FROM ROGER SIMON, A COPENHAGEN WRAPUP: “I have seen the future and it stinks.”

FROM STEPHEN GREEN, it’s The Week In Blogs.

LEON DE WINTER: Mr. President, You Can’t Save the Economy and Save the Planet.

BREAKING RECORDS with the Large Hadron Collider.

LOTS OF MARKDOWNS on Men’s and Women’s Watches.

HMM: Walpin-gate may snag Mrs. Obama. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

TEA AND COFFEE cut Type 2 Diabetes risk.

DARK LIQUOR MAKES FOR WORSE HANGOVERS.

VIA MICHAEL YON, a Christmas letter from Afghanistan.

SHOCKER: Medicare more likely to deny your claim than private insurance.

MARKDOWNS ON hot holiday toys.

Plus, what every kid needs: A marshmallow gun.

ROGER KIMBALL:

The bad news is that Senator Ben Nelson is not up for reelection until 2012.

The good news is that today, December 19, 2009, is the day we got clarity on the Obama-Pelosi-Reid effort to steal medical care and call it “reform.”

I hope that Ben enjoys his final two years in the Senate.

OK, that’s not quite right. Since it was Ben Nelson of Nebraska that finally got Harry Reid his desperately needed 60th vote for socialized medicine, I hope 1) that the next two year are unpleasant for Sen. Nelson and 2) that he loses in 2012 by a landslide.

I’m still not being entirely candid. Nelson is a pathetic pawn in this game. He’s history and I hope he has plans for a new day job. He’ll need ‘em.

The really bad news is that the American people are just about to find that their medical care got a whole lot worse and a whole lot more expensive and cumbersome. . . . I suspect that the “tea parties” of the last several months will look like modest dress rehearsals once people get a handle on what the Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate are attempting to do to us.

I hope they’re properly angry.

MAJORITY OF U.S. COCAINE SUPPLY cut with veterinary deworming drug. “Cocaine’s a hell of a drug, and even more so when laced with another drug that’s commonly used to deworm opossums. Federal agents have found that 69 percent of cocaine shipments seized entering the United States contain levamisole, a veterinary drug linked to serious weakening of the immune system in humans. Here’s the real funny part: no one knows why.”

BOOK CLAIM: Prosecutors were ready to indict Clintons. “Prosecutors investigating Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton were prepared to seek indictments of them for their roles in the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky affairs, an explosive new book about the former president’s scandals charges. In ‘The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr,’ due out in February, author Ken Gormley also says that Lewinsky believed Bill Clinton lied about their affair during grand jury testimony about his relationship with the White House intern.”

IN THE MAIL: From Randal O’Toole, Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It.

REASON TV: Exclusive Footage: DC Cop Brings Gun to a Snowball Fight!

UPDATE: Reader Kevin Greene emails:

A fundamental shift is occurring. The people are ridiculing the government. “Don’t bring guns to a snowball fight.”

Look at all those video cameras. There is simply nowhere for this arrogant police officer to hide. No way to lie his way out of it later on.

The watchers are being watched.

Interesting concept.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse thinks this is unfair to the cop. “There is a difference between a snowball fight and throwing snowballs at moving vehicles. In a snowball fight — like this cool one in Madison a couple weeks ago — you have voluntary participants playing at fighting with each other. Throwing snowballs at cars, on the other had, is surprising people who happen upon the scene and it’s distracting them — and doing so at a time when it is particularly difficult to drive. . . . ‘Brandished’ is a heavy word and ‘brandished… at’ connotes that he pointed the gun at people, which he did not.”

Fair point, but I believe that a civilian who behaved similarly would have been charged with “brandishing.” There was poor judgment by all concerned (and those who threw snowballs at the cop violated Niven’s Rule — “don’t throw shit at an armed man”) but the standards should be higher for sworn officers who carry guns, shouldn’t they?

KATHLEEN PARKER: Overreaching Leaves Obama With Few Friends. “Perhaps it is the spirit of the season, but my empathy receptors are in overdrive for poor Barack Obama. All he wanted for Christmas was a health-care reform bill — and all he got was a lousy insurance industry bailout that few can love.”

ZUBRIN ON MONCKTON on biofuels.

ED DRISCOLL: Deconstructing Jar-Jar.

RANKING THE James Cameron movies.

STUART TAYLOR: FRESH ROT AT DUKE: “You might think that a university whose students were victims of the most notorious fraudulent rape claim in recent history, and whose professors — 88 of them — signed an ad implicitly presuming guilt, and whose president came close to doing the same would have learned some lessons. The facts are otherwise. They also suggest that Duke University’s ugly abuse in 2006 and 2007 of its now-exonerated lacrosse players — white males accused by a black stripper and hounded by a mob hewing to political correctness — reflects a disregard of due process and a bias against white males that infect much of academia.”

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

PROF. KENNETH ANDERSON: Copenhagen as UN Politics, Not Climate Change Substance. “At bottom, the question is one of legitimacy and what it means to say that a climate change deal requires, in Secretary General Ban’s words, an ‘equitable global governance structure’ to administer it, and the many, many, many things that apparently fall under its tent. What is this global governance? What makes it equitable and, therefore, legitimate? Is it legitimate to do a deal of global proportions, on climate change or anything else, and not involve everyone? If your issue is simply the substance of climate change policy, and not UN politics, then you don’t much care about these abstract issues of legitimacy, global governance, and the UN. Until the end of Copenhagen, in which it turns out that — given the breathtaking scope of things to be governed under the rubric of climate change, starting, really, with the whole of the global economy — that the meanings of global governance, legitimacy, and the UN matter after all. . . . That’s not a problem for me, because I ascribe minimal legitimacy to the UN and zero to the General Assembly and its members qua members. But for a large number of international law experts and devotees, among others, this is a problem.”

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: Obama faces new global warming skeptic: Joe Sixpack: As President Obama returns from Copenhagen, polls show that Americans are becoming more more wary of his global warming agenda – and of global warming itself.

MORE ON THAT Andrew Sullivan ghostblogger thing. “Andrew was the gold standard for solo bloggers. And now… Trig is not his baby!“