QUESTION AUTHORITY: “Don’t Believe the Liberal Media” signs produced by the Media Research Center being carried by voters in New Hampshire make the cover of the Washington Post, and as this video spotlights, appear on the CBS Evening News.

Jonathan Klein could not be reached for comment.

THE CHICAGO WAY — NOT JUST FOR CHICAGO ANYMORE? Video: NH poll workers shown handing out ballots in dead peoples’ names.

RELATED: Eighth Democrat Indicted in Upstate New York Ballot Fraud Investigation. Plus an ACORN connection.

AT AMAZON, gift cards galore.

MODERN-DAY PROHIBITION: The eternal temptation to ban things that give people pleasure.

UPDATE: Bumped to top, to include a link to Mayor Bloomberg’s latest crusade: reducing the number of New York City’s liquor stores.

IT’S ALWAYS THE JEWS’ FAULT: Ottoman Heir Blames Zionists For Empire’s Collapse. Hey, if the Jews were that powerful back then, maybe you guys ought to think about staying on their right side now.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: How The UN Achieves Sustainable Peacekeeper Rape.

WHIPLASH JOURNALISM: Abrupt WaPo rollback stirs fresh questions about anonymous source use. “Left thoroughly unclear was how the Post got the story so utterly wrong in the first place.”

GOOD NEWS: CNN finally finds someone it can call evil.

Bad news? It’s not Castro, Saddam, Yasser Arafat, “Hezbollah’s giants,” Kim Jong-Il, or his son. It’s a conservative journalist.

UPDATE: Dennis Miller Smacks Down Piers Morgan for Calling Breitbart Evil.

SUSANNAH BRESLIN on why men go to strip clubs.

MICKEY KAUS: Did Obama’s populist “recess” power play backfire?

WHO IS KILLING the not-so-great nuclear scientists of Iran?

RELATED: Four Reasons To Overthrow Iran’s Mullahs in 2012.

HUNTSMAN ON TRUSTING OBAMA: A Kind Of Pathology Emerges Here. “When you run against crony capitalism and you have the Solyndras of the world pop up. There’s enough there to raise the issue of trust.”

THE GREAT EQUALIZATION: Victor Davis Hanson writes:

For all John Edwards’ talk of “two nations,” of Barack Obama’s lifelong effort to demonize “corporate jet owners” and “millionaires and billionaires” (the latter 1000 times wealthier than the former), for all the sociologists and economists who get tenure by writing obscure, clever little essays that few read on insidious class differences, the classes have never been closer. Globalization, rapidly advancing technology, the Chinese exporters, and a huge redistributive government, printing money to service $16 trillion in debt, have all accomplished what bureaucrats and politicos could not: the simulacra of equality. Add with a vast expansion of the money supply, near-zero interest, massive deficits and aggregate debt, huge expansions in entitlements and the federal work force, and fewer and fewer paying income taxes, things can certainly be spread around.

I also say simulacra because few in Selma vacation in Tuscany. But sitting in front of a big-screen TV, with some Italian music on, while watching Rick Steves (with TV sound off) touring Florence seems not all that different from the 28-hour hassle of flying to rural Italy. The former is free; the latter “rich” people alone afford.

Oh, you object: poverty is better gauged by lack of opportunity, of exposure, of the cultivation of the mind. Well, in 1959, it was true only the wealthy in the Bay Area had access to opera, symphony, and good libraries. Out here in rural Selma there were no book stores, a sole tiny library in town, and no cultural enrichment to speak of.

Now? A Google search in about five seconds can give you information about anything. All sorts of sites offer free downloads of the classics. Videos offer any symphonic performance you wish. Computers are cheaper than many video games and big-screen TVs, whose sales after Thanksgiving cause near riots.

In short,we live in an unacknowledged age in which a poor man with a laptop who taps into a free signal at Starbucks has more information at his fingertips than did the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford just forty years ago.

As VDH concludes, “Keep all that in mind as we enter the most divisive, class-warfare campaign in recent memory.”

TO BE FAIR, THE TRIANGULATION ASPECT OF IT DOESN’T HURT HIM: Obama loses a pair of key far left endorsements — Fidel Castro and Harry Belafonte in short succession. But you have to expect that to happen, when you’re too conservative a president.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: In North Korea, The Dynasty Holds Firm.

VIDEO: THE iPAD THAT FELL TO EARTH.

SCIENCEBLOGGER DEREK LOWE celebrates his tenth bloggiversary. Congratulations!

THE POST COMES FULL CIRCLE: Back in 2001, when Katharine Graham passed away (in an essay hilariously titled “Kay, Why?”) Mark Steyn wrote:

Obituary-wise, Kay was the hostess with the mostes’, but nevertheless an inevitable hierarchy quickly set in, with points for how recently you’d last seen her (“At lunch last month …”) and a bonus for whether she’d come to you (Barbara Walters scored big here, entertaining Kay at her pad in the Hamptons). Many anecdotes were told and re-told and re-re-told: 30 years ago, dining at the home of columnist Joe Alsop, Mrs. Graham discreetly rebelled by refusing to join the ladies while the men discussed world affairs over brandy and cigars. As she modestly explained to Larry King on CNN, this brave stand singlehandedly brought about an end to the custom throughout the town. Perhaps Washington was singularly backward in this respect. By this stage, in London, New York, Winnipeg, all the great cities of the world, the ladies were no longer obliged to retire after dinner, a social revolution accomplished amazingly enough without the intervention of Mrs. Graham.

Which may help to explain this item yesterday at the Tatler:

Having achieved parity in news columns and as columnists, The Washington Post’s relatively new publisher, Katharine Weymouth, granddaughter of the late Katharine Graham, has brought the institution full circle with a new blog with the air-sickness-inducing name of She The People, — “The World As Women See It.” And the birth of  She The People –get this — has inspired the newspaper’s ombudsman, one Patrick B. Pexton to inquire, of all the questions in all the world, Is The Post Innovating Too Fast?

Earth to Mr. Pexton: What The Post is doing is not innovating too fast; it is, rather, bicycling backwards too slowly, uphill.  This ludicrous new blog is the opposite of progress.

Now the gals are back in the corral where they were lassoed from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Thanks a lot.

At least here at PJM we’re all considered bloggers, contributors and columnists, irrespective of our gender. Isn’t that what the so-called women’s movement was all about?

In theory it was, but separate-but-equal has been an obsession for much of the increasingly paradoxically-named “progressivism” for much of the past decade.

RELATED: At Big Journalism, John Doyle writes, “WaPo Publisher’s New Year’s Email Reveals Haughty Old Media Isn’t Learning Its Lesson.”

But the brandy and cigar parties are fabulous. Pay no attention to the icebergs ahead.

DRONES NOW ACCOUNT FOR ONE THIRD OF U.S. WARPLANES: “The need for faster and more nimble combat drones will likely only climb, though, with the Air Force specifically mentioned as having a sound barrier smashing ‘super/hypersonic’ remote fighter already in development.”

BEATING A DEAD WAR HORSE: The IMDB quotes Steven Spielberg as saying “Spielberg’s War Horse Honors Veteran Dad:”

Steven Spielberg was inspired to make his wartime drama War Horse to ensure veterans’ service “will never be forgotten”.

The director’s latest movie tells the story of a young soldier trying to track down his beloved horse after it was sold to the cavalry in World War I.

Spielberg developed the film to honour his father Arnold, who operated radios on planes in World War II, and to teach younger audiences more about the past.

He tells Britain’s The Sun, “My father is turning 95 this year and is a veteran of World War II… He served in Karachi on the China-Burma-India campaign. He was part of the 490th bomb squadron, the Burma bridge busters. He was a communications sergeant for the entire wing, in charge of communications between ground and air, and flew some sorties… I have been going to reunions and meeting all the veterans he served with.

“I make my movies about war so that their contributions will never be forgotten… We live in an age where there is almost too much communication flying at us from all directions. Nobody seems to look back anymore. That’s why I make so many films about history.”

Shortly before Christmas though, Canadian journalist Rick McGinnis made this observation about the film. Note his conclusion:

We are less than seven years away from the anniversary of the end of World War I, and the last surviving combat veteran of the war died this year. There might be young people unaware of the dire historical facts and the unspeakable human toll of that war, but for almost everyone else, the sheer scale of the losses and nightmarish reality of the trenches, repeated in refrain for almost a century, has dulled us to the staggering truth of it all. Which is probably why Spielberg and the creators of War Horse have seen fit to transfer our sympathy from a mere human caught in that carnage to a horse, enlisting it to re-awake our sense of pathos in the form of that most noble and graceful of animals, into whose big, dark, anxious eyes Spielberg invests so much human emotion. It’s a remarkable feat, to be sure, but some part of me can’t help but be saddened that we’ve had to transfer to an animal what we can no longer comprehend in men.

This isn’t the first time that a Spielberg war movie has been accused of brushing up against nihilism.

UPDATE: Instapundit reader Drew Kelley recommends the current season of Downton Abbey if they’re looking for a WWI-era setting. For those looking for a recap of what happened afterward, Paris: 1919 is one of the few “docudramas” that live up to the name. The 2009 Canadian production brilliantly mixes documentary footage shot in Paris after the war, with actors recreating Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Keynes, et al. It even has a scene where Wilson gives the brush-off to a young Ho Chi Minh, requesting Vietnam’s independence from France, before spotlighting Wilson’s role in setting the stage for WWII.

More thoughts on that film, here.

CNN TURNED INTO CRANK YANKERS SO SLOWLY, I hardly even noticed. But Jon Stewart did.

And that’s on top of the network’s New Year’s Eve debacle, and never-ending love of totalitarian thugs.

AT AMAZON, bestselling books on Time Management.

THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW:

The talk went well, playing to a full house. Well, a full ballroom at the lovely Seven Mile Beach Marriott, anyway. I had lunch with various Cayman notables, and we had dinner last night with fellow lawprof Andrew Morriss. Now, alas, time to start packing and head home to real life.

PALIN: “FIRST DUDE WENT ROGUE.”