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Nile Gardiner reports on the president’s latest slap towards Israel. 

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has an eye-opening piece for Bloomberg that reveals in stark terms what President Obama really thinks of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Israel itself. As The Telegraph’s Middle East correspondent Robert Tait reports:

The damning assessment of the Israeli prime minister, relayed by senior White House officials to an American journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, is the most graphic sign yet of the toxic relationship between the two men, who have clashed continually over the stalled Middle East peace process.

Writing on the Bloomberg website, Goldberg quoted Mr Obama as repeatedly saying, “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are” in response to a spate of recent announcements for thousands of new Jewish settler homes in east Jerusalem and the West Bank on land the Palestinians want for a future state. …

Andrew Malcolm says obama might as well work on gun control, he can’t do anything that’s important.

President Obama has settled on a political communications strategy for his final term that begins Sunday:

Talk about admirable aspirations, ignore the nation’s economic and fiscal realities, keep everyone fighting amongst themselves over anything at hand while calmly deploring all the disputes, rancor and chaos that this president has helped to engineer.

Such stunning cynicism has actually worked pretty well for the Real Good Talker this past year.

Never mind stratospheric millions of jobless, an amazingly ineffective economic stimulus program, historic highs in poverty rates, a national debt larger than a national economy and nearly 50 million people collecting food stamps tossed out like free candy from a parade float.

Instead, talk about educating every single American child for their own fair shot at some kind of idealized future, delivering better healthcare to millions more people for less money with no additional doctors and protecting ill-defined middle-class Americans from someone doing something to them.

None of it will ever come to pass on his grand rhetorical scale. But the community organizer doesn’t care. By the time enough figure it out, Obama will be back in the Pacific golfing with Choom Gang buddies while another ghostwriter drafts the next autobiography. …

Popular Science writes on the shipping problems on the Mississippi.

Rain or shine, the battle of the Mississippi rages on. The vital shipping lane that supports middle-American economies from the Upper-Midwest to New Orleans is once again in dire straits as the Army Corps of Engineers struggles to control Big Muddy–this time by making it deeper. Wracked by the worst (and longest) droughts in memory, the Midwest and the river are critically short on water, so short that the shallowest stretch of the river between Cairo, Ill. and St. Louis could become unnavigable in the next month, and the Corps of Engineers is just about out of geoengineering options to mitigate the problem, NPR reports.

The Army Corps of Engineers has been building and managing the complex and sprawling system of levees, locks, dikes and spillways along the length of the Mississippi River for decades now, bending the river–which periodically wants to change its course, top its banks, and otherwise be, you know, a natural flowing body of water–to its will. Meanwhile, human development along the river offers the Corps a smaller and smaller envelope in which to err.

Usually when the Corps of Engineers finds itself in a jam along the Mississippi the culprit is heavy rainfall and flooding, which test the strength of decades-old levees and dams designed to keep the river in (as they did as recently as 2011). But right now, the Corps is scrambling to deal with precisely the opposite–even after tapping reservoirs all along the Upper-Midwest, there’s simply not enough water to be had. …

The Economist on the return of wolves to the civilized world.

IN AUGUST 2011 Desiree Versteeg, a Dutch mortuarist, was driving home in the suburbs of Arnhem in the eastern Netherlands when she saw an animal in the road. “At first I thought it was a dog. Then I thought it was a fox. Then—I couldn’t believe my eyes—I saw it was a wolf.” She got out of the car to take a picture. “I was seven or eight metres away from him. He couldn’t get away because a fence was blocking his path. He turned and stared at me. That was a frightening moment.” Both she and the wolf fled.

From Ms Versteeg’s photographs, and from the carcass of a deer found nearby—its throat torn out in classic wolf fashion—scientists verified that she was the first person to have seen a wolf in the Netherlands since 1897. Having talked to the experts, she now understands that the wolf was probably more frightened than she was. “But all you know at the time is: it’s a wolf, it’s a predator and I’m in its way.”

Ms Versteeg’s experience illustrates a dramatic reversal that has taken place in the West over the past couple of decades. Economic change has led to a fundamental shift in humanity’s attitude to wolves. For the first time since man first sharpened a spear, he has stopped trying to exterminate them and taken to protecting them instead. The effort has been so successful that wolves are recolonising areas from which they disappeared as much as a century ago. As they do so, they are forging revealing divisions over whether mankind can live side-by-side with the species it replaced as the Western world’s top predator.

Most man-made extinctions have been accidental—the result of over-hunting, or importing predators or diseases. Wolves are different. Through most of human history, killing them has been regarded as a public good. As soon as anything that looked like a state developed, it set about exterminating wolves.

In England King Edgar imposed an annual tribute of 300 wolf skins on Idwal, king of Wales, in 960; monarchs made land grants on condition that the beneficiaries carried out wolf hunts; King Edward I employed a wolf-hunter-in-chief to clear central and western England of wolves. By the end of the 15th century they seem to have disappeared from England, though in Scotland they hung on a little longer: in 1563 Mary Queen of Scots had 2,000 Highlanders drive the woods of Atholl for a hunt that bagged 360 deer and five wolves.

America’s original settlers, then, had no previous experience of wolves. …

… On both sides of the Atlantic the wolf’s supporters are in a majority. They include disproportionate numbers of young people, women and city dwellers. By and large, the farther away people live from wolves, the more they like them. The big exception is Native Americans, who live close to them and respect them. Wolves feature in their mythology as man’s creator or brother and, according to Chris McGeshick of the Mole Lake Band of the Chippewa tribe in the Great Lakes area, the Indians see their fate as linked to the wolf’s: “We’re doing better, we’re exercising our rights, we’re getting back to where we were before the Europeans arrived. As the wolf gets stronger, so do the tribal people.”

Environmental and animal-welfare organisations are leading the fight to keep the wolf protected. They have generous supporters, for whom the wolf is totemic. When Defenders of Wildlife polls its 1m members about the species they care about, the wolf always comes out top, according to Jamie Rappaport Clark, its president and a former director of the federal government’s Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). That makes lobbying for the wolf a priority: “Our members expect a return on their investment.”

But the wolf’s supporters do not care for it as much as its opponents hate it, and they have good reason to. In 2009, the worst year for her since the wolf’s reintroduction, Kim Baker, a rancher in Montana, suffered seven confirmed wolf kills, 12 head of cattle missing and yearlings that, worn down by harassment, weighed in at an average of 710lb (322kg) instead of the expected 770lb. She calculates the total losses that year at around $42,000. “Sometimes it gets pretty doggone depressing. If you could see what the wolves leave…We don’t raise our cattle to be tortured.” Photographs show savaged dogs and cattle with their rumps chewed off. Ranchers get compensation for losses; but Ms Baker says that, because of the difficulty of proving that a wolf was to blame, the pay-offs make up for only 10% of her losses.

In Europe conflict between wolves and farmers has been sharpest in France, where heavy subsidies still sustain agriculture in marginal areas. Joseph Jouffrey, president of the shepherds’ association in the Hautes-Alpes, says that one of his neighbours recently lost 67 sheep. Around 5,000 were killed by wolves in the whole of France last year, up from around 1,500 five years ago. As in America, farmers say the compensation does not cover their losses. There have been anti-wolf demonstrations and arson attacks in the national park where they first appeared, and death threats against the park’s staff.

In the fight against the wolves, hunters tend to side with the ranchers and shepherds (see article). Moose-hunting in Sweden is an important part of rural life, says Gunnar Gloersen, a hunter from Varmland in mid-Sweden. Every year 100,000 moose are shot, partly to protect pine trees, whose young shoots moose eat, and partly for sport. Even the schools and the police stations close on a moose-hunting day. Wolves disrupt shooting by slaughtering around 5,000-10,000 moose a year and, more importantly, by killing hunting dogs. The costs of losing a dog are not just emotional: a well-trained jamthund is worth €10,000 ($13,000). The presence of wolves reduces the value of hunting rights and, according to Mr Gloersen, costs landowners in his part of Sweden around €50m a year.

The division between the wolves’ opponents and supporters is cultural as well as economic. While supporters regard themselves as caring for the planet, opponents see themselves as in touch with the earth. Pierre de Boisguilbert, the general secretary of France’s Société de Vènerie (hunting with hounds), characterises the wolf’s supporters as “bobos”—bourgeois-bohemians, a disparaging term for urban left-wingers. “The bobos love the wolf. They’ll never see one, but the idea of the wolf is great.”

In America, the argument over the wolf’s protected status escalated into a full-blown political battle. Wolf numbers swiftly hit the FWS’s (modest) target of 100 wolves per state, so in 2002 it started talking about removing their protection. To stop this happening, the environmental and animal-rights organisations took the federal government to court. As judges deliberated, and more cases were brought, the wolf population rocketed, and hunters and ranchers got increasingly angry. In 2011 Congress lost patience and legislated to override the courts and “delist” the wolves. They are now fair game in all the Rocky Mountain and Great Lakes states where they are present. …

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WSJ OpEd on the government creeps you’ll meet on the way to repairing storm damage to your home.

Like many people whose houses were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, my family and I have been living in a rented house since the storm. Unlike some whose houses were totaled, we could have repaired things and been home toasting our tootsies by our own fireplace by now. What happened?

Two things: zoning (as in “Twilight Zone”) and FEMA.

Our first exposure to the town zoning authorities came a couple of weeks after Sandy. We’d met with insurance adjusters, contractors and “remediation experts.” We’d had about a foot of Long Island Sound sloshing around the ground floor of our house in Connecticut, and everyone had the same advice: Rip up the floors and subfloors, and tear out anything—wiring, plumbing, insulation, drywall, kitchen cabinets, bookcases—touched by salt water. All of it had to go, and pronto, too, lest mold set in.

Yet it wasn’t until the workmen we hired had ripped apart most of the first floor that the phrase “building permit” first wafted past us. Turns out we needed one. “What, to repair our own house we need a building permit?”

Of course.

Before you could get a building permit, however, you had to be approved by the Zoning Authority. And Zoning—citing FEMA regulations—would force you to bring the house “up to code,” which in many cases meant elevating the house by several feet. Now, elevating your house is very expensive and time consuming—not because of the actual raising, which takes just a day or two, but because of the required permits.

Kafka would have liked the zoning folks. There also is a limit on how high in the sky your house can be. That calculation seems to be a state secret, but it can easily happen that raising your house violates the height requirement. Which means that you can’t raise the house that you must raise if you want to repair it. Got that?

There were other surprises. A woman in our neighborhood has two adjoining properties, with a house and a cottage. She rents the house and lives in the cottage. For 29 years she has paid taxes on both. The cottage was severely damaged but she can’t tear it down and rebuild because Zoning says the plots are not zoned for two structures, never mind that for 29 years two property-tax payments were gladly accepted.

Kafka would have liked FEMA, too. We’ve met plenty of its agents. Every one we’ve encountered has been polite and oozing with sympathy. Even the lady who reduced my wife to tears was nice. The issue was my wife’s proof of income. We sent our tax return to FEMA, but that wasn’t good enough. They wanted pay stubs. My wife works as a freelance writer and editor. She doesn’t get a pay stub. Which apparently makes her a nonperson to this government agency. …

Tulsa World with more on the problems caused by ethanol.

For more than two decades, special interests have persuaded Congress to mandate Americans buy ethanol whether they want to or not. As a result, 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is now used for ethanol rather than food.

 

The ethanol mandate means that ordinary Americans pay more for a poorer quality automobile fuel and more for groceries. Ethanol proponents claim these costs will bring us environmental benefits and energy security. They are wrong.

 

A good first question about a mandate is “how good can a product be if you have to force people to buy it?”

 

The answer: not very good. Ethanol is vastly inferior to gasoline.

 

Consider these glaring drawbacks: Its energy density is a third lower, reducing cars’ emissions. It attracts water, so it cannot be transported in regular gas and oil pipelines, reduces lubricants’ effectiveness, and shortens engine lives. It is caustic, corroding engine parts and dislodging contaminants from fuel tanks.

 

While ethanol doesn’t make gasoline cleaner, the more intensive farming and water needs of ethanol refining harm the environment. …

Whadayaknow? A law prof has suggested candidates take the New York bar without the third year of law school. TaxProf has the story.

The third year of law school has long been a punching bag for critics who argue it’s a waste of time and drives up the costs of a law degree, but there have been few serious attempts to do anything about it. Until now.

Legal educators and top New York state court officials will gather on January 18 to discuss whether to allow candidates to sit for the New York state bar examination after just two years in law school. The idea was floated by Samuel Estreicher, a professor at New York University School of Law, who believes skyrocketing law school tuition and diminishing job prospects for new lawyers have created a climate favorable to reform. …

Estreicher laid out his proposal in an article, The Roosevelt-Cardozo Way: The Case for Bar Eligibility After Two Years of Law School, in the New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy. (The title refers to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, both of whom obtained their law degrees when two years was the norm.) He described two benefits to the two-year option, not least that the cost of becoming a lawyer would be reduced by one-third and that, with lower student loan debt, graduates would be in a better position to take lower-paying jobs representing low-income clients. Second, an optional 3L year would give schools incentives to create third-year curricula of more use to students, he wrote; if students saw no real benefit to the 3L curriculum, they would sit for the bar exam instead. …

Patricia Salkin, dean of TouroCollegeJacobD.FuchsbergLawCenter, fears the two-year option wouldn’t satisfy legal employers’ demands for practice-ready attorneys. “If students spend the first and second years taking core courses, when are they going to develop the practical skills that firms say they want?” she said. “And for the students, will the firms hire someone with only two years of law school, even if they pass the bar?”

The answer to that question, at least for the law firms, judges and federal agencies that tend to hire a large chunk of NYU graduates, is likely no, said dean Richard Revesz. He predicted that few NYU students would be interested in the two-year option. “I’m not a fan of the proposal,” he said. “I think it would not be beneficial, but I’m interested in hearing a lot of viewpoints.” Revesz said he is skeptical that a two-year option would be an added incentive for schools to revamp curriculum, given that many — including NYU — have already changed their 3L curricula or are weighing such reforms.

The Economist reports a new understanding of why exercise is good for us.

ONE sure giveaway of quack medicine is the claim that a product can treat any ailment. There are, sadly, no panaceas. But some things come close, and exercise is one of them. As doctors never tire of reminding people, exercise protects against a host of illnesses, from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection.

How it does so, however, remains surprisingly mysterious. But a paper just published in Nature by Beth Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre and her colleagues sheds some light on the matter.

Dr Levine and her team were testing a theory that exercise works its magic, at least in part, by promoting autophagy. This process, whose name is derived from the Greek for “self-eating”, is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled. …

And The Economist reports why many financial ”advisors” are not.

HAVE you ever met anyone who has grown rich just by saving? Probably not. But you may well have met someone who has grown rich looking after other people’s savings. That dark secret lies at the heart of “Pound Foolish”, Helaine Olen’s excellent book, a contemptuous exposé of the American personal-finance industry.

With icy logic, Ms Olen, a journalist, demonstrates that much of the advice given by moneymaking gurus on television or in print is either fatuous or based on ridiculously optimistic assumptions about future investment returns. Take the idea that saving the cost of a daily latte and investing the proceeds in the stockmarket would make you rich. Saving $3 a day, or $1,100 a year, might be a sensible economy measure but it won’t build a fortune.

Such faddish ideas are the financial equivalent of miracle diets. A belief in instant riches lured millions into buying internet stocks in the late 1990s or overpriced houses in the middle of the past decade, when any personal-finance adviser worth his salt should have been advising clients to run in the opposite direction. But optimism sells, and realism tends not to.

As well as bad advice, the gurus have plenty of expensive products to flog—from courses that teach people how to become better real-estate investors to branded goods like a $49.99 canvas laptop bag or a $34.98 silver leather wallet. By the time clients have bought all the books, attended the courses and stocked up on the accessories, someone has definitely become rich, though probably not the saver.

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If you have become a curmudgeon like Pickerhead, you can relate to the Dunbar Number which claims we can only know well 150 people. Bloomberg/Business Week with the story.

A little more than 10 years ago, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar began a study of the Christmas-card-sending habits of the English. This was in the days before online social networks made friends and “likes” as countable as miles on an odometer, and Dunbar wanted a proxy for meaningful social connection. He was curious to see not only how many people a person knew, but also how many people he or she cared about. The best way to find those connections, he decided, was to follow holiday cards. After all, sending them is an investment: You either have to know the address or get it; you have to buy the card or have it made from exactly the right collage of adorable family photos; you have to write something, buy a stamp, and put the envelope in the mail. These are not huge costs, but most people won’t incur them for just anybody.

Working with the anthropologist Russell Hill, Dunbar pieced together the average English household’s network of yuletide cheer. The researchers were able to report, for example, that about a quarter of cards went to relatives, nearly two-thirds to friends, and 8 percent to colleagues. The primary finding of the study, however, was a single number: the total population of the households each set of cards went out to. That number was 153.5, or roughly 150.

This was exactly the number that Dunbar expected. Over the past two decades, he and other like-minded researchers have discovered groupings of 150 nearly everywhere they looked. Anthropologists studying the world’s remaining hunter-gatherer societies have found that clans tend to have 150 members. Throughout Western military history, the size of the company—the smallest autonomous military unit—has hovered around 150. The self-governing communes of the Hutterites, an Anabaptist sect similar to the Amish and the Mennonites, always split when they grow larger than 150. So do the offices of W.L. Gore & Associates, the materials firm famous for innovative products such as Gore-Tex and for its radically nonhierarchical management structure. When a branch exceeds 150 employees, the company breaks it in two and builds a new office.

For Dunbar, there’s a simple explanation for this: In the same way that human beings can’t breathe underwater or run the 100-meter dash in 2.5 seconds or see microwaves with the naked eye, most cannot maintain many more than 150 meaningful relationships. Cognitively, we’re just not built for it. As with any human trait, there are outliers in either direction—shut-ins on the one hand, Bill Clinton on the other. But in general, once a group grows larger than 150, its members begin to lose their sense of connection. We live on an increasingly urban, crowded planet, but we have Stone Age social capabilities. “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us,” Dunbar has written. “Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”

While Dunbar has long been an influential scholar, today he is enjoying newfound popularity with a particular crowd: the Silicon Valley programmers who build online social networks. At Facebook (FB) and at startups such as Asana and Path, Dunbar’s ideas are regularly invoked in the attempt to replicate and enhance the social dynamics of the face-to-face world. Software engineers and designers are basing their thinking on what has come to be called Dunbar’s Number. Path, a mobile photo-sharing and messaging service founded in 2010, is built explicitly on the theory—it limits its users to 150 friends.

“What Dunbar’s research represents is that no matter how the march of technology goes on, fundamentally we’re all human, and being human has limits,” says Dave Morin, one of Path’s co-founders. …

… Scientists have long been intrigued by the question of why primates have such big brains. It’s nice to be smart, of course, but big brains demand an enormous amount of energy and require years to grow to full size, and the larger skulls that protect them make childbirth much more dangerous. Plenty of species have thrived on this planet without much of a brain at all.

Dunbar’s argument, laid out in the Journal of Human Evolution, was that big brains evolved to solve the problem of social life. Living in large groups confers significant advantages, chief among them better protection against predators. But living together is also difficult. Members compete for food and access to mates. They have to guard against bullies and cheats—and pick their own spots to bully or cheat. “For very social species, and this applies particularly to primates, the group is an adaptation to solve particular ecological problems,” Dunbar explains. “But the group itself triggers a whole series of problems at the individual level. It’s essentially the social contract problem: People tread on your toes; they steal your food just as you’ve unearthed it.”

As group size grows, a dizzying amount of data must be processed. A group of five has a total of 10 bilateral relationships between its members; a group of 20 has 190; a group of 50 has 1,225. Such a social life requires a big neocortex, the layers of neurons on the surface of the brain, where conscious thought takes place. In his 1992 paper, Dunbar plotted the size of the neocortex of each type of primate against the size of the group it lived in: The bigger the neocortex, the larger the group a primate could handle. At the same time, even the smartest primate—us—doesn’t have the processing power to live in an infinitely large group. To come up with a predicted human group size, Dunbar plugged our neocortex ratio into his graph and got 147.8. …

… Dunbar is familiar with the critiques of his work, and he has responses to them. He agrees with Watts, for example, that people have different social networks for different purposes, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some basic emotional bond we reserve for some people, independent of their utility to us: “Someone like your boss, or the person you borrow $50 from to pay the drug dealer, these people are meaningful in your life, but they’re not meaningful to you as relationships.” He also continues to find his number popping up all around him. A paper published in 2011 found that on Twitter the average number of other people a user regularly interacts with falls between 100 and 200. And though the limit on how many Facebook friends one can have is a generous 5,000, the average user has 190—more than 150, but within what Dunbar sees as the margin of error.

Dunbar himself has zero Facebook friends. He occasionally peers over his wife’s shoulder when she logs on at home, but he isn’t on the social network. He has a LinkedIn (LNKD) account, he says, “by mistake.” He opened a Path account but never uses it.

Dunbar does not rule out the possibility that human beings might be able to reset the cognitive limits on our social lives—we’ve done it before. The reason we’re able to function in so much larger groupings than our primate cousins, Dunbar argues, is because, tens of thousands of years ago, we taught ourselves to talk. Whereas baboons bond by taking turns picking each others’ nits, we have rhetoric and gossip and half-time speeches, not to mention singing and storytelling and jokes, to bring and hold us together. Language, he says, is how humans used their big brains to get to 150. And until something as revolutionary as that comes along, 150 is where he thinks we’ll stay.

Back to the real world where law faculties are still abusing their customers. Michael Graham tells us about the lousy law school where the dean makes $867,000 a year.

From the “Higher Ed Bubble Hits Massachusetts” File…

New England Law, Boston has operated in the shadows of the ­region’s more prestigious law schools for decades, trailing so far behind in some measures of excellence that US News & World ­Report does not include the downtown campus in its widely read ranking of 145 better law schools in the nation.

Yet the school’s longtime dean, John F. O’Brien, may be the highest paid law school dean in America, pocketing more than $867,000 a year in salary and benefits, includ­ing a “forgivable loan” that he used to buy a Florida condominium.

How does Dean O’Brien bring in all this legal tender? He and New England Law take advantage of the “everybody outta go to college!” attitude.

It is also the story of a law school that has hiked tuition by more than 80 percent in just a few years while doubling the percentage of applicants it accepts, generating the funds for increased student aid but also for the big salaries paid to O’Brien and other top administrators even as the demand for law school graduates dries up.

Higher tuition, taking in lots more customers, all while the market for new attorneys is falling and starting salaries collapsing. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Leno: President Obama has announced the theme for his second inauguration. It’s “Faith in America’s Future.” The idea is to get our minds off of America’s present.

Conan: Tickets to President Obama’s inauguration have sold out. At least that’s what the President is telling Joe Biden.

Conan: After 113 days, the National Hockey League has settled its contract dispute. So finally, Americans can get back to not watching hockey.

Letterman: It got so bad during the National Hockey League strike that ‘Disney on Ice’ began to allow fighting.

Fallon: Obama gears up for a fight over the Chuck Hagel Defense nomination, as well as a fight over that other thing–everything else. …

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Debra Saunders starts off our look at the Hagel nomination.

“Never make an enemy by accident,” housemaid Anna Bates warned her husband in the third season premiere of “Downton Abbey” on Sunday night. That’s what the housemaid’s mother always told her.

If his mother ever gave him the same advice, former GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel – now President Obama’s pick to serve as secretary of defense – seems to have ignored it.

Biographically, the former Nebraska senator and decorated Vietnam War hero makes a great choice. As the president noted, “He’d be the first person of enlisted rank to serve as secretary of defense, one of the few secretaries who have been wounded in war and the first Vietnam veteran to lead the department.”

But temperamentally, not so much. While Obama lauded Hagel for representing “the bipartisan tradition we need more of in Washington,” I think that what the president really meant is that Hagel is his favorite kind of Republican, the self-loathing kind.

Make that: the kind whom Democrats like because Republicans do not.

Hagel alienated some on the right when he turned against the Iraq War, for which he had voted in 2002. A lot of people changed their minds about that war, but Hagel went so far as to say in 2007 that “of course” the Iraq War was about oil.

Hagel angered folks from both parties when he said during a 2006 interview, “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here.”  …

Krauthammer is next.

The puzzle of the Chuck Hagel nomination for defense secretary is that you normally choose someone of the other party for your Cabinet to indicate a move to the center, but, as The Post’s editorial board pointed out, Hagel’s foreign policy views are to the left of Barack Obama’s, let alone the GOP’s. Indeed, they are at the fringe of the entire Senate.

So what’s going on? Message-sending. Obama won reelection. He no longer has to trim, to appear more moderate than his true instincts. He has the “flexibility” to be authentically Obama.

Hence the Hagel choice: Under the guise of centrist bipartisanship, it allows the president to leave the constrained first-term Obama behind and follow his natural Hagel-like foreign policy inclinations. On three pressing issues, in particular:

(1) Military Spending

Current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in August 2011 that the scheduled automatic $600 billion defense cuts (”sequestration”) would result in “hollowing out the force,” which would be “devastating.” And he strongly hinted that he might resign rather than enact them.

Asked about Panetta’s remarks, Hagel called the Pentagon “bloated” and needing “to be pared down.” Just the man you’d want to carry out a U.S. disarmament that will shrink America to what Obama thinks is its proper size on the world stage; i.e., smaller. The overweening superpower that Obama promiscuously chided in his global we-have-sinned tour is poised for reduction, not only to fund the bulging welfare state — like Europe’s postwar choice of social spending over international relevance — but to recalibrate America’s proper role in the world.

(2) Israel  …

Then Mark Steyn.

Obamacare at home leads inevitably to Obamacuts abroad.

If you had buttonholed me in the Senate men’s room circa 2003 and told me that a decade hence Joe Biden would be America’s vice president, John Kerry Secretary of State, and Chuck Hagel Secretary of Defense, I’d have laughed and waited for the punch line: The Leahy administration?

President Lautenberg? Celebrate lack of diversity! But even in the republic’s descent into a Blowhardocracy staffed by a Zombie House of Lords, there are distinctions to be drawn. Sen. Kerry having been reliably wrong on every foreign policy issue of the past 40 years, it would seem likely that at this stage in his life he will be content merely to be in office, jetting hither and yon boring the pants off whichever presidents and prime ministers are foolish enough to grant him an audience. Beyond the photo-ops, the world will drift on toward the post-American era: Beijing will carry on gobbling up resources around the planet, Tsar Putin will flex his moobs across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Arab Spring “democracies” will see impressive growth in the critical clitoridectomy sector of the economy, Iran will go nuclear, and John Kerry will go to black-tie banquets in Europe.

But Chuck Hagel is a different kettle of senatorial huffenpuffer. And not because of what appears to be a certain antipathy toward Jews and gays. That would be awkward at the Tony Awards, but at the Arab League the post-summit locker-room schmoozing should be a breeze. Since his celebrated “evolution” on marriage last year, President Obama is famously partial to one of those constituencies, so presumably he didn’t nominate an obscure forgotten senator because of his fascinating insights into the appropriate level of “obviousness” the differently oriented should adopt. So, why Hagel? Why now?

My comrade Jonah Goldberg says this nomination is a “petty pick” made by Obama “out of spite.” I’m not so sure. If the signature accomplishment of the president’s first term was Obamacare (I’m using “signature accomplishment” in the Washington sense of “ruinously expensive bureaucratic sinkhole”), what would he be looking to pull off in his second (aside from the repeal of the 22nd Amendment)? Hagel isn’t being nominated to the Department of Zionist and Homosexual Regulatory Oversight but to the Defense Department. Which he calls “bloated.”

“The Pentagon,” he said a year ago, “needs to be pared down.” Unlike current Secretary Leon Panetta, who’s strongly opposed to the mandated “sequestration” cuts to the defense budget, Hagel thinks they’re merely a good start.

That’s why Obama’s offered him the gig. Because Obamacare at home leads inevitably to Obamacuts abroad. In that sense, America will be doing no more than following the same glum trajectory of every other great power in the postwar era. I feel only a wee bit sheepish about quoting my book “After America” two weeks running, since it’s hardly my fault Obama’s using it as the operating manual for his second term (I may sue for breach of copyright and retire to Tahiti). At any rate, somewhere around Chapter Five, I suggest that, having succeeded Britain as the dominant power, America may follow the old country in decline, too: …

We finish Hagel with Michael Barone.

… Hagel has shown an animus against Israel that is in tension with Obama’s assurances that Israel is a valued ally. He was one of only four senators who refused to sign a letter urging the president to express solidarity with Israel and condemn the Palestinian campaign of violence.

In an interview with Middle East negotiations veteran Aaron David Miller in 2006, Hagel said, “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people,” and “I’m not an Israeli senator, I’m a United States senator.”

But American support for Israel is not the product of a sinister “Jewish lobby.” It’s a reflection of the strong pro-Israel beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.

Confirmation of Hagel will be taken by the Iranian regime as an indication that the United States will do nothing to stop it from obtaining the nuclear capacity that Israel understandably regards as a threat to its existence.

So it’s not surprising that the Washington Post editorial page, which supported Obama’s re-election, stated that Hagel “is not the right choice for defense secretary.”

Obama’s decision to nominate him anyway suggests a leftward lurch on policy for which voters were given no advance notice.

It’s not surprising that most Republican senators seem likely to vote against this Republican nominee — and that most Democratic senators are avoiding making any commitment. Even the voluble Chuck Schumer is keeping quiet. …

Jack Lew is next. Jennifer Rubin starts us off.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has already come out against Jack Lew’s nomination for Treasury secretary based on what Sessions calls “the most direct and important false assertion during my entire time in Washington.” He is referring to Lew’s testimony that the Obama budget “will get will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt.” That just isn’t so, but Sessions should consider whether there are not other contenders for “the most direct and important false assertion.”

There was Lew’s out-and-out misstatement that the Republicans had prevented a budget from being passed in the Senate, which Lew claimed required 60 votes. That earned him four Pinocchios from my colleague Glenn Kessler.

Then there was his out-and-out falsehood that Social Security is “entirely self-financing.” No it’s not, as factcheck.org pointed out.

Let’s not forget when Lew gave the president an assist in earning four Pinnochios for falsely claiming Congress proposed the sequester:

WaPo reminds us Jack Lew had a major position at CitiGroup when it nearly imploded.

Treasury secretary nominee Jack Lew has spent most of his career in government, but during the financial crisis, he was embedded inside one of the country’s biggest banks as it nearly imploded.

From 2006 to 2008, he worked at Citigroup in two major roles, a notable line in his résumégiven that as Treasury secretary, he would be charged with implementing new rules regulating Wall Street.

But Lew did not have just any position at the bank.

In early 2008, he became a top executive in the Citigroup unit that housed many of the bank’s riskiest operations, including its hedge funds and private equity investments. Massive losses in that unit helped drive Citigroup into the arms of the federal government, which bailed out the bank with $45 billion in taxpayer money that year.

The group had been under pressure to compete with similar units at other big Wall Street firms and, some analysts say, took on too many risks as it played catch-up.

“The mismanagement of risk was comprehensive at that organization,” said Simon Johnson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Details about Lew’s exact responsibilities at Citigroup, where he worked from 2006 to 2008, are scant. He declined to comment for this article. …

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Readers know Pickerhead doesn’t have much good to day about colleges in our country. Thomas Sowell has the same opinion.

Many years ago, as a young man, I read a very interesting book about the rise of the Communists to power in China. In the last chapter, the author tried to explain why and how this had happened.

Among the factors he cited were the country’s educators. That struck me as odd, and not very plausible, at the time. But the passing years have made that seem less and less odd, and more and more plausible. Today, I see our own educators playing a similar role in creating a mindset that undermines American society.

Schools were once thought of as places where a society’s knowledge and experience were passed on to the younger generation. But, about a hundred years ago, Professor John Dewey of ColumbiaUniversity came up with a very different conception of education — one that has spread through American schools of education, and even influenced education in countries overseas.

John Dewey saw the role of the teacher, not as a transmitter of a society’s culture to the young, but as an agent of change — someone strategically placed, with an opportunity to condition students to want a different kind of society.

A century later, we are seeing schools across America indoctrinating students to believe in all sorts of politically correct notions. The history that is taught in too many of our schools is a history that emphasizes everything that has gone bad, or can be made to look bad, in America — and that gives little, if any, attention to the great achievements of this country.

If you think that is an exaggeration, get a copy of “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn and read it. As someone who used to read translations of official Communist newspapers in the days of the Soviet Union, I know that those papers’ attempts to degrade the United States did not sink quite as low as Howard Zinn’s book.

That book has sold millions of copies, poisoning the minds of millions of students in schools and colleges against their own country. …

Remember how all the bien pensants, educated in our finest colleges, said electronic medical records were going to save us billions and billions? All the smart people who run our government believed this foolishness. If just one or two of them had held responsible positions with purchasing authority for software decisions in the private sector, they would have known the salesmen were spewing BS. Now the NY Times acknowledges the annual $81 billion savings have not appeared and never will. The “smartest” president ever, will turn out to be the dumbest.

The conversion to electronic health records has failed so far to produce the hoped-for savings in health care costs and has had mixed results, at best, in improving efficiency and patient care, according to a new analysis by the influential RAND Corporation.

Optimistic predictions by RAND in 2005 helped drive explosive growth in the electronic records industry and encouraged the federal government to give billions of dollars in financial incentives to hospitals and doctors that put the systems in place.

“We’ve not achieved the productivity and quality benefits that are unquestionably there for the taking,” said Dr. Arthur L. Kellermann, one of the authors of a reassessment by RAND that was published in this month’s edition of Health Affairs, an academic journal.

RAND’s 2005 report was paid for by a group of companies, including General Electric and Cerner Corporation, that have profited by developing and selling electronic records systems to hospitals and physician practices. Cerner’s revenue has nearly tripled since the report was released, to a projected $3 billion in 2013, from $1 billion in 2005.

The report predicted that widespread use of electronic records could save the United States health care system at least $81 billion a year, a figure RAND now says was overstated. The study was widely praised within the technology industry and helped persuade Congress and the Obama administration to authorize billions of dollars in federal stimulus money in 2009 to help hospitals and doctors pay for the installation of electronic records systems.

“RAND got a lot of attention and a lot of buzz with the original analysis,” said Dr. Kellermann, who was not involved in the 2005 study. “The industry quickly embraced it.”

But evidence of significant savings is scant, and there is increasing concern that electronic records have actually added to costs by making it easier to bill more for some services.  …

Karl Rove has some ideas about the debt ceiling standoff.

President Obama says he won’t negotiate with Republicans over his proposed more than $1 trillion increase in the debt ceiling as a matter of principle because Congress “should pay the bills that they have already racked up.”

Set aside the obvious—that he championed the spending and signed the measures that racked up the bills, which Republicans opposed. There may be no person in America with less moral authority than Mr. Obama on this issue. Six years ago he led a Democratic effort to defeat a $781 billion debt-ceiling increase.

On March 16, 2006, Illinois’s junior Sen. Obama argued on the Senate floor that raising the debt limit was “a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills.” He complained that “Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren,” and added, “America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.”

Even by Washington’s lax standards, Mr. Obama’s complaints today reek of hypocrisy.

Mr. Obama has since expressed semi-regret for his 2006 comments. He told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last April, “I think that it’s important to understand the vantage point of a senator versus the vantage point of a president. When you’re a senator . . . this is always a lousy vote. Nobody likes to be tagged as having increased the debt.” He acknowledged that was “making what is a political vote as opposed to doing what was important for the country.” But as president, the newly enlightened Mr. Obama said, “you start realizing . . . we can’t play around with this stuff.” …

Here’s a White House petition you might want to sign.

Gun Free Zones are supposed to protect our children, and some politicians wish to strip us of our right to keep and bear arms. Those same politicians and their families are currently under the protection of armed Secret Service agents. If Gun Free Zones are sufficient protection for our children, then Gun Free Zones should be good enough for politicians.

Speaking of gun laws, Ann Althouse makes a good point about David Gregory’s use of the illegal magazine.

No charges will be filed against David Gregory “despite the clarity of the violation of this important law, because under all of the circumstances here a prosecution would not promote public safety in the District of Columbia nor serve the best interests of the people of the District to whom this office owes its trust.”

          “The clarity of the violation of this important law….”

Why is the law important? If Gregory clearly violated the law, but there is no interest to be served in prosecuting him, doesn’t that prove that the law is not important? If the precise thing that he did — which is clearly what is defined as a crime — raises no interest in prosecution, how can we be satisfied by letting this one nice famous man go? Rewrite the law so that it only covers the activity that the government believes deserves prosecution, so there is equal justice under the law.

According to BBC News wrinkled fingers after long exposure to water have a purpose.

Science may be getting closer to explaining those prune-like fingers and toes we all get when we sit in a hot bath too long.

UK researchers from NewcastleUniversity have confirmed wet objects are easier to handle with wrinkled fingers than with dry, smooth ones.

They suggest our ancestors may have evolved the creases as they moved and foraged for food in wet conditions. …

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George Will on our “decadent democracy.”

Connoisseurs of democratic decadence can savor a variety of contemporary dystopias. Because familiarity breeds banality, Greece has become a boring horror. Japan, however, in its second generation of stagnation is fascinating. Once, Japan bestrode the world, jauntily buying RockefellerCenter and PebbleBeach. Now Japanese buy more adult diapers than those for infants.

America has its lowest birth rate since at least 1920 — family formation and workforce participation (which hit a 30-year low last year) have declined in tandem. But it has an energy surplus, the government-produced overhang of housing inventory is shrinking and the average age of Americans’ cars is an astonishing 10.8 years. Such promising economic indicators, however, mask the country’s democratic decadence, as explained by the Hudson Institute’s Christopher DeMuth in the Dec. 24 Weekly Standard:

Deficit spending once was largely for investments — building infrastructure, winning wars — which benefited future generations, so government borrowing appropriately shared the burden with those generations. Now, however, continuous borrowing burdens future generations in order to finance current consumption. Today’s policy, says DeMuth, erases “the distinction between investing for the future and borrowing from the future.”  …

… Barack Obama has (as Winston Churchill said of an adversary) “the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.” His incessant talking swaddles one wee idea — raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires,” including people earning less than half a million. He has nothing pertinent to say about the steadily worsening fiscal imbalance that will make sluggish growth — less than 3 percent — normal. …

NIle Gardiner wonders with 128 million Americans on some kind of government programs, if the US can survive as the world’s superpower. 

I have just read a staggering report written by my colleagues Patrick D. Tyrell and William W. Beach for the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis (I direct the Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom at Heritage.) It is a real eye-opener for anyone who cares about America’s future as the world’s superpower, on either side of the Atlantic. Ironically, Britain, through the tremendous determination of Iain Duncan Smith and his team at the Department of Work and Pensions, is starting to roll back the welfare state, precisely at the same time the current US administration is expanding it.

The United States isn’t just gliding towards a continental European-style future of vast welfare systems, economic decline, and massive debts – it is accelerating towards it at full speed. Or as Acton Institute research director Samuel Gregg puts it in his excellent new book published today by Encounter, America is already “becoming Europe,” with the United States moving far closer to a European-style welfare state than most Americans realize.

Tyrell and Beach point out in their Heritage paper, which is based on extensive analysis of the recently released March 2011 US Census Bureau Current Population Survey (CPS), that more than two in five Americans are now on government programs:

“The number of people receiving benefits from the federal government in the United States has grown from under 94 million people in 2000 to more than 128 million people in 2011. That means that 41.3 percent of the US population is now on a federal government program.” …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the president’s annoyance with Boehner for suggesting the country has a spending problem. 

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) recently recounted the comment that the president made to him in the midst of the fiscal cliff talks: “We don’t have a spending problem.” A source familiar with the conversation tells Right Turn that instead the president insisted we have a health-care problem.

The comment is absurd, given the huge increases in discretionary spending, the addition of more health-care spending in the form of Obamacare and the president’s unwillingness to address, for example, Medicare spending. A senior House adviser described the remark: “Obviously, he believes Obamacare is going to help drive down costs and help solve that problem. La la land.” Moreover, it does make fools of those who insisted during the election that Obama was serious about fiscal discipline and entitlement reform.

In a written statement today Boehner went back to the president’s comment, arguing, “At $16 trillion and climbing (more than $50,000 for every American), our national debt is a drag on our economy and a threat to our future. But when Republicans demanded serious spending cuts to begin addressing the debt, President Obama said: ‘We don’t have a spending problem.’ On the contrary – as Investor’s Business Daily points out – government spending is the ‘driving force’ behind our debt crisis. . .This is the year we need to work together to solve these problems with real spending cuts, meaningful reforms of the entitlement programs that are driving us deeper into debt, and a fairer, cleaner tax code.”

Clearly, the fiscal cliff negotiations have, it seems, convinced the speaker that the president is hopeless …

Jonathan Tobin takes note of Dick Morris’s debt-ceiling negotiation suggestion.

… A number of ideas are floating around, but Dick Morris floated one yesterday in the Hill that is worth considering: phasing in limited debt ceiling hikes that would avoid a government shutdown but would not be enough to allow the president to avoid having to negotiate on entitlement reform and other spending issues.

As Morris writes:

“The Republicans should offer to pass a bill now setting a debt limit that rises each quarter pegged to one-third of the revenue growth of the preceding quarter. Thus, two-thirds of all revenue growth — natural or due to tax hikes — would go to deficit reduction.

Republicans are unwilling to pull the trigger on default by refusing to raise the debt limit. But a bill to allow gradual increases in the debt limit, at a pace slower than revenue growth, need not trigger default. Instead, the president would be forced to prioritize his spending and borrowing so as to avoid default, pay the military and send out Social Security checks. All the rhetorical handles he has to battle an effort to kill the debt-limit increase will be gone in the face of a phased-in debt-limit hike.”

Critics of the idea can certainly point out that this proposal could turn out to be as ineffectual as Boehner’s Plan B fiscal cliff plan that was dead on arrival in the House and never would have been passed in the Senate or signed by the president. We should certainly expect the president to stick to his refusal to negotiate on the debt ceiling at least initially. But Morris is right that what the GOP needs to avoid is an all-or-nothing approach to the debt that will only make Obama look like the reasonable one in the negotiation, even if his stand is no less ideological than that of his Tea Party foes. …

Conn Carroll says there are some governments controlling spending – those with GOP folks in charge.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government posted a $293 billion deficit in the first fiscal quarter of 2013, setting the Obama administration up for a record fifth-year of trillion dollar deficits. But while the fiscal condition of the Democratically controlled federal government is still atrocious, Republican controlled states are now swimming in surpluses.

Thanks to a Republican governor committed to developing its natural resources, not punishing entrepreneurs who do, Texas legislators are facing an $8.8 billion surplus over the next two years. To the east, Republican governors Bill Haslam of Tennessee and Rick Scott of Florida have also turned recession deficits into budget surpluses. Moving north, Michigan’s Gov. Rick Snyder, Iowa’s Gov. Terry Brandstad, and Indiana’s out-going-Gov. Mitch Daniels, also can now all boast surpluses in the hundreds of millions of dollars. All of these governors managed to turn their state’s fiscal situation around through spending cuts, not tax hikes. Now their budgets are in the black and their economies are growing.

Things do not look as good in Democrat-controlled states. Illinois, who massively raised taxes on the rich, still has a $5.9 billion stack of unpaid bills. California, who also raised taxes on the rich, was supposed to post a small surplus this year. But tax collections are coming in at 10.8 percent below budget projections. As a result, the state is now projected to be $1.9 billion in the red by the end of this fiscal year.

It does not appear that that Congress and the White House will come to any consensus on how best to solve our fiscal crisis at the federal level. Conservatives and liberals simply have diametrically opposed views on how our fiscal crisis can best be resolved while preserving economic growth. But at the state level, conservative and liberal models of governance are being fully implemented. And it is becoming increasingly clear which of those visions is producing the best results.

Andrew Malcolm catches Pelosi’s phake photo.

You know how it is when you plan a group photo of any kind, especially a large group. Not just families.

There’s always someone moving or blinking or mugging or clowning with two fingers sticking up behind another’s head.

Or, worst of all, there’s always someone late.

Everybody else somehow organizes their life to appear at the appointed time for the group photograph. But then they’re forced to stand around and wait and wait for the tardy folks, who deem themselves more important and not subject to the normal rules of social etiquette.

Finally the group gives up. And lines up. The photographer goes ahead with the photo. Several photos actually, because it’s not easy getting about five dozen busy people all in the same place at once.

And then, wouldn’t you know, just as the group is breaking up, the self-important late-comers arrive, muttering fake apologies, but really enjoying their grand entrance.

Well, that’s just what happened when Nancy Pelosi organized the new women’s Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives. …

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Amazing story from New York Magazine on a strange permutation in our drug culture’s coin of the realm.

The call that came in from a local Safeway one day in March 2011 was unlike any the Organized Retail Crime Unit of the Prince George’s County Police Department had fielded before. The grocery store, located in suburban Bowie, Maryland, had been robbed repeatedly. But in every incident the only products taken were bottles—many, many bottles—of the liquid laundry detergent Tide. “They were losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month, with people just taking it off the shelves,” recalls Sergeant Aubrey Thompson, who heads the team. When Thompson and his officers arrived to investigate, they stumbled onto another apparent Tide theft in progress and busted two men who’d piled 100 or so of the bright-orange jugs into their Honda. The next day, Thompson returned to the store’s parking lot to tape a television interview about the crimes. A different robber took advantage of the distraction to make off with twenty more bottles.

Later, Thompson reviewed weeks’ worth of the Safeway’s security footage. He found that more than two dozen thieves, working in crews, were regularly raiding the store’s household-products aisle, sometimes returning more than once the same day and avoiding detection by timing their heists to follow clerks’ shift changes. Owners and managers of other area stores, having seen Thompson on the news, reached out to him to report their own vanishing Tide bottles. Since then, the oddly brand-loyal crime wave has gone national, striking bodegas, supermarkets, and big-box discounters from Austin to West St. Paul, Minnesota. In New York, employees at the Penn Station Duane Reade nabbed a man trying to abscond with Tide bottles he’d stuffed into a suitcase. In OrangeCounty, an attempted Tide theft led to a high-speed chase that included the thief crashing his SUV into an ambulance. Last year, for the first time, detergent made the National Retail Federation’s list of most-targeted items. Says Joseph LaRocca, founder of the trade group RetailPartners, who helped compile the report: “Tide was specifically called out.”

As the cases piled up after his team’s first Tide-theft bust, Thompson sought an answer to the riddle at the center of the crimes: What did thieves want with so much laundry soap? To find out, he and his unit pored over security recordings to identify prolific perpetrators, whom officers then tracked down and detained for questioning. “We never promised to go easy on them, but they were willing to talk about it,” Thompson says. “I guess they were bragging.” It turned out the detergent wasn’t ­being used as an ingredient in some new recipe for getting high, but instead to buy drugs themselves. Tide bottles have become ad hoc street currency, with a 150-ounce bottle going for either $5 cash or $10 worth of weed or crack cocaine. On certain corners, the detergent has earned a new nickname: “Liquid gold.” The Tide people would never sanction that tag line, of course. But this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product.

Shoppers have surprisingly strong feelings about laundry detergent. In a 2009 survey, …

… The criminalcost-­benefit ­analysis of a bottle of Tide is more straightforward. Most of the people stealing the detergent, Sergeant Thompson points out, are the same criminals who used to break into houses or mug pedestrians—male addicts whose need to feed their habits can foster a kind of innovative streak. “They are smart. They are creative. They want high reward and low risk,” he says. Theft convictions can come with a maximum fifteen-year prison sentence, but the penalty for shoplifting is often just a small fine, with no jail time. For the most active thieves, says Thompson, stolen Tide has in some ways become more lucrative than the drugs it’s traded for. “It’s the new dope,” he says. “You can get richer and have less chance of doing jail time.”

For stores, stopping Tide shoplifting presents unique challenges. Most frequently stolen goods—GPS devices, smartphones, and other consumer electronics—are pricey, light, and easily concealed. They’re also not routine purchases, which means they can be locked up until buyers ask for them. Bulk goods like detergent are harder to run off with, but they’re also bought by dozens of customers daily—lock those products up, and a store manager adds more time to his customers’ errand runs, potentially sending them to shop elsewhere. “Any time you secure something, it impacts the sale of that item at some level,” says Jerry Biggs, the director of Walgreens’ Organized Retail Crime Division. …

… Despite its popularity, Tide is not a big moneymaker for stores. P&G’s proprietary surfactants and enzymes are relatively expensive to produce, notes Bill Schmitz, a Deutsche Bank analyst, so Tide’s wholesale cost is steep. Only so much of that can be passed on to customers. “It’s so tight,” says Schmitz of the profit margin. In general, a retailer clears just a few percentage points on a Tide purchase. A store that charges $19.99 for a 150-ounce bottle might claim $2 in profit. But if it buys stolen bottles for $5, that jumps to $15. …

The Economist finds a study showing the dual use of the human hand.

THE appendage at the end of a human being’s arm is a strange organ. It is the only one that has different names, depending on what it is being used for. Employ it to hold something, and it is called a hand. Employ it to hit someone, and it is called a fist. That second use, though, is almost unknown in other primates.

Most primate hands are long of palm and finger, short of thumb, and suited for climbing. Human hands have short palms, short fingers and long thumbs, which are not. These proportions do, though, make it possible to grip things in two ways that other apes’ hands cannot manage well. One is by using what is known as a precision grip, in which an object is held between the pads of the finger tips (especially the first and second fingers) and the pad of the thumb. The other is by means of a power grip, in which all the fingers and the thumb are wrapped around what is being grasped. These two grips are crucial to Homo sapiens’s characteristic tool-crafting skills, and it has thus long been thought that the widespread use of tools by humanity’s ancestors was the driving force behind the modern hand’s proportions.

No doubt that was important. But a study just published in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Michael Morgan and David Carrier of the University of Utah has shown that the exact geometry of the hand is probably the result of its destructive rather than its constructive power. …

… it has long been the case that the species is divided between those who prosper by making things with their hands, and those who rely on their fists, or the threat of them, to take what the makers have made. And that is the story of why some people became democrats;  so they, using the government’s fist, can steal, from those who work and create. – Pickerhead

Great post from Walter Russell Mead on ethanol pushing the world’s poor back to starvation levels.

Decades of activism haven’t taught greens much about policy. The latest horror out of the sequential failure machine known as the green movement is the biofuels disaster now afflicting the Guatemalan poor. The New York Times reports:

Recent laws in the United States and Europe that mandate the increasing use of biofuel in cars have had far-flung ripple effects, economists say, as land once devoted to growing food for humans is now sometimes more profitably used for churning out vehicle fuel.

In a globalized world, the expansion of the biofuels industry has contributed to spikes in food prices and a shortage of land for food-based agriculture in poor corners of Asia, Africa and Latin America because the raw material is grown wherever it is cheapest.

Now that the United States is using 40 percent of its [corn] crop to make biofuel, it is not surprising that tortilla prices have doubled in Guatemala, which imports nearly half of its corn…Roughly 50 percent of the nation’s children are chronically malnourished, the fourth-highest rate in the world, according to the United Nations.

To make things worse: evidence suggests that the corn ethanol program, for the sake of which callous greens condemned the world’s poor to higher food prices, is a failure even on environmental terms and fails to reduce greenhouse gasses.

We’re betting that this news won’t dent greens’ self-confidence. They will still insist that unless they are put in charge of the entire world economy we face disaster. The sad truth is that the more power they get, the more damage they do.

The world needs a smart green movement. Barring that, a green movement that bothered to think through consequences and make a serious cost benefit analysis on its proposals would be an immense improvement over the shambles we have now.

And congrats to NYT reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal. In the past we’ve criticized some of her work as failing to look at or acknowledge green follies. In reporting this piece, she and the Grey Lady are getting it right.

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For a change of pace, instead of the tragedy that has become the governments of our country, lets have some of Dave Barry’s humor. Here is his end of the year review.

It was a cruel, cruel year — a year that kept raising our hopes, only to squash them flatter than a dead possum on the interstate.

Example: This year the “reality” show “Jersey Shore,” which for six hideous seasons has been a compelling argument in favor of a major Earth-asteroid collision, finally got canceled, and we dared to wonder if maybe, just maybe, we, as a society, were becoming slightly less stupid.

But then, WHAP, we were slapped in our national face by the cold hard frozen mackerel of reality in the form of the hugely popular new “reality” show “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” which, in terms of intellectual content, makes “Jersey Shore” look like “Hamlet.”  …

In January – Meanwhile the race for the Republican presidential nomination, which began in approximately 2003, continues to be a spicy political gumbo of excitement. The emerging front runner is Mitt Romney, who combines a strong résumé of executive experience with the easygoing natural human warmth of a parking meter. …

In February – Tensions between the United States and Pakistan mount after eyewitnesses in Waziristan claim that an unmanned U.S. Predator drone robbed a convenience store. Meanwhile, in what international observers see as a red flag, Iran places an ad on Craigslist stating, “WE PAY CASH FOR NUCLEAR BOMB MATERIALS.” …

In March – In the Middle East, tensions rise between the United States and Pakistan after an unmanned Predator drone destroys the only working toilet in Waziristan. …

In April – Meanwhile in Waziristan, tensions continue to mount when an al-Qaeda safe house is destroyed by an unmanned Predator drone missile that apparently gained access by pretending to deliver a pizza. …

In May – In sports, Usain Bolt, running in his final tuneup race before the Olympics, wins the Kentucky Derby. …

In June – Tensions in Waziristan mount still higher amid reports that an unmanned Predator drone missile has been roaming the province engaging in unprotected sex. …

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This was supposed to be the most open administration ever. John Fund gives us the scoop on how Lisa Jackson, EPA head, obscured her emails using a nom d’email.

The sudden announcement that Lisa Jackson, the controversial head of the Environmental Protection Agency, will be resigning later this month means that the mysterious Richard Windsor will be leaving the building with her.

His is apparently one of several fake names on official EPA e-mail accounts that Jackson used to conduct business while at EPA. Her office claims the name is a combination of her dog’s name and that of the town of East Windsor, N.J., where she once lived.

It’s not uncommon for government officials to have private e-mail accounts. But federal law has set up several barriers to prevent officials from using non-official or secret e-mail addresses to conduct business and then conceal the contents of those accounts from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Politico reports that the EPA was supposed to ensure that anyone requesting Jackson’s e-mails under FOIA would also have access to communications from “Richard Windsor.” “But the system is far from foolproof,” it dryly notes.

When the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market group, came up empty on its FOIA requests for Jackson’s e-mails relating to her anti-coal efforts, it was told by an EPA whistleblower that she was using “Richard Windsor” and other aliases to coordinate with outside anti-coal groups and engage in other activity she wouldn’t want to come to light.

After CEI filed suit, the Justice Department last month reluctantly agreed to produce 12,000 “Richard Windsor” e-mails. The first batch is set to be released on January 14. CEI employees told me they expect the e-mails will be heavily redacted to obscure their content, but that House committees headed by Representative Darrell Issa of California and Representative Fred Upton of Michigan will launch probes that will ultimately bring all of the e-mails to light. …

Mark Steyn comments on the fiscal deal.

The politics of the “fiscal cliff” deal is debatable: On the one hand, Boehner got the “Bush tax cuts” made permanent for most Americans; Obama was forced to abandon his goal of increasing rates for those earning $250,000. On the other, on taxes Republicans caved to the same class-warfare premises (the rich need to pay their “fair share”) they’d successfully fought off a mere two years ago; while on spending the Democrats not only refused to make cuts, they refused to make cuts even part of the discussion.

Which of the above is correct? Who cares? As I said, the politics is debatable. But the reality isn’t. I hate to keep plugging my book “After America” in this space, but if you buy multiple copies they’ll come in very useful for insulating your cabin after the power grid collapses. At any rate, right up there at the front – page six – I write as follows:

“The prevailing political realities of the United States do not allow for any meaningful course correction. And, without meaningful course correction, America is doomed.”

Washington keeps proving the point. The political class has just spent two months on a down-to-the-wire nail-biting white-knuckle thrill-ride negotiation the result of which is more business as usual. At the end, as always, Dr. Obama and Dr. Boehner emerge in white coats, surgical masks around their necks, bloody scalpels in hand, and announce that it was touch-and-go for awhile but the operation was a complete success – and all they’ve done is applied another temporary Band-Aid that’s peeling off even as they speak. They’re already prepping the OR for the next life-or-death surgery on the debt ceiling, tentatively scheduled for next Tuesday or a week on Thursday or the third Sunday after Epiphany.

No epiphanies in Washington: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the latest triumphant deal includes $2 billion of cuts for fiscal year 2013. Wow! That’s what the Government of the United States borrows every 10 hours and 38 minutes. Spending two months negotiating 10 hours of savings is like driving to a supermarket three states away to save a nickel on your grocery bill.

A space alien on Planet Zongo whose cable package includes “Meet The Press” could watch 10 minutes of these pseudo-cliffhangers and figure out how they always end, every time: Spending goes up, and the revenue gap widens. This latest painstakingly negotiated bipartisan deal to restore fiscal responsibility actually includes a third of a trillion dollars in new spending. A third of a trillion! $330,000,000,000! Fancy that! In most countries, a third of a trillion would be a lot of money. But in the U.S. it’s chump change so footling it’s barely mentioned in the news reports. Then there’s the usual sweetheart deals for those with Washington’s ear: $59 million for algae producers, a $20 million tax break if a Hollywood producer shoots part of a movie in a “depressed area” as opposed to a non-depressed area, like Canada. I’m pitching a script to Paramount called “The Algae That Ate Detroit.” …

Walter Russell Mead posts on the NY State fracking report that gave the techniques a clean bill of health. To establish his bona fides as a card-carrying-government-loving liberal, Gov. Cuomo suppressed the report. We wouldn’t want the US to become energy independent, would we? Then we might become strong and no liberal wants this country to be strong.

Thanks to a leak from an anonymous insider, we learned Thursday that a report commissioned by the State of New York has given fracking a clean bill of health. The insider “did not think it should be kept secret” and released the document, which is now nearly one year old, to the New York Times, which reported:

“The state’s Health Department found in an analysis it prepared early last year that the much-debated drilling technology known as hydrofracking could be conducted safely in New York.

The eight-page analysis is a summary of previous research by the state and others…[that] delves into the potential impact of fracking on water resources, on naturally occurring radiological material found in the ground, on air emissions and on “potential socioeconomic and quality-of-life impacts.”…[It] concludes that fracking can be done safely.

The analysis and other health assessments have been closely guarded by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his administration as the governor weighs whether to approve fracking. Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, has long delayed making a decision, unnerved in part by strident opposition on his party’s left.”

This is very good news. …

Another strike against “cash for clunkers.” This time from Yahoo News.

Back in 2009, the “Cash for Clunkers” federal program was supposed to be a boon for the environment and the economy. During a limited time, consumers could trade in an old gas-guzzling used car for up to $4,500 cash back towards the purchase of a fuel-efficient new car. It seemed like a win for everyone: the environment, the gasping auto industry and cash-strapped consumers.

Though almost a million people poured into car dealerships eager to exchange their old jalopies for something shiny and new, recent reports indicate the entire program may have actually hurt the environment far more than it helped.

According to E Magazine, the “Clunkers” program, which is officially known as the Car Allowance Rebates System (CARS), produced tons of unnecessary waste while doing little to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The program’s first mistake seems to have been its focus on car shredding, instead of car recycling. With 690,000 vehicles traded in, that’s a pretty big mistake.

According to the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA), automobiles are almost completely recyclable, down to their engine oil and brake fluid. But many of the “Cash for Clunkers” cars were never sent to recycling facilities. The agency reports that the cars’ engines were instead destroyed by federal mandate, in order to prevent dealers from illicitly reselling the vehicles later. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

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Craig Pirrong with a textbook example of the disgusting government we have in Washington.

… The persistence of price supports, in milk, and in sugar, and in other ag commodities, is in fact a testament to the disproportionate power of the ag lobbies.  These programs transfer billions of dollars from urban and suburban America to farmers.  Much of the impact is felt by poor Americans.  But don’t worry!  We’ll offset that by food stamps-pardon me, SNAP-a program that has metastasized, almost doubling in size in terms of participation, and more than doubling in dollars since Obama took office.

These price supports are an abomination.  They are textbook examples of redistributive government policy creating deadweight losses.

For Vilsack to get all weepy about the political weakness of rural America just adds insult to injury.

I knew Ross Perot was an economic idiot when during the 1992 campaign he expressed bewilderment at how the political power of the agriculture interests increased as the farm population declined.  Basic political economy provides the answer to that: small, concentrated interests exert disproportionate power The benefits are concentrated, the costs are diffuse.  The beneficiaries have a strong incentive to pay pols to advance their program because each individual gets a relatively large amount of money in the bargain, and those who pay the costs don’t have the incentive to organize an opposition because no individual pays a big cost (even though the collective costs are huge).  An individual farmer might make several thousand additional dollars.  An individual consumer pays a few dollars more.  No individual consumer has an incentive to spend to oppose the bill, but individual farmers do.  As the farm population has shrunk, it has become more concentrated and homogenous, and much more powerful as a result.

This is not the biggest policy disaster we face now, but it does demonstrate the dysfunction of our politics.  And no, it’s not the dysfunction that the Vilsacks and the other DC denizens routinely bewail: the inability to get things done.  In fact, getting things done is exactly the problem .

And what gets done is us.  Who gets milked to pay for the milk program? You do, sucker. …

WSJ Editors have more.

In praising Congress’s huge new tax increase, President Obama said Tuesday that “millionaires and billionaires” will finally “pay their fair share.” That is, unless you are a Nascar track owner, a wind-energy company or the owners of StarKist Tuna, among many others who managed to get their taxes reduced in Congress’s New Year celebration.

There’s plenty to lament about the capital and income tax hikes, but the bill’s seedier underside is the $40 billion or so in tax payoffs to every crony capitalist and special pleader with a lobbyist worth his million-dollar salary. Congress and the White House want everyone to ignore this corporate-welfare blowout, so allow us to shine a light on the merriment. …

… Thus Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow was able to retain an accelerated tax write-off for owners of Nascar tracks (cost: $78 million) to benefit the paupers who control the Michigan International Speedway. New Mexico’s Jeff Bingaman saved a tax credit for companies operating in American Samoa ($62 million), including a StarKist factory.

Distillers are able to drink to a $222 million rum tax rebate. Perhaps this will help to finance more of those fabulous Bacardi TV ads with all those beautiful rich people. Businesses located on Indian reservations will receive $222 million in accelerated depreciation. And there are breaks for railroads, “New York Liberty Zone” bonds and so much more.

But a special award goes to Chris Dodd, the former Senator who now roams Gucci Gulch lobbying for Hollywood’s movie studios. The Senate summary of his tax victory is worth quoting in full: “The bill extends for two years, through 2013, the provision that allows film and television producers to expense the first $15 million of production costs incurred in the United States ($20 million if the costs are incurred in economically depressed areas in the United States).”

You gotta love that “depressed areas” bit. The impoverished impresarios of Brentwood get an extra writeoff if they take their film crews into, say, deepest Flatbush. Is that because they have to pay extra to the caterers from Dean & DeLuca to make the trip? It sure can’t be because they hire the jobless locals for the production crew. Those are union jobs, mate, and don’t you forget it. …

… The great joke here is that Washington pretends to want to pass “comprehensive tax reform,” even as each year it adds more tax giveaways that distort the tax code and keep tax rates higher than they have to be. Even as he praised the bill full of this stuff, Mr. Obama called Tuesday night for “further reforms to our tax code so that the wealthiest corporations and individuals can’t take advantage of loopholes and deductions that aren’t available to most Americans.”

One of Mr. Obama’s political gifts is that he can sound so plausible describing the opposite of his real intentions.

The costs of all this are far greater than the estimates conjured by the Joint Tax Committee. They include slower economic growth from misallocated capital, lower revenues for the Treasury and thus more pressure to raise rates on everyone, and greater public cynicism that government mainly serves the powerful.

Republicans who are looking for a new populist message have one waiting here, and they could start by repudiating the corporate welfare in this New Year disgrace.

Even David Brooks sees the problem. Of course, since he has obamalove, he can’t see the empty suits who cause the problem. Brooks wants to blame the public.

Ultimately, we should blame the American voters. The average Medicare couple pays $109,000 into the program and gets $343,000 in benefits out, according to the Urban Institute. This is $234,000 in free money. Many voters have decided they like spending a lot on themselves and pushing costs onto their children and grandchildren. They have decided they like borrowing up to $1 trillion a year for tax credits, disability payments, defense contracts and the rest. They have found that the original Keynesian rationale for these deficits provides a perfect cover for permanent deficit-living. They have made it clear that they will destroy any politician who tries to stop them from cost-shifting in this way.

Most members of Congress are responding efficiently to the popular will. A large number of reactionary Democrats reject any measure to touch Medicare or other entitlement programs. A large number of impotent Republicans talk about reducing the debt, but are incapable of forging a deal that balances tax increases with spending cuts.

The events of the past few weeks demonstrate that these political pressures overwhelm the few realists looking for a more ambitious bargain. The country either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the burdens we are placing on our children. No coalition of leaders has successfully confronted the voters, and made them heedful of the ruin they are bringing upon the nation.

A Michael Walsh Corner post gets the nod because of this ‘graf.

… Naturally, Louis Michael Seidman is a graduate of Harvard Law, whence now seems to originate all our misery. (For a preview of the kind of misery heading our way, just look at these photos.) William F. Buckley, Jr., once famously said that he would rather be governed by the first few hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard, but in fact we are being governed by Harvard, from the Supreme Court on down; only at Harvard could Chief Justice John Roberts have learned the spineless sophistry that permitted him to rule in favor of Obamacare — a ruling that will live in infamy, assuming the U.S. survives Obamaism in any recognizable way. …