WELCOME TO THE PRESIDENCY: Obama bristles as the bubble closes in. It’ll only get worse.

UPDATE: Some sympathy from Tigerhawk.

ROGER SIMON: Will the New York Times review my book and do I care?

THE G.O.P.: Could it get any worse?

“DON’T MAKE THEM LISTEN TO OUR STUFF — IT’S INHUMAN!” Rockers to Press Obama on Music Torture. Best bit: “And the BBC has reported on a particularly insidious practice: using the theme songs from Sesame Street and Barney to break the will of prisoners.” Okay, that is inhuman. At any rate, whatever limits on volume and duration are applied to Guantanamo should also be applied to public concerts . . . .

UPDATE: At least they’re not waterboarding puppies. That Greenwald will stop at nothing. You’d never catch me wasting perfectly good smoothie material abusing puppies like that . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: It could be worse!

MORE: Advice from Rand Simberg: “If you don’t want people to use your music to torment terrorists, then quit making such awful music.”

ED DRISCOLL on conflating punditry and reporting.

A NEW Carnival of the Recipes is up!

GIVING A NEW MEANING TO “PORKBUSTERS:” The return of “feral swine.” Well, if the economy goes down far enough, this is a problem that will take care of itself. . . .

KEEPING WARM in “passive houses.” “Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.”

YOU DON’T SEE THIS EVERY DAY: Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit harshly censured Hamas for the current situation in Gaza. “Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit harshly censured Hamas today (27 Dec), placing responsibility for the current situation on Hamas. At a noon press conference broadcast on Egyptian television, he said that Egypt had repeatedly cautioned against continuing the situation and that whoever did not listen (Hamas) should assume responsibility and not blame others. He added that Israel had publicly warned that continued rocket fire would lead to military action.”

UPDATE: Jules Crittenden has thoughts. “It’s a build. George Bush actually made significant progress in that area, facilitating the isolation of Hamas in the Arab world. With a major assist from Hamas itself, of course, as the savagery of this terrorist group became apparent. That could be another promising area of foreign policy for Obama to lift wholesale from the Bush admin. The suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza can be laid directly at the door of Hamas and its murderous policies, with a nod to clandestine support from Iran.”

MEGAN MCARDLE AND DANIEL DREZNER discuss the coming global recession.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel: “You can tell they have jobs.” Well, so does pretty much everyone you see on TV talking about the recession.

CHRIS DODD UPDATE: He ought to be afraid to show his face, but he’s not:

Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd came home Jan. 6 to East Haddam to talk over his unsuccessful bid for president and to make clear he was not a candidate for vice president. In June, he was tied to the Countrywide Financial scandal when he was accused of accepting a sweetheart mortgage deal. His reputation took a hit, but he denied guilt and kept up his public appearances, including in a Feb. 25 speech at a Middlesex Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Cromwell, Oct. 10 at a Newington meeting with business leaders, an Oct. 17 lecture to civics students at Middletown High School, an Oct. 27 gathering to hear complaints of the working poor in New Britain and a Nov. 15 speech in Farmington on afterschool programs.

It would be interesting if people showed up at those meetings to ask him why he hasn’t released his mortgage documents yet — and put the response up on YouTube.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll wonders if the Connecticut Post would pay attention since they admit they’re tuning out complaints about Dodd and Countrywide. Journalism in action!

ELISABETH EAVES: “Americans give more to charity, per capita and as a percentage of gross domestic product, than the citizens of other nations. But why?”

BRIAN DOUGLAS: Alternative energy vehicles will happen sooner than you think.

HEH: “Dave Barry really may not be making this up.”

I KNOW HOW I’M BETTING: After Bush, will MoveOn live up to its name?

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON, author of The Clash of Civilizations and The Soldier and the State, has died.

Here’s more from Daniel Drezner, who notes that he’s remembered fondly as “a geek with a backbone of steel,” and “a quintessential Victorian man of honor.”

WASHINGTON POST: The weakening prospects of Caroline Kennedy.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Gov. David Paterson intends to use the Kennedy threat to arrange a bailout for New York State. That Senate seat is an F’ing valuable thing, so the ‘reverse Blago’ gambit comes as no surprise.” Hmm. Good luck with that.

I WAS OUT OF TOWN when the Roane County dam broke, but Katie Granju has a roundup and — Paul Mulshine take note — blogger Randy Neal was ahead of a lot of Big Media folks on this story.

Meanwhile, for those busy bashing corporate interests, note that TVA, a government entity, is involved here. . . .

WELL, I DIDN’T LIKE PAUL MULSHINE’S PIECE ON BLOGGING, but this piece hits a lot closer to the target:

A lot of people have been comparing the Ponzi scheme allegedly run by Madoff to the Ponzi scheme run by the U.S. government, also known as Social Security.

That’s entirely unfair.

To Madoff.

From what I can gather, Madoff at least made an attempt to invest the money he got from early investors to give them the returns he promised. Those investments failed to bring in enough money and the scheme was doomed to fail sooner or later. But if Madoff had been a more brilliant investor, it might have worked.

The federal government, on the other hand, never tried to make the Social Security system work. The feds didn’t invest the money in the market. They took the money that we gave them and lent it to themselves, promising themselves interest. To be paid by themselves.

This scheme is even more crooked than Madoff’s.

I remember John Langbein speaking at the law school a few years ago, saying that if Wall Street tried to do what Social Security does they’d all be in jail.

FRANK MUNGER: More evidence of a budding nuke renaissance. Faster, please.

MORE PEOPLE ARE BURNING COAL AT HOME, according to this report. We had a coal furnace when we lived in Heidelberg, and as a kid I enjoyed laying fires and stoking it. I suspect, though, that the thrill would have worn off in another year or two . . . .

UPDATE: Some related thoughts: “Environmentalists must surely dislike coal on all fronts; widespread acceptance of coal for home heating makes it more difficult to argue against the fuel generally as an evil, environmental monster. After all, you can’t concede that it’s OK for people to heat their homes with coal but then object to the use of an electric baseboard heater because the electricity is generated from burning coal.”

BITES FROM THE APPLE: A roundup of news from the Apple empire.

PAUL MULSHINE BLOWS IT. In this Wall Street Journal column, he manages to conflate punditry with reporting (following in Nick Lemann’s footsteps) while simultaneously engaging in a bit of misleading quotage that thoroughly undercuts his point.

My point, as quoted in his column, is that punditry is easy, but that reporting is harder, and more valuable, and not done enough by Big Media. In making the point, I quoted another blogger, whom Mulshine doesn’t identify — because the blogger I quoted was Iraq documentarian and blogger J.D. Johannes, who in fact does real reporting of the sort that Big Media folks all too often don’t. As J.D. comments:

I do not know why Mr. Mulshine did not give my name. If he had, it would undercut many of his statements. A news man of his esteem would have surely googled me and found that I was doing exactly what he says bloggers are not doing and nearly beating a major Hollywood director and billionaire .

(Or perhaps he did google me and for some reason thought I was not the type to read the Wall Street Journal.)

The hear-say quote, and this particular usage by Mr. Mulshine, is one of the reasons why blogs have succeeded–the core news consumer does not like hear-say quotes and does not want bland executive summaries for the “casual reader.” The core news consumer wants hard news without bias and expert opinion.

Mr. Mulshine’s use of a misleading hear-say quote explains well the demise of his beloved newspaper.

It seems that often when big-media types write about the failings of blogs, they engage in the kind of lazy inaccuracy they condemn. In an earlier column, Mulshine wrote:

Anyone can travel to a war zone and write about it. I would strongly recommend this for any of the critics of the MSM who are seeking to get out the real truth about Iraq. Go for it, guys. War coverage is great fun. One word of caution, though: Don’t lose your heads in all the excitement.

That, of course — as Mulshine should have known then, and now — is exactly what J.D. Johannes does — along with Michael Yon, Michael Totten, Bill Roggio, and others in the blogosphere. Mulshine, meanwhile, brags about having once covered the Toms River Regional Board of Education in New Jersey. That’s worthy work, of course, but if his reportage there was as poor as his work in the Wall Street Journal, then — oh, who am I kidding? “If”?

Anyway, it’s certainly true that bloggers as a class are more competition for careless pundits like Mulshine than for go-getter reporters who find out things that people don’t know, and report them truthfully. It’s also true that those go-getter reporters who put the truth first are pretty scarce in the world of Big Media reporting, and that management shows no sign of wanting more of them, and many signs of wanting attitude-mongers like, well, Mulshine. This is, as I’ve noted before, a dumb business strategy, which explains in part why newspapers are doing so badly. For more on that, see this thoughtful piece by Evan Coyne Maloney. Also, these thoughts from Jay Rosen. And here’s my diagnosis from 2002:

Though webloggers do actual reporting from time to time, most of what they bring to the table is opinion and analysis – punditry, in short. (No surprise here – people have been sharing opinions forever, and may well have an inborn drive to do so. Plus, you can opine without leaving your computer, while reporting hard news is hard work.)

This means that Big Media organizations should still have a strong competitive advantage where actual newsgathering is concerned. The problem is that most big organizations have cut back on newsgathering, treating news as a commodity product to be obtained from wire services while eliminating foreign and regional bureaus. Instead, Big Media organizations decided some years ago that they would focus on “news analysis” and punditry. That’s, well, because you can opine without leaving your computer, while reporting hard news is hard work. (And expensive).

Unfortunately, this hasn’t worked out very well. The move to analysis and punditry was driven, in no small part, by corporate pressures to cut costs, pressures that accompanied the consolidation and corporatization of the news media. . . . But actual information about what’s happening is still mostly the province of professional journalism, and that’s less likely to change. I can imagine a decentralized amateur news service (a sort of Slashdot on steroids) but I think something like that will be slow in coming.

So there you are. Not that this will stop a future Mulshine (or Lemann) from repeating the same errors. Apparently, nothing does . . . .

UPDATE: A comment from Jay Rosen. Plus, once again, I lack fire.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More discussion here.

MORE: Also here.

A BAD WEEK FOR PRINCESS CAROLINE: “Caroline Kennedy’s coronation for the U.S. Senate has been disrupted by, well, by Caroline Kennedy. The media is shocked, shocked to learn she’s a political dilettante and a bit foolish.” Well, it’s not as if those are disqualifications for the United States Senate.

And Mickey Kaus says she’s better than Andrew Cuomo: “Caroline may be boring but she does not seem evil!” He notes, however, that there are other people in New York besides the unimpressive Caroline and the thuggish Andrew. Hey, Eliot Spitzer needs a job!

ANDREW FERGUSON on the politics of fat.