CULTURE OF CORRUPTION (CONT’D): Four More “Friends of Angelo” in Congress. “With Congress about to wrap up its year-end business and head home for the holidays, there probably won’t be too much news made on Capitol Hill until next month. Why not conduct a whodunit instead? House Oversight chair Rep. Darrell Issa resurrected the Countrywide Financial influence-peddling scandal by informing the Ethics Committee that four current members received sweetheart deals on loans through the infamous Friends of Angelo program that sent former Senator Chris Dodd into retirement … perhaps to the Irish mansion he now owns.”

It’s a “cottage.” It just looks like a mansion to the untrained eye.

CHANGE: 1% of the population of Wisconsin applies for a concealed carry permit. In less than 6 weeks.

MORE ON THOSE UNDERFUNDED / OVERGENEROUS PUBLIC PENSIONS: Public retirement ages come under greater scrutiny.

After nearly 40 years in public education, Patrick Godwin spends his retirement days running a horse farm east of Sacramento, Calif., with his daughter.

His departure from the workaday world is likely to be long and relatively free of financial concerns, after he retired last July at age 59 with a pension paying $174,308 a year for the rest of his life.

Such guaranteed pensions for relatively youthful government retirees — paid in similar fashion to millions nationwide — are contributing to nationwide friction with the public sector workers. They have access to attractive defined-benefit pensions and retiree health care coverage that most private sector workers no longer do. . . . With Americans increasingly likely to live well into their 80s, critics question whether paying lifetime pensions to retirees from age 55 or 60 is financially sustainable. An Associated Press survey earlier this year found the 50 states have a combined $690 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $418 billion in retiree health care obligations.

Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.

LET’S HOPE NOT: No Supernova Potential In Our Galactic Neighborhood?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Humanities’ Real Enemies. They may be boring from within, but mostly, they’re just boring.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: MIT Will Offer Certificates To Outside Students Who Take Its Courses Online. “Millions of learners have enjoyed the free lecture videos and other course materials published online through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project. Now MIT plans to release a fresh batch of open online courses—and, for the first time, to offer certificates to outside students who complete them. The credentials are part of a new, interactive e-learning venture, tentatively called MITx, that is expected to host ‘a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.'”

GOOD ADVICE: Don’t Break The Internet. “Two bills now pending in Congress—the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House—represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark infringement. Although the bills differ in certain respects, they share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.”

TAKE THAT, FRANCE: Fancy Cheeses From East Tennessee. Plus, a brilliant idea: “During the winter when our sheep stop producing, we get local Jersey cow’s milk and we’re going to make Cheddar. Traditionally, that means bandaging the wheels with cheese cloth and wrapping it with lard to flavor. But I’ve been speaking with Allen Benton [of Benton’s Artisan Bacon fame] and he’s going to sell us 30 pounds of bacon scraps to render down and use in place of the lard.”

And we’re not just talking pimento. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — especially, as you’ll see, when it, too, is improved with bacon! Bacon. Is there anything it can’t do?

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Roll Call: Pelosi’s Expert Was Also Business Partner. “In May 2010, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi took to a podium in the Capitol to introduce a half-dozen economic experts she had convened for a meeting on how to jump-start the economy. The group had met for several hours with top Democratic leaders, and Pelosi invited them to speak publicly on their perspectives on economic growth. What Pelosi did not mention is that one of the men in the group was her son’s boss and a partner with her husband in more than a half-dozen investments, including one that generated more than $100,000 in income for the Speaker’s family last year.”

CONTRAST WITH CALIFORNIA: Texas Cities Won the Recession, and They’re Winning the Recovery. Though in most places, the question is, what recovery? “Like I said, welcome to the third phase of the Great Recession.”

IN THE MAIL: Passion and Purpose: Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders.

NOW THAT’S JUST MEAN: Jim Bennett emails: “Say, what is Captain Euro up to these days, anyway? You just don’t hear much about him any more, for some reason.”

MICKEY KAUS: “John Edwards invites his mistress Rielle Hunter to move in with him a few weeks before the start of his criminal trial, according to the National Enquirer. A heartwarming story of redemption! … P.S.: Isn’t Hunter a potential witness at the trial?”

FRANK CAGLE ON THE PROBLEM WITH JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT. “Defense attorneys and prosecutors cannot confront judges. They have no authority to tell them what to do and the prospect of having a judge mad at you (they think) is too terrible to contemplate. Judges can ruin your career and cost you your cases.”

Judges know it, too. When I was a fairly new law professor, I was at a cocktail party where a judge told me I should instruct my students to be extremely courteous as lawyers because a judge who’s miffed at a lawyer can cost his client a case. I’m all for courtesy, but I responded that harming a client out of pique at a lawyer struck me as a betrayal of one’s judicial oath every bit as serious as taking a bribe. He didn’t appreciate that, I’m afraid, but it’s certainly true. Either way the judge is abusing judicial power for personal gain.

DVD-O-RAMA: At Amazon, DVDs under $5.

Blu-Ray under $10.

New releases under $10.

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND, if you were out, you know, having a life or something.

Did Dems secretly punt on the light-bulb ban?

Lefties unhappy with Obama on civil liberties.

More downgrades for Europe.

Carbon footprint worries are for the little people.

Frank J. Fleming on the NTSB and cell phones.

Hope And Change: The Latest MAD Magazine Cover.

Europe: Herding Cats Over A Cliff?

A Neti Pot warning.

What’s Up With Chicago?

Investor’s Business Daily on the NTSB cellphone ban proposal.

Keystone Climbdown Leaves Obama Supporters Scratching Heads.

Eric Holder’s continued obfuscation on Fast And Furious.

Holsters and laser sights.

Democratic Fairfax Embraces Its Inner Tea Party: Even people who benefit from big government love it less when they have to live under it.

BRYAN PRESTON: How The One Percent Spend Your Money. “President Obama tends to lecture the wealthy about how they spend their money — how they spend their money. This $4 million vacation, though, is an example of how he is spending our money.”

TODAY ONLY: Canon PowerShot S95 10 MP Digital Camera with Free One-Day Shipping for $229.

UPDATE: Reader Richard Russell writes:

Thank you so much for linking to that excellent deal! I would never have seen it otherwise, and I am sure they will sell out in a few minutes.

Another reason to have Instapundit as my home page!

Glad to be of help. They’re not sold out yet. Also, if you follow the link above they’re running a new “lightning deal” every couple of hours.

TED TURNER ON KIM JONG IL BACK IN 2005. Ted thought he was swell. Of course. Plus a much bigger roundup of reactions, including Josh Trevino’s tweet of the year: “I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third.”

BLS QUESTIONS: Perdue Media Team Used Confidential Data To Spin Jobs Reports: Federal officials question legality of getting employment info before official release. “Since as early as January 2011, and perhaps before then, Gov. Bev Perdue’s press office has received access to confidential employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics hours if not days before its scheduled release, quite likely in violation of federal law. The governor’s staff used its early access to massage the monthly employment press release that reported jobs data to the public.”

RAND SIMERG ON VACLAV HAVEL: “Don’t expect the media to make a big deal of it. He was the wrong kind of dissenter.”

Plus this: “A country can do a lot worse than having a dissident playwright as a president. Mamet, 2012!”

Related: Bruce Bawer: Why We Need More Leaders Like Vaclav Havel. Mamet, 2012!

CALLING OBAMA’S BLUFF on taxes and spending.

LARRY RIBSTEIN: Abolishing Corporate Personhood: Still Stupid.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Looking at Rising College Costs and Whether Professors Benefit. Not as much as administrators, in my opinion.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: European “Bank Walk” Turning into a Jog: Run Next? “The wonder is that anybody is keeping any money at all in Greek banks. There is no good reason why an individual or company would want to put their assets in one of the dodgiest countries around where the banks are under threat, the government is desperate and an unstoppable financial crisis could break out at any moment.”