In his inaugural address, President Obama grandly announced–to the delight of liberals everywhere–that he would “restore science to its proper place.” As much as this veiled partisan dig pleased his base, it was also vague: we didn’t know exactly what he meant. After all, liberals aren’t exactly fond of biology, and they have mostly expressed contempt for environmental science.

Thanks to the L.A. Times, however, we are finally getting a glimpse into what the president meant. To Obama, science apparently means using taxpayer dollars to overpay a campaign donor for a no-bid vaccine that is for an eradicated disease, cannot be tested effectively anyway, and which scientists advising the FDA called “a waste of time and a waste of money.” According to the Times:

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As Alana pointed out, according to Public Policy Polling, Newt Gingrich is now at the top of the GOP field. And for understandable reasons: he’s performed quite well in the debates, he’s generally excellent during television interviews, he’s targeted the press in almost every debate, and he hasn’t gotten into any spitting matches with the other candidates. He has, in fact, gone out of his way to praise the other candidates. He’s “Uncle Newt,” to quote Fox’s Brit Hume. As the other candidates dissolve or self-destruct and as Mitt Romney continues to face a ceiling on support among conservative voters, Gingrich was bound to rise.

But here’s the thing to keep in mind: other candidates rose, too, before the white hot presidential spotlight turned on them and, to one degree or another, burnt them up. So far in this campaign, Gingrich has avoided that kind of scrutiny, precisely because until now he hasn’t been considered a front runner. Now that he is, he will increasingly become a target. We’ll see it with the press first – and then, if necessary, we’ll see it from the other candidates.

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The momentum that we started seeing late last week from Newt Gingrich is continuing, with two new polls out today showing the former Speaker surging into the lead. The competition has turned into a three-man race between Gingrich, Romney and Cain, though if Cain’s numbers continue to fall it might morph into a two-man race before long.

Here’s Public Policy Polling, which found an 18-point spike in Gingrich’s support during the past two months. Cain is still hanging on in the PPP poll, but as you can see, Rick Perry’s numbers have plummeted into also-ran territory:

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News that two of many militias in Libya have recently clashed, leaving a number of people dead, confirms the huge dangers that face the post-Qaddafi state. As I’ve repeatedly said before, our job is not done with the ouster of Qaddafi; it will be a hollow victory indeed if a durable, liberal democracy cannot be built in Libya–if, instead, Libya’s war were to devolve into civil war it would be nothing short of a tragedy. And a readily preventable tragedy at that.

Experience has shown that most post-conflict states (Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Germany, Italy, South Korea, etc.) require a long-term international troop presence to ensure a peaceful resolution of recently unleashed enmities. Those states where the troop presence has been missing or inadequate (see e.g., Congo, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan) have paid a terrible price. Maybe Libya will be the exception to the rule; I hope so. But hope isn’t a policy.

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News of this 60 Minutes investigation into congressional “insider trading” has been buzzing around Washington for awhile, which gave both Representatives John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi plenty of time to preemptively bat it down. Still, the details don’t look good for the lawmakers, and will likely spark a conversation over whether members of Congress should recuse themselves from legislation that relates to their personal stock holdings:

In the spring of 2010, a bespectacled, middle-aged policy wonk named Peter Schweizer fired up his laptop and began a months-long odyssey into a forbidding maze of public databases, hunting for the financial secrets of Washington’s most powerful politicians. Schweizer had been struck by the fact that members of Congress are free to buy and sell stocks in companies whose fate can be profoundly influenced, or even determined, by Washington policy, and he wondered, do these ultimate insiders act on what they know? Yes, Schweizer found, they certainly seem to. Schweizer’s research revealed that some of Congress’s most prominent members are in a position to routinely engage in what amounts to a legal form of insider trading, profiting from investment activity that, he says, “would send the rest of us to prison.”

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That was a great graphic graphic the New York Times ran on Sunday to illustrate an article by Mark Landler on a “new era of gunboat diplomacy.”

It shows that in the South China Sea–”an area of rich oil and gas resources”–China has the predominance of power, deploying 68 tactical submarines, 13 destroyers, and 65 frigates. By contrast, the U.S. 7th Fleet has only three tactical submarines, seven destroyers, two cruisers, and one frigate. It’s a gross mismatch even if you count on America’s side the navies of allies such as Japan (which has a large navy but is limited in its use by Japan’s pacifistic tradition) and the Philippines (which has all of one frigate). And the mismatch is only getting worse because China is growing its defense budget by double digits every year while the U.S. is in the midst of a major defense cutback.

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Lower Manhattan businesses, fed up with Mayor Bloomberg’s appeasement of the Occupy Wall Street protests, are taking matters into their own hands. NBC reports that disgruntled locals are holding a rally tonight at City Hall to pressure city officials to take action:

Downtown residents and business owners are organizing a protest of the protest after two months of Lower Manhattan being occupied by the Wall Street demonstration.

Angry over all-day drumming, people urinating and defecating on the streets and verbal attacks from protesters, organizers say they will rally at City Hall Monday to send officials a message.

“Mayor Bloomberg is helping them stay,” read the fliers posted downtown.

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This year’s GOP debates have claimed two victims – Governor Rick Perry, who has been bad to awful in all but one of the debates he’s appeared in; and some members of the press who have moderated the debates.

The latest journalist to have his reputation tarnished is CBS’s Scott Pelley. I will admit I don’t watch the “CBS Evening News,” so I wasn’t very familiar with Pelley. But what I saw of the debate CBS broadcast on Saturday night was not impressive.

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You may remember the tough-talking Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter from his blunt and brilliant sermon on personal responsibility that went viral over the summer (if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and click over to Rich Lowry’s take). So far, Nutter has dealt amicably with the Occupy Philly protesters, but that all changed this weekend when a 23-year-old woman was reportedly raped at the campsite.

Now it sounds like Philly may be on the verge of shutting down the movement:

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There were predictions in September that the Supreme Court would likely rule on Obamacare by next June, and this news all but settles it. The timing will ensure that the health care law becomes the top issue of the election, perhaps even overshadowing unemployment.

Phil Klein, the expert on all matters Obamacare, is thrilled to hear that the case is coming out of the 11^th Circuit of Appeals, which apparently has the top legal team out of all of the challenges:

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The Occupy Oakland branch of the nationwide tent city protests seems to have produced the worst-case scenario for both the occupier movement and its critics. A man was shot and killed there a few days ago, and police are clearing the protesters out this morning (though many occupiers are threatening to come back after the police are gone).

But aside from the violence, which has been common throughout the protests in several major cities, the Occupy Oakland events put the lie to the assertion that only a minor segment of the group is responsible for the violence and that the rest of the protesters do not condone that behavior. Yesterday, Rabbi Michael Lerner, the left-wing political activist who runs Tikkun magazine, emailed his supporters with a note of correspondence between Lerner and one of his followers, who was–although supportive of the occupy movement in general–horrified by what he saw at Occupy Oakland:

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The standoff between police and Occupy Portland protesters yesterday appears to have ended peacefully, with Oregon Live reporting the parks are empty this morning. But the destruction the movement left in its wake looks it was pulled from a scene in “Hoarders.” The parks are unusable – muddy and grassless, strewn with garbage and makeshift shelters. You can see police trying to clear out the debris in some of these photos, but it’s clearly going to take a significant amount of time and money to restore them. Just for the sake of comparison, here’s the beautiful, historical Lownsdale Square – which housed a monument from the Spanish-American war – before Occupy Portland got a hold of it.

With the sexual assault, riots, attacks on police, and other heinous crimes coming out of the protests, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the basic destruction the movement carries out just by existing. There is no safe and hygienic way for dozens of people to live in a park for weeks at a time. The protesters in Portland have been commended for their peacefulness – for not attacking police officers attempting to evict them from their campsite. They shouldn’t be. Even when everything ends without conflict, 99 percent of the city is still left to deal with a mess created by one percent of the residents.