THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Bleeding and Purging to Balance the Humors of the Economy.

NO SURPRISE: Joe Scarborough: Top Senate Dems have told me privately that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. Well, where would he have learned?

BECAUSE THAT’S WHO’S DUMB ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THE ANTI-VACCINE CRAP: California’s Whooping Cough Epidemic Centered in Rich, White Counties.

I had a column on this phenomenon a while back.

CHRIS MOONEY WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: White House vs. Science:

Congressional Republicans say a whole lot of questions “need to be answered” about an inspector general’s report detailing how the White House altered a scientific paper that it used to justify a controversial drilling moratorium after the BP oil spill last spring.

They’re right.

Almost from the moment the report was first made public, most of the scientists involved said it had been deceitfully edited to make it look like they’d endorsed the ban, which Gulf-state elected officials immediately denounced as a job-killer.

Now the Interior Department’s inspector general, Mary Kendall, has determined that those allegations are correct — and that the White House falsely applied a scientific veneer to justify what was clearly a political decision. . . . Ironically, of course, it was candidate Barack Obama who accused the Bush administration of twisting scientific evidence; he promised, if elected, to be guided by “science, not ideology.”

And it turns out that this is just one of several instances in which the Obama White House has manipulated the word of scientific experts.

My Chris Mooney references, for those not getting them, are all about this. He’s actually a good guy — he even made The American Prospect readable for a while — but the argument was a bit tendentious . . . .

PEGGY NOONAN: Obama’s Gifts to the GOP.

Whatever word means the opposite of snakebit, that is what the Republican party is right now. One reason they are feeling hope is that they have received two big and unexpected gifts from President Obama. The first, of course, was his political implosion—his quick descent and speedy fall into unpopularity, which shaped the outcome of the 2010 elections. At the heart of that descent was the president’s inability to understand how the majority of Americans were thinking. From the day he was sworn in he seemed to have had no practical or intuitive sense of what was on the American mind. By early 2009 they had one deep and central worry, the economy. But his central preoccupation was reforming health care. He devoted his first 18 months to it and got what he wanted, but at the price of seeming wholly out of touch with the thoughts and concerns of the American people.

This week the president gave Republicans a second unexpected gift. He reacted to the election’s outcome in a way that suggested he’s still in his own world, still seeing a reality no one else is seeing. The problem wasn’t his policies, but that he didn’t explain them well. It wasn’t health-care reform, it was his failed attempt to popularize it. His problem was that he was not political enough. He was too substantive, too serious. Americans have been under stress, and people under stress don’t think clearly, and so they couldn’t see the size of his achievements.

He sounded like a man who couldn’t see what was obvious to everyone else, and once again made his political adversaries seem, in comparison, more realistic, more clear-sighted and responsive to public opinion. And he did this while everyone was watching. Again, what a gift.

Nice point. Still waiting for Noonan’s mea culpa for her own Obamamania, though. Talk about not seeing what was obvious . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Phil Manhard writes: “Nice set of clothes that emperor has there. The crease of the pants has to be seen to be believed.”

DEFENDING THE PLANET against asteroid strikes. “If you don’t typically follow the debate on planetary defense, you could be forgiven for thinking Earth-crushing asteroids are more the stock in trade of big-budget action filmmakers than an actual concern for the taxpaying American. It might surprise you to learn that John Holdren, director of the White House’s Office for Science and Technology Policy, recently wrote Congressional leaders to recommend that NASA spearhead a multi-agency effort to assess asteroid-deflection technologies.”

METAPHOR ALERT: Barney Frank’s neighborhood grocery folds, owner blames customers. “’I think it comes down to quality and trust,’ said Formaggio’s David Robinson. ‘That’s where Don Otto’s seems to have missed out.’”

OBAMA PANEL PROBES STIMULUS WASTE — at the Ritz-Carlton. “Members of a key panel created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus bill, have scheduled a meeting on November 22 to consider ways to prevent ;fraud, waste, and abuse of Recovery Act funds. The meeting will be held at the super-luxe Ritz Carlton Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona.”

A reader emails: “Would send a damn fine message if a few hundred people joined these clowns for ‘Tea at the Ritz’.” Heh.

“WE TOLD YOU SO.”

IN VIRGINIA, ASKING FOR A TEA PARTY LICENSE PLATE. “The Virginian-Pilot reports that about 600 people have expressed interest in the plates through a group tied to the Virginia Tea Party Patriots federation. Before a specialty plate can be issued in Virginia, 350 prepaid applications must be submitted to the state Department of Motor Vehicles. Virginia has issued more than 200 different specialty plates over the years.” I like the design.

WHO KNEW CANADIANS WERE SO RACIST:

Maclean’s is facing considerable criticism for an article suggesting that some top (white) Canadian students are avoiding certain universities for fear that they are “too Asian.” The article relies on quotations from anonymous white students saying things like: “The only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian. All the white kids go to Queen’s, Western and McGill.” (U of T refers to the University of Toronto, by any measure a top Canadian university.) The article also features some quotes from Asian students, who report on experiences such as this one at the University of British Columbia: “At graduation a Canadian — i.e. ‘white’ — mother told me that I’m the reason her son didn’t get a space in university and that all the immigrants in the country are taking up university spots.”

I mean, they aren’t even Tea Partiers. . . .

VIDEO: Sen. Hatch says he’ll support the earmark moratorium.

WALTER SHAPIRO: Will Stealth Spending Decide the 2012 GOP Presidential Primaries?

A NEW HOPE: When Star Wars meets fine art.

TRIFECTA: What Obama Has Failed To Communicate.

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PROFESSOR JACOBSON: Scott Brown For Senate 2012.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Paging Dr. Luddite: “Information technology is on the brink of revolutionizing health care— if physicians will only let it.”

On the other hand, maybe their resistance is well-founded: “Very few data-mining systems survive first contact with reality.”

TESTING AUTISM DRUGS in human brain cells.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.

CHANGE: Dengue Fever Strikes Miami: First Local Case in 50 Years. “The first locally acquired case of dengue fever in Miami-Dade County in more than 50 years was confirmed Thursday by health officials. They warned people to take precautions against the mosquitoes that carry it.”

UPDATE: Reader Douglas Chandler writes: “I noticed that the Dengue feaver story followed the bad week for AGW. If one takes the contrarian viewpoint on AGW, which seems to be proving the most accurate, then the coming freeze will kill off enough of the skeeters so we won’t have to ramp the DDT production again.” Well, that’s the upside of a Little Ice Age, i suppose. Though I’ve seen some pretty big mosquitoes in Alaska. . . . I remember waking up and seeing two of them at the foot of my bed. One said, “Should we eat him here, or take him home?” The other replied: “We’d better eat him here — if we take him home, the big guys might get him away from us.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Owen Hughes writes:

Your little joke about the Alaskan mosquitoes made ms smile. I grew up in the Yukon. Same problem there; although the mosquitoes ran the first shift, from June through end July; and the blackflies ran things from late July until September frost. We hated the mosquitoes, but by second week of August we were missing them.

Regarding the emergence in USA of pathogens usually found elsewhere, this is part of a larger public health issue around infectious disease management. The chronic underinvestment in new antibiotics, and to some extent in new vaccines, has really left us exposed. Many diseases like TB have no vaccines, so there is no population-level protection. And as cases break out, the available antibiotics “self-obsolesce,” because they exert selective pressure on the pathogen. Particularly if people don’t finish the course of antibiotics, they just end up with a tougher strain. Even if they do behave, the general effect over time is to drive the emergence of strains of pathogen resistant to the current drugs. And since it’s hard to make money from antibiotics, and because the FDA has ignored good science that could speed clinical trials, we end up with fewer and fewer drugs that still work.

Right now, I figure that the next mass killer, probably XDR (extremely drug resistant) TB, is incubating in the lungs of some immune-compromised prisoner in Russia or South Africa. Once it breaks loose, it will take only months or a few years to wreak havoc on us all. Meanwhile it will take a decade or more to develop a countermeasure.

So we definitely need to do something about this.

Yes. Bill Frist wanted a crash program to develop techniques for quick vaccine production, but that never happened.

A BAD WEEK for global warming.

ARE THE “WILDERNESS YEARS” OVER ALREADY?

SCIENCE: Study reveals the subtle dynamics underpinning how cats drink (w/ video).

POLIWOOD: Tin Ears in Tinseltown – Will Hollywood Miss the Impact of the Election?

BILL WHITTLE: What We Believe, Part 6: Immigration.