MODERN SCIENCE WRITING leaves science behind. “Anyone who is willing to take off his partisan glasses will quickly come to the conclusion that both sides of the political spectrum—conservatives and progressives—are willing to throw science under the bus whenever it is politically expedient. It’s too bad that some members of the allegedly ‘watchdog’ media are too blinded by their own partisan affiliations to do their jobs properly.”

POOR CHOICE OF METAPHORS: Sen. Feinstein: US has to ‘bite the bullet’ and enact new gun-control restrictions.

Dianne, honey, when you “bite the bullet” and slash entitlements enough to balance the budget, we’ll talk.

EMILY MILLER: David Gregory’s Legal Jeopardy.

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Sentimentalizing Serial Murder: A recent book exemplifies the erosion of moral judgment in Britain.

P.J. O’ROURKE: Dear Mr. President, Zero-Sum Doesn’t Add Up.

The worst thing that you’ve done internationally is what you’ve done domestically. You sent a message to America in your re-election campaign. Therefore you sent a message to the world. The message is that we live in a zero-sum universe.

There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney’s argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we’ve got—with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners.

In this zero-sum universe there is only so much happiness. The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin.

There is only so much money. The people who have money are hogging it. The way for the rest of us to get money is to turn the hogs into bacon.

Mr. President, your entire campaign platform was redistribution. Take from the rich and give to the . . . Well, actually, you didn’t mention the poor. What you talked and talked about was the middle class, something most well-off Americans consider themselves to be members of. So your plan is to take from the more rich and the more or less rich and give to the less rich, more or less. It is as if Robin Hood stole treasure from the Sheriff of Nottingham and bestowed it on the Deputy Sheriff.

But never mind. The evil of zero-sum thinking and redistributive politics has nothing to do with which things are taken or to whom those things are given or what the sum of zero things is supposed to be. The evil lies in denying people the right, the means, and, indeed, the duty to make more things.

Read the whole thing. Just remember: In a zero-sum society, the redistributors are a lot more important. . . .

UPDATE: Related: Playing the long game on the Fiscal Cliff.

TOM MAGUIRE ON FULL-CAPACITY MAGAZINE BANS: “My goodness – the drug cartels can make mini-subs. Will we really be able to stop determined criminals from buying steel boxes with springs?”

VIDEO MOCKS CELEBRITIES BY MIXING THEIR DEMANDS FOR GUN CONTROL WITH VIOLENT FILM FOOTAGE.

PROF. JACOBSON: It’s not as good as the Christmas Plan, but Joe Manchin’s CALM Act is worth consideration: Deprive Obama of the crisis he uses as leverage.