You know how far ACORN’s star has fallen when the organization becomes the butt of jokes on late-night television.

• Updated Book Titles.
• Washington’s Most Expensive Bike Rack. It features all kinds of amenities and cost $4 million. And it was paid for with your tax dollars, of course.
• The Unintended Consequences of Protectionism. “Mr. Obama may not intend to start a trade war, but then Hoover didn’t set out to pick one either. His political abdication is what made it possible, however, and trade passions once unleashed can be impossible to control. On his present course, President Obama is giving the world every reason to conclude he is a protectionist.”

• Class Warfare. Responding to hard times, governments around the world decide not to tighten their belts but to increase their revenues through punitive taxes.
• Is This Really a Compromise? The Baucus proposal addresses superficial concerns but doesn’t address the principal conservative complaint about the Left’s health care plan: that it vastly increases the size and scope of the federal government.
• Norman Podhoretz on Why Jews are Liberals. “[I]n virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews. Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right.”
• Tyler Cowen on Politics and the Economy. “But we are now injecting politics ever more deeply into the American economy, whether it be in finance or in sectors like health care. Not only have we failed to learn from our mistakes, but also we’re repeating them on an ever-larger scale.”

• Berkeley’s Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements. “[B]eggars can’t be choosers. The unfortunate fact is that American academics have until recently shown little curiosity about conservative ideas, even though those ideas have utterly transformed American (and British) politics over the past 30 years.”
• Another Jay Nordlinger Observation. “And isn’t it interesting that, when you read about ‘angry white males,’ they’re always talking about conservatives — never, say, Keith Olbermann?”
• Greg Mankiw’s Economics Reading List. What he assigned his Harvard freshman seminar.

• What Washingtonians Make.
• The Cupcake Boom.
• Mitch Daniels Explains the Need for Fiscal Responsibility in the States. “The coming state government reset will be particularly wrenching after the happy binge that preceded this recession. During the last decade, states increased their spending by an average of 6% per year, gusting to 8% during 2007-08. Much of the government institutions built up in those years will now have to be dismantled.”
• The Tories’ Privatization Scheme. It sounds like a fine idea, but the justification is a bit odd. Aren’t there better reasons to privatize government-run industries other than short-term revenue gains? I hope and expect the Conservatives are making this point.