ANDREW KLAVAN: Fantasy vs. Reality: Can You Spot The Difference?

POLITICO: Report: Nearly 100 misconduct allegations in 2009. “Nearly 100 allegations of senatorial misconduct were made in 2009, and 13 preliminary investigations over potential breaches of Senate ethics rules were launched, according to a report issued Friday by the Senate Select Committee on Ethics.” Roughly one per Senator.

RUSH LIMBAUGH CUTS LOOSE. I caught a bit of Limbaugh asking the Miss America interview questions to Clinton Kelly last night. It was a surreal moment.

SARAH HOYT: Let’s Talk About Political Correctness. “Political correctness deliberately – IMHO – conflates race and culture so you can’t point at cultures as dysfunctional and so that anyone criticizing a foreign culture can be called racist. This is nonsense.”

MORE FROM ANN ALTHOUSE ON President Obama at the GOP Retreat. “It’s way too late to talk about some kind of ‘absolutely essential’ process that the Democrats never even considered following back when they thought they had an invincible supermajority. Republican support is a necessity now, but not because of some dialectical ideal of policymaking proceeding by debate. You need the votes now, and you didn’t then. The people reacted and are continuing to react to what the Democrats did with their supermajority. The objection isn’t to discord and obstruction. The objection is to the rule of a single party rule that has seen fit to ram through policies people don’t want.”

I’M NOT SURPRISED: Laws banning cellphone use while driving have no effect: study. “As state legislators across the United States enact laws that ban phoning and texting while driving, a new study is showing no reductions in crashes after hand-held phone bans take effect. Comparing insurance claims for crash damage in 4 US jurisdictions before and after such bans, The Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) researchers find claim rates are comparable with nearby jurisdictions without such bans. ‘The laws aren’t reducing crashes, even though we know that such laws have reduced hand-held phone use, and several studies have established that phoning while driving increases crash risk,’ says Adrian Lund, president of HLDI.”

SO MUCH FOR THAT FIERCE MORAL URGENCY OF CHANGE BUSINESS: Guantanamo eyed for 9/11 trial.

MY COLLEGE FRIEND MARTHA BOGGS BOUGHT OUT THE BISTRO AT THE BIJOU, and here’s a report on the new place. I plan to check it out next week.

CAR LUST: Remembering the Rambler/AMC Marlin.

WELL, THAT’S WHY HE GETS THE BIG BUCKS: Nick Gillespie Makes Libertarianism Look Pretty Good.

BYRON YORK: A Setback For the Drive To Punish Bush-Era “War Criminals.”

One cherished goal of legal activists on the left is to punish the “war criminals” who helped shape terrorist interrogation policies during the Bush administration. Some of those activists now work in the Obama Justice Department and have been hoping the Department would find two Bush-era lawyers in particular, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, guilty of professional misconduct — a move that would likely result in both men facing disbarment proceedings.

The activists are sure to be disappointed in a new report by Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, who say a still-unreleased report from the Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility “clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the ‘torture’ memos of professional-misconduct allegations.”

The Newsweek story is here. Meanwhile, I wonder what vulnerabilities Obama Administration lawyers face over TARP and bailout-related actions, and whether that had anything to do with the treatment of this issue. . . .

IT’S MISERABLY COLD, SINGLE-DIGIT WEATHER IN MICHIGAN, but they had a Tea Party rally anyway. Here’s a report.

PRIORITY-SETTING: Justice Dept.: Obama administration may take action on BCS. “The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday to a senator who had asked for an antitrust review.”

Reader John Lucas writes:

Here are two (related) questions some reporter should ask Robert Gibbs at the next press briefing: “Is there any aspect of our lives that the President will say is off-limits to federal regulation? Is there anything that he will unequivocally promise not to try to control?”

If they try to control how much sugar I drink in sodas and how college football is played, I can’t think of anything they would not try to control.

And, Orrin Hatch is equally to blame. His role lends credence to the idea that the “old guard” Republicans are equally unprincipled.

Indeed.

WELL, THAT’S PRETTY MUCH HOW THEY’RE RUNNING THE COUNTRY, TOO: Reid raises $2M, spends it all. “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) raised an impressive $2 million in the fourth fundraising quarter, but spent $2.1 million — even more money than he brought in — much of it on campaign advertisements designed to improve his profile.” And yet his popularity has plummeted. I’ll bet he’ll find the next $2M a bit harder to come by.

A CUNNING PLAN: Talking Down To The Public Will Surely Work.

DOPPELGANGER? I don’t even know ‘er!

REX MURPHY: So, Whatever Happened to Copenhagen?

REALCLEARPOLITICS: Obama’s Stunning Admission.

UPDATE: PETER SUDERMAN: Nevermind All Those Opposition Solutions; Obama’s Opposition Has No Solutions!

The second point, though, is that it’s more than a little irritating to see Obama speak so well of Ryan’s plan and say that it’s the sort of thing that deserves “serious discussion.” Problem is, throughout the health care debate, Obama didn’t want to have that discussion. He didn’t want to talk about any plans to significantly reduce entitlement spending, or severing the links between insurance and employment.

Indeed, not only did he make almost no effort to incorporate opposition ideas into his legislation, he wasn’t willing to recognize the existence of legitimate opposing ideas at all. Instead, he chose to caricature his opponents as having “no solutions.” That’s not true now. It wasn’t true then. But Obama’s approach to most policy and political debates has been to reiterate the notion that his way was not simply the best way, but the only way—or at least the only legitimate, acceptable, reasonable way. His conversation today with Rep. Ryan, I think, is a tacit admission that that’s just not the case.

Indeed.

APPLE’S iPAD AND The Flash Clash. “This latest iPad beef isn’t about the device’s frequently mocked name or any surrounding trademark concerns; rather, it’s about the iPad’s apparent lack of Flash support. Product demos and statements from Adobe suggest the device is not Flash-friendly — but Apple’s promotional materials paint a very different picture.”

ON THE OCCASION OF J.D. SALINGER’S PASSING: Holden Caulfield In Middle Age.

IN THE MAIL: From Mark Teppo, Lightbreaker.

BOSTON GLOBE: What’s the story behind the brown coat? Reader Matt Edens writes: “I take it Beth Teitell wasn’t a Firefly fan.”

RETRACTO, THE CORRECTION ALPACA is still on Arianna Huffington’s case.

UPDATE: You can see all of Retracto’s work — a fairly impressive body already — right here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Wayne Wren writes: “I have admired Breibart but until now had not recognized his brilliance. He turned what could have been an embarrassing, guilt by association moment into another successful attack on the creditability of the MSM, putting it on the defensive and shooting the legs out of the story.” Yep. You can seldom go wrong by taking advantage of their sloppiness, bias, and excessive self-regard.

CLIMATEGATE COVERUP? London Times: Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen. “Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists. The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions. . . . Dr Pacharui has also been accused of using the error to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.”

The Times coverage of this has been terrific, which is more than you can say for pretty much any mainstream American media outlet, most of which are still trying to pretend there’s no story here. It’s — again — a complete abnegation of journalistic responsibility.

UH OH: Climategate: NOAA and NASA Complicit in Data Manipulation.