JENNIFER RUBIN: OBAMA’S WORST ERROR: “President Obama missed the boat on tax reform. He put politics above entitlement reform. He worsened already-tense relations with Israel. But the worst error, in large part because it was both avoidable and is not reversible, was to pull all troops out of Iraq.”

OOPS: Michelle Obama’s MyPlate food guide a spectacular failure.

YOUR TAX CUT PASSED. ENJOY YOUR NEW “RECAPTURE” TAX. IRS to Implement New 2% ‘Recapture Tax’ in Two-Month Payroll Tax Cut Extension.

#OCCUPYHOLLYWOOD:

In Iraq this year I asked an Iraqi military officer doing joint training at an American base what was the big thing he’d come to believe about Americans in the years they’d been there. He thought. “You are a better people than your movies say.” He had judged us by our exports. He had seen the low slag heap of our culture and assumed it was a true expression of who we are.

And so he’d assumed we were disgusting.

A good argument against SOPA.

I HOPE THE DEATH IS PAINFUL AND PROTRACTED: Copyright troll Righthaven in its death throes, domain going up for auction. And I hope the principals wind up broke and in jail.

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Schumer Admits That Ashcroft Was Right About Instant-Checks and Guns. “Last week, Dave Kopel and I explained why Ashcroft is right and Schumer is wrong about the legality of using gun-check records to find out if terrorists bought guns. Now, in a tacit admission that this is the case, Sen. Charles Schumer has introduced a bill to change the law to permit this. But Brock Meeks says that Schumer is a power-hungry idiot in this take-no-prisoners oped.” Well, some things never change.

UPDATE: Reader Jody Green writes: “Love your 10-year flashbacks. How wonderful a vilified ‘By the book’ Ashcroft was compared to a protected ‘Corrupt leftist’ Holder. 10 years is a long time and I am afraid we are not progressing.” Even some lefties have shown signs of Ashcroft-nostalgia now and then.

AT AMAZON, warehouse deals in groceries and personal care.

HOPE: Ray LaHood sticks up for hands-free devices for drivers. “Score one for freedom. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood yesterday checked the zeal of the National Transportation Safety Board, which last week called for a nationwide ban on hands-free cell phone devices for drivers.”

Nice to see someone listening to reason.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON on the absence of an Obama Derangement Syndrome comparable to Bush Derangement Syndrome.

CHANGE: GoDaddy: “We’ve listened to our customers. Go Daddy is no longer supporting the SOPA legislation.”

UPDATE: Who’ll be next?

AT AMAZON, 10% off all Rosetta Stone downloads.

THE SWISS ARMY KNIFE GOES DIGITAL.

BREAKING: Eric Holder Blocks SC Voter ID, Texas Next. I think that right-leaning activists should start challenging other ID requirements on the same grounds. Why isn’t requiring ID to fly a racial burden on the right to travel?

UPDATE: Duane Hershberger makes an excellent point: “How about requiring ID and registration to buy a gun? ID to buy guns started out as a way to keep blacks from having them. If voting is the same as owning a gun, Holder should advocate disbanding BATFE, a clearly racist organization.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Stu Gittelman writes with a useful suggestion for the press: “Question for Eric Holder: If it is an undue burden for South Carolina to require a valid ID for someone to vote, would you support South Carolina also doing away with any requirements to show ID when purchasing a firearm?”

MORE: Rick Hasen thinks this may wind up getting Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act struck down. Before the 2012 elections.

MORE STILL: Reader Marian Booker writes: “A group of people organized by True The Vote in Houston went to Austin to shine light on the need for photo ID in voting, on the day of Eric Holder’s speech. One speaker noted the irony of declaring photo ID to be too onerous a burden in the voting booth, but that photo ID was required to get into the building where Eric Holder was speaking against requiring photo ID. I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue!”

Next time Holder speaks, someone should run to a judge for a TRO. And file a race-discrimination suit against whoever’s hosting him. Every single time. . . .

OBAMA: I am not Spock.

Yeah, Leonard Nimoy tried to tell us the same thing. But I believe Obama on this. Because Spock was competent.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Whatever Happened To Dandruff? I think it’s Nizoral. Most dandruff is caused by yeast, which Nizoral kills.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Man misses mouse and shoots roommate, revealing child rapist.

JACK NEELY remembers his dad.

ERIC HOLDER UPDATE: Gunwalker Anger Goes Bipartisan: Joe Lieberman Joins Chorus.

CHANGE: Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That’s bad news not just for the country’s economy but for the future of innovation.

GOVERNORS JOURNAL NAMES SCOTT WALKER GOVERNOR OF THE YEAR. Andrew Cuomo is runner up.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Why We Stopped Spanking.

I wonder, however, if “better” is quite the right word. It seems to me that what parents have discovered is a much, much more intensive form of parenting than their grandparents employed. The elaborate charts and systems of incentives are enabled by the fact that modern children are effectively monitored by adults every waking hour until they become quite old.

As Valerie Ramey points out in a recent essay, one of the enduring mysteries of the 20th century is that in America, at least, labor saving appliances don’t seem to have saved much labor. Adults spend less time on certain “home production” tasks–like cooking–but more on others, particularly childcare. . . . Today’s kids seem to be not only supervised but regimented; most of their time is supposed to be spent in some sort of structured activity. This makes it very easy to create elaborate reward systems, because there is all this elaborate surveillance that makes it very easy to monitor compliance.

I had some related thoughts here. “We keep hearing about declining birthrates, but raising a kid is far more expensive — financially, emotionally, and in terms of time — today than it was a few decades ago. As she occasionally notes, things that were considered adequate, or even exemplary, parenting then are now considered abuse or neglect. In fact, when you look at how the burden of childrearing has increased, it seems amazing that we see as many people having children as we do.” By way of comparison, I invoked James Lileks.

But here’s another thought. Why are kids today so fat? Because — since you can’t (or at least, many parents don’t) induce good behavior by spanking, people try to keep kids happy with food. (That’s the most common “reward.”) Stick a kid in a carseat — unknown in the past — and you pacify them with a juicebox or some goldfish. They’re immobile (burning fewer calories than old-fashioned front-to-back clambering kids) and fed to distract them from the unhappiness of being strapped in like a mummy.

Likewise, schools and daycare centers shove snacks at them for the same reason. It may only add up to a few hundred calories a day in the form of extra snacks and reduced mobility, but that’s all it takes to produce weight gain over time.

The Bryan Caplan “good enough” approach is healthier, and easier on parents. Related item here. Beware the wimpy parents.

And maybe spanking isn’t so bad.

UPDATE: Here’s a column I wrote a while back on related matters. Excerpt:

Meanwhile, in the United States, commentator John Gibson is calling for “procreation, not recreation.” But I think that attitude is part of the problem. (Procreation not recreation? As an old-timer once reportedly said in response to the Make Love, Not War, slogan: “Hell, in my time we did both.”)

But Gibson’s slogan unwittingly captures an important aspect of the problem, in the United States and other industrial societies, at least: We’ve taken a lot of the fun out of parenting. Or to echo Longman, the “social costs” of parenting continue to rise, and, more significantly, perhaps, the “social returns” continue to decline.

Parenting was always hard work, of course. But aside from the economic payoffs, parents used to get a lot of social benefits, too. But in recent decades, a collection of parenting “experts” and safety-fascist types have extinguished some of the benefits while raising the costs, to the point where what’s amazing isn’t that people are having fewer kids, but that people are having kids at all. . . . There’s also the decline in parental prestige over generations. My mother reports that when she was a newlywed (she was married in 1959) you weren’t seen as fully a member of the adult world until you had kids. Nowadays to have kids means something closer to an expulsion from the adult world. People in the suburbs buy SUVs instead of minivans not because they need the four-wheel-drive capabilities, but because the SUVs lack the minivan’s close association with low-prestige activities like parenting, and instead provide the aura of high-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. Why should kayaking be more prestigious than parenting? Because parenting isn’t prestigious in our society. If it were, childless people would drive minivans just to partake of the aura.

In these sorts of ways, parenting has become more expensive in non-financial as well as financial terms. It takes up more time and emotional energy than it used to, and there’s less reward in terms of social approbation. This is like a big social tax on parenting and, as we all know, when things are taxed we get less of them. Yes, people still have children, and some people even have big families. But at the margin, which is where change occurs, people are less likely to do things as they grow more expensive and less rewarded.

So as we head into what looks like a major demographic debate, I think we need to look beyond subsidies and finances to culture. If people want to see Americans have more children, they should probably ignore Putin’s advice, and they should definitely ignore Gibson’s advice. They should look at ways of making parenting more rewarding, and less burdensome, in social as well as economic terms.

Read the whole thing, if I do say so myself. Plus, here’s a law-review article on how the legal system encourages “over-parenting.”

NEWS FROM THE BIRTHPLACE OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance.

HMM: Hubble Spots Complex Carbon Compounds, Possibly Organic, on Pluto’s Surface. “Organic” doesn’t mean there’s life, of course, but it’s interesting.

REAL ESTATE: Fewer Than 500 New Homes Sold In Over $750,000 Bracket For 4th Month In A Row. Wow. “One thing becomes apparent when looking at the price range breakdown in the just released latest New Home Sales breakdown – the quality, or rather price, of homes sold continues to deteriorate.” I’ll say.

UPDATE: Reader Gregory Hill writes: “Doesn’t this demonstrate, yet again, that the rich are not getting richer during this downturn? Wouldn’t we be seeing significantly higher numbers than this if the OWS protesters were right? Maybe I’m missing something here, but this seems like a pretty damning statistic.”