I hope not.  Larry King's last show is on today--which would be tragic if it also meant the end of Rob's hilariously savage "transcripts" of the show in his Long View column in National Review.  This was some of the funniest satire I ever read and possibly the only thing on the green earth that could ever have made me feel sorry for King.  Here's a snippet of one of my favorites, King interviews Judas Iscariot about the so-called Judas Gospel:

LARRY KING: "Tomorrow night! Remembering Don Knotts! A surprising hour! From Chicago, Illinois, you're on with our guest, Judas Iscariot! Hello!"

CALLER: "Hi, Larry. Hi, Judas. Can I call you Judas?"

JUDAS ISCARIOT: "Of course."

CALLER: "It's just that I feel like I've known you all my life, so I feel like I can call you Judas. I just want to say that I just finished your gospel, which I loved, and I'd like to know if you have any more books planned?"

LARRY KING: "Good question. Is this thing the start of a franchise? I keep thinking Da Vinci Code, I keep thinking Narnia."

JUDAS ISCARIOT: "No, no, Larry. It's just the one gospel. At least for now."

LARRY KING: "But they gotta be after you, right? Phone ringing off the hook? Books, movies, right?"

JUDAS ISCARIOT: "Honestly, Larry, I live a quiet life. You know, when they quote unquote found my gospel — the publishing world is crazy, I wrote the damn thing 2,000 years ago and have been pushing it and pushing it and pushing it, suddenly it's out there and I'm a quote unquote overnight success — anyway, they find it, we make a deal — "

LARRY KING: "Was it a good deal?"

JUDAS ISCARIOT: "You know what, Larry? It was fair. I can't complain about the deal."

LARRY KING: "Thirty pieces of silver, and all that? Kidding!"

JUDAS ISCARIOT: "Listen, Larry, you gotta have a sense of humor about life."

LARRY KING: "Here I am the Jew talking about pieces of silver! Gotta tread careful with this stuff, am I right?"

"I live a quiet life."  Great stuff.  When comes such another?

A consolation prize as we travel down the road to serfdom:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama has signed legislation to prevent advertisers from abruptly raising the volume of TV commercials louder than regular programming.

The law signed by Obama on Wednesday requires the Federal Communications Commission to adopt industry standards coordinating ad decibel levels to those of the regular program within one year.

The new regulations go into effect a year after that. They apply to all broadcast providers, including cable and satellite.

Lawmakers who sponsored the bill said they were reacting to their constituents’ complaints about abrasively loud television commercials — and their own experiences.

The FCC has been receiving complaints since the 1960s about jarring sound bursts when commercials come on, but had not regulated program or commercial volume.

That last sentence cracks me up.  The FCC has been receiving complaints about loud commercials since the 1960's and only now -- after 50 years and after the private sector invented the TiVo to deal with this very issue -- have they finally decided to respond.  Government efficiency at its finest.

(h/t JammieWearingFool)

Over at The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes is pointing to the significance of another series of elections that the Obama administration has lost – these involving a concerted attempt to unionize the workforce of Delta Airlines.

As he points out, Obama’s appointees even changed the rules, stacking the deck in favor of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). Up to now, to organize a workplace a union had to secure the support in an election of a majority of its workers. In the recent elections, however, thanks to a new ruling by the National Mediation Board, they needed only to secure a majority among those who bothered to vote – which they did not get.

Next up. The airport screeners at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). In this case, the Federal Labor Relations Authority will play the decisive role. It, too, is now dominated by Obama’s appointees. If you think the TSA is a mess now, consider just how much worse it could get.

Let's hope that the pertinent committee in the House of Representatives holds hearings next year.

Well, actually, I do have a comment:  I'm hoping Adam Freedman tells me I'm mistaken.  You see, I'm pretty sure this item means that Western civilization is now completely defunct.

From this morning's Palo Alto Daily Post:

McD's sued over Happy Meals

A California mother of two and the Center for Science in the Public Interest are suing McDonald's Corp. to get the restaurant to stop including toys in his Happy Meals.

Monet Parham, a state employee in Sacramento, said she decided to sue after her oldest daughter, Maya, age 6, wouldn't stop pestering her to buy a Happy Meal in order to get the Fiona doll fromt eh movie "Shrek Forever After."

Parham said the girl's repeated requests were the fault of McDonald's advertising.  "This doesn't stop with one request," Parham said.  "It's truly a litany of requests."

He tells Democratic lawmakers that if they don't pass his tax deal, it's all over for his presidency.  From The Hill:

Obama is telling members of Congress that failure to pass the tax-cut legislation could result in the end of his presidency, Rep. Peter DeFazio (Ore.) said. 

"The White House is putting on tremendous pressure, making phone calls, the president is making phone calls saying this is the end of his presidency if he doesn't get this bad deal," he told CNN's Eliot Spitzer. 

And then he denies it:

"The president hasn’t said anything remotely like that and has never spoken with Mr. DeFazio about the issue," said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor.

The way this administration is going, both things are probably true.  The Obama administration is cracking up.  And it's like that old saying: the fish cracks up from the head down.

What we're going to be seeing, I think, from our tightly-wound-and-now-unwinding president, is what shrinks call projection:

...a psychological defense mechanism where a person unconsciously denies their own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, such as to the weather, or to other people. Thus, it involves imagining or projecting that others have those feelings.[1]

Projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted unconscious impulses or desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them.

An example of this behavior might be blaming another for self failure. The mind may avoid the discomfort of consciously admitting personal faults by keeping those feelings unconscious, and redirect their libidinal satisfaction by attaching, or "projecting," those same faults onto another.

Prepare yourself for this whining, self-justifying litany from our prickly, thin-skinned president: House Democrats are too liberal.  The left-wing netroots are out of touch.  Republicans are too partisan.  And starting around the first of the year: the media hate me.

It's going to be messy, but enjoyable.  And the best thing for the opposition to do is to do what mental hospital orderlies do when a patient is in the throes of a psychotic breakdown: stand back, avoid direct confrontation, remove all sharp objects, and let the patient tire himself out.

Look! There's a big blue button on your Account page!

Now, you can invite your politically-aligned friends and family to try out Ricochet for three months at no charge -- we won't even ask for their credit card. Just fill in each invitee's name and email address, preview the invitation message, and we'll take it from there. Thanks to you, they'll be able to join the conversation, take sides in debates, post things on the member feed, vote up or down different articles -- you know, member stuff. And you'll be bringing in allies who can watch your back during some of the dust-ups around here.

We can't think of a better way to expand our current community while preserving its character and esprit de corps.

Andy is answering your questions on the thread we started yesterday. Andy, you're new to Ricochet culture--in fact, Ricochet culture itself is new--so I should let you know that Ricochet is like champagne: lots of bubbles, but you have to drink it right after you open it. It's just not the same the next day. 

I'm going to re-post Andy's reply here to make sure everyone sees it: 

I don't want to debate Conor Friedersdorf's review of my book -- or, I guess, excerpt of my book. When it came out, and I remember thinking that what Conor called "manifold inaccuracies" were strawmen (I don't, for example, think Pres. Obama is afraid to say the word "war" just because his bureaucracies have been discouraged to use the word), and I think Conor read too much into the fact that Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin liked the book (in fact, he inferred that Rush's blurb meant Rush and I had "collaborated" on the book, or the title, or ... something). A lot of people liked the book, some didn't, but it stands or falls on its own merit. We're mainly talking about the Broadside here, and Conor has raised a number of good points about it. I'll try to focus on those.

Shall we take it from here to keep things up-to-date and in the same place? 

Aaron Miller drew our attention to this news item about corruption cases among Homeland Security personnel:

James Tomsheck, a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol assistant commissioner, told the panel the drug cartels operating in Mexico are making a concerted effort to infiltrate CBP, and the agency is responding with more screening of job applicants with polygraph tests and background investigations. 

This reminded me of a long-standing question. Why on earth are we still using the polygraph? Why not, say, tarot cards? There's roughly the same amount of evidence that they work. 

Robert Reich, former labor secretary under Bill Clinton--and a fellow Dartmouth alum--isn't happy about the tax bill that advanced in the Senate yesterday and goes to the House for a vote today. The bill extends the Bush-era tax cuts for two years and reduces the estate tax, "both windfalls for the rich," according to Reich.

These measures, he wrote in a column yesterday, have nothing to do with what "average Americans are worried about." To Reich,

 Most Americans are worried sick about their jobs and wages.

Most Americans were also worried about the possibility of a tax hike in the new year, following the possible expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Anticipating yesterday's Senate vote, even President Obama said that middle-class Americans “will no longer need to worry about a New Year’s Day tax hike.”

But the former labor secretary insists that the Senate tax bill "won't help" economic growth. Why? 

The rich spend a smaller proportion of their incomes than everyone else. That's what it means to be rich -- you already have most of what you want.

Has Reich forgotten that investment--which tends to be what the rich do with their money when they're not spending it--leads to economic growth as well? He must have, because his next move is to propose a marginal tax of 70% on millionaires to pay for more government programs that he believes we "need" to grow the economy:

We need a new WPA to put the unemployed back to work. And an infrastructure bank to create jobs repairing the nation's crumbling roads, bridges, and water and sewer systems....

Pay for this by raising marginal income taxes on millionaires. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the top marginal rate was 91 percent. I'm not advocating this, but a millionaire marginal tax of even 70 percent would also go a long way toward reducing the nation's future budget deficit.

Thanks to a fabulous report called Rich States, Poor States, we at least know what happens when states increase marginal rates on millionaires: millionaires move. They leave tax-hostile states for states with lower rates. A similar phenomenon would certainly occur on a national level: millionaires would find a way to avoid Reich's whopper of a tax.

So there goes the tax revenue Reich is counting on! As economist Daniel Mitchell has written for the Heritage Foundation, "The rich pay more [taxes] when incentives to hide income are reduced." Mitchell also points out that during the 1980s, after Reagan cut marginal rates across the board, "total tax revenues climbed by 99.4 percent."

And yet, Reich concludes:

At a time when the nation's job emergency cries out for bold solutions, Washington is giving us a variation on the same failed trickle-down economics [read: supply side economics] we've had for three decades.

Maybe Reich should revisit his history books. Some would say that until 2007, America experienced the longest period of economic growth in its history. So if supply-side economics worked then, then why not now?

Shortly after Thanksgiving, I posted a piece suggesting books that you might want to buy for yourself or others this Christmas. To this, before it is too late, let me add a couple of items.

In the comments on one of my posts, someone mentioned Kenneth Minogue’s The Liberal Mind, which was first published many moons ago back in 1963. What no one mentioned was that Ken has penned a sequel even better than its predecessor. It came out this year; it is entitled The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life; and  I reviewed it for The American Interest in November. Here is part of what I said:

Minogue is a classical liberal of sorts, but he is in no way doctrinaire. He has more in common with the Baron de Montesquieu, David Hume, the Adam Smith who wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville than he has with John Stuart Mill. His focus is mores and manners, and he denies that individualism, as he and his more sagacious forbears have understood it, presupposes selfishness. Individuals in the modern West are not isolated atoms; they are embedded in a social nexus. They have parents, siblings, spouses, friends, professional associates and fellow citizens, and to them all—as they learn in the process of growing up within a family, attending school and making their way in the world—they have obligations. They may be devoted to interest, and each may be concerned first and foremost with his own projects, but the interest they pursue is not material self-interest in the narrow sense. It is more nearly akin to what Tocqueville called “self-interest well understood.” Its horizon is long term; it knowingly encompasses the interests of others—first and foremost, those who are near and dear. And the divers projects that these individuals embrace nearly always require cooperation and nearly always comprehend the interests of others. Theirs is, to be sure, a fiercely competitive society, but competition of this sort generally presupposes freely chosen cooperation as well.

Minogue owes an enormous debt to Montesquieu. He has mastered what The Spirit of Laws says concerning modern monarchy and its ethos of honor, and he has reconfigured this notion with an eye to our democratic age. Minogue’s individual is concerned with reputation, which, as he understands it, is closely bound up with his character. Because he has been reared within a family, disciplined in school and shaped by the competitive and cooperative world within which he pursues his self-chosen projects, he is no less constrained by the demands of self-respect, and he is thereby induced to take initiative and assume responsibility for the welfare of others.

It is this understanding of interest, in terms of the duties one owes oneself, that constitutes what Minogue calls “the moral life.” And the moral life is threatened by “the democratic project.” In the name of rights, this project promotes a liberation from traditional social norms, and then, in self-contradictory fashion, it seeks to legislate what had long been understood as the dictates of good manners. In doing so, it aims at transforming the civil association into an enterprise association by dictating to everyone the one true, politically correct mode of conduct.

Minogue is a treasure. He remembers a world that we have largely forgotten. It was a world largely constituted by what he calls “desire”—desire chastened by deliberation, restrained by prudence, constrained by self-respect and rendered noble by a concern for the welfare of others. Since the 1960s, thanks to “the democratic project”, we have lived to an ever increasing extent in a world constituted by what he calls “impulse”, passion liberated from restraints and constraints, unchastened and utterly irresponsible. Without reflection, we have embraced the slogan that the personal is political and the political personal, and we have unwittingly confused what is politically necessary with what is morally right. We have politicized morality, moralized politics, abandoned prudence and sobriety in the political sphere, jettisoned human decency in private affairs, poisoned public life with private concerns, and demanded that the state extend its tentacles ever further into the private sphere.

Here you can find the review in its entirety. Minogue’s is a book that I can strongly recommend – if the recipient is someone with the patience to work his way through something dense and deeply thoughtful.

I can also recommend Nicholas Phillipson’s Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, which I also reviewed in November (on this occasion for National Review); David Wootton’s Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, which makes a very powerful case that Galileo was no less an unbeliever than was his friend Paolo Sarpi and the Roman Catholic Church was right in regarding Galileo with suspicion; and James W. Ceaser’s Designing a Polity: America’s Constitution in Theory and Practice, which is hot off the presses. Phillipson’s biography of Adam Smith is as good as we can hope for, and Wootton’s close look at Galileo is as informative as it is disturbing. Ceaser, who has made a practice of writing a book with Andrew Busch on each new presidential election, has a piece in the current issue of The Claremont Review of Books on the November election entitled The Great Repudiation that deserves close attention. Ceaser is always worth reading.

A quick show of hands please, so to speak: How would you prefer congressional Republicans to handle the omnibus spending debacle? Demonstrating that he can sink lower than the Titanic, Harry Reid has again waited until the last moment before Christmas to haul up a 1,924 page spending bill worth over $1 trillion. This behemoth (the bill, not the Senator) is oozing with over 6,000 earmarks that include a cool billion to help implement the Obama healthcare law, a central tenet of which has been declared unconstitutional. There's even language in this gigantic pile of legislative cowplop that designates Nevada as a Pacific Coast state so it can get a few million extra federal bucks to protect Salmon. Nevada!

This bill is everything that citizens voted against just a few short weeks ago, yet here we are again, just before Christmas with Democrats jamming another 2,000 page insult down your throat.

Now, if this thing doesn't pass by midnight Saturday, the federal government will have to shut down. What say you?

Washington Post head and sub-head, at least as the wire version has it:

Security Council formally frees Iraq from Saddam-era sanctions

Vice President Biden reflected on how far the Iraqis have come in two decades.

Yes, ever since that Gulf War in 1990 he voted against. The piece continues:

 The 15-nation council voted to end restrictions on Iraqi's rights to develop a civilian nuclear program, agreed to restore Iraqi control of its oil revenue within six months and brought an end to the vestiges of the controversial $64 billion oil-for-food program . .  Vice President Joe Biden presided over the session, which provided the Obama administration with an opportunity to highlight progress in the long, hard political transition in Iraq.

Speaking on behalf of the council, Biden said Wednesday's action marked a recognition of how much Iraq has improved its relations with the rest of the world.

The passage of the resolutions "brings an end to the burdensome remnants of the dark era of Saddam Hussein," he said.

The article gives no specifics about how the dark era of Saddam ended, or when this happened, or why, or who was involved. Can anyone fill me in? Thnx!

I certainly agree with John Yoo’s post arguing that the decision in Virginia v Sibelius demonstrates that Obamacare’s weak spot is the Commerce Clause. But I hasten to add that the battle will probably not center on the word “commerce” which is now nearly meaningless in Constitutional law, but rather “Necessary and Proper.”  There's a debate going on -- which Orin Kerr has stoked over at Volokh, and which has the Washington Post jumping for joy -- that Judge Hudson made a huge mistake by failing to address the "Necessary and Proper" clause of the Article I.  According to Kerr:

The point of the Necessary and Proper clause is that it grants Congress the power to use means outside the enumerated list of Article I powers to achieve the ends listed in Article I.

This is one of those fundamental errors that has become embedded in post-New Deal jurisprudence: the idea that the Necessary and Proper Clause transforms the Commerce Clause into the Whatever-Congress-Wants Clause.  Constitutional scholar Robert Natelson has done exhaustive research on this clause and has (IMHO) demolished the conventional wisdom.  In fact, “necessary and proper” was eighteenth century legal boilerplate used in powers of attorney – and its purpose was to restrict the scope of activities that the agent could perform on behalf of the principal.  

The Founders often referred to government as “agents” (or servants) of the People, and they borrowed from agency law to reinforce the concept that Congress must stick faithfully to the enumerated powers.  And then they stuck in the Tenth Amendment to make it absolutely beyond-all-doubt clear that the powers not delegated to the federal government remain with the States and the People. Or so they thought.   

I am just now reading -- excuse my dilatory behavior -- that in his meeting with top CEOs (I'm hurt I wasn't invited), Obama urged them to do more hiring.

Now this is the guy who the elites told us was sophisticated, elegant, brilliant and the rest. It was bad enough that he campaigned and governed on failed Keynesian, demand-side, pump-priming theories. But this, I'm afraid, is a step further down the ladder. 

He urged them to do more hiring to bring down unemployment. I wonder why they never thought of that. I guess, though, that it's a step up from, say, a Stalin 5 Year Plan. And we can be grateful he didn't order the executives to hire more people. 

In his command-controlish nudge to the fat cat executives, though, Obama once again paid lip service to his fealty to capitalism, affirming his belief that government is not "the primary engine of America's economic success. ... It is the ingenuity of America's entrepreneurs." You go Barack.

As to that ingenuity thing, though, I guess he wanted to give the execs a little jump start on it by sharing his profound idea about their hiring. Obviously they've been preoccupied with other things and increasing their work rolls just hadn't yet occurred to them.

This is happening 10 miles south of the U.S. border in Juárez:

Now as Christmas approaches, mobsters have chosen a new target, turning their sights on humble schoolteachers.

Painted threats scrawled outside numerous public schools demand that teachers hand over their Christmas bonuses or face the possibility of an armed attack on the teachers—and even the children.

To make the point clear, assailants set fire to a federal preschool in the San Antonio district a week ago, leaving the director's office in smoldering ruins.

Scribbled on the wall in gold paint was the reason: "For not paying."

The targeting of teachers in Juarez's 1,270 preschool, primary and secondary schools is a sign of the depravity that rules in a city whose name has become synonymous with homicide.

Gangs already have shaken down other parts of the municipal social fabric—doctors, dentists and even ambulance drivers.

Now with the targets being teachers, parents have pulled thousands of children from schools where heightened security already had turned them into seeming prisons, enclosed with coils of barbed wire atop concrete walls.

Three schools have closed for fear they might come under armed attack. "We are scared," admitted Maria de Jesus Casio, principal of the Ramon Lopez Velarde Elementary School. But she also said teachers don't want to pay. "Teachers don't have much money. The salaries are just enough for survival."

Teachers in this city earn an average of $650 a month. Christmas bonuses vary but the average is about a month's pay.

Casio, 53, a veteran teacher with close-cropped reddish hair, said teachers arrived at school one day in late November to find this graffito painted on the outside wall:
"For the well-being of everyone, and the children, pay 50,000 pesos."

That same day, assistant principal Jorge Alberto Palacios said that he found a notice on his pick-up truck that "talked about a massacre of children" and indicated where to drop the money.

A third message came in a school telephone bill. The threats arrived at a dozen schools, perhaps more, according to news reports, though a senior school official would speak only in general terms.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon maintains that the federal government has control over the entire country -- a laughable assertion indeed, if the situation were not so darned serious. 

Anyone care to venture a prediction as to what will happen with Mexico in 2011?  Does the situation simply continue to get worse?  Or does the mayhem become so intolerable that the United States government intervenes?

With a hot line up of guests, we're burning rubber this week. Strategist Mike Murphy returns to the podcast for a fascinating discussion of what happened in California, the future of the party, and yes, a certain candidate from Delaware. Then we're joined by John Yoo and Richard Epstein who labor against a spotty Skype connection to explain what the recent court decision on health care and where the battle for repeal goes from here. Also, Rob discusses why his script is late and Peter boasts about his hot new wheels. Or his hot wheels. 

A hail of bullets:

• Peter Robinson's poodle Crusoe carefully guards the family's new ride. 
• We don't know why James Lileks couldn't make it today, but perhaps it had something to do with this.
• As noted last week, the script Rob is trying to finish is for Indian/Canadian comedian Russell Peters. If the pilot is picked up, it will be on NBC in the fall.
• Jeffrey Toobin's New Yorker piece accuses the Roberts court of "willingness, even its eagerness, to overturn the work of legislatures." 
• The "No Labels" convention is currently being held at Columbia University. Featured speakers include Charlie Christ, Michael Bloomberg, and Joe Scarborough. Sounds like a party. 
• Here's the clip of Justice Alito mouthing "not true" during last year's State of The Union speech. Dramatic stuff. 
• The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was signed by President Clinton on August 22nd, 1996, a little less than 21 months after the 1994 mid-term elections. 
• Ricochet member Scott Reusser's post about the gaming of unemployment benefits maybe found here.
• Professor Randy Barnett has his very own website.
• Richard used the example if government required auto insurance to help explain why government mandated health insurance may be unconstitutional. There was a similar debate recently in the member feed on Ricochet.
• Don't miss Richard and John's various Ricochet posts on Obamacare and the recent court decision. They also duke it out in the comments.
• Once again, apologies for the Skype issues. Skype is kind of like democracy -- it's the worst solution except for all the others.

Music from this week's episode:

• Let Yourself Go by James Brown
• Camaro by Kings of Leon

The direct link to this week's episode is here, but we'd really love it if you'd subscribe. Don't use iTunes? Visit our Feedburner page for a number of other subscription options.

The Ricochet Podcast is sponsored by Encounter Books. Our featured title this week is How the Obama Administration Has Politicized Justice by Andrew C. McCarthy. Available for $5.99 at EncounterBooks.com.

In his “unemployment benefits primer,” Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein makes the following assertion with which I completely agree:

North Dakota…has a very low unemployment rate. It doesn't make sense to have 99 weeks of unemployment benefits in a state where unemployment is 2.8 percent. That's when unemployment benefits really do discourage work.

That point is consistent with the anecdotal evidence member Scott Reusser wrote about recently:

Of the two dozen or so of my acquaintances who have collected unemployment, every single one--not most, every single one--has gamed the system. They disgust me, but it's the system that corrupts. Most often the con involves working for cash while running out the string on benefits--the longer the string, the longer the run--then going "on the books" only after the government checks stop.

It’s Klein’s next assertion that seems rather flimsy:

But it does make sense to have 99 weeks in Nevada, where the unemployment rate is 13.7 percent....We should probably be further shortening the unemployment benefits in low-unemployment states like North Dakota, while further lengthening them in places like Nevada, for instance.

So according to Klein it doesn’t make sense to offer unemployed North Dakotans 99 weeks of unemployed benefits because that would incentivize them to remain unemployed, but it does make sense to offer Nevadans 99 weeks of benefits because…they’re unaffected by the same incentives as North Dakotans?

The more holes in the system, the more ways to exploit the system for personal gain.  It doesn’t matter whether you live in Nevada, where the unemployment rate is 13.7%, well above the 9.8% national unemployment rate, or if you live in North Dakota, where the unemployment rate is far below the national average at 2.8%.  If you’re unemployed -- especially from a job that wasn't paying much to begin with -- you’re incentivized to stay that way until your benefits expire (or to work for supplemental cash under the table until your benefits expire).  

As the chart illustrates, states with the highest unemployment rates in the nation – take for example California (12% unemployment), Nevada (13.7%), Michigan (12%), and Florida (11.6%) -- offer 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, whereas states with low unemployment rates – North Dakota (2.8%), South Dakota (4.1%), and Nebraska (4.2%) – offer only 60 weeks of unemployment benefits.

If we accept the premise that an increase in the duration of unemployment benefits would exacerbate unemployment in a place like North Dakota, does it not follow that an increase in duration of unemployment benefits in Nevada will exacerbate the situation there as well?  And if this is indeed the case, would it be better to do away with taxpayer funded unemployment insurance altogether, or to set a uniform duration of unemployment insurance across the country? 

In a piece posted yesterday on the website of the National Association of Scholars, Ashley Thorne and Steve Balch drew attention to a series of revisions to the Pennsylvania State University’s statement on Academic Freedom that the Faculty Senate at that institution has submitted to its President for final approval and implementation.

“These changes,” as they point out, “include the deletion of key passages that described the responsibility of the professor not to introduce unrelated controversial material into the classroom.” The 1987 version of the document, which followed in most respects the version adopted in 1950, stipulated that

It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects. The faculty member is expected to train students to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently. Hence, in giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty member is expected be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without supersession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.

No faculty member may claim as a right the privilege of discussing in the classroom controversial topics outside his/her own field of study. The faculty member is normally bound not to take advantage of his/her position by introducing into the classroom provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of his/her study.

David Horowitz praised these provisions both in testimony he gave in 2005 to the Pennsylvania legislature and in his book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, arguing that by specifying limits to proper professorial conduct it connected freedom with responsibility and protected students against professorial abuse. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), denounced these provisions earlier this year in his book No University is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom, and he welcomed the new statement proposed, which reads as follows:

Faculty members are expected to educate students to think for themselves, and to facilitate access to relevant materials which they need to form their own opinions. Faculty members are expected to present information fairly, and to set forth justly divergent opinions that arise out of scholarly methodology and professionalism.

In an e-mail to Inside Higher Education, Nelson wrote, “Penn State had one of the most restrictive and troubling policies limiting intellectual freedom in the classroom that I know of. It undermined the normal human capacity to make comparisons and contrasts between different fields and between different cultures and historical periods. The revised policy is a vast improvement.”

There is more to these changes than meets the eye. As Thorne and Balch point out, the language in the 1987 Penn State statement derives from the AAUP’s original Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, which was promulgated in 1915. That in the revised statement reflects revisions introduced by the AAUP in 1940 and, more to the point, in 1994 and 1997. The two do not say in so many words that in recent years the AAUP has substituted license for liberty, but that is what they mean.

Are Thorne and Balch right? For my part, I think that they have a point. All too often what goes on in the classroom in our colleges and universities amounts to indoctrination and even hectoring. The old language served as a check on the vanity and self-righteousness to which we professors are prone. The new language may be unobjectionable in itself, but it lacks the clarity and specificity essential to constraint. It is far easier for a dean or department chair to determine whether a professor is pontificating outside his sphere of expertise than for someone not as expert as he is within that sphere to judge whether he has presented “information fairly” and “set forth justly divergent opinions that arise out of scholarly methodology and professionalism.”

What say you? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill?

It's not nearly as fun a name to say as Julian Assange, but who are the editors of TIME magazine to care about that? Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook mastermind, is 2010's Human of the Year. Well, technically, the title is Person of the Year -- but it ought to be, in this case, Therapist of the Year. Here's Zuck's apparently formulaic reaction to receiving the Great Title (posted, yes, on his Facebook page):

Being named as TIME Person of the Year is a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I'm happy to be a part of that.

Boring, right? But consider this, via Alan Jacobs:

It’s easy to dismiss words as airy nothings and talk therapy as mere talk. Sitting on a couch can seem like such an antiquated form of treatment. But the right kind of talk can fix our broken mind, helping us escape from the recursive loop of stress and negative emotion that’s making us depressed. Changing our thoughts is never easy and, in severe cases, might seem virtually impossible. We live busy lives and therapy requires hours of work and constant practice; our cortex can be so damn stubborn. But the data is clear: If we are seeking a long-lasting cure for depression, then it’s typically our most effective treatment.

Relative to the ubiquitous scientific cope-all known as prescription drugs, talk therapy is very 'aristocratic' -- labor-intensive, time-consuming, attention-demanding, investment-based, costly. But Freud wanted therapists able to practice without a license. As reality television has spun into fantasy escapism, reality internet has risen to replace it as our go-to destination for public group therapy. Facebook isn't exactly dominated by what we're used to thinking of as therapeutic communication, but it's the perfect platform, and, already, we can begin to think of the endless networking and photo-posting and venting and status updating and friending and unfriending as a kind of collective coping mechanism for precisely the rise of real-life social awkwardness that online living seems to deepen.

So says Justice Stephen Breyer in an interview with Fox News.  How does he know?  According to Breyer, historians say that James Madison (the primary author of the the Second Amendment) wrote the provision “to appease the states” who were concerned about maintaining control over local militia.   Madison’s “motive,” says Breyer was not to create an individual right to carry guns.

Who cares what Madison’s “motive” was?  Originalism – properly understood – is not about trying to “channel” the hopes and dreams of the Founders.  It’s about understanding what the text of the constitution and amendments would have meant to the public at the time of ratification.  It doesn’t matter if James Madison thought the Second Amendment was a recipe for fruitcake.  All that matters is the text. 

Admittedly, the Second Amendment presents a difficult text: one clause granting a “right to keep and bear arms” preceded by an introductory clause talking about militias. If Breyer wants to debate the meaning of the text, fair enough.  But this attempt to guess at what James Madison’s secret intention was is worse than useless.

And no wonder Gibbs got laughed at.  Who can forget this pathetic moment in Congressional history?

Oh! I nearly forgot! We have five copies of Andy's broadside to give to you. They go to the authors of the best five comments, as measured by the "like" button, and you're on the honor system--one vote, one member, and not for yourself.

In response to my posts about the Muslim Brotherhood, his new broadside, and the Ricochet Book Club, Andy McCarthy has kindly offered to join us for a discussion. You have all done the reading, I presume? I warned you the test was coming.

Let me start by saying that in response to my post--in which I agreed broadly with much of what Andy said in the broadside, but faulted him for not drawing a sufficiently clear distinction between Islam and Islamism--Andy asked Encounter Books to send me a copy of The Grand Jihad, for which I thank him and thank Encounter Books. 

Whether or not you agree with his arguments, it's a surprisingly great book--great, in the sense that Andy's a natural writer: It's gripping, it's dramatic, and in places very funny (where it is not absolutely horrifying). It was a bestseller and now I see why. It deserved to be. 

I must say that Andy in fact takes pains in his book to draw at quite some length exactly the distinction I faulted him for not drawing clearly enough in his broadside. He devotes an entire chapter to it. I'll leave it to him to explain why this important distinction--the case for which he makes extremely well--was elided in the broadside.  

By the way, the reception to The Grand Jihad is an object lesson in the importance of reading a book before criticizing it. Conor Friedersdorf, you know I like you, but you got suckered on this one. You should have read it before writing this; you'd see that you're missing his point. 

Also by the way, Andy, while I was all too aware of much of what you discuss, the chapter on Kenya was new to me, and very disturbing. That should be better known. 

Anyway, to the broadside. The first meeting of the Ricochet Book Club is convened.  Questions for Andy? He's right here. I have quite some number, but I'll let you all start first. 

Diane Ellis made the great mistake of asking me which book or movie or play that came out this year did I like. That is always a mistake with our family, because Mrs. McGurn and I almost never read a book or see a movie that isn't years old. Not that we're opposed to it: everything is new some time. But we liked the tried and true.

Friends and relations, however, keep asking me for book suggestions. And if I had to name two on my all favorites list, both would be biographies. The first is Peter Ackroyd's The Life of Thomas More. It does more than bring the one-time Lord Chancellor to life: it paints a canvas of the medieval England in which he lived -- and which was dying even as he was sent to the block. Just wonderful reading.

The other is Allen Guelzo's Redeemer President, a biography of Abraham Lincoln. For similar reasons. Guelzo does a good job of depicting not only Lincoln but the time in which he lived -- and the forces and factions, very similar to today, that led to the creation of the Republican Party. It's highly readable and relatively concise. In addition, I think he does a good job handling Lincoln's religious beliefs: neither painting the 16th President as a complete agnostic nor going to the other extreme of claiming him for Christianity (at least any orthodox Christianity).

Both wonderful reads, even if they came out years ago.

Here you go: An introduction to Deirdre McClosky's thought, rather than her gender: 

I am claiming that the economy exploded because the forms of speech about enterprise and invention suddenly changed, for various good and interesting reasons.  Speech, not material changes in foreign trade or domestic investment, caused the non-linearities. We know this in part because trade or investment were ancient routines, but the new dignity and liberty for ordinary people were unique to the age. ...  

The change was of greater importance for explaining the modern world than the clerical Reformation in Germany after 1517, or even the aristocratic Renaissance during and after the Tuscan Trecento, though both of these influenced it, as did a third great R-shift of late medieval and early modern times, the political Revolts and Revolutions which shook Holland and Britain and America and finally France. But the point here is that in a fourth great and uniquely European R-shift—the “Bourgeois Revaluation” in Holland and Britain—an old class began to acquire a new and higher standing in the way people talked about it, in their rhetoric. 

There are a lot of fascinating ideas in that paper. What do you make of her thesis? 

Michael Steele sent this letter to the RNC Membership launching his re-election bid.  His apparent plan for an RNC comeback?  Baffle 'em with a blizzard of typos and lousy grammar.  The war against the "shift" key is a canny move too.

So the OECD's annual education testing scores of the world's 15 year olds are out and the news is bleak for the U.S.  The new wrinkle this year is that for the first time students from two Chinese cities -- Hong Kong and Shanghai -- are included in the results.  And yes, the Chinese students rank at the top, with Shanghai number 1 in all three areas: Math, Reading and Science.  America results are proudly, in the middle at 25th overall.  We did manage to narrowly edge out Latvia.  This is the data I talked about on the podcast today, when I wasn't shamelessly gloating over my notorious earlier post predicting a complete Christine O'Donnell fiasco in Delaware.  Anyway you can read the data -- in English, at least for now -- at the OECD website or inside this CSM story.

Jon Bon Jovi: just a pretty, made-up face? The White House doesn't think so.

Politics Daily reports on Obama's latest political appointee:  

The "Livin' on a Prayer" singer has been appointed to the 25-member White House Council for Community Solutions.

In its announcement Tuesday, the White House said the new panel will "provide advice to the President on the best ways to mobilize citizens, nonprofits, businesses and government to work more effectively together to solve specific community needs."

Is this the consolation prize for not making the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?