NOW SHE’S SUING: Christian worker loses her job after being ‘targeted’ by Islamic extremists. “She claims that she was told that she would go to Hell for her religion, that Jews were responsible for the September 11th terror attacks, and that a friend was reduced to tears having been bullied for wearing a cross.” If you take all this anti-racism/anti-hate stuff seriously, the Islamists will be highly vulnerable. If, on the other hand, the authorities decide they don’t really mean it, well, let’s make that clear.

As a great man said, punch back twice as hard!

INSTAPUNDIT READER T. L. JAMES asks me to plug his new science fiction novel. Done!

BLUE COLLAR PHILOSOPHY: Obama’s Green Jobs Failure. “Not only is President Obama’s push for green jobs an abysmal failure, he is attacking the one area that has the potential to create plenty of jobs.”

HERSCHEL SMITH PAINTS AN UGLY PICTURE of the border.

DAN MITCHELL: European Economic Crisis Highlights an Increasingly Important Reason to Oppose Gun Control.

About a year ago, I spoke at a conference in Europe that attracted a lot of very rich people from all over the continent, as well as a lot of people who manage money for high-net-worth individuals.

What made this conference remarkable was not the presentations, though they were generally quite interesting. The stunning part of the conference was learning – as part of casual conversation during breaks, meals, and other socializing time – how many rich people are planning for the eventual collapse of European society.

Not stagnation. Not gradual decline. Collapse.

As in riots, social disarray, plundering, and chaos. A non-trivial number of these people think the rioting in places such as Greece and England is just the tip of the iceberg, and they have plans – if bad things begin to happen – to escape to jurisdictions ranging from Australia to Costa Rica (several of them remarked that they no longer see the U.S. as a good long-run refuge).

Don’t kid yourself. If the U.S. is bad, Costa Rica won’t be good. Plus, this question: “Here’s a thought experiment to drive the point home. If Europe does collapse, which people do you think will be in better shape to preserve civilization, the well-armed Swiss or the disarmed Brits?”

CLAUDIA ROSETT: CONFESSIONS OF A LIGHT-BULB ADDICT:

Please don’t think this is easy for me. I’m one of those crazed Americans who can’t walk into Home Depot, Target or my local grocery store right now without wanting to grab one of those king-sized shopping carts and stuff it to the gunwales with 100-watt incandescent lightbulbs.

Maybe it’s the sheer thrill of buying bulbs that in just over a month, as of Jan. 1, 2012, will be banned for sale in America. What fun, in this incandescent twilight, to acquire legally what the federal government will soon treat as contraband, should it appear in any American marketplace. Or maybe it’s that gut sense that with the dollar teetering toward an abyss of unfathomable and inflationary government spending, those beloved old 100 watt bulbs will at least provide a decent store of value, even if all I do is use them to read by for the rest of my life — meticulously taking care never to violate federal law by offering even a single bulb for sale to some fellow citizen willing to pay for it.

Or, just possibly, this urge to stockpile incandescents is the product of simmering outrage. For decades, I have written about America as the world’s beacon of freedom, which it has been. Yet here we are, wards of the nanny state, with politicians dictating that even that prime symbol of American ingenuity, Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb, shall be regulated into oblivion. All this has been ably exposed as an act of crony capitalism, designed to enrich manufacturers who prefer to sell pricier light bulbs that a lot of Americans, if free to choose, prefer not to buy.

Kick ’em out in November. Meanwhile, it’s still not to late to stock up! Yet.

ROGER KIMBALL: What happened to the Conservatives? (British edition). “The extent to which conservatives, by betraying their principles (including the principle of patriotism), abet right-wing alternatives that are anathema to genuine conservatism is a phenomenon that is not sufficiently appreciated. More generally, conservatives, in the United States as well as in the UK, do not win elections by pretending to be liberals, but this seems to be a lesson that is difficult for conservatives to absorb.”

BRITAIN: It is likely that the army could secure Britain’s borders if planned strikes go ahead, says Francis Maude. “Speaking on Sky’s Murnaghan, and the BBC’s Politics Show, Francis Maude suggested that the army could be used to help secure British borders if Wednesday’s planned strikes over public sector pensions were to go ahead. Britain’s image would be affected, he said, ‘if people travelling to Britain are subjected to inordinately long queues and inconvenience’.”

FOLLOWING THE MONEY: 1.2 trillion taxpayer dollars spent in secret and with no accountability or oversight by elected representatives.

Here’s an interactive chart from Bloomberg.

I FEEL A DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE: Canada to pull out of Kyoto Protocol next month. So they’re finally catching up with that dumb cowboy Bush.

JERRY POURNELLE: Stringing up Gibson; tales of the American Nomenklatura. “The biggest result of the legal harassments of Microsoft was to convert the Microsoft District of Columbia office from a sales organization to a lobby. More lobbyists mean more revenue for the Nomenklatura, more parties for the staff, more campaign donations for the Members of Congress and the Senators.”

OH, GREAT. Now our secret is out.

#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy Oakland calls for Total West Coast Port Shutdown. Because nothing says we care about the working class like inducing economic breakdown.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, THE GOVERNMENT WOULD BE SEEKING POWERS TO LOCK UP AMERICAN CITIZENS INDEFINITELY WITHOUT TRIAL: AND THEY WERE RIGHT! “The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. Even Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) raised his concerns about the NDAA detention provisions during last night’s Republican debate. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself. The worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial provision is in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Why Not Pay Higher Taxes? “Here are a random 12 complaints that I hear from those who become furious about proposed higher income tax rates.”

Including this one: “Opening a bakery at 5AM for forty years or owning a fleet of semis is a constant headache in a way being the regional director of the Department of the Interior is not. By that, I mean it is far harder to net $150,000 in the muscular private sector than in the world of the tenured bureaucratic technocracy. If one reads the resumes of a Steven Chu, Hilda Solis, Eric Holder or Barack Obama there is a long government cursus honorum that almost ensures that none of these grandees has a clue how a business works or how fragile is expected income, how sure are expenses. So the technocratic class that soared to prosperity through government subsidies and employment is somewhat resented by the more conservative small business private sector that both supports it and so frequently finds itself on the receiving end of the latter’s disdain.”

WAIT, I THOUGHT THAT ELECTING OBAMA WOULD MAKE US UNIVERSALLY LOVED OR SOMETHING: Pakistanis burn Obama effigy and US flag.

Frankly, he doesn’t seem to be doing any better with those people than that Bush fellow. . . .

UPDATE: Reader Brian Gates emails: “Is it my imagination, or has the Bush-era ‘angry foreigners hate George W Bush’ coverage given way to ‘angry foreigners hate the United States, and, therefore, symbols of all we hold dear, like mom, apple pie, the flag, and Barack Obama’?”

SCOTT OTT: Jon Huntsman’s Disqualifying Distortion About Vietnam. “Perhaps as stunning as the Huntsman remark was the way CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and seven Republican candidates let it stand unchallenged, as if it were unassailable common knowledge. They should all know better, and speak up. As H.R. McMaster wrote in his 1997 book Dereliction of Duty, President Lyndon Johnson’s leadership of the war effort was characterized by marginalizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, lying to Congress about troop levels, and pursuing Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s tactic of ‘graduated pressure,’ which treated military force as a communication tool rather than a way to achieve victory.”

To be fair, they were probably just thinking about tomorrow’s lunch. That’s what I usually do when Huntsman’s talking.

PAT CADDELL: New Hampshire Democrats Should Dump Obama. And Draft Hillary.

OBAMA DOESN’T WANT US TO HAVE IT, but China is open to buying Canadian oil. Not going ahead with that pipeline may turn out to be one of the longest-lasting blunders of Obama’s presidency, though there’s a lot of competition for that slot.

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Former AG Sues Five Additional Law Schools for Age Discrimination in Faculty Hiring.

AT AMAZON, rolling out the Cyber Monday deals.

A GOOD QUESTION: If the Foreign Office is preparing for a eurozone crash, why isn’t it warning British citizens travelling abroad? “There is a real problem here – any such official warning would trigger panic and make the eurozone’s horrible problems even worse.”

Jim Bennett emails: “When are they going to start acting like it’s a crisis? Every Brit expat in southern Spain will be trying to get to Gibraltar where their ATM cards will still work, if the Spanish ones stop working, for example. Maybe they need more border agents and guards pre-positioned to deal with the crowds. That’s one example, I’m sure there are many more.”

THINGS YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW: The Silence Of The Mainstream Media.

THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION: “We’ve already killed all the dumb terrorists, so all that’s left are the smart ones.”

RUSSIA TODAY: Medvedev: If We Can Put a Man in a Gulag, Why Can’t We Send Him to Mars?