My experience attempting to sign up for ObamaCare is the subject of my column this week. Please check it out at Newsmax (here) or Reason (here) or the New York Sun (here).

The "stealth" subscription drive last quarter was so successful that we are trying it again. Renewal notices went out this afternoon to subscribers who are due to re-up. Thank you to those who have already paid or let me know they plan to renew. As a reminder to the rest of you — both current subscribers up for renewal and those of you who have not taken the plunge yet — this site is supported by paying readers.

We recognize that this is a busy time of year, when even those of you who aren't preparing for holidays or away on vacation are besieged by requests to spend money, whether from retailers touting holiday sales or by charities offering year-end tax deductions. We're considering moving this quarterly drive for paying subscribers to January just to break out of the clutter. Until then, though, here we are, and it's going to take a few more of you to meet our annual goal.

From a New York Times column about the failures of the government's "war on poverty":

Importantly, government benefits can make it tough for people to leave poverty behind. "There's a lot of action at the very bottom," Professor Waldfogel said. "But once you hit the poverty line a lot goes away."

For a two-parent family with children and a breadwinner earning $25,000, it makes little financial sense for the other spouse to get a job. After subtracting taxes, lost government benefits and the added cost of child care, the family would take in only some 30 cents of each additional dollar, according to calculations by Melissa Kearney and Lesley Turner of the University of Maryland.

Walter Isaacson has posted a draft excerpt of his next book, a portion of which is a reminder that notwithstanding all the negative effects of the late 1960s and early 1970s counterculture that conservatives regularly remind people about, there was a positive effect in terms of the technology of Silicon Valley:

The antiauthoritarian and power-to-the-people mindset of the late 1960s youth culture, along with its celebration of rebellion and free expression, helped lay the ground for the next wave of computing. As John Markoff wrote in What the Dormouse Said, "Personal computers that were designed for and belonged to single individuals would emerge initially in concert with a counterculture that rejected authority and believed the human spirit would triumph over corporate technology."

This is a point made here at FutureOfCapitalism, also citing the Markoff book, at the death of Steve Jobs.

Isaacson quotes Stewart Brand:

It's been 26 years since Richard Wigton and Timothy Tabor were arrested, and 24 years since federal prosecutors in New York announced they were dropping the cases against the two men.

But their names are being discussed again by Wall Street traders today as the classic examples of innocent victims caught up in an overzealous, politically ambitious prosecutor's insider trading investigation. It's a pattern that risks being repeated, with serious consequences, with this week's conviction of Michael Steinberg, a fund manager at SAC Capital Advisers LP, part of the Connecticut hedge fund led by Steven A. Cohen.

In the Daily Caller, Charles C. Johnson takes a look at the support that self-described "tax-and-spend liberal" television and radio personality Ed Schultz is getting from labor unions, while also noting Mr. Schultz's use of private jets.

Foreign Affairs has an article by Columbia professor Charles Calomiris and Stanford Professor Stephen Haber on banking regulation:

Mayor Bloomberg touts his Wall Street Journal op-ed page defense of his anti-poverty record in the face of the New York Times Dasani series by posting, to Facebook, the claim that "No city in the country has devoted more energy and resources to combating homelessness and poverty than NYC."

You'd hope that a mayor as smart and as empirically minded as Mr. Bloomberg, however, would realize that the measure of achievement on this front isn't how much "energy and resources" you devote, but what you get for them. Otherwise it's all just a waste of time and money, or energy and resources. What counts isn't the input, but the output. If the city could help the poor more by spending less energy and resources, that would be better. What matters isn't how much money you spend, but the results.

So the Wall Street Journal article by two Bloomberg deputy mayors, for example, asserts:

Possibilities and predictions for the year ahead are the subject of my column this week, the annual William Safire-style "Office Pool." Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

AllThingsD has news of the death of a worker on December 4 at an Amazon warehouse in New Jersey:

Abacus executives did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment. A woman who answered the phone at Abacus' Avenel location hung up on me when I identified myself as a reporter.

A Genco spokesman didn't respond to email and phone messages requesting comment.

Senator Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, has released his latest "wastebook" detailing what he describes as wasteful federal spending. The report has attracted press coverage in the New York Post (here), Politico (here) and Fox News (here). Among the expenditures were $630,000 to buy followers for the State Department's Facebook and Twitter accounts and "$325,525 for a National Institutes of Health study that found wives would be happier if they could calm down faster during arguments with their husbands."

Peter Schiff has a pretty funny — verging on genius, actually — YouTube video asking Walmart customers if they would be willing to pay 15% higher prices to support higher wages for Walmart workers. He finds not many takers.

The New Republic takes a close look at the Bloomberg View operation:

Writers were also wined and dined by Bloomberg himself. At a dinner for columnists at the Palm, the mayor promised not to censor anyone, assuring them that they could, within limits—one of which was advocating against a woman's right to choose—write whatever they wanted.

Heavy use of anonymous sources by The New Republic in this one.

E.J. Dionne Jr. writes in the Washington Post:

Consider how much less freedom so many of us would have without civil rights or voting rights laws, without government student loans, without labor laws, without public schools and without Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. (And we don't take seriously enough the implications of a most basic fact of our national story: that it took big government in Washington to outlaw slavery.)

To write that "it took big government in Washington to outlaw slavery" distorts the story. The same "big government in Washington" enacted and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act until an abolition movement of preachers and newspaper editors forced the issue.

Damian Thompson writes at the Web site of the Telegraph:

Let's put this simply: America is secularising just like Europe – and all that talk of "American exceptionalism", the free market in religion that kept it thriving, has turned out to be hogwash.

I'm not so sure he's right. But it is true that America has gone through up-and-down cycles of religious revivals in its history, with significant political implications (see my book on Samuel Adams for one example). It's certainly worth keeping a close eye on.