was on the beach of some sort of tropical ocean paradise. I call that cheating. I wouldn’t need any yoga at all if I were on that beach. But whatever. …

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David Warren does not think we will see real change in Tunisia. Yet we can always hope for a miracle for the Tunisian people.

In a startling development, the “Arab Street” has exerted itself, spontaneously… But the explosion in Tunisia — of all places, with its reputation for stability, and only two presidents since independence from France more than half a century ago — runs off the chart of precedent.

…We should not now assume there will be any fundamental changes in Tunisia, no matter how much blood is shed. The new “president for life” — whether for minutes or decades — is one of Ben Ali’s flunkies, just as Ben Ali was one of Bourguiba’s. Mohamed Ghannouchi is working on consolidating his power and will succeed or fail. Even without being able to read his mind, I can assure my reader that he isn’t fantasizing about some new dawn of representative democracy and a limited government of laws, not of men. Nor is any potential rival.

For the dictators of Third World countries would not be so if they did not appreciate another of Chairman Mao’s memorable apophthegms, that: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” To gloss this: Democracy happens when the preponderance of guns is on the democratic side.

There is no such side in places like Tunisia. In my view, perhaps jaded by the recent historical experience of Iraq, it would be false to hope for anything but the appearance of a new strongman, wherever in the Arab world an old strongman falls. This is because the conditions for constitutional government have not developed in any of these countries; and where there was promise of a responsible opposition, it was thoroughly erased. …

In her latest article in the Jewish World Review, Caroline Glick addresses a number of events in the Middle East, and the blundering US responses to each. She also criticizes some of the tired ideas that our foreign policy bureaucracy still hold as sacrosanct.

…The Tunisian revolution provides several lessons for US policymakers. First, by reminding us of the inherent frailty of alliances with dictatorships, Tunisia demonstrates the strategic imperative of a strong Israel. As the only stable democracy in the region, Israel is the US’s only reliable ally in the Middle East. A strong, secure Israel is the only permanent guarantor of US strategic interests in the Middle East.

…Saudi Arabia has to be balanced with Iraq, and support for a new regime in Iran. Support for Egypt needs to be balanced with close relations with South Sudan, and other North African states.

…At the same time, the US should fund and publicly support liberal democratic movements when those emerge. It should also fund less liberal democratic movements when they emerge. So too, given the strength of Islamist media, the US should make judicious use of its Arabic-language media outlets to sell its own message of liberal democracy to the Arab world. …

Jennifer Rubin says that Tunisia’s revolution may be contagious.

The revolution in Tunisia is resonating in Egypt. This AP report tells us:

…News of the Tunisian uprising has dominated the Egyptian media over the past few days, with opposition and independent newspapers lauding the fall of Ben Ali and drawing parallels between his toppled regime and that of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled for nearly 30 years.

…Nearly half of all Egyptians live under or just below the poverty line set by the U.N. at $2 a day. Mubarak and his ruling National Democratic Party have been pledging to ensure that the fruits of economic reforms benefit more Egyptians.

Stephen McInerney of the Project on Middle East Democracy e-mails me, “The Egyptian activists are all definitely energized. Two hundred of of them spontaneously went to the Tunisian Embassy to celebrate within an hour after Ben Ali stepped down on Friday, and they shouted chants for Ben Ali to take Mubarak with him.”

It seems that freedom is catching.

Bret Stephens notes that Stuxnet did not end Iran’s nuclear program.

…And yet the Iranian nuclear program carries on. Stuxnet appears to have hit Iran sometime in 2009. As of last November, U.N. inspectors reported that Iran continued to enrich uranium in as many as 4,816 centrifuges, and that it had produced more than three tons of reactor-grade uranium. That stockpile already suffices, with further enrichment, for two or possibly three bombs worth of fissile material.

Nor can it be much comfort that even as Stuxnet hit Iran, North Korea began enriching uranium in a state-of-the-art facility, likely with Chinese help. Pyongyang has already demonstrated its willingness to build a secret reactor for Syria. So why not export enriched uranium to Iran, a country with which it already does a thriving trade in WMD-related technologies and to which it is deeply in debt? Merely stamp the words “Handle With Care” on the crate, and the flight from Pyongyang to Tehran takes maybe 10 hours.

…And so Iran has fallen for a neat computer trick. That may be a source of satisfaction in Jerusalem, Washington and even Riyadh. But it cannot be a cause for complacency. …

P. J. O’Rourke was in January 18th’s Pickings with a broadside against the NY Times. James Taranto wishes to differ in some respects.

… We do not dispute O’Rourke’s opinion of this report, but we are prepared to defend reporter Zernike (Hulse we don’t know from Adam), for we are familiar with her work outside the Times. She is the author of “Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America,” a 2010 book that we happen to have reviewed for the January issue of Commentary. Our review began:

“The author of Boiling Mad is a New York Times reporter, and the title suggests a hostile view of the Tea Party movement as a cauldron of undifferentiated rage. The book itself is a pleasant surprise. Kate Zernike has produced a largely fair and measured account of the populist rebellion against Barack Obama’s aggressively liberal presidency.”

“Boiling Mad” wasn’t perfect. We faulted it for weak analysis and occasional tendentious liberal asides. But it convinced us that Zernike, whatever her political leanings, is a fair and honest reporter. If yellow journalism appears under her byline in the Times, it is the fault of her editors and the paper’s corrupt culture.

How corrupt? So corrupt that the Hulse-Zernike piece was, by the standards of the Times last week, a relatively minor case of journalistic malpractice. Even the editors who assigned it at least have the excuse of having been under deadline pressure at a time when the facts were not yet in about the suspect’s motives. The same cannot be said for the Times editorial board and Paul Krugman, who on Jan. 10, as we noted last Tuesday, were still linking the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to “uncivil rhetoric” from the right, even after the facts had disproved any connection. The Times has made no acknowledgment yet of this gross journalistic wrong.

Pinch Sulzberger, the Times scion who became publisher in 1992, is said to be a fan of “putting the moose on the table,” a management-consulting gimmick. Like the elephant in the living room and the hippopotamus at the water cooler, the moose is an ungainly animal that serves as a metaphor for an uncomfortable and unacknowledged truth. During the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003, it was reported that Sulzberger carries around a stuffed moose and literally puts it on tables to encourage honesty among his company’s executives.

This past weekend, the metaphorical moose was very much off the table in the pages of the Times. Writer after writer weighed in on what had happened without mentioning their own newspaper’s scurrilous conduct. …

The Economist reports on something else that will agitate the green fascists.

…Dust aloft cools the land below, as Europe’s meteorologists found out in May 2008. It does this directly, by reflecting sunlight back into space, and indirectly, by helping clouds to form. The effect is significant. The carbon dioxide which has been added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began has a greenhouse effect equivalent to the arrival of about 1.6 watts of extra solar power per square metre of the Earth’s surface. The direct effects of dust are estimated to provide a countervailing cooling of about 0.14 watts per square metre. Add the indirect effect on clouds and this could increase markedly, though there are great uncertainties.

This dust-driven cooling, though, is patchy—and in some places it may not even be helpful. Dust that cools a desert can change local airflow patterns and lessen the amount of rain that falls in surrounding areas. This causes plants to die, and provides more opportunities for wildfires, increasing the atmospheric carbon-dioxide level.

To get a better sense of the net effects brought about by the ups and downs of dust, it would help to have a detailed historical record of the dustiness of the planet. And this is what Natalie Mahowald of Cornell University and 19 colleagues have achieved. They analysed cores from glaciers, lake bottoms and coral reefs and measured how the levels of some telltale chemicals changed with depth, and thus with time. They then used models of global wind circulation to deduce which dust sources have become stronger and which weaker. Their conclusion, published recently in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, is that in fits and starts over the past century the air became twice as dusty. …

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Samizdata sports an interesting analysis on current U. S. politics from a Brit who has never visited, but shows some insight. We attached some comments. We’ll see if they continue to be interesting.

… Voters used to think that Democrats were good people with bad ideas, clever, but mostly only at excusing their bad ideas. Democrats sincerely believed in bloating the government, taxing, regulating and generally screwing things up. But they applied these bad ideas to all, without fear or favour. Personally, there had blue collars and were honest hardworking folks. They did not lie or cheat. They looked you in the eye and treated you right.

Voters used to think that Old School Republicans were bad people with good ideas. Republicans believed in business success, low taxes, less regulation, and generally getting the US economy motoring along. Trouble is that they were also rich and nasty snobs, and corrupt. They used their grasp of economics mostly to get rich themselves. Politically, they applied their ideas only in ways that suited them. If a tax or a regulation happened to suit them or their huge country club network of rich and nasty and snobbish friends, then they would, on the quiet, be for it. For them, business-friendly government meant a government friendly to their own businesses. If, on the other hand, your collar was blue, they’d deregulate and tax-cut the hell out of you, for the good of all, and for the good of themselves especially.

Hard to choose, wasn’t it? No wonder it was a dead heat, decade after decade. Good but stupid idiots versus clever but sneaky bastards. …

Mark Steyn selects an article from the archives that is still relevant today: problems with big government.

…Government is simple provided two conditions are met: You do it locally, and you do it without unions.

The first is the reason America is one of the few large countries that hasn’t disintegrated. If it were as centrally governed as the USSR or Yugoslavia, it would have bust up in the early 19th century. And, while the Obama Administration is certainly testing that proposition to the limits, they’re hardly starting from scratch. I’m a big fan of Laura Bush, and found her utterly charming on the one occasion we met, but I can think of no good reason why taxpayers should fund a “Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program”. Sample disbursement: $420,000 to the State Library of Illinois to fund a program to help its employees master “social networking” tools such as Facebook and Blogger. Across the land, every illiterate and innumerate Third Grader can master Facebook and Blogger without getting the best part of half a million taxpayer bucks. But apparently it would be unreasonable to expect a state library to get the hang of it without a massive federal program. …

…The other obstacle to effective localism is unionization. …whatever the arguments for private sector unionization as a protection against the robber barons of capitalism red in tooth and claw, there is no justification whatsoever for public sector unions. After all, government is a monopoly: Even if it goes bankrupt, it’s never going to go out of business, much as one might long to see the “Final Liquidation. Everything Must Go” shingles hanging in the windows in Sacramento and Albany. A snapshot of America in the 21st century would show a motivated can-do,small businessman working round the clock till he’s 78 to pay for a government worker who retires at 52 with pension and other benefits the private sector schmuck could never dream of. That’s why Big Government produces no economies of scale. The bigger the government the more everything it does costs…

…The metastasization of the public-sector workforce eventually becomes an existential threat to democracy. One in every eight workers in New York State – or 1.2 million – is a unionized government employee, and thus a reliable vote for the Democrats, the Party of Government. Recently I heard Herbert London of the Hudson Institute put it this way – that, on the first day of any Empire State election campaign, the Democrat starts with those 1.2 million votes and the Republican starts with zero and attempts to play catch-up.  It’s hardly surprising very few do. …

Charles Gasparino, in the NY Post, looks at similarities and differences between the housing bubble and the bond bubble.

…The municipal-bond market’s assumption is that cities and states won’t default on their debt because they need to keep selling bonds to build roads and bridges. Investors will keep buying munis because they think the state will always make good on its obligations (and with the added incentive that these bonds are free of state, local and federal taxes).

But suppose taxes are so high that people leave cities or states in droves, depleting the pool of revenue need to pay bondholders? Suppose these states have so many other obligations — from federal mandates, massive “guaranteed” pensions to government workers and more — that they can’t or won’t make the vast cuts needed to keep paying on their bonds?

…Sure, a huge degree of paranoia is sweeping the muni market. The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a wide examination of whether states and cities are properly disclosing budget issues to investors in municipal debt.

That review is prudent because even a few defaults would hit average investors hard. Munis, more than other bonds, are overwhelmingly held by individuals, not institutions.

Prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney (who accurately predicted the banking crisis in late 2007) recently warned that 50 to 100 municipal-bond defaults will happen over the next year, likely amounting to more than $100 billion in defaulted debt. …

There are so many ways Paul Krugman is stupid. This dimming star of the fading NY Times firmament lately has been pounded for his comments on the Tucson shooting. Now John Tamny in Forbes takes on a Krugman column about commodity prices. 

… In a New York Times column titled “The Finite World”, Krugman reminds the mildly sentient among us that history always repeats itself in ways that fool the gullible.

In an article meant to explain the ongoing commodity boom, Krugman argues that it has “no bearing, one way or the other, on U.S. monetary policy.” To him the run-up is firstly the result of a “global recovery”, but more to the point, he asserts that “the commodity markets are telling us we’re living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of emerging economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw materials, pushing up their prices.”

Specifically Krugman notes that “Oil is back above $90 a barrel” as evidence supporting his claim of a global scarcity, but the problem for him is that $90 oil wrecks the very foundation of his argument. Had he simply bothered to do a currency comparison of oil prices he would know that oil’s rise in recent months is once again a dollar phenomenon; thus exposing as false his suggestion that the commodity boom is unrelated to U.S. monetary policy.

Sure enough, since the middle of 2010 the Australian dollar has risen 27% against our wilting greenback. During that time oil has risen 33% in dollars against a fairly pedestrian 6% increase in the cost of crude measured in Aussie dollars. The recent commodity spike that Krugman deems global has in fact confined itself to the countries that have mimicked our devaluation. …

In the National Review, Matthew Shaffer talks with meteorologist Joe Bastardi about global warming inaccuracies, and where global temps are actually headed.

…But unlike most climate skeptics, Bastardi is in a position to change the conversation. He’s a meteorologist and forecaster with AccuWeather, and he proposes a wager of sorts. “The scientific approach is you see the other argument, you put forward predictions about where things are going to go, and you test them,” he says. “That is what I have done. I have said the earth will cool .1 to .2 Celsius in the next ten years, according to objective satellite data.” …

…What’s his reasoning? Here are some specific topics on which Bastardi disagrees with mainstream climate scientists:

… Third, Bastardi sees modern climate scientists as inordinately fixated on carbon dioxide at the expense of other major factors (an example of their narrow, model-focused approaches, versus his tendency toward holistic empirical observation). “It’s almost the equivalent of saying, ‘Your big toe runs your body,’” he says. “Carbon dioxide is a trace gas, a tiny gas, part of this huge system. You’re trying to tell me that’s going to control the system and influence the energy of the system? When you have things like the sun, which is obviously the greatest contributor to the world’s energy? It almost defies common sense.”

…he notes that in recent years, “CO2 is still increasing, and the overall temperature has leveled off.”

…Whereas a significant portion of today’s climate scientists are politically motivated, Bastardi has only one incentive in his job: accuracy. He won’t be denied tenure or publication if he ends up on the wrong side. He gets paid handsomely — he won’t tell me just how much — for long-term weather forecasts by traders who have an interest in commodities whose production is affected by the weather. And he still gets hired, despite his rising to fame and infamy as a global-warming skeptic. His credential, in other words, is that he’s passed the market test: “Because I know the physical drivers of the atmosphere…I get calls from companies when money is on the line.” …

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A simple Democracy in America blog post, expressing a libertarian’s frustrations talking with a confirmed statist, does an excellent job explaining the free market logic of Hayek and Friedman.

… If we compare the Affordable Care Act to Friedman’s ideal, it’s clear that its changes are not in the “right direction”.  Now, I don’t agree with all the details of Friedman’s ideal, but I agree with most of it, and, more generally, I share his and Hayek’s way of thinking about social insurance. First, set up dynamic free-market institutions and enjoy the blessings of their efficiency and innovation. High levels of growth and technical invention are the best social insurance, period. Then, use some portion of our enlarged national income to buy insurance for those who can’t afford it and to buy care for those who are uninsurable. If a mandate to purchase insurance is really necessary, I don’t mind. If some version of an IPAB is needed to decide how much of what care to provide to those who are houses afire, that’s fine. But let there be competitive markets. Let there be prices.  

One of my complaints about this debate is that the left has been committed to a fundamentally dirigiste vision of universal health care for so long that it has difficulty even conceiving of a system that combines relatively laissez faire market institutions with generous social insurance. My colleague’s insistence that Obamacare represents some kind of culmination of liberals’ appreciation and incorporation of Hayekian concerns only reinforces my complaint and leaves me in despair.

Thomas Sowell looks back at how Clinton and the MSM hurt the Republicans during the government shutdown of 1995. Sowell thinks that this time Republicans and Tea Partiers will have to win the political battle to be effective.

…The last time the government shut down, back during the Clinton administration, the Republicans were riding high as a result of their capture of the House of Representatives– where all spending bills must originate– for the first time in decades.

…Congress had increased the amount of money appropriated for the government to spend, though not by as much as President Clinton wanted. So it was Clinton who shut down the government, though it was the Republicans who got blamed.

…Often, in politics, it doesn’t matter what the facts are. What matters is how well you make your case to the voting public.

Back in 1995, Bill Clinton and the Congressional Democrats, with the aid of the media, pounded away on the theme that the Republicans had “cut” government programs, even where the Republicans had appropriated more money than these programs had ever had before. …

Roger Simon appears in our pages frequently, but there was one post back in September that did not make the cut. Simon posted then about the Stuxnet Worm that was causing problems in the Iranian nuclear program and he speculated the German firm Siemens was involved. The post was not well organized and seemed too fantastic for belief. Turns out now he was correct. So the NY Times wrote yesterday in a lengthy and fascinating article. We have the Times story. If you want to read Simon you must follow the link above.

…The biggest single factor in putting time on the nuclear clock appears to be Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed.

In interviews over the past three months in the United States and Europe, experts who have picked apart the computer worm describe it as far more complex — and ingenious — than anything they had imagined when it began circulating around the world, unexplained, in mid-2009.

Many mysteries remain, chief among them, exactly who constructed a computer worm that appears to have several authors on several continents. But the digital trail is littered with intriguing bits of evidence.

In early 2008 the German company Siemens cooperated with one of the United States’ premier national laboratories, in Idaho, to identify the vulnerabilities of computer controllers that the company sells to operate industrial machinery around the world — and that American intelligence agencies have identified as key equipment in Iran’s enrichment facilities.

Siemens says that program was part of routine efforts to secure its products against cyberattacks. Nonetheless, it gave the Idaho National Laboratory — which is part of the Energy Department, responsible for America’s nuclear arms — the chance to identify well-hidden holes in the Siemens systems that were exploited the next year by Stuxnet.

The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.

The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts of Iran’s operations ground to a halt, while others survived, according to the reports of international nuclear inspectors. Nor is it clear the attacks are over: Some experts who have examined the code believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults. …

P.J. O’Rourke criticizes the NY Times.

…In the matter of self-serving, bitter, calculated cynicism, there wouldn’t seem to be much left to prove against the Times. Judging by what I’ve heard from my fellow conservatives, the issue is decided. The New York Times is a worthless, truthless, vicious institution. But I disagree. I think things are worse than that.

…We observe in the Times a bizarre overreaction to people and things that can be construed as “antigovernment.” (And all people and most things often can be so construed, e.g., the man who just got a speeding ticket.) The Times has become delusional, going from advocating big government to believing that it is the big government. …

Ross Douthat wrote a calm, well-reasoned Monday Times opinion column about how most contemporary attacks on American politicians have been of greater interest to psychiatrists than ideologues. “From the Republican leadership to the Tea Party grass roots, all of Gabrielle Gifford’s political opponents were united in horror at the weekend’s events.” The newspaper probably heard this as a hallucinatory voice in its head urging self-destruction. If we’re going to discuss dark, paranoid corners of the Internet that have an unwholesome influence on our national life, there’s the New York Times online. …

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asks NJ Governor Chris Christie why he won’t run in 2012.

… CHRISTIE: Listen, I think every year you have as a governor in an executive position in a big state like New Jersey would make you better prepared to be president. And after one year as governor, I am not arrogant enough to believe that after one year as governor of New Jersey and seven years as the United States attorney that I’m ready to be president of the United States, so I’m not going to run.

WALLACE: Yes, but you know, and I heard you say it might make more sense somewhere down the line, 2016, 2020, whatever. But one of the things that Obama learned and showed us all in 2007, when it’s your moment, you have got to move.

CHRISTIE: Listen, that is a decision that he made. And he’s obviously was successful in winning the presidency. My view is I want to, if I ever would have run for the presidency, if I was ever to do it, I want to make sure in my heart I feel ready. And I don’t think you run just because political opportunity is there. That’s how we wind up with politicians who aren’t ready for their jobs. …

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Jennifer Rubin wonders if Virginia Senator Jim Webb, who voted for Obamacare, will have an explanation to go along with his backpedaling.

My home-state senator, Jim Webb (D.-Va.), made a remarkable statement yesterday. The Virginian-Pilot reported on his appearance in Norfolk:

The Obama administration “did a really terrible job handling health care reform,” he said, because the president relied on Congress to draft a plan.

“You can’t turn something that complicated loose on the United States Congress,” he said, adding that the resulting debate led to great public confusion. …

Wait a second. Didn’t he vote for the monstrous bill? Well, sure. He was the 60th Senator — each Democrat was — on the critical cloture vote. So is he saying he didn’t know how bad the bill was, or is he saying he cast a bad vote? Neither answer is a winner.

It’s not clear that he is going to seek re-election, but if so, he better be able to answer those questions.

John Stossel asks if our Congress will have the guts to make the tough fiscal decisions that Canada has made.

…Economist David R. Henderson points out that our neighbors to the north faced a similar crisis. In 1994, the debt that Canada owed to investors was 67 percent of GDP. Today, it’s less than 30 percent.

What did Canada do? It cut spending from 17.5 percent of GDP to 11.3 percent.

This wasn’t merely a cut in the growth of spending, a favorite trick of congressional committees. These were actual reductions in absolute spending.

…All but one of Canada’s 22 federal departments experienced real cuts in spending. While Canada raised taxes slightly, spending was cut six to seven times more.

These supposedly painful cuts didn’t cause terrible pain. In fact, there was much more gain than pain. Unemployment dropped, the economy boomed, and the Canadian dollar — then worth about 71 cents U.S. — today is about equal to the American dollar. …

In the Corner, Rory Cooper has an well-written article on how Obama’s green agenda, specifically on oil drilling, circumvents the Constitution and hurts the economy. Soon people are going to start noticing the rise in gas prices and the president will own them.

…Nobody denies that important safety reforms are necessary in the wake of the tragic Deepwater Horizon accident and oil spill. In fact, the Heritage Foundation introduced a plan for reform in August 2010 that increased liability caps; created an insurance pool for claims over $1 billion; and installed safeguards against industry risk-taking. The Heritage model would’ve promoted safety; assigned full liability; protected taxpayers; and allowed oil and gas exploration to continue.

But the Obama commission apparently failed to consider the impact of reforms on taxpayers and on our energy industry. While the commission correctly included a focus on risk-based assessment for all individual offshore activities and operations, they spent entirely too much time appeasing environmental activists with proposals for ways to slow the industry down, like expanding the time it takes for a lease application to be reviewed and recommending a vast amount of new industry-wide regulations.

This is exactly what President Obama aims to do: slow down or stop entirely the drilling of fossil fuels in the U.S., raise the price of existing and new supply wherever it comes from, and use unilateral executive-branch action to make gas so expensive that alternative energy sources will become viable dollar-to-dollar.

Obama started down this track with his reckless across-the-board drilling moratorium, which was declared illegal by two federal courts. President Obama persisted anyway, and even after announcing he was lifting the moratorium, continued with a de facto moratorium. In fact, since Obama “lifted” the moratorium, deepwater permit issuance is down 88 percent, with only two new permits in that time.

…Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in 2008, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Outside the drilling moratorium, President Obama directed his Interior secretary, Ken Salazar, to ban offshore drilling in over 85 percent of American waters (even while he spends billions subsidizing Brazil’s offshore industry) and directed EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to impose new global-warming regulations on oil refineries.

The Hill reports that, in response to the commission’s report, President Obama asked the commission what else he can do unilaterally, without congressional approval…

…Federal government revenue is also suffering. For the first time since 1959, the U.S. could go an entire year without a lease sale. According to Heritage, as a result, the government will “lose more than $1 billion in bonus bids, less revenue from rental payments and significantly fewer royalties.” And state governments will also suffer forfeiting upwards of $100 million in tax revenue. …

David Warren shares his thoughts on the consequences of the current political debate.

…The advantage of insinuations over hard arguments is that they bypass critical thought. No one can respond precisely to a charge that is utterly vague or to accusers who will envelope any reply in a poisonous fog of further insinuations. The best that can be said is that the accusations in question here were fatuous. Yet they were also entirely predictable, given the extraordinarily low standards in contemporary political debate.

…The motive behind it is obvious: to tar political opponents. And there is no excuse for this. For every “incendiary” or “vitriolic” remark made on the right of the U.S. political spectrum, a matching remark may be found on the left. The tarring is hypocritically selective.

And it is consequential. The further intention behind these smears is to advance “hate speech” legislation for the very purpose of silencing opponents in debate.

Words are not deeds. The distinction between them is written deeply into the history of our common law. It is a distinction that is crucial to a free society. If words can be prosecuted as if they were deeds (except in the most extreme situations), we cannot discuss anything openly. …

David Harsanyi thinks that the Right should walk away from the debate on the political climate. Engaging in a discussion with an opponent that doesn’t use logic or facts does seem like a waste of time, at the very least.

No doubt some of you are upset by the hysterical politicization of the murders in Tucson. Be heartened that a new CBS poll found that 57 percent of respondents believed the political tone in the nation had nothing to do with this particular madman’s rampage.

…But this impending conversation about civility and our climate of hate is not only a useless one, it also is meant to discourage dissent. It is a rigged talk, because not only do we — by any standard and context available — reside in a highly civil and peaceful political system, violence is almost non-existent. The Tea Party didn’t pick up pitchforks and storm the White House; they knocked off Republicans in primaries. …

In Slate, Annie Lowrey reports on new advertising phenomenons – Groupon and what is supposed to come next.

…In the past few years, millions of Americans—more than 50 million, in fact—have signed up for a “daily deal” or “group coupon” site. It works like this: You give the online company your ZIP code. Once a day, it sends you an e-mail with a deal from a local business, whether a salon or a sushi joint. The discount is usually steep—generally, 50 percent to 90 percent—and the offer generally expires after a day or two. If you decide you want that $20 massage for $10, you pay up, then print your coupon.

The two dominant players in the field are LivingSocial and Groupon—and both are highly successful. Washington-based LivingSocial has more than 16 million members, and Chicago-based Groupon more than 44 million. …

…Advertising analysts also expect the daily deal/group buying/social discount sites to become a lot more sophisticated. For one, that means that some will start asking for more than your ZIP code. (The more an advertising company knows about you, of course, the more valuable you are to it and to advertisers.) Some curated sites might request your profession, salary, hobbies—even your favorite restaurants or brands, or your exact block—to better tailor deals to you.

Finally, expect more big businesses to get in the game—with chain stores and social networking sites starting to send out deeply discounted, tailored, and location-based offers. In November, for instance, Facebook announced a new function inspired by the success of Groupon: “Deals.” Users can check in at malls and coffee bars, and businesses near them can offer them discounts. …

In the WaPo, Donna St. George tells how one parent turned the tables on the local school board.

…Awakened at 4:33 a.m. Wednesday by a ringing phone, Aaron Titus jumped out of bed in a panic. Maybe something terrible had happened, he thought. Even if nothing was wrong, his heart raced with other considerations: His five children, ages 5 and under, including his week-old daughter, were mercifully still asleep, and he wanted to keep it that way.

In a blurry rush, Titus answered the phone halfway into the second ring, listening in disbelief to an automated caller tell him what he already knew: It was a snow day. School would open two hours late. In other words, he and his family could sleep.

But now he couldn’t.

…Sometime later in the day, the 31-year-old father from Fort Washington, a lawyer who knows a thing or two about technology, made a decision that might well bring amused satisfaction to like-minded parents everywhere.

Titus arranged for an automated message of his own. …

Just before the cartoons we have links to some stunning time-lapse video of the Northern Lights. That’s to make up for taking tomorrow off.

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Bill Kristol already has his picks for the 2012 race.

Having just returned from the e21 and Manhattan Institute-sponsored Conversation with Paul Ryan (very ably conducted by Paul Gigot)–and having seen Marco Rubio speak recently as well, I’ll just say this: Wouldn’t it be easier just to agree now on a Ryan-Rubio ticket, and save everyone an awful lot of time, effort, and money over the next year and a half?

UPDATE: For what it’s worth, these were the first four of many e-mails to arrive, responding to the Ryan-Rubio blog post:

“Excellent, excellent choices!  Unbeatable pair! I’m so excited – a reason for hope!”

“All I can say is: YES!!!!!”

“I don’t want to take away from some of the other potentially great candidates, but you are so right. Rubio is inspirational and Ryan is simply the best out there. His knowledge of the issues, particularly issues related to the budget, is second to none and he is able to communicate his position in a concise and understandable way.”

“Love it.”

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on the president’s recent snub of the UK for the French. Perhaps Gardiner can remind the British that there are lots of bitter Americans, clinging to our guns and religion, who think very highly of the US-UK relationship. This presidency, too, shall pass.

The Obama administration is not known for its pro-British track record, but this is by far the strongest indication yet that the current White House has little regard for the Special Relationship and its unique role in modern American history. At a White House photo opportunity with French President Nicolas Sarkozy today, recorded by C-Span (view the video at 2:45 for the remark), President Obama had this to say:

“We don’t have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy, and the French people.”

…There is of course no comparison between the extremely close-knit relationship between the United States and Great Britain, from defence and intelligence ties to economic investment and cultural exchange. It is an alliance forged over the course of 70 years, from the beaches of Normandy to the battlefields of Afghanistan. Today in the war against the Taliban there are more than 10,000 British troops fighting alongside their US allies, compared to 3,850 Frenchmen. Nearly 350 British soldiers have laid down their lives in Afghanistan in contrast to French losses of 53.

These kinds of presidential statements matter. No US president in modern times has described France as America’s closest ally, and such a remark is not only factually wrong but also insulting to Britain, not least coming just a few years after the French famously knifed Washington in the back over the war in Iraq.

Perhaps the White House would like to confirm that this is what the President of the United States firmly believes, or clarify the comments? Either way, this latest remark from Barack Obama will only further strengthen the impression of a president who is both woefully out of his depth on the world stage, as well as contemptuous of traditional friends and alliances.

In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin has a post on new construction in Jerusalem. He tells the rest of the story that the NY Times neglected to get.

…When the New York Times reported the fact that ground was being broken for the new housing in Sheikh Jarrah in a story published on Sunday, what it did was to focus on the destruction of what it claimed was a Palestinian “landmark.” What landmark, you ask? Was it a medieval structure that in some way represents the longstanding Arab presence in the city or its culture? No. The building that was toppled to make way for some new apartment houses was just a large home that was built in the 1930s as a villa for one of the most notorious figures in 20th-century history: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. Husseini may never have spent much time in what eventually was renamed the Shepherd Hotel, but he did make his mark on the region by inspiring bloody pogroms against the Jews then living in the country. After the outbreak of World War II, he joined forces with the Nazis, meeting with Hitler and then spending the war making Arabic propaganda broadcasts for the Axis and successfully recruiting Muslims (mostly Bosnians) to serve in a special SS brigade. He was promised that, in the event of a German victory, he would be made the puppet ruler of what is now Israel, where he would assist the Nazis in the massacre of the several hundred thousand Jews who lived there.

That a home that was in any way connected to Husseini or any other Nazi would be considered a landmark whose demolition inspired statements of sadness from contemporary Palestinian leaders like Saeb Erekat speaks volumes about the nature of Palestinian politics. That the intended home of the man who dreamed of wiping out every last Jew in Jerusalem is coming down to make room for Jewish homes is certainly ironic. One needn’t necessarily agree with the politics of Daniel Luria, a representative of Ateret Cohanim, the group that promotes Jewish building throughout Jerusalem, to appreciate what he termed the “beautiful poetic justice” of this event.

David Segal’s article on the law school bubble is the topic of conversation at NRO’s Phi Beta Cons. Nathan Harden opens with this post.

The New York Times has a lengthy article on how America’s law schools are juicing their numbers — Enron-style, inflating statistics about their graduates’ employment prospects in order to attract more applicants. In reality, new law-school grads face dim job prospects in this economy:

“A generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades. Since 2008, some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished, according to a Northwestern Law study. Associates have been laid off, partners nudged out the door and recruitment programs have been scaled back or eliminated…

But improbably enough, law schools have concluded that life for newly minted grads is getting sweeter, at least by one crucial measure. In 1997, when U.S. News first published a statistic called “graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation,” law schools reported an average employment rate of 84 percent. In the most recent U.S. News rankings, 93 percent of grads were working — nearly a 10-point jump.

…How do law schools depict a feast amid so much famine?”

Phi Beta Cons continues: Jason Fertig quotes the sad comments of a recent grad.

Great job, Nathan and Jane, for noting that Times article on law-school fuzzy math. What is even more troubling in that piece is the story of the young individual with $250,000 of student-loan debt. This young man’s troubles are weaved throughout the article to emphasize the overselling of the J.D., and the last few paragraphs of the article are perhaps the most valuable:

Another of [his] techniques for remaining cool in a serious financial pickle: believe that the pickle might somehow disappear.

“Bank bailouts, company bailouts — I don’t know, we’re the generation of bailouts,” he says in a hallway during a break from his Peak Discovery job. “And like, this debt of mine is just sort of, it’s a little illusory. I feel like at some point, I’ll negotiate it away, or they won’t collect it.”

He gives a slight shrug and a smile as he heads back to work. “It could be worse,” he says. “It’s not like they can put me jail.”

Like a good steak, those comments stand up fine on their own. I don’t need to add anything.

Phi Beta Cons: George Leef makes some excellent points about the legality of the law school reports, and the wider economic issue of the barrier to entry into the law profession.

…I wonder how long it will be before some aggressive member of the trial bar finds an underemployed law grad to serve as plaintiff in a suit against one of the schools that fudge their numbers. That looks like fraud; it’s no different than a homeowner hiding the fact that his basement leaks from a purchaser.

My disappointment in the article was that no one mentioned the principal reason that legal education costs so much — the requirement in nearly all states that you must earn a degree from an ABA-accredited law school before you can take the bar exam. The ABA insists on a three-year course of study, but just about everyone who has gone through law school will tell you that the second and third years are almost entirely useless. You take a lot of courses in subjects that you will never need to know anything about. There is some benefit to the first year, especially learning legal research and writing and key fields like contracts and torts — but there is no reason that you should have to learn even that in a law school.

All in all, forcing prospective legal practitioners through the portal of an accredited law school is nothing but a gigantic subsidy to the legal-education establishment, and it increases the cost of legal services. If state governments allowed people to take the bar exam without first earning an approved J.D., some of those going into the profession would probably be willing to take cases from poorer people who, as the ABA admits, are often unable to find counsel when they need it.

The mandated three-year law school was originally conceived as a barrier to entry that would keep down the number of lawyers, part of the legal profession’s cartel maintenance. What with the increasing wealth of society and the availability of government financial aid, it no longer serves that function. The U.S. is glutted with law grads, but the schools profit handsomely from continuing to churn them out. …

And the last post from Phi Beta Cons, George Leef adds more history and an opportunity to learn more on the topic.

One commenter asks whether lawyers really need to go to law school at all. Prior to the ABA’s big push in the 1920s for “higher standards,” most lawyers had not gone to law school, and many of the law schools then in existence had programs lasting less than three years. Using the typical smokescreen of concern for consumers, the legal profession went about lobbying for the requirement that prospective lawyers must get a degree from an ABA-accredited law school before being allowed to take the bar exam. There were some incompetent lawyers back then, and there still are. It isn’t formal legal schooling that makes for a competent practitioner. I covered all of that and the legal profession’s main cartel trick of prosecuting anyone who does anything resembling legal work, no matter how competently, for “unauthorized practice of law” in a Cato Policy Analysis, “The Case for a Free Market in Legal Services.”

Charles Krauthammer discusses the hate-filled Left and the mentally-ill killer.

…Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

…His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with “unnerving, long stupors of silence” during which he would “stare fixedly at his buddies,” reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through “grammar.” He was obsessed with “conscious dreaming,” a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.

This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder – ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.

These are all the hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic. And a dangerous one. A classmate found him so terrifyingly mentally disturbed that, she e-mailed friends and family, she expected to find his picture on TV after his perpetrating a mass murder. This was no idle speculation: In class “I sit by the door with my purse handy” so that she could get out fast when the shooting began.

…The origins of Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman’s?

Peter Wehner comments on Charles Krauthammer’s column.

Sometimes, a future Hall of Fame pitcher is, during a key moment, asked to pitch out of rotation. So, too, with certain columnists.

Charles Krauthammer’s regular slot in the Washington Post is Friday — but he was moved up in order to address the liberal libel that the Tucson massacre was the result of a “climate of hate” created by conservatives. The result is a spectacularly good column. And it concludes with a devastating knockout of the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has earned the distinction of being the most scurrilous and irresponsible commentator on the Tucson killings (the competition was stiff).

“The origins of [Jared] Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness,” Krauthammer writes. “What are the origins of Krugman’s?”

An excellent question. And whatever the answer is, Paul Krugman — based on his grotesque conduct during the past five days and Krauthammer’s withering takedown — will not recover. He may continue to write, but he has become, in serious circles, an object of ridicule as well as contempt.

John Steele Gordon adds his thoughts on Paul Krugman’s ignominy.

…I also agree that this may be a tipping point in Krugman’s disgraceful career as a columnist. For one thing, he is intellectually lazy and seems to operate on the principle that a Krugman assertion is, ipso facto, an established fact. He rarely buttresses his assertions with evidence. His one bit of evidence that ”eliminationist rhetoric” in American political life is overwhelmingly on the right was to quote Rep. Michelle Bachmann as saying that people who oppose the Obama agenda should be “armed and dangerous.”

Far worse, however, he is intellectually dishonest. Even the Times’s first public editor, Daniel Okrent, said that Krugman has a “disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.” He is no less cavalier with quotes. As John Hinderacker at Power Line shows, complete with a recording of the entire interview, Michelle Bachmann was merely using a metaphor. She was holding a town hall meeting with constituents regarding the cap-and-trade bill and said, “I’m going to have materials for people when they leave. I want people armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax, because we need to fight back.” She was arming them with information, not bullets, so they could successfully oppose a terrible bill, not shoot politicians.

On June 19, 1954, Joseph Welch asked Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” It turned out to be the tipping point in McCarthy’s career, the moment when public opinion turned decisively against him. …

…I hope that Krugman’s column on Monday, when he shamelessly used a tragedy to smear his political opponents, will be his have-you-no-decency-sir moment. …

The Washington Examiner editors point out the First Amendment implications, and the hypocrisy, of the rantings from the Left.

…Another self-righteous voice in this debate is left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas, who said in June 2008 that he was placing a “bull’s-eye” on Giffords’ and other Democratic moderates’ districts because of their vote on an intelligence bill, by which they had “sold out the Constitution.” Last week, a Kos diarist even wrote an angry rant about Giffords, declaring, “My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!”

Let’s be clear: The Tucson crimes were not encouraged by any such heated rhetoric. Neither Kos with its rhetorical bull’s-eyes, nor the cross hair graphics on Sarah Palin’s Web site, nor the cross hairs used in the ads of nearby Arizona Democratic Rep. Harry Mitchell’s campaign in 2006, nor the bull’s-eyes used by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to “target” Republicans in 2009 have any relevance to this discussion. Their elimination for the sake of political correctness would not have saved — and will not save — a single life…Unless our endgame involves burning books, banning certain kinds of speech and censoring the Internet, lest something someone says or writes might inspire some crazy person to kill someone, the discussion about “toxic political rhetoric” is a waste of time. Unless your aim is to use it as a pretext to repeal somebody’s First Amendment rights.

Jennifer Rubin has more on Krugman’s shameful opinions. She also highlights a liberal commentator who takes the hypocrites to task.

Longtime readers know I have my differences with David Brooks. But the Arizona massacre is the sort of incident for which David Brooks writing — calm, measured and moderate — is much needed. Today he writes:

“…These accusations — that political actors contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl — are extremely grave. They were made despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that Loughner was part of these movements or a consumer of their literature. They were made despite the fact that the link between political rhetoric and actual violence is extremely murky. They were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness. …”

And John Steele Gordon wraps things up with a post on how the Internet brings accountability to the commentators.

Someone should tell liberals that the old days are over. Not so long ago, if you wanted to prove that a member of the chattering classes had flatly contradicted himself in order to advance a political agenda, you had to go to the library, get a roll of microfilm, insert it into a machine, and then search for the earlier statement. If your memory was faulty as to where or when the earlier statement had appeared, this process could take hours, even days. Often it wasn’t worth the bother.

Today you need only click the icons for Google and/or YouTube, push a few keys, and bam! — you have proof positive of the chatterers’ shameless hypocrisy. A few more clicks and their intellectual perfidy is all over the Internet.

The recent spate of liberals decrying the hostile rhetoric of the right following the tragedy in Tucson is a case in point. One would think that the incivility had started on January 20, 2009, and that political conversation of the previous eight years had been a modern-day Socratic dialogue. As Michelle Malkin demonstrates – in spades! — that is not exactly the case.

I don’t know how long it took Michelle to come up with her list, but I bet it was less time than she would have needed to take the bus to the library.

It is worthwhile having a look at Michelle Malkin’s long post. Here’s another link.

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On Monday, January 9th, we posted a wonderful article. Yasmine El-Rashidi, in Ahram On-Line, had an amazing story of Muslims protecting Coptic Christians in Egypt, in the wake of a church bombing. The movement for religious tolerance in Egypt that has inspired millions, rallies to the phrase, “Egypt for All.” David Warren hopes that this story will move Canadians to stand against religious persecution in Canada.

…The recent bomb blast in Alexandria was hardly an isolated event, and well before that happened, Islamist websites were posting the names, faces, and home addresses of leading Copts in Ottawa, as well as elsewhere, with instructions to kill them; and addresses of churches with instructions to bomb them. Direct threats have been received by many Copts. And even here — in a free country, where the liberty of worship is supposedly guaranteed — they may be privately advised to keep their heads down, and not make their memorials to the dead, or their celebration of Christmas, too conspicuous.

This is not as it should be. Freedom — including especially freedom of belief and worship, at the heart of all other freedoms — has always required courage. It requires the refusal to be intimidated, and that in turn demands the solidarity of the whole society against those who would intimidate.

…Canadians, too, must learn to perform such spontaneous acts of solidarity when our neighbours are threatened. We must not think, “the police will take care of it,” for the police follow orders, only. We must have the courage to give the orders, and when necessary, risk our own necks. …

In the NY Times, David Segal looks at the bleak future of law school graduates, and how law schools are lying with statistics. Segal also touches on a theme we see in the housing crash: how government interference has created distorted market incentives.

…In reality, and based on every other source of information, …a generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades. Since 2008, some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished, according to a Northwestern Law study. Associates have been laid off, partners nudged out the door and recruitment programs have been scaled back or eliminated.

…But improbably enough, law schools have concluded that life for newly minted grads is getting sweeter, at least by one crucial measure. In 1997, when U.S. News first published a statistic called “graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation,” law schools reported an average employment rate of 84 percent. In the most recent U.S. News rankings, 93 percent of grads were working — nearly a 10-point jump.

…How do law schools depict a feast amid so much famine?

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson of Indiana University, one of many exasperated law professors who are asking the American Bar Association to overhaul the way law schools assess themselves. “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.” …

…A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You’re working, too.

… Job openings for lawyers have plunged, but law schools are not dialing back enrollment. About 43,000 J.D.’s were handed out in 2009, 11 percent more than a decade earlier, and the number of law schools keeps rising — nine new ones in the last 10 years, and five more seeking approval to open in the future.

Apparently, there is no shortage of 22-year-olds who think that law school is the perfect place to wait out a lousy economy and the gasoline that fuels this system — federally backed student loans — is still widely available. But the legal market has always been obsessed with academic credentials, and today, few students except those with strong grade-point averages at top national and regional schools can expect a come-hither from a deep-pocketed firm. Nearly everyone else is in for a struggle. Which is why many law school professors privately are appalled by what they describe as a huge and continuing transfer of wealth, from students short on cash to richly salaried academics. Or perhaps this is more like a game of three-card monte, with law schools flipping the aces and a long line of eager players, most wagering borrowed cash, in a contest that few of them can win.

And all those losers can remain cash-poor for a long time. “I think the student loans that kids leave law school with are more scandalous than payday loans,” says Andrew Morriss, a law professor at the University of Alabama. “And because it’s so easy to get a student loan, law school tuition has grossly outpaced the rate of inflation for the last 20 years. It’s now astonishingly high.” …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Toby Harnden wonders if Obama will underestimate the new House Speaker.

…Boehner has no aspiration to be president. One of 12 children born into a working class Roman Catholic family in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio, he worked in his father’s bar and later as a janitor before entering politics.

His performance in accepting the Speakership was notable for how low-key it was. “The American people have humbled us,” he said. “What they want is a government that is honest, accountable and responsive to their needs. A government that respects individual liberty, honours our heritage, and bows before the public it serves.”

When the chamber erupted into applause, Boehner looked almost embarrassed and said: “It’s still just me.”

…When the health care bill came to the House floor, Boehner yelled: “Hell no!” It turned out most Americans were with him. Obama explained the benefits of his reform like a Vulcan and it didn’t compute with him when the majority disagreed. …

Michael Barone has a post on Bill Daley.

Was it just my imagination, or was there a note of one-upsmanship in Bill Daley’s noting, in his remarks after being announced as the next White House chief of staff, that he had been in the White House fifty years ago this month?

Fifty years ago this month Barack Obama was a fetus and Bill Daley was a 12-year-old visiting the White House. Not, one is safe in assuming, in an ordinary tourist visit but as the guest of the “young president” Daley referred to but did not name, John Kennedy. And Daley even at 12 was surely aware that he and his parents and siblings were there because his father had done more than anyone else (exactly how much remains a matter in dispute) to deliver Illinois’s 27 electoral votes to Kennedy.

The implied message to Obama: I’ve been around a lot longer than you have, and I know how things work. This looks something like the opposite of groveling.

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We open with Craig Pirrong, aka Streetwise Professor. He responds to liberal Paul Krugman’s disgusting commentary on the Tucson shooter, and Krugman’s intellectually dishonest article on Texas.

…If you want a more reasonable conjecture about the Tuscon shooter, I suggest Shannon Love’s piece at Chicago Boyz.  The conclusion is spot on:

The left plays a dangerous and ultimately self-defeating game when in every case to date, they have immediately, often literally within minutes, of a reported act of political violence, sprung out to denounce ordinary non-lefitsts as culpable in the attack. Since it is widely known that such attackers are either seriously mentally ill or individuals with highly egocentric and idiosyncratic ideologies, seeking to link such attacks to their mainstream political opposition makes it clear that they see instances of political violence merely as chances to advance their political power. Moreover, since such attackers have a hodgepodge ideology, one can just as easily blame leftist’s rhetoric for such attacks as non-leftists.

More darkly, by linking ordinary, mainstream political opponents to such political violence, the left appears to be creating a context for suppressing or even violently attacking such opposition. They are desperately trying to create an equation in which disagreeing with a leftists is tantamount to a violent attack. …

Victor Davis Hanson weighs in on “political vultures” who try to spin tragedy to fit their repugnant world view.

…There is much talk that Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs” ad pushed Loughner over the edge. But if sloppy use of gun metaphors can drive anyone to shoot congressional representatives, think what we are up against when the president of the United States invokes violent imagery to galvanize his supporters. What are we to make of Obama’s warning of “hand-to-hand combat” if the Republicans take over; or his comment that one of his supporters could “tear [Sean Hannity] up”; or his Untouchables boast that “if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”; or his advice to supporters of his presidential campaign to argue with Republicans and independents and “get in their face”?

…Yet do we really wish to tie crude presidential metaphors, similes, and bombast to the next violent attack on a conservative political figure? Are we to suggest that President Obama’s occasional indiscretions have created a climate of fear that someday will lead to violence against his political adversaries? Or, did Obama merely from time to time indulge in sloppy thinking and clumsy expression? Even as someone who did not vote for Barack Obama, I do not think the president’s ill-advised and juvenile similes and allusions will ever drive a liberal extremist into “bringing a gun” to a political fight or literally “tearing up” a political opponent.

…the outrage of Daly, Krugman, Sullivan, and others is partisan and transparently self-serving. Paul Krugman would have more credibility on the topic of extreme rhetoric had he written a column a few years ago warning Americans that it was one thing to oppose George W. Bush, but quite another to publish a novel envisioning the assassination of the president, or to award first prize at the Toronto Film Festival to a “docudrama” constructing the shooting of Bush…

…If crazed gunmen are sadly a periodic characteristic of American culture, so are political vultures who scavenge political capital as they pick through the horrific violence.

In the WSJ, Glenn Reynolds makes several excellent points about the shameful comments made by some liberals after Tucson.

…American journalists know how to be exquisitely sensitive when they want to be. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York pointed out on Sunday, after Major Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood while shouting “Allahu Akhbar!” the press was full of cautions about not drawing premature conclusions about a connection to Islamist terrorism. “Where,” asked Mr. York, “was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?”

Set aside as inconvenient, apparently. There was no waiting for the facts on Saturday. Likewise, last May New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and CBS anchor Katie Couric speculated, without any evidence, that the Times Square bomber might be a tea partier upset with the ObamaCare bill.

…To be clear, if you’re using this event to criticize the “rhetoric” of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you’re either: (a) asserting a connection between the “rhetoric” and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you’re not, in which case you’re just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America’s political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder. …

Jennifer Rubin notes some of the people who demonstrated dignity in their responses to the Tucson shootings.

The horrific shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), the death of six (including a 9 year old and a federal judge) and the injuring of a total of 18 revealed the best and the worst in American politics.

First, let’s look at the best. President Obama issued an eloquent statement as did Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Obama, having learned something about emergency incidents, quickly dispatched the FBI chief and appeared on top of the incident. Congress appropriately put off its business for the week. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) paid tribute to the slain federal court judge. They all conducted themselves in a calm and dignified fashion.

…To his credit, Howard Kurtz blasted the blame game. He wrote, “This isn’t about a nearly year-old Sarah Palin map [targeting Giffords's seat]; it’s about a lone nutjob who doesn’t value human life. It would be nice if we briefly put aside partisan differences and came together with sympathy and support for Gabby Giffords and the other victims, rather than opening rhetorical fire ourselves.” Likewise, Howard Fineman wrote: “The deaths there are not about politics, ideology or party. From what we know, Jared Loughman’s acts were those of a madman divorced from reality, let alone from public debate.” Bravo. …

And we wind things up with NRO Shorts. Here are three:

Morgan Tsvangirai is the prime minister of Zimbabwe and the leader of the democratic opposition: the opposition to the president and strongman, Robert Mugabe. Tsvangirai is one of the bravest men in Africa, or anywhere. As the Zimbabwe Mail put it, “Tsvangirai has survived several attempts on his life, had his wife killed in an ‘accident’ and was a hunted man for years. Only the unwaiving attention of the world’s powers kept him alive.” He will need such attention now. In a conversation with American and European diplomats, he said that he supported sanctions on Mugabe and his cronies, because they were forcing concessions from them. He could not support the sanctions in public, however, because Mugabe had succeeded in painting them as anti-Zimbabwe instead of anti-regime. How do we know about this conversation? Because a U.S. diplomat memorialized it in a cable, and this was one of the thousands of such cables released by WikiLeaks. Tsvangirai will now be investigated for treason, and faces the death penalty. The Zimbabwe Mail said, “Wikileaks may have just signed Morgan Tsvangirai’s death warrant. It will take an enormous effort on the part of the diplomatic corps of many nations to prevent that.” Let them make that effort, then. It seems strange, doesn’t it? Brave democrats are in jeopardy while Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, accepts applause and largesse as a freedom fighter.

We’ve been beating the hell out of the Taliban in and around its traditional stronghold of Kandahar. A mid-level Taliban commander quoted by the New York Times complained that “the government has the upper hand now.” The conventional wisdom about the war hasn’t yet caught up with this military progress — a phenomenon that General Petraeus must consider standard operating procedure by now. The corruption and unreliability of Afghan president Hamid Karzai and the double-dealing and instability of our ally Pakistan remain, of course, enormous problems. They aren’t susceptible to any easy solution, but we can at least minimize the hedging of Karzai and the Pakistanis if we convince them that we intend to stay until we finish the job. It helps that the administration has walked back its self-defeating July 2011 deadline for the beginning of withdrawal; it doesn’t help that Vice President Biden says the new deadline of 2014 will bring the withdrawal of all U.S. troops come “hell or high water.” Biden has an infallible instinct for saying whatever is most foolish or damaging. Regardless, events on the ground show that the futility of this war has been greatly exaggerated.

On Labor Day, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo published an op-ed in the New York Daily News that, though making many rhetorical genuflections, said what had once been sayable only by New York’s conservative think tanks: “Public employees unions must make sacrifices.” And Cuomo has kept up the pleasant surprises post–blowout election. “The words ‘government in Albany’ have become a national punchline,” he acknowledged at his January 1 inauguration, a symbolically terse one. “This state has no future if it is going to be the tax capital of the nation.” He then gave himself a 5 percent pay cut and requested a one-year government-employee pay freeze. Maybe only Andrew Cuomo — a creature of the Albany Democratic-machine/public-sector-union complex — can solve the bloated-government crisis that his father’s governorship, seminal in the creation of the union-kickback system that has enabled Democratic ascendance in Albany, wrought. We hope Cuomo II will keep his harsh word — but hope rarely triumphs over experience.

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In the City Journal, Heather Mac Donald reviews the success of conservative policies on crime and welfare.

…New York’s demolition of conventional thinking about crime was even more momentous. Since 1990, New York has experienced the largest and longest sustained drop in street crime of any big city in the developed world. In less than a generation, many major felonies have fallen 80 percent or more. New York did this by rejecting everything that the criminology and social-work professions counseled about crime. Police Chief William Bratton announced in 1994 that the police, not some big-government welfare program, would lower crime by 10 percent in just one year. He not only met his goal, he bested it—by ruthlessly holding precinct commanders accountable for the safety of their beats, by the rigorous analysis of crime data, and by empowering street cops to intervene in suspicious behavior before a crime actually happened.

Just as the liberal philosophy of exempting the poor from bourgeois standards of behavior set up a vicious cycle of fatherlessness, crime, and dependency, the conservative philosophy of universal standards set up a virtuous cycle of urban renovation. With crime in free fall across New York in the 1990s, the tourism and hospitality industries boomed, triggering demand for the low-skilled welfare mothers whom welfare reform was nudging into the workplace. Businesses moved back into formerly violence-plagued areas, creating more jobs. Neighborhoods were transformed.

…The national crime drop of 41 percent since 1991 is also the longest and largest national decline in modern history, one wholly unforeseen by criminologists. It was made possible by the increased incarceration rate, which achieved its maximum effect in the 1990s, and by the spread of New York–style data-driven policing. Most significant is that the national crime rate has fallen in each of the last three years, putting the final nail in the coffin of the liberal conceit that a bad economy drives otherwise law-abiding individuals into crime. …

In the Exchequer, Kevin Williamson comments on Texas’ projected budget deficit and how the adults in government there handled a similar situation in 2003.

…Texas doesn’t do shortfalls. Texas starts from scratch: Every year is basically Year Zero when it comes to the state budget — there is no assumption that next year’s funding will match or exceed this year’s, and the state’s constitution explicitly forbids any legislature to tie the hands of a subsequent legislature, financially or otherwise. When necessary, Texas implements zero-baseline budgets, in order to keep the state living within its means…

…In 2003, Governor Perry and Texas Republicans took the state’s budget baseline to zero, and told state agencies to write new budgets, based on what they actually needed to spend to accomplish their missions, rather than based on increasing by 3 percent or 4 percent or 30 percent or 40  percent what they spent last year. And the Republicans handled the politics pretty well: Instead of calling state agency chiefs down to the legislature to be dressed down by pompous elected types or denouncing them from the governor’s office, they had a bunch of what must have been drearily tedious private meetings with them, and helped them to sweat their budgets down in a rigorous but respectful way. It worked. Texas balanced the books, and the place does not look like Afghanistan.

…Texas’s low-B.S. approach has had some salubrious effects, as I’ve documented here and here. It also left Texas with surpluses that allowed the state to put about $10 billion in its rainy-day fund, which could come in handy now that the economy seems to be clouding up a little. Could, but probably won’t: Republicans plan to introduce a budget that comes in within current revenue without touching the rainy-day fund. Get your head around that: There’s a multibillion-dollar pot of cash sitting there in front of politicians who must be just slavering inside at the thought of it, and they aren’t going to touch it — even though they have a pretty good excuse. Imagine a Congress that could do that. …

In Forbes, Daniel Oliver believes inflation is coming.

…The inflation rate has fallen for the past three years, as it did between 1969 and 1972, but monetary policy has caused commodity prices to surge back to 2008 bubble highs despite rising unemployment. Anecdotal evidence of pricing turmoil for foreign producers of intermediate goods suggests that inflation is already lurking just offshore, preparing to crash into the economy. The higher costs will cause commerce to freeze, as it did in 2008, or else the inflation spiral will again begin in earnest. Either way, European-style protests will soon come to these shores as well.

…From 1969 to 1980 the dollar lost 96% of its value in terms of gold and 92% in terms of oil. The stock market was no safe haven: The Dow’s nominal value in 1980 was the same as in 1969, meaning it lost similar value against gold and oil.

In the current cycle, the dollar and the Dow began deflating in 1999. With gold at $1,400 and oil at $90, the dollar and the Dow have declined by nearly 80% against both. To match the 1970s, they would have to lose another 80% against gold and another 60% against oil, implying gold at $7,000 and oil over $200. Given that the current monetary abuse is far worse than in the 1960s and 1970s, these figures are conservative.

Bretton Woods II is collapsing. The seductive Keynesian policies that fiscal and monetary authorities have followed for decades will soon cause the end of dollar hegemony. The United States is entering its third consecutive year of deficits greater than $1 trillion coupled with continuing dramatic increases in the stock of money. Devaluation and economic chaos are guaranteed, just as they were in 1969. Fortunately, unlike in 1969, gold ownership is legal. Those who understand free markets can still preserve the capital that will be needed to restore American prosperity after the deluge.

David Goldman posts on the latest unemployment numbers.

…Half of the drop in the unemployment rate to 9.4% from 9.8% is due to a fall in the labor force participation rate, from 64.5% to 64.3%. Clearly the labor market has stabilized and some of the sectors (notably hospitality) which fired people most aggressively are rehiring a bit. But the establishment survey shows a continued decline in manufacturing employment and an insignificant upward blip in retail employment. The biggest contribution to employment growth (35,000 jobs) was, again, in health care, not surprising given the fact that the federal government is committed to spending more in the sector.

As I suspected, the huge ADP number probably reflected statistical catchup between the BLS and ADP series. What we have is not a reinvigorated economy but a mediocre, low-growth environment. …

Robin Harding looks at the unemployment numbers in greater depth, in the Financial Times.

…Yet the household survey, from which the unemployment rate is calculated, sent a completely different message. It showed an extra 297,000 people in jobs and 260,000 fewer people in the labour force. The combination of the two was enough to cause a drop in the unemployment rate from 9.8 to 9.4 per cent.

…Most analysts attribute the fall in labour force participation and therefore the fall in the unemployment rate, to the expiry of long-term unemployment benefits in December.

If you no longer receive unemployment benefits, the theory goes, then you no longer have any reason to tell a survey you are ac-tively looking for work. The number of “discouraged workers”, who say that they are no longer looking for a job because they do not think they can find one, was 1.3m in December.

Congress has since renewed long-term unemployment benefits. A likely consequence is that the size of the labour force will bounce back in January, reversing the fall in the unemployment rate. …

Douglas Holtz-Eakin also tackles the jobs report, in the Corner.

The December jobs report disappointed on payroll employment, but slashed the unemployment rate. What’s up?

The most important fact is that two different surveys are used, and often they give conflicting signals.

The jobs number is calculated by asking employers (“payroll survey”) how many workers they have.

The unemployment rate is calculated by asking households (“household survey”) if they are out of work.

…The bottom line: Taken as a whole, the December report looked like a continuation of trend — not surprising. However, the confusing and anomalous drop in the unemployment rate is likely to reverse in the near term.

In Discovery News, Emily Sohn talks with some scientists who report that bird die-offs are usually not witnessed by humans.

…”This is really not the unusual thing that people are trying to make it into,” said Robert Meese, an avian ecologist at the University of California, Davis. “A lot of this stuff happens without anyone documenting it.”

…Records kept by the United States Geological Survey list at least 16 die-offs of more than 1,000 blackbirds or starlings over the past 30 years, said Marisa Lubeck, a spokesperson for the USGS in Denver. But group deaths among animals have been going on for a lot longer than that.

…In Beebe…thousands of blackbirds had settled for the night in trees near people’s homes. After a series of fireworks blasts went off on New Year’s Eve, the birds were startled off their roosts. Because blackbirds can’t see at night, they ended up flying all over the place, mostly downward.

One bird made it into a house, when the homeowner opened the door to see what was causing the racket. Most landed on roofs and the ground, making loud clunking noises as they shattered themselves to death. Necropsies revealed internal hemorrhaging, with no sign of pesticides. …

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Out of Egypt comes a story about Muslims showing up at a Coptic Christian Mass to provide protection. We have only one source for this, a blog from Cairo, but we want it to be true.

Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.

Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole. …

Charles Krauthammer thinks there is good reason to read the Constitution in Congress.

…Americans are in the midst of a great national debate over the power, scope and reach of the government established by that document. The debate was sparked by the current administration’s bold push for government expansion – a massive fiscal stimulus, Obamacare, financial regulation and various attempts at controlling the energy economy. This engendered a popular reaction, identified with the Tea Party but in reality far more widespread, calling for a more restrictive vision of government more consistent with the Founders’ intent.

Call it constitutionalism. In essence, constitutionalism is the intellectual counterpart and spiritual progeny of the “originalism” movement in jurisprudence. Judicial “originalists” (led by Antonin Scalia and other notable conservative jurists) insist that legal interpretation be bound by the text of the Constitution as understood by those who wrote it and their contemporaries. Originalism has grown to become the major challenger to the liberal “living Constitution” school, under which high courts are channelers of the spirit of the age, free to create new constitutional principles accordingly.

What originalism is to jurisprudence, constitutionalism is to governance: a call for restraint rooted in constitutional text. Constitutionalism as a political philosophy represents a reformed, self-regulating conservatism that bases its call for minimalist government – for reining in the willfulness of presidents and legislatures – in the words and meaning of the Constitution.

Hence that highly symbolic moment on Thursday when the 112th House of Representatives opened with a reading of the Constitution. Remarkably, this had never been done before – perhaps because it had never been so needed. The reading reflected the feeling, expressed powerfully in the last election, that we had moved far, especially the past two years, from a government constitutionally limited by its enumerated powers to a government constrained only by its perception of social need. …

Jonah Goldberg exposes embarrassing liberal criticisms of the House reading of the Constitution.

…Last week, Ezra Klein, a famously liberal Washington Post blogger, explained to MSNBC host Norah O’Donnell that the “gimmick” of reading the Constitution on the floor was ultimately silly because the Constitution was written “more than 100 years ago” and is, therefore, too confusing for everyone to understand. By that standard, Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare and the Bible are long past their expiration dates…One might also point out that the recently minted phonebook-thick Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) is a good deal harder to decipher than the U.S. Constitution.

Meanwhile, the GOP’s promise to require that every legislation contain a clause citing the constitutional authority for it has sparked a riot of incredulity. A writer for U.S. News & World Report says the idea is “just plain wacky.” …Dahlia Lithwick, Slate magazine’s legal editor, responded, “How weird is that, I thought. Isn’t it a court’s job to determine whether or not something is, in fact, constitutional? And isn’t that sort of provided for in, well, the Constitution?”

…You do have to wonder why senators and representatives bother swearing to “support and defend” the Constitution if that’s not part of their job description. Surely, it would strike most citizens as bizarre to suggest that legislators shouldn’t worry about whether their proposed legislation is constitutional. …

David Harsanyi ponders the Constitution.

…because the Constitution has become too complex for many of us to decipher, and thus irrelevant, its time to boil the whole thing down to its troglodytic and/or graceful basics and engage P.J. O’Rourke’s rules of governance in a free society:

1. “Mind your own business.”

2. “Keep your hands to yourself.”

If the public believes in the spirit of the founding and politicians are committed to the resurrection of the constitution those rules are a good guide when looking at new legislation. …

In the Corner, Mario Loyola notes that politicians on both sides of the aisle have aided in the federal government overreach.

The opening of the new Congress with a reading of the Constitution on the floor of the House of Representatives has triggered some angry reactions on the left, but it wasn’t intended just as a criticism of them. The GOP leadership was also implicitly criticizing those Republicans who have strayed from the ideals of limited government, individual liberty, and constitutional originalism.

…People can sense that in Washington, a relentless concentration of government power has been well underway for decades. They sense that it is a danger to our democracy — and they don’t know the half of it. While Obamacare’s assault on constitutional rights is well understood, the EPA’s audacious power grab and the increasingly corrosive use of conditional federal funds in state budgets are only just becoming apparent.

Liberals laugh at such talk. But there aren’t many thoughtful law students of any political persuasion who can read the classic “con law” case of Wickard v. Filburn (1942) without feeling that somewhere along the line the Supreme Court lost its way and stopped guarding against the unconstitutional expansion of federal power. …

Karl Rove explains some of the unethical consequences of the federal government gaining power through Obamacare. 

…By early December, HHS had granted 222 such waivers to provide mini-med policies for companies including AMF Bowling and Universal Forest Product, as well as 43 union organizations. According to the department’s website, the waivers cover 1,507,418 employees, of which more than a third (525,898) are union members. Yet unionized workers make up only 7% of the private work force. Whatever is going on here, a disproportionately high number of waivers are being granted to administration allies.

…The AARP provided a big chunk of the $121 million spent on ads supporting the bill’s passage, as well as $21 million on lobbying in 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. HHS’s proposed regulations on Dec. 21 exempted the AARP’s lucrative “Medigap” plans from the rate review and other mandates and requirements.

…The AARP is also exempt from the new law’s $500,000 cap on executive compensation for insurance executives. (The nonprofit’s last CEO received over $1.5 million in compensation in his last full year, 2009.) It won’t pay any of the estimated $14 billion in new taxes on insurance companies, though according to its 2008 consolidated financial statement, it gets more money from its insurance offerings than it does from dues, grants and private contributions combined. Nor will it have to spend at least 85% of its Medigap premium dollars on medical claims, as Medicare Advantage plans must do; the AARP will be held to a far less restrictive 65%.

It’s not hard to connect the dots. The Obama administration is using waivers to reward friends. On the flip side, business executives will be discouraged from contributing to the president’s opponents or from taking any other steps that might upset the White House or its political appointees at HHS. …

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill hedges his bets against global warming. Still, the cold, white proof against global warming is hard to ignore.

You couldn’t have asked for a better snapshot of the chasm that divides today’s so-called expert classes from the mass of humanity than the snow crisis of Christmas 2010. They warn us endlessly about the warming of our planet; we struggle through knee-deep snow to visit loved ones. They host million-dollar conferences on how we’ll cope with our Mediterranean future; we sleep for days in airport lounges waiting for runways to be de-iced. They pester the authorities for more funding for global-warming research; we keep an eye on our elderly neighbours who don’t have enough cash to heat their homes.

…Anyone with a shred of self-respect who had predicted The End Of Snow would surely now admit that he was wrong. But no. Perhaps the most revealing thing about the snow crisis is that it was held up as evidence, not that the experts were mistaken, but that the public is stupid. Apparently it’s those who ask ‘Whatever happened to global warming?’, rather than those who predicted ‘no more traditional British winters’, who need to have their heads checked. Because what they don’t understand – ignoramuses that they are – is that heavy snow is also proof that our planet is getting hotter, and that industrialised society is to blame, just as surely as the absence of snow was proof of the same thing 10 years ago.

‘The snow outside is what global warming looks like’, said one headline, in a newspaper which 10 years ago said that the lack of snow outside is what global warming looks like. A commentator said that anyone who says ‘what happened to global warming?’ is an ‘idiot’ because nobody ever claimed that global warming would ‘make Britain hotter in the long run’. (Er, yes they did.) …

… In 2011, we should take everything that is said by this new doom-mongering expert caste with a large pinch of salt – and then spread that salt on the snow which they claimed had disappeared from our lives.

Christopher Hitchens is “tea”ed off and wishes to make us more refined.

…Just after World War II, during a period of acute food rationing in England, George Orwell wrote an article on the making of a decent cup of tea that insisted on the observing of 11 different “golden” rules. Some of these (always use Indian or Ceylonese—i.e., Sri Lankan—tea; make tea only in small quantities; avoid silverware pots) may be considered optional or outmoded. But the essential ones are easily committed to memory, and they are simple to put into practice.

If you use a pot at all, make sure it is pre-warmed. (I would add that you should do the same thing even if you are only using a cup or a mug.) Stir the tea before letting it steep. But this above all: “[O]ne should take the teapot to the kettle, and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours.” This isn’t hard to do, even if you are using electricity rather than gas, once you have brought all the makings to the same scene of operations right next to the kettle. …