DORIS LESSING HAS DIED. Let me again call attention to this column of hers on political correctness and communism, and this piece on why feminism should stop attacking men, which was linked back in the very earliest days of InstaPundit.

Also, this scathing piece on Robert Mugabe. “Mugabe is now widely execrated, and rightly, but blame for him began late. Nothing is more astonishing than the silence about him for so many years among liberals and well-wishers—the politically correct. What crimes have been committed in the name of political correctness. A man may get away with murder, if he is black. Mugabe did, for many years.”

STUFF? THAT’S SO 20TH CENTURY. GE Gets Back Into The Stuff Business.

MORE ON Christina Romer and the Lies Of ObamaCare.

CHARLIE MARTIN: 13 Weeks: Weekend Update.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 192.

DON’T BUCK THE PARTY LINE, COMRADE: DC Insurance Commission Fired for Questioning Obamacare ‘Fix.’

ANNALS OF INEPTITUDE: Obama’s ACA “Fix” Stuns DC, Nation.

Insurance companies and commissioners aren’t the only ones getting an immense headache from this “fix.” In the White House also people are coming to grips with the huge mess created by the President’s desperate maneuver, and in the Beltway wonks are panicking. The American health and insurance system, badly flawed as it is, is as complex a web of interests and institutions as you will find. It can’t be uprooted and overturned by casual comments and presidential decrees—not without serious side effects.

This miscalculation is sadly entirely consistent with the long series of miscalculations this President has made about health care going back all the way to 2010. Obama is in trouble because he did not fully understand the interplay of forces in the American health care system, and is trying to reform it via a clumsy set of fixes, off-sets, mandates and subsidies. Imposing a new and even less well-considered decree is not going to end his troubles.

Related: The Lawlessness of the ‘Fix:’ Insurance companies would be insane to offer plans that failed to comply with the ACA. “Let’s start with the basics. The president has no power to rewrite statutes — he is bereft of dictatorial power to legitimize what Congress has made a violation of law. …Not only is a president barred from writing or rewriting laws; he is required to enforce them as Congress has written them. The only exception is when he has a good-faith reason to believe they are unconstitutional, a claim Obama can hardly make about Obamacare while crowing that the Supreme Court has upheld it. . . . He would have gotten away with it a year ago. He won’t get away with it now.”

Also: Obamacare’s Creative, Or Illegal, Rule-Making. “The administration is already too reliant on creative rule-making to make the law work, such as their decision to delay the employer mandate even though it’s pretty firmly set into law. But now they’re reaching the limits of this strategy. There is always discretion in the implementation of any law, but that discretion is not infinite. . . . That’s leaving aside the civic problems with having an administration that simply waives by fiat any rule that gets in the way of their grand designs. President Obama, who used to be so sharply critical of George W. Bush’s use of executive power, is now pioneering his own expansive views of what the president may do. The White House seems to believe that they are allowed to shinny around any rule, as long as they wrote it. I’d argue that this is exactly backward: They have an especial duty to uphold the laws that they themselves constructed, because if they don’t, why should the rest of us go along?”

Why, indeed?

SEAN TRENDE: Why Obama’s Job Approval Matters.

AT AMAZON, Holiday Deals in Home, Kitchen & Garden.

Also, shop the Movies & TV Gift Guide.

Plus, today only: 50% Off the Samsung DV150F Smart Digital Camera. With an LCD screen on the front, as well as the back, for perfect self-portraits. You get a lot of camera nowadays for $74.99.

And, also today only:Intex Raised Downy Queen Air Mattress, $35.00 (50% off). A guest bed you can store in a drawer.

FROM SUSAN SHEPARD, a profile of American Formula One racer Alexander Rossi.

TEACHABLE MOMENT: After Losing Insurance, Students At Historically Black School Rail Against ObamaCare.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Moral Decline Of Oprah.

Multi-billionaire Oprah Winfrey, after her surreal $38,000 handbag “racism” encounter in Switzerland, has just weighed in again on race and the presidency, as yet the nth way of hyping her new film: “There’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he’s African American. There’s no question about that and it’s the kind of thing nobody ever says but everybody’s thinking it.”

Nobody ever says? Has she read a newspaper columnist or turned on MSNBC lately?

Aside from her historical ignorance, Oprah Winfrey has increasingly turned to the race card to explain the president’s plummeting polls. In her race-obsessed world, Syria, Benghazi, the NSA, IRS, AP, and ACA messes do not explain why a reelected president crashes from a recent 60 percent approval rating to less than 40 percent in less than a year.

Instead, in Oprah’s no-win, racialist world, to the degree that Obama is popular, Americans are considered for the time being as not racist; to the degree that he is not, the country suddenly is collectively under suspicion (e.g., “everybody’s thinking it”).

That Obama might be utterly inexperienced in the manner of Jimmy Carter, less than veracious in the manner of the impeached Bill Clinton, or suffering the same second-term blues of Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra or popularity crash of George W. Bush after Katrina simply cannot for Oprah be true of an African-American president, who for some reason must not suffer the same fate and treatment as almost all who have held the highest office.

In the words of Tony Katz: “It’s not his race. It’s that he’s awful.” To Oprah, however, it’s all about his race. That’s why she supported him in 2008, and it’s why she’s smearing his opposition now: Racial loyalty trumps all. Her fans figured this out in 2008, of course, which is why she’s a comparative nobody now.

OBAMACARE: The Vasa Of Our Time. “Vasa was a Swedish warship launched in 1628 — only to sink after sailing less than a mile. It is so apt!”

BYRON YORK: Four years ago, GOP showed exactly what was false about Obama’s keep-your-coverage promise.

It is now painfully evident to millions of Americans that President Obama’s promise that they could keep their current health coverage under Obamacare wasn’t true. But what has received less attention in the current uproar is that back in 2009, when Obamacare was under debate and Obama was making the promise, some Republicans saw precisely what was wrong with it, and said so. And when those Republicans challenged the White House, the White House had nothing to say.

Go back to June 23, 2009. The House Education and Labor Committee, chaired by Democratic Rep. George Miller, held a hearing on a draft of Obamacare. Christina Romer, then chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, testified. Among the Republicans who questioned Romer was Rep. Tom Price, who is also a doctor. Price pressed Romer to cite a basis for the president’s promise, and in the process predicted much of what would happen more than four years later, in late 2013. Obama’s promise fell apart right there in the hearing room.

Follow the exchange. But note that the press continued to treat Obama’s promise as true — and the critics as lying racists — until, oh, about last week or so.

Related: 27 Democratic senators who promised you could keep your health coverage.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Earmark Ban Hits Lobbyists’ Influence on Spending Bills.

If the lobbying world of K Street was as powerful as its public image, earmarks would be back in full force in Congress — or, maybe, they never would have gone away.

The modern lobbying business was built largely on helping clients secure member- directed pots of money in annual appropriations bills. And many of the firms that pioneered the practice have taken a serious hit since lawmakers banned earmarks in 2010.

But don’t expect K Street to mount a high-profile, big-dollar campaign to bring them back. Instead, in private meetings with members of Congress and their aides, lobbyists say they offer a pitch for how earmarks could help lawmakers, who are often frustrated that they can’t direct money to their districts, wrest more control of federal dollars.

And those making the case for earmarks aren’t just the ones whose paychecks depended on appropriations work.

Uh huh. Eternal vigilance, etc. But that they’re still trying to bring earmarks back means that, well. . .

ANNALS OF THE .0001 PERCENT: Geithner heading to Wall Street firm. I hope he’s not doing anything related to taxation.

TAKING ON OBAMACARE IN COURT: “When defenders of the IRS say that Jonathan Adler and I have identified a ‘semantic oversight’ in the law, what they mean is that the statute is clear and does not support their position.”

ED DRISCOLL: Turn the Beat Around: A Reformed Disco Hater Looks Back at Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: ObamaCare “Fix” Is An Attempt At Spaying Constitution.

HOPE AND CHANGE: ObamaCare Fiasco Has Republicans Feeling Good About The Future.

THE INSTAWIFE’S Men On Strike gets a nice review from Rick McGinnis.

MORE COOL TOYS: Besides the Trebuchet I mentioned earlier, you can also get this catapult, and this desktop ballista.

Bundle these with a copy of Backyard Ballistics and you’ve got a good present for the right kind of kid.

THIS IS COOL: Hybrid Machine Combines Milling and Additive Manufacturing. (Via David Kirkham, who writes: “I see LOTS of possibilities!”)

SORRY, BUT IF YOU’RE SERIOUSLY WORRIED ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING AND CARBON EMISSIONS, YOU CAN’T ALSO BE ANTI-NUCLEAR. “Nuclear reactors do one thing no other mainstream source of electricity can boast: they generate large blocks of power without producing carbon dioxide in the process.”

Plus this: “The liquid-fluoride thorium reactor, developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee during the late 1960s, ran successfully for five years before being axed by the Nixon administration. The reason for its cancellation: it produced too little plutonium for making nuclear weapons. Today, that would be seen as a distinct advantage. Without the Cold War, the thorium reactor might well have been the power plant of choice for utilities everywhere.”