Let it be known up front that I routinely warn other drivers about police speed traps by flashing my lights.  Back in my youth it New Jersey it would have been considered unchivalrous to do otherwise.  I will continue to engage in the practice as long as I drive.  I suspect that there is a philosophical issue underlying my desire to play cat and mouse with the police.  Some regard the police as stalwart men in blue who do no wrong and who uphold civic virtue.  Having worked in an intelligence agency, somewhat akin to police work, I have a different viewpoint.  Cops are guys holding down a job who do what they are told to do.  They are not necessarily heroes or martyrs.  If the local county is revenue shy and can work out some ingenious ways to fine the citizenry to raise money they will do so and the police will be tasked to pull in more miscreants and whack them with heavy fines.  It is my responsibility to deny the state my earnings, so I will do what I have to do to avoid that possibility. …

Which comes back to the central issue of state intrusion in people’s lives.  Passing a law prohibiting flashing lights on a car is clearly designed to make it easier for police to catch people, whether or not they are behaving recklessly.  It denies the people the right to have some pushback in a system which is heavily weighted against the individual. [Bold mine-R]

The comments are also worth reading, including this one:

My own home town is a notorious speed trap. Speed limits were lowered on our main thoroughfare until the desired number of enforcement actions (revenue) were produced. Shameless, obvious and loathed by the locals, this practice continues because no one is willing to appear in favor of speeding. And God help the politician who runs afoul of the Mothers Against Drunken Driving!

1.) The Brightest Are Not Always the Best: Frank Rich looks at Obama’s economic appointees with a suspicious eye, and for good reason.

As Barack Obama rolls out his cabinet, “the best and the brightest” has become the accolade du jour from Democrats (Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri), Republicans (Senator John Warner of Virginia) and the press (George Stephanopoulos). Few seem to recall that the phrase, in its original coinage, was meant to strike a sardonic, not a flattering, note …

Lawrence Summers, the new top economic adviser, was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history and is famous for never letting anyone forget his brilliance. It was his highhanded disregard for his own colleagues, not his impolitic remarks about gender and science, that forced him out of Harvard’s presidency in four years. Timothy Geithner, the nominee for Treasury secretary, is the boy wonder president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He comes with none of Summers’s personal baggage, but his sparkling résumé is missing one crucial asset: experience outside academe and government, in the real world of business and finance. Postgraduate finishing school at Kissinger & Associates doesn’t count.

Summers and Geithner are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transition economic advisers three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Ever since his acclaimed service as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.

Geithner was no less tardy in discovering the reckless, wholesale gambling that went on in Wall Street’s big casinos, all of which cratered while at least nominally under his regulatory watch. That a Hydra-headed banking monster like Citigroup came to be in the first place was a direct byproduct of deregulation championed by Rubin and Summers in Clinton’s Treasury Department (where Geithner also served). The New Deal reform they helped repeal, the Glass-Steagall Act, had been enacted in 1933 in part because Citigroup’s ancestor, National City Bank, had imploded after repackaging bad loans as toxic securities in the go-go 1920s.

Well, nobody’s perfect. Given that John McCain’s economic team was headlined by Carly Fiorina and Joe the Plumber, the country would be dodging a fiscal bullet even if Obama had picked Suze Orman. But I keep wondering why the honeymoon hagiography about the best and the brightest has been so over the top.

2.) Abortion Politics Didn’t Doom the GOP: The Atlantic’s Ross Douhat gets a spot in the Grey Lady to explain why pro-choice Republicans’ laments over the fundamentalist wing are misguided and unfounded.

(M)ore frustrating than the blame game is the equally familiar advice that has accompanied it. Most abortion opponents can recite the litany by heart. Their movement should focus on changing hearts and minds, rather than the law. It should be more consistently pro-life, by helping human beings outside the womb as well as those within it. It should cease trying to roll back the sexual revolution and standing athwart science yelling “stop!” And above all, it should be less absolutist, and more amenable to compromise.

Obviously there’s wisdom in some of these suggestions. But pro-lifers have already taken much of it to heart. Compromise, rather than absolutism, has been the watchword of anti-abortion efforts for some time now. Since the early 1990s, advocates have focused on pushing largely modest state-level restrictions, from parental notification laws to waiting periods to bans on what we see as the grisliest forms of abortion…

So the question isn’t whether the anti-abortion movement can change, adapt and compromise. It’s already done that. The question is whether it can afford to compromise on the national issue that keeps serious pro-lifers in the Republican fold, and requires an abortion litmus test for Republican presidential nominees — namely, the composition of the courts. And here the pro-life movement is essentially trapped — not by its own inflexibility, but by the inflexibility of the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence…

The public is amenable to compromise: majorities support keeping abortion legal in some cases, but polling by CBS News and The Times during the presidential campaign showed that more Americans supported new restrictions on abortion than said it should be available on demand. And while some pro-lifers would reject any bargain, many more would be delighted to strike a deal that extends legal protection to more of the unborn, even if it stopped short of achieving the movement’s ultimate goals.

But no such compromise is possible so long as Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey remain on the books. These decisions are monuments to pro-choice absolutism, and for pro-lifers to accept them means accepting that no serious legal restrictions on abortion will ever be possible — no matter what the polls say, and no matter how many hearts and minds pro-lifers change.

Overturning Roe and Casey has never been an easy task, and the election of Barack Obama will make it that much more difficult. Facing a hostile governing majority, pro-lifers can and should talk more about the possibility of compromise: They should explain, more often and more cogently, that if Americans want laws that better reflect their muddled sentiments on abortion, it is pro-choice maximalism, not the pro-life movement, that’s really standing in the way.

3.) On Joe the Plumber and his forthcoming book: You may remember I mentioned some weeks back that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher has launched a website and has a book coming out? (It’s here, if you missed it.) Well tomorrow, Timothy Egan takes ol’ Joe to task! (Fair warning: This guy is as cutting as they come.)

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate.

Joe, a k a Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, was no good as a citizen, having failed to pay his full share of taxes, no good as a plumber, not being fully credentialed, and not even any good as a faux American icon. Who could forget poor John McCain at his most befuddled, calling out for his working-class surrogate on a day when Joe stiffed him.

With a résumé full of failure, he now thinks he can join the profession of Mark Twain, George Orwell and Joan Didion.

He also gets some punches in at Sarah “2012″ Palin:

Next up may be Sarah Palin, who is said to be worth nearly $7 million if she can place her thoughts between covers. Publishers: with all the grim news of layoffs and staff cuts at the venerable houses of American letters, can we set some ground rules for these hard times? Anyone who abuses the English language on such a regular basis should not be paid to put words in print.

Here’s Palin’s response, after Matt Lauer asked her when she knew the election was lost:

“I had great faith that, you know, perhaps when that voter entered that voting booth and closed that curtain that what would kick in for them was, perhaps, a bold step that would have to be taken in casting a vote for us, but having to put a lot of faith in that commitment we tried to articulate that we were the true change agent that would progress this nation.”

I have no idea what she said in that thicket of words. [bolds mine-R]

Now something has gone wrong with all three television sets. They will get only Sarah Palin.

I can play a kind of Alaskan roulette. Any random channel clicked on by the remote brings up that eager face, with its continuing assaults on the English Lang.

There she is with Larry and Matt and just about everyone else but Dr. Phil (so far). If she is not yet on “Judge Judy,” I suspect it can’t be for lack of trying. …

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

2.) Most astute analysis of the potential auto bailout: Many times in past months, I’ve directed your gaze to the wise words of Pat Buchanan, former Nixon speechwriter, Reagan adviser and fringe presidential candidate. There are plenty of places I part ways with him, but the man’s political instincts are usually keen — this post about “conservatives” and their strange opposition to a meager $25 million to bail out our auto industry is worthwhile reading, even if (like me) you aren’t sure you agree with it:

Understandably, Republicans are seething.

When Hank Paulson demanded $700 billion to haul away the trash in the dumpsters of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs — assuring us we could hold a garage sale of the junk — they rebelled. They acted as the nation, by 100 to one, demanded. They killed the Wall Street bailout.

The Dow quickly sank another 1,000 points, and, charged with criminal irresponsibility by the elites, the GOP buckled, reversed itself, rescued the bailout — and was wiped out on Nov. 4.

Now we hear from Paulson that the $700 billion Congress voted will not, after all, be used to buy up all that rotten paper on the books of the big banks. Some banks are using the cash to buy other banks.

So Republicans are right to be enraged. They are victims of the biggest bait-and-switch in political history. But they are now about to do something terminally stupid. With GM, Ford, and Chrysler teetering on the brink, they are turning a cold stone face to Detroit …

And to let the auto industry die is to write America out of much of the economic future of the planet. [Bolds mine-R]

Go read the whole thing. You’ll be a little smarter afterward.

3.) Funniest totally lame YouTube thing I just found: Thanks, Nick, for pointing me to this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J6S6mDyNvY[/youtube]

1.) “The Joshua Generation”: This in-depth piece from reporter David Remnick looks at how Obama used race to his advantage — and downplayed it as well — en route to the White House, and looks at what the victory ultimately means for black Americans in the 21st century. It’s not an altogether shiny, happy tale, but it’s informative for anyone interested in the racial, social and political divides in this country.

2.) “Battle Plans”: Ryan Lizza gives us an overarching view of how Obama’s advisers used an adept understanding of the nation’s political tide, as well as a cool-headed approach to usually white-hot presidential politics, to help Obama to victory.

All this from the same magazine that gave us the unforgettable cover above, in the name of satire.

A forged boarding pass, printed with a consumer laptop and consumer inkjet printer. This one got Mr. Goldberg in "elite" first class.

I could have ripped up these counterfeit boarding passes in the privacy of a toilet stall, but I chose not to, partly because this was the renowned Senator Larry Craig Memorial Wide-Stance Bathroom, and since the commencement of the Global War on Terror this particular bathroom has been patrolled by security officials trying to protect it from gay sex, and partly because I wanted to see whether my fellow passengers would report me to the TSA for acting suspiciously in a public bathroom. No one did, thus thwarting, yet again, my plans to get arrested, or at least be the recipient of a thorough sweating by the FBI, for dubious behavior in a large American airport. …

(B)ecause I have a fair amount of experience reporting on terrorists, and because terrorist groups produce large quantities of branded knickknacks, I’ve amassed an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls (really). All these things I’ve carried with me through airports across the country. I’ve also carried, at various times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary screening four times—out of dozens of passages through security checkpoints—during this extended experiment. At one screening, I was relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving cream.

He never once missed his flight.

Anyway, it’s a definite must-read and a shocking look at how $7 billion taxpayer dollars have been used on what Goldberg calls “security theater.”

Best new web presence: The Daily Beast, a blend of news aggregator (i.e. it has lots of links to actual news and commentary sites), blog hub and high society. The design is great, the bloggers are varied and terrific (if a bit elite), and “The Big Story” feature is particularly nice, giving five or six widely different angles on a particular story of the day. You really should check it out.

Worst new TV show: Fox’s “Hole in the Wall.” The preview looked sort of funny, which compelled me to look it up on Hulu during a lull here at work. The contestants, hosts and audience are all WAY too excited about the stupid task that’s going on here: Namely, people trying to contort themselves to fit through (you guessed it!) holes in a wall. This further strengthens my urge to come up with some pitches for TV shows — if this thing can make it on the air, anything can. Click here to watch; it’s a great test of the human will to see how far you can get before turning if off. I made it almost 7 whole minutes!