WELCOME TO the harem.

CATHY YOUNG: A Rand Revival?

ANOTHER VICTIM OF DEMAGOGUERY: Vegas hotel closes:

Luxury hotels have also suffered from the backlash from the so-called “AIG effect,” referring to the uproar caused by American International Group’s decision to fly top brokers and executives to a resort shortly after receiving a bailout check from the U.S. government.

“The whole demonization of luxury meetings and companies’ pulling back on having their high-end meetings in luxury hotels — this has had a tremendous impact on Las Vegas,” Deuschl said. “I can’t think of another destination that has had to defend itself more against comments from politicians.”

Hope and change. The hotel employed 350 people.

SCOTT JOHNSON: The Campus Intifada, Cont’d.

FIGHTING BACK: Paterson pens J’accuse letter to Times editor.

“DRILLGATE?”

SHOCKER: Anti-Tea Party Web Site Part of Scheme to Funnel Funds.

MARKDOWNS ON new Blu-Ray releases.

DOUG WILDER TO OBAMA: It’s Time To Clean House And Start Firing People.

COMEDY PLAGIARISM at The Daily Show?

RETRACTO, THE CORRECTION ALPACA now has a theme song.

SO HOW’S THAT SMART DIPLOMACY WORKIN’? China PLA officers urge economic punch against U.S.

DANA LOESCH: “I disagree with Allahpundit.”

FROM THE CINCINNATI TEA PARTY FOLKS: Liberty Snowmen.

AN IMMIGRATION SCANDAL in Britain. Since the rulers don’t please the people, I guess they decided to get a new people. Good luck with that . . . .

ABUSIVE LAB TEST: Handheld Vacuum Cleaners.

FINANCIAL CRISIS: Berlin looks to build Greek ‘firewall’.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “If this is how we react to a snow storm, what are we going to do when the Russkis invade?”

UPDATE: More:

Sitting here in DC right now (Tuesday afternoon). It’s a ghost town. Little traffic….still downtown streets with no serious attempt at clearing snow. And, of course, the government shut down…the one bright spot.

A private utility that did not take steps to deal with a situation like this would be broken on the regulatory wheel. Politicians, not so much.

Indeed.

CHANGE: From “staying the course” to “staying on course.” See, that’s totally different. . . ..

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH has some questions regarding the Andrew Sullivan / Leon Wieseltier spat.

Meanwhile, I’m surprised that this item on The Atlantic’s Political Wire refers to me as a “die hard critic” of Andrew’s. I don’t think I pay enough attention to him to merit that designation.

UPDATE: Could be worse. Could be Oxford.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Poul Costinsky writes: “Even if Andrew is antisemitic, he is not antisemitic-antisemitic. Har har.”

AN ETHICAL PLEDGE FOR NEUROSCIENTISTS?

Don’t miss my PJTV show on this, either.

U.C. IRVINE’S Free Speech Problem.

JENNIFER RUBIN: Phony Centrists Pay The Price For ObamaCare.

“BUT DON’T WORRY TOO MUCH ABOUT THE MYRRH NEXT TIME:” Frankincense may cure cancer.

AGING RATE INFLUENCED by genetic variant?

SCOTT STEIN: Put down the political pom-poms.

PREDICTION: U.S. Solar Market To Double In Next Year.

FASTER, PLEASE: By Stimulating Stem Cells, Bioactive Nanogel Regenerates Cartilage in Joints.

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

TIN EAR:

Robert Gibbs showed the words “hope” and “change” on his hand as he started his daily briefing with reporters on Tuesday.

Many in the room, where President Barack Obama had spoken just moments before about the need for bipartisanship, groaned at the political shot.

Leaving aside its lameness — stepping on the President’s message, and demonstrating, once again, that Robert Gibbs is never intentionally funny — it really seems to me that bringing up the whole “hope and change” schtick nowadays isn’t doing much for the White House, but rather is simply reminding people of how the original promise of this Administration has failed to bear fruit.

UPDATE: “Tell me again who the childish ones are, here?”

RE-ENGINEERING the human immune system.

ERIC S. RAYMOND: Don’t Dis The Wiccans!

BOEING FLIES its biggest plane to date.

IN THE GUARDIAN: If you’re going to do good science, release the computer code too. Thanks to Shannon Love, who found it via Slashdot.

THIRTY KNOTS OF SPEED, in a sailboat.

VERONIQUE DE RUGY ON DEFICITS: The Limits Of Blaming Bush. “In his latest budget request, President Obama added roughly $1.6 trillion in spending over the next ten years on top of what he requested last year. Can President Obama blame that extra $1.6 trillion on former President Bush? No.”

UPDATE: More from Megan McArdle.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Cops lodge felony snowball-throwing charges.

HOW TO GET A DATE. It’s the comments that are more interesting.

VIDEO: Audio Myths Workshop.

THE HORROR OF sexual anorexia.

IN THE MAIL: From Hank Paulson, On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System.

BYRON YORK ON JOHN EDWARDS: Why The Media Ignored A Scandal. “It turned out that many journalists just didn’t want to report the news and didn’t try very hard to uncover the facts.”

BYRON YORK: White House: People Who Criticize Us Are Helping Al Qaeda. They told me if I voted for McCain we’d see for-us-or-against-us jingoism from the White House — and they were right!

CHANGE: Gallup: Obama approval hits new lows on economy, health care, deficit.

NEW YORK TIMES: U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege.

LEON WIESELTIER: Andrew Sullivan has a serious problem. “Sullivan is hunting for motives, not reasons; for conspiracies, which is the surest sign of a mind’s bankruptcy. These days the self-congratulatory motto above his blog is ‘Of No Party or Clique,’ but in fact Sullivan belongs to the party of Mearsheimer and the clique of Walt (whom he cites frequently and deferentially), to the herd of fearless dissidents who proclaim in all seriousness, without in any way being haunted by the history of such an idea, that Jews control Washington. . . . And this is not all that is disgusting about Sullivan’s approach. His assumption, in his outburst about ‘the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing,’ that every thought that a Jew thinks is a Jewish thought is an anti-Semitic assumption, and a rather classical one. Bigotry has always made representatives of individuals, and discerned the voice of the group in the voice of every one of its members. . . . Having demanded that the Jews behave apologetically in America, Sullivan now demands that the United States behave apologetically in the world–that it adjust its relationship with Israel to the preferences of the Muslim peoples. This is a little like decrying the election of a black president because it will inflame white racists. . . . To me, he looks increasingly like the Buchanan of the left.” Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: On consideration, I don’t think this gets it quite right. Andrew certainly has a lot of hate, but unlike Buchanan he seems less . . . fixed in exactly who he hates at any given moment. I think it’s more of a frog-and-scorpion kind of thing and not a traditional idee fixee hatred like anti-semitism.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dan Riehl: Sullivan is actually not an antisemite.

HMM: Stay rates for foreign Ph.D’s rebound.

TIGERHAWK: “If the ‘jobs bill’ contains card check unionization, it will be a ‘jobs bill’ only insofar as it destroys them.”

POLL: Carol Shea-Porter’s Antics Catching Up To Her.

POLL: “Three-fourths of independents have a favorable view of the tea party movement and say one-party control of the White House and Congress has been bad.”

JENNIFER RUBIN: New Black Panther Case Investigator Getting a Lifetime Judgeship?

MEGAN MCARDLE: Shoe, Meet The Other Foot.

PJTV: I talk with RedState’s Erick Erickson.

PHOTO FROM HANOI: “This is too easy.”

UH OH: Trouble for Charlie Crist?

GENE HEALY: Time for “Question Time?”

HOW GOLDMAN SACHS helped Greece mask its true debt. This is interesting in itself, but it makes me wonder how much similar chicanery is out there undiscovered . . . .

UPDATE: Related: Why Sovereign Debt Pain Has Only Just Started.

AND NOW FOR THE REALLY IMPORTANT NEWS: Brooklyn Decker gets Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Cover.

BLUE ON BLUE: Ben Nelson To Filibuster Becker for NLRB.

TRANSPARENCY: Financial Crisis Commission Grills Top Bankers Behind Closed Doors.

SOME NEW LENSES from Nikon.

HEH: Bush was right, says Obama.

HEY, WAIT A MINUTE: Surveillance Society: Obama Takes a Blue Pencil to the Bill of Rights. They told me if I voted for McCain we’d live an Orwellian nightmare of surveillance and repression — and they were right!

RAND SIMBERG responds to astronaut Tom Jones. “While my admiration and gratitude to Tom Jones for his service to our nation, both on the planet and off, is unbounded, I believe he is wrong in his description of the new space policy as a ‘path to nowhere.’ In so characterizing it, he falls prey to the same mental traps as many of us have for the past forty years since Apollo, in which we don’t have a real manned space program unless we have something that looks like Apollo—a goal to send a few NASA astronauts to a specific place by a specific date on a really big rocket. Not to mention spending an eye-boggling amount of money on it. In this mind set, anything that doesn’t fit within that model is turning our back on the universe.”

MICHAEL LEDEEN: What Is Iran Planning For Thursday?

BUDGET FOLLIES: How do California and Greece compare?

PAM GELLER on Joy Behar.

PIONEERING BLOG SITE “NASHVILLE IS TALKING” shuts down Friday.

BEWARE STATISTICIANS bearing advice. Well, unless they’re named Michael Barone, anyway.

RADLEY BALKO: Calculating The Number Of Innocents In Prison.

A MEDICAL UPDATE from Jim Treacher. Plus this: “Have you seen the website for the U.S. Department of State? It’s lovely.” I can’t find the part that says “We apologize for running over Jim Treacher,” though.

PARTY TIME! Bill Whittle on the Tea Parties.

THE PRISM of condescension.

POLL: Special Interests More Influential Under Obama.

TIM CAVANAUGH looks at failed promises of government job-creation. “I’m glad nobody believes the Democrats have created any jobs. I’d be happier if both ruling parties acknowledged that job creation is not part of their purview and is not within their power.”

UPDATE: Photo: Job created or saved! But shouldn’t he be breaking windows or something?

THE WAGES OF SOCIALISM: Chavez declares “electricity emergency” in Venezuela. “President Hugo Chavez inaugurated a folksy new radio talk-show on Monday by declaring an ‘electricity emergency’ in oil-rich Venezuela.”

NOT IF THE “DEATH PANELS” GET THEM FIRST! Will Baby Boomers Bankrupt Social Security?

FIRST WALL STREET, NOW THIS: Largest gay rights group in NJ stops donating to Dem. Committees, asks members to do the same.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Get Over It: Birtherism Is Not Journalism. Nope, it’s as if somebody who called himself a journalist developed a sick fascination with Sarah Palin’s uterus. And nobody wants to think about what that would represent. Then again, “According to a new book by John Avlon, ‘Birtherism’ began on the Left.”

Here’s Avlon on the Democratic Party roots of “Birtherism.”

AYAAN HIRSI ALI speaks at Wisconsin.

REP. ALAN MOLLOHAN, targeted.

FAUSTA ON the Argentinean Central Bank Crisis and more.

OH, GOODY: Iran moves closer to nuke warhead capacity.

HMM: Sweet Tea for GOP in Alabama. “While last weekend’s Tea Party convention in Nashville was making national headlines, the real political impact of the grassroots movement was evident among Republicans who gathered Friday and Saturday in Montgomery. . . . A native of Trinidad who came to the United States with his parents when he was 8, Phillip could become the first black Republican elected to Congress from the Deep South since Reconstruction. His message of American exceptionalism and limited government draws enthusiastic applause at Tea Party events and has earned the endorsement of Mike Huckabee.”

JIM GERAGHTY: Obama’s Latest Gallup Numbers Seem Somewhat Late Bushian. “Somehow, this doesn’t seem surprising.”

IRONY ABOUNDS: NOAA: Blizzard Rearranges Climate Change Announcement.

MICKEY KAUS: “So Orszag’s thesis didn’t just sink health care. It also destroyed hopes for peace in the Middle East. … Only half joking.”

HOW THE RIGHT TO ARMS saved the non-violent civil rights protesters.

FIVE SUPER BOWL COMMERCIALS about women emasculating men. Plus some related thoughts from Ann Althouse: Men Need Pants.

HMM: Iowa Poll: 33% of Iowans support ‘tea party’ movement. “A third of Iowans from across the political spectrum say they support the ‘tea party’ movement, sounding a loud chorus of dissatisfaction with government, according to The Des Moines Register’s new Iowa Poll. Neither party has a lock on these restless advocates of limited government and fiscal control, according to the poll. However, their conservative leanings appear to give Republicans a greater opportunity than Democrats to make gains at the dawn of a volatile election year.”

CHINA’S DEBT BOMB: America’s No. 1 creditor holds the ultimate weapon. Is that really true? Who would suffer more from a U.S. default?

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, government agencies would be keeping secret dossiers on peaceful protesters. And they were right!

A READER EMAILS:

Re the I-35 billboard….

At a Superbowl party last night a gentleman sported a button that read: “Is it 2012 yet?” And this, in a monolithically liberal New York suburb. No violence ensued. Made me wonder how long before we’ll start seeing cryptic bumper stickers designed like odometers reading: 01/20/13.

Not long.

UPDATE: Reader John Casey writes:

The Obama stickers are disappearing in the Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago. I was shocked a few weeks ago when I realized that I was no longer seeing any Obama stickers during my walks home from the Fullerton el stop which is next to De Paul’s campus. Obviously different dynamics but until 18 months ago “Kerry/Edwards For America” stickers were commonplace as were the ever popular “Some Village Is Missing Its Idiot” stickers.

I’m hearing that from a lot of places.

ANOTHER UPDATE: NPR: ‘Miss Me Yet?’ Billboard With Photo Of Bush Is Real; Not An Internet Trick.

MORE: Reader Brendan Haley writes:

I’m a long-time reader, and first-time writer. Thanks for all of your efforts.

Re: the 1/20/13 bumper sticker, I have one on my car, and have for about 4 months (got mine through CafePress, btw, with an American flag in the background). Not particularly noteworthy, but I thought you might appreciate some recent stories. First: I live in NJ (57% for BO in 2008), in Essex County (76% for BO in 2008), and further still, in Montclair (83% for BO, highest in NJ). As you can imagine, I’ve taken a ton of heat for having the sticker on the car since it went on, but in the last 3 weeks, I’ve had four separate people ask me where I got the stickers, and if I had any left they could have for their own cars. 3 of the 4 voted for BO, and “simply can’t believe how they fell for it”, with “it” defined as you might expect. If his act is wearing thin to former true believers in my neck of the woods, that can’t mean good things…

Indeed. I like Montclair. I had a girlfriend from there when I was in college.

ACORN UPDATE: Under Investigation, ACORN Chief Bertha Lewis Quits Working Families Party.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ FOR YA? Dow closes below 10,000 for first time in 3 months.

NOT AS VEGETATIVE AS WE THOUGHT? Brain Scans Enable Communication With People In Vegetative States. Some interesting discussion in the comments.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Why Fear Big Government?

AT PJTV, Helen and I interview Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft.

MARKDOWNS ON NATURAL AND ORGANIC GROCERIES.

POLIWOOD: A Challenge to Al Gore: Come Defend Your Oscar.