Dan Gerstein takes a hard look at Obama’s inner circle in the West Wing and sees a campaign organization, not a governance council. The stifling political mindset is setting up the Chief for failure.

The president’s top advisers are not just overly political, they are almost totally political. Indeed, this West Wing is stacked with “hacks”–campaign professionals who are acculturated to think, act and win in the hothouse environments of elections, not to govern a bitterly divided country in extremely difficult times.

Of course, this is precisely the opposite of what we were promised last year.

John Stossel documents his transition from a typical left-wing government-knows-best journalist hack to a thoughtful free-market libertarian — and the price he paid to make that journey. The experience has given him a unique perspective on the issue of bias in journalism.

Reporters who think coercive government control is generally good and I, who thinks voluntary market forces are generally better, both have a point of view. So why am I the one called biased?

Only one of the three has it.

The double-standard shown by the NFL and the media in the recent flap over Rush Limbaugh’s bid to buy ownership in the St. Louis Rams is over-the-top shameless. John Hawkins draws five important lessons from the episode. The last one is directed at conservatives:

Maybe conservatives should actually start raising a lot more hell about issues like this one. When Hollywood, the NFL, and the mainstream media conclude that conservatives aren’t suckers who will still hand them money even as they’re insulted, maybe the insults will stop. . . . If conservatives do nothing else in the next few years — well, besides taking back Congress and defeating Barack Obama — we should insist on an end to that double standard.

No, not the tipping point Al Gore has warned us about. Rather, the tipping point in the media’s move away from AGW alarmism toward skepticism. Marc Morano documents the media’s gradual shift toward a more balanced coverage of the science behind the issue. The result is a growing number of skeptics.

The science is so overwhelmingly obvious, that sooner or later the questions could no longer be avoided.

Recent advances in technology for extracting natural gas from shale and methane beds have dramatically changed the global outlook on energy supplies.

The claims of BP and Statoil are so extraordinary that we may need to rewrite the geo-strategy textbooks for the next half century.

Please note: The free market is making these advances, without a trillion-dollar government program dictating outcomes.

Nancy Gibbs worries that the Nobel Peace Prize just awarded our Dear Leader might hang like an albatross around his neck.

The Nobel committee cited “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” . . .  But even his fans know that none of the dreams have yet come true, and a prize for even dreaming them can feed the illusion that they have.

Gibbs points to Greg Mortenson, who has devoted his life to building schools for girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a far more worthy candidate for a peace prize — someone whose actions are more eloquent than any of Obama’s speeches.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has collected some great zingers relating to this “accomplishment.”

UPDATE: How did Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize? He was the tenth caller.

Obama’s high-profile play to get the 2016 Olympic Games in Chicago not only failed, it failed spectacularly. The fact that Chicago got booted in the first round of voting suggests an international message to our President of “Get lost, loser.”

Dan McLaughlin fears more was lost here than merely an Olympic host bid.

This is why you don’t publicly stake your prestige on something that’s not (1) hugely important (2) a done deal or (3) ideally, both. All presidents suffer defeats and embarrassments, but you generally don’t walk right into one on an issue of purely local importance to your home city. Obama’s and the nation’s standing in the world can’t help but be chipped away by this; the next time he goes jetting off to a summit or some other international event, people won’t be so quick to assume that he has all figured out in advance how he’s going to get what he wants. That aura, that mystique is a thing of value that the President is supposed to husband carefully for when the nation really needs it.

Obama assured us that if he was elected, he would restore respect for America in the world community. Looks like the exact opposite has happened.

UPDATE: From the (UK) Times Online:  “A stunning humiliation for this President.”

Tristan Yates documents ACORN’s history of shaking down banks for millions, with the help of The Community Reinvestment Act.

ACORN perfected this “pay for protection” business model in the 1990s. And it is a business. While some of the ACORN organizations are non-profit, others are not, which means that by working together they can get the best of all worlds: political actions, union-style organization, tax-exempt status, privacy, and profit.

And the politicians who enabled this racket get gobs of votes. What’s not to like about it?

The unemployment rate among young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-WWII high. And there is little likelihood of the picture improving over the next several years.

Al Angrisani, the former assistant Labor Department secretary under President Reagan, doesn’t see a turnaround in the jobs picture for entry-level workers and places the blame squarely on the Obama administration and the construction of its stimulus bill.

“There is no assistance provided for the development of job growth through small businesses, which create 70 percent of the jobs in the country,” Angrisani said in an interview last week. “All those [unemployed young people] should be getting hired by small businesses.”

The delicious irony here, of course, is that it was these same young people who overwhelmingly voted for Obama. Now they are learning a hard lesson in how socialist economics works. And the learning is just beginning. These young Americans will inherit the trillions of dollars in debt that Obama has created. It will likely be a miserable life for these folks.

If the Republicans had any sense, they would build their election strategy in upcoming campaigns around this increasingly disillusioned demographic.

The next time someone argues that global warming alarmism is driven by science, refer them to the sad case of Mitchell Taylor, a polar bear research expert who was recently uninvited to the Polar Bear Specialist Group at the upcoming Copenhagen meeting. The reason? Mitchell does not share the prevailing opinion on the cause of global warming. An excerpt from the letter informing him of the decision:

I do believe, as do many Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) members, that for the sake of polar bear conservation, views that run counter to human induced climate change are extremely unhelpful. In this vein, your positions and statements in the Manhattan Declaration, the Frontier Institute, and the Science and Public Policy Institute are inconsistent with positions taken by the PBSG. . . .

Nothing I heard had to do with your science on harvesting or your research on polar bears – it was the positions you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition.

In other words, politics trumps science. When political considerations shape the scientific debate, truth is the first casualty.

Some day the current global warming scare will be taught in universities as a good example of how not to do science.