HOW SAD: Obama Administration trying to assemble “a coherent narrative” for Afghanistan.

A COOL NEW TUNE from Rick Torres and The Smart Set.

WELL, THAT’S JUST SAD: Westboro Baptist Protesters Get Tires Slashed Following Protest Saturday.

UPDATE: Reader George Wilson writes:

I read about the Westboro tires and I was troubled. Their message is abhorrent even if constitutionally protected. When, however, does it become ‘fire in a crowded theatre’ I.e. An incitement to riot?

I’m not surprised about the counter protest but I am concerned about the tire slashing. It seems like a significant escalation. I wonder if this is a confluence of elite disregard for the feelings of the average American and the success of Muslim violence, threatened and real, in getting action. People learn by example.

Yes, when the authorities implicitly condone violence in causes that they support (or at least are afraid to oppose), it sends a more general message that violence works. I’ve warned about this incentive system in the past.

I’VE GOT AN IDEA: Just waive everybody from ObamaCare’s requirements. It seems we’re off to a good start. It’s like the whole thing is some kind of big failure.

UPDATE: Reader Mark Shelden emails: “We’re going to have a field day cross checking Obamacare exemptions with the FEC database.” Heh.

LAW STUDENTS AT BROOKLYN LAW SCHOOL get their panties in a wad.

TEN BUSINESSES SMARTPHONES ARE DESTROYING.

READER J.T. SMITH EMAILS: “I’m sitting here in my living room watching Palin’s Alaska on TLC and I have one prediction for 2011…Record tourism for Alaska.”

UPDATE: Another review here.

IRA STOLL: The War on For-Profit Education.

As I’ve said before, it’s not at all clear that the traditional, not-for-profit model deserves a pass. Plenty of people enrolled in traditional colleges are graduating without marketable skills and with mountains of debt. I suspect that all of this is in part a PR effort by traditional schools to shift the blame.

And there’s plenty of blame to shift: “A bad story? Wait, it gets worse. How did Ms. Munna get to Citi to borrow more money than she could afford? She was referred there by her dear university, NYU. But what she didn’t know was that NYU was in a ‘revenue sharing’ (read: kickback) arrangement with Citibank, where NYU got 0.25 percent of the value of student loans made by Citibank.”

UPDATE: Reader Bob O’Hara writes:

Glenn, the Ira Stoll piece on the war on for-profit education is on target, but even more on target is your comment that traditional non-profit universities often have a predatory relationship with their own students.

To fix this we need to open the books. At public universities it should go without saying that all financial operations should take place in plain view of the taxpaying public. A tool exists to do just that, and Gil Brown of George Mason University has written about it for the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

It’s an online open-book accounting system, very easily implemented, that would allow anyone on campus to view all financial transactions within a university. If I were a state legislator with pork-busting ambitions and a sense of educational integrity, I’d push to have every campus in my state put this in place. Who knows what the student journalists of the country might uncover with such a system. (The new carpeting in the chancellor’s office cost how much??)

We had that scandal, I think.

BRYAN PRESTON: Is Obama Trying to Turn the Border into the Next ‘Third Rail’?

Meh. Good luck with that. I’m putting my money on the likes of Bill Whittle instead.

THE YEAR’S best horror DVDs.

LAME-DUCK HUNTING.

JACK LAIL: Fixing errors online needs some correcting at news organizations. “When someone is looking for information on a person or a place, or a thing or an event, they are going to Google; not heading to the public library for an exciting date with microfilm. But newspapers and other news organizations really haven’t developed a solid or transparent set of policies and procedures to deal with the issue online. Most newspapers have longstanding policies on how errors are corrected in print, but if you ask editors and reporters about online corrections in their own newsrooms, you likely will get as many answers as people you ask.”

CLAYTON CRAMER: The Myth That High Unemployment Means A High Crime Rate.

VIDEO: Naked Ukrainian Women Bust Up Iranian Regime Speech to Protest Stoning. Good for them.

A group of female protesters went topless in Ukraine on Thursday at an event promoting Iranian culture, to demonstrate against the death sentence handed down to a woman in Iran for murder and adultery.

Five members of the Ukrainian group Femen tore off their clothing and shouted slogans against what they called court-sanctioned murder during the event at Kiev’s Ukrainian House convention centre, which featured hundreds of Ukrainian and Iranian dignitaries.

‘Don’t kill women!’ one Femen activist shouted.

Video at the link. Would that American feminists were as aggressive with this sort of thing. But, alas . . .

READER STEPHEN TAYLOR WRITES: “I saw your recipe for Lamb Stew this week on Instapundit. My wife gathered the ingredients and made it today. It was outstanding! We used one can of beer; it tasted perfect.”

Glad to be of service! Now branch out and try the Insta-Chicken. You can make it in a slow-cooker, too.

TERROR: Muslim who shot soldier in Arkansas says he wanted to cause more death: Memphis man drifted to the dark side of Islamic extremism and then plotted a one-man jihad against his homeland.

COMFORT FOOD THE EASY WAY: Markdowns on slow cookers.

Here’s a good slow-cooker cookbook. And here’s another one.

INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE: WHY CAN’T CHUCK GET HIS BUSINESS OFF THE GROUND?

POPULAR MECHANICS: Top 10 Cars of 2011.

FROM A READER: “They told me if I voted for John McCain detainees would be held indefinitely at Guantanamo without trial, and they were right!” “Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, will probably remain in military detention without trial for the foreseeable future, according to Obama administration officials. The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters.”

Ah, remember the fierce moral urgency of change? And the obvious illegality and ineptitude of the Bush Administration’s approach? Why, all we needed was to put some really smart people in charge and all the problems would magically disappear! Apparently, the people we elected aren’t that smart. . . .

Related: “After all the bold talk in the campaign, Obama apparently has no idea what to do with the detainees. Or, that he had ideas, but they encountered reality. Why not reach out to newly reddened America by saying Bush actually got it right and proceed with the military commissions?”

Instead, I predict robotic-and-anesthetized repetition of talking points.

OKAY, I LIKE THE P.J. Institute’s version better. But that said, even though the NYT’s you-fix-the-deficit calculator offers a somewhat tendentious set of choices, it does successfully convey the message of just how deep a hole we’re in. Here are my choices from their somewhat limited palette of options. I would have cut more military spending had they not “channeled” cuts in particular directions. I also would have cut more federal spending in other areas if allowed. . . .

UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark emails:

In looking at your choices, what struck me most was how reasonable they seemed. Yeah, I know, I’m in the choir. And yes, I know that raising the retirement age – meaning raising the age for full benefits – and raising the eligibility age for Medicare and capping Medicare growth will induce howls of disapproval from all the usual corners amplified times 10 by the all the usual media, but I suspect that there might be more willingness to seriously consider these measures than most suppose. I really think proposals like yours await a Christie-like personality in Congress to push something like this forward.

I am a reasonable man. It may be, though, that we need some unreasonable men — and, based on Tea Party experience, more likely women — to push hard enough.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Don Vollum emails:

I think they are sending the wrong message with this calculator– it shows me how easy it is to eliminate the deficit! I was able to do so in a few minutes, even within the constraints imposed by the NYT’s calculator. If I can do it so easily, why can’t the politicians?

That’s a rhetorical question– the answer is that there are not enough opportunities for graft in deficit elimination.

Indeed. If we could change that, we’d be getting somewhere. . . .

PAUL KRUGMAN: You know what we need to balance the budget? Death Panels! And sales taxes.

I think the White House staff can end their “rebranding” effort. As usual, Krugman’s got his finger on the pulsebeat of America. Or maybe that’s the wrong metaphor, here . . . .

FETAL TESTOSTERONE EXPOSURE boosts male risk-taking.

TERROR CLERIC OMAR BAKRI MOHAMMED CAPTURED IN LEBANON: “Apparently confident that he would receive divine protection, Bakri remained at his home in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, where he was discovered by a police patrol.” Whoops.

HEH: TLC following up Sarah Palin’s Alaska with Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco.

NISSAN LEAF DELAYS: Report: Leaf dealer demos pushed back to April. I put down 99 bucks to reserve one and all I’ve gotten is lame spam. Color me disappointed.

CHANGE: Here’s Niall Ferguson’s Complete And Definitive Guide To The Coming Sovereign Debt Crisis.

IN THE MAIL: Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.

VIDEO: Quantitative Easing Explained.

IF YOU MISSED IT YESTERDAY ON SIRIUS/XM SATELLITE RADIO, the latest PJM Political is now online.

SHELLACKED AT HOME, SHELLACKED ABROAD: San Francisco Chronicle: Obama can’t get G-20 nations to follow his lead. “U.S. leadership, once taken for granted, has all but vanished, and no one’s in charge.”

ECONOMISTS WEIGH IN: Can the economy be saved?

I just want to remind people of what Robert Samuelson said about the stimulus way back when it was passed:

Judged by his own standards, President Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus program is deeply disappointing. For weeks, Obama has described the economy in grim terms. “This is not your ordinary run-of-the-mill recession,” he said at his Feb. 9 news conference. It’s “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” Given these dire warnings, you’d expect the stimulus package to focus almost exclusively on reviving the economy. It doesn’t, and for that, Obama bears much of the blame. . . . His politics compromise the program’s economics.

Yes, they did. And he knew it, and didn’t care.

UPDATE: More on how the stimulus was targeted.

HE’S BAAACK! Toby Harnden: The Decider returns to haunt Mr Nuance as George W. Bush eclipses Barack Obama. “Who would have thought that the man hailed as a great American orator and whose stage at the 2008 Democratic convention was a faux Greek temple would be shown up in terms of the theatricality and articulation of the presidency by the man derided as a tongue-tied bumbler and global village idiot?”

THE ECONOMIST: Global Imbalances: Pot And Kettle.

AXELROD: “Robotic and anesthetized.”

UPDATE: Some write to suggest that “robotic and anesthetized” seems to be the new style in the White House. Hmm. Zoloft? Or have the aliens taken over?

ANOTHER ONE-DAY SALE on cheap, external hard drives. Back up, people.

UPDATE: Via reader Richard Marpet, here’s a 2 TB hard drive for 99 bucks. Wow.

CHANGE: Rangel In Hot Water Over Tapping His PAC For Cash. “Congressman Charles Rangel, whose ethics trial starts tomorrow, appears to have improperly used political-action committee money to pay for his defense. Rangel tapped his National Leadership PAC for $293,000 to pay his main legal-defense team this year. He took another $100,000 from the PAC in 2009 to pay lawyer Lanny Davis. Two legal experts told The Post such spending is against House rules.” Luckily for him, the ethics trial is taking place while Dems have a lame-duck majority. Unless, you know, this revelation causes things to be put off for further investigation.

WESLEYAN FACULTY ENDORSE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: “Well, this is awkward. In the wake of an affirmative-action bake sale hosted by the campus conservative club, the Wesleyan University admissions office swore up and down that the school doesn’t have an affirmative-action policy — but now, a large number of the Wesleyan faculty have written in to Wesleyan’s campus paper, the Wesleyan Argus, to defend the practice of affirmative action.”

CHANGE: The old scientific powers are starting to lose their grip. “America’s share of world publications, at 28% in 2007, is slipping. In 2002 it was 31%. The EU’s collective share also fell, from 40% to 37%, whereas China’s has more than doubled to 10% and Brazil’s grew by 60%, from 1.7% of the world’s output to 2.7%.”

SO IS THIS HOPE, OR CHANGE? Surprise, California! Budget Deficit 25 Percent Worse Than a Month Ago.

PRECARIOUS ALBION: “Britain today still has a productive demographic that sees value in things like restoring fiscal responsibility to government, commemorating Britain’s national identity and history, and maintaining public order. But that demographic is increasingly under siege.”

OH GOODY: Lugar sounds alarm on lax security of deadly bio agents seen on Africa tour.

TOM MAGUIRE: Peggy Noonan – Wrong, Wrong, And Wrong.

PETER WEHNER: Who’s serious about the debt?

It is simply not tenable for public officials to portray themselves as courageous voices for fiscal sanity while simultaneously fencing off cuts and reforms for entitlements. This doesn’t argue for recklessness or doing everything all at once. And it certainly doesn’t mean promoting austerity at the expense of pro-growth economic policies. But it does mean one should not declare entitlement programs off-limits. We have to deal with them; there’s no way around it. So there’s no point in making things more difficult or making commitments that are contrary to the national interest. Those who do open themselves to the charge that they are fundamentally unserious on this matter.

For the most part, they’ll be as serious as they’re forced to be.

And entitlement programs shouldn’t be off-limits, they should be at the top of the list. On the other hand, don’t underestimate the importance of earmarks. They’re the gateway drug of corruption and overspending.

BUYING GOLD? Caveat Emptor. “Wait: George Soros getting investment advice from . . . Glenn Beck? Come up with your own crazy conspiracy theory to explain that one.”

CHANGE: Secret Walmart Survey Shows Inflation Already Here.

WARD HEELING: “Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) warned Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) of “disloyalty” to President Obama if she should seek to distance herself from the White House in her re-election campaign.”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Winter Warm-Up Sale.

INDEED: Tea Partiers to GOP: Fall in line or face challengers. “Prominent leaders within the Tea Party movement have a warning for presumptive House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. – keep their campaign promises to cut spending and repeal the health care law or face defeat in their next primaries.”

UPDATE: Reader Neil Sorens writes:

This is exactly why the Tea Party nominating Senate candidates was such a big win. The weakness of the candidates, far from being a Tea Party failure, makes it an even bigger win in terms of leverage within the party. The GOP establishment exists primarily to further the interests of the GOP: namely, winning elections and raking in funds. Everything else, including issues, voters’ desires, the well-being of the country, etc., is secondary. With weak Tea Party candidates losing important, winnable races, the GOP establishment either has to give in and start backing principled, electable fiscal conservatives rather than good ol’ boys or face the punishment they fear most: letting power and influence slip through their fingers because the establishment candidate got taken down in the primary by another O’Donnell.

Hopefully, the end result is something that both groups want: strong fiscal conservatives for the Tea Party, and a Republican majority for the GOP.

Interesting take.

RAND PAUL ON THE DEFICIT COMMISSION REPORT: “Those in Washington think a 30-year plan to balance the budget is bold, and I think that’s still anemic.”

CORRECTING Gloria Steinem’s revisionist history.

ANDREW STUTTAFORD ON EARMARKS: “That anyone can still be defending earmarks, at least on the right side of the aisle, is astounding. It’s not only the small ‘c’ corruption that earmarks can imply, and it’s not only the not so small ‘e’ extravagance that they represent, it’s also the political tone deafness of those who–even now–look to defend them.”

AMERICAN NARCISSUS: “Politicians as a class are particularly susceptible to mirror-gazing. But Obama’s vanity is overwhelming. It defines him, his politics, and his presidency.”

Related: Ask me about the compliments I received.

UPDATE: South Park unimpressed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More prescience.

OUCH: ABC: So that Obama trip to Asia turned out to be a huge bust, huh?

UPDATE: “He came back with bupkis.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Why Wall Street Should Fear Sarah Palin. “Palinomics, embryonic as it is, seems to be rooted in ‘free-market populism,’ a version of conservative thinking that is pro-market rather than pro-business. It says the role of government is to help markets function more fairly and efficiently for everyone, encouraging competition and ‘creative destruction’ (which Palin specifically mentioned in her book). Pro-business policies, by contrast, can end up subsidizing favored companies, raising barriers to entry and otherwise entrenching the status quo. . . . It’s easy to imagine her campaigning against corporate tax breaks, say, or in favor of limiting the size of banks under the belief that as long as they are ginormous, government will find a way to bail them out. That agenda might not attract much campaign cash from Manhattan bankers or Washington lobbyists, but it could be a compelling formula in the new Tea Party-infused Republican party.”

UPDATE: Reader Billy Harvey writes: “I’d vote for this in a heartbeat.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A hedge-fund reader emails:

“Wall Street” isn’t afraid of Sarah Palin. The “too big to fail” bastards who’ve gamed the system may fear a more level playing field, but the hundreds of smaller players who’ve been elbowed aside by the crony capitalists would LOVE to see a new broom sweep through DC.

Well then, they should put some support behind the new broom of their choice.

IT KEEPS MY MIND FROM WANDERING, where it will go . . .

FASTER, PLEASE: Retina Implant Restores Vision, Lets Cyborgs See IR Spectrum! “Scientists in Germany have developed a retina implant to restore vision to the blind that hints at the augmentation cyborgs may receive in the future. The device, developed by Retina Implant AG, is an array of 1500+ photodiodes (roughly 38×40 pixels) that is surgically placed under the retina. Light that enters the eye stimulates the photodiodes which send electric currents through the underlying neurons. In a recent article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers describe how blind patients (mostly suffering from retinitis pigmentosa) were able to see light and dark areas and discern basic shapes only a week after their surgeries. One man was even able to see the difference between objects, and read large letters! That would be remarkable enough, but implanted patients also reported a sensitivity to infrared light. That’s right, the retina implant could only provide very basic vision, but it did so in an extended spectrum. Cybernetic implants like these may not only be able to restore sight to the blind, they could let them see things that no normal person has ever seen before with their own eyes.”

RACIST NOSTALGIA from Roy Edroso? Or something like that.

Plus, from the comments: “Humility is a good thing, but it’s not good for a government official in a democracy to be urging it on voters. It might be good for government officials to be reminded that there are systems where people get rid of the officials they don’t like by hanging them from lamp posts. Perhaps they would find it useful to contemplate their privileges.”

STILL A FEW HOURS LEFT on that 48-hour HDTV and Video Sale.

REASON TV: Peter Thiel on Facebook, Technology, and the Higher Education Bubble. “Politics becomes libertarian as an absolute last resort.”

WHICH IS ACTUALLY ADAPTIVE IF YOU’RE A BLOGGER: Aging Brains Notice More Irrelevant Information.

IT LOOKS LIKE A MERCEDES S-CLASS: Hyundai’s 429-horsepower 5.0 liter V8 Sedan.

GOOGLE STREET VIEW: “A systematic invasion of privacy?” “Arguing that people somehow ‘deserved it’ or have no right to complain because the data wasn’t encrypted is fatuous. We don’t encrypt our mail or our telephone calls, but they come with a legitimate expectation of privacy; our internet usage and e-mail is just the same. Many people use public networks, sharing their access with friends or colleagues — sometimes because it’s convenient; sometimes because they’re at a café which provides such access for free; sometimes because they don’t know how to protect their wi-fi. Certainly, they should encrypt their systems — but it hardly relieves the wrongdoer of culpability if the victim is more culpable than others. That logic says that your grandmother shouldn’t leave the house because she’s so easy to rob.” Also, Google is perceived as lefty, so they get more of a pass.

CHINA BOOSTS ITS TARGET for nuclear power capacity.

Meanwhile, Tennessee Valley Authority plans to build 6 modular mini-reactors.

IN THE MAIL: From Bill Peschel, Writers Gone Wild: The Feuds, Frolics, and Follies of Literature’s Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Lovers, Iconoclasts, and Misanthropes.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Obama’s India Trip Was Worth All The Money.

UPDATE: A reader disagrees:

Sorry Charlie.

No amount of imperial barge travel to impress the sub-continent will ever replace a sound fiscal policy, a strong dollar and an environment that nurtures entrepreneurship and business.

Let me know when your highly advertised “smarts” get back from their extended lunch.

I don’t buy it. Not one rupee.

Hmm. Not sure where I come down on this, though the part about fiscal policy and business environment is clearly true.

IOWAHAWK: CrisisGate!

IMPORTANT ELIOT SPITZER QUESTION: Is it OK to wear socks during sex? I’m guessing that Spitzer’s partners wouldn’t object to him wearing as much clothing as possible.

THE CARNIVAL OF NUCLEAR ENERGY IS UP!

CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS: Memorable movies on the rails.

CHANGE: Growing backlash against TSA body scanners, pat-downs.

MICKEY KAUS: Psst! Rand Paul Was Right About Federal Pay. “So you have apples in that pay basket! When I heard that Rand Paul had claimed that average federal employee’s compensation (including benefits) was more than $120,000, I thought that can’t be true. Then I read Media Matters’ lengthy response to the claim.”

Plus this:

P.S.: When people are outraged at the $120,000 figure, I think, they aren’t making an implicit apples to oranges comparison. They’re making an apples to themselves comparison. They know what they do and what they’re making. They have a pretty good, rough idea of what federal employees do (some are highly skilled doctors, some are equal opportunity compliance facilitators). They know that they themselves have had to take pay freezes and cuts and endure waves of corporate downsizing while the federal government hasn’t been through anything like that. In fact, pay for individual federal workers has kept growing each year thanks to both cost-of living raises and “step” increases. The federal pay escalator kept on running right through the recesssion. Meanwhile, federal workers enjoy job security they can only dream of.

They know, in short, that as a result of this Great Divergence (sorry Tim!) they don’t make anything like $120,000, but they pay taxes to support the government workers who do—and they’re outraged. Oranges have nothing to do with it.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Reader Dan Hollenbaugh writes:

Glenn, it’s distressing to see you climb on the bandwagon for federal pay cuts. I have 29 years of civil service. I’m an aerospace engineer at Redstone Arsenal. There are a few things I’d like to point out to help explain the numbers you’re quoting:

1. The federal government has no low-paying jobs. We don’t hire janitors or ditchdiggers or record clerks – all of that work is contracted out. With the rise of office automation, the GS-4 secretary positions have gone away too – we all do our own typing now. The clerical jobs have completely disappeared. Everybody on the payroll now is a professional of some type.

2. We’re paycapped. Nobody here can make more than a congressman’s official salary. A young professional in a large corporation has the chance to eventually make big bucks – those multimillion dollar salaries with bonuses and stock options that top executives make. That’s not possible for us. That’s what we gave up to get the security that civil service offers. The best we can hope for is a decent salary, never a high one. Would you take that from us too?

3. We went through long hiring freezes in the ’80s and ’90s. The result is that most of the engineers I work with are senior people in higher pay grades. There are very few engineers in the 30-45 age range. Senior people in any organization make larger salaries. The downside of that is that over 50% of the workforce is eligible for retirement within the next 10 years. You’ll see the average salary go way down then, but so will the experience level.

My annual pay is $150K, plus a decent benefits package. The guys with my skills and experience in aerospace firms make $200K and more, with comparable benefits packages. Once again, I went for the security, plus I’m serving the Army, the service I started in and love.

4. Finally, where the hell were all of you people in the ’80s, when I was making $22K a year as a young engineer, and federal salaries were well behind the civilian secto? I didn’t hear a lot of complaining about lack of fairness then.

Good points, but once you start class-envy politics, which the Dems have done, this kind of thing is inevitable. If a 250K income makes you one of the hated-rich, then a two-civil-servant household is pretty much there. And this blowback is perhaps fair, since federal employees tend to vote heavily Democratic. If people still believed in a neutral civil service, perhaps sentiment would be different. Meanwhile, the low-pay-for-security trade isn’t really there anymore, as federal employees now often make more, not less, than people in comparable private sector jobs where there’s also no security.

Meanwhile, reader Troy Hinrichs writes:

Regarding federal pay… not only do we make an “apples to self” comparison… we look at our men and women in the military — federal employees all — and realize they don’t make squat compared to bean counters living in Virginia. They really are public servants in myriad ways… I would support paying an E-7 120,000 a year over ANY EEOC compliance officer. Would that they could switch pay scales.

I think a lot of people feel that way.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Miller writes:

I’d agree, in part, with Mr Hollenbaugh’s comment. There are people in Federal government doing useful work that deserve to be compensated for it.

But…if we take him at his point that there are no low-level staff in Federal employment, how in Hell could government have gotten so large?

Perhaps it’s true that in his area a substantial percentage of the staff will retire in a decade, but when so much of the government has grown so explosively over the past decade that can’t be true everywhere. Which means that in a decade the engineers will be gone and the recently-fattened bureaucracies will be even more ascendant.

It’s part of Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. And Katie Kring emails:

Here’s an apples-to-apples comparison: I was, in a former life, a box office manager working in live theatre. I was working at a non-profit, and making $30k a year, which was a little on the low side, but in range. I had the opportunity to interview for a similar job, working at a city-run performing arts center, getting 3 weeks paid vacation plus something like 12 paid holidays, for $72k/year. Now, the cost of living in that other city was a bit higher, but nowhere near enough to justify the discrepancy. That’s not a federal job, but it pretty neatly illustrates the difference between rigidly scaled governmental pay and what-the-market-will-bear private pay. After all, I would have happily taken that job for, say, $55-60k!

Indeed.

BAD NEWS FOR OBAMA IN THE WASHINGTON POST: To be a great president, Obama should not seek reelection in 2012. “We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed.” (Reader Jeff Dobbs emails: “They told me that if I voted for John McCain there would be calls for the president to only serve one term. And they were right!“)

Related: The WaPo shivs The One. And the NYT isn’t exactly positive, either.

GET READY FOR THE GREAT MERS WHITEWASH BILL: “When Congress comes back into session next week, it may consider measures intended to bolster the legal status of a controversial bank owned electronic mortgage registration system that contains three out of every five mortgages in the country.”

FROM SARAH PALIN: An Open Letter to Republican Freshmen Members of Congress. “Republicans campaigned on a promise to rein in out-of-control government spending and to repeal and replace the massive, burdensome, and unwanted health care law President Obama and the Democrat Congress passed earlier this year in defiance of the will of the majority of the American people. These are promises that you must keep.”

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Bleeding and Purging to Balance the Humors of the Economy.

NO SURPRISE: Joe Scarborough: Top Senate Dems have told me privately that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. Well, where would he have learned?

BECAUSE THAT’S WHO’S DUMB ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THE ANTI-VACCINE CRAP: California’s Whooping Cough Epidemic Centered in Rich, White Counties.

I had a column on this phenomenon a while back.

CHRIS MOONEY WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: White House vs. Science:

Congressional Republicans say a whole lot of questions “need to be answered” about an inspector general’s report detailing how the White House altered a scientific paper that it used to justify a controversial drilling moratorium after the BP oil spill last spring.

They’re right.

Almost from the moment the report was first made public, most of the scientists involved said it had been deceitfully edited to make it look like they’d endorsed the ban, which Gulf-state elected officials immediately denounced as a job-killer.

Now the Interior Department’s inspector general, Mary Kendall, has determined that those allegations are correct — and that the White House falsely applied a scientific veneer to justify what was clearly a political decision. . . . Ironically, of course, it was candidate Barack Obama who accused the Bush administration of twisting scientific evidence; he promised, if elected, to be guided by “science, not ideology.”

And it turns out that this is just one of several instances in which the Obama White House has manipulated the word of scientific experts.

My Chris Mooney references, for those not getting them, are all about this. He’s actually a good guy — he even made The American Prospect readable for a while — but the argument was a bit tendentious . . . .

PEGGY NOONAN: Obama’s Gifts to the GOP.

Whatever word means the opposite of snakebit, that is what the Republican party is right now. One reason they are feeling hope is that they have received two big and unexpected gifts from President Obama. The first, of course, was his political implosion—his quick descent and speedy fall into unpopularity, which shaped the outcome of the 2010 elections. At the heart of that descent was the president’s inability to understand how the majority of Americans were thinking. From the day he was sworn in he seemed to have had no practical or intuitive sense of what was on the American mind. By early 2009 they had one deep and central worry, the economy. But his central preoccupation was reforming health care. He devoted his first 18 months to it and got what he wanted, but at the price of seeming wholly out of touch with the thoughts and concerns of the American people.

This week the president gave Republicans a second unexpected gift. He reacted to the election’s outcome in a way that suggested he’s still in his own world, still seeing a reality no one else is seeing. The problem wasn’t his policies, but that he didn’t explain them well. It wasn’t health-care reform, it was his failed attempt to popularize it. His problem was that he was not political enough. He was too substantive, too serious. Americans have been under stress, and people under stress don’t think clearly, and so they couldn’t see the size of his achievements.

He sounded like a man who couldn’t see what was obvious to everyone else, and once again made his political adversaries seem, in comparison, more realistic, more clear-sighted and responsive to public opinion. And he did this while everyone was watching. Again, what a gift.

Nice point. Still waiting for Noonan’s mea culpa for her own Obamamania, though. Talk about not seeing what was obvious . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Phil Manhard writes: “Nice set of clothes that emperor has there. The crease of the pants has to be seen to be believed.”

DEFENDING THE PLANET against asteroid strikes. “If you don’t typically follow the debate on planetary defense, you could be forgiven for thinking Earth-crushing asteroids are more the stock in trade of big-budget action filmmakers than an actual concern for the taxpaying American. It might surprise you to learn that John Holdren, director of the White House’s Office for Science and Technology Policy, recently wrote Congressional leaders to recommend that NASA spearhead a multi-agency effort to assess asteroid-deflection technologies.”

METAPHOR ALERT: Barney Frank’s neighborhood grocery folds, owner blames customers. “’I think it comes down to quality and trust,’ said Formaggio’s David Robinson. ‘That’s where Don Otto’s seems to have missed out.’”

OBAMA PANEL PROBES STIMULUS WASTE — at the Ritz-Carlton. “Members of a key panel created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus bill, have scheduled a meeting on November 22 to consider ways to prevent ;fraud, waste, and abuse of Recovery Act funds. The meeting will be held at the super-luxe Ritz Carlton Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona.”

A reader emails: “Would send a damn fine message if a few hundred people joined these clowns for ‘Tea at the Ritz’.” Heh.

“WE TOLD YOU SO.”

IN VIRGINIA, ASKING FOR A TEA PARTY LICENSE PLATE. “The Virginian-Pilot reports that about 600 people have expressed interest in the plates through a group tied to the Virginia Tea Party Patriots federation. Before a specialty plate can be issued in Virginia, 350 prepaid applications must be submitted to the state Department of Motor Vehicles. Virginia has issued more than 200 different specialty plates over the years.” I like the design.

WHO KNEW CANADIANS WERE SO RACIST:

Maclean’s is facing considerable criticism for an article suggesting that some top (white) Canadian students are avoiding certain universities for fear that they are “too Asian.” The article relies on quotations from anonymous white students saying things like: “The only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian. All the white kids go to Queen’s, Western and McGill.” (U of T refers to the University of Toronto, by any measure a top Canadian university.) The article also features some quotes from Asian students, who report on experiences such as this one at the University of British Columbia: “At graduation a Canadian — i.e. ‘white’ — mother told me that I’m the reason her son didn’t get a space in university and that all the immigrants in the country are taking up university spots.”

I mean, they aren’t even Tea Partiers. . . .

VIDEO: Sen. Hatch says he’ll support the earmark moratorium.

WALTER SHAPIRO: Will Stealth Spending Decide the 2012 GOP Presidential Primaries?

A NEW HOPE: When Star Wars meets fine art.

TRIFECTA: What Obama Has Failed To Communicate.

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PROFESSOR JACOBSON: Scott Brown For Senate 2012.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Paging Dr. Luddite: “Information technology is on the brink of revolutionizing health care— if physicians will only let it.”

On the other hand, maybe their resistance is well-founded: “Very few data-mining systems survive first contact with reality.”

TESTING AUTISM DRUGS in human brain cells.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.

CHANGE: Dengue Fever Strikes Miami: First Local Case in 50 Years. “The first locally acquired case of dengue fever in Miami-Dade County in more than 50 years was confirmed Thursday by health officials. They warned people to take precautions against the mosquitoes that carry it.”

UPDATE: Reader Douglas Chandler writes: “I noticed that the Dengue feaver story followed the bad week for AGW. If one takes the contrarian viewpoint on AGW, which seems to be proving the most accurate, then the coming freeze will kill off enough of the skeeters so we won’t have to ramp the DDT production again.” Well, that’s the upside of a Little Ice Age, i suppose. Though I’ve seen some pretty big mosquitoes in Alaska. . . . I remember waking up and seeing two of them at the foot of my bed. One said, “Should we eat him here, or take him home?” The other replied: “We’d better eat him here — if we take him home, the big guys might get him away from us.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Owen Hughes writes:

Your little joke about the Alaskan mosquitoes made ms smile. I grew up in the Yukon. Same problem there; although the mosquitoes ran the first shift, from June through end July; and the blackflies ran things from late July until September frost. We hated the mosquitoes, but by second week of August we were missing them.

Regarding the emergence in USA of pathogens usually found elsewhere, this is part of a larger public health issue around infectious disease management. The chronic underinvestment in new antibiotics, and to some extent in new vaccines, has really left us exposed. Many diseases like TB have no vaccines, so there is no population-level protection. And as cases break out, the available antibiotics “self-obsolesce,” because they exert selective pressure on the pathogen. Particularly if people don’t finish the course of antibiotics, they just end up with a tougher strain. Even if they do behave, the general effect over time is to drive the emergence of strains of pathogen resistant to the current drugs. And since it’s hard to make money from antibiotics, and because the FDA has ignored good science that could speed clinical trials, we end up with fewer and fewer drugs that still work.

Right now, I figure that the next mass killer, probably XDR (extremely drug resistant) TB, is incubating in the lungs of some immune-compromised prisoner in Russia or South Africa. Once it breaks loose, it will take only months or a few years to wreak havoc on us all. Meanwhile it will take a decade or more to develop a countermeasure.

So we definitely need to do something about this.

Yes. Bill Frist wanted a crash program to develop techniques for quick vaccine production, but that never happened.

A BAD WEEK for global warming.

ARE THE “WILDERNESS YEARS” OVER ALREADY?

SCIENCE: Study reveals the subtle dynamics underpinning how cats drink (w/ video).

POLIWOOD: Tin Ears in Tinseltown – Will Hollywood Miss the Impact of the Election?

BILL WHITTLE: What We Believe, Part 6: Immigration.