WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Our President The WASP. “President Obama’s vision of a strong central government leading the people along the paths of truth and righteousness has ‘New England’ stamped all over it. Puritan Boston believed in a powerful government whose duty was to promote moral behavior and punish the immoral; by 1800 many of the Puritan descendants were turning Unitarian and modernist, but while they lost their love of Christian doctrine they never abandoned their faith in the Godly Commonwealth and the duty of the virtuous to make the rest of the world behave.”

To be fair, using drones to do so was Obama’s contribution.

TOM BLUMER ON THE DEATH OF JOURNALISM, and its possible resurrection in January of 2013. “What Peters told readers, in essence, is that White House officials, the Obama administration in general, the Obama for America campaign, the campaign of presidential challenger Mitt Romney (though the evidence Peters provided is thin and seems to relate largely to the candidate’s family), and powerful Washington politicians on Capitol Hill are dictating what the press will print concerning their nonpublic statements and remarks — and that the press is, for the most part, acquiescing with little if any objection. . . . If the Times, with what remaining power and influence it has, began to document and report every instance where a sycophantic administration flunky demanded quote approval and it firmly refused, I’ll bet things would change — and quickly. But either Dean Baquet doesn’t have the stones to try, or for the time being would prefer not to. Perhaps the day he and others in this sadly compromised calling will find the nerve to be journalists again will arrive on about January 21, 2013 — but only if someone other than Barack Obama begins to occupy the White House.”

HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Foreign Policy: Four years after Barack Obama’s landmark Berlin speech, the transatlantic alliance is fading fast. What went wrong? “Europeans have never cared less about what the United States thinks. Germany, traditionally among the most Atlanticist of European countries, has led the pack. Many German foreign-policy makers think it was simply a tactical error for Berlin to line up with Moscow and Beijing against Washington on Libya. But there is nothing accidental about the way Berlin has systematically refused even to engage with American concerns over German policy on the euro. During the Bush years, Europeans who were unable to influence the strategy of the White House would give a running commentary on American actions in lieu of a substantive policy. They had no influence in Washington, so they complained. But now, the tables are turned, with Obama passing continual judgment on German policy while Chancellor Angela Merkel stoically refuses to heed his advice.”

BUT OF COURSE: Billions In Tax Dollars Subsidize Junk Food Industry.

AT DRUDGE, another amusing juxtaposition: Rahm Rejects CHICK-FIL-A: ‘Not Chicago Values’… is paired with GODFATHER WELCOMES FARRAKHAN.

AT AMAZON, warehouse deals in Grocery & Personal Care.

I GUESS FOLKS ON THE RIGHT ARE GOING TO HAVE TO TAKE A CUE FROM THE LEFTIES IN TEXAS, and launch ethics attacks against researchers who publish results they don’t like. It’s a lot easier than attacking the actual research, and it should be a target-rich environment. . . .

DECLINE AND FALL: Tax Equity And The Growth In Nonpayers.

ED MORRISSEY: Obama’s Ethics Lesson: Don’t Pay Your College Loan.

BOSTON GLOBE: Stop Picking On Chick-Fil-A. “If the mayor of a conservative town tried to keep out gay-friendly Starbucks or Apple, it would be an outrage.” Except that doesn’t seem to happen, does it? What I think is funny is that if you have the same view on gay marriage that Obama had when he was elected, now you’re an enemy of humanity or something. It’s some sort of, I don’t know, Liberal Fascism or something. . . .

A DROUGHT OF LEADERSHIP: U.S. NOW IMPORTING CORN. “For the first time, U.S. agricultural companies are importing corn from Brazil — the equivalent of Saudi Arabia importing oil, as the Financial Times noted. . . . The problem here is the man-made element that is exacerbating the U.S. drought. There should be plenty of corn from U.S. reserves after recent record harvests for exports — 61 million metric tons in 2008 — were it not for the 2007 law that forces U.S. corn producers to turn ever greater percentages of U.S. corn into ethanol.”

UPDATE: Reader Robin Rhea emails:

I just noticed a snippet blaming our importation of corn on Ethanol, noting that last year was a banner year and if we weren’t pumping it into our cars we would still have plenty left for other uses. It is important to understand that Ethanol is the reason we had the banner year in the first place. It has artificially elevated the price of corn, making farmers more likely to produce it. Prior to widespread utilization of corn in ethanol $3 per bushel was a good price for corn. Now farmers routinely receive $6-7 per bushel and they have made sure that every acre available is growing corn. Land prices have skyrocketed, equipment sales to farmers are on the rise, all thanks to ethanol.

Now this might just be a gigantic wealth transfer from drivers to farmers, but the bottom line is that without corn ethanol, there would have been no banner year last year.

Just more to dry up and blow away this year. And yeah, it is a gigantic wealth transfer.

WELL, OBAMA DID BUILD THIS HIMSELF: Gallup: U.S. Business Owners Now Among Least Approving of Obama.

JAMES TARANTO MOCKS ERIC BOEHLERT OVER DAVID BROCK’S ILLEGAL-GUN-TOTING BODYGUARD.

YA THINK? Buyer’s Remorse for Pro-Israel Obama Voters.

WHY KIDS HAVE IT WORSE THAN THEIR PARENTS’ GENERATION. But I posted this on Facebook and got this reply from a 20-something friend:

So the economy/ government sucks and everyone is miserable, etc., etc. I am sorry. However, I am happier and making/ saving more money than ever before. I have a few young friends who are down on their luck and are looking for work. I suggest to them that they get their CDL and drive trucks like me (I am on the higher end of the profession with hotels and per diem, but thats the kind of work you get when you have all your teeth). My friends say “No, thats too much work.” I feel like my parents and their parents wouldn’t say that. They would have said, “Anything I can do, thanks for the tip” I don’t know, I can’t speak for everyone but sometimes I feel like the young people I meet are lazy, entitled or just give up easily…but I have met a few adults like that too, so who knows. When things got bad I didn’t sit around waiting for things to get better, I made it better for myself. OK, I’ll shut up now.

She does have a point.

JOEL KOTKIN ON WHY DOMESTIC ENERGY MATTERS:

Growth of these sectors — along with construction and manufacturing — could prove critical to our beleaguered working class. There’s not much respect among the university-dominated pundit class for people who work with their hands or have specific tangible skills. Instead they need to lower their expectations and seek, as Slate recently suggested, to find work “in the service sector supporting America’s innovative class.”

In this neo-Victorian society, the “new normal” means a society dominated by “innovative” or “creative” masters and their chosen, lucky servants. Leave your job and family in the Midwest or Nevada to become a toenail painter in Silicon Valley, San Francisco or Boston. Besides losing any sense of one’s independence, it’s hard to see how a barber or gardener can live decently, particularly with a family, in such expensive places.

This bleak reality may not inevitable, though. In many places construction employment is on the rise from its nadir in 2010. This recovery has been a nationwide phenomena but is, not surprisingly, most evident in growth states like Montana, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and Utah.

At the same time over the last two years the nation has added more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs, led by the industrial states hit hardest by the recession. Though these gains are small compared to the losses earlier in the decade, the growth is encouraging; automakers and other industries already are complaining about severe shortages of skilled labor. Maybe, after all, life as a dog-walker and hostel denizen in Palo Alto is not the best one can hope for if you can make enough to afford a nice suburban house outside Columbus or Detroit.

The pundit class may be ready to write off the American dream but many Midwest states are working to restore it.

Prosperity in flyover country? The prospect is unbearable, at least to some. Which leads Mickey Kaus to observe:

If true, this might provide an “objective’–in the Marxian sense–explanation for how Republicans convinced the white working class that Democrats were a bunch of elitists, the riddle Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas” tried to solve. Frank blames a form of false produced by skillful Republican manipulation of cultural issues (like abortion and gay marriage). But is it ‘false consciousness’ if liberals actually, in practice, favor an economy that, however prosperous, is filled with jobs where the booklearned get to boss around the unbooklearned? If what you care about is social equality, not money equality, it doesn’t seem false at all.

Plus: “Good Kotkin dig at this cluelessly economistic Slate article by Ray Fisman, who doesn’t seem to realize how creepy the future he offers to America’s unskilled workers is.”

BUT CAN IT SURVIVE OBAMACARE? Colonoscopy Screening Markedly Reduces Colorectal Cancer Incidence and Death.

LEGAL EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: 28 of the Top 50 Law Schools Are Still Accepting Applications for Entering 1L Class.

JIM TREACHER: Stop claiming Obama said what he said, just because he said it. “You might think that just because President Barack Obama stepped up to a podium and said certain words in a certain order — ‘If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that’ — and it was caught on tape, that means he really said it in real life. Nice try, wingnut! You’re a big fat liar.”

ERIC HOLDER, INTERN BULLY: Sources: Eric Holder scolded Capitol Hill intern for taking notes during lecture.

Sources have confirmed to The Daily Caller that Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday berated an intern from House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy’s office for taking notes during a lecture he gave on Capitol Hill.

According to one intern who was present, Holder had just started speaking when he noticed a male intern who was standing on the side of the packed room beginning to take notes with a pen and paper.

“Holder is talking and then he sees some kid taking notes,” the intern, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his boss, said in a phone interview. “He [Holder] asks, ‘Oh, why are you taking notes? Are you from the Washington Post?’”

“He [the intern Holder scolded] is like, ‘no,’” the intern who spoke with TheDC recalls.

“Then, he [Holder] is like, ‘what office do you work in?’” he continued. “And, the kid is like, ‘oh Kevin McCarthy.’”

He said, next, Holder responded, “’Oh, you’re one of those guys,’ kind of like jokingly but meaning he was a Republican.”

Holder’s remarks apparently had an effect on the room, the intern who spoke with TheDC said. ““Yeah, I was scared to take notes then,” he told TheDC. “No one else whipped out pens and paper to take notes.”

Next time, record it on your smartphone.

Also, they checked all the interns’ IDs to make sure they were who they said they were. Isn’t that racist?

UPDATE: Reader J.E. King writes:

Hi Professor, you know what it means that Eric Holder puckered up when the intern began taking notes and then checked the IDs of all the interns…. Breitbart was there! Or at least, that’s what the AG was afraid of.

I love that story! Breitbart instills fear beyond the grave! Breitbart lives!!!!

Heh.

IN CASE YOU’RE NOT SURE, this is how fascism works.

UPDATE: Reader John Hawkins emails: “I think Jake and Elwood had it right on this one. I hate Illinois Nazis.”

DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON with Mike Hendrix of Cold Fury?

JESSICA WAKEMAN: “Why does masculinity have to have anything to do with heroic behavior?”

It doesn’t. Er, but where are the girlfriends who threw themselves into the path of bullets to save their boyfriends?

VIOLENCE: Legendary Director Peter Bogdanovich: What If Movies Are Part of the Problem? “The fact that these tentpole movies are all violent comic book movies doesn’t speak well for our society.”

BREITBART: Fed Considers Bailing Out Obama. Not sure it can, at this point. And to try and fail would be costly.