AN IPHONE GAME to raise money for cancer research.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Everyone is wrong about how people die when they fall into lava.

IT’S SAD THAT THIS IS EVEN PLAUSIBLE: Did the Obama administration delay report on Volt fires? But that’s not the real disaster.

PETER BERKOWITZ: Boot Camp For Citizens: As we learn more about the American political tradition, we may see a shared commitment to freedom and equality behind partisan disputes.

It’s a review of Teaching America: The Case For Civic Education.

BARACK OBAMA: Doing For America What John Lindsay Did For New York?

Related: His Adolescency. “Maybe a better question to ask is where the hell that $5 trillion that Obama borrowed went.”

FELIX SALMON: Europe’s Disastrous Summit. “Remember how Wolfgang Münchau said that the Euro zone had to get it right at this summit or it would collapse? Well, the Euro zone has most emphatically not got it right.” This could get ugly. And over there the lampposts aren’t always just metaphorical.

FASTER, PLEASE: 17-year-old wins 100k for creating cancer-killing nanoparticle. (Bumped, because we need some good news.)

MATT WELCH TO BARACK OBAMA: Hey, what about that “net spending cut” you promised back in 2008?

Plus this:

Candidate Obama campaigned every day—and rightly so—against the “fiscal irresponsibility” of the Bush era. “When George Bush came into office, our debt—national debt was around $5 trillion. It’s now over $10 trillion. We’ve almost doubled it,” he complained in his second debate with Republican nominee John McCain. “We have had over the last eight years the biggest increases in deficit spending and national debt in our history.”

As president, Obama tacked on another $5 trillion in debt in record time. In every measure of basic budgetary incompetence, the last three years have dwarfed the previous eight, despite the candidate convincing a majority of voters of his superior credentials as a fiscal steward. United States debt zoomed through the 100-percent-of-GDP threshold around Halloween, and as the Baby Boomers get ready to scoop up their old-age entitlements, there isn’t even a proposed end to the budget leakage in sight.

And it’s not just the size of government, it’s the scope. Obama has given historical leeway to regulators on health care and financial reform, and (like presidents before him) is increasing his influence on executive branch enforcement at a time when his sway over the congressional branch continues to wane. All of which begs a question: If we just finished three years of a cautious and centrist Obama, what in the name of government vigor will the next 12-60 months look like?

By the end, we may see profligate politicians hanging from lampposts. But there’ll be a lot of bad stuff, too. . . .

UPDATE: Reader Robert Crouse emails:

I know the below post was intended to be funny, but it came across (to me) as a little over the line:

“By the end, we may see profligate politicians hanging from lampposts….,”

Well, in an era when the President himself openly threatens bankers with pitchfork-wielding mobs, and jokes about auditing those who disrespect him, it’s hard to know where the line is. Or if there even is a line. Maybe Frances Fox Piven knows.

But all joking aside, if the current profligacy continues, and America winds up in a Greece-style (or worse) collapse, politicians may not wind up hanging from lampposts (we don’t really do that here), but they will at the very least likely face the kind of investigations, prosecutions, and social opprobrium normally reserved for child molesters and Bernie Madoff types. I don’t think they fully appreciate that. If they did, they’d be acting differently.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Virginia Postrel: Universities Feast on Federal Student Aid: Virginia Postrel.

Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions.

It’s not as crazy as it might sound.

As veteran education-policy consultant Arthur M. Hauptman notes in a recent essay: “There is a strong correlation over time between student and parent loan availability and rapidly rising tuitions. Common sense suggests that growing availability of student loans at reasonable rates has made it easier for many institutions to raise their prices, just as the mortgage interest deduction contributes to higher housing prices.”

It’s a phenomenon familiar to economists. If you offer people a subsidy to pursue some activity requiring an input that’s in more-or-less fixed supply, the price of that input goes up. Much of the value of the subsidy will go not to the intended recipients but to whoever owns the input. The classic example is farm subsidies, which increase the price of farmland.

Read the whole thing. Including this:

A good chunk of the educated public has decided that college educators are decadent and lazy. Many are positively lusting to see higher education get its Detroit-style comeuppance.

This attitude is unfortunate and often unfair, but it’s the direct result of decades of federal policies. Any strategy to reduce college costs needs to look beyond traditional subsidies to remove some of the insulation that stifles innovation and feeds public resentment.

Indeed.

THE HILL: Obama makes Boehner’s job easier with payroll veto threat.

AT AMAZON, “Holiday Flurry” deals in Kitchen, Home & Garden.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Texas Law School Dean Resigns Immediately in Wake of Faculty Division Over Compensation. Is the availability of $500,000 forgivable loans a sign of a bubble? Possibly.

I DOUBT THEY’LL LET GREENS BLOCK DEVELOPMENT: China Hits It Big With Shale Gas. I’m guessing this is why they were so uncooperative at Durban.

Will Tom Friedman now start singing the praises of shale gas?

METAPHOR ALERT: We can’t get to the Moon any more, and we can’t even keep track of the rocks we brought back when we could. “Astronauts may have had the ‘right stuff’ to go to the moon, but when it comes to keeping track of what they brought back, NASA seems to have misplaced some of that stuff.”

Moon rocks, money — it’s all gone missing.

FLIGHT CAPITAL: European CEOs Move Cash To Germany.

WE ARE THE 47%: “A recent Gallup poll found that 47% of American households own a gun, up from 41% just a year ago.”

MICHAEL WALSH: Eric Holder Stonewalls On. “There you have it: One of the most incompetent (at best) and murderous operations ever undertaken in the name of the Justice Department, and all the attorney general can do is say they’ve closed the barn door now that the horses have fled, taking the guns and ammo with them.”

MATTHEW HOY HAS SOMETHING FROM THE HOLDER HEARINGS THAT DIDN’T MAKE THE TRANSCRIPT. “Hundreds are dead as a direct result of actions undertaken by your subordinates and you wish to shame Congress?”

Okay, I think he stole this idea from Tim Blair. But you could steal from worse. . . .

ALSO GOOD FOR PRANK CALLS: This “Voice Changer” Toy. Though I guess in the age of Caller ID, prank calls are out of style.

JAMES TARANTO: Democrats for Buchanan: “Core institutions” of the president’s party turn against Israel. “Whatever one may think about the Middle East, the emergence of CAP and MediaMutters as ‘core institutions’ of the Democratic Party is unsettling. It suggests that the donks are increasingly organizing themselves around tactics of bullying and slander. That’s good news for the GOP inasmuch as it indicates the Dems’ underlying weaknesses. But it’s bad news for the country that one of the two major parties has so lost its moral bearings.”

NEAL MCCLUSKEY: The Student Aid Myth Myth.

MICHAEL KINSLEY ON OBAMA’S CLASS WARFARE RHETORIC:

For every group Obama takes to task, he also has a “to be sure” passage in which he tries to make clear that he’s not talking about you. But if you listen to the music, not the words, you might well think otherwise. A wish to raise taxes on top-bracket taxpayers doesn’t prove that you “hate the rich” or that you’re trying to stoke the fires of class warfare. It doesn’t mean you define an income of $250,000 as “rich.” It simply means that you believe that the people who’ve been most fortunate in this country are in the best position to contribute more to solving its financial problems. But this distinction is hard to maintain if you’re simultaneously suggesting that there is something ill-gotten about most rich people’s gains.

People really resent this. I have a friend, a banker, who voted for Obama in 2008 but senses that he is being picked on unfairly. Which he is. And he is not pacified by reminders that Obama’s grandmother was a banker, as charming and surprising to some as that may be.

Aren’t most typical white people bankers? Plus this: “In addition to being unfair, conflating actual crooks and the innocent affluent makes it hard to claim that raising their taxes isn’t punishment for some form of misbehavior. Taxes are not a punishment; they are a source of necessary revenue. But if you tie them to the financial scandal, they sound pretty punitive.”

That’s not all that Obama has done to make taxes seem punitive. . . .

HELPFUL MEDICAL NEWS: CDC: Castrating Lambs With Your Teeth May Make You Sick.

PUBLIC PENSION UPDATE: Chicago Union Officials Face Criminal Probe Over City Pensions. “The reports focused on a 1991 law that allowed union leaders who once worked for the city to receive credit in public pension plans for their private union work. When they retire, the union officials’ pensions aren’t based on their old city paychecks but on their much higher union salaries. That opened the door for them to land public pensions that far exceeded their pay as city employees — even as they continued to earn lucrative salaries from their unions.”