IN LIGHT OF THE COLORADO POT-LEGALIZATION DEVELOPMENTS, let me recommend this excellent piece by Brannon Denning: One Toke Over the (State) Line: Constitutional Limits on ‘Pot Tourism’ Restrictions, which specifically addresses some Colorado restrictions.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Students’ Thesis Topics Are Hilarious, Depressing.

AS USUAL, SCAPEGOATING AN UNPOPULAR MINORITY FOR THE FAILURES OF BIG GOVERNMENT: Professor blames ‘southern white radicals’ for Obamacare debacle. Seems like this sort of statement might indicate a hostile environment toward white southern students at John Jay, one that might deny them educational opportunities.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 238.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: The Rope to Hang Them: John Podesta’s corporate donors are hoping to buy political protection.

President Obama is calling in the political cavalry, notably John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff before he became America’s most powerful unelected liberal by founding the Center for American Progress. So it’s instructive to inspect the list of corporate donors that Mr. Podesta’s think tank released last month.

Mr. Podesta founded the alternative to the Heritage Foundation in 2003, but it has long resisted disclosing its donor list. The motivation to do so now seems to be that it would be embarrassing to keep mum amid the current Democratic political campaign against businesses that give to conservative candidates or causes. All the more so with Mr. Podesta in the West Wing. . . .

Whatever the motive, the list of 58 corporate donors is revealing about the ways of the modern regulatory state. It certainly blows apart the myth that corporate America is “conservative” in any modern political sense of that word. It’s more accurate to say that Fortune FT.T +8.00% 500 CEOs think they must buy political protection from the left. So it’s no surprise to see the list is heavily weighted toward the most politicized parts of the economy.

Health insurers are there in force (eight), befitting their new role as public health utilities. That includes the insurance lobby, America’s Health Insurance Plans, whose silence amid the make-it-up-as-you-go start of the ObamaCare shows it is now essentially a business partner of the Obama Administration.

Also Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, Apple, General Electric, Google, Facebook. Keep this in mind.

SCIENCE: Concealed Carry Means Fewer Murders, Says New Study.

MANLY FACES AND AGGRESSIVE MEN. But John Kerry’s face is “cerebral?” Really?

AT AMAZON, New Year’s Deals in Sports & Fitness.

Also, up to $39.90 off on P90X3. One of my old research assistants uses this to get into shape for her annual duties as part of the chain-mail-bikini Princess Leia gang at DragonCon. I guess it works: She’s getting married.

Plus, today only: Withings Pulse Wireless Activity Tracker plus Sleep Monitoring and Heart Rate, $79.00 (20% off).

RED DAWN: DeBlasio in New York.

SHARYL ATTKISSON: Ten 2013 stories that should make news in 2014.

MICHAEL BARONE: China may face a revolution of rising expectations.

In between Qianlong and Deng, China went through tough times. The Taiping rebellion (1849-64), decades of Western domination, the Chinese revolution (1911-27), the War with Japan (1931-45) and Mao Zedong’s Communist policies (1949-76) each resulted in the deaths of millions.

The Chinese ruling party and, apparently, the Chinese people see the economic growth of the last 35 years as a restoration of China’s rightful central place in the world. And note that that period is longer than the 27 years of Mao’s rule.

American supporters of engagement with China, including the architect of the policy, Henry Kissinger, agree and have expressed the hope that an increasingly prosperous China will move toward democracy and peaceful coexistence.

Those hopes, as James Mann argued in his 2007 book The China Fantasy, have not been and seem unlikely to be realized.

Other China scholars like Arthur Waldron and Gordon Chang have predicted that China’s Communist party rulers will be swept from power. . . . Regime members, like French aristocrats, no longer believe in their own ideology but cling to power. The Chinese people have come to expect rapidly rising living standards, and may abandon the regime if it doesn’t produce.

Regime elites must be careful, like Deng in 1989, or the rulers will lose everything and chaos will be unleashed on China.

Well, let’s hope we avoid a rerun of the Taiping Rebellion.

GEORGE WILL: The Price of Political Ignorance: More Government.

A column on Ilya Somin’s book, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Federal Election Commission Vulnerable To Hacking, Inspector General Warns.

Deficient computer security at the Federal Election Commission has already led to high-level breaches and puts the agency “at high risk” of continued hacking, according to a federal Inspector General report released this month.

FEC information systems, which in the previous election tracked more than $6 billion in political spending, “have serious internal control vulnerabilities and have been penetrated at the highest levels of the agency,” according to the FEC Inspector General’s final audit for fiscal 2013.

The report, which reiterates security concerns flagged by federal auditors for several years running, identifies two specific, high-level hacking incidents. In May of last year, an adversary identified as an “Advanced Persistent Threat” compromised a commissioner’s personal user account, as well as several FEC systems, for eight months running.

During that period, the unidentified hacker had potential access to such sensitive information as details of FEC investigations; General Counsel’s reports; briefs; subpoenas, and personal identifying information.

The second intrusion took place in August of this year and involved the FEC’s public disclosure website, forcing the agency to shut down portions of the system while it investigated. While the FEC was working on remediating the August breach, “another intrusion was detected on the agency’s website in early fiscal year 2014,” according to the report.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Plenty Of Debt, No Degree.

JOHN STOSSEL ON THE COMMON CORE CONTROVERSY:

This may sound good. Often, states dumb down tests to try to “leave no child behind.” How can government evaluate teachers and reward successful schools if there isn’t a single national standard?

But when the federal government imposes a single teaching plan on 15,000 school districts across the country, that’s even more central planning, and central planning rarely works. It brings stagnation.

Education is a discovery process like any other human endeavor. We might be wrong about both how to teach and what to teach, but we won’t realize it unless we can experiment — compare and contrast the results of different approaches. Having “one plan” makes it harder to experiment and figure out what works.

Some people are terrified to hear “education” and “experiment” in the same sentence. Why take a risk with something as important as my child’s education? Pick the best education methods and teach everyone that way!

But we don’t know what the best way to educate kids is.

As American education has become more centralized, the rest of our lives have become increasingly diverse and tailored to individual needs. Every minute, thousands of entrepreneurs struggle to improve their products. Quality increases, and costs often drop.

But centrally planned K-12 education doesn’t improve. Per-student spending has tripled (governments now routinely spend $300,000 per classroom!), but test results are stagnant.

“Everyone who has children knows that they’re all different, right? They learn differently,” observed Sabrina Schaeffer of the Independent Women’s Forum on my show. “In the workplace, we’re allowing people flexibility to telecommute, to have shared jobs. In entertainment, people buy and watch what they want, when they want.” Having one inflexible model for education “is so old-fashioned.”

That’s pretty much my philosophy in my new book on education.

FUNNY, IN FALL OF 2012 AL QAEDA WAS “ON THE RUN.” Obama Faces Resurgent Al Qaeda In 2014.

IT’S LONG: The Complete List of Everything Banned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

THE TOP 10 LEGAL EDUCATION STORIES OF 2013.

CHANGE: Obama To Americans: You Don’t Deserve To Be Free. “President Obama’s Kansas speech is a remarkable document. In calling for more government controls, more taxation, more collectivism, he has two paragraphs that give the show away.”

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Obamacare delays create New Year’s confusion.

AT AMAZON, Futurama: The Complete Series, $79.49 (60% off).

Also, deals galore at the Amazon Boot Store.

SLOW LEARNERS:

What is it about Obama that makes otherwise intelligent people so dumb?

Politico has a headline for the ages up right now: “Management Experts Knock Obama.” Management “experts” are just noticing now, after five years, that Obama’s lack of experience is significant. Maybe these “experts” aren’t so expert.

Maybe those “otherwise intelligent” people aren’t so otherwise intelligent.

THE END OF INCANDESCENT LIGHTBULBS — NOT ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION, BUT CORPORATE CRONYISM:

Competitive markets with low costs of entry have a characteristic that consumers love and businesses lament: very low profit margins. GE, Philips and Sylvania dominated the U.S. market in incandescents, but they couldn’t convert that dominance into price hikes. Because of light bulb’s low material and manufacturing costs, any big climb in prices would have invited new competitors to undercut the giants — and that new competitor would probably have won a distribution deal with Wal-Mart.

So, simply the threat of competition kept profit margins low on the traditional light bulb — that’s the magic of capitalism. GE and Sylvania searched for higher profits by improving the bulb — think of the GE Soft White bulb. These companies, with their giant research budgets, made advances with halogen, LED and fluorescent technologies, and even high-efficiency incandescents. They sold these bulbs at a much higher prices — but they couldn’t get many customers to buy them for those high prices. That’s the hard part about capitalism — consumers, not manufacturers, get to demand what something is worth.

Capitalism ruining their party, the bulb-makers turned to government. Philips teamed up with NRDC. GE leaned on its huge lobbying army — the largest in the nation — and soon they were able to ban the low-profit-margin bulbs. . . .

Technologies often run the course from breakthrough innovation to obsolete. Think of the 8-track, the Model T or Kodachrome film. But the market didn’t kill the traditional light bulb. Government did it, at the request of big business.

That’s usually how these things work. Big business is not the same as capitalism or free markets.

But if you want to fight the power, there’s still time to stock up.

THEY SHOULD ALL BE CARRYING PITCHFORKS: ‘Looks Like Weimar Germany’: The Viral Photo Out of Connecticut That’s Giving Some Gun Owners Chills.