THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD: Damon Root on Columbia University’s eminent domain abuse.

BURNING BILLIONS behind closed doors: “For officials who came into office promising to operate the most honest and transparent White House and Congress ever, President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seem determined to achieve exactly the opposite result. . . . Less than 48 hours elapsed between the time the text of the compromise became available for public examination late Saturday evening and yesterday’s 61-37 vote for passage. At that rate, the Senate effectively was spending about $300 million every minute while considering the compromise, and allowing taxpayers a scandalously brief opportunity to discover how the senators were doing it. But even before the votes on final Senate passage were counted, Reid left a White House meeting with Obama and Pelosi yesterday morning promising to convene the conference committee as soon as possible and predicting the ‘minor differences’ between the two chambers’ bills would be worked out within 24 hours, with conferees working into the night.”

A POSSIBLE SIRIUS XM BANKRUPTCY: I’m not surprised. The service is decent (I have XM) but the companies took on way too much debt. I remember my dad looking at the stocks a few years ago and saying that Sirius’s only viable business plan was to be bought by XM, and XM’s only viable business plan was to hope for some kind of miracle.

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.

ANDY KESSLER: Why Markets Rejected the Geithner Plan.

BRINK LINDSEY ON Paul Krugman’s Nostalgianomics. “The political economy of the early postwar decades, while it generated impressive results under the peculiar conditions of the time, is totally unsuited to serve as a model for 21st-century policymakers. And as to the social attitudes and values that undergirded that political economy, it is frankly astonishing that self-described progressives could find them attractive.”

IN BRITAIN, BIG-GOVERNMENT TYPES ARE rattled by the Taxpayers Alliance. We need to rattle ’em here some, too. It’s never good when big-government types are unrattled.

WORRIES ABOUT THE “STIMULUS” BILL AND AGING RESEARCH, at FightAging.org.

WASHINGTON POST: Raided Firms Have Murtha Ties.

Plus, from The Hill: Dems’ ethical troubles reminiscent of GOPers’ headaches as majority.

Also, from Politico: Rangel keeps gavel as ethics panel probes. Hope and change and a new kind of politics!

POLITICO: For Senators, Tax Questions Are Taxing. “The offices of two senators — Jim Webb (D-Va.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — told Politico that they would not answer the survey questions. The offices of Kyl and 42 other senators — 17 Republicans, 24 Democrats and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) — failed to respond at all. Some Senate offices took issue with the line of questioning, saying it was either unfair or an invasion of privacy. Aides to one senator told Politico that they considered the survey ‘presumptuous and intrusive.’ Some Senate press secretaries encouraged others not to respond to the survey.” Taxes are for the little people!

UPDATE: Say, what I’d really like to see is a list of stock trades made by members of Congress after the September meltdown briefing . . . .

GLEN DEAN WONDERS why we’re not hearing more about controlling the census from the White House.

HOPE AND CHANGE! In Florida, an ammunition shortage. “After months of heavy buying, gun dealers across the state are experiencing shortages. . . . Demand for bullets is so strong that suppliers are restricting deliveries.”

WHILE PEOPLE GO TO ALABAMA TO LOOK FOR RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE: “A poll commissioned by the ADL shows that 33% of Europeans blame the Jews for the financial meltdown. A mind-boggling 74% Spaniards think so.” Pathetic. No wonder they caved so easily to al Qaeda.

OBAMA’S TV AUDIENCE: Big, but underperforming the hype: “That figure was much lower than the 64.3 million Americans who watched President Bill Clinton’s 1993 post-inauguration news conference on the economy, Nielsen said.”

DAMON ROOT on guns, liberals and the Constitution. I’ll note what Bob Cottrol told me at the NRA convention last year: Progress on the Second Amendment owes a lot to the intellectual honesty of liberal constitutional scholars.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Schumer on “those little tiny, yes, porky amendments”: “The American people really don’t care.”

Here’s Schumer’s contact information.

UPDATE: Reader Kelly Jefferson writes: “Sen. Schumer’s DC phone number is busy, busy, busy. I recommend calling one of the district offices instead. Or maybe all of them. Hell hath no fury like a taxpayer scorned!”

MORE LOCAL HEAT FOR CHRIS DODD: Dodd’s poll numbers slip amid mortgage controversy. “Senate Banking Chairman Christopher J. Dodd is off to a rocky start in his attempt to smooth over his mortgage controversy with Connecticut voters.” He’s certainly getting bad home-state press.

And this has got to hurt: So Far Down, Lieberman Looks Like up to Dodd.

IN AMERICA, a failure of social cohesion? I’d say it’s more a failure of our political and intellectual classes.

CASH FOR TRASH: Another bad review for Geithner’s plan. “He came. He spoke. The market tanked. He went. The market tanked some more. Such is the power of Treasury Secretary Geithner.”

I THINK HE’S TOO KIND: “We are ruled by people who have achieved the remarkable distinction of being both dull and frivolous.” This was substantially true before the change in administrations, too.

NEW YORK TIMES: 3 Lawmakers Tied to Lobbyist Inquiry: “Federal prosecutors are looking into the possibility that a prominent lobbyist may have funneled bogus campaign contributions to his mentor, Representative John P. Murtha, as well as other lawmakers, two people familiar with the investigator’s questions said Tuesday.”

POLITICO: Obama Allies Attack GOP Leadership. Well, good, because I’ve gotten kind of tired of it.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: A Rocky First Few Weeks. “To defer to the House of Representatives and let the bill be thrown together by cacophonous mob rule made the president seem passive and behind the curve.”

MICKEY KAUS HAS MORE on the “stimulus” bill’s welfare-reform torpedoing:

On bloggingheads my colleague Bob Wright routinely ridiculed me as paranoid for worrying that if Democrats got back in power they would unravel welfare reform. Even I thought I was paranoid. If only for political purposes, I figured, Dems would have to wait a few months or years before sabotaging Bill Clinton’s major domestic achievement. It took them two weeks. …

Read the whole thing.

UH OH: FINANCIAL TIMES: Why Obama’s new Tarp will fail to rescue the banks.