KLAVAN ON THE CULTURE: What’s the Matter With America? (Soros, Huffington, Maher, & Olbermann Can’t Be Wrong).

ED MORRISSEY: COICA: Giving the government the power to shut down dissent. “Thanks to a bill that has received bipartisan support in the Senate, the Department of Justice may soon have the power to suspend domain names if the Attorney General deems a site as having copyright infringement “central to the activity” conducted by the site owners. Hollywood and the recording industry has pushed the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) to get the government in position to seize Internet sites that damage the property rights of intellectual property producers, bypassing the existing remedies of lawsuits and damage recoveries. However, the ambiguous nature of the definition and the wide latitude it gives the executive branch in imposing remedies without due process should have everyone in the First Amendment space nervous — especially the blogosphere. . . . As Wired reports, the Obama administration and Congress are engaged in a little hypocrisy here. Hillary Clinton just got done warning China not to censor the internet in almost exactly the way this bill would allow Eric Holder to do. It’s not the first time in recent weeks that we’ve barked at China for actions that the US has either proposed taking or actually has taken, like devaluing currency to boost exports.”

TODAY IS NATIONAL AMMO DAY, as several readers have emailed to remind me.

DENNIS KUCINICH vs. the Congressional Black Caucus.

HOPE YOU’RE ENJOYING National Tracksuit Day. What, that’s not every day?

REVERSING GUM LOSS with a tissue growth factor.

TAKING THE NISSAN LEAF FOR A WHIRL: That’s more than I’ve gotten to do.

Related: The politics of plug-in vehicles.

REASON TV: 44 Ways to Say TSA: What do the initials “TSA” really stand for?

IN THE MAIL: The Blame Game: The Complete Guide to Blaming: How to Play and How to Quit.

THINGS TO LOVE AND HATE about the new MacBook Air.

PILGRIMS AND INDIANS IN HER FAMILY TREE. We have at least one ancestor in common. Hello, cousin!

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, TANKS WOULD BE ROLLING THROUGH AFGHANISTAN: And they were right! “The U.S. military is sending a contingent of heavily armored battle tanks to Afghanistan for the first time in the nine-year war, defense officials said, a shift that signals a further escalation in the aggressive tactics that have been employed by American forces this fall to attack the Taliban.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Heavy battle tanks in Afghanistan?

I am pretty worried about this development. It seems that we are following the Russian plan. That turned out well. Are we sure we aren’t just putting valuable ( and expensive ) targets into the fight so the Taliban can get some propaganda points? The loss of helicopters is bad enough, but at least they also represent a mobile mountain hopping capability. A burned out tank covered with “freedom fighters” creates a different PR visual.

Is Obama turning into LBJ? Is he trying to recreate the Vietnam experience? Is this part of the vaunted “Smart Diplomacy” we were promised?

I want to back our troops 110%, but the first step is a great plan. I hope this is part of one. I don’t really trust the political cats we’ve got right now.

Let’s pray for a good result to all of this.

I’ve never thought of tanks as a good counterinsurgency tool, but General Petraeus has been right in the past.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A military reader emails:

A couple of things stand out about the tanks to Afghanistan story. First, it is a single company, which should have 14 tanks. Second, it is the Marines bringing them in. This is the same group that ignored the conventional wisdom that tanks couldn’t possibly operate in the jungle and sent its tanks to Vietnam. Of course, this was because they had an institutional memory of actually using tanks in the jungle during WW2. Eventually the Army realized that they were right and followed suit. I think the Marines are right again. They are not following the Soviet model, which was a large and at first almost totally mechanized/armored force, but they do recognize that the protected firepower of a tank is sometimes impossible to replace. I expect that the Army will follow suit again if we stay much longer.

Well, stay tuned.

MORE: Reader Dave Parmly writes:

Coming from a guy who commanded a bunch of them, let me say that you get a lot farther with a kind word and a 120mm gun than with a kind word alone.

The commenter who referenced the Marines was correct, though a more recent example is the 2 BDE/3d ID use of tanks in the assault in Baghdad, counter to lots of “conventional wisdom”. Used as stationary pillboxes? We might see the propaganda uses as they get picked off at the enemy’s time/place of choosing. However, this is to fail to use the M1 at its most lethal: On the move, disrupting things at 40 MPH.

Still, not sure what sort of target the enemy in A-stan presents that needs a tank, but better to have them and not need them than need them and not have them.

Well, those 120mm guns outrange most snipers. . . .

THIS WILL GET LAWYERS’ ATTENTION: Thomson Reuters to Acquire Indian Legal Outsourcing Company.

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Vitamin D may prevent strokes. Though in whites, but not blacks, according to this study. More research needed, I’d say.

SNOW GLOBE IN SPACE: Surprise at a Comet Visited by NASA: A Snowstorm. “The Deep Impact spacecraft passed within 435 miles of Comet Hartley 2 two weeks ago, producing a series of photographs that showed bright jets coming off a rough surface. What fascinated the mission scientists most was that the chunks of water ice in the jets were not being lifted off the surface by the force of water vapor heated by the sun, but rather by jets of carbon dioxide. This was the first time that such carbon dioxide jets had been observed at a comet.”

MARKDOWNS ON COMPUTERS, OFFICE GEAR, AND SOFTWARE.

MARY KATHARINE HAM: The United States of “Don’t Touch My Junk.”

SCOTT JOHNSON: Revolt Against The TSA: “The TSA is bound by a form of political correctness that has long rendered it a joke. With its newly implemented scanning and patdown procedures, however, the TSA has become something worse than a joke. It has become intrusive and humiliating to a degree that is difficult to accept.”

Related thoughts from Charles Krauthammer: “The junk man’s revolt marks the point at which a docile public declares that it will tolerate only so much idiocy.”

VISIONS OF HISTORY: WAYS OF SEEING THE PAST. “Most of us without realising it have a unique vision of the past, a way of thinking about it that predisposes us to look at current events in a particular way. In general, we focus on power and its workings while overlooking other aspects of human existence such as voluntary exchange, cooperative interaction, innovation, and discovery.” Remember that the scribes who wrote the records generally worked for some king or other.

UPDATE: Reader John Walker emails:

One of my favourite Kropotkin quotes:

If you open a daily paper you find its pages are entirely devoted to Government transactions and to political jobbery. A Chinaman reading it would believe that in Europe nothing gets done save by order of some master. You find nothing in them about institutions that spring up, grow up, and develop without ministerial prescription. Nothing — or hardly nothing! Even when there is a heading — “Sundry Events” — it is because they are connected with the police. A family drama, an act of rebellion, will only be mentioned if the police have appeared on the scene.

Three hundred fifty million Europeans love or hate one another, work, or live on their incomes; but, apart from literature, theatre, or sport, their lives remain ignored by newspapers if Governments have not intervened in some way or another. It is even so with history. We know the least details of the life of a king or of a parliament; all good and bad speeches pronounced by the politicians have been preserved. “Speeches that have never had the least influence on the vote of a single member,” as an old parliamentarian said. Royal visits, good or bad humour of politicians, jokes or intrigues, are all carefully recorded for posterity. But we have the greatest difficulty to reconstitute a city of the Middle Ages, to understand the the mechanism of that immense commerce that was carried on between Hanseatic cities, or to know how the city of Rouen built its cathedral. If a scholar spends his life studying these questions, his works remain unknown, and parliamentary histories — that is to say, the defective ones, as they only treat one side of social life — multiply, are circulated, are taught in schools.

And we do not even perceive the prodigious work accomplished every day by spontaneous groups of men, which constitutes the chief work of our century.

– Peter Kropotkin, “The Conquest of Bread”, 1906

And it is only more true today.

MICKEY KAUS: Obama’s Last-Ditch Push for Immigration Amnesty.

In the post-election “lame duck” session of Congress, Obama and the Democrats will focus on jobs, jobs, jobs. … Oh, wait, no. They’ll focus on passing a big amnesty for illegal immigrants, in order to reward their Latino “base”–which was only 8 percent of the national vote but supposedly cares with something approaching monomania about amnesty (despite evidence that Hispanic American opinion is shifting against illegal immigrantion). … When did the Democrats’ African-American base–11 percent of the vote–get that kind of service? …

More at the link.

TIMOTHY B. LEE: Internet Censorship Bill Threatens Free Speech, Rule of Law.

On Thursday the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act. Its backers, including Hollywood and the recording industry, are hoping to rush the legislation through Congress during the current “lame duck” session. The legislation empowers the attorney general to draw up a list of Internet domain names he considers to be “dedicated to infringing activities,” and to obtain a variety of court orders designed to block access to these sites for American Internet users.

No danger of abuse there. . . .

DEMOCRATIC STRATEGISTS: Obama Bungled 2010. The recriminations continue.

PROF. JACOBSON: Dems To Force Through Judgeship For Huge Campaign Donor. Hope and change! “It is bad enough when large campaign donors get ambassadorships or other short-term rewards. The McConnell nomination is so much worse. To reward a huge campaign donor with a lifetime federal judgeship makes a mockery of our judiciary.”

TOM FRIEDMAN WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: Chinese woman gets sent to labor camp for using Twitter.

POPULAR MECHANICS: Technical Q&A on Full-body Scanners.

Related: Joe Pappalardo: Three Things No One Wants To Think About. “Every security precaution since 9/11 has been countered by a change in terrorists’ tactics. . . . During World War II, the Germans defeated the Maginot Line by bypassing it. Right now, as the TSA fortifies our airports, it’s hard not to think that terrorists are switching to other methods or targets. If this is the case, the body-scan debate could be moot.”