REAL GLOBAL WARMING: Close-Up Photos of Dying Star Show Our Sun’s Fate. “About 550 light-years from Earth, a star like our Sun is writhing in its death throes. Chi Cygni has swollen in size to become a red giant star so large that it would swallow every planet out to Mars in our solar system. Moreover, it has begun to pulse dramatically in and out, beating like a giant heart.”

STOCKING STUFFERS under five bucks.

NUCLEAR COURIERS: “Suicide Jockeys?”

RAY KURZWEIL ON how technology will change humanity by 2020.

ED DRISCOLL: Guido Beach Meets The Great Relearning.

COLLAPSE: NBC Poll: Public Sours On Health Reform. “As the Senate sprints to pass a health-care bill by Christmas, the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that those believing President Obama’s health-reform plan is a good idea has sunk to its lowest level. Just 32 percent say it’s a good idea, versus 47 percent who say it’s a bad idea. In addition, for the first time in the survey, a plurality prefers the status quo to reform.”

GEORGIAN BRITAIN: A “wonderland of sex.”

ROGER SIMON REPORTS FROM COPENHAGEN: “Before I head out to the demonstration this morning, I thought I’d throw up the first of my notes on the Copenhagen Climate Conference. First the good news: it’s snowing out (big flakes, beautiful) and I didn’t drink too much last night. Now the bad news: The rest. This whole event so far, what I can see of it anyway, is just silly.”

HOW LIKELY is hyperinflation?

INVISIBLE TO COPS? The 10 Least-Ticketed Vehicles.

DAVID HARSANYI: Hide The Decline: Why Government-Funded Scientists Should Release Their Data.

MILBLOGS GO DARK FOR THE DAY, in support of C.J. Grisham.

SOME DANGERS OF the expansion of “federal regulatory crimes.”

IN THE MAIL: From Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University.

IMPLODING? Politico: Chaos At Climate Conference.

RAND SIMBERG: The Precautionary Principle And Global Warming.

CLIMATEGATE: Something’s Rotten in Denmark … and East Anglia, Asheville, and New York City.

THE FIRST global map of Mercury.

FINALLY: Europe’s Long Banana Nightmare Ending.

SHOULD CIA DRONE OPERATORS worry about legal liability?

PLAYING GAMES WITH HEALTH CARE NUMBERS: “Proposals that would result in a complete cost estimate are dropped. Because we can’t let the public see how much this thing really costs.”

A BUNCH OF clever kitchen gadgets.

SALENA ZITO: Tea Party Responds to “Code Red” Alert.

ASKING THE TOUGH QUESTIONS: Batts, Polymers or Recycled Jeans: Which Insulation is Sexiest?

“DOPPELBLOGGERS.” “That’s the Andrew Sullivan I remember working for.” Love the coinage.

YELLOWSTONE SUPERVOLCANO bigger than thought.

OOPS: Energy-Efficient Stoplights Can’t Melt Snow.

BRIAN MICKLETHWAIT: Climategate – the reversing of the burden of proof. “You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof. Unfair to all the fraud detectives (Watts, McIntyre, and the rest of them, including Monkton himself) though it undoubtedly was, those noble toilers, until the Climategate revelations erupted, had to prove everything, in defiance of the default position. Their every tiny blemish was jumped upon. Their major claims were ignored. Now the default position is slowly mutating into: It’s all made-up nonsense. And the burden of proof is shifting onto the shoulders of all those who want to go on believing in such ever more discredited alarmism. In short, our side is winning this argument, big time.”

CHARLES SCHUMER DISPLAYS HIS BREEDING: Schumer curses flight attendant.

PAUL MIRENGOFF: Whatever Happened To The Obamacons?

JUSTICE: DOJ STIFLES NEW BLACK PANTHER PROBE, RIGHTS SUBPOENAS BLOCKED. “The Justice Department has told the federal attorneys who filed a civil complaint against the New Black Panther Party for disrupting a Philadelphia polling place last year not to cooperate with an investigation of the incident by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “

NGO AID ORGANIZATIONS AND ARMS MERCHANTS using the same planes?

THIS KIND OF THING JUST KEEPS HAPPENING: DNA clears man jailed 25 years for rape, murder.

OH, GOOD GRIEF: Unwitting tourists attend White House breakfast. “The White House is once again explaining how uninvited guests wound up shaking hands with President Barack Obama.”

The country’s in the very best of hands.

POLITICO: Tea Partiers rally: ‘Kill the bill’. “I’ve never seen so many attractive domestic terrorists in all my life!”

RON BAILEY: Battle Between U.S. and China Threatens Climate Conference.

PAPER: San Francisco The Worst Run City in the U.S. “It’s time to face facts: San Francisco is spectacularly mismanaged and arguably the worst-run big city in America. This year’s city budget is an astonishing $6.6 billion — more than twice the budget for the entire state of Idaho — for roughly 800,000 residents. Yet despite that stratospheric amount, San Francisco can’t point to progress on many of the social issues it spends liberally to tackle — and no one is made to answer when the city comes up short.”

MARKDOWNS ON grills and outdoor stuff.

STIMULUS: Shocker: Pork boondoggle costlier, less useful than first presumed.

A REPORT FROM TODAY’S Code Red ObamaCare protest.

PJTV: Roger Simon on The Real Copenhagen: Hippies, Goofballs and Climate, Inc.

WAR AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY (CONT’D): Photographer arrested at mall after taking holiday photos. Judging from this report, he should sue the Town Center Mall in Charleston, whose behavior was obviously unreasonable, and he should seek discipline regarding officer R.C. Basford. Perhaps he settle for a written apology, and a promise to train personnel to respect photographers’ rights.

IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME: Media Matters Morphs Into One-Stop Fisting Information Clearinghouse.

BRUCE BAWER ON HOMOPHOBIA IN “LIBERAL” NORWAY: “One thing I have learned in my ten years here is that the so-called liberality of this part of the world is skin-deep. There is a big difference between the official acceptance of gay people and the treatment gay people receive when they dare to wander out of a very tiny urban area. I have never experienced this kind of treatment in the United States, not even in the Southern states, which so many of my gay friends here in Norway are so scared to visit, because they think those states are so dangerous for gay people.”

GHOST-BLOGGING AT ANDREW SULLIVAN’S? When I have guestbloggers, they get their own bylines — and I don’t have any regular “staff” checking emails, running down links, etc. It’s just me and the readers and scheduled posts. I do ask Stacy Tabb and Aaron Hanscom to watch for typos when I’m going to be offline for a while, but that’s it. From now on I’ll wonder what on Andrew’s blog is Andrew’s. I’m pretty sure all the Trig-truther stuff, anyway . . . .

IT’S REALITY, IT’S JUST NOT REALITY-REALITY.

JONAH GOLDBERG IS REMINISCING ABOUT Crack in the World. The screenplay was by my University of Tennessee colleague John Manchip White, who also coauthored a book with Robert Conquest, What To Do When The Russians Come: A Survivor’s Guide. It was about how to survive the transformation of America into a communist state, based on experiences in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Can you imagine worrying about America going communist? Those were scary times. Fortunately, that chapter in our history is over for good.

BILL WHITTLE, SCOTT OTT, STEPHEN GREEN: The B+ President.

INSULATION IS “SEXY:” “Eh. Ugh. I don’t know whether to be bored or indignant.”

GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS for everyone on your list.

TEST-DRIVING A plug-in Prius.

DAN MITCHELL: Deficits Are Bad, But The Real Problem Is Spending.

AL GORE: Wrong about mosquitoes?

A REPORT FROM TODAY’S anti-Obamacare protest outside Claire McCaskill’s offices.

SOME IWV Health Care Video Contest Entries.

OOPS: WaPo/ABC poll: Obama hits new lows on health care, overall approval rating.

A 787 FLEW BY RY JONES’ WINDOW: He took pictures.

THE MATHEMATICS OF slicing pizza.

WAR AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY, CONT’D: Photographer beaten, detained in London for being “cocky” to policeman who implies she is a terrorist. Tar. Feathers.

PHOTOSHOPPING Meryl Streep?

GENE HEALY: Making Criminals Out Of All Americans. “The Founders viewed the criminal sanction as a last resort, reserved for serious offenses, clearly defined, so ordinary citizens would know whether they were violating the law. Yet over the last 40 years, an unholy alliance of big-business-hating liberals and tough-on-crime conservatives has made criminalization the first line of attack — a way to demonstrate seriousness about the social problem of the month, whether it’s corporate scandals or e-mail spam. . . . There are now more than 4,000 federal crimes, spread out through some 27,000 pages of the U.S. Code. Some years ago, analysts at the Congressional Research Service tried to count the number of separate offenses on the books, and gave up, lacking the resources to get the job done. If teams of legal researchers can’t make sense of the federal criminal code, obviously, ordinary citizens don’t stand a chance.”

TOM MAGUIRE: Heck Of A Job, Barack! “Feel the gestalt shifting.”

PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT: Backdating case against 2 ex-Broadcom executives tossed. “Carney found that prosecutors tried to prevent three key defense witnesses from testifying, improperly contacted attorneys for defense witnesses, and leaked information about grand jury proceedings to the media.”

MORE JOHN EDWARDS PROBLEMS: “Today, the Charlotte Observer reports that John Edwards has used the private jet of a potential witness in an investigation of misuse of campaign funds, and that could raise serious legal issues for the former Democratic VP nominee.”

The press, which covered for Edwards during and after the campaign, is still covering for him, instead of covering him.

SORRY, BUT NICE CLEAN NUKES JUST KEEP LOOKING BETTER: Two Major Geothermal Projects Abandoned Due to Induced Quake Risk.

RADLEY BALKO: Chicago’s Thick Blue Wall: The Windy City’s notoriously aggressive police department fights for less accountability.

SO I’M DOING AN FCC PANEL on their Open Internet proposals (I think you can stream it at the link), and my take is that I’m for it in principle, but wary in practice. Here’s a copy of my prepared statement, for those who are interested. Note the cautionary observations at the end. Ironically, I’m connecting via an outdated ISDN setup, which supports my point about regulators being stuck behind the technology curve, I guess . . . .

Reynolds FCC Statement On Open Internet –

UPDATE: Okay, now the ISDN isn’t working . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Success! Not sure when I’ll be on, though.

MORE: Okay, they brought me on and the audio didn’t work. [Silenced by the FCC! -- ed. Well, not deliberately, I'm pretty sure.] Trying again in a bit.

FINALLY: Okay, it all worked out in the end; just a few bugs along the way. I gotta say, ISDN felt so 1990s — iChat or SkypeHQ would have been so much better. And easier.

WORKS FOR ME: Toyota Promises an ‘Affordable’ Plug-In Prius in 2011. I was thinking of a Chevy Volt, but I don’t want a bailoutmobile.

HAPPY BILL OF RIGHTS DAY! More here.

IN THE MAIL: From Neal Knox, The Gun Rights War.

FEDERAL EMPLOYEES owe $3 billion in unpaid taxes. Try a cabinet appointment — that seems to get ‘em to pay up.

TRUST: ‘Smart’ Electric Utility Meters, Intended to Create Savings, Instead Prompt Revolt. This story doesn’t even address the big problem — utilities turning down your thermostat without your consent. My take: Give consumers more control and they’ll like it. Give them less, and they won’t. Kinda like, well, most things.

CATHY YOUNG ON CLIMATEGATE: When Science Becomes A Casualty Of Politics. “Public trust is something scientists must work hard to maintain. When it comes to science and public policy, the average citizen usually has to trust scientists—whose word he or she has to take on faith almost as much as a religious believer takes the word of a priest. Once that trust is undermined, as it has been in recent years, science becomes a casualty of politics.”

MICHAEL BARONE: Are Democrats Exiting The Sinking Ship?

OUCH: From the NYT: You Dumb Women are Opposing the New Mammogram Recommendations Because You Don’t Understand Science or Math.

Don’t worry. They know what’s good for you. And soon they’ll have waiting lists to protect you from those deadly CT scans, too!

UPDATE: Ann Althouse: “The strategy for avoiding the label ‘death panel’ is: present the treatments as deadly. Voila: life panels! Now, here’s your blue pill.”

Plus, from the comments: “This is the problem with a giant political intrusion into healthcare: Now every single decision will be viewed as a political maneuver instead of a scientific or medical decision.”

LEAVING AMERICA: More Foreign-Born Professionals Are Finding Better Jobs, Lower Unemployment Abroad; ‘I’ve Had Headhunters Calling’. “And recruiters say in most cases, salaries will be equivalent to or better than what the employees were making in the U.S., although adjusted to the living costs in the new country.” Hope and Change!

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.

THE MOST DANGEROUS ROAD in Germany.

CHARLIE MARTIN: ClimateGate: McIntyre and the Divergence Problem. “The ‘trick’ used to ‘hide the decline,’ which alarmists have claimed was taken out of context, is actually worse when the context is included.”

UPDATE: Related: DOE sends a “litigation hold notice” regarding CRU to employees – asking to “preserve documents.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: HEALTH “REFORM” IS DEAD. Like Megan, I think they’ll eventually pass something that they’ll call health care reform, but it won’t be much.

MICKEY KAUS: “Only 33% of *U.S. born* (second-generation) Latino immigrant kids identify themselves first by the term ‘American.’ Most prefer either their country of origin (41%) or the term ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic.’ This is supposed to prove Lou Dobbs wrong?”

In previous waves of immigration, we got assimilation because teachers, politicians, media, etc. believed in it, and thought America as it was an indisputably good thing, and thus acted accordingly. This time, they feel differently, and act differently, and so we get different results.

CLIMATEGATE: IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES, Clive Crook writes: “It is not enough for climate scientists and environment ministers to go to Copenhagen and tell each other how right they are. They also need to convince the public. National politics – the democratic process – is awfully inconvenient sometimes, but cannot be waved away. . . . Aiming to smear the doubters and shut them up is just bad science, and from a public-relations point of view is wholly counter-productive. . . . For the sake of their own credibility, scientists should maintain a cautious distance from politics, and those who take up politics should not expect the deference to disinterested scholars they would otherwise deserve.”

CHANGE: Report: In one year, U.S. public debt has risen from 41 to 53 percent of GDP.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: The Apocalypse Is Not Upon Us: The climate change movement gets nowhere by claiming it is. “The assumption behind this calculation is profoundly negative: Human beings are nothing more than machines for the production of carbon dioxide. And if we take that assumption seriously, a whole lot of other things look different, too. Certainly weapons of mass destruction must be reconsidered, along with the flu virus: By reducing the population, they might also reduce emissions as well. Perhaps they should be encouraged?” Don’t give ‘em ideas.

RON BAILEY reports from Copenhagen. “I spent the day waiting with thousands of others in subfreezing cold to try to get into the proper building to obtain our credentials for the official United Nations Climate Change Conference. I clocked about 5 hours in line while my housemate, in town representing a Colorado NGO, waited 10.5 hours and was also turned away. The conference chaos makes one wonder how anyone expects the U.N. to run the world’s climate if it can’t manage a queue?”

LONDON TIMES: Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don’t add up.

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.

The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.

Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore. . . . Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

Busted. It won’t be the last time.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

CLIMATEGATE: Jim Lindgren: Michael Mann Should Not Be Investigated By Penn State. “But if I were Professor Mann’s dean at Penn State, I would try to determine whether he has fully shared his data, metadata, and computer code. . . . If Mann is still withholding the data and code necessary for replication, I’d ask him to replicate his most important or most controversial recent work (certainly not everything) and to release the data and code so that others might do so. If Mann couldn’t replicate his own work, I would ask him to announce that fact to the scientific community, so that serious scientists would know whether his work is replicable.” Plus, lessons from the Bellesiles scandal.

PROFESSOR KENNETH ANDERSON ON Just War Theory and Obama’s Nobel Prize speech.

GOING AFTER THE “FAT CATS” IN PUBLIC, staging a “lovefest” in private. “Maybe Obama’s softened tone was recognition of Wall Street’s election help. Campaign-finance filings show that firms like Goldman — now getting ready to dish out $20 billion in bonuses after nearly imploding last year — favored Obama over John McCain by a fairly wide margin. Nearly all the major Wall Street CEOs — including Dimon, Blankfein and Mack — have told people that they voted for Obama.”

UPDATE: U.S. News: What Obama Tells His Banker Pals.

MEGAN MCARDLE: What is Claire McCaskill Saying, Exactly?

I think she’s nervous about all the protests back home.

UPDATE: Why The Rush? Because the more people know, the more they’re against it.

STORE OPERATOR just joking about jihad.

MARK HEMINGWAY: Is The Senate Healthcare Bill Imploding?

BYRON YORK: Why Democrats push health care, even if it kills them.

JAMES TARANTO: “Whose job was it to make ObamaCare popular? The politicians who backed ObamaCare, of course. If 61% of Americans oppose the Senate bill, it is because the senators who support it have failed to make their case. It’s hard to see how someone who thinks they had a good case to make can excuse this failure, much less present it as an achievement of near-courage.”

MARKDOWNS ON cellphones, smartphones, and service.

CYBERSECURITY CZAR POSITION a waste of time? “It’s a position that’s going to report up to the economic council and the security council. It won’t have any statutory authority. . . . It’s not a winning position. I’m not at all surprised by the fact that it’s empty. That position is a blame-taking position.”

GOVERNMENT: D.C. hands out $15M in bonuses despite recession, budget gaps. “The bonuses were ladled out even as the city was facing nine-figure budget shortfalls and officials — including Rhee — were firing employees by the busload, claiming they could no longer afford them.” It’s only a scandal if business does it.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST at the IPCC? “Seek and ye will find. Our friendly part-time chairman of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, is quite a remarkable man. As well as his onerous post with the UN’s IPCC, it seems he has a considerable number of other interests. . . . Intriguingly, for such an upstanding public servant though, he is also a strategic advisor to the private equity investment firm Pegasus Capital Advisors LP, which he became in February of this year. However, this is by no means Dr Pachauri’s only foray into the world of finance. In December 2007, be became a member of the Senior Advisory Board of Siderian ventures based in San Francisco. This is a venture capital business owned by the Dutch multinational business incubator and operator in sustainable technology, Tendris Holding, itself part-owned by electronics giant Philips. It acquired a minority interest in January 2009 in order to ‘explore new business opportunities in the area of sustainability.’ As a member of the Senior Advisory Board of Siderian, Dr Pachauri is expected to provide the Fund and its portfolio companies ‘with access, standing and industry exposure at the highest level.’”

Access at the highest level, indeed.

“INSURANCE COMPANIES WIN:” Kos wants to kill the healthcare bill.

ON PJTV, it’s Stephen Green’s Hair Of The Dog.