RON RADOSH: The Second Time is Farce: Frances Fox Piven Calls for a new Cloward-Piven Strategy for Today. Actually, it was pretty much a farce the first time, as the original Cloward-Piven strategy wasn’t exactly a brilliant success. As for calls for “mass protests” and “unruly mobs” in favor of more socialism, modeled on the Greek riots, I can’t think of anything better for the Republicans. It’s like this is some sort of clever scheme using a doddering, easily manipulated provocateur, but who could . . . Karl Rove, you magnificent bastard!

ETHICAL QUANDARY: Kidney transplant as a condition of life-sentence suspension in MS. That’s nothing. Under ObamaCare, your kidney transplant will depend on how connected you are. Oh, I’m just joking . . . .

MORE Ezra Klein Constitution Mockery. Plus, from the comments: “I notice that the article has been edited and now says that the Constitution was written more than 200 years ago, which makes Klein look like less of a putz. If you didn’t know what the original version said, then the first comment about the Constitution not being written in 1910 would make no sense at all.”

DAN RIEHL NOT IMPRESSED WITH JOE SCARBOROUGH’S POLITICAL AMBITIONS: “Dude, you’re currently third banana behind frickin’ Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.”

HEATING UP: Video: NYC councilman repeats charges of sanitation “snow slowdown.”

Related: Gov. Paterson calls for snow slowdown probe.

WE WUZ ROBBED.

SO IS THIS HOPE, OR CHANGE? Most In Poll See Lingering Unemployment.

AT AMAZON, year-end deals in Tools and Home Improvement.

STEPHEN GREEN UNCORKS an old-fashioned Fisking on Colman McCarthy’s lame anti-military column.

It’s funny that the likes of Colman McCarthy feel morally or intellectually superior to, well, anyone.

UPDATE: “The US military can’t possibly be a hundredth as uncomfortable with gays as the Left is uncomfortable with the American soldier.”

RICHARD POLLOCK: Ten Political Flash Points For 2011.

SLATE: A defense of “May-December” marriages like Hugh Hefner’s. “The research is thin, but there’s little evidence that marriages with wide age gaps between partners turn out any worse than marriages between people born around the same time. Presumably, at least some of the time, these arrangements fit each person’s needs better than marrying someone the same age would. . . . But the best reason not to hate May-December marriages is the same reason not to hate any marriage that’s not your own: What’s the point?” The important thing is that people who like to cluck their tongues in disapproval have sufficient opportunities to do so.

THE LEE COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD WILL BE HOLDING AN EMERGENCY MEETING TOMORROW MORNING presumably about the Ashley Smithwick paring-knife case. “This is notice that the Lee County Board of Education will hold an emergency meeting regarding a student disciplinary issue on Friday, December 31, 2010, at 9 a.m. The meeting will be held in the Heins Education Building, 106 Gordon Street, Sanford.”

Here’s the latest on that — note the update — from Bryan Preston. If any InstaPundit readers attend, please drop me a note about what happens. I suppose the meeting could be about something else, but . . . .

UPDATE: This story says it’s about Smithwick, and also calls into question Superintendent Jeffrey Moss’s earlier statement.

IOWAHAWK: The Ezra Klein Constitution Essay. Fish, barrel, smoking gun.

UPDATE: Charles Austin emails: “Just imagine how confused Ezra Klein might be if he had to read something over a thousand years old like Aristotle, Sun Tzu, the Torah or (gasp) the Koran!” No dissing the Koran. That would be racist, or something.

JIM LEACH: Buying membership in the Academy with taxpayer money?

TAINTED LOVE: Lockyer, Chiang Got Campaign Money From Fraud-Tainted Developer. “Two high-level state officials have frozen nearly $150,000 in campaign contributions raised for them by a low-income housing developer now accused of bilking government agencies. State Treasurer Bill Lockyer and state Controller John Chiang said they have put the money into separate accounts while they await the outcome of a federal probe into Advanced Development and Investment Inc. The company has built dozens of subsidized apartment complexes up and down the state with taxpayer money. . . . Spokesmen for Lockyer and Chiang said that if the company is found to have committed wrongdoing, the two men will give the money back.”

Note that they’re not returning the money. Just, you know, freezing it. Somehow, though, this makes me think of Rep. William Jefferson, which I’m sure was not their hope . . . .

UPDATE: Dodd Harris emails:

What? No mention of escorting Bill Lockyer to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, “Hi, my name is Spike, honey.”?!?

I’m shocked — shocked!

Unlike Lockyer, I don’t regard prison rape as a political tool. Though if I were to make an exception, he’d be at the top of the list.

MICHAEL WALSH: Fighting Back Against ObamaCare.

One thing Hollywood knows how to do is to give audi ences a “cheer moment” when the underdog finally turns on his adversaries — Rocky’s first, bone-crushing left hook against Apollo Creed, for example. As the 112th Congress convenes next week, that’s what many Americans will be expecting from the 63 new Republican House members and five new Republican senators. The first thing they’re going to have to rock back on its heels is ObamaCare.

Tea Partiers, start your engines. The great battle for the soul and future of America is about to begin.

Indeed.

MAN-MADE FAMINE in America.

LOW-LIGHT KING: Testing The Nikon D3s.

SO CAN’T THEY FIND SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T SUPPORT OBAMACARE to head the RNC? I mean, just a thought . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Bill Reece thinks this is unfair:

I don’t think your comments or the blog post to which you linked are necessarily fair to Mr. Priebus. As a member of a Firm with 50 or so fellow members, I can tell you that we have pretty divergent political and philosophical views within my firm, and I am in a pretty conservative locale. We have some members who are pretty big Obama supporters, and I can guarantee their views do not represent those of myself or many of the other members of the Firm, and vice versa.

In addition, pretty much every Firm in the country with any work in the medical field has been making similar sales pitches to clients regarding the coming regulatory avalanche associated with ObamaCare. It is good business and it serves clients’ interests.

Let’s give Priebus the benefit of a doubt and an opportunity to take a public position. After all, isn’t it a bit disconcerting that this was brought to public attention by “ThinkProgress”?

Good point. But I think a lot of folks feel that they’ve given the RNC crowd the benefit of the doubt repeatedly, only to be disappointed again and again.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Greg Andrews writes:

Priebus has been in charge of the Wisconsin GOP – and he has been remarkably successful here.

Ron Johnson (libertarian Republican) Senator

2 new Republican Congressmen

Both Houses of the legislature – Republican

Scott Walker, (Libertarian Republican) Governor – has already killed slow-speed rail, before even taking office.

That’s a good record, all right. So what’s his position on ObamaCare? I’d be interested to hear from him.

And honestly, the way things are going, the picture of him with Michael Steele is probably more damaging . . . .

MORE: Dan Riehl raises other issues, and says the RNC needs to pay attention to the optics. “A bad choice will only inflame tensions between the RNC and the base while they’re already at an all time high.”

FUN WITH COOKING APPS.

COLMAN MCCARTHY: Now that Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell Has Been Repealed, Here’s Another Excuse For Keeping ROTC Off Campus. “ROTC and its warrior ethic taint the intellectual purity of a school.” Pathetic. What does McCarthy know about either intellectualism or purity? Not much, to judge from this column. His post-Post “academic” career is just further evidence of both a higher education bubble, and of the politicized lack of standards therein.

UPDATE: Reader Jason Johnson sends: “The state that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “If you consider the quote from your reader and look at Washington DC it’s pretty much where we are. Anti-violence activists aren’t anti violence. They’re just against the rest of us being able to resist them.”

Looking at Colman McCarthy’s language drawing equivalence between U.S. soldiers and the Taliban, I don’t think he’s just a dreamy peacenik. And I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of the good intentions of “dreamy peacenik” types anyway, since, somehow, they always seem to promote things that help the other side. At best, they’re oikophobes.

MORE: Reader Dave Everson emails:

I don’t understand why people are so eager to reinstate ROTC at the Ivies. We have the finest military ever created and we did it without any substantial contribution from the Ivy League schools for the past 40 years. Why mess with success? The best officers I served under were state university graduates. I would not have followed the one Harvard officer I did serve under to a free lunch much less a war.

Ouch. And in response to Jason Johnson’s Thucydides quote above, reader David Swager writes: “Actually, the scholars are already cowards AND fools (notable exceptions, of course) while the warriors are heroic and highly ingenious. I know, I work with our soldiers and most of the officers have advanced college degrees.”

MORE STILL: In response to Dave Everson, Paul Baker writes:

You’re missing the point. We don’t want the military to be influenced by Ivy leagues, we want the military (and its values) to influence the Ivy leagues. I remember a few years after I graduated from a midwest Catholic college (University of Dayton), there was a sit-in protest about allowing the CIA to recruit on campus. It was diffused by having an open forum where the protesters argued that the CIA did not reflect the values of a Catholic institution and should therefore be banned. However, they were silenced when the counter-argument was made that if the goal is to infuse the CI with morals and values, what better place to recruit than at a Catholic institution?

Liberal values only succeed when they bully the other values out. When conservative values are infused, the liberal values wither on the vine due to lack of intellectual arguments. Get ROTC in the Ivy leagues, and the liberal monopoly is broken.

And, also, it’s just fun to watch them try to come up with a new excuse, in the process demonstrating that all the fierce moral urgency deployed behind the last excuse was just so much dishonest twaddle.

Meanwhile, reader Peter Davis offers a cautionary note:

Glenn, an infantry squad today is filled with young men who are brighter than an equal number of college students their age, as well as in better physical shape.

My war was some forty-five years ago. I never once spent time in a firebase where there was not a collection of paperbacks, and not just Louis L’Amour and Micky Spillane but philosophy and history, math and other heavy stuff.

A career enlisted man will have finished his AA degree by the time he’s made E-4 or E-5 and will likely have a BA or BS degree by E-7. Few officers will make Major without a graduate degree.

Your commenter is sort of wrong, the fighting is not done by fools. It is, however, more and more likely that the fighting will be by men with a deep and abiding contempt for “the elite”. This probably will not be good.

Indeed. The best solution would be for the elite not to be contemptible, of course. . . .

STILL MORE: Reader David Wharton — a classics professor — emails:

For the sake of scholarship, I thought you would want to know that the Thucydides quote about scholars and warriors you referred to here almost certainly isn’t from Thucydides, but is probably adapted from General Sir William Butler. As you know getting it right matters, in history and in law — as you know. Thucydides said many insightful things, but this isn’t one of them.

Noted. And Jason Johnson sends this followup:

Thank you for posting my Thucydides quote earlier. Since a few people disagreed with the “fighting done by fools” part I wanted to respond and say that, based on the down-to-earth people I’ve know in the military who were avid readers and closely followed world events, compared to outright insane postmodern drivel that gets counted as intellectualism, that I agree the country is definitely much more in danger from acquiring more foolish and cowardly thinkers than it is foolish fighters.

I’d also like to add, after reading McCarthy’s article again, one of his justifications for keeping ROTC off college campuses, is “America’s penchant for war-making.” Wouldn’t it be nice if all of the people who’ve caused trouble for America in the past held the same strong convictions about how much Americans loved war as your typical university teacher or left-wing commentator.

Maybe the world would be a less war-filled place if America’s enemies were given free scholarships to Ivy League schools, where the versions of history and views on current events taught there might fill their imaginations with ideas of how horrible we are and make some of them have second thoughts about attacking/threatening us or our interests.

From back to WWII when all but a few in the Japanese military thought Americans would be too disheartened after the sneak attacks at Pearl Harbor to fight and later by Kamikaze attacks and staging costly defenses when it turned out we weren’t, all the way to Saddam Hussein thinking Iran was a bigger threat to him than the US, it seems to me that while many of our university teachers and others who deeply drink from the “Americans are the ultimate warmongers” fountain of propaganda, many of our enemies don’t seem to actually swallow it themselves.

Indeed.

MORE BIG SECOND AMENDMENT NEWS: Fourth Circuit orders Second Amendment hearing to assess constitutionality of § 922(g)(9). “We cannot conclude on this record that the government has carried its burden of establishing a reasonable fit between the important object of reducing domestic gun violence and § 922(g)(9)’s permanent disarmament of all domestic violence misdemeanants.”

More thoughts from Eugene Volokh.

A PRESS RELEASE FROM ACTIVIST GWU LAW PROFESSOR JOHN BANZHAF: Usually his spam is about anti-smoking or anti-fat crusades, but today I got this:

Union Bosses Could Be Sued or Jailed Over NYC Snow Snafu
Workers Reportedly Admit to Conspiracy to Paralyze City

Sanitation workers have reportedly admitted that they deliberately flubbed snow plowing in New York City as part of a union protest, a move which, if true, could make their sanitation supervisors and the union civilly liable in law suits for huge monetary damages, and might even result in criminal charges for homicide for the deaths they apparently caused, argues public interest law professor John Banzhaf.

People who conspire together to cause harm to others, even if the individual acts themselves are not unlawful, can all be held liable under a tort known as civil conspiracy, says Prof. Banzhaf, who teaches torts and is widely know for various public interest activities. These law suits, under a variety of legal theories, might even be brought as class actions, he says. . . . It is also possible, argues Banzhaf, that some individuals – as well as the union – could be held criminally liable for homicide for the deaths which were proximately caused by the deliberate lack of plowing of city streets.

Well, we’ll see. But Banzhaf has an instinct for vulnerability, and it seems to be sounding here. He’s not the only one. “Sure, Mayor Bloomberg planned poorly and should have announced a snow emergency. But this story makes it clear that even if he did, it wouldn’t have made a difference. The question is whether Bloomberg will do anything about it.”

Well, here’s an idea. Do that, and Bloomberg’s third-party campaign might have a chance . . . . On the other hand, let’s not get ahead of the story just yet. Maybe these reports will turn out to be false. They’re certainly convenient for Bloomberg.

A LOOK AT who pays for online content.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: American Top Gear Sucks.