What could go wrong?  Just as I was ripping a few more CDs to upload to the Amazon cloud, comes ominous news indeed from Doug Ross that the “Amazon board adds Jamie Gorelick, former Fannie Mae and DOJ official.” That PR-style headline from Geek Wire hides the fact that, as Doug writes, “Gorelick is best-known for her leading roles in two epic, trillion-dollar catastrophes, which earned her the nomme de guerre ‘The Mistress of Disaster:’”

It’s not often that one person plays key roles in two — count ‘em, two — trillion-dollar disasters. Welcome, my friends, to the world of well-connected Democrat Jamie Gorelick.

You’ve been warned.

Third time’s the charm! Though if Gorelick does to Amazon what she did to Bill Clinton’s nascent non-war on terrorism and then to Fannie Mae, they’re in heap big trouble. Amazon has run roughshod over first Borders and then Best Buy — what happens to the Internet if the 800 pound gorilla of online retailing falls?

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While I was away in New Jersey for the past week and a half, several books came in for review. I’ll get to some of these in more detail in the coming weeks and months, but in the meantime, and to be fair to the authors and publishers, I thought I’d do a Glenn Reynolds-style “In the Mail” style post with Amazon links to at least help get these titles into (further) circulation:

• Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World, by Jay Nordlinger.
• The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, by Jonah Goldberg.
• Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, by Charles Murray.
• American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.

The last title dovetails nicely with my recent interview with Thomas Hibbs, the author of the newly updated Shows About Nothing, set at the corner of Hollywood and Nietzsche.

The books by Jonah and Jay Nordlinger are due out in the spring. The titles by Hibbs, Murray and Ratner-Rosenhagen have been out for a bit. If you’ve read them, please post your thoughts in the comments.

(Cross-posted at the Tatler.)

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Why, yes it is.

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes:

Athens is burning tonight, as leftists and others protest against the Greek Parliament’s vote in favor of the measures that are required by the EU in exchange for a 130 billion Euro bailout–enough to keep Greece afloat for now, at least. The rioters have nothing intelligent or constructive to say. They believe, evidently, that Greeks are entitled to consume far more than they produce, forever. Nice work if you can get it.

Best observed, to borrow the title of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest essay on the topic, from the rearview mirror. But Blue America’s woes are quite similar — and may get nearly as violent, in the coming months and years.

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“What are you rebelling against?” Marlon Brando’s character was famously asked in 1953′s The Wild One. “Whadda you got?” he famous replied. (“Oh, I don’t know,” James Lileks replied, albeit somewhat belatedly. “The Pure Food Act, antibiotics, an industrial infrastructure that makes it possible for you to ride your bikes around, paved roads, a foreseeable successful conclusion to rural electrification, sewers, the ability to walk into any small café and order a Coke and know you won’t be squitting your guts out 12 hours later into a hole in the ground alive with squishy invertebrates. Little things.”

Flashforward nearly 60 years. “What are you protesting?” Michelle Fields of the Daily Caller asks an astroturfed group of Occupiers in front of CPAC in the above video.

“I don’t know,” several reply. Others refused to appear on camera, perhaps the first camera and press-shy protesters in the history of mankind.

Well, other than the $60 bucks one of the would-be Occupiers said he received from the Sheet Metal Workers Local 100.

Update: “A search on ‘CPAC’ at the Associated Press’s main national site returns five stories on the conference. A search on ‘CPAC occupy’ (not in quotes) returns none. It would appear that the AP is doing all it can to make sure as few news readers, listeners and viewers as possible learn how totally humiliated the Occupiers’ not so excellent adventure at CPAC this weekend really was.”

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In his weekly column, Mark Steyn writes, “The president of the United States has decided to go Henry VIII on the Church’s medieval ass:”

Announcing his support for Commissar Sebelius’ edicts on contraception, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion, that noted theologian the Most Reverend Al Sharpton explained: “If we are going to have a separation of church and state, we’re going to have a separation of church and state.”

Thanks for clarifying that. The church model the young American state wished to separate from was that of the British monarch, who remains to this day Supreme Governor of the Church of England. This convenient arrangement dates from the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The title of the law gives you the general upshot, but, just in case you’re a bit slow on the uptake, the text proclaims “the King’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England.” That’s to say, the sovereign is “the only supreme head on earth of the Church” and he shall enjoy “all honors, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits and commodities to the said dignity,” not to mention His Majesty “shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts and enormities, whatsoever they be.”

Welcome to Obamacare.

You know what to do next.

Related: “No one wants to believe the president of the United States or any other high governmental official would deliberately lie to the Archbishop of New York. But what other conclusion can a reasonable person reach? That Valerie Jarrett and Kathleen Sebelius made him do it?” Michael Walsh writes:

One of the problems the Right consistently has in dealing with the Left is its touching credulity in their stated motives, instead of assessing their genuine objectives. Like the Archbishop, we’re constantly taken by surprise when the entirely predictable happens. Haven’t any of the princes of the Church read the essential text on the subject of good and evil (and the deception that evil must practice in order to overcome good), Milton’s Paradise Lost?

It’s star was certainly beloved by Saul himself.

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The “New Youth Normal?” It’s “Your Parents’ Basement,” the ZeroHedge Econoblog notes:

As Pew Research Center notes though, that fully 55% of those aged 18-24 (and 4% of 25-34 year olds) say young adults are having the toughest time in today’s economy. The day-to-day realities of economic hard times are somewhat shocking for a country supposedly so far up the developed spectrum as roughly a quarter of adults aged 18 to 34 (24%) say that, due to economic conditions, they have moved back in with their parents in recent years after living on their own. In the 25 to 29 age range a shocking 34% have moved back home with mom and pop (hardly likely to help with the huge shadow housing inventory overhang we discussed yesterday) Finding a job, saving for the future, paying for college, and buying a home are seen as dramatically harder for today’s young adults compared to their parent’s generation while Facebook saves the day as staying in touch with friends/family is the only stand out aspect of life that is ‘easier’ for today’s youth.

That’s long been the norm in socialist Old Europe, as this passage from Tom Wolfe’s epochal “Me Decade” article from 1976 highlights:

In 1971 I made a lecture tour of Italy, talking (at the request of my Italian hosts) about “contemporary American life.” Everywhere I went, from Turin to Palermo, Italian students were interested in just one question: Was it really true that young people in America, no older than themselves, actually left home, and lived communally according to their own rules and created their own dress styles and vocabulary and had free sex and took dope? They were talking, of course, about the hippie or psychedelic movement that had begun flowering about 1965. What fascinated them the most, however, was the first item on the list: that the hippies actually left home and lived communally according to their own rules.

To Italian students this seemed positively amazing. Several of the students I met lived wild enough lives during daylight hours. They were in radical organizations and had fought pitched battles with police, on the barricades, as it were. But by 8:30 P.M. they were back home, obediently washing their hands before dinner with Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis&theMaidenAunt. Their counterparts in America, the New Left students of the late sixties, lived in communes that were much like the hippies’, except that the costumery tended to be semimilitary: the noncom officers’ shirts, combat boots, commando berets—worn in combination with blue jeans or a turtleneck jersey, however, to show that one was not a uniform freak.

That people so young could go off on their own, without taking jobs, and live a life completely of their own design—to Europeans it was astounding.

As Jonah Goldberg noted in a 2005 column titled, “Invasion of the America Snatchers,” if you “look very closely and study body language and speech, you may just discover that the liberals screeching at conservatives aren’t in fact Americans at all. They are Europeans taking on the form of Americans:”

The ideas, assumptions and prejudices held by the statistically typical Democratic voter, according to the Pew study, are quite simply, European. Europeans believe in a strong social welfare state, for rich and poor alike. Europeans are cynical. They look askance–these days–on patriotic sentiment (hence the rush to form a new European nation). The church pews of Europe would make a great hideout for bank robbers since they’re always empty. The United Nations is, in the typical European’s worldview, the last best hope for mankind. From the death penalty to gay marriage, the more similar you are to a typical European in your political and social outlook, the more likely you are to be a Democrat.

Presumably, they should welcome this latest bit of “unexpected” bad economic data.

Oh, and occupying mom’s basement? It’s officially #OWS approved, in case you’re wondering.

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Ace asks a question that all of us have pondered at one point or another in the career of Barack H. Obama. “Has he gone insane?” As Ace notes in his headline, “Obama’s Compromise: I’ll Just Mandate That Employers Contract With Insurers To Cover Contraception For Free, and Hence Employers Cannot Be Said To Be Paying For It:”

The revised Obama mandate will make religious groups contract with insurers to offer birth control and the potentially abortion-causing drugs to women at no cost. The revised mandate will have religious employers refer women to their insurance company for coverage that still violates their moral and religious beliefs. Under this plan, every insurance company will be obligated to provide coverage at no cost.Essentially, religious groups will still be mandated to offer plans that cover both birth control and the ella abortion drug

According to Obama administration officials on a conference call this morning, a woman’s insurance company “will be required to reach out directly and offer her contraceptive care free of charge. The religious institutions will not have to pay for it.”

The birth control and abortion-causing drugs will simply be “part of the bundle of services that all insurance companies are required to offer,” White House officials said.

So here’s how this works.

I’m an insurer. Here were your two options, before Obama’s brilliant solution:

I could cover your employees for x dollars.

If you want birth control/abortifacient coverage, we’ll add that rider for y dollars. So this option is x + y dollars.

Obama’s genius solution is:

Hey, we’ll cover your employees for x + y dollars as a baseline. But we’ll toss in abortifacient coverage for 0 dollars.

Uhhh… That x+y is what it cost to have base insurance + birth control/abortifacient coverage. All that’s being done here is that people are lying about the costs — now the insurer and the contracting party lie and pretend the base insurance cost is x + y (which it isn’t; it’s x) and also pretend the cost for the birth control coverage is 0 (which it isn’t; it’s y).

All Obama’s doing is mandating that employers enter into a contract with insurers in which both parties pretend that the base cost of the service is higher than it is, and that abortifacient coverage now costs zero dollars.

Obama’s mandate solution is now just to force the conscience-objectors to lie about it.

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey concurs with that last sentence:

Basically, the Obama administration told religious organizations to stop complaining and get in line.  This “accommodation” only attempts to accommodate Obama’s political standing and nothing more.

Update: The LA Times’ Jon Healy calls this new position “magical thinking”:

Here’s where the magical thinking comes in. The following is from the fact sheet the White House released Friday:

Covering contraception saves money for insurance companies by keeping women healthy and preventing spending on other health services. For example, there was no increase in premiums when contraception was added to the Federal Employees Health Benefit System and required of non-religious employers in Hawaii. One study found that covering contraception lowered premiums by 10 percent or more.

Making everyone in a pool carry coverage whether they need it or not spreads the cost, saving money for those who really do need it and who’d choose to carry it if it were merely optional. But costs faced by the insurer are the same — and when the care is provided with no out-of-pocket costs, the insurer’s costs are likely to go up because more people will use it. Such is likely to be the case with contraception.

Also, let me emphasize one point that this does not address.  The government is forcing religious organizations to both pay for and facilitate activities that violate their religious doctrine.  If anyone thinks that passes muster with the First Amendment, that’s even more magical thinking than this funding shell game.

Mr. Obama has engaged in magical thinking throughout his public career. However, I’m not sure if the L.A. Times is the best source to attack him from that angle, lest anyone recall this infamous moment from the paper.

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James Pethokoukis has your scary-ass chart of the day and writes:

Tell me what U.S. consumers are thinking, Reuters:

Americans felt worse about their personal finances in early February, even as they saw a light at the end of the tunnel for the jobs market, a survey released on Friday showed. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan overall index of consumer sentiment fell to 72.5 in early February from January’s 75.0, which was the highest level since February 2011. The latest figure fell short of the median forecast of 74.5 among economists polled by Reuters. ”This pattern of responses – less favorable current assessments and more favorable prospects – is not surprising. It simply indicates that consumers find their current situation all the harder to bear when improvement is finally in sight,” said survey director Richard Curtin said in a statement.

When you drill down into these numbers, you find out two things. First, consumers are still pretty dour. Most of the drop in the index was caused by a decline in the current conditions index, which came in at 79.6 vs.  84.2 previously. Indeed, 45 percent of respondents said they were worse off financially than a year ago, up from 41 percent in January and 39 percent in February 2011.

Second, the drop would have been much worse if not for much greater optimism about the job market, with 34 percent of respondents saying they’ve been hearing good things about employment. This, Barclays Capital notes, was the highest percentage in the history of the survey. And 32 percent said that they expected better business conditions a year from now, which was the highest reading since May. Finally, 31 percent expected lower unemployment levels in the next 12 months, which was the largest percentage since 1984.

So people think today stinks, but tomorrow will be way better.

Read the whole thing.

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“The trailer for the new film produced by Citizens United and directed by Stephen K. Bannon. ‘Occupy Unmasked’ goes deep into the ‘Occupy’ movement and exposes its origins as well as the radical ideas behind ‘income inequality’ that has become the centerpiece of the Obama re-election effort.”

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“Rick Santorum Is Right: Gas Prices Caused the Great Recession,” Derek Thompson writes at the Atlantic, though he cautions high gasoline prices were but one of several factors. It’s a fascinating post, especially considering the pro-Obama publication running it.  It was, not coincidentally, home to the MSM’s uterus detective during his most manic phase, obsessed with destroying a vice-presidential candidate who had the obvious solution to reducing energy prices — and thus jump-starting the economy:

In 2009, economist James Hamilton published a paper that retroactively forecast what an oil shock, like the one we experienced in 2007-08, would do to GDP. And guess what? His model accurately predicated much of the collapse in GDP that resulted from the Great Recession — as if there had been no housing bubble or financial crisis! The oil spike was that bad.

Still, there was a housing bubble. And there was a financial crisis. How do we account for them and still hold onto the gas story? Here’s a one-paragraph theory of the Great Recession that begins with gasoline. Cheap gas ruled in the 1990s. This encouraged families to settle down farther from the cities where they worked. In the 2000s, super-low interest rates, declining lending standards, and an appetite for mortgages on Wall Street (among other factors) further encouraged sprawl and residential development in the ‘burbs. As the price of gas went up, families stopped buying homes 30 minutes from the city. For folks shacking up in the exurbs, higher gas bills ate into mortgage money. For companies, higher energy bills shocked productivity. Classic oil-shock + housing development arrested + financial crisis = Great Recession.

There appears to be pretty strong correlation (if not causation) between national gas prices, which accelerated after 2005, and housing starts, which declined after 2005.

Say, what was different about America in 2005?

The video above provides the answer. And how did the entire elite media react in late 2008 when gas prices had temporarily cratered? NBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post all begged the Office of the President Elect in lockstep unison to tax the daylights out of energy and get those prices back into the stratosphere — and the economy stuck in the mud of Obamaville.

(Update: Video moved to top of post to avoid positioning conflict with our advertisement.)

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In Time — which is careful to remind its delicate readers that “the views expressed are solely his own” — Charles Murray outlines some of the material in his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010:

What makes the new upper class new is that its members not only have power and influence but also increasingly share a common culture that separates them from the rest of the country. Fifty years ago, the people who rose to the most influential positions overwhelmingly had Hank’s kind of background, thoroughly grounded in the American mainstream. Today, people of influence are characterized by college education, often from elite colleges. The men are married not to the girl next door but to highly educated women socialized at the same elite schools who are often as professionally successful as their husbands. They were admitted to this path by a combination of high IQ and personality strengths. They are often the children — and, increasingly, grandchildren — of the upper-middle class and have never known any other kind of life.

As adults, they have distinctive tastes and preferences and seek out enclaves of others who share them. Their culture incorporates little of the lifestyle or the popular culture of the rest of the nation; in fact, members of the new upper class increasingly look down on that mainstream lifestyle and culture. Meanwhile, their children are so sheltered from the rest of the nation that they barely know what life is like outside Georgetown, Scarsdale, Kenilworth or Atherton. If this divide continues to widen, it will completely destroy what has made America’s national civic culture exceptional: a fluid, mobile society where people from different backgrounds live side by side and come together for the common good.

Much truth in Murray’s diagnosis, but I can’t say much for his prescription for a cure though, as Kathy Shaidle writes, paraphrasing Murray’s solution. “Competent, responsible rich people should move next door to incompetent, irresponsible poor people, who will then supposedly be inspired by the former’s example to pull themselves up by their own Air Jordan laces:”

Murray’s startling reverse-Beverly Hillbillies “solution” to the great divide’s “problem” is his new book’s biggest “takeaway,” and not always in a good way.

Writing in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher remarked dryly:

But why, concretely, should a particular family choose to do that? Murray, a libertarian, suggests that it would make life more interesting for them. I bet it would….

Yes, no doubt life was terribly “interesting” for Helen Hill, Susan Poff, and Robert Kamin—right up to the second they were killed by the “underprivileged” ingrates they’d stooped to embrace.

(Naturally, The New York Times’ David Brooks thinks Murray’s idea is just dandy and would be even better if it was turned into a federal government program.)

Charles Murray has forgotten more about race, class, education, and intelligence than I could ever learn, so I feel deeply sheepish issuing the same challenge to him (and to David Brooks) that I would to any semi-anonymous, upper-class, bumper-stickered do-gooder preaching “zero population growth,” state-sponsored solar-powered homes, and a ban on the internal-combustion engine:

After you, sir.

Immediately after the 2004 election, Rush Limbaugh was fond of quoting this exchange between David Westin, then the president of ABC News (the initial reporting on 9/11 certainly proved a challenge to Westin, you may recall), and Tina Brown, now the editor of the Daily Beastweek, then the host of a long-since-canceled CNBC show.

RUSH: So, anyway, she’s got David Westin on the program, and she says, “David, would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities?” She’s talking about the red states of America here, folks. “Would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities and saturate themselves in these cultures so that they get more stories from those communities?”

WESTIN: I think we don’t do that enough, and I’m not just talking religious communities. I’m talking all sorts of communities across the country. I think that… You understand this, Tina, living in New York or in Los Angeles, we have busy jobs. We go into the office every day. We tend to socialize with the same people, or the same types of people, and I think it’s terribly important for journalists to get out whether it’s overseas or domestically and try to understand.

RUSH: We need more foreign correspondents in Alabama! We need more foreign correspondents north of Palm Beach County in Florida! We need embeds to go to church, find out what’s going on with these holy rollers! Ah, folks, you can’t know how much I love this.

Instead of dispatching foreign correspondents to red state Alabama, what Murray is calling for is wealthy coastal elites to “Occupy” less fortunate neighborhoods mostly in their own blue states. Living in Silicon Valley, adjacent to Palo Alto,  Marin, and the aforementioned Atherton, I can’t see that happening, well, ever. Can you?

Update: “Mitt did it all wrong” Don Surber writes, in a very much related post:

No matter who you support this year, you have to admit Mitt Romney went about becoming president the wrong way. Instead of wasting his time learning how business works and building a multi-billion-dollar company that really did save or create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Mitt should have lived off his daddy’s fortune like Jack Kennedy. Chasing skirts and molesting teenage virgin is a lot more fun than figuring out how to revive an old business.

Instead, Mitt Romney gave his inheritance to charity. Who does that anymore?

The press loves the kids of privilege — Bobby Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller and the rest of the trust fund babies — but only if they support huge government programs that transfer wealth from workers to non-workers. Remember, the press says liberals win despite their wealth while the press says conservatives win because of their wealth. The press never inquires into the manipulation of the tax code that allows wealth to transfer on to the fifth generation of a 19th century robber baron or 20th century bootlegger.

As the Professor writes, read the whole thing.™

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Deadline Hollywood reports that AMC Entertainment had a rough 2011:

The exhibition chain reports this morning in an SEC filing that it had a $72.8M loss in the last three months of 2011 — more than double its $32.8M loss in the quarter a year ago — on revenues of $557.3M, down 7.6%.  Attendance fell 8.7%. With a decline in the number of 3D and Imax films which come with higher ticket prices, patrons on average paid 1.4% less to get in than they did a year ago.

From Hollywood and the White House’s perspective, that’s nothing but good news, right? If, as President Obama said last fall, America has “gotten a little soft,” less movie watching should help ameliorate some of the national flab he perceives, right? Robert Redford is anti-energy, and less movie attendance should help reduce our energy consumption a little bit. Less toilet paper being consumed in the restrooms should make Laurie David and Sheryl Crow happy.  Then there’s the main consumer product that movie theaters distribute. If, as James Cameron said in 2010, “DVDs are wasteful…It’s a consumer product like any consumer product.” If DVD are a wasteful consumer product, isn’t movie watching as well? It sets the Hollywood cycle of selling consumer products in motion — and sells plenty of non-Michelle Obama-approved junk food in the process.

And speaking of eco-puritans at the intersection of DC and LA, “Al Gore’s Current TV Could Go Belly-Up If Keith F’n’ Olbermann Doesn’t Start Delivering Big Ratings,” Ace writes.

If, as Al claims, we have less than four years left to save the planet, shouldn’t he eliminate his channel voluntarily to help reduce his carbon footprint?

Flashback: “Prominent Environmentalist Finally Discovers His Religion’s Catch-22.”

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I have no idea whether or not Matthew Continetti’s new Washington Beacon will ultimately succeed, but he kicks it off with one helluva manifesto, which promises a little political jiu-jitsu. “What would happen,” Continetti asks, “if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right?”

After hours listening to the drone of Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, or Scott Pelley, one might conclude that America is a one-party state ruled by the GOP. But in fact the Republicans have controlled just one chamber of Congress for just one year, have been outspent by Democrats in the two most recent election cycles and are likely to be outspent in the current cycle, have drawn the ire and opposition of the 10 richest zip codes in the country, and have been so inept at shaping public opinion that one of America’s premier anti-cancer organizations had to backtrack when it decided to part ways with the country’s largest abortion provider.

Meanwhile, rather than tease out the connections between the big banks, unions, alternative energy companies, entrenched market incumbents, institutions such as the Center for American Progress and its Action Fund, and the policy apparatus of the Democratic Party, the press is far happier to mock Republicans as rubes and incompetents and to cover with relish Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe.

What would happen, though, if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right? What picture of the world would one have in mind if the morning paper read like the New York Times—but with the subjects of the stories and the assumptions built into the text changed to reflect a conservative, not liberal, worldview? What would happen if the media wolf pack suddenly had to worry about an aerial hunting operation?

You are about to find out. The Washington Free Beacon is here to enter the arena of combat journalism. Our talented staff will add to the chorus of enterprising conservative reporters, publishing original stories, seeking out scoops, and focusing on the myriad connections between money and power in the progressive movement and Obama’s Washington. Our research and war room divisions will supplement that reporting with context, additional materials, and breaking video. At the Beacon, you will find the other half of the story, the half that the elite media have taken such pains to ignore: the inside deals, cronyism cloaked in the public interest, and far-out nostrums of contemporary progressivism and the Democratic Party. At the Beacon, all friends of freedom will find an alternative to the hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, paranoid hyperbole, and insipid folderol of Democratic officials and the liberal gasbags on MSNBC and talk radio. At the Beacon, we follow only one commandment: Do unto them.

Hey remember all that hypocritical BS a year ago by an MSM railing against war and gun-related imagery? I think Continetti just told the MSM to shove it all up their lavalier mics.

And the timing of his new Website couldn’t be better, as an otherwise unrelated post by Peter Robinson makes clear today at Ricochet:

As recently as this past Friday, I would still have said that the single, overriding issue in this election year would be the economy.  Yet in the past 100 hours, Planned Parenthood and its pro-choice supporters in the press have savaged the Komen Foundation; the Obama administration, which might easily have backed down from its regulations forcing Catholic health care institutions to provide contraceptives in direct violation of Catholic teaching, has instead mounted a public relations offensive to insist upon its position; and the Ninth Circuit has ruled unconstitutional California’s Proposition 8, issuing its decision in language so self-righteous and so bald that it could only have been intended to insult the millions of Californians who supported the ballot measure.

As Peter writes, “Already the highest in a generation, the stakes in this election have just risen.” It would nice if the right had anything approaching parity with old media and the establishment left. Perhaps a more pugilistic tone might be a good first start.

Related: “And what is true of liberal politics is also true of liberal public policy, Jonah Goldberg writes in USA Today. “As the Obama administration has made clear to the Catholic Church, there is no neutrality, no safe harbor from liberalism’s moral vision. You’re either with us, or against us — which means we shall be against you.”

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Member of mostly peaceful Occupy Newfoundland accused of stabbing 22-year old woman; “Occupy NL movement shocked by charges,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports, in an article written by Claude Rains’ Louis Renault character from Casablanca:

David Harrington, 19, was calm as he was led into court. Harrington will remain in custody until he enters a plea later this month.

He is charged with stabbing a woman as she walked to her job at McDonald’s on Torbay Road.

Harrington is a familiar face to many in the downtown. He has no fixed address, and recently spent time in Harbourside Park, with the Occupy NL movement.

“Absolutely surprised, because from what I know of Dave, this is not something Dave would do — he has no reason to be up into the east end,” Canning told CBC News. “It doesn’t make fricking sense.”

Nice epitaph for the entire Occupy movement, which has had plenty of violence swirling about it. I’m sure all of this is purely a coincidence.

(Via the Corner.)

Related: Mostly peaceful Occupy DC plans mayhem for CPAC.

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“There’s nothing better than being able to do the right thing and the politically savvy thing,” Kurt Schlichter  writes at Big Hollywood, “ while simultaneously paying back a long-time abuser in spades:”

And that’s just what the Republicans in Congress did to Hollywood when it abandoned the rush to pass SOPA and regulate the Internet for the benefit of Tinseltown. Astonishingly, considering its usual inability to perform competently at even the most basic level, the GOP not only managed to embrace good policy but drove a wedge into the Democratic coalition that may well have dramatic consequences down the road. And, best of all, it provided a bit of long overdue payback to the smug oligarchs of LA’s West Side who have spent the last couple decades treating Republicans like something you’d hasten to flush.

Hey, suckers, how do ya like us now?

Read the whole thing.

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Whether it was on the field…

Eli Manning and the New York Giants, all but given up on mid-December, saved their best for the last, pulling out a dramatic fourth-quarter comeback against the New England Patriots to finish off a brilliant stretch of play with a 21-17 victory Sunday for the franchises’ fourth Super Bowl title.

Manning delivered a 78-touchdown drive, capped by six-yard Ahmad Bradshaw touchdown run against an uncontested Patriots defense with 1:04 left. New England tried to give Tom Brady as much time for a comeback as possible, but the Giants defense stopped them to seal the victory.

It was Manning’s seventh fourth-quarter winning drive of the season for the Giants, who seemed to court disaster and play their best with everything hanging in the balance. It also signaled another late-game, Super Bowl outdueling of Brady, considered among the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. Manning previously won a duel between the two in Super Bowl XLII.

The Giants took over at their own 12-yard line, trailing 17-15 with just 3:46 remaining. Manning started with a pass to Mario Manningham, who made a circus 38-yard grab down the sideline. The Giants moved methodically the rest of the way, both killing the clock, burning New England timeouts and eventually forcing the Patriots to concede the winning points rather than allow a field goal with no time left.

…Or during the halftime show…

While sharing the stage with Madonna and Nicki Minaj during the song “Give Me All Your Luvin,” M.I.A. — in Cleaopatra gear and black stiletto boots — gave the middle-finger insult directly to a camera for a full second.

Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” in which her breast, with a nipple guard, became exposed during her halftime show with Justin Timberlake has been a difficult-to-top moment in TV history.

Jackson’s indiscretion resulted in a $550,000 fine levied by the FCC against CBS for airing the uncensored, highly controversial moment.

…This Super Bowl had a distinct sense of deja vu about it, right down to yet another Government Motors, Chrysler division commercial praising the joys of bombed out, government stimulus-ed out Detroit, this time with Clint Eastwood — once a  self-professed libertarian — playing the role of Eminem:

And once again, presumably Mark Steyn’s next weekly column or Corner post writes itself.

Update: “Would Dirty Harry ask for a handout? Hell no, he wouldn’t.” In contrast, the attendees at the Super Bowl have a bit more common sense than Clint: “#Occupy Protesters Heckled Outside Super Bowl.”

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Heathrow’s flight controllers would never cut it at O’Hare or Minneapolis:

Heathrow Airport faced questions last night as to why half of all flights were cancelled hours after it stopped snowing.

BAA, the Spanish-owned airport operator, incurred the wrath of passengers after 600 flights were grounded at Heathrow despite just three inches of snowfall, disrupting the plans of as many as 18,000 travellers.

The disruption was in stark contrast to airports across Europe where, despite record low temperatures, flights took off as normal.

But why wouldn’t Heathrow’s flight controllers be unnerved at the thought of any snow, based on the stories that their hometown newspapers were running a decade ago?

Related: “Global Warming Engine Unexpectedly Slows,” Walter Russell Mead writes. Though not before England’s James Delingpole writes at Ricochet.com, “Memo to the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven’t had quite enough death threats yet…”

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At the DC Examiner, Charlie Spiering writes:

An obvious victim of CNN’s graphic-heavy election presentation, news anchor John King called Mitt Romney “Governor Mormon” last night, during coverage of the Nevada election results.

“If you look here among faith, obviously Governor Mormon is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” King said. “He’s a Mormon and he also won big among Mormons.”

Romney won the vote of 9 out of 10 Mormons in Nevada.

“Bigotry will slip out,” Glenn Reynolds writes, clearly in nowhere near as charitable a mood as Spiering. Nor should he be. A year ago, King apologized on-air for a guest using the word “crosshairs,” which for a time was a temporarily-loaded word amongst King’s fellow left-leaning members of old media — even on one that for years hosted a show with an almost identical title:

On Tuesday’s John King USA, CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term “crosshairs” during a segment: “We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language” (audio available here). This action stands in stark contrast to an incident over a year earlier where former anchor Rick Sanchez took four days to apologize for using a unconfirmed quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh.

Since King himself set the standard, clearly, he must apologize for using his own similarly potentially inflammatory language or risk being called a hypocrite.

Well, again, especially given his network’s repeated penchant for religious bigotry.

Update: As a commenter asks below, does King ever refer to Harry Reid as “Senator Mormon?”

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It’s no coincidence that SF stands for both “science fiction” and “San Francisco” — terms that are increasingly interchangeable as a once great city continues to collectively go further off a cliff:

Above the Law may need to hire a full-time legal bathroombeat reporter.

A few days ago, we learned that Harvard Law School named a bathroom after an alumnus with an, umm, unusual last name.

Last night, we received a tip about the San Francisco branch of a national law firm that delivered an office-wide email concerning “restroom etiquette.” The email is hilarious, and if nothing else, impressively thorough. They thought of everything. The missive covered tips for masking awkward bathroom noises, suggestions for choosing a urinal, and an emphasis on the ways bathroom behavior can affect your professional reputation.

Let’s see which firm has (toilet) water on the brain, and take a look at the memo after the jump….

Without further ado, the hygienically minded firm is Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith.

I prefer the video version, myself:

Related: In Florida, an “environmentally-friendly” restroom goes “unexpectedly” horrifically wrong.

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• “Stock Market Predicts Defeat For President Obama.”

– Headline, Investor’s Business Daily, yesterday.

• “As the probability of President Barack Obama’s reelection grows, state and local officials across the country are tallying up the potential ramifications of a second term.”

– Lede of Joel Kotkin’s Thursday article at Forbes, titled, “Who Stands The Most To Win – And Lose – From A Second Obama Term.”

Not surprisingly, I find the first scenario much more interesting to contemplate, but your mileage may vary.

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