SO SHOULD I TAG THIS “21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS,” OR “HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE?”

I am a sophomore at a prestigious private college. My sister, an alumna of the college, was able to avoid paying rent by living with a very nice family and providing light child care and housework. I was lucky enough to be employed by the same family, making meals and cleaning, but I wasn’t sure how much the family would need me now that their youngest is joining the armed forces. The wife travels a lot on business, and there has been tension between the two, but they recently offered me a very interesting proposition: I could stay on as an emotional and sexual companion for the husband when the wife is away! The man is 20 years my senior, and my first initial response was to say no, but now that the shock has worn off, I’m actually intrigued by the idea. I’ve always been attracted to him, and I’m sure that was clear to them. I know other girls who work at strip clubs, and this is better than having risky sex with college men. It would also be a lot cheaper than paying for a room at college. Is it wrong for me to consider this arrangement?

What do you think?

SCIENCE: Study: Men With Attractive Wives More Satisfied In Marriage. “A study of more than 450 newlywed couples over the course of four years found that men with physically attractive wives remained much more satisfied in their marriage than men who did not. However, the attractiveness of a woman’s husband played no part in the satisfaction that women felt from their marriage.” But more attractive women were also happier with their marriages: “Men were found to be more ‘sensitive’ to women’s attractiveness, and lead researcher James McNulty of the University of Tennessee suggested that women tended to mirror the level of support they were receiving from their husbands.”

BLOOMBERG: Public Approval of ObamaCare Hits New Low.

THE NEW CRITERION: Audio from a symposium on The Kennedy Phenomenon.

“THE MAN WHO USED TO WALK ON WATER:” not the Economist cover Obama wants to see.

BLOOMBERG: Obama Plunges in Investor Poll as Stocks Make New Highs.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Politicization Of Everything.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 197.

INSTAVISION: Now on YouTube, my interview with Avik Roy about his new book, How Medicaid Fails The Poor.

STILL TRYING TO TURN THE PAGE: Arne Duncan Apologizes — Again — For His “White Suburban Moms” Crack.

ROGER SIMON: Fitness for Seniors (Me).

THE GREAT DISRUPTION COMES TO AUTO DEALERS:

It turns out that building and selling cars is a bit more complicated than doing the same with computers. Oh, and auto dealers are extremely well connected in Congress and especially in state legislatures; they are often among the richest people in a legislator’s district, which has translated, over the years, into protective franchise laws that make it very hard for automakers to prune their dealer networks.

And yet, the dream of low, no-haggle pricing seems to be moving closer. The Internet didn’t get rid of the dealers, but it forced them to become much more competitive. Pricing is much more transparent, thanks to a wealth of Web-based information, and because dealers are now advertising. Lower your price a bit, and you’ll poach customers who in the old days might not have thought to check a dealer an hour and a half away when they had to make inquiries by phone. But they’ll happily drive that far to save a few hundred dollars.

The result, reports the Wall Street Journal, is falling profits for dealers, with some moving toward no-haggle pricing.

Car-buying is, for most people, a stressful and unpleasant experience, where they worry if they got taken when they drive off. Making it more pleasant would result in more car sales, and less interest in alternative ways of buying.

OBAMACARE: Now It’s The Doc Shock. “So far, coverage about the Affordable Care Act has focused on rate shock and policy cancellations. But the next wave of bad news is coming, and it could wind up being even more fatal to public support for the law. Supporters of Obamacare can fight back against the rate shock stories by pointing to examples of people who have gotten cheaper premiums through the ACA. But in many cases, the ACA’s cheaper premiums are the result of restricting provider networks. It’s a phenomenon pundits are calling doc shock, and WaPo reports it’s already effecting the insurance agency.”

AT AMAZON, Hot New Toy Releases.

Plus, save up to 50% on His-and-Her gifts from Phillips.

Also, today only: Up to 60% Off Transcend Flash Memory, Flash Drives, and Hard Drives.

Plus, also today only: 45% Off Energizer Max Alkaline Batteries. Stock up!

REASON TV: Daisy Ad 2013: Senate Filibuster Nuclear Option Remix.

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE FOLKS AT F.I.R.E.: ‘Blueprint’ No More? Feds Back Away from New Campus Speech Restrictions.

It’s a little earlier than I usually tout end-of-year charitable donations, but you could do a lot worse than donating to F.I.R.E.

JAMES TARANTO: War on What? It is the left that has supplanted expertise with ideology.

A left-liberal magazine’s publication of an article titled “The Republican War on Competence” would have seemed unremarkable at just about any point in this columnist’s adult lifetime. But this article, by Jeff Shesol for The New Yorker, was published yesterday–with a Democrat in the White House presiding for the 51st day over the most stunning display of governmental incompetence since Prohibition, maybe since Nero. In that context, it’s like a dispatch from a different planet. . . .

Obama was effective, especially by contrast with McCain, at projecting an image of competence. But there was never any reason to think he possessed the real thing.

Obama had spent most of his career as a state senator; he also briefly worked as a lawyer and a U.S. senator. He wrote a memoir that was reputed to have some literary merit and a second one that was not. At the convention where he was nominated in 2008, his biggest selling point was that he had worked as a “community organizer.” As we noted at the time, Obama was not a competent community organizer, if such a thing is even possible.

Now of course Obama is not incompetent at everything. Simply by being elected president–an office to which many politicians aspire but few come close to reaching–he proved himself highly competent at certain political tasks, including, as we have already acknowledged, the task of projecting an image of competence.

Obama succeeded where Dukakis failed for two reasons: first, as Shesol suggests, because unlike in 1988 the public viewed both the incumbent Republican president and the GOP nominee to succeed him as deficient in competence; but second, because Obama was far better at masking his ideological vulnerability.

That’s not because Obama was less extreme than Dukakis (except on a few issues, such as capital punishment). Rather, he was less vulnerable to attack because he was better defended, and what defended him was his ideological confidence. But that confidence is of a piece with his incompetence at leadership and governance. Obama is a perfect product of the leftist higher-education monoculture of the 1980s.

Indeed.

TED CRUZ: “Nuclear Option” Is About Packing Courts With Judges Who’ll Uphold ObamaCare Regs.

FIRST AMENDMENT UPDATE: Washington Times sues Homeland over seizure of reporter’s notes: Newspaper accuses feds of unlawful search and seizure.

MICHAEL S. GREVE: America’s Real Problem: Corruption Under Color Of Law.

REPUBLICANS still playing catch-up in campaign technology.

IT’S THE YEAR ONE, WITH NOTHING BUT GLORIOUS TOMORROWS: Victor Davis Hanson: Obamacare-Speak: The Obama administration is altering its language like there’s no tomorrow.

C. BRADLEY THOMPSON: Education In A Free Society. “The present essay calls for the complete separation of school and state, indicates what a fully free market in education would look like, and explains why such a market would provide high-quality education for all children.”

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: The Obama Administration Plans To Keep Us in Afghanistan: Another campaign promise dies as the U.S. government hammers out a deal to keep troops in a war-torn country.