FROM “GOING ROGUE” TO “GOING ROGAINE.”

U.N. CLIMATE CHIEF: ClimateGate emails are damaging our credibility.

A FOOLISH CONSISTENCY is the hobgoblin of little minds.

A SALE ON cookware and housewares.

JOURNALISM: CNN’s Kurtz: ‘Stunning Lapse in Judgment’ for CNN to Ignore Baucus Scandal, CBS’s Reid Sees ‘No Scandal’. No, it’s no scandal at all when a Senator nominates the unqualified mistress with whom he is having an extramarital affair to be United States attorney. Nothing to see here. Move along.

ROBERT FRANK WANTS YOU IN PRISON for daring to criticize.

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: North Dakota Democrats Want To Punish Insurance Company For Speaking Out Against Obamacare. This seems to be a consistent theme . . . .

CLARK HOYT DROPS THE BALL AGAIN, gets spanked by Ann Althouse.

SOME TV and video markdowns.

LIFE EXTENSION AND DIET: “A new study in fruit flies suggests that the life-extending properties of caloric restriction may be due not only to fewer calories in the diet, but also to just the right mix of protein building blocks, called amino acids. The study, published online December 2 in Nature, may help explain some of the health benefits of restricted-calorie diets. Coupled with other data, the new study should prompt researchers to reevaluate whether it is calorie count or the nutrient composition of a diet that is most important for regulating lifespan and health, comments Luigi Fontana of Washington University in St. Louis.”

I hope they figure this out soon. Faster, please!

J.D. JOHANNES: “I just returned from Iraq and people have started asking me what I think of the Afghan Surge. (I spent some time in Afghanistan this Summer.) The Afghan Surge can work if Battalion Commanders on the ground fight the war correctly and if it lasts longer than one troop rotation. As of this morning I am lacking in confidence on both counts.”

UPDATE: Related thoughts. “President Obama is in pretty much the same position as President Nixon found himself in 1969 and 1970. If he continues to fight in Afghanistan, he really can’t allow the enemy to have a safe haven in Pakistan.” It’s certainly true that Pakistan is the real problem here. If Pakistan were in good order, Afghanistan would be much easier; without fixing Pakistan, it’s much harder. But Pakistan is very hard to fix.

Of course, Barack Obama has been talking about sending troops into Pakistan for a long time: “Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, has said that he would send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, a week after chief rival Hillary Clinton described his foreign policy skills as naive. The senator warned Pakistani President Gen Pervez Musharraf that, under an Obama presidency, he would have to do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters or risk a US troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid.”

THE HILL: Obama Meets Dems Without Addressing Divisive Issues.

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “I wonder if the Senators realize they got peed on.” You mean that wasn’t rain?

IT IS SO A PLANET! Alan Boyle has a new book out called The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference. Dale Amon has a report from the book release party.

THE AGE OF STUPID.

UPDATE: Jonathan Gewirtz writes: “Since the train didn’t explode it must not have been a critical mass of stupidity, but if two such trains collided…” Best not even to imagine such things.

DAN RIEHL: What Is ACORN Up To In Ohio?

SALENA ZITO: What Today’s Democrats Don’t Get:

Franklin D. Roosevelt understood what it meant to be a core Democrat and to maintain his party’s ranks.

He built winning coalitions around his policies by empowering previously suppressed groups, such as labor unions and urban ethnics. In the process, he created a 40-year dynasty for Democrats.

Today’s bunch? Not so much.

The problem for FDR’s party is that it hasn’t adapted swiftly enough to two realities — that jobs are the most important issue to the nation, and that the middle class (which Democrats claim to champion) is dissolving under its watch.

Read the whole thing.

OOPS: WaPo: White House forgot that they told McChrystal to defeat the Taliban. “They told him — in his official orders — to come up with a plan to eliminate the enemy and, dummy that he is, he thought that meant he was supposed to come up with a plan to eliminate the enemy. Then they told him he didn’t have to. Six months later. . . . So it goes for our supposedly Spock-like president, who made such a pageant during the the past three months of deliberating over Afghanistan lest he waste time and lives by rashly adopting the wrong strategy.”

CHARLIE MARTIN: Fast Facts About ClimateGate.

POLLING: Obama Approval Goes Underwater On Pollster.com Average.

WASHINGTON POST: Obama The Mortal. “Some parishioners in the Church of Obama discovered last week that their spiritual leader is a false prophet.” And that they were the rubes . . . .

ANNE APPLEBAUM unhurt after car blast. Given police guard.

SCIENTISTS behaving badly.

THE BIG CUTOFF: Climate Scientist to Revkin: “we can no longer trust you” to carry water for us.

Related: “It’s how they build consensus.”

UPDATE: A breach in the “bunker.”

OUCH: Gordon Brown snubbed by soldiers’ ‘curtain’ protest. “Gordon Brown was snubbed by badly injured Afghan veterans when they closed curtains round their beds during a hospital visit and refused to speak to him. More than half the soldiers being treated at the Selly Oak hospital ward in Birmingham either asked for the curtains to be closed or deliberately avoided the prime minister, according to several of those present. . . . Furious about equipment shortages and poor compensation for their injuries, one soldier said:’It is almost as if we are the product of an unwanted affair … he has done nothing for us.'” New Labour expects sacrifice but returns no loyalty. This is the result, and they’ll be lucky if it stops here.

MELISSA CLOUTHIER is not happy about the male-cleavage fashion trend. “I have some news for Mr. Bastian: The ’70s were hideous. There were man perms. Remember the powder blue tux with ruffles? How about the wide lapels and the fat ties that fought them? This was the decade of Elvis Presley’s lamb-chop sideburns. And even now, ‘pornstaches’ (as in mustaches gracing ’70s-era porn stars) are scorned.”