The January issue of Commentary has a symposium on the future of conservatism after the 2012 election. It's behind a paywall, but the Matt Welch, Daniel Pipes, and Bret Stephens entries seem to be freely available. Mr. Stephens complains that the Republicans are "God-obsessed": "To a greater degree than some readers of this magazine may care to admit, the conservative movement has grown prudish, crotchety, God-obsessed, conspiratorial, retrograde, and insipid. Somebody needs to stand athwart and yell 'stop.'"

Actor Gerard Depardieu, a refugee from France's 75% tax rate on high-income earners (recently bumped down slightly by a court that found it confiscatory), has been granted citizenship by Russia, which has a flat tax of 13%, Reuters reports.

Wouldn't it be nice if it were the United States, rather than Russia, serving as the receiving place for talented Europeans fleeing unreasonably high taxes?

From the New York Times report on the sale of Al Gore's Current TV to Al Jazeera, via Mike Allen's Politico Playbook: "people with direct knowledge of the deal pegged it at around $500 million, indicating a $100 million payout for Mr. Gore, who owned 20 percent of Current. Mr. Gore and his partners were eager to complete the deal by Dec. 31, lest it be subject to higher tax rates that took effect on Jan. 1. … But the deal was not signed until Wednesday."

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, has an op-ed at Yahoo! News about the tax deal: "If I had my way taxes would not have gone up on anyone, but the unavoidable fact was this if we had sat back and done nothing taxes would have gone up dramatically on every single American, and I simply couldn't allow that to happen."

He also looks forward to the next stage:

now that the President has gotten his long-sought tax hike on the "rich," we can finally turn squarely toward the real problem, which is spending. Predictably, the President is already claiming that his tax hike on the "rich" isn't enough. I have news for him: the moment that he and virtually every elected Democrat in Washington signed off on the terms of the current arrangement, it was the last word on taxes. That debate is over. Now the conversation turns to cutting spending on the government programs that are the real source of the nation's fiscal imbalance.

Compost Cab, the subject of a post here on December 31, is mentioned in a New York Times article today.

The press is filled with talk about the next secretary of State, the next secretary of defense, the next secretary of Treasury. About the next secretary of commerce, there is hardly a peep.

Who is the secretary of commerce now? Rebecca Blank has been the acting secretary since John Bryson resigned on June 21, 2012. Have you missed having a permanent secretary of commerce rather than an acting one for seven months? Has the economy suffered as a result? Has commerce been crippled?

As I wrote here back in June 2012 when Mr. Bryson resigned, America didn't have a separate commerce department until 1913, yet somehow Americans managed to engage in commerce before that time without a federal government bureaucracy to assist them in doing so.

Paul Ryan explains why he voted for the tax bill approved by the House yesterday: "to protect as many Americans as possible from a tax increase...I came to Congress to make tough decisions—not to run away from them."

My column this week is a tax cuts murder mystery. Please check it out at Reason.com here.

There's some attempt to put a positive spin on the tax bill approved early this morning by the Senate on the grounds that it raises taxes only by an estimated $600 billion over ten years rather than the $1.6 trillion over ten years that was President Obama's post-election opening demand. Don't buy that.

One important indication is that Rand Paul and Marco Rubio both voted against the bill.

Another important indication is that the Senate and the House both are probably going to vote on it not only without the seven-day public examination period recommended by Grover Norquist, but without even the three-day preview that had been promised by Boehner's Pledge.

Some of the more cutting-edge cities out in California are already making separate collections of organic waste for compost as part of their municipal garbage collection. But in cities that haven't gone that route yet, entrepreneurs are rising to the challenge.

A company called Compost Cab is operating in Washington D.C. and Baltimore, offering to pick up for a fee and compost waste from residential customers and businesses (apartment buildings, schools) who want to do this.

Here in New York City, there are non-profits that collect banana and orange peels, apple cores, used coffee grounds, wilted cut flowers, and the like, at farmer's markets, and at least one non-profit that accepts commercial quantities of this sort of trash, but I'm not aware of anyone offering residential pick up.

This is from earlier this month, but is a hopeful sign, which is welcome amid all the doom and gloom about going over the fiscal cliff. The Hill newspaper reports that Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland will take over the chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee after the death of Senator Inouye. Senator Leahy and Senator Harkin both outranked her in seniority, but they chose to keep the chairmanships they already had (Judiciary, and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, respectively):

The Leahy and Harkin decisions may at least partly reflect the declining appeal of Appropriations in a time where austerity rather than stimulus spending dominates the conversation and earmarks are no longer the currency of influence in Congress.

The Hill article refers to the Appropriations chairmanship as a "once-coveted post."

Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe suggesting a change to the $40 billion-a-year Pell Grant program, which awards grants that max out at $5,550 a year:

Pell payments to schools should be increased, and split between an up-front payment and a later conditional payment based upon a student's college completion and employment success. If the maximum annual Pell grant is increased to, say, $7,000, the University of Phoenix could get $3,500 now, and $3,500 later, when the student has a degree and when Social Security records confirm that she has held a decent job for three months. After four years, the school will have $14,000 riding on the student's employment.

This strikes me as misguided on at least three fronts.

The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page editor is an occasional panelist on NBC's "Meet the Press," has an editorial asserting that a possible indictment of "Meet the Press" anchor David Gregory for violating D.C. gun laws by displaying an illegal gun-magazine (hardware, not glossy paper) on his show would be "nonsensical."

I've got high regard for the Journal and its editor, but it seems to me that, to the contrary, such a prosecution would make some sense.

"How can the Republican Party — or the center-right political movement in this country generally — dig itself out of the hole it's in?" That's the question I try to answer in my column this week, suggesting that if the Republicans want to broaden their demographic and geographic appeal, they might look to three former governors, Pete Wilson, William Weld, and George Pataki. Please check it out at the New York Sun here.

The University of Chicago's John Cochrane has a long, grim post about the fiscal cliff:

Here is the big issue. The US has already enacted European welfare and regulatory state with American characterstics -- the bloated inefficiency, legalism, and red tape that is our specialty. We have not enacted the taxes to pay for it. We will either dramatically cut back the former, or rather dramatically raise the latter. On the table now is at most $100 billion out of a $1 trillion deficit, and likely much less. The fiscal molehill.

US Federal, State and Local spending is 40% of GDP. Pay attention to state and local, that's a lot more than the 24% Federal we talk about a lot. Europe is more like 50% of GDP, so it sounds like we're behind. But our government is bigger than it looks.