THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Petraeus: We Knew Right Away It Was Terrorism, But Talking Points Were Changed. “No one knows yet exactly who came up with the final version of the talking points.” Plus: “The suggestion that the intelligence was altered raised questions about who altered it, with King asking if ‘the White House changed the talking points.'”

UPDATE: Roger Simon: Who Is Responsible For Benghazi? “There’s your smoking gun, as the saying goes. Someone, or ones, somewhere redacted that crucial line. Who?”

Plus, someone else suggests: “Consider this possibility … the talking points came from the CIA, and they were altered by the campaign people in Chicago. The coverup has been about hiding the sharing of classified information with campaign officials who don’t have the proper clearance. This sharing of information could also be the source of the earlier leaks such as the virus in Iran’s nuclear program.” Well, stay tuned. Things seem to be unraveling, and today’s modified limited hangout isn’t likely to end the story.

NBC NEWS ON HOW GREEDY UNIONS KILLED THE TWINKIE.

UPDATE: “Those 18,500 new initial jobless claims next week? Sandy’s fault.” Heh.

IN CHINA, THE APPEAL OF AMERICAN IMPORTS: “It’s no surprise that Americans prefer American-made products, but a new survey reveals something a bit more interesting: so do many Chinese. In a survey conducted by Boston Consulting Group, 47 percent of Chinese respondents ‘somewhat’ or ‘absolutely’ preferred goods from the United States. Furthermore, both the Chinese and Americans surveyed said they would pay slightly more for U.S. products when compared with Chinese counterparts.”

CHINA’S GREAT SHAME:

THIRTY-SIX million people in China, including my uncle, who raised me like a father, starved to death between 1958 and 1962, during the man-made calamity known as the Great Famine. In thousands of cases, desperately hungry people resorted to cannibalism.

The toll was more than twice the number of fallen in World War I, and about six times the number of Ukrainians starved by Stalin in 1932-33 or the number of Jews murdered by Hitler during World War II.

After 50 years, the famine still cannot be freely discussed in the place where it happened. My book “Tombstone” could be published only in Hong Kong, Japan and the West. It remains banned in mainland China, where historical amnesia looms large and government control of information and expression has tightened during the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress, which began last week and will conclude with a once-in-a-decade leadership transition.

Those who deny that the famine happened, as an executive at the state-run newspaper People’s Daily recently did, enjoy freedom of speech, despite their fatuous claims about “three years of natural disasters.” But no plague, flood or earthquake ever wrought such horror during those years. One might wonder why the Chinese government won’t allow the true tale to be told, since Mao’s economic policies were abandoned in the late 1970s in favor of liberalization, and food has been plentiful ever since.

The reason is political: a full exposure of the Great Famine could undermine the legitimacy of a ruling party that clings to the political legacy of Mao, even though that legacy, a totalitarian Communist system, was the root cause of the famine. As the economist Amartya Sen has observed, no major famine has ever occurred in a democracy. . . . The Great Leap Forward that Mao began in 1958 set ambitious goals without the means to meet them. A vicious cycle ensued; exaggerated production reports from below emboldened the higher-ups to set even loftier targets. Newspaper headlines boasted of rice farms yielding 800,000 pounds per acre. When the reported abundance could not actually be delivered, the government accused peasants of hoarding grain. House-to-house searches followed, and any resistance was put down with violence.

All in the name of equality and material abundance, of course.

UPDATE: Reader Alan Nott writes: “I just can’t resist: Thomas F*cking Friedman, call your God d*mn office…”

IS THE UNITED STATES NOW a “Center-Libertarian” Nation?

QUICK, PAY SOME GREENS TO BLOCK IT! How cheap energy from shale will reshape America’s role in the world. “US self-sufficiency in energy is likely to end American reliance on despotic Gulf regimes but biggest loser of all may be Russia.”

UPDATE: Sorry, greens — the Obama Administration is already running interference. So Putin and the Saudis are safe for the moment.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on Strength Training Equipment.

Also, J-Buds noise-reducing earbuds, $5.99.

Also, today only: Up to 60% Off Select Transcend Memory and Storage. Memory chips, external hard drives, and thumb drives. You can never have too much memory! I forget who said that . . .

JAMES TARANTO: Get ready for higher taxes and no spending reform. Remember when Obama promised us “net spending cuts” that would halve the deficit by the end of his term? I guess that statement hit its expiration date.

TIME TO ADD BUREAUCRACY TO SAUSAGES AND LAWS AMONG THINGS YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE BEING MADE: Thanks to The Washington Examiner’s Watchdog special reporting team, which aimed a burst of sunlight at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Out popped a former soap opera starlet and beauty queen on the public payroll, friends helping friends get jobs, employees who rarely do any work, hiring senior executives without even pro forma background checks, and a spend-it-all-now-or-lose-it culture. And that’s just for starters! Go here, here and here.

J.P. FREIRE:

Part of why I’ve been holding back from the conversation about What The Republican Party Can Do Better Next Time is limited data. I mean, sure, we now have all the exit poll information, the voter data, and most of the results, but that can only be so helpful. I guess if Republicans want to beat Barack Obama again in 2012, they have all the information they need. But we don’t have a time machine, so we can’t change history. #Forward, or whatever. . . .

Someone should tell that to Mitt Romney, whose comments on a donor call are at odds with the facts of the election. There are a lot of reasons the GOP lost big this cycle, but no, one of them is not the scale of Democratic handouts. But let’s take care of one thing before I go on.

The media is jumping all over Romney’s comment for the wrong reason: Not because it’s simply wrong and the data show that it’s wrong, but because it has that tinge of classic Republican racism and the war on the middle class. That’s a real shame, because it demonstrates how journalists can be a bunch of polyannas about the reality of patronage politics in our government. Why did Andy Stern, former head of the SEIU, visit the White House so frequently leading up to the passage of Obamacare? Why are we talking about returning to earmarks in Congress? Because interest groups exist. If you think Democrats pushed free contraception into a presidential race that was clearly about the economy because It Was The Right Thing To Do, maybe you’ll be interested in some cattle futures I’m selling. So long as journalists fail to recognize how Democrats (and Republicans) dole out goodies when in power, they will fail to properly restrain government excess.

Did women turn out for Obama because of free contraceptives? Of course not. Did they turn out because of Romney’s refusal to do more outreach with women than simply deploying his wife? Yeah.

In nearly every instance in which Democrats were out there, trying to make inroads of voters, the Romney campaign was intent on this really clever strategy that involved ignoring those voters.

Well, everyone said to focus on the economy. But it turns out he should have been focusing on voters’ personal economies. Perhaps he should have focused more on rising prices.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is hiring.

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING SUGAR BAG: Manufacturers are hiding food price increases by shrinking the size of the packages. Why that’s bad for consumers, and the economy.

PATRICK REDDY: Identity Politics: Yes, Racial Divides Gave Obama the Win. Well, racial division is key to the Dems’ strategy.

NEW YORK TIMES See No Evil CEO Mark Thompson’s Veil of Ignorance Continues To Unravel. “The NY Times stuck with embattled former BBC chief Mark Thompson based on his assurances that despite thirty-three years at the BBC including eight at the helm he had never heard a whisper about BBC star Jimmy Savile’s pedophilia. Now the Times has documentation that his ignorance was not as complete as he had claimed.”

HOUSE GOP to retain earmark ban.

THE HILL: House Dem leaders avoid specifying tax rates for top earners. “They demand that the top rate be raised in the name of deficit reduction but they are avoiding being specific as to the precise level. Although President Obama and other top Democrats have vowed for two years to allow rates on the highest earners to jump back to Clinton-era levels at year’s end, and some Senate Democrats remain focused on that goal, House Democratic leaders now say the specific rate is less important than the effect of a larger budget package on the economy and revenue creation.” I wonder if they’re starting to hear from their wealthier blue-state constituents.

But still: Repeal The Hollywood Tax Cuts! It’s time for Hollywood to pay its fair share.

FOR THE RECORD: Gov. Jindal’s letter rejecting Obamacare implementation.

AND YET FILMMAKER NAKOULA IS STILL IN JAIL: CNN: Petraeus To Testify He Knew Libya Was Terrorism ‘Almost Immediately.’

Related: Members of Congress shown drone footage of attack in Benghazi. “Chairman Dianne Feinstein revealed that the video included footage of the attack from a Predator Drone.”

ED MORRISSEY: Obama’s “Fairness” Tax is Political, Not Fiscal.

WHAT THE AMERICAN LEFT HAS COME TO: Decrying The Prospect Of Cheaper Beer.

TEN USEFUL SMARTPHONE APPS for the self-employed.

BYLINED DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES: To Protect Obama From Libya, Media Turns McCain Into Captain Ahab.

AT AMAZON, Top Deals in Cookware.

SOUNDS LIKE A DIVERSITY PROBLEM TO ME: Campaign donations from university employees went overwhelmingly to Obama. “Four of the top ten organizations whose staff donated to President Obama’s reelection campaign were universities, data released by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) reveals.”