THE COMING EXCUSES: Econo-Misery and Three Econo-Myths. Media memes for the lousy economy over the next 50 weeks.

JAMES TARANTO ON MEDIA INCITEMENT AND OBAMAVILLE VIOLENCE:

In covering the Tea Party, of course, the Times emphasized its supposed extremism and violence. Brisbane doesn’t even mention these themes his column on Obamaville, even though there has been a good bit of violence there, whereas Tea Party violence was a figment of left-wing imaginations. That tells you something about the agenda of the Times and other like-minded news outlets.

The media helped create and now helps sustain the Obamaville monster, but that doesn’t mean they can control it. In recent days videos have surfaced from Oakland, Calif., and Portland, Ore., showing Obamavillians attacking local news crews attempting to report on the going-on.

The Portland video is especially creepy. It shows an angry white man–his face obscured part of the time by a pink scarf–shouting obscenities at a newsman, and declaring: “We are the 99%, you’re the 1%. . . . We don’t want you in our society.” The distinction between demonization and dehumanization is a very fine one, and media figures who have encouraged this foul and dangerous movement will have a lot to answer for if it continues to escalate.

But they’ll probably just blame the Tea Party or something.

THE HILL: Dems fear Supreme Court will rule against Obama on healthcare reform.

TAKING THE CONSTITUTION SERIOUSLY? When asked if the health law was constitutional, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi sneered, ‘Are you serious?’ Now the Supreme Court has decided it’s a worthy question. Let’s hope they give it a worthy answer.

#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy Portland domestic terrorists arrested with hand grenades. All the media myths about the Tea Party seem to have come true with regard to the Occupy movement, but the press doesn’t seem to care all that much.

PROF. JACOBSON ON MEDIA DOUBLE STANDARDS: How Would They View Occupy Planned Parenthood? A Proposed Paradigm For Protest Propriety.

MICKEY KAUS continues his Newsweek/Beast deathwatch. I saw a print copy of Newsweek at Kroger yesterday, the first one I’ve seen in ages. It was thin, in all senses of the word.

OBAMA’S KEYSTONE PUNT WILL HURT U.S. ENERGY PRICES: Canadian PM eyes China after US pipeline delay. “Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Sunday that he was looking at exporting more oil to China after the United States delayed a decision on a controversial pipeline. . . . The conservative Canadian leader, taking part in a summit in Hawaii hosted by Obama said the pipeline decision had produced ‘extremely negative reactions’ and that he discussed oil exports with Chinese President Hu Jintao.”

THE KINDLE FIRE IS NOW SHIPPING. Mine’s supposed to show up today. I’ll post a review tonight if it does.

IN THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION, Kyle Wingfield endorses my federal-employee surtax proposal. It’s a groundswell, baby! But he takes it farther: “How about a 50 percent tax on financial transactions by members of Congress and their staffs while they are with the government, and for five years thereafter? Let them trade all they want on the knowledge they gain as public, ahem, servants. Just make sure that half of the proceeds go to the U.S. Treasury.”

I like it!

UPDATE: Some related thoughts on “public servants.” “What kind of servants are these, after all, who come and go as they please, who respond to neither phone calls nor letters, who hire their own family and friends and then exempt themselves from the very laws they’d have us observe?”

BILL WHITTLE: Afterburner: The Bridge In Your Mind. “Why can Israelis look at a desert and see an orchard when their neighbors can only see, well, a desert? Bill Whittle thinks it may have something to do with the exceptionalism of Western thought.”

IS YOUR CONGRESSMAN (OR CONGRESSWOMAN) TRADING ON INSIDE INFORMATION? “There’s not even a way to prosecute this under the law; it is at best ambiguous whether it’s even a crime for our legislators to trade based on their inside information (the way it is for every single other person in the country). And even if it were decided that it is a crime, I encountered a reluctance among government officials to even talk about the subject, which suggests that it would be difficult to get anyone to bring a case.”

Which is funny, because federal prosecutors can be quite creative when they have the desire to be so. For example, even if the Supreme Court holds that a GPS tracker placed on a citizen’s car isn’t a violation of privacy, I’ll bet that if I stuck one on the U.S. Attorney’s car, they’d find something to charge me with. But where members of Congress — who control budgets — are concerned, the wellsprings of creativity suddenly dry up. It’s almost enough to make me doubt whether we live under the rule of law.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UNC-Wilmington Professor Tells It Like It Is.

The genesis of the problem in our universities is the “democratization” of education and the easy availability of student loans, “Affordable education,” November 7. The nation is thus saddled with a trillion dollars in student loan debt ready to follow the housing bubble.

The floodgates have been opened wide to campus admission with faculty responding by adding courses and programs that do not prepare students in the important basic areas, especially, in the hard sciences and mathematics. Accordingly, students do not seek truly academic knowledge and skills but are just satisfied with a diploma, which is used by potential employees as a selection tool.

Administrators cater to such business model irrespective of how soft academic programs expand exponentially with the more solid academic curricula not being supported and even eliminated. Students are thus shackled with bogus degrees that lead nowhere. The state subsidizes students and so the increase in the number of students results in higher tuition costs for all. . . . The failure of K-12 education is finally creeping and crippling our entire university system. Too bad.

Indeed.

#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy Movement Deteriorates, Press Pretends It Never Played Booster. “Funny how the left’s assertion that this was a grand political awakening has now gone down the memory hole. In their frenzy to find a grassroots movement on the left and in their insistence that the public really did support these people, the left-leaning elites tried mightily to ignore the instances of anti-Semitism, violence and fouling of public places. When that became impossible, they simply chose to ignore the whole disgusting mess. Had they been candid from the start about what the Occupy protesters looked like, sounded like and believed, the liberal punditocracy might not be embarrassed (is that possible?), or, at the very least, anxious that someone might call its members out for their immensely dishonest portrayal of the Occupy phenomenon.”

THE HILL: ‘Secret farm bill’ primed for passage in debt deal.“The legislators are using the supercommittee to avoid what would be a more public, election-year debate in 2012, when the current farm bill expires and new legislation would be scheduled for writing, according to critics of the effort.”

PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: USAT evokes mythical ‘crack baby’ scare in report on drug-dependent newborns.

USA Today evoked the media-hyped crack baby scare yesterday in a front page report telling of “explosive growth” in numbers of newborns supposedly hooked on prescription drugs. The report, which appeared with the headline “Surge in babies addicted to drugs,” offered scant hard data and over-the-top word choice, not unlike news accounts of the supposed crack baby epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the crack baby scare “was a media-driven myth based more on anecdote than solid, sustained research.” It turned out to be, as the New York Times put it in 2009, “the epidemic that wasn’t.”

Good thing for news organizations that they’re not subject to product liability laws. . . .

RAND SIMBERG: How Crony Capitalism Is Undermining The Space Program. “The crony capitalism represented by the failed ‘green energy’ firm Solyndra has gotten a lot of media attention lately, but much lower on the public’s radar is a much bigger example of corporate pork over at the national space agency—and it’s bipartisan. Let’s call it Shuttlyndra. Here’s how it works.”

ELECTIONS: “Throw Them All Out” Sounds Like A Good Start.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST? Kagan Openly Cheered ObamaCare Passage.