THAT WAS FAST:

• “Snoop Dogg to W.H.: Legalize pot,” the Politico today, in a post time-stamped 6:34 AM EST, and highlighted by Matt Drudge.

• “Drug dog busts Snoop Dogg’s bus,” CNN today, in a post time-stamped 3:42 PM EST.

WILLIAM DALEY TO STEP DOWN AS OBAMA’S CHIEF OF STAFF: “Budget director Jack Lew is taking over the President Obama’s team as it heads into a tough election year, senior administration officials say,” the L.A. Times reports. “Daley gave his letter of resignation to the president in a private meeting in the Oval Office last week, recounting the administration’s successes of his one year on the job and saying it was time for him to return to his hometown of Chicago.”

Which successes were those?

Meanwhile, Ace asks, “So… no adult in the room again, huh?”

FLASHBACK: Jim Geraghty tweets a link to this New York magazine profile of Obama after the midterms:

Emanuel’s ad-hocracy, meanwhile, didn’t faze Obama. The president’s friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett sometimes pointed out that not only had he never managed an operation, he’d never really had a nine-to-five job in his life. Obama didn’t know what he didn’t know, yet his self-confidence was so stratospheric that once, in the context of thinking about Emanuel’s replacement, he remarked in all seriousness, “You know, I’d make a good chief of staff.”

Those overhearing the comment somehow managed to suppress their laughter.

Or as Joshua Green of Business Week tweets today, “Obama rapidly approaching Michele Bachmann-level of # of CoS.”

UPDATE: Thanks to Daley’s resignation, Heather Higginbottom, “appointee blocked for 10 months by GOP for lack of qualifications” is now in charge of the Office of Management and Budget, Amanda Carpenter tweets.

KARMA: “Law faculties at Iowa and elsewhere have been enthusiastic advocates of wider liability for other employers that get sued. They’re not really going to ask for an exemption for themselves, are they?”

SEXUAL ADDICTION AMONG WOMEN: A real and growing problem. “We are seeing the biggest change in human sexuality maybe in the history of our species.” But some are skeptical: “When we collapse the two things, we end up mislabelling everything that looks broadly compulsive to us as the sign of an addiction, but it isn’t and it’s dangerous to assume otherwise.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Romney Doesn’t Need To Apologize For His Bain Career.

UPDATE (Ed): Romney tells New Hampshire, “I like being able to fire people.” If Romney promises to bring that attitude to DC, he may finally start to get some support from the Tea Party and other fiscal conservatives.

JOHN NOLTE: Johnny Depp-Gate: What Did the Mainstream Media Know and When Did They Know It?

RELATED (From Ed): Zombie rounds up the only known photos from the White House’s 2009 “Alice in Wonderland” party.

UPDATE (Ed): Hmmmm…“Why don’t White House visitor logs report Hollywood Halloween guests?”

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What Does Keith Olbermann Have Against Bald People?

On the defensive this week amid reports that his relationship with Current TV has soured, Keith Olbermann has responded as he usually does: by slinging insults at his critics on Twitter. Reading his tweets, I’ve noticed something funny: Olbermann seems to take particular enjoyment in pointing out his antagonists’ hair loss.

I wonder what his boss thinks of Olbermann’s tweets attacking the follicly challenged?

YOU CAN THANK THE TEA PARTY FOR THE END OF THE ETHANOL SUBSIDY. “Sunsetting the subsidy once seemed impossible. Yet this year it expired just prior to the caucuses that helped it survive for so long.”

THE NEW AUTHORITARIANISM: At City Journal, Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin write:

If Obama does win, 2013 could possibly bring something approaching a constitutional crisis. With the House and perhaps the Senate in Republican hands, Obama’s clerisy may be tempted to use the full range of executive power. The logic for running the country from the executive has been laid out already. Republican control of just the House, argues Chicago congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., has made America ungovernable. Obama, he said during the fight over the debt limit, needed to bypass the Constitution because, as in 1861, the South (in this case, the Southern Republicans) was “in a state of rebellion” against lawful authority. Beverley Perdue, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, concurred: she wanted to have elections suspended for a stretch. (Perdue’s office later insisted this was a joke, but most jokes aren’t told deadpan or punctuated with “I really hope someone can agree with me on that.” Also: Nobody laughed.)

The Left’s growing support for a soft authoritarianism is reminiscent of the 1930s, when many on both right and left looked favorably at either Stalin’s Soviet experiment or its fascist and National Socialist rivals. Tom Friedman of the New York Times recently praised Chinese-style authoritarianism for advancing the green agenda. The “reasonably enlightened group” running China, he asserted, was superior to our messy democracy in such things as subsidizing green industry. Steven Rattner, the investment banker and former Obama car czar, dismisses the problems posed by China’s economic and environmental foibles and declares himself “staunchly optimistic” about the future of that country’s Communist Party dictatorship. And it’s not just the gentry liberals identifying China as their model: labor leader Andy Stern, formerly the president of the Service Employees International Union and a close ally of the White House, celebrates Chinese authoritarianism and says that our capitalistic pluralism is headed for “the trash heap of history.” The Chinese, Stern argues, get things done.

To paraphrase Steven Den Beste on George Orwell’s 1984, Liberal Fascism: A warning for the rest of us; a user’s manual for the left.

RELATED: Mickey Kaus’s “Paranoid Thought #279.”

HMM: Suspected Islamic Extremist Arrested in Alleged Florida Bomb Plot. “A 25-year-old man described as an Islamic extremist was arrested in an alleged plot to attack crowded areas in the Tampa, Fla., area with a car bomb, assault rifle and other explosives, authorities said Monday.”

EUROPE: Merkel, Sarkozy Press For Quick Greek Solution. Also: German Bonds Sell For Negative Yield. More here.

CODEACADEMY is a website that teaches you to program. Maybe I should tag this “higher education bubble update.”

DANA LOESCH: MSNBC’s MARTIN BASHIR MAXES-OUT THE RACE CARD: It’s January of an election year. NBC’s spin-off network hasn’t maxed out the race card; they’re only just getting warmed up.

PLASTIC SURGERY’S curse of the catface.

WHAT’S MISSING from Gallup’s party identification numbers.

MARK STEYN ON SATURDAY’S DEBATE: “The correct response is to take an unconstitutional federally-funded supersized condom, roll it over George Stephanopoulos’ head, and say, ‘That’s odd. I can no longer hear a word you’re saying. So let me throw in my two bits on impending multi-trillion-dollar ruin…’”

PAGE ONE, THE NEW YORK TIMES & MODERN MEDIA BIAS: A review of the recent documentary on the New York Times and its myriad structural woes, at the Libertas film blog.

#OCCUPYFAIL: “SOMEBODY’S GOING DOWN TONIGHT, BUT IT AIN’T GOING TO BE JOBS, SWEETHEART:” Chris Christie 60,000, OWS Ø. Video at link.

RELATED: “Chris Christie Uses Hecklers As His Props” Investor’s Business Daily adds. “The only problem with the scene for the Romney campaign was the lingering question: Why can’t their candidate do this?”

ILLINOIS EDUCATION: Like Pac-Man, Gobbling Up The Future.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: For Now, China’s Snark Is Worse Than Its Bite.

MICKEY KAUS: “Just a thought: Maybe President Obama wants to establish unprecedented power to make ‘recess’ appointments–even when the Senate says it isn’t in recess–because he knows he will need that power to save Obamacare in 2013, even if he wins reelection, should the Republicans take the Senate. There must be all sorts of federal health care boards and agencies that will need staffing–and which maybe couldn’t function very well if the GOP Senate simply refuses to approve any Obama appointees, Cordray style. …”

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: Time For Justice Department Transparency.

BRYAN PRESTON is reporting from New Hampshire.

THE TEA PARTY THE WHITE HOUSE COULDN’T RESIST: White House threw secret ‘Alice in Wonderland’ bash during recession.

A White House “Alice in Wonderland” costume ball — put on by Johnny Depp and Hollywood director Tim Burton — proved to be a Mad-as-a-Hatter idea that was never made public for fear of a political backlash during hard economic times, according to a new tell-all.

“The Obamas,” by New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor, tells of the first Halloween party the first couple feted at the White House in 2009. It was so over the top that “Star Wars” creator George Lucas sent the original Chewbacca to mingle with invited guests.

The book reveals how any official announcement of the glittering affair — coming at a time when Tea Party activists and voters furious over the lagging economy, 10-percent unemployment rate, bank bailouts and Obama’s health-care plan were staging protests — quickly vanished down the rabbit hole.

“White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans — or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care — that the event was not discussed publicly and Burton’s and Depp’s contributions went unacknowledged,” the book says.

However, the White House made certain that more humble Halloween festivities earlier that day — for thousands of Washington-area schoolkids — were well reported by the press corps.

The complicit press corps, that is.