REMINDER: In 2009, President Obama “Joked” About Having The IRS Audit His Enemies.

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THIS NEW YORK TIMES PIECE ON THE OBAMACARE DEBACLE — WHICH IS CLEARLY MEANT TO BE SYMPATHETIC — REVEALS AN INEPT AND OUT-OF-TOUCH WHITE HOUSE. Key bit: “The story of how the administration confronted one of the most perilous moments in Mr. Obama’s presidency — drawn from documents and from interviews with dozens of administration officials, lawmakers, insurance executives and tech experts working inside the HealthCare.gov ‘war room’ — reveals an insular White House that did not initially appreciate the magnitude of its self-inflicted wounds, and sought help from trusted insiders as it scrambled to protect Mr. Obama’s image.”

Initially? According to the story it took them a month to start taking the problem seriously.

END-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s Maduro accuses 99 percent of businesses of “price gouging,” vows to punish more “capitalist parasites.”

SHOCKER: That Viral “Poverty Thoughts” Essay Is Totally Ridiculous.

You see, Linda Walther Tirado, or “KillerMartinis,” as she’s known on her Kinja screen name, wrote this brain-grating essay, and it’s all about being subjected to the pitfalls of poverty. Linda’s not actually poor, though, nor was she raised in what most would describe as poverty. Unless you consider a boarding school education as a marker for poverty, anyway.

The inferences on what it’s like to be poor — from the roach-infested living quarters to the lack of wholesome food — would almost be laughable, if they weren’t such freakin’ gross stereotypes written by a person who has never experienced true poverty. That little fact takes it from laughable to infuriating.

What’s also infuriating is that Linda — who is panhandling for $100,000 worth of donations on GoFundMe — wrote this piece, and the comments and rebuttals to it, while masquerading as a “poor person,” but has now decided to clean up the mess by copping to her past as a person from a much different background.

It’s Potemkin villages all the way down. But hey, there’s good money in telling lefties what they want to hear.

THE WAGES OF “QUANTITATIVE EASING:” Central bank money-printing has impoverished a generation of older, small savers.

Intergenerational unfairness is one of those intellectually sloppy complaints that nevertheless commands a strong following among a certain cadre of privileged young metropolitan types. It even has its own think tank – the grandly named Intergenerational Foundation. . . .

Yet for those who continue to insist that the baby boomers have had it cushy, consider the following. Say you have done the right thing throughout your working life, and saved when means allowed. . . .

One reason for these now painfully low annuity rates is rising life expectancy. Yet the bigger explanation is officially sanctioned, ultra-low interest rates. Central bank money-printing may or may not have saved Western economies from ruin in the aftermath of the financial crisis, but it has also disfranchised a generation of older, small-time savers.

Just as the main demographic bulge of post-war retirees come to buy their pensions, they find themselves – thanks in part to these interventions – confronted by the lowest rates of return in history.

A recent report by the management consultants McKinsey tried to put hard numbers on the consequences. Their findings were shocking. Since 2007, the world’s four most influential central banks have injected more than $4.7 trillion of new money into the world economy.

The effect has been to help drive both short- and long-term interest rates to record lows. The chief beneficiaries, as you might expect, are governments with big deficits. In the UK alone, ultra-low interest rates are reckoned to have saved the Government some $120 billion since the start of the crisis.

Highly indebted households will also have derived a major benefit. Without these interventions, many would be facing foreclosure. What tends to be forgotten, however, is that most households are net savers, not debtors. On the McKinsey figures, households as a whole have lost out to the tune of $110 billion – a massive transfer of income from people to government, amounting to nearly half of what the Government collected in income tax last year.

It’s financial repression. And it’s produced a Senior Squeeze that, in this country at least, would be getting a lot more media attention under a Republican administration.

SHADES OF WHAT P.J. O’ROURKE SAYS, BELOW: Nearly Half Of All Taxpayers Are Over 45.

P.J. O’ROURKE: “Whenever anything happens anywhere, somebody over 50 signs the bill for it.”

His new book is The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault) (And I’ll Never Do It Again).

WHEN I SEE ONE OF THESE THINGS NOW, MY PRESUMPTION IS THAT IT’S A FAKE: Shocking discovery in hoax bias incident at Vassar College.

Reports of bias incidents at Vassar College that involved hateful messages left on students’ doors were actually elaborate hoaxes — and the perpetrator is none other than the student member of the Bias Incident Response Team, The Daily Caller has learned.

This fall semester at the liberal arts college in New York saw a curiously high number of bias incident reports. On Nov. 14, the college sent a mass email to students advising them that Bias Incident Response Team (BIRT) had received at least six reports in the last few months of hateful and insensitive messages being scrawled and spray painted on student residences. Messages included “Avoid Being Bitches,” “Fuck Niggers,” and most prominently, “Hey Tranny. Know Your Place.” . . .

Five days after the email was sent, Vassar President Catharine Hill sent a follow-up email announcing that the bias incidents were hoaxes perpetrated by two students. The students wrote the vile messages and then filed the reports themselves, claiming to be the victims of unknown haters.

Well, if you wait around for real hate incidents of this time, you might wait a long time. Then people might wonder if they even need a Bias Incident Response Team.

MARK STEYN ON THOSE SUSPICIOUS IRS AUDITS: Dissent Is The Highest Form Of Tax Bracket.

A couple of weeks back, cancer patient Bill Elliot, in a defiant appearance on Fox News, discussed the cancelation of his insurance and what he intended to do about it. He’s now being audited.

Insurance agent C Steven Tucker, who quaintly insists that the whimsies of the hyper-regulatory bureaucracy do not trump your legal rights, saw the interview and reached out to Mr Elliot to help him. And he’s now being audited.

As the Instapundit likes to remind us, Barack Obama has “joked” publicly about siccing the IRS on his enemies. With all this coincidence about, we should be grateful the President is not (yet) doing prison-rape gags.

Obama’s a putz, and the people at the IRS who are implementing this should have their names, and their boss’s names, and their grandbosses’ names publicized.

THE NEXT DETROIT? WaPo: Puerto Rico, with at least $70 billion in debt, confronts a rising economic misery.

A THANKSGIVING LEG OF LAMB REPORT FROM HERSCHEL SMITH: “Followed your recipe. Everyone loved it. Done on the outside (like I like it), and very rare on the inside (like some of my clan like it). It’s very hard to get it to 140 degrees F for a large piece of meat.” Yeah, I used to rely on a meat thermometer, but now I just slice into it to check when it seems about time. Crude, but effective.

Here’s the recipe. Also, for the turkey this year, I sprinkled the surface with curry. That worked out well.

SARAH HOYT: Measuring Up Outlets For Indie Publishing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: American Lawyer: ‘White Flight’ Hits Nation’s Law Schools.

GOALPOST-MOVING AT HEALTHCARE.GOV: If you can set the goal at the point of seeing how far you’ve gotten when the deadline arrives, doesn’t that make the whole notion of a deadline pretty much a scam?

MY EARLIER POST ON CHEAP BOURBONS PRODUCED THIS FROM ROGER SIMON:

So you might want to share “Sazeracs a la Simon” with your readers. This is an absolute killer drink. If you have more than two you will be in the ICU and it’s somewhat more pricey than the cheap bourbon… but, hey, it’s the holidays.

4 parts Rittenhouse rye (best rye around and for a mid-range price $25.99 – all prices BevMo)

1 part Kubler Absinthe (good, clear absinthe for $44.99…but you won’t need much. Some recipes call for only swirling it, but I say go the whole Van Gogh, hence one part… I mean-what do you need two ears for anyway?……Nevertheless, if you find this bottle going down quickly, see a doctor fast)

Dash of Angostura bitters – but if you don’t have, no one will notice

Shake in a Martini shaker, Mr. Bond, and pour into a glass with ice and a tiny bit of sugar. Extra points, if you have one of those block ice things.

Enjoy, but make sure you have a designated driver. Secret of this drink: the Rittenhouse is 100 proof and the Kubler is 106.

As you can tell, I’ve already had one myself. Second one: no email.

Celebrate!

GORGEOUS COLOR PHOTOS from World War II.

CAR AND DRIVER: 2014’s Best Cars.

FLASHBACK: Four Pony Cars, Two Different Eras.

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READER APP PLUG: Reader Glenn Howes writes: “I notice that sometimes you’ll publicize a reader’s book or something similar. Well, just today, I published a free children’s app, Frog Draw, which I’m quite proud of and put everything I’ve learned in 20 years of being a pro coder into. It’s aimed at 6-8 year olds and is a shape drawing app that amongst many other features allows you to put funny hats on people, although I hope children will find more creative uses for it.”

CHARLOTTE ALLEN: Silicon Chasm: The class divide on America’s cutting edge. “You can laud this underbelly barrio as vibrant immigrant culture or you can decry it as an instant-slum product of untrammeled illegal border-crossing, but it represents an important fact on the ground: These are the people who earn their livings tending to the needs of the high-tech ‘creative class’ that has made Silicon Valley famous. I could see them on Atherton Avenue, the amanuensis class heading up from Menlo Park in their wee panel trucks and Dodge minivans and their Ford flatbeds fitted out with racks for garden tools among the Bentleys, BMWs, Audis, and Lexuses that are the standard Atherton vehicles. . . . Master and servant. Cornucopian wealth for a few tech oligarchs plus relatively steady but relatively low-paying work for their lucky retainers. No middle class, unless the top 5 percent U.S. income bracket counts as middle class. Silicon Valley is a tableau vivant of what many economists and professional futurologists say is the coming fate of America itself, a fate to which Americans, if they can’t embrace it as some futurologists hope, should at least resign themselves.” Hopey-Changey!

This might profitably be read alongside Joel Kotkin’s Entrepreneurs Turn Oligarchs.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Cheap Bourbons, Ranked. Doug Weinstein was always a fan of Evan Williams in college, but he drank his bourbon with Coke. I always sprung for Jack Black, or Old Weller.

YOU SURE ABOUT THAT, CHAMP? Obama: People Do Think I’m Trustworthy.

PERSONALLY, I FAVOR N.C. WYETH: Kitsch or Kitchen Sink?: Illustrating Conservatism with Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Kinkade. I have Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company, with N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations. Interestingly, this was a huge bestseller in its day — rivaling Ben Hur — but is barely remembered today. Probably too politically incorrect and manly or something.