GOLD INTO LEAD: How In Europe, Even Admission Of A “Plan B” Is Equivalent To Failure.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Eric Holder ‘one of the most incompetent attorneys general in US history.’

CLAUDIA ROSETT: The Long, Rough Awakening Of Russia.

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Christmas with blended families. It still works pretty much the same way with us a decade later, though we’ve lost some folks, sadly, but picked up some new ones, gladly.

It’s not as easy for everyone.

AT AMAZON, loads of Year-End Deals.

SOME PEOPLE ARE feeling unappreciated.

STACY MCCAIN is heading for Iowa.

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

TEN THINGS TRAINERS wish you knew about your workout.

Meanwhile, inspired by my Mark Rippetoe interview, I went to the gym on leg day yesterday and did a bunch of heavy squats and deadlifts as outlined in his new book. Today, I’ve been walking a little funny as a result. . . .

IOWA FORECAST: Moderate Weather.

HAPPY 10TH ANNIVERSARY to Bill Quick’s DailyPundit. How many of us blogging back in 2001 thought we’d still be doing it ten years later?

CHRISTMAS, 1981. “Things sure have changed in the past 30 years…”

BELARUS: The Irresistible Lure Of The Dark Side.

RUSSIA: Vast Rally In Moscow Is A Challenge To Putin’s Power.

JEFF JACOBY: The Affirmative Action Myth.

ON PJTV: Bill Whittle and I talk about our favorite Christmas toys as kids. With awesome Johnny Astro video.

CALIFORNIA ATHEISTS BLOCK OUT NATIVITY SCENES: You know, atheism would be more popular if atheists weren’t such schmucks.

HOPE AND CHANGE: U.S. Retirement Assets Declined by $1.4 Trillion.

SAYUNCLE is switching teams.

OBAMA ON SIGNING STATEMENTS, then and now. “I agree with the Obama of 2008. Just because presidents are incompetent and can’t get what they want from congress doesn’t mean they can run off and decide which laws to enforce and which to ignore. ‘Gridlock’ is not an excuse.”

JOHN HAWKINS: THE 50 BEST POLITICAL QUOTES OF 2011.

ON FACEBOOK, Jay Cost recommends Sean Trende’s The Lost Majority: Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs – and Who Will Take It.

And hey, if you got a new Kindle for Christmas, why not fill it up here?

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

ROSS DOUTHAT: THE CRATCHIT TAX CREDIT: “In 21st-century America, the well-off and well-educated have the best odds of enjoying the domestic stability that the Yuletide stories celebrate, while the very people who most need resilient families — the Cratchits and Baileys, the working poor and the hard-pressed middle class — are less and less likely to have them. . . . There is no government program that can guarantee a happy childhood or a devoted spouse. (If you replaced Clarence from “It’s a Wonderful Life” or the Angel Gabriel of the Gospels with a Health and Human Services bureaucrat, those stories would probably have a much grimmer ending.)” Just remember, people respond to incentives, even perverse ones.

RAND SIMBERG: Obama has achieved his goal of higher energy costs. This should be a powerful campaign theme next year: “Obama got what he wanted. Did you?”

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

MARK STEYN: “The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency — ‘America’s heading for the same fate as Greece if we don’t change course,’ etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren — i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social-democratic state where workers in ‘hazardous’ professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again. . . . If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people’s money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: It’s run out of other people, period.”

THE SPIRIT OF GIVING: World Giving Index 2011: U.S. Is #1 (Out of 153 Countries). “Using data from Gallup’s Worldview World Poll, the report is based on three measures of giving behaviour – giving money, volunteering time and helping a stranger. The results show that the USA is officially the most charitable nation in the world.”

IN THE MAIL: From Melanie Phillips, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

GO DADDY GONE: Go Daddy loses over 37,000 domains due to SOPA stance.

BRITAIN TO ARGENTINA: Don’t even think about the Falklands.

OKAY, IT’S TOO LATE TO SEND CHRISTMAS GIFTS — unless you send a gift card, or a Kindle book, or an MP3. But now Amazon has rolled out its after-Christmas year-end deals.

Also, today only: Battlefield 3 for Xbox 360 and PS3, $34.99.

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

Via Molly Lewis. Entire Wade Johnston Christmas Extravaganza here.

CHANGE: E.U. APPROVES AVASTIN FOR OVARIAN CANCER: “The European Commission has approved Roche’s drug Avastin for treating women with newly diagnosed, advanced ovarian cancer, offering new options to sufferers previously limited to surgery and chemotherapy. . . . In two late-stage studies, Roche found that women with newly diagnosed advanced ovarian cancer who used Avastin and chemotherapy and then continued on just Avastin lived quite a bit longer without their disease getting worse compared with those who received only chemotherapy.”

PEACE ON EARTH: Radical Muslim sect claims bomb attacks on Nigerian churches; at least 25 killed.

MERRY CHRISTMAS from the TSA.

CHRISTMAS WEEKEND NEWS DUMP: Obama Campaign, DNC Return Corzine Contributions After MF Global Collapse.

WHAT DO WE DO When The Internet Mob Is Wrong?

PUBLIC SCHOOLS TODAY: School accused of putting autistic student in bag: ‘He was treated like trash and thrown in the hallway,’ mom says.

CNN POLL: Americans still prefer ‘Merry Christmas’ over ‘Happy Holidays.’

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, and to all a good night.

MARK STEYN: Silent Night. “On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the ‘Arab Spring’ is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium. Not merely the media but Christian leaders in the west seem to be embarrassed by behavior that doesn’t conform to their dimwitted sappiness about ‘Facebook Revolutions’.”

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: “EUROPE IS MERELY A GEOGRAPHICAL EXPRESSION, Jim Bennett writes, and the Euro-alchemists are busy turning gold into lead.”

SECURITY: Stratfor Hacked, 200GB Of Emails, Credit Cards Stolen, Client List Released, Includes MF Global, Rockefeller Foundation.

PROF. LARRY RIBSTEIN HAS DIED. That’s terrible. My condolences to friends and family.

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in health, fitness, and dieting.

HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” AND “ARAB SPRING” STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Egypt: Islamists consolidate gains in 2nd round of parliamentary elections.

RUSSIA: Tens Of Thousands of Protesters Pressure Putin.

PETER INGEMI: Under the Fedora: Communists, Lies, and the Unseen Wound.

MEDICAL MYSTERY: “Large areas of northern Uganda are experiencing an outbreak of nodding syndrome, a mysterious disease that causes young children and adolescents to nod violently when they eat food. The disease, which may be an unusual form of epilepsy, could be linked to the parasitic worm responsible for river blindness, a condition that affects some 18 million people, most of them in Africa.”

VITAMIN C AND AGING. Hmm. I’d like to see more studies on this.

UPDATE: Reader Joseph Schuster, MD writes:

Several years ago there were a number of studies concerning beta carotene, smokers and lung cancer. The first study was an epidemiological study suggesting beta carotene protected smokers from lung cancer.

The next several studies gave beta carotene to smokers (and a placebo to a control group) to see if it protected them from lung cancer. The study was cut short because beta carotene caused more lung cancers and a higher mortality. Here is a follow up study showing that the excess adverse events persistent even after the supplement was stopped.

It was then thought that beta carotene was a marker for a diet high in fruits and vegetables and that other unknown factors protected the smokers in the first study.

This study in Japanese women who did not take supplements may yet again be a similar red herring and that the high vitamin C level may simply be a marker for a diet high in fruits and vegetables and not the actual protective factor.

To prove any benefit would require a study giving vitamin C to people and then see what happens to health and well being and eventual longevity.

Until then eat your broccoli.

Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. Even if the high C levels just indicate vitamin-taking, my guess is that vitamin-takers are more conscientious about their health overall.

AT AMAZON, Top Deals In Electronics.

And if you’re looking for a present, you can still send a gift card for Christmas. Or, you know, Frank J. Fleming’s book, on Kindle. Or, actually, any book on Kindle.

Also, top albums of 2011 for $3.99 on MP3.

RON RADOSH: How the Left sees the Life of Vaclav Havel, and why they Do Not Mourn his Passing. “Now that a week or more have passed since Havel’s death, some on the Western Left have decided to let their true feelings about Havel out. Despite having to give some lip service to Havel’s integrity and what he accomplished, these men of the Left quickly get to what they really think: Havel helped destroy the great ideal of Communism as a worthy goal, and for that, he cannot be forgiven.”

Also read this piece by Pejman Yousefzadeh. Those who defend communism are on the same moral plane as those who defend Nazism.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Will Desperate Egyptian Christians Seek Refuge In The U.S.? “Christians are being threatened with violence if they fail to convert; women who do not cover their hair are harassed, harangued and threatened on the street; churches are burned and the wall of isolation around this ancient community deepens every day. Under US and international law, growing numbers of Egyptian Christians will qualify as refugees if these conditions continue to worsen.”

I predict a chilly reception from the Obama/Clinton State Department.

HOW TO SPEND LESS ON EVERYTHING.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: The Obamas, in Hawaii beach house, urge Americans to help the less fortunate.

WELCOME TO CAIROSTAN.

UNLESS, OF COURSE, IT’S A BRILLIANT PIECE OF MISDIRECTION: How Downed U.S. Drone Helps China.

AT AMAZON, bestselling digital cameras.

WHEN QUOTES ARE FAKE BUT ACCURATE, at The Nation.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh writes: “Glenn: I wonder if the item that you quoted is really that telling an indictment of the article in The Nation. As I understand it, The Nation is acknowledging that the line wasn’t actually said by Zhou Enlai, but was made up by someone else, so it’s not trying to deceive anyone. And it’s not claiming extra wisdom from the line because it was said by Zhou Enlai. So really it’s just quoting an interesting and possibly insightful saying, albeit one which might have originated in a mistranslation or a misreport. I’m not sure there’s anything really wrong with that. Or am I missing something?”

Well, I think that Prof. Campbell — who is hell on fake quotes and misleading press tropes — thinks that using a misreported quote to illustrate a point perpetuates the misreported quote. But people can follow the link and see what they think.

THIS WEEK IN THE FUTURE.

HUMAN ECOLOGY: Cheating Spreads Like Infections In Online Mulitplayer Games. “If you have friends who cheat, you are more likely to become a cheater, according to computer scientists who say this can be used to label you as a potential cheater.”

SOLAR UPDATE: Solar Photovoltaic Price Declines Not Sustainable.

CHANGE: Annual fuel budget for U.S. families this year? Over $4,000. “Been wondering where a bunch of your money went this year? For the average American family, a higher percentage of the budget was spent on gas in 2011 than at any point since 1981. According to the AP, gas cost most Americans $4,155, or 8.4 percent of the median household income, in 2011. In 1981, the number was 8.8 percent. In the 2000s, a normal number was around 5.7 percent. The culprit, as should not be a surprise, was $3.50-a-gallon gas in a sluggish economy.”

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH: Apologists For Communist Totalitarianism: I Hate Those Guys. Me too.

IN THE MAIL: From Robert Conroy, Himmler’s War.

THAT ZANY RAND SIMBERG has questions on space policy for Mitt Romney.

BILL WHITTLE: Afterburner: Three Years Under Obama.

HAVE A SNO-CONE AND ENJOY THE SHOW: Snow-Cone Machines For Homeland Security. “When you give out money based on politics, without any accounting, this is what you get.”

UPDATE: It took only 7 minutes for the first InstaPundit reader, Thomas Jones, to email noting the Webb Wilder reference.

HUMAN ECOLOGY: The Microbes In Your Body. “This sort of diversity is made possible thanks in part to the vast number of ecological niches in the human body. Microbes that live on the surface of the skin can get lots of oxygen, but they also bear the brunt of sun, wind, and cold. Microbes in the intestines have next to no oxygen, but they have a much more stable habitat. Microbes have carved up the human body into far finer niches. The bugs on your fingers are different from the ones on your elbow. The two sides of a single tooth have a different diversity of microbes. . . . Here’s one crude but effective example of what this kind of ecosystem engineering might look like. A couple years ago, Alexander Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota, found himself in a grim dilemma. He was treating a patient who had developed a runaway infection of Clostridium difficile in her gut. She was having diarrhea every 15 minutes and had lost sixty pounds, but Khoruts couldn’t stop the infection with antibiotics. So he performed a stool transplant, using a small sample from the woman’s husband. Just two days after the transplant, the woman had her first solid bowel movement in six months. She has been healthy ever since.”

GAY ROBOT CONFRONTS MICHELE BACHMANN: “You’re A Robo-Phobe.”

Watch out, Matt Yglesias. They’ll be coming for you next.

Just don’t tell Yglesias about this.

SIGN OF THE TIMES: A Frankincense Shortage.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: The Xinjiang Procedure: Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners. Funny how people who were outraged beyond outrage by the Abu Ghraib pics don’t care much about this.

A CROWDSOURCED LIST OF SOPA SUPPORTERS.

CHANGE: Voters leaving Republican, Democratic parties in droves.

CHRIS PETERSON ON the current state and future potential of nanotechnology.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, we’d have a President who used “signing statements” to evade laws passed by Congress. And they were right! Obama says he’s not bound by Guantanamo, gun-control provisions. “After he signed the omnibus into law Friday, the White House released a concurrent signing statement saying Obama will object to portions of the legislation on constitutional grounds. Signing statements are highly controversial, and their legality is disputed.”

Well, mostly when there’s a Republican in the White House.

HOW’S THAT BAILOUT WORKIN’ FOR YOU? “The EPA and the Department of Transportation predict stagnation for General Motors, with only 3% sales growth by 2025. Fiat/Chrysler is expected to shrivel by more than half. As Truth About Cars says.”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “He Got Us Both Pregnant At The Same Time.”

PHYLLIS CHESLER: Naked Breasts vs. Fundamentialist Islam. “In the last year, three Muslim women have posed nude or nearly nude in the media.” Shockingly they’re all still alive.

Chesler, however, falls into the lame bikini-burka equivalence trap that has snared many Western feminists. When writing “I am wondering whether she has escaped one noose only to find herself about to be hung in another way,” it is important to remember that one noose is literal, and the other is only figurative.

In that regard, I refer back to these comments from Jim Henley: “1) This would be a shade closer to true if western women who ever tried to wear something other than bikinis – like, say, a business suit – GOT THE SHIT KICKED OUT OF THEM FOR DOING SO. But there’s more: 2) We may feel very ambivalent about it, but women’s sexual power is real. In a REAL patriarchy, as opposed to a half-assed one, it’s practically the only power women have available. Afghanistan is a real patriarchy for sure, and the burkha robs women of their sexual power by design. That is its function. But we’re still not done. 3) A bikini-clad woman has a face. Men can see when she is happy, when she is sad, when she is cogitating, when she is pissed off and, especially, when she suffers. There are some sick bastards who get off on visible evidence of female suffering. But even most squishy sexists are as squeamish as the rest of us about seeing torment play across the face of another human being. This too is what the burkha takes away by design. There is simply no comparison that is not invidious.”

More on that here. Note this from Megan McArdle: “What Aziz is arguing for is, in my opinion, a well meaning but futile attempt to take sex out of male-female relations.” This seems to be Chesler’s problem, too.

FROM STEPHEN GREEN, IT’S the Week In Blogs.

STILL CRAZED IN WISCONSIN: “What is extraordinary is not just that a business owner would put up a sign that is a) obscene and b) political, but one that would infuriate roughly half of the potential customers who see it. Such is the level of craziness to which Wisconsin’s liberals have descended.”

JENNIFER RUBIN: OBAMA’S WORST ERROR: “President Obama missed the boat on tax reform. He put politics above entitlement reform. He worsened already-tense relations with Israel. But the worst error, in large part because it was both avoidable and is not reversible, was to pull all troops out of Iraq.”

OOPS: Michelle Obama’s MyPlate food guide a spectacular failure.

YOUR TAX CUT PASSED. ENJOY YOUR NEW “RECAPTURE” TAX. IRS to Implement New 2% ‘Recapture Tax’ in Two-Month Payroll Tax Cut Extension.

#OCCUPYHOLLYWOOD:

In Iraq this year I asked an Iraqi military officer doing joint training at an American base what was the big thing he’d come to believe about Americans in the years they’d been there. He thought. “You are a better people than your movies say.” He had judged us by our exports. He had seen the low slag heap of our culture and assumed it was a true expression of who we are.

And so he’d assumed we were disgusting.

A good argument against SOPA.

I HOPE THE DEATH IS PAINFUL AND PROTRACTED: Copyright troll Righthaven in its death throes, domain going up for auction. And I hope the principals wind up broke and in jail.

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Schumer Admits That Ashcroft Was Right About Instant-Checks and Guns. “Last week, Dave Kopel and I explained why Ashcroft is right and Schumer is wrong about the legality of using gun-check records to find out if terrorists bought guns. Now, in a tacit admission that this is the case, Sen. Charles Schumer has introduced a bill to change the law to permit this. But Brock Meeks says that Schumer is a power-hungry idiot in this take-no-prisoners oped.” Well, some things never change.

UPDATE: Reader Jody Green writes: “Love your 10-year flashbacks. How wonderful a vilified ‘By the book’ Ashcroft was compared to a protected ‘Corrupt leftist’ Holder. 10 years is a long time and I am afraid we are not progressing.” Even some lefties have shown signs of Ashcroft-nostalgia now and then.

AT AMAZON, warehouse deals in groceries and personal care.

HOPE: Ray LaHood sticks up for hands-free devices for drivers. “Score one for freedom. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood yesterday checked the zeal of the National Transportation Safety Board, which last week called for a nationwide ban on hands-free cell phone devices for drivers.”

Nice to see someone listening to reason.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON on the absence of an Obama Derangement Syndrome comparable to Bush Derangement Syndrome.

CHANGE: GoDaddy: “We’ve listened to our customers. Go Daddy is no longer supporting the SOPA legislation.”

UPDATE: Who’ll be next?

AT AMAZON, 10% off all Rosetta Stone downloads.

THE SWISS ARMY KNIFE GOES DIGITAL.

BREAKING: Eric Holder Blocks SC Voter ID, Texas Next. I think that right-leaning activists should start challenging other ID requirements on the same grounds. Why isn’t requiring ID to fly a racial burden on the right to travel?

UPDATE: Duane Hershberger makes an excellent point: “How about requiring ID and registration to buy a gun? ID to buy guns started out as a way to keep blacks from having them. If voting is the same as owning a gun, Holder should advocate disbanding BATFE, a clearly racist organization.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Stu Gittelman writes with a useful suggestion for the press: “Question for Eric Holder: If it is an undue burden for South Carolina to require a valid ID for someone to vote, would you support South Carolina also doing away with any requirements to show ID when purchasing a firearm?”

MORE: Rick Hasen thinks this may wind up getting Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act struck down. Before the 2012 elections.

MORE STILL: Reader Marian Booker writes: “A group of people organized by True The Vote in Houston went to Austin to shine light on the need for photo ID in voting, on the day of Eric Holder’s speech. One speaker noted the irony of declaring photo ID to be too onerous a burden in the voting booth, but that photo ID was required to get into the building where Eric Holder was speaking against requiring photo ID. I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue!”

Next time Holder speaks, someone should run to a judge for a TRO. And file a race-discrimination suit against whoever’s hosting him. Every single time. . . .

OBAMA: I am not Spock.

Yeah, Leonard Nimoy tried to tell us the same thing. But I believe Obama on this. Because Spock was competent.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Whatever Happened To Dandruff? I think it’s Nizoral. Most dandruff is caused by yeast, which Nizoral kills.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Man misses mouse and shoots roommate, revealing child rapist.

JACK NEELY remembers his dad.