Cheney slams Obama for projecting ‘weakness’  —  MCLEAN, Va. — On the eve of the unveiling of the nation's new Afghanistan policy, former Vice President Dick Cheney slammed President Barack Obama for projecting “weakness” to adversaries and warned that more workaday Afghans will side …

Why I Parted Ways With The Right  —  1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)  —  2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)

UK climate scientist to temporarily step down  —  LONDON — Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

State dinner crashers exchanged e-mails with Pentagon official  —  The special assistant to the Secretary of Defense, who was appointed by Obama, said she clearly stated in correspondence with the couple that she could not extend any kind of invitation.  —  Reporting from Washington …

The Worst Kind Of Scheduling Conflict.  —  President Barack Obama ...  ... is slated to deliver a prime-time address on Tuesday night in which he'll lay out his plans for the American war in Afghanistan.  —  The address before the United States Military Academy at West Point on Tuesday night …

Arming Goldman With Pistols Against Public: Alice Schroeder  —  Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) — “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol.

Job Cuts Loom as Stimulus Fades  —  WASHINGTON—Highway-construction companies around the country, having completed the mostly small projects paid for by the federal economic-stimulus package, are starting to see their business run aground, an ominous sign for the nation's weak employment picture.

Threat of reconciliation hovers over centrist Democrats on healthcare  —  Talk about using budget reconciliation to pass healthcare reform in the Senate has faded from public view, but Democratic leaders continue to hang the threat over centrists in private.

Lakewood police shooting suspect killed by officer in South Seattle early today  —  Maurice Clemmons, the suspect wanted in the slaying of four Lakewood police officers, was shot and killed in South Seattle early this morning by a Seattle police officer making a routine check of a stolen car.

The Climate Science Isn't Settled  —  Confident predictions of catastrophe are unwarranted.  —  Printer  —  Friendly  —  Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming?  Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing.

MoveOn Mobilizes Against Obama on Afghanistan  —  ABC News' Rick Klein reports: The liberal drumbeat against President Obama's new Afghanistan policy is about to get a whole lot louder.  —  MoveOn.org, the liberal advocacy group that claims 5 million members, today sent an e-mail blast urging members …

Huck: Political attacks ‘disgusting’  —  Under fire for commuting the sentence of suspected cop-killer Maurice Clemmons, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Tuesday called some of the criticisms “disgusting” and suggested they were attempts to score political points.

The quintessential Andrew Sullivan  —  Blogger Andrew Sullivan charged Sunday that, whereas in December of last year I advocated a gasoline tax, in my “latest column” on climate change, “the gas tax idea is missing.”  —  “Why?” asks Sullivan.  Because: “In the end, the conservative intelligentsia …

No Country for Old Typewriters: A Well-Used One Heads to Auction  —  Cormac McCarthy has written more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters and more — and nearly every one of them was tapped out on a portable Olivetti manual typewriter …

In Iowa, As Huck Goes, So Goes Romney?  —  Presidential primary politics is not, as Robert Wright might put it, always a zero sum game.  Given the prevailing metaphors of political positioning and space, one candidate often fills an ideological space and displaces others — think Pat Robertson in the 1988 Iowa caucuses.

The War  —  It seems I should write my official What I Think About Obama's Escalation in Afghanistan post.  —  Mostly the whole situation makes me want to sigh.  I don't think the kind of effort that as best I understand it we're undertaking in Afghanistan meets any kind of plausible cost benefit test.

The Mutual Fund Fraud  —  Via Felix Salmon, some Fama and French empirical work on the (lack of) returns to actively managed mutual funds.  —  Here's how fund managers do before fees relative to a hypothetical zero skill case:  —  Some managers do worse than random, others do better.