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Foreign Policy magazine points to Western corporations that have sold internet technology to Mid-East tyrants.

Pick a country, any country, touched by the Arab Spring, and chances are that Western technology has been used there to suppress pro-democracy movements. Even though this directly undermines U.S. efforts to promote democracy and Internet freedom in the Middle East and elsewhere, President Barack Obama’s administration has remained oddly silent about it. If the White House won’t act, it’s time for Congress to pick up the slack.

European companies have provided software to security services in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen to monitor email and voice communications. In Bahrain, dissidents were confronted by interrogators with intercepted email messages and were tortured. U.S. surveillance technology was reportedly provided to Egypt (from Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing) and Syria (from the Silicon Valley-based firm NetApp), though both companies deny knowledge of the sales.

The use of Western technologies to censor Internet content is even more widespread. Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, among others, have blocked access to content deemed undesirable by their governments by using U.S.-made SmartFilter products. Syria got hold of Internet-filtering devices from California-based Blue Coat without the company’s knowledge, despite the U.S. trade embargo on Syria. These devices were used to block websites of opposition groups and news about the anti-regime protests. Other countries, including Qatar, Kuwait, and Sudan, use Canadian or European technologies to filter content on a large scale. …

According to Andrew Malcolm, CA voters are beginning to choke on the cost of high-speed rail.

Let’s face it: Our president, the one who had so many outstanding parking tickets when he was just Barack Obama, has rail envy.

Just judging from the number of times he’s mentioned the high-speed rail system of China, which has one party rule so no problem with messy democracy stuff. Or bipartisanship, there being no bi- in Chinese politics, just uni-. Or the wonderfully modern airports that communist China has constructed that we should emulate with Obama’s newest stimulus spending ideas.

Well, it seems many Americans are not as enamored of China’s choo-choos as the president who spent much of his childhood living in Asia. Remember Florida’s new Gov. Rick Scott? He took one look at Obama’s $10 billion high-speedrail program and said, “It’s going to cost way more and we can’t afford it.” Joe Biden made fun of him for not having any vision.

Well, now it’s California’s turn. …

Jonathan Tobin thinks Teddy would have found Obama’s ideas as ignorant as we do.

… The great dilemma facing the nation is not the grinding poverty of 1910, when no safety net was available. It is the enormous debt that has been created by a system of entitlements that will bankrupt the nation. The middle class Obama says he wants to save will be crushed by that debt. But Obama has ridiculed proposals to reform the system and harps instead on raising taxes on the wealthy, a measure that will kill job creation while doing virtually nothing to fix the problem.

Roosevelt’s proposals in 1910 were an attempt to head off the coming of class warfare that he rightly believed would destroy American liberty if the choice before Americans were only that of J.P. Morgan’s worldview or that of leftist radicals. By contrast, Obama’s political agenda consists of precisely the sort of class war rhetoric TR despised. Obama and his cheering section in the mainstream press may think he is channeling the 26th president. But Roosevelt would have had no patience for either his economic strategies or his vision of America’s place in the world.

Mark Steyn thinks the words he used to dismiss Newt in a piece published 13 years ago are just as apt today.

Since Ramesh, Mona, Yuval & Co have got out the tire irons, I figured I might as well pile on. But then a reader from the Cayman Islands reminded me that I’d said pretty much everything I have to say about Newt in November 1998 — in the London Spectator, upon his resignation as speaker. For those Newtroids who huff that I must be in the tank for Mitt (that’s some tank), November 1998 is 13 years ago, when I’m not sure I’d even heard of Mitt Romney.

Anyway, back then, after a brisk trot through his collected Brainstorms-of-the-Week — “The Triangle of American Progress,” “The Four Great Truths,” “The Four Pillars of American Civilization,” “The Five Pillars of the 21st Century,” “The Nine Zones of Creativity,” “The Fourteen Steps to Renewing American Civilization,” The Thirty-Nine Steps to the Five Year Plan of the Six Flags of the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers of the Nine-Inch Nails of Renewing Civilizational Progress for 21st Century America, etc, I concluded:

“The Democrats demonised Newt as an extreme right-wing crazy. They were right — apart from the ‘extreme’ and ‘right-wing’, that is. Most of the above seem more like the burblings of a frustrated self-help guru than blueprints for conservative government. For example, Pillar No. 5 of the ‘Five Pillars of American Civilisation’ is: ‘Total quality management’. Unfortunately for Newt, the person who most needed a self-help manual was him — How to Win Friends and Influence People for a start. After last week’s election, Republicans have now embarked on the time-honoured ritual, well known to British Tories and Labour before them, of bickering over whether they did badly because they were too extreme or because they were too moderate. In Newt’s case, the answer is both. He spent the last year pre-emptively surrendering on anything of legislative consequence, but then, feeling bad at having abandoned another two or three of his ‘Fourteen Steps to Renewing American Civilisation’, he’d go on television and snarl at everybody in sight. . . . For Republicans it was the worst of all worlds: a lily-livered ninny whom everyone thinks is a ferocious right-wing bastard.”

That’s how it would go this time round. We’d wind up with a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and Alvin Tofler who canoodled on the sofa with Nancy Pelosi demanding Big Government climate-change conventional-wisdom punitive liberalism just as the rest of the planet was finally getting off the bandwagon . . . but the media would still insist on dusting off their 1994 “The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas” graphics.

A very thoughtful post from Yuval Levin comparing and contrasting Mitt and Newt.

What an odd pair of front runners Republicans appear to have ended up with. Not the usual conservative vs. moderate pairing, but two quite unusual political figures with remarkably similar policy and political profiles but remarkably different temperaments and dispositions.

Let me say first: I used to work for Newt Gingrich. In the last year of his speakership, I was a “staff assistant” in his congressional office.  I was 21 when I started there. No offense to anyone reading this who is now a staff assistant on the Hill, but that’s a very junior job—or at least it certainly was in my case: some policy research, some note-taking in meetings, some answering of phones, and the like. I didn’t spend all that much time with Gingrich (when I did, he was always very nice to me and to other junior staffers), and I don’t pretend to have learned much about him that you wouldn’t have learned from just following politics. So I offer my views as an observer of politics, not as any kind of expert on Gingrich.

What stands out about Romney and Gingrich, to me, is that they have in common a very unusual profile for a Republican politician. Both of them are fundamentally moderates: Very wonky Rockefeller Republicans who moved to the right over time as their party moved right and maybe as events persuaded them to move right, and they both still very much exhibit the technocratic countenance of the Rockefeller Republican—a program for every problem. Conservative humility about human nature and about the potential of technical solutions is not readily discernible in either one.

They’re also essentially in the same place politically—I can’t think of a single major issue on which Gingrich is more conservative than Romney, and with the possible exception of immigration (and perhaps Medicare reform, as I mention here, though it’s hard to be sure) I can’t think of one where Romney is more conservative. Substantively, their views are largely indistinguishable from one another. They’re part of a very broad consensus on policy among Republicans this year, which is one of the underreported stories of the year and is frankly in many ways a testament to Paul Ryan, who really defined the Republican agenda with his budget. The House Republican budget caused both Romney and Gingrich to take significantly more conservative positions on entitlement reform in particular than either one would otherwise have taken. …

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor calls our attention to a nifty beat down of the insufferable Bill Keller.

My colleague, economist and historian of Russia Paul Gregory, delivers a beatdown on former NYT editor Bill Keller for Keller’s attempt to define who is a real economist and who is a crank.  And I mean beatdown: make sure no children are present when you read it.

Keller’s views on economics are a pitch-perfect display of the insular Pauline-Kael-I-don’t-know-anybody-who-voted-for-Nixon worldview so characteristic of the Upper West Side.  Sadly, although Keller is not an economist and wouldn’t know good economics if it bit him where he sits (his head, apparently), he is joined in his narrowmindedness by Krugman and David Warsh, who have taken it upon themselves to read Hayek out of the respectable economics canon.   I can guarantee you, by the way, that Krugman has no prayer of being remembered and cited 40-75 years after the publication of his most important scholarly works, as Hayek is. Eat your heart out, Paul–teh Krugman, not Gregory.

The Keller-Krugman-Warsh effort to define respectable economics as “people who agree with Keller-Krugman-Warsh” is actually kind of pathetic and defensive.  It also brings to mind the frantic efforts of the climate clerisy to discredit and stifle contrary voices.  These efforts actually betray a rather acute insecurity.  An insecurity that is quite warranted, by the way, as Paul Gregory brutally points out.

And here is Paul Gregory’s piece from Forbes.

… Keller is particularly incensed that “shouting economists” claim that the Obama stimulus created no new jobs (He should say no net new jobs). After all,  Keller tells us that a Pulitzer prize winning fact-checking service and the  “still trustworthy” CBO prove that the stimulus “created or saved a couple of million jobs.” Case closed, but no, the rascally Republicans “just went on repeating the claim.”

Keller’s irritation sent me to the CBO study to check for myself.  Table 2 told me all I need to know. The CBO simply attached to the different categories of stimulus spending low and high multipliers “based on past experience.”  (A multiplier is the dollar increase in GDP for every dollar of stimulus spending.) Once the CBO plugged in positive multipliers, the positive effects on jobs was assured. The CBO “proof” therefore depended on its “assumptions,” not on any real facts. Most people appear to believe not the CBO but their “lying eyes” (to use Groucho’s term) when they see their jobs disappear.

I am not the first to notice this little trick, as Keller’s economics tutors would know. Stanford’s John Taylor concluded the CBO estimates are “wrong because they assume ‘multipliers’ for temporary one-time payments or tax changes far in excess of the basic “permanent income” or “life cycle” models (which we teach in Economics 1).” Nor do “they do not take account of the negative growth effects of expected future permanent increases in tax rates.” Keller’s tutors also failed to brief him on Harvard’s Robert Barro, who finds near-zero multipliers in his research. I guess distinguished economists like Taylor and Barro are poor practitioners of “mainstream economic science.”

Keller is particularly incensed that House Speaker John Boehner published a list of 132 economists who endorse Republican spending cuts, tax cuts and deregulation that “will do more to boost private-sector job growth in America in both the near-term and long-term than the ‘stimulus’ spending approach favored by President Obama.”

Keller finds this outrage easy to discredit. The signers (myself included) are “academics from off-the-beaten-path colleges,” bloggers, and economists from “devoutly libertarian think tanks.” As one of Keller’s “lesser economists,” I should enjoy my “moment of fame as witnesses on behalf of dubious claims.” Although distinguished economists from top ten departments are among the 132 signers, the Ivy Leagues are indeed underrepresented, and we regular folks should know who really counts in elite circles. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Fallon: Obama had three New York City fundraisers for his reelection campaign the other night. Seriously? How about holding a fundraiser to raise money for the United States?

Conan: A new study debunks the idea that men think about sex every seven seconds. The study says men only think about sex once every 50 minutes. It was conducted during a taping of The View.

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David Harsanyi was listening to the president’s speech in Kansas yesterday.

… Smart people can grouse all they want about the supposed zealotry of the tea party or the conservative presidential field (and sometimes, they might be right), but Obama‘s mimicking Teddy Roosevelt’s end-of-career hard left turn tells us a lot about the president’s worldview. In his speech in Osawatomie, Kan., Obama dropped almost all pretenses and made the progressive case against an American free market system, which he called “a simple theory … one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. … And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work.”

Obama, after all, is such a towering economic mind that in Osawatomie, he once again blamed ATMs (and the Internets) for job losses. This is a man we can trust. “Less productivity! More jobs!”

That‘s not to say capital isn’t useful occasionally, of course. Not long ago, Obama hosted a $38,000-a-plate fundraiser for wealthy Manhattanites. The president — with the Democratic National Committee — has hauled in more cash from rent-seeking financial-sector companies than all Republican candidates combined. This president has supported every big-business bailout with taxpayers’ money, even though he claims they shouldn’t be on the “hook for Wall Street’s mistakes.”

But it is refreshing to hear Obama come out and give us a clear picture of this country in all its ugly class-conscious, unjust, menacing glory rather than veil his arguments with any of that soothing rhetoric that got him elected last time. It’s time, my friends, for a new square deal.

Tony Blankley says to the administration, “Nice job in Egypt.” 

One of the nice things about human history is that no matter how much people or their leaders misjudge events and make a hash of things, within a few centuries, the debris is cleared away and we can have a another go at getting things right.

Yes, I am thinking about the Middle East and the latest mix-up by the experts – their assessment just a few months ago of the nature of the Arab Spring and its democracy movement. Back in the spring, leading experts – from the Obama administration to the neoconservatives on the right to the major liberal media to most of the academic area specialists – were overwhelmingly predicting that all those great secular, liberal, college-educated kids with their iPhones in Tahrir Square represented the new Egypt and would bring all their wonderful values to the revolution. It was primarily us cranky right-wingers who have been writing about radical Islamic politics (and, of course, the Israelis, who can’t afford to get it wrong on Muslim political habits) who warned that this was all going to end in the rise in still-ancient Egypt of radical Islamist, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti American, anti-Western governance.

So our government – as I said, cheered on by neoconservatives as well as liberals – undercut Hosni Mubarak’s regime and told us not to worry about the Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood was a group of really old, tired men who were no longer really radical and had been propped up just to provide the regime with an opposition punching bag. Armed with their social-media devices, the kids would run rings around the sorry excuse for Islamists and deliver real democracy.

Hadn’t any of those experts been to Egypt? There are not a lot of secular liberals hanging out – even at the universities – let alone in the thousands of villages and urban slums. Who the heck did the experts think those angry, bearded men were who were roaming around glaring at Westerners and Muslim women who dared to walk on the street? I saw them back in the 1960s and ‘70s, and they were scary even then. …

Caroline Glick says the U. S., under Obama, is no longer an Israeli ally.

With vote tallies in for Egypt’s first round of parliamentary elections in it is abundantly clear that Egypt is on the fast track to becoming a totalitarian Islamic state. The first round of voting took place in Egypt’s most liberal, cosmopolitan cities. And still the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists received more than 60 percent of the vote. Run-off elections for 52 seats will by all estimates increase their representation.

And then in the months to come, Egyptian voters in the far more Islamist Nile Delta and Sinai will undoubtedly provide the forces of jihadist Islam with an even greater margin of victory.

Until the US-supported overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt served as the anchor of the US alliance system in the Arab world. The Egyptian military is US-armed, US-trained and US-financed.

The Suez Canal is among the most vital waterways in the world for the US Navy and the global economy.

Due to Mubarak’s commitment to stemming the tide of jihadist forces that threatened his regime, under his rule Egypt served as a major counter-terror hub in the US-led war against international jihad.

GIVEN EGYPT’S singular importance to US strategic interests in the Arab world, the Obama administration’s response to the calamitous election results has been shocking. Rather than sound the alarm bells, US President Barack Obama has celebrated the results as a victory for “democracy.”

Rather than warn Egypt that it will face severe consequences if it completes its Islamist transformation, the Obama administration has turned its guns on the first country that will pay a price for Egypt’s Islamic revolution: Israel.

Speaking at the annual policy conclave in Washington sponsored by the leftist Brookings Institute’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hammered Israel, the only real ally the US has left in the Middle East after Mubarak’s fall. Clinton felt it necessary — in the name of democracy — to embrace the positions of Israel’s radical Left against the majority of Israelis. …

The Economist writes on the man who envisioned the internet.

“FROM its very beginnings, the software industry has suffered from having too many engineers,” says David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University. “There are too many people who love computers and too few who are impatient with them.” He blames his fellow technologists for making computers too difficult for non-specialists to use effectively. “The industry doesn’t grasp the fundamental lack of sympathy between, conservatively, at least half the population and the software they’re using.” But what about the late Steve Jobs of Apple, who was obsessed with building elegant and easy to use products? He and Dr Gelernter ought to have been natural allies. One of the many oddities of Dr Gelernter’s unusual career, however, is that they ended up as adversaries instead.

More than two decades ago, Dr Gelernter foresaw how computers would be woven into the fabric of everyday life. In his book “Mirror Worlds”, published in 1991, he accurately described websites, blogging, virtual reality, streaming video, tablet computers, e-books, search engines and internet telephony. More importantly, he anticipated the consequences all this would have on the nature of social interaction, describing distributed online communities that work just as Facebook and Twitter do today.

“Mirror Worlds aren’t mere information services. They are places you can ‘stroll around’, meeting and electronically conversing with friends or random passers-by. If you find something you don’t like, post a note; you’ll soon discover whether anyone agrees with you,” he wrote. “I can’t be personal friends with all the people who run my local world any longer, but via Mirror Worlds we can be impersonal friends. There will be freer, easier, more improvisational communications, more like neighbourhood chatting and less like typical mail and phone calls. Where someone is or when he is available won’t matter. Mirror Worlds will rub your nose in the big picture and society may be subtly but deeply different as a result.” …

More on David Gelernter from Holman Jenkins at WSJ.

Is it David Gelernter’s time to be rich?

Mr. Gelernter, a professor at Yale, is already destined to be remembered as the man nearly murdered by the Unabomber. After a painful recovery, he blossomed as a conservative social critic and continued to pursue his personal vocation of painting. He’s also written books on subjects as diverse as the future of technology, the meaning of Judaism, and the 1939 World’s Fair. Today, the still-revolutionary opportunities of computing are again taking a central place among his varied interests.

To him, Facebook and Twitter are partial fulfillment of something he’s been writing about and thinking about since the early 1990s, an evolution of the Internet into a form far less chaotic and more useful than today’s. His preferred term is “lifestream.” Whatever you call it, the cybersphere as it now exists is due for an overhaul.

Prophecy comes naturally to Mr. Gelernter. He is credited in some circles for having coined the term “the cloud.” But what preoccupies him is the inadequacy of our conventions and practices for organizing the wildly expanding array of digital objects that populate the cybersphere.

On the desktop, he says, “The file system was already broken in the early ’90s, the hierarchical system. Namespaces were saturated. I was sick of making up names like nsfproposal319. The file system got too crowded and people started crowding their desktops with icons.” …

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Charles Krauthammer says it has come down to Mitt v. Newt.

It’s Iowa minus 32 days, and barring yet another resurrection (or event of similar improbability), it’s Mitt Romney vs. Newt Gingrich. In a match race, here’s the scorecard:

Romney has managed to weather the debates unscathed. However, the brittleness he showed when confronted with the kind of informed follow-up questions that Bret Baier tossed his way Tuesday on Fox’s “Special Report” — the kind of scrutiny one doesn’t get in multiplayer debates — suggests that Romney may become increasingly vulnerable as the field narrows.

Moreover, Romney has profited from the temporary rise and spontaneous combustion of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. No exertion required on Romney’s part.

Enter Gingrich, the current vessel for anti-Romney forces — and likely the final one. Gingrich’s obvious weakness is a history of flip-flops, zigzags and mind changes even more extensive than Romney’s — on climate change, the health-care mandate, cap-and-trade, Libya, the Ryan Medicare plan, etc.

The list is long. But what distinguishes Gingrich from Romney — and mitigates these heresies in the eyes of conservatives — is that he authored a historic conservative triumph: the 1994 Republican takeover of the House after 40 years of Democratic control.

Which means that Gingrich’s apostasies are seen as deviations from his conservative core — while Romney’s flip-flops are seen as deviations from .?.?. nothing. Romney has no signature achievement, legislation or manifesto that identifies him as a core conservative. …

Bill Kristol explains what we don’t know about the GOP race, and why it is good we don’t know.

… Confident pundits who treat the choice among them as an open-and-shut matter are behaving as .??.??. mere pundits. As are those who confidently proclaim which of the candidates is “most electable.” For example, right now, Romney seems a stronger general election candidate than Gingrich. That’s what most of the polling so far would suggest. But these polls don’t capture the implications of the last couple of weeks of the campaign, which suggest that Gingrich can make the case for himself to heretofore unconvinced voters in a way Romney cannot. Admittedly, these are mostly Republican voters Newt has been charming. Can he similarly win over independents, or disaffected Democrats?

We don’t know. We do suspect, however, that the mainstream media’s view—and conservative elites’ view—of who the swing voters are is somewhat distorted. Every journalist knows upper-middle-class, suburban, socially moderate independents on the East and West Coasts who (for now, at least) would be more likely to vote Republican if the nominee were Romney rather than Gingrich. Journalists do not tend to know the lower-middle-class, non-college-educated, churchgoing voters of exurban Tampa, or the working-class Reagan Democrats of Toledo, who are also swing voters, and who might prefer Gingrich. In any case, for now we don’t really know which of the two frontrunners—or, for that matter, which of the other candidates—would have a better chance to win. And that’s without factoring in possible third and fourth parties, which could well appear on the scene in 2012 and would have different kinds of appeal depending on the identity of the GOP nominee.

We do not know. But if it’s not given to us mere humans to know, we are capable of learning. We’re a month away from the Iowa caucus. There are three months before 90 percent of the Republicans in the nation begin voting, and even then, further information will be produced and processed as the primaries unfold. The Democrats are stuck with their nominee—a failed and unpopular president. Republicans, by contrast, are free to choose. They are in no way required to rush to judgment. And they need not defer to pundits whose “station, office, and dignity” impel them to claim to know what they do not know.

We need to spend some time on last week’s unemployment numbers. David Harsanyi is first.

… What would the unemployment rate look like if we had the same level of active workers as we did when the recession first struck? The American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis tweeted: “If labor force size was same as Oct., U-3 unemployment rate would be 8.9%; same as when Obama took office, 11%”. Eleven percent.

Apologies for my cynicism, but though the unemployment rate does not offer us the full story, politically speaking, it is an important political ingredient that could help President Obama — the man who helped turn a recession into a new state of normal – win a deeply undeserved second term for a couple of reasons:

1- Unemployment rates will decline and the economy will look a lot healthier than it actually is to many less- informed voters. Everyday Americans don’t have the time to parse unemployment statistics – they just want to see the right trajectory. In the end, though, none of the underlying fundamental problems have changed.

2- The more Americans drop out of the work force the more Americans will be tied to some form of government dependency, the lifeblood of progressive politics. We are already experiencing record number of citizens relying on government, and while progressives might find dependency moral and beneficial, it is a sure sign of an ailing nation. …

James Pethokoukis with seven reasons it is better, but still terrible.

1. The red flag here is the sharp drop in the size of the labor force versus October. The participation rate fell from an already low 64.2 percent to 64.0 percent. In a strong jobs recovery, that number should be rising as more people look for work. If the labor force participation rate were back at its January 2009 level, the U-3 rate would be 11.0 percent.

2. As it is, the broader U-6 rate — which includes part timers who wish they were full timers — is still a sky-high 15.6 percent, down from 16.2 percent last month.

3.  The broadest measure of employment is the employment/population ratio and it rose to 58.5 percent from 58.4 percent. But as MKM Partners notes: “The employment/population ratio has averaged 58.4 since December 2009, meaning there has essentially been no real progress on employment in two years’ time. …  In other words, we are not growing fast enough to reduce the so-called output gap/labor market slack.”

4.  The workweek was flat, at 34.3 hours in November, but aggregate hours worked actually fell 0.1 percent  after two months of relatively strong gains. (MKM)

Peter Wehner says the drop in labor force participation is disturbing.

On the surface, the new jobs report, which shows the unemployment rate dropping to 8.6 percent from 9.0 percent the previous month, is good news. Below the surface, however, the news is actually quite disturbing.

According to the Department of Labor, 120,000 jobs were created last month, which is an unusually low figure for what is supposed to be a recovery. But what really stands out about the DOL report is that 315,000 people dropped out of the labor market in November. To put it another way: The number of people dropping out of the labor force in November was more than two-and-a-half times as large as those joining the labor force. In fact, the labor participation rate fell to 64 percent from 64.2 percent in October – nearly matching the lowest figure we’ve seen (63.9 percent in July) since the early 1980s. The long-term unemployed (27 weeks or more) increased as well, even as the average hourly earnings went down. (Wages are up by only 1.8 percent over the past 12 months while overall inflation increased by 3.6 percent.)

What this means is that we’ve got a very weak labor market.

Often a decreasing unemployment rate is a sign of economic strength. In this case it’s a sign of economic weakness. And all the political spin in the world won’t change that.

Pethokoukis looks deeper at political implications.

Despite a sharp drop in the U-3 unemployment rate last month to 8.6 percent from 9.0 percent, there was no triumphalism coming from the Obama White House this morning. As economic adviser Alan Krueger wrote on the White House blog about the November employment numbers:

Today’s employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but the pace of improvement is still not fast enough given the large job losses from the recession that began in December 2007. … The monthly employment and unemployment numbers are volatile and employment estimates are subject to substantial revision. Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.

Sobriety is certainly called for when the main reason the unemployment rate dropped so much was due to a shrinking labor force. And the broader U-6 rate, which includes part timers who wished they were full timers, is at a stomach-churning 15.6 percent. (Also recall that the unemployment rate during the last pre-Great Recession year averaged 4.6 percent.) But at least jobs are being created and the unemployment rate is falling.

So politically the November jobs report is a net plus for the Obama reelection effort. Or is it? …

Margaret Wente says suppression of debate is a disaster for climate science.

Environment Minister Peter Kent has done us all a favour by stating the obvious: Canada has no intention of signing on to a new Kyoto deal. So long as, the world’s biggest emitters want nothing to do with it, we’d be crazy if we did. Mr. Kent also refuses to be guilted out by climate reparations, a loony and unworkable scheme to extort hundreds of billions of dollars from rich countries and send it all to countries such as China. Such candour from Ottawa is a refreshing change from the usual hypocrisy, which began the moment Jean Chrétien committed Canada to the first Kyoto Protocol back in 1998.

Yet even though a global climate deal is now a fantasy, the rhetoric remains as overheated as ever. Without a deal, we’re told, the seas will rise, the glaciers will melt, the hurricanes will blow, the forest fires will rage and the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will do their awful work.

Or maybe not. As Roger Pielke Jr., one of the saner voices on the climate scene, points out, the hurricanes have failed to blow since Hurricane Wilma hit the Gulf Coast back in 2005. Despite the dire predictions of the experts, the U.S. has now experienced its longest period free of major hurricanes since 1906.

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Perhaps this election will have a brush with “Who lost Egypt?”  Mark Steyn has the story.

… The short 90-year history of independent Egypt is that it got worse. Mubarak’s Egypt was worse than King Farouk’s Egypt, and what follows from last week’s vote will be worse still. If you’re a Westernized urban woman, a Coptic Christian or an Israeli diplomat with the goons pounding the doors of your embassy, you already know that. The Kingdom of Egypt in the three decades before the 1952 coup was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it was closer to a free-ish pluralist society than anything in the years since. In 1923, its Finance Minister was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a Member of Parliament, and a Jew. Couldn’t happen today. Mr. Cattaui’s grandson wrote to me recently from France, where the family now lives. In the unlikely event the forthcoming Muslim Brotherhood government wish to appoint a Jew as Finance Minister, there are very few left available. Indeed, Jews are so thin on the ground that those youthful idealists in Tahrir Square looking for Jews to club to a pulp have been forced to make do with sexually assaulting hapless gentiles like the CBS News reporter Lara Logan. It doesn’t fit the narrative, so even Miss Logan’s network colleagues preferred to look away. We have got used to the fact that Egypt is now a land without Jews. Soon it will be a land without Copts. We’ll get used to that, too.

Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact two decades ago we have lived in a supposedly “unipolar” world. Yet somehow it doesn’t seem like that, does it? The term Facebook Revolution presumes that technology marches in the cause of modernity. But in Khartoum a few years ago a citywide panic that shaking hands with infidels caused your penis to vanish was spread by text messaging. In London, young Muslim men used their cell phones to share Islamist snuff videos of Westerners being beheaded in Iraq. In les banlieues of France, satellite TV and the Internet enable third-generation Muslims to lead ever more dis-assimilated, segregated lives, immersed in an electronic pan-Islamic culture, to a degree that would have been impossible for their grandparents. To assume that Western technology in and of itself advances the cause of Western views on liberty or women’s rights or gay rights is delusional. …

Writing in Hot Air, Tina Korbe posts on the Cooperman open letter to the president.

Dear Mr. President,

It is with a great sense of disappointment that I write this. Like many others, I hoped that your election would bring a salutary change of direction to the country, despite what more than a few feared was an overly aggressive social agenda. And I cannot credibly blame you for the economic mess that you inherited, even if the policy response on your watch has been profligate and largely ineffectual. (You did not, after all, invent TARP.) I understand that when surrounded by cries of “the end of the world as we know it is nigh”, even the strongest of minds may have a tendency to shoot first and aim later in a well-intended effort to stave off the predicted apocalypse.

But what I can justifiably hold you accountable for is you and your minions’ role in setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us that smacks of what so many have characterized as “class warfare”. Whether this reflects your principled belief that the eternal divide between the haves and have-nots is at the root of all the evils that afflict our society or just a cynical, populist appeal to his base by a president struggling in the polls is of little importance. What does matter is that the divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them. It is a gulf that is at once counterproductive and freighted with dangerous historical precedents. …

Jennifer Rubin asks if Gingrich was a lobbyist.

Mitt Romney has finally begun to engage Newt Gingrich. Yesterday, he went after Gingrich, if not by name, by attacking him as a creature of Washington. The timing couldn’t have been better for Romney.

Today, the New York Times has a front-page piece documenting Gingrich’s activities, which by any reasonable person’s definition, constitute lobbying. This brings into focus the hypocrisy that is at the core of Gingrich’s personality. His view of himself (Churchillian, ”transformational,” “historian”) doesn’t match his own track record, which is a history of milking the Washington lobbyist-legislator connection for great personal wealth.

Federal law defines lobbying activity as “Lobbying contacts and any efforts in support of such contacts, including preparation or planning activities, research and other background work that is intended, at the time of its preparation, for use in contacts and coordination with the lobbying activities of others.” And a lobbying contact is “Any oral, written or electronic communication to a covered official that is made on behalf of a client with regard to” congressmen and senators, among others.

Even before the Times story, there was ample evidence suggesting that Gingrich was engaged in this sort of lobbying activities. …

Similar commentary from Contentions’ Jonathan Tobin.

In the years between his stepping down as Speaker of the House and running for the presidency, Newt Gingrich became a wealthy man. While no one I am aware of has alleged that he did anything illegal or even improper in amassing his fortune, as a feature in today’s New York Times makes clear, his attempt to portray his Center for Health Transformation as a think tank rather than a lobbying firm is somewhat disingenuous.

Gingrich was not registered as a lobbyist, and his work on behalf of the Center’s “members” — companies that paid up to $200,000 to belong to the group in exchange for access to Gingrich and for his help in promoting their efforts — did not conform to the legal definition of lobbying in that he did not specifically write bills or advocate on behalf of legislation that would benefit his clients. But as the article makes clear, much of what he did do appears to be indistinguishable from the sort of tasks lobbyists routinely perform. …

Streetwise Professor highlights the irony of Russians once again aligned with the American left.

… Hence, it is doing what comes naturally to Sovoks: propaganda.  It is pulling out all the stops to discredit shale and fracking, not just in Europe, but elsewhere.  The next time you hear anti-fracking flacking, it’s fair to ask who’s paying for it. No, not all the opposition is from Gazprom: some is from the well-intentioned, some from those who reflexively oppose any kind of energy production.  But knowing the way Gazprom works, no doubt some Gazprom money is funding anti-fracking lobbying, politicking, and information campaigns

But the enviro angle is really just too much.  Sorry, but lectures on environmentalism from the direct descendent of the Soviet Ministry of Gas (the USSR being history’s largest environmental catastrophe), and a company with a pretty poor environmental record to boot (witness the huge problems with leakage from Gazprom pipelines), are enough to challenge the strongest gag reflex.

But the fact that the company feels compelled to engage in such risible hypocrisy is actually encouraging news.  The more Gazprom execs squeal about shale, the more you know that it is a threat to them.

So yet again: Gazprom gripes–music to my ears.

True to form, the federal government has slowed down fracking, this time in Ohio. Seth Mandel who is running for the Ohio Senate seat writes for WSJ.

On the same day two weeks ago, Ohioans saw the following diverging headlines:

In the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Republic Steel to add 450 jobs to Lorain as oil and gas exploration booms.” This story reported Republic Steel’s announcement of new jobs in one of Ohio’s hardest-hit counties, to manufacture products in support of the state’s growing oil and gas industry.

In the Marion Star: “Ohio national forest halts sale of drilling rights.” This story reported the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s decision to suspend the auction of leases for oil and gas drilling on more than 3,000 acres of federal land in the most economically depressed region of Ohio.

You might be asking yourself: Why would Washington block drilling in Ohio at the same time that Ohio manufacturers are adding jobs to support the state’s growing oil and gas exploration? Thousands of middle-class families and out-of-work Ohioans are asking that same question. …

Tony Blankley reviews a new China book.

A just-released book, “Bowing to Beijing” by Brett M. Decker and William C. Triplett II, will change forever the way you think about China – even if, like me, you already have the deepest worries about the Chinese threat. As I opened the book, I was expecting to find many useful examples of Chinese military and industrial efforts to get the better of the United States and the West.

Indeed, there are 100 pages of examples of the most remorseless Chinese successes at stealing the military and industrial secrets of the West and converting them into a growing menace – soon to be a leviathan – bent on domination and defeat of America. The authors itemize the sheer unprecedented magnitude of this effort. But the opening chapters deal with human rights abuses, and my first thought as I started reading was that I wanted to get right to the military and industrial examples.

But the authors were right to lead with 50 pages itemizing in grisly detail Chinese human rights abuses – for the profound reason that after reading those first 50 pages, the reader will be impassioned to resist Chinese domination not only on behalf of American interests, but for the sake of humanity.

Many people think America is in decline and mentally acquiesce to the thought that the rise of China is inevitable. Those 50 pages will stiffen your resolve to be part of the struggle never to let such a malignancy spread to the rest of the world – let alone to America. One of the authors, Brett M. Decker, is a friend – and I have never been more proud of his (and his co-author’s) accomplishment of providing such a deep moral vision in this carefully factual book. …

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David Brooks, writing on the spirit of enterprise, graces our pages for the first time in months.

Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich? It’s not primarily because they possess natural resources — many nations have those. It’s primarily because of habits, values and social capital.

It’s because many people in these countries, as Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.

People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not. Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness.

This ethos is not an immutable genetic property, which can blithely be taken for granted. It’s a precious social construct, which can be undermined and degraded.

Right now, this ethos is being undermined from all directions. People see lobbyists diverting money on the basis of connections; they see traders making millions off of short-term manipulations; they see governments stealing money from future generations to reward current voters.

The result is a crisis of legitimacy. The game is rigged. Social trust shrivels. Effort is no longer worth it. The prosperity machine winds down.

Yet the assault on these values continues, especially in Europe. …

Mohamed ElBaradei who headed up the UN atomic agency did his best to defeat Bush in 2004 by leaking false compromising documents to both the NY Times and 60 minutes just one week before the election. (Here’s a contemporaneous account from one of National Review’s blogs – The Kerry Spot.) For that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. He also maintained for years that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons. Now we learn, from his own agency, he was wrong. Claudia Rosett wonders if the Nobel committee should seek a return of the prize.

Since Mohamed ElBaradei retired from leadership of the International Atomic Energy Agency, at the end of 2009, the IAEA has made great strides toward an honest assessment of an Iranian nuclear program that is obviously hell bent on developing nuclear weapons. On Nov. 8, ElBaradei’s successor, Japan’s Yukiya Amano, delivered a devastating report to the IAEA board of governors. It details abundant signs that for years Iran has been working not only toward a supply of enriched uranium that could fuel nuclear warheads, but also on detonators, on missiles to deliver them, and on preparations for a nuclear test — in sum, widely sourced and credible information gathered by the IAEA “indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.”

All of which ought to be mortally embarrassing to ElBaradei, who, together with the IAEA that he ran, collected a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for “their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way.” Even in 2005, this was a farce. In the face of alarming signs that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, ElBaradei down-played information he evidently had, leading to an official farewell in 2009, in which he visited Iran and –speaking from Iran — stressed that the IAEA had “no concrete proof that there is an ongoing weapons program in Iran,” and reassured Iran’s rulers that the IAEA did not view their missile program as “nuclear-related.”  He added that in his post-IAEA capacity as a private citizen, he hoped to return often to Iran: “I would be very happy to come here as many times as I can.” …

New Editor’s Tom Elia posts on the life and career of Barney Frank.

All other criticisms of Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) aside, however valid they may or may not be, Barney Frank is really a poster boy for what is wrong with our government: that is, professional lives spent in practically nothing but government.

From about 1968-1972 Frank was first an aide to the mayor of Boston and then a US congressional aide; from 1972-1980, he was a Massachusetts state representative; and from 1980 until now he has been a representative in the US House. For more than 40 years, from the time he was 28 until now, Frank has been involved in government.

How is that for a ‘breadth of experience’? How does Frank’s lack of a broad and varied experience — like so, so many in our political leadership — actually benefit this country?

No wonder the policies he advocated seemed so foreign to so many, and in the end, were frankly just so goddamned piss-poor.

More on our leader’s lives from Al Davis’ blog at WSJ. 

People who say Washington should be run like a business don’t realize that it is a business.

First, you pretend you’re in it for the people, or America, or some nonsensical ideology. Then you get elected. Then you chase money.

Remember, you are not a lying, self-dealing scoundrel, you are a bold entrepreneur, entitled to speaker’s fees, consulting contracts, and insider stock and real-estate deals. And if you end up taking a spin through the revolving door, you can be a highly paid lobbyist one minute and America’s greatest hope the next.

The GOP’s Newt Gingrich, now leading in the polls, denied last week that he ever lobbied for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One of his Republican challengers, Michele Bachmann, called it “shilling.”

Over the past decade, Mr. Gingrich reportedly bagged $1.6 million from the government-seized mortgage giants that Mr. Gingrich would tell you contributed mightily to America’s decline and its $15 trillion worth of debt. Mr. Gingrich says the money was for his work as “a historian.” …

Andrew Malcolm peers into Joe Biden’s future.

… On one level, keeping Joe makes sense. He’s tall. Genial. He’s prone to gaffes and calling Republicans “terrorists.” But he’s generally obedient and good for laughs. Seemingly harmless. Abraham Lincoln did it during the Civil War, but a modern incumbent president seeking reelection hasn’t dumped his VP in 67 years. It just looks messy.

But it’s a long time until next August in Charlotte. The economy’s not likely to surge, regardless of this morning’s jobs numbers. So, neither is approval of the O-B administration.

Come next summer the Chicago Gang could decide it needs a real game-changer on the ticket — an Hispanic, a woman, a Westerner. Someone who brings more than Delaware’s whopping three electoral votes to a table that needs 270.

And Joe would be advised in a Windy City kind of way how much he wanted to spend more time with his family after four decades of Washington service.

John Steele Gordon notes India has allowed big box stores and hopes New York City will catch up.

The economic revolution in India continued this week, when the cabinet voted to allow in big box stores such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot?.

This is a major change, as Indian retail has long been dominated by an endless number of mom-and-pop stores. Indeed India has one of the highest densities of stores to people in the world, with one store for about every ten people. With each store doing only a tiny business, economies of scale are impossible and prices are high. The distribution network behind these stores is primitive, inefficient, and causes much spoilage, which again assures high prices.

There are, of course, restrictions. Foreign firms will need domestic partners who will have 49 percent ownership and the stores can be located only in cities with a population of at least 1 million. But India has an astonishing 51 cities with more than a million people (the U.S. has nine). …

… Now, if only New York City would follow India’s example and allow its citizens to enjoy lower prices, more choice, and higher quality, it might aspire to first-world status as well.

Andrew Ferguson reports on frauds at the intersection of journalism and the academy.  

Lots of cultural writing these days, in books and magazines and newspapers, relies on the so-called Chump Effect. The Effect is defined by its discoverer, me, as the eagerness of laymen and journalists to swallow whole the claims made by social scientists. Entire journalistic enterprises, whole books from cover to cover, would simply collapse into dust if even a smidgen of skepticism were summoned whenever we read that “scientists say” or “a new study finds” or “research shows” or “data suggest.” Most such claims of social science, we would soon find, fall into one of three categories: the trivial, the dubious, or the flatly untrue. 

A rather extreme example of this third option emerged last month when an internationally renowned social psychologist, Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, was proved to be a fraud. No jokes, please: This social psychologist is a fraud in the literal, perhaps criminal, and not merely figurative, sense. An investigative committee concluded that Stapel had falsified data in at least “several dozen” of the nearly 150 papers he had published in his extremely prolific career. 

Perhaps “falsified” is too mild a word. Stapel didn’t just tweak and twist numbers, he made stuff up. With his colleagues, Science Insider reported, “he would discuss in detail experimental designs, including drafting questionnaires, and would then claim to conduct the experiments at high schools and universities with which he had special arrangements. The experiments, however, never took place.” Questionnaires are the mother’s milk of social science, given (most often) to collections of students who are easily accessible to the scientist. After being rewarded with course credits or money, the students go on to serve as proxies for humanity in general, as the scientist draws from their questionnaires large conclusions about the way human nature compels us, all of us, to think and act. 

The conclusions that Stapel drew were large indeed. One thing he liked to demonstrate in his studies was the exploitive nature of democratic capitalism. Last year, the New York Times reported on a typical Stapel study, called “The Self-Activation Effect of Advertisements.” It proved that advertising for cosmetics and fancy shoes “makes women feel worse about themselves,” as the Times put it. …

… The experiments are preposterous. You’d have to be a highly trained social psychologist, or a journalist, to think otherwise. Just for starters, the experiments can never be repeated or their results tested under controlled conditions. The influence of a hundred different variables is impossible to record. The first group of passengers may have little in common with the second group. The groups were too small to yield statistically significant results. The questionnaire is hopelessly imprecise, and so are the measures of racism and homophobia. The notions of “disorder” and “stereotype” are arbitrary—and so on and so on. 

Yet the allure of “science” is too strong for our journalists to resist: all those numbers, those equations, those fancy names (say it twice: the Self-Activation Effect), all those experts with Ph.D.’s! 

To their credit, the Stapel scandal has moved a few social psychologists to self-reflection. They note the unhealthy relationship between social psychologists and the journalists who bring them attention—each using the other to fill a professional need. “Psychology,” one methodologist told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “has become addicted to surprising, counter-intuitive findings that catch the news media’s eye.” 

That’s a scandal, all right. Stapel’s professional treachery is a scandal, too. But the biggest scandal is that the chumps took him seriously in the first place.

The best part of today’s Pickings is the story of the “Migrant Mother” – the iconic depression era picture by Dorothy Lange of a migrant woman and her children. You’ll be pleased with how it all worked out. The story was in James Altucher’s blog.

Last night I was on CNBC’s Fast Money. Everyone seems to want to talk about the impending Great Depression: Europe fails, contagion spreads it to here, all of our banks fail, everyone loses their jobs, blah, blah, blah. The world feels like it’s ending.

But it’s not. I listed my reasons why. I won’t list them again here. It’s not important. Innovation is happening. The economy is growing. And Europe is not going to disappear.

Look at the above photograph. That’s when the world was ending. But it wasn’t ending even then.

Realist photography is an interesting art form as it doesn’t seek to “create” but rather to document intensity exactly as it is, without embellishment. Dorothea Lange took the above photograph called, “Migrant Mother” which became one of the most iconic photographs documenting the dustbowl era during the Great Depression. Lange’s life underlines several themes that I try to cover throughout this blog:

A) you don’t need a formal education to become a huge success at a field you are passionate about. Lange didn’t go to college (as was more common then) and trained herself in her style of  photography.

B) you don’t need anyone’s approval to fail or to succeed. her mother wanted her to be a teacher. When Lange tried to teach, all of the fifth graders climbed out the window and went to play in the yard. So Lange quit and became a photographer. …

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BBC News Magazine reports on two Holocaust survivors.

Two remarkable women living hundreds of miles apart were fortunate enough to survive the Holocaust – one became a famous pianist, the other fought with Tito’s Partisans.

Jamila Kolonomos leafs slowly through the ageing photographs, her finger tracing the outline of her family members.

“My mother Estef, my father Isaac,” she begins, moving through them slowly. “Then my brothers and sisters.”

She goes on, naming all 18 of her relatives killed in the Holocaust.

“I was the only one not taken. I didn’t even say goodbye to them,” she muses, grappling with the memories.

Jamila Kolonomos is one of the few Jews still remaining in Macedonia – a country that lost 98% of its Jewish population, the highest proportion anywhere in the world. I stopped off at her house in Skopje on the way to the city’s new Holocaust museum.

At 89 years old, she is one of the few who remembers the deportation of the Macedonian Jews, sent by the occupying Bulgarian forces to the Nazi German death camp at Treblinka in Poland.

The Economist on the chances for the Euro.

EVEN as the euro zone hurtles towards a crash, most people are assuming that, in the end, European leaders will do whatever it takes to save the single currency. That is because the consequences of the euro’s destruction are so catastrophic that no sensible policymaker could stand by and let it happen.

A euro break-up would cause a global bust worse even than the one in 2008-09. The world’s most financially integrated region would be ripped apart by defaults, bank failures and the imposition of capital controls (see article). The euro zone could shatter into different pieces, or a large block in the north and a fragmented south. Amid the recriminations and broken treaties after the failure of the European Union’s biggest economic project, wild currency swings between those in the core and those in the periphery would almost certainly bring the single market to a shuddering halt. The survival of the EU itself would be in doubt.

Yet the threat of a disaster does not always stop it from happening. The chances of the euro zone being smashed apart have risen alarmingly, thanks to financial panic, a rapidly weakening economic outlook and pigheaded brinkmanship. The odds of a safe landing are dwindling fast. …

John Tamny gives a look at one side of the 1%.

The rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement has brought with it a renewed emphasis on the impoverishing notion of envy. To the Occupiers, along with much of the political class, society’s economic rules favor the top 1 percent at the certain expense of the other 99.

Great rhetoric for sure, but also quite a lot of nonsense. People who should know better bemoan the economic means possessed by the 1 percent, but rarely do they consider the gargantuan efforts required by those at the top to get there in the first place.

To show why this is true it’s useful to reference an opinion piece written by Thomas Sowell long, long ago. Having witnessed a caricature artist draw a willing individual, when the artist collected his payment after services rendered he was dismayed to hear the customer complain about the “high” cost of something which took five minutes to draw. But as the artist correctly pointed out, the customer didn’t see the 25 years of hard work and practice that preceded his ability to sketch an individual in five minutes.

The age of Sowell’s op-ed can be measured in decades, his point within concerned the huge upfront investment required by pharmaceutical firms ahead of tiny pills that “cost way too much”, but his reasoning surely applies much the same to successful individuals today. The envious see the success on the way to obnoxious anger and calls for wealth redistribution, but very few see all the work and sacrifice that precedes entrance into the 1 percent club.

Considering the myriad business owners that dot the American landscape, as owners they’re often demonized for their possession of the means of production. What’s left out is the grand deal they’re offering the 99 percenters who work for them.

Basically the owners provide the capital, conceive the business plan, and then if the plan fails, as owners they stand to lose all that they ventured. As for the allegedly exploited laborers, they get paid no matter what. Not a bad deal. …

NY Times profiles Harvard psychologist who has argued there is less violence in human affairs today.

Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve.

Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you weren’t an anarchist,” he said, “you couldn’t get a date.”

At the dinner table, he argued with his parents about human nature. “They said, ‘What would happen if there were no police?’ ” he recalled. “I said: ‘What would we do? Would we rob banks? Of course not. Police make no difference.’ ”

This was in Montreal, “a city that prided itself on civility and low rates of crime,” he said. Then, on Oct. 17, 1969, police officers and firefighters went on strike, and he had a chance to test his first hypothesis about human nature.

“All hell broke loose,” Dr. Pinker recalled. “Within a few hours there was looting. There were riots. There was arson. There were two murders. And this was in the morning that they called the strike.”

The ’60s changed the lives of many people and, in Dr. Pinker’s case, left him deeply curious about how humans work. That curiosity turned into a career as a leading expert on language, and then as a leading advocate of evolutionary psychology. In a series of best-selling books, he has argued that our mental faculties — from emotions to decision-making to visual cognition — were forged by natural selection.

He has also become a withering critic of those who would deny the deep marks of evolution on our minds — social engineers who believe they can remake children as they wish, modernist architects who believe they can rebuild cities as utopias. Even in the 21st century, Dr. Pinker argues, we ignore our evolved brains at our own peril.

Given this track record, Dr. Pinker’s newest book, published in October, struck some critics as a jackknife turn. In “The Better Angels of Our Nature” (Viking), he investigates one of the most primal aspects of life: violence.

Over the course of 802 pages, he argues that violence has fallen drastically over thousands of years — whether one considers homicide rates, war casualties as a percentage of national populations, or other measures.

This may seem at odds with evolutionary psychology, which is often seen as an argument for hard-wired Stone Age behavior, but Dr. Pinker sees that view as a misunderstanding of the science. Our evolved brains, he argues, are capable of a wide range of responses to their environment. Under the right conditions, they can allow us to live in greater and greater peace.

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James Pethokoukis posts on today’s central bank actions.

What just happened?

The world’s major central banks acted jointly on Wednesday to provide cheaper dollar liquidity to starved European banks facing a credit crunch as the euro zone’s sovereign debt crisis threatened to bring financial disaster. The surprise emergency move by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the central banks of Britain, Canada and Switzerland recalled coordinated action to steady global markets in the 2008 financial crisis. (via Reuters)

The move makes clear that regulators increasingly are concerned about the strain that the European debt crisis is placing on financial companies, which are facing increasing difficulty in borrowing through normal channels the money that they need to fund their operations and obligations. (via the NYTimes) …

Caroline Glick writes on our withdrawal from Iraq.

Next month, America’s long campaign in Iraq will come to an end with the departure of the last US forces from the country.

Amazingly, the approaching withdrawal date has fomented little discussion in the US. Few have weighed in on the likely consequences of President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw on the US’s hard won gains in that country.

After some six thousand Americans gave their lives in the struggle for Iraq and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on the war, it is quite amazing that its conclusion is being met with disinterested yawns.

The general stupor was broken last week with The Weekly Standard’s publication of an article titled, “Defeat in Iraq: President Obama’s decision to withdraw US troops is the mother of all disasters.”

The article was written by Frederick and Kimberly Kagan and Marisa Cochrane Sullivan.

The Kagans contributed to conceptualizing the US’s successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, popularly known as “the surge,” that president George W. Bush implemented in 2007.

In their article, the Kagans and Sullivan explain the strategic implications of next month’s withdrawal. …

… The lion’s share of responsibility for this dismal state of affairs lies with former president Bush and his administration. While the Left didn’t want to fight or defeat the forces of radical Islam after September 11, the majority of Americans did. And by catering to the Left and refusing to identify the enemy, Bush adopted war-fighting tactics that discredited the war effort and demoralized and divided the American public, thus paving the way for Obama to be elected while running on a radical anti-war platform of retreat and appeasement.

Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left’s ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease America’s worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is why he supports Turkey’s Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to Israel.

And this is why come December 31, the US will withdraw in defeat from Iraq, and pro- American forces in the region and the US itself will reap the whirlwind of Washington’s irresponsibility.

There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.

Toby Harnden says the president’s dovish tone has caused problems.

Sitting in a bland conference room one evening last week, a focus group of seven Republican-leaning suburban voters from the crucial swing state of Virginia mused about America’s foreign policy in the light of the 2012 election.

A group of us were in a a darkened room next door observing through a one-way mirror. The candidate preferences of the seven broadly reflected national polls: two gung-ho for Newt Gingrich, two undecided and three for Mitt Romney, though none of them especially enthusiastic about it.

It was no shocker that they were down on President Barack Obama. What was surprising, though, was that all seven thought he was bringing troops back from Iraq and Afghanistan precipitately.

More broadly, there was a consensus that their president was ineffectual. “Obama is giving things away,” said a man who works as a mortgage broker and coaches Little League baseball. “If say we’ll be out of X county by Y date you’ve already weakened your bargaining power because they don’t know if you have will to fight.”

An Asian-American man, who was the best-versed on politics, said: “The President wants to be amiable but that doesn’t work in foreign policy. We’re not conveying strength we have.” What Americans were looking for, he ventured, was a switch “in tone” to “someone seeming to stand up for country, rallying for country, fighting for the country – whereas Obama’s trying to everyone as equals, trying to be fair”.

How can it be that a US commander-in-chief who ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden, has increased drone strikes in Pakistan sevenfold, arranged for Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, to be taken out in Yemen and protected the American homeland from terrorist attack for three years is seen as weak? …

Forbes’ Sally Pipes welcomes Wal-Mart’s health care clinics.

Earlier this month, Wal-Mart dropped a bombshell on the health care industry. A memo from the retail giant obtained by National Public Radio revealed that the company would seek partners to help it “dramatically . . . lower the cost of health care . . . by becoming the largest provider of primary health care services in the nation.”

That’s great news for American consumers. Retail health clinics like those operated by Wal-Mart and its peers represent crucial components of our nation’s drive to expand access to affordable health care.

Wal-Mart already operates about 140 retail clinics. Nationwide, there are now more than 1,000 such clinics, where consumers can get a variety of treatments for common ailments like colds or ear infections for less than the cost of a visit to the doctor’s office.

Not everyone supports the rapid expansion of retail clinics. Some doctors, for instance, question whether the nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants that treat most patients at the clinics are equipped with the proper tools and skills to deliver high-quality care.

Their fears are generally unfounded. Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, a professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and RAND Institute researcher, examined the comparative quality of treatment at retail clinics in a 2009 study for Annals of Internal Medicine.

The results? …

WSJ Editors say goodbye Barney.

… Few House Members have made a bigger legislative mark, and arguably no one so expensively. Mr. Frank deserves to be forever remembered—and we’ll help everyone remember him—as the nation’s leading protector of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before their fall. For years Barney helped block meaningful reform of the mortgage giants while pushing an “affordable housing” agenda that helped to enlarge the subprime mortgage industry.

“I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision],” Mr. Frank said on September 25, 2003, in one of his many legendary rhetorical hits. “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.” The dice came up snake-eyes for the housing market and U.S. economy. …

Michael Graham is less polite. 

Two generations ago, Will Rogers noted that the problem with Congress was that, when they told a joke, it became a law; and when they passed a law, it was a joke. And one of America’s biggest — and most expensive — political jokes has finally gotten to the punchline:

Barney Frank is leaving office at the end of his term. Maybe he just wants to spend more quality time with his pot-growing prostitute friends in the sub-prime lending business.

I apologize for the mean-spiritedness of that last comment. It’s particularly mean-spirited because it’s demonstrably true.

A sitting congressman re-elected after his boyfriend is busted for running a male prostitution ring out of the congressman’s condo? Amazing. Re-elected after it’s discovered another boyfriend helps run a major money-losing government agency “regulated” by the congressman’s committee? Astounding. But after a third boyfriend is busted for growing pot while you’re sitting on his front porch?

Words fail. Then again, so did the voters who kept this joke going. …

Late Night with Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: Some bad news. You have probably heard that the congressional Supercommmitee failed to solve the national deficit problem with $1.2 trillion in savings. The best idea the members could come up with was a bake sale.

Fallon: Well, President Obama is back now from another bunch of his trips. The last one he was in Asia where he got to see all kinds of stuff that he never sees at home, like jobs.

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Heather Mac Donald says the Occupy folks should protest against one of the real campus calamities – the diversity pukes that populate American academia.

As protesters festively (oops! I mean “heroically”) rally on college quads across California in the wake of the gratuitous macing of a dozen Occupy Wall Street wannabes at University of California–Davis last Friday, UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion declared that the rising tuition at California’s public universities is giving him “heartburn.” It should, since Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri and his fellow diversity bureaucrats are a large cause of those skyrocketing college fees, not just in California but nationally.

It is to be expected that students will be immaculately ignorant of the matters they protest, but it takes a special type of gall for a bureaucrat such as Basri to shed crocodile tears over California’s tuition increases, which had been a seeming target of OWS-inspired protest before the brutish UC Davis pepper-spray incident provided a more mediagenic reason to cut classes. OWS-ers are theatrically calling for a general strike of the University of California for this coming Monday.

Basri commands a staff of 17, allegedly all required to make sure that fanatically left-wing UC Berkeley is sufficiently attuned to the values of “diversity” and “inclusion”; his 2009 base pay of $194,000 was nearly four times that of starting assistant professors. Basri was given responsibility for a $4.5 million slice of Berkeley’s vast diversity bureaucracy when he became the school’s first Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion in 2007; since then, the programs under his control have undoubtedly weathered the recession far more comfortably than mere academic endeavors.

UC Berkeley’s diversity apparatus, which spreads far beyond the office of the VC for E and I, is utterly typical. For the last three decades, colleges have added more and more tuition-busting bureaucratic fat; since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally. UC Davis, for example, whose modest OWS movement has been happily energized by the conceit that the campus is a police state, offers the usual menu of diversity effluvia under the auspices of an Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations. A flow chart of Linnaean complexity would be needed to accurately map all the activities overseen by the AEVC for CCR. They include a Diversity Trainers Institute, staffed by Davis’s Administrator of Diversity Education; the Director of Faculty Relations and Development in Academic Personnel; the Director of the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center; the Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; an Education Specialist with the UC Davis Sexual Harassment Education Program; an Academic Enrichment Coordinator with the UC Davis Department of Academic Preparation Programs; and the Diversity Program Coordinator and Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator with the Office of Campus Community Relations. The Diversity Trainers Institute recruits “a cadre of individuals who will serve as diversity trainers/educators,” a function that would seem largely superfluous, given that the Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations already offers a Diversity Education Series that grants Understanding Diversity Certificates in “Unpacking Oppression” and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in “Understanding Diversity and Social Justice.” …

And Debra Saunders says the OWS group should hope they’re not treated like those opposed to abortion. 

For all their whining about the “police state” and the city’s failure to respect their “First Amendment rights,” Occupy Oakland activists have managed to flout the law with regular impunity. Somehow demonstrators have managed to turn Frank Ogawa Plaza into a tent stew and shut down parts of the city in a so-called general strike Nov. 2, and still they think they’re victims who have been deprived of their free speech rights.

But if they want to see what it’s really like to fight City Hall, they should talk to Walter Hoye. Hoye’s offense was to walk up to people with a sign that said, “Jesus loves you and your baby. Let us help.” For that he was arrested twice in 2008 and sentenced to 30 days in jail.

The difference here is that Hoye wasn’t peddling some amorphous grievances that might be addressed with higher taxes and more government. Hoye’s sin – pardon the expression – is that he opposed abortion. …

Janet Daley writing in The Telegraph, UK, has advice for British pols – “Want to fix things in the economy, try doing less.”

… Instead of finding new, ingenious ways to use your money that might give a brief appearance of nibbling at the edges of problems such as unemployment and property prices, the state needs to withdraw from hyperactive job-creation and mortgage-lending, and become much more vigilant in ensuring competition in the productive parts of the economy. The deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s would be coming in for much less criticism now if it had not funked the matter of competitiveness: nationalised industries too often gave way to private monopolies and cartels. If people are taxed less and fleeced less, they will be happy to stimulate the economy in the good old-fashioned way.

As David Cameron used to say before he took fright: we need a smaller state that does less and spends less. Mr Osborne used to say that, too, in terms that were at least as stark as any Tory backbencher. Maybe a generation of Treasury officials who came of age under the Brown Terror got to him with the electrodes. Or else, his role as election campaign manager for the Conservatives is conflicting with what should be his better judgment as head of the nation’s finances. After all, it should be his function as Chancellor to tell his party’s political strategist that voter-appeasing initiatives are unaffordable, and that economic reality must take precedence. Presumably, Mr Osborne would have had to carry on that argument with himself. (If he did, we know which side won.)

There is an urgent need now to rethink the whole relationship between government and populace while there is still the possibility of discussion. In Britain, Europe and America, the questions are remarkably similar. Can a free-market economy support an infinitely growing state? We will have to choose, quite soon, between liberty and the “security” of a society in which government controls the levers of economic life. Washington politicians are getting a terrible drubbing for failing to resolve their implacable differences over the size of the state (to the extent that they are unable to agree a federal budget). The US national debate may seem rough and ready to European ears – but at least they are engaging in the real argument.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the Gingrich balloon.

Many conservatives who know better have constructed an odd justification in the 2012 presidential primary for supporting the man who makes Bill Clinton look like a model of impulse control. It goes like this: Newt Gingrich did a magnificent job getting the GOP back into the House majority and defeating HillaryCare 17 years ago. His acerbic wit and mental dexterity would make for a hugely entertaining debate with President Obama. Therefore, he should be our nominee.

This is silliness on stilts. The American people — the ones who will vote in the general election — don’t give a darn about 1994. Moreover, the huge ideological inconsistencies, the character flaws and the ever-present danger of self-immolation make Gingrich probably the worst possible nominee to go up against the search-and-destroy Obama reelection campaign. And should he, by some miracle, get to the Oval Office, do we really imagine the presidency would be any different than his speakership (disorganized, frenetic, disloyal to conservatives, gaffe-prone and all about HIM)? …

Ann Coulter has Gingrich memories too. She closes by endorsing Romney.

So now, apparently, we have to go through the cycle of the media pushing Newt Gingrich. This is going to be fantastic.

In addition to having an affair in the middle of Clinton’s impeachment; apologizing to Jesse Jackson on behalf of J.C. Watts – one of two black Republicans then in Congress –- for having criticized “poverty pimps,” and then inviting Jackson to a State of the Union address; cutting a global warming commercial with Nancy Pelosi; supporting George Soros’ candidate Dede Scozzafava in a congressional special election; appearing in public with the Rev. Al Sharpton to promote nonspecific education reform; and calling Paul Ryan’s plan to save Social Security “right-wing social engineering,” we found out this week that Gingrich was a recipient of Freddie Mac political money. … 

… Although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the institutions most responsible for the nation’s current financial crisis — were almost entirely Democratic cash cows, they managed to dirty up enough Republicans to make it seem like bipartisan corruption.

Democrats sucked hundreds of millions of dollars out of these institutions: Franklin Raines, $90 million; Jamie Gorelick, $26.4 million; Jim Johnson, $20 million.

By contrast, Republicans came cheap. For the amazingly good price of only $300,000 apiece, Fannie and Freddie bought the good will of former Reps. Vin Weber, R-Minn., Susan Molinari, R-N.Y., and Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.* Former Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y., was even cheaper at $240,000.

[*Correction: After Gingrich admitted last week to receiving $300,000 from Freddie, we found out this week that it was actually closer to $1.6 million.] …

… Instead of sitting on our thumbs, wishing Ronald Reagan were around, or chasing the latest mechanical rabbit flashed by the media, conservatives ought to start rallying around Romney as the only Republican who has a shot at beating Obama. We’ll attack him when he’s president.

It’s fun to be a purist, but let’s put that on hold until Obama and his abominable health care plan are gone, please.

Kimberley Strassel gives us the back story on the government gripes against Gibson Guitar. 

On a sweltering day in August, federal agents raided the Tennessee factories of the storied Gibson Guitar Corp. The suggestion was that Gibson had violated the Lacey Act—a federal law designed to protect wildlife—by importing certain India ebony. The company has vehemently denied that suggestion and has yet to be charged. It is instead living in a state of harassed legal limbo.

Which, let’s be clear, is exactly what its persecutors had planned all along. The untold story of Gibson is this: It was set up.

Most of the press coverage has implied that the company is the unfortunate victim of a well-meaning, if complicated, law. Stories note, in passing, that the Lacey Act was “expanded” in 2008, and that this has had “unintended consequences.” Given Washington’s reputation for ill-considered bills, this might make sense.

Only not in this case. The story here is about how a toxic alliance of ideological activists and trade protectionists deliberately set about creating a vague law, one designed to make an example out of companies (like Gibson) and thus chill imports—even legal ones. …

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Jeff Jacoby remembers Thanksgiving assembly at the Hebrew Academy in Cleveland.

… The key to what Peter Salins, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, calls “assimilation, American style’’ was a balancing act. On the one hand, newcomers to the United States found out quickly that they were expected to become honest-to-God Americans. That meant learning English, getting a job, embracing America’s democratic values and institutions, and eventually taking the oath as new citizens.

On the other hand, immigrants weren’t obliged to shed their ethnic pride, or to drop the foods and customs and festivals they brought with them from their native land. They were free to be “as ethnic as they pleased,’’ writes Salins. The goal of assimilation was not to make all Americans alike; it was to get newcomers, however dissimilar their backgrounds and cultures, to believe that they were “irrevocably part of the same national family.’’

There was one other key ingredient, which we too easily overlook. Immigrants understood that the country they had come to was in some indispensable way better than the one they had left. They might retain a soft spot for the scenery or clothing or rhythms of life in the Old Country, they might always prefer their mother tongue to English, they might even pay tuition at a private or parochial school so that the religious or linguistic values they had grown up with would be passed on to their kids. But underlying everything would be the awareness that they had chosen to be Americans.

America was better than their native land — perhaps because its rulers were corrupt, or because it was riven by war, or because economic opportunities were limited. Perhaps, as in my father’s case, because totalitarian tyrants — first Nazis, then Communists — had made life there a hell on earth. Perhaps because, like the Pilgrims, they sought a peaceable society where they could worship as they saw fit without being “hunted and persecuted on every side.’’

As my fellow forth-graders and I belted out the lyrics to another song — P-I-L-grim fathers landed here on Plymouth Bay — we assumed that Mrs. Feigenbaum was simply getting us ready for the Thanksgiving assembly. She knew, of course, that she was doing something far more important. She was getting us ready to be Americans.

All the assimilated Americans have actually, according to Mark Steyn, come to this;

… In return for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling (and, by the way, that’s the wrong way of looking at it: more accurately, we’re lowering the debt abyss), John Boehner bragged that he’d got a deal for “a real, enforceable cut” of supposedly $7 billion from fiscal year 2012. After running the numbers themselves, the Congressional Budget Office said it only cut $1 billion from FY 2012.

Which of these numbers is accurate?

The correct answer is: Who cares? The government of the United States currently spends $188 million it doesn’t have every hour of every day. So, if it’s $1 billion in “real, enforceable cuts,” in the time it takes to roast a 20-pound stuffed turkey for your Thanksgiving dinner, the government’s already borrowed back all those painstakingly negotiated savings. If it’s $7 billion in “real, enforceable cuts,” in the time it takes you to defrost the bird, the cuts have all been borrowed back.

Bonus question: How “real” and “enforceable” are all those real, enforceable cuts? By the time the relevant bill passed the Senate earlier this month, the 2012 austerity budget with its brutal, savage cuts to government services actually increased spending by $10 billion. More, more, more, how do you like it?

But don’t worry. Aside from spending the summer negotiating a deal that increases runaway federal spending, those stingy, cheeseparing Republicans also forced the Democrats to agree to create that big ol’ supercommittee that would save $1.2 trillion — over the course of 10 years.

Anywhere else on the planet that would be a significant chunk of change. But the government of the United States is planning to spend $44 trillion in the next decade. So $1.2 trillion is about 2.7 percent. Any businessman could cut 2.7 percent from his budget in his sleep. But not congressional supercommittees of supermen with superpowers thrashing it out across the table for three months. So there will be no 2.7 percent cut. …

Charles Moore in the Telegraph, UK says there is some to dislike and some to like in the movie about Margaret Thatcher.

Friends of Lady Thatcher tend to deplore The Iron Lady, the new film about her starring Meryl Streep. They do so because they are upset at the portrayal of a still living person as suffering from dementia. Their feelings do them credit as friends. As someone who knows her himself, I find bits of the film, which I have just seen, distressing.

But friends are often the last people to understand how things look in a wider setting. When the general public (who, for some reason, will not be allowed to see the film until January) walk into the cinema and watch the Streep version of Thatcher, I am convinced that they will be moved by the human story. They will also absorb a most powerful piece of propaganda for conservatism (though not necessarily Conservatism). One reason it is so powerful is that it feels uncalculated: it just arises, inescapably, from the tale it tells. And its lessons apply, pointedly, to the current state of the Western world.

The message, embodied in the personality of the extraordinary woman depicted, is that conservatism is a sort of insurrection. We all know the romance of slave revolts. People wrote great poems about them. Wordsworth, for example, celebrated the oddly named Toussaint L’Ouverture, who turned his fellow slaves against their masters in Haiti. But there is romance, too, in the revolt of the bourgeoisie. The Iron Lady is a sort of poem about the triumph and tragedy of its leader, Margaret L’Epicière. …

Christopher Caldwell on the rout of the Spanish socialists.

Just as incoming American presidents are given the atomic “briefcase” by their predecessors, along with the codes for launching a nuclear attack, perhaps Spanish prime ministers will henceforth receive a begging cup and a German phrasebook. It was al Qaeda that made José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of the Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) Spain’s prime minister; Lehman Brothers and the euro crisis have unmade him, putting his country at the financial mercy of its European neighbors. Zapatero came to power when jihadists bombed several trains in the heart of Madrid on election weekend 2004. The bombs convinced Spaniards they would be safer voting for the candidate more congenial to al Qaeda’s reading of the Iraq war. 

This week prime minister-elect Mariano Rajoy, leader of the conservative Popular party, put an end to seven years of Zapaterismo. …

Ilya Somin in Volokh Conspiracy posts on the perverse police incentives of the drug war.

Radley Balko has an interesting piece at Huffington Post on the ways in which the War on Drugs creates perverse incentives for police departments:

“Arresting people for assaults, beatings and robberies doesn’t bring money back to police departments, but drug cases do in a couple of ways. First, police departments across the country compete for a pool of federal anti-drug grants. The more arrests and drug seizures a department can claim, the stronger its application for those grants.

“The availability of huge federal anti-drug grants incentivizes departments to pay for SWAT team armor and weapons, and leads our police officers to abandon real crime victims in our communities in favor of ratcheting up their drug arrest stats,” said former Los Angeles Deputy Chief of Police Stephen Downing. Downing is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an advocacy group of cops and prosecutors who are calling for an end to the drug war.

“When our cops are focused on executing large-scale, constitutionally questionable raids at the slightest hint that a small-time pot dealer is at work, real police work preventing and investigating crimes like robberies and rapes falls by the wayside,” Downing said.

And this problem is on the rise all over the country. Last year, police in New York City arrested around 50,000 people for marijuana possession. Pot has been decriminalized in New York since 1977, but displaying the drug in public is still a crime. So police officers stop people who look “suspicious,” frisk them, ask them to empty their pockets, then arrest them if they pull out a joint or a small amount of marijuana. They’re tricked into breaking the law. According to a report from Queens College sociologist Harry Levine, there were 33,775 such arrests from 1981 to 1995. Between 1996 and 2010 there were 536,322.”

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Charles Krauthammer knows who was the super failure.

… Has the president ever publicly proposed a single significant structural change in any entitlement? After Simpson-Bowles reported? No. In his February budget? No. In his April 13 budget “framework”? No. During the debt-ceiling crisis? No. During or after the supercommittee deliberations? No.

Indeed, Obama was AWOL from the supercommittee — then immediately pounced on its failure by going on TV to repeat his incessantly repeated campaign theme of the do-nothing (Republican) Congress.

A swell slogan that fits nicely with the Norquist myth. Except for another inconvenient fact: It is the Republicans who passed — through the House, the only branch of government they control — a real budget that cut $5.8 trillion of spending over the next 10 years. Obama’s February budget, which would have increased spending, was laughed out of the Senate, voted down 97 to 0. As for the Democratic Senate, it has submitted no budget at all for 2?1 / 2 years.

Who, then, is do-nothing? Republicans should happily take on this absurd, and central, Democratic campaign plank. Bring Simpson-Bowles to the House floor and pass the most radical of its three deficit-reduction alternatives.

Dare the Senate Democrats to vote down the grandest of all bargains. Dare Obama to veto his own debt commission. Dare the Democrats to actually do something about debt.

Investors editors say the CBO admits the stimulus was a bust.

After nearly all the stimulus money has been spent, the Congressional Budget Office now admits it cost more than advertised, did less to boost growth and will hurt the economy in the long run.

In its latest quarterly report on the economic effects of the Obama stimulus, the CBO sharply lowered its “worst case” scenario while trimming many of its upper-bound estimates for stimulus-fueled growth and employment.

The new report finds, for example, that the stimulus may have added as little as 0.7% to GDP growth in 2010 — when spending was at its peak — and created as few as 700,000 new jobs.

Both are down significantly from the CBO’s previous worst-case scenario. …

When asked to pick which economy will blow up first, Peter Schiff thinks the super failure points to us. 

With fiscal time bombs ticking in both Europe and the United States, the pertinent question for now seems to be which will explode first. For much of the past few months it looked as if Europe was set to blow. But Angela Merkel’s refusal to support a Federal Reserve style bailout of European sovereigns and her recent statement the she had no Hank Paulson style fiscal bazooka in her handbag, has lowered the heat. In contrast, the utter failure of the Congressional Super Committee in the United States to come up with any shred of success in addressing America’s fiscal problems has sparked a renewed realization that America’s fuse is dangerously short. 

Chancellor Merkel has been emphatic that European politicians not be given a monetary crutch similar to the one relied on by their American counterparts. Her laudable goal, much derided on the editorial pages of the New York Times, is to defuse Europe’s debt bomb with substantive budget reforms, and as a result to make the euro “the strongest currency in the world.” Much has been made of the poorly received auction today of German Government bonds, with some saying the lack of demand (which pushed yields on 10-year German Bonds past 2% –hardly indicative of panic selling) is evidence of investor unease with Merkel’s economic policies. I would argue the opposite: that many investors still think that Merkel is bluffing and that eventually Germany will print and stimulate like everyone else. It is likely for this reason that yields on German debt have increased modestly.

In contrast, the U.S. is crystal clear in its intention to ignore its debt problems. With the failure of the Super Committee this week it actually became official. American politicians will not, under any circumstances willingly confront our underlying debt crisis. …

David Harsanyi on the super committee.

H.L. Mencken famously wrote that every decent man is ashamed of his government. This one gives you little choice.

Gridlock is ordinarily the most constructive and moral form of government, but with entitlement programs on autopilot self-destruct, we’re in trouble. So Americans turned their weary eyes toward a dream team, a supercommittee, a 12-member panel of our brightest lights, charged with identifying a measly $1.2 trillion in deficit savings over 10 years. Save us. …

A couple of Corner posts on Gingrich smarts. Here’s Mark Steyn.

In all the Newt immigration stuff, this seems to have gone overlooked:

“Newt is for a local, community review board where local citizens can decide whether or not their neighbors that have come here illegally should find a path to legality, not citizenship,” [Gingrich spokesperson R C Hammond] said. “Two distinctly different things.”

He said it would operate like a World War II draft board. But I asked him whether it would be a problem for local communities to determine legality given that this issue would concern federal law.

“None of this matters until you secure the border,” he said.

I asked him again, though, about how local communities could determine federal law.

“That’s why it’s called reform,” he said.

So the North Podunk Town Meeting could vote to deny you your Green Card but ten miles down the road the burghers of South Podunk could vote to give one to your cousin? That sure sounds like a plan.

It’s a tribute to Mitt Romney’s soporific caution and Herman Cain’s blithe indifference to the bit on the map marked Rest of the World that Newt is now what passes for the GOP’s deep thinker.

Conrad Black will turn your Nixon thoughts on their heads.

… Richard Nixon was the first president since Gen. Zachary Taylor in 1848 to be elected to office without his party being in control of either house of the Congress. Despite the fact that the Democrats had plunged the country into Vietnam without any proper authorization, mismanaged the war, and lost control of domestic opinion, they, with the eager complicity of the national media, abandoned their former leaders and became anti-war agitators, and the entire Democratic establishment except Scoop Jackson set out to inflict defeat on the U.S. while Nixon and Kissinger worked with great skill and often courage to extract America from the war while salvaging a non-Communist government in South Vietnam, in obvious conformity with the wishes of most of the people of South Vietnam.

The Democrats failed to prevent Nixon and Kissinger from negotiating out of the Democrats’ war after South Vietnam successfully repulsed the Communists on the ground on their own in April and May 1972. They did this with no American ground support, though with heavy American air support, and after Nixon and Kissinger, with surpassing diplomatic agility, had recruited China and Russia to help pressure North Vietnam into a settlement. After having thus failed to prosecute the war they started, or to force an outright surrender from the succeeding Republican administration, the Democrats and their partisans in the national media approved the administration’s Vietnam peace treaty in the Senate (which was a formality Nixon did not have to seek), in which treaty it was implicit that anticipated North Vietnamese violations would be replied to with U.S. air power as they had been in 1972.

When the North Vietnamese assault came, the Democrats prevented the Nixon and Ford administrations from providing the South Vietnamese any assistance, dooming the mission for which 57,000 Americans had died. This outright betrayal of the South Vietnamese anti-Communists, which condemned millions to gruesome fates in the Cambodian killing fields and among the Boat People on the high seas, and to the insatiable execution squads of the Viet Cong, was covered by, in Napoleon’s phrase, the “lies agreed upon” that Nixon and Kissinger had known all along that a non-Communist Vietnam had no chance of survival and had deliberately sacrificed tens of thousands of American servicemen in order to masquerade as patriots and true-grit Cold Warriors. This was not just a shameful traduction; it was an egregious act of partisan transvestism.

In his one full presidential term, in addition to extracting America undefeated from Vietnam and opening relations with China, Richard Nixon negotiated and signed the greatest arms-control agreement in the history of the world with the Soviet Union, started the peace process in the Middle East, abolished the draft that had so vexed the hordes of supposedly conscientious anti-war demonstrators, ended school segregation while avoiding the court-ordered lunacy of compulsory busing of children all around metropolitan areas in pursuit of “racial balance,” and founded the Environmental Protection Agency.

For all of these reasons, Nixon was reelected in 1972 by the greatest majority of the states (49) since James Monroe ran unopposed in 1820, and by the greatest plurality in history (18 million). …

Andrew Malcolm with late-night humor.

Fallon: PETA released a new Thanksgiving ad aimed at children. It compares eating turkeys to eating their pet dogs. Or as kids in China put it, ‘So?’”

Conan: Occupy Wall Street protesters planned to Occupy the Subway. Because if there’s one place to confront the nation’s wealthy 1%, it’s on the New York City subway.