The latest "Conversations With Bill Kristol" interview is with Newt Gingrich and has some history of how Reagan became a supply-side tax-cutter:

GINGRICH: I was with Kemp before he went out to the ranch.

KRISTOL: Is that right?

GINGRICH: And Kemp said to me, "I'm going to go see Reagan. If he will agree to take up the tax cut, I'll agree to chair his campaign. If he won't take up the tax cut, I'm going to run."

More from Gingrich about Reagan:

if you read his farewell address, which is one of the best statements of his entire presidency – he says at one point, he said, "People said I gave great speeches but I actually gave speeches about great ideas." And I think it's one of the reasons why people like Clinton and Obama can't figure out the Reagan formula because you have to have the Reagan ideas in order to have the Reagan language in order to dance with the American people, who are, in fact, instinctively Reaganite.

The New York Times' Robert Pear does a fine job of capturing some of the irony of the Harvard faculty's complaints about changes to its health benefits. The changes are being made in part because of cost increases attributable to the ObamaCare policy that a lot of them supported:

Some Harvard employees have said they will gladly accept a narrower network of health care providers if it lowers their costs. But Harvard's ability to create such networks is complicated by the fact that some of Boston's best-known, most expensive hospitals are affiliated with Harvard Medical School. To create a network of high-value providers, Harvard would probably need to exclude some of its own teaching hospitals, or discourage their use.

The Boston Globe has recently brought in admiring articles about a new $125 million building, designed by a Dutch architect, that will be the headquarters of Boston's public schools, and a new $182 million science building at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

If you, like me, are a Boston or Massachusetts taxpayer in the private sector being taxed to pay for these things and you are keeping your residence or business or privately funded school in less luxurious quarters, the justice or wisdom of being taxed, or borrowing, to finance such luxurious accommodations for public employees may be something less than obvious. Whatever happened to the old Yankee virtue of thrift?

The Associated Press reports on the growing number of cities and towns banning sledding in public parks in a surrender to trial lawyers:

faced with the potential bill from sledding injuries, some cities have opted to close hills rather than risk large liability claims.

No one tracks how many cities have banned or limited sledding, but the list grows every year. One of the latest is in Dubuque, Iowa, where the City Council is moving ahead with a plan to ban sledding in all but two of its 50 parks.

At least they aren't requiring airbags and backup cameras on the sleds.

This is the sort of story that you'd think might build some political support for tort reform.

As principled and in some ways personally admirable as Mario Cuomo appears in the obituaries and remembrances, it's hard to get around the fact that his policies failed.

This was brought home to me most emphatically when, in searching through some clips about Mr. Cuomo, I stumbled upon a New York Times dispatch by Sam Roberts from 1994, Mr. Cuomo's final year in office. It reported that Texas had surpassed New York to become the second most populous state in the nation, after California, which had surpassed New York for first place back in 1970. "New York has been hemmorhaging population to other states, including Texas," the Times reported then.

As government press releases go, the one of December 30 from the federal department of education is really something. It begins, "The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced today that it has entered into a resolution agreement with Harvard University and its Law School after finding the Law School in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 for its response to sexual harassment, including sexual assault."

This is a law school whose dean from 2003 to 2009 was Elena Kagan, and whose dean from 2009 to now has been Martha Minow (a former law clerk to Thurgood Marshall). Since 2007 the president of Harvard has been Drew Faust. If an institution led by these eminent and almost certainly well-intentioned women can't follow the law, what does it say about the law?

Tennessee's Republican governor, Bill Haslam, has found a way to expand the coverage of the state's Medicaid program for the poor without forcing the state's taxpayers to pay, NPR reports. Instead, he's gotten the state's hospital association to pay the bill. They'll come out ahead anyway because the program will bring in more federal dollars.

One political advantage of this solution from the Republican point of view is that it prevents Democrats from making it look as if Governor Haslam is preventing poor people from getting health care. Also, it prevents Tennesseans from being forced to pay (at least through their state taxes) for an ObamaCare provision that winds up redistributing money from people with private insurance (or non-Medicaid government insurance, such as Medicare) to those without it (and to their health-care providers).

How presidential candidate Jeb Bush will handle questions about his Catholic faith at a time when Pope Francis is dabbling in the politics of Cuba and climate change is the subject of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and at Newsmax (here).

This week's "Conversations With Bill Kristol" interview is with Jim Manzi, who talks about the value of experimentation in business and public policy:

[I] left and went to work for a little group that had spun out of the Boston Consulting Group, which is a strategy consulting firm. And this little spin-off firm was focused on the idea of using data and fairly intensive analytics, which at the time, this is 1987, which was a pretty innovative idea, to do really high-level strategy corporate work. And we very quickly started getting deep into using mathematical models to understand how to answer the kinds of questions I was referencing before, we're now answering experimentally. Would the following major investment in redesign of the bank branches actually pay out or not, would we create enough incremental customer volume to pay for this or not.

My column this week offers a speculative preview of the year ahead in the style of William Safire's annual "office pool" column. Please check the column out at Reason (here) and Newsmax (here).

Glenn Reynolds has a USA Today column proposing a "House of Repeal" — a third house of Congress in which "the only thing that the elected legislators would have the power to do would be to repeal laws, meaning that for them, all the votes, campaign contributions, media exposure and opportunities for hearings would revolve around paring back the federal behemoth."

From a Washingtonian magazine article about the NBC News program "Meet The Press," its owner Comcast and Comcast's Washington hand David Cohen:

Cohen knew about the money and shoe leather required to win friends in Washington. After taking over Comcast's government-affairs office in 2002, he had steadily beefed up the company's presence in the capital. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Cohen expanded its lobbying team from 31 bodies in 2002 to 103 in 2009, when the merger was announced, and increased its lobbying spending more than five-fold over the same period.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara's handling of insider trading cases has come in for caustic criticism here, but when he does something right, he deserves a cheer. We're glad to see the fraud case he brought and settled against a Port Authority construction contractor who brought in a "Disadvantaged Business Enterprise" — DBE — solely to help win the contract, but not to do any useful work. From the press release from the U.S. Attorney's office:

Union and "occupy" activists in America have occasionally picketed the homes of corporate executives, board members, or government officials. In Israel, these tactics were taken to a new low when someone — police suspect "anti-bank activists" — targeted a school attended by the daughter of a bank CEO, scattering the schoolyard with leaflets including the student's name and the words "It's not your fault your mother [the bank CEO] is a criminal." The Israeli daily Ha'aretz (registration required) has the story.

New York magazine's story about a high school student making tens of millions of dollars trading stocks turns out to be phony. Rolling Stone magazine's story about a rape at the University of Virginia story turns out to be, if not phony, at least so flimsy that the editor of it has no confidence that it is true. President Obama cuts a deal to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba and no one in the press, other than the New York Times editorial page, seems to have had any advance inkling that it was underway. The New York Times publishes a fake front-page story about Pope Francis saying dogs can go to heaven.