HOW SAD: Obama Administration trying to assemble “a coherent narrative” for Afghanistan.

A COOL NEW TUNE from Rick Torres and The Smart Set.

WELL, THAT’S JUST SAD: Westboro Baptist Protesters Get Tires Slashed Following Protest Saturday.

UPDATE: Reader George Wilson writes:

I read about the Westboro tires and I was troubled. Their message is abhorrent even if constitutionally protected. When, however, does it become ‘fire in a crowded theatre’ I.e. An incitement to riot?

I’m not surprised about the counter protest but I am concerned about the tire slashing. It seems like a significant escalation. I wonder if this is a confluence of elite disregard for the feelings of the average American and the success of Muslim violence, threatened and real, in getting action. People learn by example.

Yes, when the authorities implicitly condone violence in causes that they support (or at least are afraid to oppose), it sends a more general message that violence works. I’ve warned about this incentive system in the past.

I’VE GOT AN IDEA: Just waive everybody from ObamaCare’s requirements. It seems we’re off to a good start. It’s like the whole thing is some kind of big failure.

UPDATE: Reader Mark Shelden emails: “We’re going to have a field day cross checking Obamacare exemptions with the FEC database.” Heh.

LAW STUDENTS AT BROOKLYN LAW SCHOOL get their panties in a wad.

TEN BUSINESSES SMARTPHONES ARE DESTROYING.

READER J.T. SMITH EMAILS: “I’m sitting here in my living room watching Palin’s Alaska on TLC and I have one prediction for 2011…Record tourism for Alaska.”

UPDATE: Another review here.

IRA STOLL: The War on For-Profit Education.

As I’ve said before, it’s not at all clear that the traditional, not-for-profit model deserves a pass. Plenty of people enrolled in traditional colleges are graduating without marketable skills and with mountains of debt. I suspect that all of this is in part a PR effort by traditional schools to shift the blame.

And there’s plenty of blame to shift: “A bad story? Wait, it gets worse. How did Ms. Munna get to Citi to borrow more money than she could afford? She was referred there by her dear university, NYU. But what she didn’t know was that NYU was in a ‘revenue sharing’ (read: kickback) arrangement with Citibank, where NYU got 0.25 percent of the value of student loans made by Citibank.”

UPDATE: Reader Bob O’Hara writes:

Glenn, the Ira Stoll piece on the war on for-profit education is on target, but even more on target is your comment that traditional non-profit universities often have a predatory relationship with their own students.

To fix this we need to open the books. At public universities it should go without saying that all financial operations should take place in plain view of the taxpaying public. A tool exists to do just that, and Gil Brown of George Mason University has written about it for the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

It’s an online open-book accounting system, very easily implemented, that would allow anyone on campus to view all financial transactions within a university. If I were a state legislator with pork-busting ambitions and a sense of educational integrity, I’d push to have every campus in my state put this in place. Who knows what the student journalists of the country might uncover with such a system. (The new carpeting in the chancellor’s office cost how much??)

We had that scandal, I think.

BRYAN PRESTON: Is Obama Trying to Turn the Border into the Next ‘Third Rail’?

Meh. Good luck with that. I’m putting my money on the likes of Bill Whittle instead.

THE YEAR’S best horror DVDs.

LAME-DUCK HUNTING.

JACK LAIL: Fixing errors online needs some correcting at news organizations. “When someone is looking for information on a person or a place, or a thing or an event, they are going to Google; not heading to the public library for an exciting date with microfilm. But newspapers and other news organizations really haven’t developed a solid or transparent set of policies and procedures to deal with the issue online. Most newspapers have longstanding policies on how errors are corrected in print, but if you ask editors and reporters about online corrections in their own newsrooms, you likely will get as many answers as people you ask.”

CLAYTON CRAMER: The Myth That High Unemployment Means A High Crime Rate.

VIDEO: Naked Ukrainian Women Bust Up Iranian Regime Speech to Protest Stoning. Good for them.

A group of female protesters went topless in Ukraine on Thursday at an event promoting Iranian culture, to demonstrate against the death sentence handed down to a woman in Iran for murder and adultery.

Five members of the Ukrainian group Femen tore off their clothing and shouted slogans against what they called court-sanctioned murder during the event at Kiev’s Ukrainian House convention centre, which featured hundreds of Ukrainian and Iranian dignitaries.

‘Don’t kill women!’ one Femen activist shouted.

Video at the link. Would that American feminists were as aggressive with this sort of thing. But, alas . . .

READER STEPHEN TAYLOR WRITES: “I saw your recipe for Lamb Stew this week on Instapundit. My wife gathered the ingredients and made it today. It was outstanding! We used one can of beer; it tasted perfect.”

Glad to be of service! Now branch out and try the Insta-Chicken. You can make it in a slow-cooker, too.

TERROR: Muslim who shot soldier in Arkansas says he wanted to cause more death: Memphis man drifted to the dark side of Islamic extremism and then plotted a one-man jihad against his homeland.

COMFORT FOOD THE EASY WAY: Markdowns on slow cookers.

Here’s a good slow-cooker cookbook. And here’s another one.

INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE: WHY CAN’T CHUCK GET HIS BUSINESS OFF THE GROUND?

POPULAR MECHANICS: Top 10 Cars of 2011.

FROM A READER: “They told me if I voted for John McCain detainees would be held indefinitely at Guantanamo without trial, and they were right!” “Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, will probably remain in military detention without trial for the foreseeable future, according to Obama administration officials. The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters.”

Ah, remember the fierce moral urgency of change? And the obvious illegality and ineptitude of the Bush Administration’s approach? Why, all we needed was to put some really smart people in charge and all the problems would magically disappear! Apparently, the people we elected aren’t that smart. . . .

Related: “After all the bold talk in the campaign, Obama apparently has no idea what to do with the detainees. Or, that he had ideas, but they encountered reality. Why not reach out to newly reddened America by saying Bush actually got it right and proceed with the military commissions?”

Instead, I predict robotic-and-anesthetized repetition of talking points.

OKAY, I LIKE THE P.J. Institute’s version better. But that said, even though the NYT’s you-fix-the-deficit calculator offers a somewhat tendentious set of choices, it does successfully convey the message of just how deep a hole we’re in. Here are my choices from their somewhat limited palette of options. I would have cut more military spending had they not “channeled” cuts in particular directions. I also would have cut more federal spending in other areas if allowed. . . .

UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark emails:

In looking at your choices, what struck me most was how reasonable they seemed. Yeah, I know, I’m in the choir. And yes, I know that raising the retirement age – meaning raising the age for full benefits – and raising the eligibility age for Medicare and capping Medicare growth will induce howls of disapproval from all the usual corners amplified times 10 by the all the usual media, but I suspect that there might be more willingness to seriously consider these measures than most suppose. I really think proposals like yours await a Christie-like personality in Congress to push something like this forward.

I am a reasonable man. It may be, though, that we need some unreasonable men — and, based on Tea Party experience, more likely women — to push hard enough.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Don Vollum emails:

I think they are sending the wrong message with this calculator– it shows me how easy it is to eliminate the deficit! I was able to do so in a few minutes, even within the constraints imposed by the NYT’s calculator. If I can do it so easily, why can’t the politicians?

That’s a rhetorical question– the answer is that there are not enough opportunities for graft in deficit elimination.

Indeed. If we could change that, we’d be getting somewhere. . . .

PAUL KRUGMAN: You know what we need to balance the budget? Death Panels! And sales taxes.

I think the White House staff can end their “rebranding” effort. As usual, Krugman’s got his finger on the pulsebeat of America. Or maybe that’s the wrong metaphor, here . . . .

FETAL TESTOSTERONE EXPOSURE boosts male risk-taking.

TERROR CLERIC OMAR BAKRI MOHAMMED CAPTURED IN LEBANON: “Apparently confident that he would receive divine protection, Bakri remained at his home in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, where he was discovered by a police patrol.” Whoops.

HEH: TLC following up Sarah Palin’s Alaska with Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco.