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The New York Times:
The Republicans believe they have President Obama in a box: either he approves a controversial Canadian oil pipeline or they accuse him of depriving the nation of jobs. Mr. Obama can and should push back hard.
This is precisely the moment for him to argue the case for alternative fuel sources and clean energy jobs — and to lambaste the Republicans for doubling down on conventional fuels while ceding a $5 trillion global clean technology market (and the jobs that go with it) to more aggressive competitors like China and Germany.
Ana Marie Cox has some agony aunt advice for the GOP candidates.
George Will reinforces his increasing irrelevancy with yet another column denying the reality of climate change.
In 2011, for the first time in 62 years, America was a net exporter of petroleum products. For the indefinite future, a specter is haunting progressivism, the specter of abundance. Because progressivism exists to justify a few people bossing around most people and because progressives believe that only government’s energy should flow unimpeded, they crave energy scarcities as an excuse for rationing — by them — that produces ever-more-minute government supervision of Americans’ behavior.
Norman Lear:
I was recently shown a picture from one of the Occupy protests taking place across the country. It featured a young woman surrounded by police. She was the only protester in the picture, but she didn't seem intimidated. All by herself, up against the police barricade, she held a handwritten sign saying simply "I am a born again American."
I've never met this woman, but I think I know exactly what she's feeling. ...
To those many millions of Americans whose guts tell them the Occupy movement is on to something but aren't the sort to camp out or protest in the street, I say find another way to let your voice be heard in the new year. Work with others who share your passion for equal opportunity and equal justice for all Americans, and find ways to channel outrage into productive action. I'm betting you'll find, as I have over my nearly four score plus 10, that you'll form some of the most rewarding relationships and have some of the most meaningful experiences of your life.
Linda Chavez gives Ann Coulter way too much credit by calling her a "know-nothing" on immigration.
Paul Krugman:
when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.
Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!
And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.
Mona Charen:
If Mitt Romney is nominated and elected, he will be the first member of a highly persecuted American minority group to be so honored. Yet no one is celebrating the possibility of the first Mormon president. Anti-Mormon bias, which has proved remarkably persistent over decades, is scarcely ever condemned.
Mike Littwin offers a pre-mortem on the candidates' battle to get the GOP nomination:
This would be the first campaign in which everyone apparently forgot to run against the front-runner.
In the race to be the last not-Romney standing, the rest of the field has basically run as if Romney weren't even there.
John Nichols:
Add it all up and there is a good chance that, when all is said and done Tuesday night, the candidates will have spent $200 a vote to influence the roughly 110,000 Iowans who are expected to participate in the GOP caucuses.
And the really unsettling thing is that the caucuses are just for show.
While the results may so damage some candidates that their runs for the presidency will be finished, they will not actually produce any delegates to the Republican National Convention.
That’s because, as the Des Moines Register notes, “Iowa delegates are not bound to vote for a specific candidate at the national convention, and no percentage of delegates is given to any one candidate (on caucus night).” Iowa Republican Party Executive Director Chad Olsen told the paper that the GOP caucus acts more as a “temperature gauge” of how Iowans feel about the candidates, and convention delegates use the results to inform their decision.
Seriously? All this for an glorified straw poll?
Tim Murphy, taking note of Newt Gingrich's latest comments regarding his amateur expertise on (the supposed lack of) climate change, recalls another area of amateurism by the candidate:
In addition to keeping a T-Rex skull in his congressional office (loaned from the Smithsonian), he twice debated famed Montana State paleontologist Jack Horner on the feeding habits of the T-Rex, with Gingrich arguing that the king of dinosaurs could not have been a scavenger because "I saw Jurassic Park and he ate a lawyer and it wasn't a dead lawyer." So while not professionally trained, his paleontological analysis clearly does carry a lot of weight.