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Looking at the president’s negotiating stance, Charles Krauthammer says it is nothing but a power play.

Let’s understand President Obama’s strategy in the “fiscal cliff” negotiations. It has nothing to do with economics or real fiscal reform. This is entirely about politics. It’s Phase 2 of the 2012 campaign. The election returned him to office. The fiscal cliff negotiations are designed to break the Republican opposition and grant him political supremacy, something he thinks he earned with his landslide 2.8-point victory margin on Election Day.

This is why he sent Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to the Republicans to convey not a negotiating offer but a demand for unconditional surrender. House Speaker John Boehner had made a peace offering of $800 billion in new revenue. Geithner pocketed Boehner’s $800 billion, doubled it to $1.6 trillion, offered risible cuts that in 2013 would actually be exceeded by new stimulus spending and then demanded that Congress turn over to the president all power over the debt ceiling.

Boehner was stunned. Mitch McConnell laughed out loud. In nobler days, they’d have offered Geithner a pistol and an early-morning appointment at Weehawken. Alas, Boehner gave again, coming back a week later with spending-cut suggestions — as demanded by Geithner — only to have them dismissed with a wave of the hand.

What’s going on here? Having taken Boehner’s sword, and then his shirt, Obama sent Geithner to demand Boehner’s trousers. Perhaps this is what Obama means by a balanced approach.

He pretends that Boehner’s offer to raise revenue by eliminating deductions rather than by raising rates is fiscally impossible.

But on July 22, 2011, Obama had said that “$1.2 trillion in additional revenues . . . could be accomplished without hiking tax rates, but could simply be accomplished by eliminating loopholes, eliminating some deductions and engaging in a tax reform process.” Which is exactly what the Republicans are offering today. …

And David Ignatius says the administration of naive fools has made Morsi our man in Cairo.

How did Washington become the best friend of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, even as President Mohamed Morsi was asserting dictatorial powers and his followers were beating up secular liberals in the streets of Cairo? It’s a question many Arabs ask these days, and it deserves an answer.

Morsi and his Brotherhood followers are on a power trip after decades of isolation and persecution. You could see that newfound status when Morsi visited the United Nations in September and even more so during the diplomacy that led to last month’s cease-fire in Gaza, brokered by Morsi and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Brotherhood leaders had gone from outcasts to superstars, and they were basking in the attention.

And let’s be honest: The Obama administration has been Morsi’s main enabler. U.S. officials have worked closely with him on economic development and regional diplomacy. Visiting Washington last week, Morsi’s top aides were touting their boss’s close contacts with President Obama and describing phone calls between the two leaders that led to the Gaza cease-fire. …

A post from Michael Barone points the way to a liberal NY Times columnist who understands a little of what the free market people know about the perverse incentives that government by A students inflict on our country. Barone also makes a great point about Romney’s 47% remark.

“This is painful for a liberal to admit,” writes liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, “but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in soul-crushing dependency.”

Kristof is writing from Breathitt County, Ky., deep in the Appalachian mountains, about mothers whose Supplemental Security Income benefits will decrease if their children learn to read. Kristof notes that 55% of children qualifying for SSI benefits do so because of “fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation,” far more than four decades ago when SSI was just a new program.

Evidently SSI administrators decided to be more generous to parents of such children. But, as Kristof notes, giving parents an incentive to keep children from learning to read works against the children’s long-term interest.

Kristof’s column makes a point similar to that in my Dec. 2 Examiner column on the vast rise in people receiving Social Security Disability Insurance payments. As with SSI, one imagines that those responsible for extending benefits to those not previously eligible did so out of a sense of generosity. But as I noted, “there is also a human cost. Consider the plight of someone who at some level knows he can work but decides to collect disability payments instead. That person is not likely to ever seek work again, especially if the sluggish recovery turns out to be the new normal. He may be gleeful that he was able to game the system or just grimly determined to get what he can in a tough situation. But he will not be able to get the satisfaction of earned success from honest work that contributes something to society and the economy.” Generosity that produces “soul-crushing dependency” is not really generosity.

BreathittCounty, by the way, has long been a heavily Democratic county. Even in 1972 it voted 59% for Democrat George McGovern over Republican Richard Nixon. But it’s in coal country and it voted 53% for John McCain in 2008 and 66% for Mitt Romney in 2012. More proof that Romney’s 47% remark was not only hugely ill-advised but simply inaccurate.

And here is Kristof’s column from Sunday.

THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.

Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.

“The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in BreathittCounty, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.”

This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.

Some young people here don’t join the military (a traditional escape route for poor, rural Americans) because it’s easier to rely on food stamps and disability payments.

Antipoverty programs also discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like S.S.I., a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households.

Most wrenching of all are the parents who think it’s best if a child stays illiterate, because then the family may be able to claim a disability check each month.

“One of the ways you get on this program is having problems in school,” notes Richard V. Burkhauser, a CornellUniversity economist who co-wrote a book last year about these disability programs. “If you do better in school, you threaten the income of the parents. It’s a terrible incentive.”

About four decades ago, most of the children S.S.I. covered had severe physical handicaps or mental retardation that made it difficult for parents to hold jobs — about 1 percent of all poor children. But now 55 percent of the disabilities it covers are fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation, where the diagnosis is less clear-cut. More than 1.2 million children across America — a full 8 percent of all low-income children — are now enrolled in S.S.I. as disabled, at an annual cost of more than $9 billion.

That is a burden on taxpayers, of course, but it can be even worse for children whose families have a huge stake in their failing in school. Those kids may never recover: a 2009 study found that nearly two-thirds of these children make the transition at age 18 into S.S.I. for the adult disabled. They may never hold a job in their entire lives and are condemned to a life of poverty on the dole — and that’s the outcome of a program intended to fight poverty.

THERE’S no doubt that some families with seriously disabled children receive a lifeline from S.S.I. But the bottom line is that we shouldn’t try to fight poverty with a program that sometimes perpetuates it. …

Here and there a bright spot. Here’s one from John Steele Gordon.

Bills that would make Michigan the 24th state to adopt a right-to-work law have passed the Michigan Senate and House, both in Republican hands. If the bills are reconciled, as seems likely, the legislation will be signed by the Republican governor.

This is a remarkable event. Michigan is the fifth-most unionized state in the country, with 19.2 percent of the workforce. The United Auto Workers, born in Michigan, has been a major player in state politics for decades.

But the Michigan economy is doing very poorly, relative to the country as a whole, with unemployment at 9.1 percent. Only five states are doing worse. The state’s biggest city, Detroit, is a poster child for urban decay, on the brink of bankruptcy thanks to decades of spectacularly corrupt government and unaffordable pension agreements with its unionized workers.

Right-to-work states have been overwhelmingly concentrated in the South, the mountain West, and the northern plain states. But this year Indiana became the first state in the Midwest industrial heartland to adopt a right-to-work law. Should Michigan do so as well, it will be a powerful indication that union power is in serious and probably permanent decline. No longer obliged to belong to a union in order to work at a unionized company or government, many workers will simply stop paying the substantial dues unions charge. And since, as California’s Jesse Unruh explained decades ago, “money is the mother’s milk of politics,” that means union political power will diminish accordingly.

Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff on the latest jobs report from the no-growth obama economy.

Superficially, the November jobs report doesn’t look bad. Non-farm jobs increased by almost 150,000 and the unemployment rate dropped to a four year low of 7.7 percent.

Viewed with a little more sophistication, the report looks worse. 150,000 new jobs isn’t very impressive. And the drop in the unemployment rate stems from the large number of Americans who stopped looking for work.

In fact, the deeper one drills down, the grimmer the picture. James Pethokoukis has the details:

1. The two-tenths drop in the unemployment rate was because people gave up looking for work. The labor force participation rate fell to 63.6% from 63.8% in October. If it had just held steady since then, the unemployment rate would be back over 8%. Indeed, if the LFP rate was just where it was in November 2011, the unemployment rate would be 8.3%. Some 542,000 Americans left the labor force just last month.

2. If labor force participation was at its January 2009 level, the unemployment rate would be a whopping 10.7%. Now, some of the drop in the LFP is due to demographic reasons, primarily the aging of the US population. But even taking that into account would give you a much higher unemployment rate than 7.7%. If you go by the pre-recession CBO forecast of the 2012 LFP rate, the unemployment rate would be 10.4%. …

James Pethokoukis posts on the missing 15 million jobs.

Let’s keep it simple. For the past three decades, US private sector jobs have grown by about 1.8%-2.0% a year. But that’s not been happening since the Great Recession. Private sector jobs fell sharply in 2008 and 2009. And in 2010, for instance, the first full year of recovery, private sector jobs grew by just 1.2%. Last year growth was 1.9%, with 2012 looking about the same.

Not only do we need another 4 million private sector jobs to get back to the pre-Great Recession level, but we need a lot more to get private sector jobs back to the pre-Great Recession trend (as the above chart reflects).

A whole lot more. If the US economy had been generating jobs at its usual pace since 2007 until the present, the US would have roughly 15 million more private sector jobs right now. (Other folks calculate it a bit differently, but basically the range is between 13 million and 16 million.)

That’s the true jobs gap. And unless we get a period of above average economic growth and job creation, that gap will close only ever-so slowly. By one measure, not until after 2025.

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Daniel Henninger says, “Well of course we’re heading to fiscal cliff. The GOP is negotiating with a bargaining neophyte.”

… The inability of this Congress and this president to compromise on anything, now or at any time in the past four years, is itself a problem worthy of some thought.

Here’s one thought: The main reason there isn’t, and may never be, a solution on the fiscal cliff is that Barack Obama doesn’t know how to do a political compromise. Where in his career did Barack Obama ever learn the art of the political deal? Nowhere.

Recall the famous Blair House summit he called early in 2010 amid the legislating over ObamaCare. Lamar Alexander, Tom Coburn, Paul Ryan and other Republicans talked about wonkish compromises. All of it, every single idea, blew right by the president. Naturally the legislation got zero GOP votes. A kid running for high-school president could have gotten more opposition votes than that.

Presidents, kings, queens, generals all have accomplished a modus vivendi with their opponents and mortal enemies. Until now. What deal of Clintonesque majesty has Barack Obama ever pulled off?

The fiscal-cliff negotiation is a train driven by an engineer who doesn’t know how to use the brake, doesn’t know where the brake is and doesn’t care. His idea of politics is giving campaign speeches outside Washington to assemble a Sandy of public sentiment that will blow congressional Republicans off the cliff.

Politics ain’t beanbag, but it also isn’t just about politics. While Barack Obama may think his election mandate includes the ruin of the Republican Party, Republicans seeking a strategy of self-preservation should assert their refusal to participate in the ruin of the nation. As it is, the fiscal cliff has degenerated into a familiar Beltway melodrama in which the media reduce the whole thing to which party gets shafted. As to the health of the gasping American economy, well, whatever. …

The story of the sinking of the Bounty in der Spiegel is told a little too breathlessly for Pickerhead’s taste, but it is still worth reading. It seemed really strange the ship was transiting the Atlantic during a hurricane. It turns out there was some logic involved. Stupidity too.

As Hurricane Sandy approached the East Coast in late October, Captain Robin Walbridge wanted to save his ship, the legendary Bounty. He set out to sea to ride out the storm — a decision which ended in disaster. He lost the ship, a crewmember and his own life.

It was still a mild fall day in New London, Connecticut, when Captain Robin Walbridge stepped on deck to prepare his crew for the possibility of dying. It was 5 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 25.

About 1,200 nautical miles to the south, Hurricane Sandy, billed as the storm of the century, was making its way northward from Cuba. With wind speeds of more than 100 miles per hour (165 kilometers per hour), the storm was rushing across the ocean, headed for the east coast of the United States. At least 70 people had already died in the Caribbean, after being drowned, buried alive or struck with debris.

Captain Walbridge had a decision to make. He could leave the ship, the Bounty, in the harbor at New London, where it would be tossed back and forth by the storm and would presumably sustain serious damage. Or he could try to save the ship by taking it out into the Atlantic, thereby putting his life and the lives of his 15 crewmembers on the line.

Walbridge wanted to save his ship. A ship versus 16 human lives. How can such a decision be explained?

It wasn’t just any ship that he had under his command. Walbridge was the captain of the Bounty, a replica of the most famous sailing vessel in seafaring history, and a treasure of the Hollywood world. Legendary films like “Mutiny on the Bounty,” starring Marlon Brando, and “Pirates of the Caribbean,” with Johnny Depp, had been made on board the Bounty. A legend like that can’t just be left at the mercy of the weather. …

… Captain Walbridge was 63, a quiet, contemplative man with thinning gray hair and glasses. He had stood at the helm of the Bounty for 17 years, and it was hard to say whether he was more in love with the ship or his wife, although he did spend most of his time on the ship. The crew changed, and so did its owners, but Walbridge remained.

People who have sailed across the world’s oceans with Walbridge praise him for his modesty, levelheadedness and patience. He taught young people how to sail, and he took disabled children out to sea.

But there must have been another Captain Walbridge, one who overestimated himself and his ship, and who felt invincible after all those years at sea. In one interview, he talked about “chasing” hurricanes. It was important not to sail in front of a hurricane, but to stay behind it, in the southeastern quadrant, in which case it would make for a smooth ride, he said. He had sailed through 20-meter (66-foot) waves that way, Walbridge said — not exactly the words of a cautious captain. …

Andrew Malcolm treats us to the story of another green energy failure from the failure capital of the world – Washington, DC.

You won’t hear much about it elsewhere today. But from some downtown Chicago law offices will come the distinct sound of one more nail being driven into the coffin of Barack Obama’s green energy giveaway loans.

A123 Systems will be auctioned off. It’s a Michigan lithium ion battery maker which declared bankruptcy back in October, the same day it cashed another $1 million check from the crack Obama investment team.

A123 is one of those notorious bad bets like Solyndra that the Obama administration poured billions of taxpayer dollars into, allegedly with the hope it would launch a vibrant clean energy industrial sector. As Gov. Romney pointed out during the presidential debates that same month, many of the recipients of those federal loan guarantees just happened to belong to campaign finance bundlers for the same Barack Obama.

A123, an 11-year-old firm founded to manufacture batteries for electric cars and utilities, had received $133 million of its promised $250.1 million loan grants before the bankruptcy, mainly to build a new facility in Michigan.

Just more wasted taxpayer money, right? Another reason for Obama’s coveted tax hikes come next year.

But wait! There’s more! A leading suitor for A123′s remaining assets is Wanxiang Group Corp., a $13 billion firm that’s China’s largest automotive components maker.

So, let’s get this straight: Obama bashes Romney for being a successful (and, whispering, wealthy) venture capitalist so successfully picking so many corporate winners. But Obama gives away money to an American company to develop American battery technology and manufacturing on American soil for American workers. A123 flops financially, as have almost three dozen other hand-picked Obama greenies receiving financial food-stamps from that wheeling-dealing Chicago crowd.

And a private Chinese company comes along to buy up the pieces. …

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Thomas Sowell has two columns on the Fiscal Cliff.

Amid all the political and media hoopla about the “fiscal cliff” crisis, there are a few facts that are worth noting.

First of all, despite all the melodrama about raising taxes on “the rich,” even if that is done it will scarcely make a dent in the government’s financial problems. Raising the tax rates on everybody in the top two percent will not get enough additional tax revenue to run the government for ten days.

And what will the government do to pay for the other 355 days in the year?

All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting “the rich” to pay “their fair share” is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics. Taxing “the rich” will produce a drop in the bucket when compared to the staggering and unprecedented deficits of the Obama administration.

No previous administration in the entire history of the nation ever finished the year with a trillion dollar deficit. The Obama administration has done so every single year. Yet political and media discussions of the financial crisis have been focused overwhelmingly on how to get more tax revenue to pay for past and future spending.

The very catchwords and phrases used by the Obama administration betray how phony this all is. For example, “We are just asking the rich to pay a little more.”

This is an insult to our intelligence. The government doesn’t “ask” anybody to pay anything. It orders you to pay the taxes they impose and you can go to prison if you don’t. …

Sowell says the president’s argument that Bush’s “tax cuts for the rich” cost the Treasury money are demonstrably false.

… The official statistics which show plainly how wrong Barack Obama is can be found in his own “Economic Report of the President” for 2012, on page 411. You can look it up.

You may be able to find a copy of the “Economic Report of the President” for 2012 at your local public library. Or you can buy a hard copy from the Government Printing Office or download an electronic version from the Internet.

For those who find that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” they need only see the graphs published in the November 30th issue of Investor’s Business Daily.

What both the statistical tables in the “Economic Report of the President” and the graphs in Investor’s Business Daily show is that (1) tax revenues went up— not down— after tax rates were cut during the Bush administration, and (2) the budget deficit declined, year after year, after the cut in tax rates that have been blamed by Obama for increasing the deficit.

Indeed, the New York Times reported in 2006: “An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year.”

While the New York Times may not have expected this, there is nothing unprecedented about lower tax rates leading to higher tax revenues, despite automatic assumptions by many in the media and elsewhere that tax rates and tax revenues automatically move in the same direction. They do not.

The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction.

This has happened as recently as the George W. Bush administration and as far back as the Reagan administration. Moreover, tax revenues went up when tax rates went down, as far back as the Coolidge administration, before there was a Congressional Budget Office to make false predictions. …

Andrew Malcolm with a narcissism update.

… Last Saturday was the 57th anniversary of the Rosa Park’s catalytic act of defiance aboard Montgomery public transportation.

To honor the historic memory of civil rights leader Rosa Parks, Obama’s White House website posted a photo — not of Rosa Parks, but of Barack Obama.

It’s an eerie photo. Obama was four years old and far away when that seminal civil rights event occurred.

But there he is in the staged photo inserting himself into history via a Michigan museum, sitting alone in the Parks bus forlornly looking out the window as if waiting for his stop. 

It’s tempting to write alternate captions for this awkward Obama photo op. But maybe we’ll leave that for others in the Comments below.

Ann Coulter says the GOP must find a way to make the Dems own the economy.

… Republicans have a PR problem, not an economic theory problem. That doesn’t mean they should cave on everything, but seeming to fight for “tax cuts for the rich” is a little close to the bone, no matter how tremendously counterproductive such taxes are.

Yes, conservatives can try harder to get the truth out, but as UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose has shown, media bias already costs Republicans about 8 to 10 points in elections. Try arguing a year from now that Republicans’ refusal to agree to tax hikes on the top 2 percent of income earners — resulting in an expiration of all the Bush tax cuts — had nothing to do with the inevitable economic disaster.

Republicans have got to make Obama own the economy.

They should spend from now until the end of the congressional calendar reading aloud from Thomas Sowell, Richard Epstein, John Lott and Milton Friedman and explaining why Obama’s high tax, massive regulation agenda spells doom for the nation.

Then some Republicans can say: We think this is a bad idea, but Obama won the election and the media are poised to blame us for whatever happens next, so let’s give his plan a whirl and see how the country likes it.

Republicans need to get absolute, 100 percent intellectual clarity on who bears responsibility for the next big recession. It is more important to win back the Senate in two years than it is to save the Democrats from their own idiotic tax plan. Unless Republicans give them an out, Democrats won’t be able to hide from what they’ve done.

Even Democrats might back away from that deal.

Michael Barone on the rise in disability abuse. 

Americans are very generous to people with disabilities. Since passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, millions of public and private dollars have been spent on curb cuts, bus lifts and special elevators.

The idea has been to enable people with disabilities to live and work with the same ease as others as they make their way forward in life. I feel sure the large majority of Americans are pleased that we are doing this.

But there is another federal program for people with disabilities that has had an unhappier effect. This is the Disability Insurance program, which is part of Social Security.

The idea is to provide income for those whose health makes them unable to work. For many years, it was a small and inexpensive program that few people or politicians paid much attention to.

In his recent book “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic,” my American Enterprise Institute colleague Nicholas Eberstadt has shown how DI has grown in recent years.

In 1960, some 455,000 workers were receiving disability payments. In 2011, the number was 8,600,000. In 1960, the percentage of the economically active 18-to-64-year-old population receiving disability benefits was 0.65 percent. In 2010, it was 5.6 percent.

Some four decades ago, when I was a law clerk to a federal judge, I had occasion to read briefs in cases appealing denial of disability benefits. The Social Security Administration then seemed pretty strict in denying benefits in dubious cases. The courts were not much more openhanded.

Things have changed. …

Check on the WORD document for an amazing picture of an Sikh flame thrower.

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Dana Milbank on another broken promise from this administration.

“My administration,” President Obama wrote on his first day in office, “is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

Those were strong and hopeful words. Four years later, it is becoming more and more clear that they were just words.

On Monday afternoon, open-government advocates assembled in a congressional hearing room to ponder what had become of the Obama administration’s lofty vows of transparency.

“It’s been a really tough slog,” said Anne Weismann of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The lack of effective leadership in the White House, in the executive branch, has really made it difficult to have more significant progress.”

“They’ve been reluctant to take positions,” said Hudson Hollister of the Data Transparency Coalition, “and translate that to real action.”

“In the beginning of 2010, [Obama] said he made a significant mistake by abandoning some of his pledges related to transparency,” said Josh Gerstein of Politico, “and that going forward they would do things differently. Seems to me we are forward and it seems to me we’re not doing things any differently.”

It was a more-in-sadness-than-in-anger critique of Obama often heard from the political left, and the moderator, the Sunlight Foundation’s Daniel Schuman, was apologetic. “We’re placing a lot of blame at the administration,” he observed. “Or blame isn’t the right word — maybe responsibility.”

No, blame is just fine. …

There are some wonderful things happening in DC. Thomas Boswell on Robert Griffin III, commonly called RG3.

Robert Griffin III gets credit for everything except the ability of geese to migrate in winter. Now, he’s going to get credit for one more virtue. In big games on big stages, Griffin inspires his teammates to play up to the level of their hopes, not down to the depths of their fears.

Just three games ago, Griffin had a perfect 158.3 quarterback rating in a rout of the Eagles. Then he passed for four touchdowns on Thanksgiving Day in Dallas. Now, he’s completed his three-game sweep of the NFC East with a win head-to-head over Eli Manning and the Super Bowl champion Giants. After a dead-even, all-night battle with New York, Griffin pulled out a fourth-quarter come-from-behind victory, 17-16, with an eight-yard touchdown pass to Pierre Garcon with 11 minutes 31 seconds left to play.

Griffin has the aura of victory. That inspires. That elevates. And, as the Redskins rebuild their franchise, that changes every aspect of their future.

Or, as the loudest crowd at FedEx Field in years, a total of 80,246, put it so pithily with their victory chant: “RGIII, RGIII, RGIII.” You do it three times, of course, then pause, then start again.

Like so many of the supremely gifted, RGIII also has an extra and almost undeserved quality: He even seems a little lucky, too.

In the first quarter, Griffin made his only real mistake of the game, a fumble after a 12-yard run. The ball bounced directly to wide receiver Josh Morgan, who picked it up in stride and wove his way into the end zone to complete a 28-yard touchdown.

Griffin has done so many amazing things that the same thought jumped into thousands of minds: Did he do that on purpose? That’s impossible.

It was just a lucky fumble. But it will soon become one more piece of Griffin lore. “Some people thought he fumbled that ball” to Morgan, Coach Mike Shanahan said later. “Robert has worked on that during the week.”

A room full of reporters sat silent, taken in or, maybe, just believing anything if the protagonist was Griffin.

“Sometimes you’ve got to get lucky,” Shanahan said to help the humorless. …

Turns out Mt.Everest is sporting an impressive collection of bodies. Altered Dimensions has the post. (We have eliminated some of the more gruesome photos.)

It is estimated that over 200 people have died in their attempt to reach the summit of Mount Everest. The causes of their death vary as widely as the weather at Mount Everest’s peak. Climbers face the dangers of falling off the mountain, tripping into huge crevices, low oxygen levels, avalanches and falling rocks, and weather that can change drastically in mere minutes. At the summit, winds can reach hurricane strength literally blowing the climber off the mountain. Oxygen levels leave the climbers gasping for breath and their oxygen deprived brains leave them unable to make rational decisions. Some climbers stop for a brief rest only to slowly drift into sleep, never to wake up. All dangers aside, ask any climber who has beaten the mountain and reached the 29,000 foot summit and they will tell you the most memorable, and disturbing, part of their climb were the many perfectly preserved bodies that they passed on their way to the top. …

… Dead bodies in such a cold environment stay perfectly preserved. Given that a person can die between breaths, many dead are not recognized as such until quite some time after they succumb. In an environment where the climber’s every step is a struggle, rescue of the dead or dying is all but impossible and bodies of the dead are almost always irretrievable. The bodies become part of the landscape and many become “landmarks” that later climbers use as way markers during their climb. There are an estimated 200 bodies lying around the topmost part of Mount Everest. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: President Obama and Mitt Romney had lunch the other day at the White House. Romney offered to pay. But Obama said, “No, no, it’s on our grandchildren.”

Conan: House Speaker John Boehner’s office was invaded by a group of nude female protesters. Boehner’s unsure what they were protesting, but says he’ll definitely keep doing it.

Conan: A 69-year-old Florida woman was arrested for stealing hundreds of dollars’ worth of lingerie. Authorities released her after she threatened to model the lingerie.

Conan: A new study says the average American now weighs 176 pounds. May not sound too bad to you. But the study was conducted at elementary schools.

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Charles Krauthammer thinks the GOP folks should grow a pair.

Why are Republicans playing the Democrats’ game that the “fiscal cliff” is all about taxation?

House Speaker John Boehner already made the preemptive concession of agreeing to raise revenue. But the insistence on doing so by eliminating deductions without raising marginal rates is now the subject of fierce Republican infighting.

Where is the other part of President Obama’s vaunted “balanced approach”? Where are the spending cuts, both discretionary and entitlement: Medicare, Medicaid and now Obamacare (the health-care trio) and Social Security?

Social Security is the easiest to solve. So you get a sense of the Democrats’ inclination to reform entitlements when Dick Durbin, the Senate Democrats’ No. 2, says Social Security is off the table because it “does not add a penny to our deficit.”

This is absurd. In 2012, Social Security adds $165 billion to the deficit. Democrats pretend that Social Security is covered through 2033 by its trust fund. Except that the trust fund is a fiction, a mere “bookkeeping” device, as the Office of Management and Budget itself has written. The trust fund’s IOUs “do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits.” Future benefits “will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures.” …

Jennifer Rubin wonders if barack will blow it a second time.

If you were under the impression President Obama learned something from his mishandling of the debt-ceiling negotiations in 2011, aptly described in Bob Woodward’s “The Price of Politics,” the last day or so should disabuse you of any optimism. Once again Obama can’t be troubled to put a counteroffer on the table. Once again he’s going out to the voters (when has he ever convinced them on a point of policy?). Once again he and the liberal special-interest groups have whipped themselves into a frenzy, certain that they can threaten to take us over the fiscal cliff. (Remember when the media howled, accusing the GOP of wanting the country to default in 2011?) It is a peculiar sort of regard for the middle class that delights in throwing them over the tax cliff, so long as the rich go, too.

Obama may have forgotten that he didn’t benefit in 2011 from the prolonged stalemate, nor did the House Republicans suffer. (As I am sure he noticed, the Republicans retained their majority.) Moreover, and this is the big difference, the Republicans have put revenue on the table, not in a backroom deal, but publicly and in defiance of their hardcore base. The president has done nothing but grandstand. Will voters notice?

He can’t very well bring out the old saw that he wants a balanced deal and Republicans do not. They put revenue on the table; where are his spending cuts? …

Rubin also points out WaPo editors are not happy with barry’s stunts.

President Obama got a wake-up call this morning from an unexpected source — the mainstream media. In multiple news and editorial pieces, the press took the president and the Democrats to task for intransigence and irresponsibility in the fiscal cliff negotiations.

The Post editorial board, which endorsed Obama in part because “the president understands the urgency of the problems as well as anyone in the country and is committed to solving them in a balanced way,” now warns: “Since his reelection, Mr. Obama has fueled a campaign-style effort to pressure Republicans to give ground on taxes. That’s fine, but it won’t be enough. At some point, he has to prepare the American people — and his own supporters most of all — for the ‘hard decisions’ required to put the country on a sound financial footing. That means spending cuts, it means entitlement reform, it means compromise, it means a balanced solution that will please neither House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) nor Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Only one person is in a position to make it happen.” …

And she also suggests maybe the president is just putting on a show for his base – Valerie and Michelle.

There was a great deal of huffing, puffing and even laughing (by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner) over the president’s ludicrous offer of “a $1.6 trillion tax increase, $50 billion in infrastructure spending in 2013 and new power to raise the federal debt limit, a provocative set of demands that Republicans said represented a step backward in efforts to avoid looming tax increases and spending cuts,” as the Wall Street Journal reported.

Well, take a deep breath. It’s “only” Nov. 30. Seriously, that means it is way too early to tell if President Obama is putting on a show for his base or if he’s really got his head in the clouds, ready to send the country over the fiscal cliff. …

Robert Samuelson asks who is bargaining in bad faith.

Put Social Security on the table — clearly and irrevocably. Protecting retiree benefits is the left’s political equivalent of the right’s “no new taxes” pledge. Congressional Republicans are abandoning their untenable position. Now it is time for President Obama and congressional Democrats to do the same. As long as they don’t, they aren’t bargaining in good faith, or in the national interest. …

Keith Hennessey also thinks the GOP should toughen up.

… House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have offered on behalf of Republicans a significant concession in an attempt to close the negotiating gap. Mr. Boehner and Mr. McConnell propose to accept higher taxes on the rich as long as government spending is cut significantly and incentives to work and invest are not weakened. That way, higher taxes and entitlement-spending cuts would reduce future deficits, not finance even bigger government as the president proposes.

Unfortunately, it appears that President Obama cannot take yes for an answer. Republican leaders have shown him a legislative path to lock in his top policy priority with a strong bipartisan vote. Their proposal splits their own caucus, yet still the president refuses because he thinks he can get even more.

Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole and a few lame-duck Republicans appear ready to capitulate. Cowed by a bully on the pulpit, afraid of being blamed for a stalemate, and convinced that they have no negotiating leverage, they bravely propose to embrace bigger government—and call it a win. These politicians prioritize their personal popularity over the policy consequences of major fiscal choices.

They also misread the negotiating environment. While the president has a strong hand, he is overplaying it. Republicans have some leverage. They need to use it effectively. …

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You can tell The Economist hates to do it, but even they have come to the awareness that American colleges are providing poor value.

ON THE face of it, American higher education is still in rude health. In worldwide rankings more than half of the top 100 universities, and eight of the top ten, are American. The scientific output of American institutions is unparalleled. They produce most of the world’s Nobel laureates and scientific papers. Moreover college graduates, on average, still earn far more and receive better benefits than those who do not have a degree.

Nonetheless, there is growing anxiety in America about higher education. A degree has always been considered the key to a good job. But rising fees and increasing student debt, combined with shrinking financial and educational returns, are undermining at least the perception that university is a good investment. 

Concern springs from a number of things: steep rises in fees, increases in the levels of debt of both students and universities, and the declining quality of graduates. Start with the fees. The cost of university per student has risen by almost five times the rate of inflation since 1983 (see chart 1), making it less affordable and increasing the amount of debt a student must take on. Between 2001 and 2010 the cost of a university education soared from 23% of median annual earnings to 38%; in consequence, debt per student has doubled in the past 15 years. Two-thirds of graduates now take out loans. Those who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2011 graduated with an average of $26,000 in debt, according to the Project on Student Debt, a non-profit group.

More debt means more risk, and graduation is far from certain; the chances of an American student completing a four-year degree within six years stand at only around 57%. This is poor by international standards: Australia and Britain, for instance, both do much better.

At the same time, universities have been spending beyond their means. Many have taken on too much debt and have seen a decline in the health of their balance-sheets. Moreover, the securitisation of student loans led to a rush of unwise private lending. This, at least, has now been curbed by regulation. In 2008 private lenders disbursed $20 billion; last year they shelled out only $6 billion. …

The NY Times covers the same ground, but makes it a life style trend one surfs on the way to becoming a gazillionaire. No chance the folks from the Gray Lady would criticize college administrators since they are all of one class.

… Indeed, ambitious young people who consider dropping out of college a smart option have a different set of role models from those in the 1960s, who were basically stuck with the acid-guru Timothy Leary and his “turn on, tune in, drop out” ramblings. Nowadays, popular culture is portraying dropouts as self-made zillionaires whose decision to spurn the “safe” route (academic conformity) is akin to lighting out for the territories to strike gold.

Bill Gates dropped out of college. So did Michael Dell. So did Mr. Zuckerberg, who made the Forbes billionaires list at 23.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s story is familiar to anyone who has seen the 2010 film “The Social Network,” in which Harvard seems little more than a glorified networking party for him. While the other Phi Beta Kappas are trudging through their Aristophanes, his character is hitting the parties, making contacts and making history. The dropout-mogul-as-rock-star meme will get a further boost with coming Steve Jobs biopics, including “Jobs,” starring Ashton Kutcher, and another one in the works written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay for “The Social Network.”

Such attitudes are trickling down to the small screen, too. In a recent episode of the Fox sitcom “The Mindy Project,” Mindy Kaling’s character, a doctor, grills a teenager about his plans for college. “I’m not going to college,” he tells her. “Why should I load up on debt just to binge drink for four years when I could just create an app that nets me all the money I’ll ever need?” Such tales play well in the eyes of millennials, a generation hailed for their entrepreneurial acumen and financial pragmatism. Why pay money if you can make money?

No wonder the swashbuckling Web subculture is suddenly percolating with whiz-kid programmers thinking like “one and done” college hoopsters, who stick around campus only long enough to showcase their skills (and meet National Basketball Association draft requirements) before bolting for pro riches. Tech-start-ups have their own versions of Carmelo Anthony: folks like Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams of Twitter, and Kevin Rose of Digg. (Meanwhile, David Karp of Tumblr dropped out of high school.)

“Here in Silicon Valley, it’s almost a badge of honor,” said Mick Hagen, 28, who dropped out of Princeton in 2006 and moved to San Francisco, where he started Undrip, a mobile app. He is now recruiting from the undergraduate ranks, he said, which is becoming a trend among other tech companies, too. In his view, dropouts are freethinkers, risk-takers. They have not been tainted by groupthink.

“College puts a lot of constraints, a lot of limitations around what you can and can’t do,” Mr. Hagen said. “Some people, they want to stretch their arms, get out and create more, do more.”

Even the staunchest critics of college concede that a diploma is still necessary for many professions — law and medicine, clearly, and in many cases, for a Fortune 500 executive, too. But that’s the point: how many more lawyers and middle managers do we need? …

In a post from a few days ago, Streetwise Professor commented on the Chinese aircraft carrier and its maiden landing; “a baby step when you consider the complexity of carrier operations, especially at a true operational tempo, with 120 sorties (takeoffs and landing) per 12 hour flight day, sometimes surging to 190 per day. The ballet of the deck is an amazing-and amazingly dangerous-thing. Especially when you start doing it with live ammunition hanging from wings and waiting on deck, and especially especially when you do it day after day and crews become fatigued.”  The Daily Press, Pickerhead’s local paper had a story about one incident 43 years ago when things went terribly wrong on the USS Enterprise.

As the Navy prepares to bid farewell to the USS Enterprise, it paused Friday to honor those who lived through one of its darkest days.

On the morning of Jan. 14, 1969, a rocket loaded on an F-4 Phantom jet overheated due to exhaust from a nearby vehicle. The rocket blew up and set off a disastrous fire on the flight deck, spreading to fighter jets loaded with bombs, missiles and thousands of pounds of jet fuel.

Live bombs and burning fuel spread below as explosions tore massive holes in the deck. Before it was over, 28 sailors were killed and 314 were injured, many severely.

Petty Officer Third Class Terry Johnson had just ended a 12-hour overnight shift and was getting ready for sleep when the first explosion sounded.

“I barely got out,” he recalled. “I was on my way out of there, and my compartment blew up and kind of flattened me. I bounced once and kept going.”

As the fire roared, Johnson ran to the other side of the ship – where he was supposed to go – and joined a hose crew.

“There were about three or four people in my compartment when it blew up,” he said.

At a brief morning service on a sun-splashed flight deck, the Navy paid homage to survivors like Johnson and to those sailors who didn’t make it. The names of the dead were read aloud, and the crowd heard an emotional, halting speech from Michael Neville, who was on the flight deck at 8:18 a.m. when the first rocket exploded. …

Which brings us to another Streetwise Professor post – this time on the ubiquitous “sea-going tug” that sails in the wake of Russian Navy sorties.

In any world crisis, it is said that the first question any American President asks is: “Where are the carriers?”

In Russia, it is: “Where are the tugboats?”

The decrepitude of the Russian navy is so pronounced that every deployment is accompanied by a salvage tug, just in case (and the case is quite likely) the sortied combat ships break down at sea. …

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Business Week explores the highs and lows of concierge medicine.

… There are 4,400 concierge doctors in the U.S., 30 percent more than there were last year, according to the AmericanAcademy of Private Physicians, their professional association. “This is all doctors want to talk about,” says Jeff Goldsmith, a health-care industry analyst and trend spotter. “ ‘I want to go off the grid. I’m done billing Blue Cross. I can’t deal with this anymore. It’s destroying my life and my relationship with my patients.’ ”

Some health policymakers are encouraged by this trend. They think an increase of direct-pay doctors—especially affordable ones—could lead to better health care in the U.S., which has the highest costs and some of the worst outcomes of any wealthy nation. “I think it’s great,” says Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine and business administration at DukeUniversity. “We’re rediscovering that if we just ask people to pay for services, we could provide them with better value. Primary care is affordable.”

Others worry that the growth of concierge medicine will mean the affluent receive high-quality care while the rest of the country struggles to be seen by fewer and fewer doctors. “It is a step towards a two-tiered health-care system: a system where the rich get first-choice care and the not-so-rich get second-choice care,” says Kathleen Stoll, deputy executive director of Families USA, a health-care consumer advocacy group.

This much is certain: There will be greater demand for primary-care physicians because of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. “Love it or hate it,” Atlas MD’s Umbehr says of Obamacare, “it’s going to make it harder for you to see your doctor.” 
 
Primary-care physicians have long complained of being the poor men of their industry. Their median salary is $160,000 a year—roughly half of an anesthesiologist’s—but rising overhead, more paperwork, and packed waiting rooms are propelling ever-greater numbers to shed patients and charge a retainer. In 2011 the average American medical practice spent $82,975 per doctor dealing with insurers, according to the Commonwealth Fund. That same doctor has 3,281 active patients over a three-year period, says the AmericanAcademy of Family Physicians. She rarely has time to see them for more than a few minutes. The attraction of concierge medicine for her isn’t hard to fathom: She can winnow down her patient roster, spend more time with each, and do away with her insurance-related headaches.

It will only become more enticing in 2014 when the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate requires everyone to be insured. The law will enable 30 million previously uninsured people to get coverage through an expansion of Medicaid. They’ll need primary care, but it’s not yet clear who will give it to them. By 2020, the Association of American Medical Colleges estimates, there will be 45,000 fewer primary-care doctors than the U.S. needs. “For the last 13 years, very few students have been going into it,” says Patrick Dowling, chairman of the department of family medicine at the University of California-Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine. “What motivates medical school students is income, just like everyone else.”  …

Andrew Malcolm writes about an Illinois congressional district that is illustrative of Chicago way. This also provides understanding of how we came to the present president’s putrid politics.

Ah, Chicago and its politics. There’s no other American city quite like it.

Fortunately.

It’s a beautiful city from the outside. And a political cesspool inside, a seeping source of conniving and corruption that spawned Barack Obama and his top aide Valerie Jarrett and is now ruled by the president’s ex-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Another amazing chapter in the WindyCity’s sordid politics began unfolding Wednesday, one whose lineage can actually be traced back to the very beginnings of Obama’s political career, which now has an extended expiry date of Jan. 20, 2017. Today, Obama lunches with the man he defeated, Mitt Romney. 

See if you can follow along now. The details are revealing of the uncompromising history, incestuous inner workings and municipal mores of the place that produced Obama the politician.

Yesterday Mel Reynolds announced his candidacy for the House seat representing Illinois’ 2d Congressional District, which includes the city’s South Side and — oh, look! — Obama’s Hyde Park house. So, he’ll be eligible to vote in the February Democrat primary and the meaningless April special election. 

That special election became necessary after the sudden resignation last week of the district’s easy Nov. 6 election winner, eight-term member Jesse Jackson Jr.

Jackson Jr. has been absent from his House duties most of this year during treatment for depression and bipolar disorder. His situation was complicated by revelations that federal authorities are probing allegations of his misuse of campaign funds, not a rare occurrence in Chicago politics.  …

John Fund writes in the Corner about next years race for Virginia governor. We won’t have Chicago style, but will have a chance for some Clinton slime.

It looks as if the makeup of next year’s Virginia governor’s race is set. GOP Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling dropped out yesterday, admitting he was unlikely to win a GOP convention against conservative favorite Ken Cuccinelli, the state’s hard-charging attorney general. The Democratic field also is now clear — former top Clinton fundraiser and businessman Terry McAuliffe will run again.

Expect the race to be a bitter one, with McAuliffe trying to frame it around Cuccinelli’s staunchly conservative social views and Cuccinelli trying to peg McAuliffe as a slippery operator who has had no experience in elected office.

Starting out, the race looks to be roughly even. The Quinnipiac poll out this week has McAuliffe leading Cuccinelli by 41 percent to 37 percent among registered voters. But as the liberal blog Blue Virginia points out “usually what happens in off-year elections in Virginia is that the Democratic base tends to show in relatively lower numbers than the Republican base.” Thus, while President Obama narrowly carried Virginia this month, Republican Bob McDonnell won a 17-point victory in his race for governor just three years ago. …

WSJ Editors point out the hypocrisy at Costco. 

When President Obama needed a business executive to come to his campaign defense, Jim Sinegal was there. The Costco COST -0.68% co-founder, director and former CEO even made a prime-time speech at the Democratic Party convention in Charlotte. So what a surprise this week to see that Mr. Sinegal and the rest of the Costco board voted to give themselves a special dividend to avoid Mr. Obama’s looming tax increase. Is this what the President means by “tax fairness”?

Specifically, the giant retailer announced Wednesday that the company will pay a special dividend of $7 a share this month. That’s a $3 billion Christmas gift for shareholders that will let them be taxed at the current dividend rate of 15%, rather than next year’s rate of up to 43.4%—an increase to 39.6% as the Bush-era rates expire plus another 3.8% from the new ObamaCare surcharge.

More striking is that Costco also announced that it will borrow $3.5 billion to finance the special payout. Dividends are typically paid out of earnings, either current or accumulated. But so eager are the Costco executives to get out ahead of the tax man that they’re taking on debt to do so.

Shareholders were happy as they bid up shares by more than 5% in two days. But the rating agencies were less thrilled, as Fitch downgraded Costco’s credit to A+ from AA-. Standard & Poor’s had been watching the company for a potential upgrade but pulled the watch on the borrowing news. …