VIRGINIA POSTREL: Paul Ryan Should Be the Ross Perot of 2012.

The traditional roles of a U.S. presidential running mate are ticket balancer and attack dog. With their choices of Al Gore and Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush added another: the brainy policy partner with big-picture views.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is following that model in picking Paul Ryan. Ryan fires up the party’s base, but he’s also a policy wonk who could actually help a victorious candidate govern. As a candidate, the telegenic, articulate Ryan could play another much-needed role. He could be a great communicator, educating the public about policy challenges and Republican plans to address them.

Here I’m thinking not of Ronald Reagan but of a quirkier candidate. Two decades ago, Ross Perot riveted the public with his half-hour prime-time lectures on the dangers of the budget deficit. People still remember his hand-held charts.

The Perot commercials treated the voters as intelligent citizens hungry for knowledge and willing to sit still long enough to absorb it. Perot didn’t offer especially cogent ideas for dealing with the deficit — his main prescription was to get the “best experts” in the room and have them come up with a plan — but he effectively focused attention on the issues, particularly the federal budget. His commercials capped a campaign year in which voters, anxious about recession and restructuring, were unusually engaged with economic policy.

Treat voters as intelligent? Hey, that’s an idea so crazy it just might work! As Virginia says: “The American public is in the appropriately desperate frame of mind for a serious policy discussion. The Ryan pick suggests that Romney might be willing to offer one.”

YOU KNEW THIS WAS COMING: Large sodas banned, Bloomberg now goes after children’s laughter.

IF WE HAD A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT, THIS WOULD BE A STORY OF EARTHSHAKING IMPORTANCE (CONT’D): Contempt Lawsuit Against Holder: NBC Ignores, ABC and CBS Do Bare Minimum.

SOME SENATE CANDIDATES talk about repealing the 17th Amendment.

How would the Senate look without Senators elected by voters?

Before the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, that’s exactly how it worked, with increasingly corrupt state legislatures picking Senators.

While there’s no chance of the amendment being repealed, a small number of Republican Senate candidates are coming under fire for even broaching the subject.

So now instead of increasingly corrupt state legislators, we have increasingly corrupt U.S. Senators. . . .

UPDATE: Jim Bennett emails: “Did a state legislature ever pick anyone worse than Jon Corzine?”

THE ECONOMIST: “The Greek economy is imploding for no other reason than that the prices are wrong.”

BYRON YORK: A strong solo debut for Ryan — with Romney’s script.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Ryan’s Budget Is Radical? Far From It.

What’s radical is jacking up federal spending to near-World-War-II levels, and funneling much of the money into the pockets of cronies.

But even Obama didn’t think the Ryan budget was radical when it came out: FLASHBACK: Obama in 2010 on Ryan Roadmap: ‘This is an entirely legitimate proposal.’

Video at the link.

UPDATE: Reader Kenneth Nachbar writes:

Great work on the video of Obama legitimizing Ryan’s plan. But you buried the lede! At about 4 minutes in, he concedes that Medicare is the real problem, and that we must not attack opponents’ plans as “irresponsible” or trying to “hurt senior citizens.”

So I guess ads like this are off the table, right?

Only for those possessed of a conscience.

TWO WAYS OF LOOKING at China’s economic problems. “The Austrian approach raises the possibility that there is no way for China to make good on enough of its oversubsidized investments. At first, they create lots of jobs and revenue, but as the business cycle proceeds, new marginal investments become less valuable and more prone to allocation by corruption. The giddy booms of earlier times wear off, and suddenly not every decision seems wise. The combination can lead to an economic crackup — not because aggregate demand is too low, but because the economy has been producing the wrong mix of goods and services.”

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: Leftist Planet: Why do so many travel guides make excuses for dictators? They know their audience. “There’s a formula to them: a pro forma acknowledgment of a lack of democracy and freedom followed by exercises in moral equivalence, various contorted attempts to contextualize authoritarianism or atrocities, and scorching attacks on the U.S. foreign policy that precipitated these defensive and desperate actions. Throughout, there is the consistent refrain that economic backwardness should be viewed as cultural authenticity, not to mention an admirable rejection of globalization and American hegemony. The hotel recommendations might be useful, but the guidebooks are clotted with historical revisionism, factual errors, and a toxic combination of Orientalism and pathological self-loathing.”

Oikophobia isn’t pretty.

TOBY HARNDEN: 10 reasons why Paul Ryan could help Mitt Romney become US President.

Related: David Hogberg: Paul Ryan Could Help Romney With White Working Class.

I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Obama to NASA: ‘Let me know right away’ if there are Martians.

MICKEY KAUS: GM Plan As Dumb As It Seems.

General Motors’ plan to displace the venerable and respected Opel brand in Europe with a new Chevrolet “global” brand really is as insane as it seems, according to Keith Crain of Automotive News. “It will take decades for Chevrolet to establish anywhere near the recognition that Opel has,” Crain argues. Don’t be silly. Modern marketing can do anything!** …

P.S.: When people say CEO Dan Akerson isn’t up to the job, I assume this is the sort of thing they are talking about. The title of Crain’s column: “GM is going from bad to worse.” They are certainly not “back on top.” I’m not sure they’re even “back.” …

They’re pumped up by taxpayer money. No more, no less. But especially, no more.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Union contracts driving pension crisis.

Maryland’s $37 billion public pension system earned a pitiful 0.36 percent return on its investments last fiscal year.

How embarrassing is that? Even the fiscal basket case that is California was able to eke out a 1 percent return. Indeed, the news for Maryland looks “like a minor disaster for fiscal 2011,” in the prosaic words of Jeff Hooke, chairman of the Maryland Tax Education Foundation. That’s a lot like saying the Trojan War was a minor disagreement over a girl.

Sadly there’s no brave and clever Odysseus waiting in the wings to save Maryland. Instead, state officials continue to wrap themselves in delusion. State Treasurer Nancy Kopp, for example, who chairs the pension system’s trustees, explained, “The board continues to focus on long-term performance. Taking the long view, the system has on average exceeded the assumed rate of return over the last 25 years, which is a more appropriate measure of performance.”

Nothing to see here, folks.

The truth is that things are even worse than official numbers suggest, both in Maryland and across the country. As a new report from State Budget Solutions notes, government accountants have a way of cooking the books.

If a private company did this, it would be a felony.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Scholars, colleges and higher ed associations file dozens of briefs with U.S. Supreme Court, hoping to preserve the right to consider race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Retaliation and Sexual Harassment Claims Surge at ICE.

This would be a story of earthshaking importance if we had a Republican president.

ROGER KIMBALL: Karl Marx vs the Zeitgeist, or The Concept of Momentum Applied to Politics. “I have been saying for some weeks now that I think Mitt Romney will not only win but will win by a significant margin.”

PATRICK POOLE: The Biggest D.C. Spy Scandal You Haven’t Heard About (Part One). “Why has the story of a 20-year illegal infiltration of D.C. on behalf of Pakistani intelligence gone unnoticed?”

BY THE TIME I NOTICED IT, THIS HITJOB ON PAUL RYAN HAD ALREADY COLLAPSED: Hey Paul Ryan haters, your congressional insider trader suspect actually is Sheldon Whitehouse.

Paul Ryan falsely was accused today by left-wing bloggers, most notably Matthew Yglesias (formerly of Think Progress now of Slate), of insider trading based on confidential information provided by the Treasury Secretary to Congress on September 18, 2008.

That day, Ryan traded Citigroup stock.

The accusation fell apart when someone noticed that the congressional meeting was in the evening of September 18, after the markets closed and Ryan already had completed his trades. Yglesias issued a retraction, and even New York Magazine defended Ryan on the charge of insider trading (which at the time would have been legal for members of Congress).

If Yglesias and the rest of the left-blogosphere want to chase someone for insider trading based solely on the timing of trades around the September 18 congressional briefing, then they need look no further than their hero Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), as I detailed on November 19, 2011, Sheldon Whitehouse, luckiest investor in America? . . .

I don’t know that Sheldon Whitehouse traded on inside congressional information, but the timing is a lot more suspicious than that of Paul Ryan.

It’s time for Whitehouse to release all the records and make the money manager available for questioning.

It’s also time for the Ryan-haters to realize they wished too hard for something, and now they have it.

Read the whole thing.

Related: All Right, Everybody Quit Making Fun Of Matthew Yglesias.

MICHAEL LEDEEN ON ISRAEL AND IRAN: “Will they (the Israelis) or won’t they? And if so, when? I know the answers, but you’re not going to like them.”

FAIL: Obama Slams Paul Ryan For Not Passing Farm Bill That He Passed 2 Weeks Ago (Video).

MATH: “If Barack Obama gets his way and raises taxes on everyone making $250,000.00 a year or more, the amount of money he brings in will not close his own budget deficit. Nevermind the national debt — he won’t close this year’s budget deficit.”

TRUISMS: “I don’t think the Massachusetts political class enjoys an especially strong national reputation. . . . How many of your House speakers have gone to jail?”

DER SPIEGEL: Investors Prepare For Euro Collapse.

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Anti-Police Brutality Journalist Jailed For Recording Public Officials.

EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN: Fareed Zakaria Didn’t Plagiarize! “Zakaria’s crime was not plagiarism. He embarrassed his employer, Time, by not sufficiently juggling the words around or employing the thesaurus to camouflage the sorry fact that instead of going to the ultimate source, the book Gunfight, he (or his assistants) used the electronic clip file. By not changing enough words, he provided the ‘gotcha’ bait for the feeding frenzy of bloggers out for his blood. And for this embarrassment, he had to give an abject apology. But unless Time or CNN provide examples in which he took ideas from others that he did not credit to them, I submit that he is not guilty of plagiarism.”

I haven’t followed this story very closely, but if this analysis is right, I agree. Peter Morgan and I wrote about this in The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society.