THAT’S MY LIFE EVERY DAY: ‘I Feel As If I’m in a Surreal Swedish Movie Being Threatened by Bizarre Trolls.’

ADVICE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY’S Ambrose Bierce.

POLITICO: Harry Reid tries to add online poker to tax bill. “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is trying to use the tax cut package President Barack Obama brokered with Republicans to legalize online poker, POLITICO has learned — a move that could further complicate the deal Obama announced Monday. Already, the online poker proposal has exposed the Nevada Democrat to charges of flip-flopping on a controversial issue, as well as using his Senate leadership position to repay big casino interests that helped him win reelection in a hard-fought campaign against Republican Sharron Angle last month.”

Gee, do you think?

CHANGE: Wisconsin Governor-Elect raises prospect of union decertification to balance budget.

POLITICO: Why Obama Can’t Shake Bush. “Obama’s promise to reverse the tax cuts reflected a broader belief among Democrats that the Bush years were a bizarre and in essential ways illegitimate aberration, a period of panic and greed the errors of which Obama would reverse in a series of swift and decisive strokes. Yet the tax compromise is just the most spectacular — and to Democrats, infuriating — element of a broader trend under a president who ran as the leader of the counter-revolution. It is the domestic counterpart of Obama’s early decision not to repudiate and investigate reviled Bush national security policies such as indefinite detention and warrantless wiretapping, but to refine and embrace them.”

CARBON FOOTPRINTS AND REDUCING THE SURPLUS POPULATION: Ed Driscoll has a memo for Ted Turner.

CHANGE: The Hill: Pelosi escalates criticism of tax-cut deal.

RADLEY BALKO: The War On Cameras: It has never been easier—or more dangerous—to record the police. Read the whole thing.

Here’s a column I wrote on the same subject not long ago.

VAN JONES IS the gift that keeps on giving.

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch emails: “It’s interesting. People that keep saying America doesn’t have to be a military power are just thrilled to use extraordinary police powers on America’s citizens. I wonder if the two positions are related?”

NEW PJM POLL: What Voters Think About Obama And ObamaCare.

PETER SUDERMAN: Obama: “When Medicare was started, it was a small program. It grew.” You don’t say!

RAND SIMBERG: Remember all that stuff we heard from David Brooks and Chris Buckley about Barack Obama’s “superior temperament” back in 2008? “It’s hard to take anything they tell us seriously, at this point.”

CHANGE: Fred Upton, author of the light bulb law, turns against it. I’m incandescent with glee.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH: In Which Thomas Friedman Insults the Chinese By Pretending That He Can Think Like Them.

PUSHBACK ON THAT arsenic-based life study.

WARREN BUFFETT: Robber Baron? “Warren Buffett isn’t just noted as an owner of life insurance companies and a supporter of the estate tax. He’s also noted as a buyer of family businesses. . . . These two business strategies support each other. . . . It’s hard to think of Warren Buffett as a robber baron. He’s a jolly chap who just seems to be along for the ride. But the ugly truth is that his businesses benefit from one of the major big-government redistributive programs by which the ruling class makes government big and families small. He’s a leader of a ‘redistributive combine’ that wants to keep what it got from the government favor factory. He’s one of the chaps sitting by the side of the road taking their cut, courtesy of Uncle Sam.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED REPUBLICAN, we’d see creepy team-ups between WalMart and Homeland Security. And they were right!

JEFF CARTER: Frustrated troops.

LIST: Top 15 Food and Cooking Gifts.

JOE WEISENTHAL: Stop And Think About The Ridiculousness Of The Democrats’ Position On Taxes. “The Democrats, it would appear, would are willing to risk rising middle-class taxes during a recession — about as anti-stimulative as it gets — if it means the wealthy aren’t seeing taxes rise during this period. That’s how devoted they are to higher taxes. Look, you can make an argument that taxes on the rich ought to be raised from a deficit standpoint. And you can argue that tax cuts for the rich have virtually no stimulative value. But it’s implausible to argue that the economy would be strengthened by higher taxes on the rich, unless you use the farcical deficit hawk logic that somehow it’s high deficits causing the economy to be weak, a line of logic we know that no Democrats accept.”

IT’S ALL PIGFORD, ALL THE TIME, over at Big Government.

SARAH PALIN AND ELIZABETH EDWARDS: Sisters Under The Skin? “Interesting that the lamestream media, mindlessly mouthing the mantra of Sarah Palin’s lack of intellectual curiosity, never thought to ask John Edwards what he was reading.”

SOONER OR LATER, you have to join the side you’re on.

MICHAEL BARONE: While his base rages, Obama faces tax-cut reality.

CLAIRE MCCASKILL should be careful about invoking pitchforks.