A typically great Bill Gertz piece about a mole hunt at Ft. Meade.

Ezra Klein accuses Obama of playing “bad poker” in his dealings with Republicans. But wait! How could that be? After all, one of the may founding myths about Obama was that he was an amazing poker player back in his Illinois state senator days. He beat up on the lobbyists in his poker game all the time.

Of course, the poker story was right up there with Obama does curls with 70 lb weights! and Obama is so good at basketball that he can play with UNC’s men’s varsity team! in terms of its nonsense quotient. But no one wanted to hear that back in 2008.

Perhaps Klein should have listened to Steve Sailer:

Time Magazine has an article on how . . . Barack Obama played poker every Wednesday night in Springfield with other legislators and lobbyists. Most nights Obama won.

In fact, that would have to be just about my number one tip on how to win at gambling: Be a state legislator and play poker against lobbyists.

In other Google news, it appears that the Googleplex is poised to pay $5.3 billion . . . for Groupon.

To put that in some context, General Motors, which manufactures cars and trucks and has factories and whatnot has a market cap of $53B, only 10 times this valuation of Groupon.

The Dow Chemical Company, an industrial giant, has a market cap of $37B, just 6 times the valuation of Groupon. That’s the same as Colgate Palmolive, which also makes and sells a lot of actual, you know, stuff.

But Groupon is social networking! And no one could ever parachute in and instantly duplicate their business model!

Galley Friend A.K. sends along this amazing NYT story about how the Google algorithm can be fooled with negative feedback:

Today, when reading the dozens of comments about DecorMyEyes, it is hard to decide which one conveys the most outrage. It is easy, though, to choose the most outrageous. It was written by Mr. Russo/Bolds/Borker himself.

“Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com,” the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

It’s all part of a sales strategy, he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.”

That would sound like schoolyard taunting but for this fact: The post is two years old. Between then and now, hundreds of additional tirades have been tacked to Get Satisfaction, ComplaintsBoard.com, ConsumerAffairs.com and sites like them.

Not only has this heap of grievances failed to deter DecorMyEyes, but as Ms. Rodriguez’s all-too-cursory Google search demonstrated, the company can show up in the most coveted place on the Internet’s most powerful site.

Which means the owner of DecorMyEyes might be more than just a combustible bully with a mean streak and a potty mouth. He might also be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship — utterly noxious retail — that is facilitated by the quirks and shortcomings of Internet commerce and that tramples long-cherished traditions of customer service, like deference and charm.

And not for nothing, but the New York Times (and reporter David Segal) deserve enormous praise for nearly perfect execution with this story. Epic awesome.

Joe Scarborough takes after Sarah Palin this morning for her demeaning former Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

He then mounts extended defenses of Reagan and H.W. Bush.

Megan McArdle and Matthew Yglesias have (intentionally?) hilarious posts arguing that urban neighborhoods which have odious  restrictions on liquor licenses are really hurting themselves because it would be better for everyone if there were lots of super cool bars to go to at night. Here’s Yglesias summing up the argument:

Basically the East Village really “wants” to be full of nightlife establishments just like Qiaotou, China wants button factories. Restricting the creation of new button factories in Qiatou will help incumbent button makers (and alleviate neighborhood concerns about factory smoot) but it’s hard to call a bar scene into existence that way. Similarly, making it hard to open a new bar in the East Village isn’t going to create a button factory. It’s going to create an underutilized space. That means somewhat more unemployment in the city, somewhat less tax revenue in the city, and thus at the margin higher tax rates and fewer social services for everyone.

It’s hard to take any of this seriously–it’s as if neither of them has ever heard of “opportunity cost.” But just for giggles, let’s poke a few holes.

* How many salaried positions do bars create? For starters, a bar requires relatively few employees, and for another, they tend not to be salaried positions. How much income tax revenue do bars really generate?

* If the loss of tax revenue incurred by not having bars leads in fewer marginal social services, how many more social services do bars consume relative to other uses of the space? More police work, more sanitation, more billable hours on the public side of the criminal justice system. Surely bars consume more state resources than residential or retail units.

* How do bars impact property values? If the presence of bars lowers surrounding property values, which seems at least possible, this creates a property tax shortfall.

And so on and so on. The heart of this, of course, is that hipster amateur economists really just want to manufacture an economic rationale for a good which they personally prefer. There’s no consideration that other people in the neighborhood might prefer competing goods–like quiet, stable property values, family-friendly space, etc– and that those goods also have value.

But hey, that’s cool, because grown-up, professional economists do this all the time.

The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson offers a particularly silly defense of the TSA’s pat-down regime, though, to his credit, he does understand that the issue is really about profiling. Here’s Robinson:

Our terrorist enemies may be evil but they’re not stupid.

If we only search people who “look like terrorists,” al-Qaeda will send people who don’t fit the profile. It’s no accident that most of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were from Saudi Arabia; at the time, it was easier for Saudi nationals to get U.S. visas than it was for citizens of other Arab countries. If terrorists are clever enough to hide powerful explosives in ink cartridges, then eventually they’ll find a suicide bomber who looks just like you, me or Granny.

Robinson is wrong on so many levels. For starters, many of the recent terrorist plots have failed because the would-be terrorists were stupid. Surely some jihadis are smart. Others are not.

As for the question of finding willing suicide bombers who look like Everyone Else, that, too, is foolish. It’s entirely plausible that a white 20- or 30-something might be an Adam Gadahn-style jihadist. It’s also possible that a middle-aged black man (like Robinson) might be a jihadist. But no one is seriously arguing that profiling should totally bypass these groups.

But I suspect that it would be nearly impossible for terrorists to find a suicide bomber who looks like an elderly Chinese woman. Or a 2-year-old child. Or a teen-age Maori girl. Or a 70-year-old Swedish man.

Further, Robinson seems totally unaware that the system used by the Israelis rests as much on behavioral as demographic profiling. Here’s how behavioral pattern recognition (BPR) works:

In 1986, Anne-Marie Murphy, a pregnant, 32-year-old Irish lass, was on her way to board a London flight to Israel, where she was to marry her Arab fiance. After passing through several security checks, she was stopped for a targeted conversation by Israeli security because she stuck out: Pregnant women do not often travel long distances alone. Authorities became more interested in her because of the evasive answers she gave. Turns out, she had a bomb in her carry-on bag.

What made the BPR success so impressive in Murphy’s case is that she didn’t even know that she had a bomb on her. (Her fiance had packed it without her knowledge, happy to make his fiance and unborn child into unwilling martyrs.)

Now, maybe you think that profiling–which involves both demographic and behavioral scrutiny-is a bridge too far and that it presents an undue burden on our liberties without providing enough of a marginal increase in security. That’s an argument that Eugene Robinson should feel free to make.

But somehow, I don’t think that’s what he was going for.

Memo to Vanity Fair, New Yorker, et al: If you want to do a hit on Sarah Palin, this is how you do it. Who needs imaginary crimes and deceptions when you have Palin Twitter feed to mine?

Brutally effective.