MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Forget “Income Inequality” — Obama Can’t Solve The Jobs Problem.

CAREER DAMAGE: Interns Who Sued Now Can’t Find Jobs. “Former Hearst intern Diana Wang says her lawsuit over an unpaid internship at Bazaar has made it difficult to find a full-time job.” Who could have seen that coming?

MICKEY KAUS NOT SO IMPRESSED WITH OBAMA’S INEQUALITY SQUIRREL:

You have to admire President Obama for choosing to give a speech declaring that the fight against “growing inequality”–specifically economic inequality–is “the defining challenge of our time” and the “focus” of “all our efforts”–given that:

a. Five years into his presidency he so far hasn’t done anything to stop growing income inequality–the problem has gotten worse on his watch.

b. He doesn’t have any proposals (“It’s time to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act”) that come close to solving the problem as he defines it.

c. His one big previous initiative to reduce inequality–the Affordable Care Act–may now be hopelessly screwed up due to his own inattention and non-competence.

d. His remaining big domestic initiative–”comprehensive” immigration reform–would almost certainly make inequality worse by vastly increasing the number of unskilled workers bidding down wages at the bottom of the income scale, with the profits from the cheap labor going to business owners at the top.

Well, but remember, the main point of all of this was just to give the (friendly) press an excuse to talk about something other than the ObamaCare debacle. And to give the unfriendly press an easy pinata to whack at, so that they, too, will talk less about the ObamaCare debacle.

And on that note, here’s Stephen Green on “Moving At The Speed Of Government.”

WHAT YOUR TOILET PAPER says about you.

PROBABLY BECAUSE THEY DON’T KILL PEOPLE AND STUFF: Rand Paul Isn’t Afraid of Amazon Drones.

CHANGE: FDA Approves Pill To Treat Hepatitis C.

DOUBLE STANDARDS: “Juan Williams thinks he’s defending Obamacare by observing that it has no effect on him and the other members of the Sunday talk show pundit panel. This is the sort of thing that a Republican would be pilloried for saying. . . . Williams shouldn’t get away with that callousness. Where’s the empathy?” You demonstrate “empathy” by being a Democrat, especially a minority Democrat. As a Republican, you can only demonstrate “empathy” by agreeing with Democrats’ demands, preferably accompanying that agreement with an apology for your own existence.

THE INSTA-WIFE’S BOOK, Men On Strike, is $3.99 on Kindle today.

GAY RIGHTS AND DEMOCRACY: Obama and Congress should boycott the Winter Olympics. I agree. Although, to be fair, I think we should boycott the corrupt and stupid Olympics all the time.

8 HOME UPGRADES YOU’LL WISH YOU’D installed sooner. I have the instant hot-water dispenser, and it rules. Thinking of installing the Nest thermostat.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: SpaceX to build spacecraft parts with motion tech and 3D printers.

ACCOUNTABILITY: Jury Quickly Convicts Woman In False Rape Trial.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: How the FTC’s Hertz Antitrust Fix Went Flat. With a nice quote from my UT Law colleague, Maurice Stucke. I doubt, however, that we’ll see much “soul-searching” at either Justice or the FTC.

JONAH GOLDBERG: The Minimum Wage And The Rise Of The Machines.

MILTON WOLF: The President’s Other ObamaCare Lies: Millions losing their health insurance is just the beginning. “In 2010, the year Obamacare was signed into law, I wrote ‘Obamacare’s Unkeepable Promises’ in The Washington Times. These false promises were easily predictable and are finally now being exposed.”

He’s running for Senate in Kansas.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 214.

HERE IN THE U.S. THEY JUST THREATEN NOT TO INVITE REPORTERS TO THE WHITE HOUSE CHRISTMAS PARTY. SAME RESULT, THOUGH. China’s Government Is Scaring Foreign Journalists Into Censoring Themselves.

UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

IT’S NOT JUST THE NSA SPYING ON YOUR CELLPHONE.

The National Security Agency isn’t the only government entity secretly collecting data from people’s cellphones. Local police are increasingly scooping it up, too.

Armed with new technologies, including mobile devices that tap into cellphone data in real time, dozens of local and state police agencies are capturing information about thousands of cellphone users at a time, whether they are targets of an investigation or not, according to public records obtained by USA TODAY and Gannett newspapers and TV stations. . . . At least 25 police departments own a Stingray, a suitcase-size device that costs as much as $400,000 and acts as a fake cell tower. The system, typically installed in a vehicle so it can be moved into any neighborhood, tricks all nearby phones into connecting to it and feeding data to police. In some states, the devices are available to any local police department via state surveillance units. The federal government funds most of the purchases, via anti-terror grants. . . . In most states, police can get many kinds of cellphone data without obtaining a warrant, which they’d need to search someone’s house or car. Privacy advocates, legislators and courts are debating the legal standards with increasing intensity as technology — and the amount of sensitive information people entrust to their devices — evolves.

We really need some sort of national debate on this. The courts have been pretty supine.

VIDEO: Augustus Gladstone Speaks – a teaser for Boing Boing’s first movie.

CREEPY UNCLE SAM: FBI can turn on your Web cam, and you’d never know it. As I’ve said before, hardware on-off switches for cameras and microphones may come back into style. Plus this: “The FBI can also burrow into a suspect’s computer and download files, photographs and stored e-mails.” If they can do that, of course, they can also plant evidence without a trace. . . .

NEW STUFF TO BROWSE: At Amazon, Top Holiday Deals Galore!

Plus, up to 35% off on Leatherman Hand Tools.

Also, today only: 20% off on Kindle, Kindle Fire, and Kindle Fire HDX. That’s a really good deal, whether you go with the “Mayday” button or not.

And, also today only: Panasonic Lumix ZS20 Digital Camera (Black), $172.00 (51% off). As InstaPundit readers know, I’ve been a big fan of the Lumix line for some time.

BRAD SMITH: The Latest IRS Power Grab.

WHEN IS INEQUALITY HARMFUL? When It’s Caused By Cronyism.

In other words, is it a bad thing for a country to have some really rich people? Again, it depends on how they got rich.

Sutirtha Bagchi of the University of Michigan’s business school and Jan Svejnar of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs studied how inequality correlates with economic growth. In general, more inequality meant slower growth, and less inequality meant faster growth.

But in many countries, over various time periods, growing inequality had no effect on economic growth. The new study suggests that an increase in inequality hurt the economy when the rich were getting rich through political connections.

That is, inequality hurts the economy when “a large share of the national wealth is held by a small number of politically connected families,” as the authors put it. . . . When a country’s wealthiest people got their wealth as Pangestu and Fridman did, inequality places a drag on the economy. When a country’s wealthiest got wealthy through market means, the resulting inequality has no negative effect on economic growth.

This jibes with what we know about free markets. If people can get rich by providing valuable things at good prices, then society will get more valuable things at good prices—and people across the income spectrum benefit. But if people get rich by pocketing subsidies and using the state to crush competitors, then they gained their wealth at the expense of everyone else.

Uh oh.

OUT FROM RICHARD EPSTEIN: The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government.