YA THINK? The Hill: Reid faces task of mending fences with GOP after campaign attacks. “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) infuriated Republicans during the campaign with his harsh partisan attacks and now faces the delicate task of mending his relationship with the GOP. Some Republicans say Reid poisoned his relationship with their party by waging controversial attacks against GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. They were most angered by Reid’s charge that Romney had not paid taxes in ten years, attributing the information to an anonymous source.”

The more-deft legislative leaders of eras past remembered that once the election was over you still have to work with people.

I TOLD YOU IT WAS DANGEROUS TO TRY TO “OUT-CRAZY” STACY MCCAIN: “Stacy McCain is not a Sicilian, but he has the memory of a Sicilian.”

ALONG WITH MY PROPOSAL TO REPEAL THE HOLLYWOOD TAX CUTS and various other ideas on how the GOP can push popular ideas that will hurt Democratic constituencies, several readers have suggested that the Republicans in Congress push cable-unbundling as a cause. It will, they suggest, make consumers happy, hurt the entertainment industries and probably put MSNBC out of business since, well, how many people would actually pay to get MSNBC? . . . .

AT AMAZON, Black Friday Deals in Men’s Clothing.

Also women’s clothing, and clothes for kids and babies.

And, today only: Garmin Forerunner 410 GPS Sport Watch with Heart Rate Monitor, $149.99 (50% off).

IF BRICK-AND-MORTAR RETAILERS HAVE THEIR WAY, the next Cyber Monday will be taxed.

Cyber Monday is the marketing term for the Monday after Thanksgiving, when many online retailers offer steep discounts and promotions. The day is a counterpart to Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

Under current law, states can only collect sales taxes from retailers that have a physical presence in their state. People who order items online from another state are supposed to declare the purchases on their tax forms, but few do.

This’ll happen sooner or later. If it has to happen, I favor a single uniform tax, to get rid of the complexities of trying to account for city and county taxes across the nation.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: When it comes to economic policy, liberal pundits are failing their liberal base.

Liberal pundits have a real problem here. Now I’m not talking about old-fashioned, substance-lite stylists such as Maureen Dowd or Gail Collins. But Paul Krugman is a Nobel laureate. He’s supposed to know something. And Krugman surely does. But he’s just playing to his liberal fan base when he writes, as he did the other day, a paen to the high-tax, union-heavy 1950s economy as if it’s a relevant model for 2012 America. Many liberals would love to believe that if only we sharply raised taxes on wealthier Americans and corporations and slashed defense, we could not only leave Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as is. Unfortunately for them, the math doesn’t work.

But it’s not just Krugman. During the campaign, President Obama argued that the economic policies of George W. Bush caused the Great Recession and Financial Crisis. Indeed, this was a major theme of the Democratic National Convention. “We can’t go back!” Talk about a teachable moment that was wasted. Understanding what went wrong in the 2000s is critical to avoiding such economic catastrophes in the future. But where were the liberal econ pundits going on MSNBC and myth-busting the idea that Bush’s tax cuts and deficits were to blame?

Or pointing out the role of the Clinton administration in financial deregulation and housing policy?

Or explaining that the Great Recession might have been just a mini-version of the Great Depression, and thus it was overly tight Fed policy that really sunk the economy in 2007-2009, not Bush or the banks.

That last omission is particularly troubling. Many liberal econ writers now accept the theory, most famously advanced by economist bloggers Scott Sumner and David Beckworth, that the Fed should conduct monetary policy by targeting nominal GDP rather than inflation or interest rate levels. (I buy it, too.) But a major part of this theory argues that the Fed blew it in 2008.

Read the whole thing.

GETTING IT FAST AND HARD (CONT’D): Student Loan Interest Deduction Phasing Out: Another Screw For Obama Voters.

NEW YORK POST: Racial Smears Against Susan Rice’s Critics. Well, what else have her defenders got? “Fact is, the ambassador’s defense of the then-already discredited claim that the Benghazi attack was a spontaneous mob protest against an anti-Muslim video is a legitimate target of criticism. That so many Democrats feel the need to resort to the racism-sexism shield in her defense more than makes us wonder just what they think she has to hide.”

MEN ON STRIKE:

The battle of the sexes is alive and well. According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Believe it or not, modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t.

Over the last several decades, the rewards of marriage for men have declined, while the risks have climbed. Unsurprisingly, they find it less appealing.

UPDATE: Reader Chuck Allen notes an additional angle: “With regard to fewer young men looking to get married, who can blame them? Those 18-34 y.o. males mentioned in the survey have grown up watching media where husbands and fathers are demeaned as either incompetent or uncaring (or both) by the all-knowing and exalted wife/mother. So, if that is the impression of marriage given by television shows and ads, why would young men want to get married (at least so quickly)?”

Indeed.

MORE RASPBERRIES FOR PAUL KRUGMAN, this time from Liz Peek. “Mr. Krugman should get out more. He would find that women no longer wear poodle skirts and the United States is no longer the globe’s free-range economic powerhouse that it was after World War II. In the 1950s, the U.S. was leagues ahead of its economic rivals, most of which had blown up their budgets, and their industries, during the long years of destruction.”

And if you missed it earlier, check out Mickey Kaus’s epic Krugman beatdown.

“BITTERLY, BITTERLY DISAPPOINTED.”

HOW IMPLEMENTING OBAMACARE will give the GOP a majority.

RESPONDING TO MARGINAL TAX RATES: Reader Alex Clay writes:

After the election, my wife and I are going partial Galt. We’re in California, so our state income tax went up in addition to what’s sure to come out of Washington.

My wife quit her job last week. I increased my participation in a tax deferment plan offered by my employer to bring my taxable income as close to $250K as possible. We’ll be cutting back a little, but the government is going to getting a whole lot less.

My wife’s entire salary barely covered our tax bill – she was 100% slave to the government, while I was a 10% slave. Now she is 100% free, and I’ll be a ~35% slave As a couple, 17.5% of our time is slaving on the government plantation from an astounding 55% previously.

My wife is deliriously happy, our children are delighted to have mom home, the dog gets more walks, and I find not spending money rapturously satisfying.

I think we’ll see a lot of this. Whether it will add up to “Irish Democracy” or not, well, we’ll see.

OUR LABORATORIES OF DEMOCRACY are moving toward one-party rule.

The federal government may be locked up in an extended state of bipartisan gridlock, but our fifty nifty United States have been moving towards clear-cut majorities not seen in these numbers in decades. . . .

This is going to be an interesting phenomenon to watch during the next four years of a continued Obama economy. As the choices made by individual states become more starkly partisan and the results start rolling in, we’re going to be able to compare apples to apples — and I’d bet good money that red states are going to start seeing significant gains in areas over which they have control.

Probably true, but if one-party rule persists over the long term it will be a bad thing, regardless of which party is involved.

MR. NAKOULA WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: Jailed Pussy Riot band member moved to ‘safe’ cell.

“WHAT ABOUT THE TWINKIE?”

RED CROSS NOT LOOKING SO GOOD, POST-SANDY: In the hardest-hit areas, smaller and nimbler groups are playing key relief roles.

The American Red Cross “knows what it’s doing,” President Barack Obama said when he visited the agency the day after Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey and New York—and during the final week of the presidential campaign—as he called on Americans to donate to it. Two weeks after the storm, Gail McGovern, the group’s chief executive officer and president, deemed its response “near flawless.” . . .

But many residents and volunteers in the hardest-hit areas say they’ve been disappointed by its response, even as smaller and ad-hoc relief efforts have played a prominent frontline role in the relief and recovery effort.

It’s hardly the first time the Red Cross—which collected more than a billion dollars in contributions in its fiscal year ending last June—has come under fire. In recent years, the 131-year-old charity has been heavily criticized for its responses to 9/11, Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti, and the tsunami that hit Japan, with many of the complaints revolving around mismanaged funds and misleading fundraising, as well as the propriety of its blood-bank operations.

Yet the Red Cross continues to dominate fundraising in the aftermath of each new disaster, perpetuating its dominance over the emergency-response industry. Perhaps that’s because the Red Cross’s shortcomings often come to public light only in the wake of a disaster, and are forgotten before the next one hits. . . . In the days and weeks since Sandy ravaged parts of the New York and New Jersey coasts, however, residents in some of the hardest-hit areas say they still have seen no sign of the Red Cross.

Your money is better sent to smaller, less politicized and bureaucratic organizations.

UPDATE: Like who? Here’s a list.

JOHN HINDERAKER disagrees with my analysis. His take on why Dems do better nationally: “At the national level, we have seen an increasing disconnect between spending and payment. This is partly because most people pay either no, or very modest, federal income taxes, and partly because 40% of all federal spending is borrowed, so that our children will have to pay for it. To the average voter, federal money must seem to appear almost magically. There has been, in recent years, no connection at all between increased spending and any necessity to pay for it. So I think it is not surprising that the Democrats are currently doing better at the national level than the state and local levels.”

Good argument, and I certainly agree with this: “This strikes me as one data point among many that indicate it is time to revise our federal tax code so that more voters are also, to a meaningful degree, payers of federal taxes.”

ROBERT PARK: Genocide And Crimes Against Humanity Ongoing In North Korea. World doesn’t care. Too busy attacking Israel.

NEWS FROM THE NEW ARMY: “I had no idea that a combat zone would be such a sexually charged environment. . . . There’s nothing that compares to making love at war.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

While I understand the premise, did you notice the “Jesus obsession” bit?

I’m guessing a similar letter referring to a “Mohammed obsession” would not have seen print…or be written in the first place.

Another example of oikophobia?

Yeah, probably.

THE NEW YORK TIMES takes secession seriously. Well, I think it’s a dumb idea, and suggest instead that taking federalism seriously would be a better idea. That said, this is a dumb argument against secession:

Few of the public calls for secession have addressed the messy details, like what would happen to the state’s many federal courthouses, prisons, military bases and parklands. No one has said what would become of Kevin Patteson, the director of the state’s Office of State-Federal Relations, and no one has asked the Texas residents who received tens of millions of dollars in federal aid after destructive wildfires last year for their thoughts on the subject.

These are details — really, we can’t secede because Kevin Patteson would be out of a job! isn’t very persuasive — and one might as well say “No one has asked Texas residents how they’ll spend the federal income taxes and gas taxes they’ll no longer be paying.” If those are the best arguments against secession, I might change my mind. But they’re not.

WAYS TO CULTIVATE GRATITUDE IN KIDS.

PROFESSOR JACOBSON: “Every time I think the Democratic race card players could not get more vile, more deranged, more patronizingly demeaning to blacks, someone manages to defy even my vivid imagination. This time, it is the Editorial Board of The Washington Post.”

HOW DO PORCUPINES MATE? Very carefully. “Their stark, night-piercing shrieks aren’t just about the quills.”

THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE: Gesture Control. And future means “sometime next year.”