Occupy Wall Street’s surface message, cleverly backed up with the canny but fatuous “99%” slogan, is an illusion, a red herring employed in a cynical attempt to press more mainstream public unease into the service of a worldview that remains very much on the fringe. Were all of OWS’s gripes to be resolved firmly in their favor, the displeased would not suddenly consider America pure. On the contrary, by and large, the types who have occupied Zuccotti and other parks across the nation consider the United States to be an intractably racist, imperialist, unequal nation, which boasts an invidious history whose alleged crimes can be seen populating the pages of Howard Zinn’s books. As a new report concludes, “while their rhetoric might decry crony capitalism or bank bailouts, their values reveal self-centered and fear-based motivations,” and a deep hostility to capitalism and American values of individualism and limited government is thrown in for good measure.

The report, Shortselling America, reveals that, below the surface, there is a lot more going on than meets the eye, and most of it has very little to do with “social justice.” Its author, Frontier Lab, takes an interesting approach, applying techniques of market research to political science. The group’s aim is to move away from the short-term model employed by political pollsters — which, although valuable, essentially provides just a fleeting snapshot — and instead to conduct a more thorough assessment of participants’ values. From these data, they then seek to predict future behavior. An example: Surface-level polling will see consumers tell us that the reason they buy a particular dish soap is because it is green, or cheap, or conveniently sized. But research shows the deeper truth is that, overwhelmingly, people buy the same brand as their mother did. (Nobody will write that on a survey.)

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 The road to gastric hell is paved with first lady Michelle Obama’s nanny-state intentions. Don’t take my word for it. Schoolkids in Los Angeles have blown the whistle on the East Wing chef-in-chief’s healthy-lunch diktats. Get your Pepto-Bismol ready. The taste of government waste is indigestion-inducing.

According to a weekend report by the Los Angeles Times, the city’s “trailblazing introduction of healthful school lunches has been a flop.” In response to the public hectoring and financial inducement of Mrs. Obama’s federally subsidized anti-obesity campaign, the district dropped chicken nuggets, corn dogs, and flavored milk from the menu for “beef jambalaya, vegetable curry, pad Thai, lentil and brown rice cutlets, and quinoa and black-eyed pea salads.”

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Last election cycle, Iowa’s social conservatives and evangelicals catapulted Mike Huckabee to a surprise caucus win. But this time around, the most distinguishing aspect of the social-conservative vote is how fractured it is now — and how fractured it could still be by the time the caucus is held.

“If I was a betting man, which I’m not, I would say it’s going to stay divided,” says Steve Scheffler, president of the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition. “But anything can change.”

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Mike Flynn, Big Government
Yes, I’ve seen the debates. And, yes, I’ve watched the “oops” moment probably a dozen times. While he has steadily improved, Rick Perry is not a skilled debater. Seeing him debate is like watching a high-wire act, where each moment is tense with the fear that the performer could slip and fall. I get it. But, when did debate performance become our sole criteria for picking a President? When did the RNC decide to team up with the legacy media and turn the nomination contest into an almost unwatchable reality TV spectacle? Is this really a sane way to pick...

Joe Klein, Time
“I was chatting with some young people on my way to the podium,” Newt Gingrich told about 100 people at a rally near Cedar Rapids last night, “and it was clear how our campaign differs from the other campaigns with all the negative ads. A 7-year-old named Ty asked me what my favorite iPad app was…I think Ty’s probably smarter than most political consultants…It’s saddening, the weight of the totally negative campaigns…This campaign should be all about kids like Ty and their future. And so if you see one of these...

David Smick, Commentary
These days, it is said, the industrialized world economy is like a beauty pageant for the unattractive in which the victor will be the contestant deemed the least ugly. And so, as disappointingly as the U.S. economy has performed over the past four years, America could still end up a winner. That helps explain why U.S. Treasury bonds continue to be the safe haven for the world’s capital. But is being the “least ugly” good enough for a country experiencing rising social disruption stemming from high unemployment and declining personal income?Twice a year, the...

Dana Milbank, Washington Post
House Speaker John Boehner gave a spirited reply when asked recently about whether his party’s resistance to middle-class tax cuts risked making Republicans appear to be lackeys of the rich.“I’ve got 11 brothers and sisters on every rung of the economic ladder, all right?” Boehner said. “My dad owned a bar. I know what’s going on out in America.”So Boehner has his finger on the American pulse because his deceased father owned a saloon? What strange brew have they been pouring in the speaker’s office?

Daily Caller - Oklahoma Republican Rep. James Lankford told The Daily Caller that the Senate’s two-month payroll tax extension would create “tremendous” economic “uncertainty” if signed into law by President Barack Obama. Lankford supports a full year extension, which the House passed last week.

Madeleine Albright, Washington Post
Madeleine Albright was secretary of state from 1997 to 2001.Nov. 24, 1989: Prague’s storied Wenceslas Square swarmed with demonstrators chanting slogans and waving signs that read “Posledni Zvoneni,” the last bell. Activists rattled the keys in their pockets, emulating the sound of a bell tolling to mark the end of four decades of communist rule. On a balcony overlooking the crowd stood a 53-year-old man who had been arrested that year and would, within a month, be president. Almost alone among his countrymen, he had predicted that this moment of triumph would...

Michael Medved, Daily Beast
With many (if not most) GOP voters harboring a “none-of-the-above” attitude toward the current crop of presidential contenders, insiders and activists have begun developing dreams of deliverance via deadlock and dark horses. The present state of the race, with four or more candidates drawing significant support in Iowa and elsewhere, raises the real possibility that no one aspirant will win a majority of delegates on the first ballot, creating an opening for some fresh face (Rubio? Christie? Mitch Daniels? Paul Ryan? Even Jeb Bush?)  to emerge as the anointed...

Newt Gingrich took pains to wrap himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan during last week’s Fox debate in Iowa. He reminded viewers that Reagan was once called “not electable,” just as he sometimes is. He went on to point out he had “accomplished conservative goals” as speaker in the 1990s, including welfare reform and a balanced budget. “I am someone who campaigned with Reagan,” he concluded.

But at the same time Newt tries to wrap himself in the Reagan mantle, he also exhibits another nostalgic tic that should give conservatives agita. Newt is an unabashed admirer of the Roosevelts — Theodore and Franklin. Together those two presidents embodied the Progressive Era and the New Deal, developments which dramatically expanded Washington’s powers and radically changed the expectations Americans had of government.

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Daily Caller - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has accused “the establishment” of rallying behind his chief rival for the Republican nomination, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

The formal end of the U.S. war in Iraq on December 15 enhances neighboring Iran as a major, unpredictable factor in the U.S. presidential election of 2012.

First, a look back: Iran’s mullahs already had one opportunity to affect American politics, in 1980. Their seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran for 444 days haunted Pres. Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign and — thanks to such developments as yellow ribbons, a “Rose Garden” strategy, a failed rescue operation, and ABC’s America Held Hostage program — contributed to his defeat. Ayatollah Khomeini rebuffed Carter’s hopes for an “October surprise” release of the hostages and twisted the knife one final time by freeing them exactly as Ronald Reagan took the presidential oath.

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 If Newt Gingrich were being nominated for sainthood, many of us would vote very differently from the way we would vote if he were being nominated for a political office.

What the media call Gingrich’s “baggage” concerns largely his personal life and the fact that he made a lot of money running a consulting firm after he left Congress. This kind of stuff makes lots of talking points that we will no doubt hear, again and again, over the coming weeks and months.

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Given a lot of the rhetoric coming out of Washington and mainstream media outlets these days, one could be forgiven for believing that the United States has entered a new age of unprecedented austerity. This is hardly the case. Indeed, despite the best efforts of an insurgent Republican majority in the House of Representatives — elected in 2010 as a rebuke to Democratic fiscal recklessness — federal spending continues to rise.

When Congress passed the Budget Control Act (BCA) — legislation to raise the debt ceiling that called for about $1.8 trillion in spending cuts over ten years — in August, the agreement was hailed by both sides as “the deepest spending cut since World War II” (freshman GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois) that would bring federal spending “to its lowest level as a share of the economy since the Eisenhower administration” (President Obama).

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In southern Manhattan, the “Occupy” crowd tried to squat on private property, and were arrested. One of the occupier-squatters was quoted as saying, “We’re just trying to say that this country has gone in the wrong direction, and we need spaces that we can control and we can decide our future in, and that’s what this is about.”

Haven’t Communists talked like this, more or less, for generations? Is that too McCarthyite for you? Or just true?

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President Obama spoke to the annual meeting of the Union for Reform Judaism last week, and he gave them that ol’-time religion: liberalism. Not surprisingly, since Reform Judaism is, in Richard Brookhiser’s timeless phrase, “the Democratic party with holidays,” it was well-received.

While the audience in the hall purred appreciatively at the president’s invocation of the usual liberal bromides, Mr. Obama’s claims on the subject of his administration’s support of Israel — at least to those not blinkered by partisanship — are nothing short of jaw-dropping. “I am proud to say,” he told the group, “that no U.S. administration has done more in support of Israel’s security than ours. None. Don’t let anybody else tell you otherwise. It is a fact.”

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Daily Caller - It didn’t take very long for Jimmy Moncrief to put together his new 150-page book, “Everything Obama Knows About The Economy.”

Charlie Savage, NY Times
For nearly three years, Republicans have attacked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on national security and civil rights issues. For months, they have criticized him over a gun-trafficking investigation gone awry, with dozens of leaders calling for his resignation. Last week, more than 75 members of Congress co-sponsored a House resolution expressing “no confidence” in his leadership.The intensifying heat on Mr. Holder comes as the Justice Department is stepping into some of the most politically divisive social issues of the day, including accusing an Arizona sheriff...

Ezra Klein, Washington Post
We don't have a payroll tax deal. Over the past week, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell had been negotiating a two-month extension under the tacit understanding that whatever they agreed on, John Boehner would sign onto. They agreed on a two-month extension of the payroll tax. And whether Boehner wanted to sign onto it or not, his members rebelled, and Boehner quickly got in line with them.“It’s pretty clear that I and our members oppose the Senate bill,” Boehner said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It’s only for...

Jonathan Last, Weekly Standard
Over at the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein reacts to a Romney video Ben Domenech highlighted this weekend. In the clip, Mitt Romney, who is responding to a young Mike Warren’s question at Vanderbilt, talks about the similarities and differences between Romneycare and Obamacare and says, among other things, he wants to “repeal the bad and keep the good.”Boston, we have a problem.As Klein notes, the problems this presents for Romney are more than superficial. First, he talks about a number of similarities between the two laws, something he downplays these days.

Democratic waters are still roiled by last week’s decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to overturn an FDA recommendation and continue to restrict access to the Plan B contraceptive pill for girls under 17. Now 14 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus have expressed their displeasure in a letter to the beleaguered Sebelius urging her to stop playing politics and follow the “medical and scientific evidence.”

I get the playing politics. There is little question that the Obama administration’s sudden sympathy for a cause near and dear to the conservative heart is — shall we say? — time sensitive. But “medical and scientific evidence”? That one sounds as if the critics themselves are playing politics.

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Around here, you are the Man of the Year. America doesn’t have time for anything less.

You are concerned about the future of your country. You, like Sen. Marco Rubio — who has credited NR with helping him get to Washington — look around at his colleagues and protest their lack of a “sense of urgency.”

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One might assume, or at least hope, that the fallout over the $535 million Solyndra loan scandal would make the Obama administration think twice before lavishing more taxpayer dollars on politically connected “green energy” firms. Not in the slightest.

The administration’s latest boondoggle involves the use of executive authority to essentially force the U.S. Navy to buy 450,000 gallons of “alternative” biofuel, at the bargain-counter rate of just $15 per gallon. It is the largest federal purchase of biofuel in U.S. history. The massive “investment” is part of President Obama’s broader biofuel initiative, announced in August, on which he envisions spending $510 million over the next three years to support the use of biofuel in military and commercial transportation.

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