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David Warren is pessimistic about Egypt’s future as a democracy.

…The rhetoric of the Bush administration took them in this way, fondly hoping that with the passage of time, “modern” attitudes would keep spreading, as they once did in Europe, and have done more recently in countries of the Pacific Rim. The “neo-conservatives” sincerely believed that once constitutional democracy is implanted, it will grow, until it can be sustained by habit. India, “the world’s largest democracy,” is the standard example of this sort of miracle.

…I tend to look at the world more darkly than the “neo-conservatives” did.

While I recognize that support for “democracy and freedom” is substantial, within each Arab national society — that the middle class is not a nothing; that each economy depends on it — I doubt this “faction” can prevail. Worse, I think we are watching its final, hopeless bid for power. …

Peter Wehner reminds us of what Bush 43 said about Middle East policy.

As popular unrest sweeps the Middle East and North Africa, from Tunisia to Yemen to Egypt, it’s worth recalling the words and warning of President George W. Bush – in this case, his November 19, 2003, address at Whitehall Palace in London, where Bush said this:

We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. …

As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found.

…The core argument Bush made, which is that America must stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity — the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, private property, free speech, equal justice, and religious tolerance — was right. No people on earth long to live in oppression and servitude, as slaves instead of free people, to be kept in chains or experience the lash of the whip. …

In Contentions, Max Boot follows up on Peter Wehner’s comments.

…But whatever happens, one thing is already clear: as Pete Wehner has already noted, President Bush was right in pushing his “freedom agenda” for the Middle East.

…Turns out that Bush knew a thing or two. He may not have been all that sophisticated by some standards, but like Ronald Reagan, he grasped basic truths that eluded the intellectuals. Reagan, recall, earned endless scorn for suggesting that the “evil empire” might soon be consigned to the “ash heap of history.” But he understood that basic human desires for freedom could not be repressed forever. Bush understood precisely the same thing, and like Reagan he also realized that the U.S. had to get on the right side of history by championing freedom rather than by cutting disreputable deals with dictators.

Too bad he didn’t have more success in pushing the “freedom agenda.” If he had — if, for example, he had been willing to hold back American aid to force Egypt to make liberal reforms — the U.S. might possibly have averted the explosion currently seen on the streets of Egypt by engineering a more orderly transition to democracy. But in his second term, humbled by setbacks in Iraq, Bush and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, charted a different course. They did little or nothing while Mubarak locked up liberal dissident Ayman Nour. Instead, they concentrated their energies on the vaunted Middle East peace process, which ended in a predictable failure.

Obama has essentially continued this policy, which he — and legions of like-minded thinkers — sees as the height of “realism.” But what’s so realistic about endorsing a sclerotic status quo? The answer is being delivered in the streets of Egypt. So having already endorsed the essentials of the Bush war on terror, Obama is now belatedly embracing the freedom agenda too. Does that mean we’re all neocons now?

Peter Schiff once again hits it out of the ballpark. Schiff explains how the Federal Reserve fueled the housing and financial crises.

…The government has been subsidizing housing since the Roosevelt administration, and we never had a bubble of this proportion. It was not until these guarantees were combined with a 1% federal funds rate that they became supercharged. It was the unfortunate combination of government guarantees and cheap money that produced such a toxic brew.

During the bubble, a large percentage of loans, particularly those in high-priced markets like California, had adjustable rates. These rates were popular as a direct result of the ultra-low fed funds rate, which made them significantly cheaper than traditional thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages. Some of the most popular subprime loans were of the “2/28″ variety, where borrowers enjoyed artificially low “teaser” rates for the first two years only. For conforming loans, Fannie and Freddie actually guaranteed mortgages based solely on borrowers’ ability to afford the teaser rate, even if they could not afford the resets. Therefore, without low rates from the Fed, most of these ARMs never would have been originated.

…Meanwhile, the low rates themselves created investor demand for mortgage debt. With Treasuries and CDs offering pitiful returns, investors were encouraged to look elsewhere for (seemingly) low-risk investments with higher yields. This created unprecedented demand for Fannie- and Freddie-insured debt as well as new varieties of mortgage-backed securities.

Since Wall Street needed additional mortgages to package, lending standards steadily eroded to meet the demand. Much of the demand came from foreign sources looking to recycle large trade surpluses, which would have been much smaller had the Fed not kept rates so low. …

George Will notes how many ways the government can waste your money, and discusses how some Michigan politicians want to spend more for you.

…On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, in the Utah Territory, a golden spike was driven to celebrate the joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. In the 1960s, the United States sent men to the moon. Obama said: Today’s government should take more control of the nation’s resources so it can do innovative things akin to building the transcontinental railroad and exploring space.

The nation heard: You should trust the government whose recent innovations include the ethanol debacle that, four days before the State of the Union, the government expanded. And you should surrender more resources to the government whose recent innovations include the wild proliferation of subprime mortgages.

Obama spoke to a nation limping into a sixth year of declining housing prices (housing accounts for about one-quarter of households’ assets), with an additional 10 to 20 percent decline likely. With 5 million households at least two months’ delinquent on their mortgage payments and 5.5 million households with mortgages at least 20 percent larger than the value of their houses, more housing foreclosures will probably take place this year than the 1 million in 2010, when sales of new homes hit a 47-year low. It is indeed amazing what innovative government can accomplish. …

In the Corner, Rich Lowry takes us on an interesting digression generated from the Sputnik rhetoric.

…Here is a thoughtful e-mail in reply:

…Kennedy’s challenge was to accomplish the goal within the decade. His political motivations for choosing this date are well documented and do not require retelling. What is significant are the key decisions made by individuals within the program permitting NASA to hit the date. It is these decisions with constitute the ‘soul’ of Apollo and represent the power of combining enormous public funding with an almost religious conviction to get the job done.

 I believe the two best examples of individuals assuming tremendous personal, professional and political risk in the interest of realizing on the objective are as follows:

1. George Mueller’s decision to adapt an ‘all-up’ testing regimen for the Saturn V booster 2. George Low’s decision to fly Apollo 8 in 1968…

Bob Dorigo Jones, in the Daily Caller, criticizes Congressman Dennis Kucinich for his lawsuit.

Did you see the report in The Daily Caller on Wednesday about Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich suing a cafeteria on Capitol Hill for $150,000 over a sandwich he purchased there nearly three years ago? Kucinich claims he hurt his tooth by biting into an olive pit that was part of his vegetarian sandwich, and now he wants to settle this in the courts. Ughh!

There is so much wrong with this lawsuit that I hardly know where to begin, but here are some of the reasons why Americans should care about this.

As taxpayers, we all pay for premium dental coverage for Kucinich and all members of Congress. Surely, it has to be some of the best dental care in the world. Has the congressman opted out of this coverage? Or, does he still have the coverage and want to reimburse taxpayers for the cost of his dental care?…

And as you can imagine, the President’s address provided inspiration to many cartoonists. Enjoy.

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In commenting on Obama’s State of the Union address, David Harsanyi says that high-speed rail and government interference in the economy aren’t winners.

…Obama says that “none of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from.” And by “none of us,” he means you. Because Obama proceeded to give a speech that laid out exactly what needed innovating, which sectors would be innovative, where new jobs would be found and how we were going to get to those jobs. Can you say high-speed rail? The president can. He mentioned railroads six times, because how else are we going to win the 19th century back?

Actually, this fixation with building an extraordinarily expensive, outdated and tax-funded rail system is a great example of why central planning undermines progress.

…Obama, for example, used the word “invest” — a well-known euphemism for more spending and subsidizing — 13 times in the speech. Didn’t he just get through telling us we didn’t know where modernization would emerge? Didn’t he just explain that free enterprise drove innovation? True, but government knows how to guide the markets in the right direction. Just think of it as an ethanol additive for capitalism. …

And Harsanyi has a good response to the “Sputnik moment” rhetoric.

…The Soviets’ intense effort to erect a façade of accomplishment was achieved by investing in an unnecessary, costly, symbolic, ideology-driven project that did nothing for the aspirations of its citizens or its stagnant, dying economy.

Let’s be sure we’re not on the wrong side of the Sputnik moment.

Charles Krauthammer says the State of the Union address shows that the Big Spender hasn’t changed.

…This entire pantomime about debt reduction came after the first half of a speech devoted to, yes, new spending. One almost has to admire Obama’s defiance. His 2009 stimulus and budget-busting health-care reform are precisely what stirred the popular revolt that delivered his November shellacking. And yet he’s back for more.

It’s as if Obama is daring the voters – and the Republicans – to prove they really want smaller government. He’s manning the barricades for Obamacare, and he’s here with yet another spending – excuse me, investment – spree. To face down those overachieving Asians, Obama wants to sink yet more monies into yet more road and bridge repair, more federally subsidized teachers – with a bit of high-speed rail tossed in for style. That will show the Chinese.

…He’s been chastened enough by the election of 2010 to make gestures toward the center. But the State of the Union address revealed a man ideologically unbowed and undeterred. He served up an insignificant spending cut, yet another (if more modest) stimulus, and a promise to fight any Republican attempt to significantly shrink the size of government. …

We have a couple pieces from Jennifer Rubin on the State of the Union address. 

…the mystery is solved: There is no new Obama, just a less snarly one. But it was also a flat and boring speech, too long by a third. Can you recall a single line? After the Giffords memorial service, this effort seemed like Obama had phoned it in. Perhaps that is because the name of the game is to pass the buck to Congress to do the hard work of digging out of the fiscal mess we are in.

As we expected the laundry list of spending is called “investment.” But it is spending, pure and simple. And there is a ton of it.

There was undisguised hunger for government to pick winners and losers: “We need to get behind this innovation. And to help pay for it, I’m asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re doing just fine on their own. So instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy, let’s invest in tomorrow’s.” And what special expertise does Obama or the Congress have in sprinkling our money to energy projects? More importantly, how much does GE stand to gain?…

Jennifer Rubin adds a few more thoughts to her commentary on the SOTU.

…First, the terms of the debate on spending have changed entirely, and Obama’s plan to rename “spending” as “investment” therefore failed miserably. The Republicans have rejected it outright. Ryan debunked it effectively. And even liberal pundits on the cable shows last night rolled their eyes. Nearly all of these plans are dead on arrival, and both sides know it.

Another lesson is the importance of the messenger. As Bill Kristol pointed out, Obama was not simply flat but now a pale imitation of Bill Clinton, who tried to perpetuate and grow the federal government by small steps instead of large leaps. He was, frankly, old hat, lacking the magic of 2008. Contrast that will Ryan, who not unlike Obama in 2009, has the ability to present daring and dramatic ideas in so pleasant and congenial a manner as to make them seem nothing more than common sense. As Bill put it, “Yes, Ryan is younger and friendlier and smarter than your typical old guard Republican. But he’s also much more radical in both his thinking and his political strategy.”

And finally, Obama has a peculiar and, I think, ineffective justification for all the spending. The Chinese and the South Koreans are getting ahead because they “invest,” so we must, too! But the Chinese repress freedom and outlaw labor unions, should we go down that road? The Europeans have “invested” well beyond their means, and in the process wrecked their economies. Is that the model? Obama talks increasingly about “exceptionalism,” but he fails to understand a key component of what makes us exceptional: a faith in free markets, dynamic market capitalism, and restraint on the power of government. We need to compete, but not imitate. Obama doesn’t quite grasp that.

And Rubin also comments further on the foreign affairs portion of the SOTU.

…Likewise, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, was concerned about what was missing from Obama’s speech. She praised the president on Iraq and Afghanistan in a statement, but voiced a variety of concerns:

…The President also did not mention the threat posed by Iran and Syria’s sponsorship of terrorism and efforts to undermine its neighbors, on the very day that the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis took a severe step to undermine Lebanon’s sovereignty.

Support for freedom and people yearning to be free must always be at the center of U.S. foreign policy, and I am glad that the President expressed our nation’s support for the people of Tunisia and South Sudan. Yet, the Administration has pursued a ‘reset’ of relations with Russia, which has dismissed the crisis of Russia’s worsening human rights record. It has made concessions to the regime in Havana while the Cuban people remain enslaved. And just last week, China’s leader was honored with a State dinner even as the regime in Beijing continues to imprison those who dare to demand their basic human rights, including the most recent Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Turning to the President’s reference to strong support for our ally South Korea, he is right that the free trade agreement with South Korea will create jobs, and I look forward to working with him to ensure that it passes Congress as soon as possible. But that is not the only ally that merits a job-creating free trade agreement. The pending agreements with Colombia and Panama will also bring jobs and other economic benefits to the U.S., including to my Congressional district in South Florida. Every day that passes without these agreements in place is another lost opportunity for the U.S. economy. …

In Newsweek’s KausFile Blog, Mickey Kaus runs down his comments on SOTU.

SOTU to Snooze To: Reaction to the first karaoke SOTU (since everyone had the words in advance):

1) Obama seemed to have contracted Reich’s Disease, the annoying affect of lecturing to his audience as if they were schoolchildren in the manner of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. He dropped this attitude as the speech war on, then recontracted it for the closing paragraphs. Note: It’s even worse for Obama to lecture than for other politicians to do it, since the reason he is unlikable (to people like me) is that he seems stuck up.

2) Civility is boring! Who knew?  It was way more invigorating when people cheered and shouted “You Lie!” Next time, rigorously separate the parties and give them cheerleaders with megaphones. Yes, boring SOTUs sometimes play well with the electorate. But what about the people who have to cover them?…

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, looks at troubling numbers from the CBO, and discusses Congressman Paul Ryan’s response to the President’s address. His brief discussion of how the UK is dealing with their debt is instructive.

In contrast to the president, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, conveyed a far more credible and serious message in his response to the State of the Union. As Ryan noted:

Our nation is approaching a tipping point.  We are at a moment, where if government’s growth is left unchecked and unchallenged, America’s best century will be considered our past century. …

…. We need to reclaim our American system of limited government, low taxes, reasonable regulations, and sound money, which has blessed us with unprecedented prosperity. And it has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed. That’s the real secret to job creation – not borrowing and spending more money in Washington.  Limited government and free enterprise have helped make America the greatest nation on earth.

Across Europe, governments are at last beginning to acknowledge the sheer scale of the debt problem, and in some cases taking immediate action to deal with it, especially in Britain. In the UK the Coalition plans to eliminate the structural deficit altogether by 2015, and intends to cut 490,000 public sector jobs, nearly one in ten of the 6 million total for the UK…Most UK government departments will have their annual budgets cut by 19 percent. …

It’s good to have a new House Speaker. Judicial Watch details Pelosi’s wasteful abuse of privilege regarding military flights. We have one question: did two million dollars come out of the defense budget to pay for the Pelosi joy rides?

…According to previous documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, the former Speaker’s military travel cost the United States Air Force $2,100,744.59 over one two-year period — $101,429.14 of which was for in-flight expenses, including food and alcohol. …

Judicial Watch also previously uncovered internal Department of Defense (DOD) email correspondence detailing attempts by DOD staff to accommodate Pelosi’s numerous requests for military escorts and military aircraft as well as the speaker’s last minute cancellations and changes. For example, in response to a series of requests for military aircraft, one DOD official wrote, “Any chance of politely querying [Pelosi's team] if they really intend to do all of these or are they just picking every weekend?…[T]here’s no need to block every weekend ‘just in case’…” The email also notes that Pelosi’s office had, “a history of canceling many of their past requests.”

Judicial Watch also uncovered emails from the DOD that show the Pentagon worked hand-in-hand with congressional offices prior to releasing documents regarding congressional military travel under the FOIA. These “heads up” emails involved FOIA requests filed…

“Despite the media firestorm over her military travel abuses, Nancy Pelosi continued to use the United States Air Force as her own personal travel agency right up until her final days as House Speaker,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “…We are pleased that Speaker Boehner will not follow Pelosi’s corrupt example and will instead fly commercial. But this scandal is not only about travel by the Speaker of the House. Through the Speaker’s office, other members of the House are able to obtain permission for the use of military luxury travel for congressional delegation trips abroad. These trips, known as CODELs, have exploded in number and cost. Speaker Boehner needs to reform this abuse of our military’s assets. This is the right thing to do for the U.S. Air Force and for the American taxpayer.”

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In USA Today, Michael Gartner gives us a gift that will warm your heart as he tells us about his parents.

…As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?” “I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

“No left turns,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”

“What?” I said again. “No left turns,” he said. “Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”

“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support. “No,” she said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It works.”

But then she added: “Except when your father loses count.”

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing. “Loses count?” I asked. “Yes,” my father admitted, “that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again.”…

Amity Shlaes, in Bloomberg News, reports on how government spending stifles private-sector job growth.

…Yet what if additional federal spending for roads, bridges, schools, and work programs in states doesn’t redeem itself in jobs? Perhaps such spending actually impedes employment in the private sector. Maybe President George W. Bush killed jobs by signing off on stimulus spending. And maybe President Obama is doing more of the same.

…For the past few years Price Fishback, a University of Arizona economist, and Valentina Kachanovskaya, a graduate student at the school, have been studying the effects of federal domestic spending from the point of view of individual states during the 1930s, a period of dramatic unemployment.

…The two Arizona economists see a more modest benefit. They find that each dollar of public works spending and funding jobs for the poor did increase the average amount of personal income, or cash an individual had on hand to purchase goods and services, by $1.67. When government spending under Hoover and Roosevelt involved grants and loans, the figure was $1.39. …

…After that, the news about multipliers gets worse. According to Fishback and Kachanovskaya, a dollar spent by Washington didn’t jump-start job creation. The money may have had no effect or even suffocated nonfarm private-sector employment. The investment did not spill over to most other sectors of the economy in a positive way. A double dip, the depression within the depression, followed record federal investment in the economy in 1936. …

Tony Blankley has a plan of action on how we can get out from under government’s regulatory reign.

…Regarding the vastly damaging economic and deeply annoying personal effect of excessive regulation, we need to take advantage of this momentary diversion of the administration toward at least rhetorical common sense. At the congressional level, as has been promised by new GOP committee chairmen such as Fred Upton at the key House Energy and Commerce Committee, we must identify, publicize and repeal as many oppressive regulations as possible.

This will require the Appropriations Committee to explicitly defund the enforcement of such regulations. And yes, unless the president genuinely follows through with his asserted intentions to rein in regulations, this will mean confrontation between the Republican House and the administration. But the GOP Congress must stand firm.

To help, the conservative media and think tanks need to bring much more focus on abusive regulations. The administration and liberals generally are delighted to let the re-regulation of America continue under the radar. …

In the Washington Examiner, Timothy Carney discusses two political entrepreneurs joining Obama’s team. Liberals worry about the unrestrained greed of big business and conservatives worry about the totalitarian drive of big government. These alliances should cause everyone concern, because they profit politicians and the big businesses they collude with at taxpayers’ expense.

…But the anti-business charge against Obama was always off target. “Anti-free market” was — and is still — more accurate.

Immelt and Daley don’t represent a new side of Barack Obama — they represent the unhealthy collusion of Big Business and Big Government that has always been the essence of Obamanomics.

Check out Daley’s resume. In the 1990s, he ran Amalgamated Bank, owned by a union and described by the Chicago Sun-Times as “one of the city’s most politically connected financial institutions.” Bill’s brother, Mayor Richard Daley, kept the city’s money on deposit at Amalgamated. Later, Bill held a seat on Fannie Mae’s board, pocketing six-figure compensation from the government-sponsored enterprise that used a housing bubble and an implicit government guarantee to fill a slush fund for well-connected Democrats — until taxpayers bailed it out in 2008.

…And Obama’s kind of corporation: GE, which marches in sync with government, pocketing subsidies, profiting from regulation, and lobbying for more of both. …

In Baseball Crank, Dan McLaughlin says that 2012 will not look like 1996, much to liberals’ chagrin.

…Undoubtedly, Obama will have the opportunity to take advantage of many of the same dynamics that favored Clinton’s re-election, and he may succeed for those and other reasons. But history never repeats itself precisely. It is worthwhile to reflect on the many things that worked to Clinton’s benefit that Obama can’t count on:

1) The Democrats Still Hold The Senate: Clinton lost both Houses of Congress in the midterms, the third president of the past century to do so, the others being Truman in 1946 and Eisenhower in 1954. Both were re-elected; Truman used the GOP as a foil to confront, Eisenhower showed he could cooperate with the Democrats, and Clinton did some of both. Each was able in one sense or another to run on the same divided-government rationale that had helped them lose Congress in the first place.

Obama won’t have the same crisp contrast with Congress; the unpopular Harry Reid is still running the Senate, and sooner or later it will become impossible to conceal that fact. History suggests that this can matter: Obama’s the third President in the past century to lose only the House and keep the Senate in the midterms, and the other two – Taft and Hoover – both got slaughtered (Hoover carried just six states and drew 39.7% of the popular vote, Taft carried just two states, finished third in a three-way race and drew just 23.4% of the popular vote).

…3) Obamacare passed; Hillarycare didn’t: As unpopular as the Clinton Administration’s health care plan was, it wasn’t a major issue in the 1996 campaign because it had failed and, with Republicans controlling both Houses of Congress, it wasn’t coming back. (Ditto Clinton’s destructive BTU tax). Not so Obamacare, which remains very much a live issue. There’s clearly a decisive majority supporting repeal right now in the House, and possibly a majority could be mustered in the Senate (certainly if the GOP gains more seats in 2012), but obviously not enough votes to override Obama’s veto. Unless Mitt Romney wins the nomination, the GOP will almost certainly run a presidential candidate who can and will mount a full-throated campaign in favor of repealing the bill. The same will be broadly true of a number of Obama’s big-spending, big-regulating initiatives. …

Pajamas Media has news that makes us admire Texas even more.

The not at all slow death of the Texas Democratic Party continues.  I’ve just gotten word via press release that nine local Democrats up in northeast Texas just switched parties to become Republicans.  From the release

In what is believed to be one of the largest number of officeholders to change party affiliation in Texas, Lamar County GOP Chairman John Kruntorad and State Representative Erwin Cain announced today that 9 local elected Democrats have joined the Republican Party.   This announcement follows unprecedented election gains by the GOP in 2008 and 2010 as Northeast Texans increasingly identify with the conservative platform of the Republican Party. …

They join a few dozen who switched from D to R in Texas leading up to the 2010 elections, and the two state Reps. who switched parties after the elections (bringing the total of state Reps. switching from D to R, to three).  And today’s group of switchers is jumping ship in an area that has been considered yellow dog Democrat for generations.

The Economist reviews a new book about India by Patrick French.

ONE of the startling features of India’s economic progress is how much opposition it stirs at home. Across the political divide, many people are still sceptical of the two-decade-old reform programme that underpins the boom, including leading lights of the ruling Congress party. Their gripes are often rhetorical—even India’s communist parties have grudgingly embraced capitalism in the three states where they rule. But critics still need to be reminded how badly India was served by its former mixed economy.

…While presenting few new ideas, Mr French has a sometimes surprising tendency to lay claim to established ones. That Western power will be diminished in relative terms by Asia’s rise, that Indian politics is becoming ever more dynastic and that the country’s Hindu nationalists need to freshen up their manifesto are all commonplace. Mr French suggests them as insights. Meanwhile he decries lazy journalists who “make a living by reporting ceaseless tales of woe” from India; but these are a dying lot. In recent years, foreign reporting of the country has often gone too far the other way, lauding India’s economic growth with only occasional easy-to-spot regard to the country’s manifold problems.

Mr French is a fine reporter, with an appealing fascination for all things Indian, as his book makes clear. Despite its flaws, it is an accomplished portrait of momentous times in a remarkable country.

Schumpeter’s Notebook Blog in the Economist blogs that India is a work in progress.

MANAGEMENT theorists have fallen in love with India in much the same way that they fell in love with re-engineering fifteen years ago. India is synonymous with rapid growth, frugal innovation and exciting new business models.

I agree with all that (and have promoted it myself). But it is important to remember that India is also a mess.

…The local newspapers are certainly full of stories of India’s economic boom. As usual the advertisements are more interesting than the business pages. There are endless ads for MBAs (not all of them entirely plausible), English courses, computer classes: all signs of a country that is pulling itself up by its boot-straps. But the news pages are full of darker stories—about the Naxalite rebellion, about institutional incompetence and corruption and about the general mess that is Indian politics. …

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Today’s Pickings have a singular focus – an article from last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine about the disarry of the administration’s economic team   In it Peter Baker gives a center-left perspective on the president’s efforts to create jobs. Pickerhead likes this for the perspective you get from reading between the lines. A fundamental illustration of the president’s narcissism and shallowness exists in the first paragraph when he reacts to a presentation with, “I’ve told you before, I want you to come to me with ideas that excite me.”

Three days before Christmas, President Obama gathered his economic team in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room to review themes for his State of the Union address. The edge-of-the-cliff crisis he inherited had passed, but with more than 14 million Americans still out of work, he was looking for bold ways to bring down unemployment. The ideas presented to him, though, seemed familiar and uninspired. “You know, guys,” he said, according to someone in the room, “I’ve told you before, I want you to come to me with ideas that excite me.” Nothing he was hearing excited him.

…Obama has been casting about for ideas. He held two unpublicized meetings last month with outside economists, a group of liberals one day and a group of conservatives the next, soliciting suggestions while deflecting criticism. (He was “a bit defensive,” one participant told me.) He likewise met with labor leaders and convened a four-hour meeting with chief executives from Google, General Electric, Honeywell, Boeing and other corporations. Obama was so intent on the conversation that he canceled a lunch break and asked the executives to bring their chicken, fish and pasta back from a buffet so they could keep talking.

…There is a compelling case that Obamanomics has produced results. An economy that was shrinking in size and bleeding more than 700,000 jobs a month is now growing at 2.6 percent and added 1.1 million jobs last year. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, known as the stimulus, produced or saved at least 1.9 million jobs and as many as 4.7 million last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The much-derided Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, started by George W. Bush and continued by Obama, stabilized the financial sector, and the big banks have repaid the money with interest. According to a Treasury Department report sent to Congress this month, TARP will cost taxpayers $28 billion instead of the $700 billion originally set aside. The nearly $80 billion bailout of the auto industry may cost taxpayers only $15 billion, as the restructured General Motors and Chrysler come back to life with strong sales. The stock market has surged; corporate profits are setting records.

All of which seems offset by one simple figure: 9.4 percent. Or perhaps two, if you add $1.3 trillion. The first, of course, is the unemployment rate, which has remained stubbornly above 9 percent for 20 straight months, the longest since the Great Depression. Counting those who are seeking full-time jobs while working part time and those who have stopped looking altogether, it’s closer to 17 percent. At the current rate, it could be 2017 before the country replaces the more than eight million jobs lost since December 2007. The second figure is this year’s federal budget deficit, which has touched off a prairie fire of public protest and emerged as the central issue of the newly installed Republican House. In a recent poll by The Times and CBS News, 82 percent of Americans rated the economy bad, and just 43 percent approved of the way Obama was handling it. “People look at the economy today, and they’re disappointed by what we’ve achieved,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told me last month. “But that just misses the fundamental reality — it could have been so much worse.” The program Obama managed to enact represented an “unbelievably heroic, implausible accomplishment,” Geithner argued, yet one that requires patience. “Even if we had a magic wand,” he said, “it was going to take a long time to dig out.”

The path from crisis to anemic recovery was marked by turmoil inside the White House. The economic team fractured repeatedly over philosophy (should jobs or deficits take priority?) and personality (who got to attend which meetings?), resulting in feuds that ultimately helped break it apart. The process felt like a treadmill, as one former official put it, with proposals sometimes debated for months before decisions were reached. The word commonly used by those involved is “dysfunctional,” and in recent months, most of the initial team has left or made plans to leave, including Larry Summers, Christina Romer, Peter Orszag, Rahm Emanuel and Paul Volcker.

…While Obama and his team were hardly the only ones to underestimate the depth of the problem they inherited in early 2009, their failure to define it from those early days has undermined a bedrock idea of American liberalism, the faith in the capacity of government to play a constructive role in the markets and make up for the limits of individuals to cope with them. Since unemployment has remained so high for so long while deficits have soared, it must mean the stimulus did not work and the money was wasted. Smaller government, less regulation and lower taxes, therefore, would be the only answer. And so, Obama’s challenge may be more fundamental even than reducing unemployment and winning re-election; he wants to prove that liberal economic theory can be adapted to the 21st century.

…Liberals like the Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman argue that the $800 billion package of infrastructure projects, aid to states and tax breaks that Congress eventually passed was inadequate and poorly targeted. “The stimulus was too small and not well-enough designed,” Stiglitz told me. “Most of my concerns have turned out to be valid.” Romer, who has returned to teach at Berkeley, told me she now agrees about the size. In Washington, she said, “you’re not supposed to say the obvious thing, which is that in retrospect of course it should have been bigger. With unemployment at 10 percent, I don’t know how you could say you wouldn’t have done anything different. Of course you would have made it bigger.”

…The crisis forced Obama to confront the larger question of government’s role in the economy. Should taxpayers save large enterprises from failure? When is the risk of not intervening too great? How much should politicians dictate to business? His team engaged in a fierce debate about whether to nationalize the biggest banks, as Stiglitz and Krugman advocated. Summers entertained the idea, at least for purposes of discussion, for banks that could not pass a “stress test” examining their solvency. Geithner and Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, argued against it. Ultimately the tests found the banks were in better shape than feared, a critical moment in shoring up confidence. …

…A January 2009 study by Romer and Jared Bernstein, the economic adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden, predicted that if the stimulus passed, unemployment would be at 7 percent at the end of 2010.

“I truly believed that forecast,” Romer told me. “I consulted with every good forecaster who would talk with me, including the Federal Reserve.” …

…The renewed focus on the economy goes back to last August, when after months of grappling with health care, the oil spill and the financial-regulation bill, Obama resolved to redouble efforts to create jobs. While he was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Obama called his economic advisers and told them to develop a new agenda for the fall, which led to a September proposal to invest more money in infrastructure, make the research-and-development tax credit for businesses permanent and allow companies to deduct more expenses right away. His advisers also began discussing ideas for his next State of the Union, like a payroll tax holiday, ideas that ultimately were worked into last month’s tax deal with Republicans instead.

The president’s search for an agenda that will excite him, and the rest of America, has taken him to the far corners of the economic conversation. He recently asked advisers to present arguments about whether the slow recovery is part of an economic cycle that will ultimately turn around or something different, a “new normal” signaling stagnation as in Japan in the 1990s. “He’s trying to gather different ideas and different perspectives both on where we are and where we’re going,” Goolsbee said.

…Instead, the debate will shift to curbing deficits and redesigning the tax code. Republicans have made shrinking government the core of their economic message, appealing to many Americans who think Obama (and before him, Bush) let spending get out of hand. “We’re at that transition moment,” Lew told me. “We’ve got to look ahead at the very serious fiscal challenges we have.” Obama plans to use the State of the Union to present himself as a fiscal conservative. But it will be a delicate balance for someone who believes government spending helped turn the economy around; he hopes to make the case that he can rein in the deficit but that the deepest cuts should wait until after the recovery gathers momentum. …

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The WSJ Notable & Quotable has an excellent quote from Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh on his radio show, Jan. 20:

The moral code, the moral compass of the state-controlled media is something to behold. Now, some of you may not know the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted a state dinner last night for Hu Jintao of China. Hu Jintao is holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison in China. Not making it up. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted a dinner for the guy holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison, and the media does not get the irony of this at all. They’re too busy running around chasing Sarah Palin and radio talk show hosts over “civility.”

In Contentions, Alana Goodman comments on an anti-American song played at the US state dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao.

So that lavish state dinner President Obama hosted for Chinese President Hu Jintao last week? Turns out it was an even worse decision than previously thought. Not only did Obama honor a regime of human-rights abusers, but it turns out they weren’t even appreciative. According to the Epoch Times, a pianist at the event played a well-known Chinese propaganda song that’s about defeating the U.S. in a war. And it sounds like the Chinese government may have known the song would be played beforehand…

…The song apparently thrilled hardliners in China, who saw it as a major humiliation of America…

…The whole concept of the Chinese playing an anti-American song during a state dinner in their honor is too petty and childish to even be insulting. The embarrassing part is that Obama-administration officials didn’t bother to find out the background of the songs on the agenda before they were played. In comparison, the Chinese delegation reportedly knew about the song in advance, and may have been the ones who tipped off news outlets in China beforehand…

…Awful. This is worse than Obama’s bow to the Japanese emperor in 2009. The White House better have a serious explanation for why this song was allowed to be played at its own party. And it should also serve as a lesson to Obama for why we don’t throw state dinners in honor of openly anti-American governments.

David Harsanyi believes China’s power is overrated.

…I often hear talk radio hosts and politicians condemn China’s nefarious role as the largest stakeholder in American debt. How is it China’s fault that Washington spends $1 trillion more than it takes in in revenue? Substantial national debt is our concern, but if we’re going to find people to borrow from, having China vested in American success seems like a good enough idea. (Unless China’s dynamic economy is an elaborate ruse to sink us in the end.)

…We can talk about China’s disgusting record on human rights. It can’t be ignored. But the best cure for illiberalism is probably “wealth and economic power.” How long can communist hard-liners thrive in a nation that sees its economy grow 10 percent a year?

Let’s not forget, as well, that China is still a place of deep poverty, stressed infrastructure, and political upheaval; it’s struggling with problems that dwarf our own. We might be overrating its influence. …

Peter Schiff discusses how China’s monetary policy is distorting both Chinese and American economies.

…To a very large extent the distortions are caused by China’s long-standing policy of pegging its currency, the yuan, to the U.S. dollar. But as China’s economy gains strength, and the American economy weakens, the cost and difficulty of maintaining the peg become ever greater, and eventually outweigh the benefits that the policy supposedly delivers to China.

…In order to buy these dollars, the Chinese central bank must print its own currency. In essence, China is adopting the Fed’s expansionary monetary policy. In the U.S. the inflationary impact of such a strategy is mitigated by our ability to export paper dollars in exchange for inexpensive Chinese imports. Although prices are rising here, they are not rising nearly as much as they would if we had to spend all this newly printed money on domestically produced goods. The big problem for China is that, unlike the U.S., the newly printed yuan are not exported, but remain in China bidding up consumer prices. As a result, inflation is becoming China’s dominant political issue.

…This week, Chinese president Hu Jintao arrives for a summit in Washington, where he will get an earful from President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner about the importance of letting the yuan appreciate. On this point, the Administration actually has it right. But they fail, of course, to grasp the full implications of how a falling dollar and a rising yuan will hurt the U.S. economy. If the Chinese stop buying dollars, Americans will face higher prices and higher interest rates. If Geithner thinks we can take such changes in stride, he is in for a rude awakening. …

…For now the old guard in China still holds sway and the status quo remains intact. But new leaders are expected to be in place by 2014. When fresh hands take the wheel, we may finally see some meaningful change in the global monetary system. 

Robert Samuelson thinks China is a force to be reckoned with, and the US should be making more of an effort to influence Chinese economic decisions.

…Next, consider technology transfer. Big multinational firms want to be in China, but the cost of doing so is often the loss of important technology through required licensing agreements, mandatory joint ventures, reverse engineering or outright theft. American software companies estimate that 85 to 90 percent of their products in China are pirated.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Thomas Hout and Pankaj Ghemawat cite China’s high-speed-rail projects. Initially, foreign firms such as Germany’s Siemens got most contracts; in 2009, the government began requiring foreign firms to enter into minority joint ventures with Chinese companies. Having mastered the “core technologies,” Chinese companies have captured 80 percent or more of the local market and compete with foreign firms for exports. The same thing is occurring in commercial aircraft. China is building a competitor to the Boeing 737 and the Airbus 320; General Electric has entered into a joint venture that will supply the avionics, the electronics that guide the aircraft.

Finally, there’s finance. China’s foreign exchange reserves – earned mainly through massive export surpluses – approached $2.9 trillion at year-end 2010. These vast holdings (which increase by hundreds of billions annually) enable China to expand its influence by sprinkling low-cost loans around the world or making strategic investments in raw materials and companies. The Financial Times recently reported that China – through the China Export-Import Bank and the China Development Bank – has “lent more money to other developing countries over the past two years than the World Bank.” …

Christopher Hitchens tells us more about Tunisia.

…One found the political atmosphere constipated and conformist rather than outright terrifying. Perhaps one reason the Tunisian crowds were able to mobilize so swiftly and to such immediate result—splitting the army leadership from the police in a matter of a few days—was simply that they knew they could. There was scant likelihood of the sort of all-out repression and bloodshed that was met by, say, the protesters against the Iranian mullahs. Thus, and sadly, it’s probably premature to say that the events in Tunis are harbingers of grass-roots movements in other states of the region. (Still, Qaddafi’s own deranged response to the rebellion, ranting about the horrible prospect of a “Bolshevik or American revolution,” was truly heartening. Just to know that he is sweating …)

…When the ancient El Ghriba synagogue there was truck-bombed by al-Qaida in April 2002, the government rushed to express solidarity and to undertake rebuilding, and the Tunisian parliament was unusual in the region for having a Jewish senator. Along the boulevards, young couples in jeans held hands without awkwardness, and I seldom saw a headscarf, let alone a veil or burqa.

I was interested to see an interview last week with a young female protester who described herself and her friends as “children of Bourguiba.” The first president of the country, and the tenacious leader of its independence movement, Habib Bourguiba, was strongly influenced by the ideas of the French Enlightenment. His contribution was to cement, in many minds, secularism as a part of self-government. He publicly broke the Ramadan fast, saying that such a long religious holiday was debilitating to the aspirations of a modern economy. He referred with contempt to face-covering and sponsored a series of laws entrenching the rights of women. During the 1967 war, he took a firm position preventing reprisals against the country’s Jewish community, avoiding the disgraceful scenes that took place that year in other Arab capitals. Long before many other Arab regimes, Tunisia took an active interest in a serious peace agreement with Israel (as well as playing host to the PLO after its expulsion from Beirut in 1982). …

Another ObamaSkeptic emerges writing on the supposed push for deregulation. Jeff Jacoby has thoughts.

…It was only last spring, after all, that The New York Times — in a story headlined “With Obama, Regulations Are Back in Fashion’’ — was reporting on “the surge in rule-making’’ and how the administration “has pressed forward on hundreds of new mandates.’’ In October, a Heritage Foundation report on “Obama’s torrent of new regulation’’ concluded that the federal regulatory burden was increasing at an unprecedented rate: In fiscal 2010 alone, the administration had adopted 43 major new regulations, at an estimated annual cost to the economy of $26.5 billion, a record.

And even as Obama promises to throttle back the regulatory overdrive, the White House says that ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank — the massive new laws overhauling health care and the financial industry, which will create scores of new agencies and generate hundreds of new regulations — will not be affected. You don’t have to be an Obama-wary conservative to assume that the impact of the president’s order, as the Times put it last week, “is likely to be more political than substantive.’’…

Fred Barnes gives an example of how big government can bring out the worst in big business. We are reminded of an article we featured on March 10th, 2010, where Daniel Henninger reviewed historian Burton Fulsom’s book The Myth of Robber Barons. Henninger explains the premise: market entrepreneurs revolutionize markets and create products that benefit people, while political entrepreneurs work the system for their own benefit.

In General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, President Obama may not have picked the worst possible corporate executive to head his new panel on job creation. But Immelt is pretty close.

Immelt is a classic example of a rent-seeking CEO who may know what’s good for his own company but not what produces economic growth and private sector job creation.  He supported Obama on the economic stimulus, Obamacare, and cap and trade – policies either unlikely to stir growth and jobs or likely to impede faster growth and hiring.

…Immelt is a big player in Washington, having been a member of the president’s earlier Economic Recovery Advisory Board. The new panel he’ll head is the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

Immelt’s support for cap-and-trade was pure rent-seeking.  The measure was certain to drive up energy costs and weaken the economy, but GE was expected to benefit enormously. …

He said some people argue for a simple tax on carbon. “But I just think cap and trade is the more practical approach.”  Cap-and-trade would let Washington impose a national ceiling on carbon emissions, and companies could buy or sell emission rights. GE, by gaining rights in a windfall as a result of the legislation, would have many rights to sell. …

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Tony Blankley, who was Newt Gingrich’s press secretary during the 1995 budget battles, has advice for the GOP. 

…We lost that battle for three reasons: 1) because the shutdown was falsely, but effectively, framed in the public mind as motivated by the personal pique of the speaker and the desire of the GOP to “cut Medicare in order to give tax cuts to the rich,” 2) the issue of deficit spending and public debt was of much less concern to the public than it is now and 3) we were not able to deliver our interpretation of the issues directly to even our own supporters.

Back in 1995, there was no Fox News, there was no broadly used Internet and conservative talk radio was not nearly as powerful as it is today.

…Today, we are in the aftermath of an election that was largely about deficit spending, Obamacare and the trillions of dollars most GOP voters correctly think will get us further in debt. So not only is the deficit issue far more powerfully motivating than it was in 1995, but if the GOP fails even to try seriously to reduce the deficit, which means addressing, among other issues, Medicare and Social Security, it is likely to pay harshly in the next election for such inaction.

But equally important, with the massive alternative media, the GOP can effectively frame the issues as necessary for our future prosperity and the creation of millions of new jobs – without having our message filtered out by the once-mighty liberal media. …

Charles Krauthammer advocates repealing the Obamacare monstrosity.

Suppose someone – say, the president of United States – proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I’ve got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield a savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion.

…As National Affairs editor Yuval Levin pointed out when mining this remarkable nugget, this is a hell of a way to do deficit reduction: a radical increase in spending, topped by an even more radical increase in taxes.

…In fact, the whole Obamacare bill was gamed to produce a favorable CBO number. Most glaringly, the entitlement it creates – government-subsidized health insurance for 32 million Americans – doesn’t kick in until 2014. That was deliberately designed so any projection for this decade would cover only six years of expenditures – while that same 10-year projection would capture 10 years of revenue. With 10 years of money inflow vs. six years of outflow, the result is a positive – i.e., deficit-reducing – number. Surprise.

…amending an insanely complicated, contradictory, incoherent and arbitrary 2,000-page bill that will generate tens of thousands of pages of regulations is a complete non-starter. Everything begins with repeal.

Ronald Bailey in Reason columns on Obama’s push for regulation reform saying the president is only for good regs. Reminds us of Saul Bellow saying he was “for all the good things and against all the bad ones.”

…even before the president signed his new executive order, the super-efficient bureaucrats over at the EPA have already apparently done a review of the agency’s new greenhouse gas regulations. As The Hill reports:

…“EPA is confident that our recent and upcoming steps to address GHG emissions under the Clean Air Act comfortably pass muster under the sensible standards the president has laid out,” an EPA official told The Hill in a statement Tuesday.

Policy analyst Sterling Burnett over at the free market think tank, the National Center for Policy Analysis, writes in the vein of Claude Rains as Captain Renault in Casablanca that he is “shocked, shocked” [YouTube] to discover that a federal agency finds its regulations are cost-effective and helpful to business:

‘I was shocked, shocked I say, to find that a regulatory agency would find that none of its current or proposed rules unnecessarily burdens the economy or hurts job retention or growth. … After all, what agency is going to say, “yeah, we were wrong, these rules don’t work, they produce more harm than they prevent,” or “Sure we’re in a recession, and sure these rules won’t do any good [let’s say, for example, in preventing climate change], and sure there are going to be enormous costs but the country should adopt the regulations anyway – at least we’ll look like we are doing something.” ‘

…President Obama has mastered the art of vacuously promising to consider all “good ideas.” The problem is that he thinks that he already has all the good ideas and most of them entail ever more government intrusion into the lives of Americans.

In City Journal, Steven Malanga reports on how we are losing liberty as government departments seize more and more power with regulations.

…Further, the White House is using its rule-making powers in aggressively political ways. In its most notable move, the administration used the threat of extensive new environmental regulations to get Congress to pass a law to fight climate change. When Congress failed to act, the Environmental Protection Agency went ahead with the new rules, which included declaring carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas and demanding that manufacturers seeking permits for new facilities install the “best available technology” to control emissions, though the agency has yet to define what that technology is. A number of states and industry groups have launched lawsuits to fight the regulations. The EPA also issued controversial new goals for gas efficiency in cars and light trucks, with a target of 35.5 miles per gallon, on average, in cars sold in the U.S. by 2016, compared with 25 miles per gallon in 2009.

Other federal agencies have been nearly as busy. At Obama’s request, the Department of Labor now requires firms that contract with the federal government to inform employees that they have the right to unionize and bargain collectively. …The labor department also required any contractor doing stimulus-financed weatherization to pay prevailing wages, which are generally on par with union pay scales.

The union-friendly Obama labor department did, however, get rid of one significant regulation: a Bush-administration rule that unions file disclosure statements on how they spend their members’ money. The disclosure rule had helped prompt a number of investigations of abuses, including a Los Angeles Times series that resulted in the removal of the head of a Service Employees International Union local for misallocating hundreds of thousands of dollars of members’ money. The Obama administration considered the transparency requirement an excessive burden on unions. …

In Pajamas Media, Abraham Miller, who has been watching the moral and academic decay of our universities from inside the beast.

The recent study of 2,300 college students showing that half of them learn nearly nothing in the first two years is generating a lot of conversation. As someone who spent more than three decades in the professoriate, what surprises me is why this is news.

Certainly the students know this. We know this. The college administrators know this. Maybe, it’s only the parents who are suckered into thinking that the tens if not hundreds of thousands they are shelling out for a residential college education is really buying that.

…The next financial bubble is out there. It is comprised of people like your son who are carrying enormous debt without any prospect of paying it off. They are going to default. It’s our fault, you say. Well, you say that now. But if we gave your son the grades he deserved you both would have screamed foul and due processed us to death. If your son is a member of some protected class, we would have had to defend against the accusation that we discriminated against him. Anyhow, he got more than he deserved, and the rest of us subsidized his education directly or indirectly with our tax dollars. Of course, you do know that we are going to have to pick up the defaults, just as we picked up the sub-prime mortgages.

Oh yes, if you think the statistic that half don’t learn anything in the first two years is terrible, how does this one grab you? After four years 36% did not experience significant educational improvement. And that statistic is worse than it appears, because at many institutions nearly half the students drop out after two years. So among the self-selected that continued, more than a third learned almost nothing in four years of college. …

Der Spiegel has an astonishing story of a boy who scared off a pack of wolves with rock music.

…Walter Eikrem listened to music on his mobile phone as he often does as he made his way home from school in the southern Norwegian town of Rakkestad earlier this week. The path leading from the stop where he catches the school bus to his family’s farmhouse traverses a gently sloping hillside. All of a sudden, he made out something gray on the hillside. “At first, I thought it might have been the neighbor’s dogs,” he later told TV2, Norway’s largest commercial broadcaster. What he actually encountered, though, were four wolves.

“I was afraid they would attack me,” Walter told the Norwegian tabloid VG, describing the incident, which took place on Monday. But he didn’t let his fear show. Remembering his parents’ advice, Walter pulled the earphones out of his mobile phone, turned the volume all the way up and blasted heavy metal music over its miniature speakers. At the same time, he yelled as loud as he could while flailing his arms about wildly to scare off the pack of wild animals.

…The plan worked. Eikrem said he was able to drive away the wolves by playing the song “Overcome” by the American hard-rock band Creed. “They didn’t really get scared,” Walter said. “They just turned around and simply trotted away.” …

In the WSJ, James Wilson reviews a collection of essays from Irving Kristol, titled, the Neoconservative Persuasion.

…The views of Kristol and those who wrote for him became especially important because of two major developments in American life: the Great Society (the first issue of the Public Interest appeared in 1965) and the counterculture. The Great Society was an effort to show that a democratic government could do anything, the counterculture a movement that suggested it could do nothing. The first asserted that empowering poor people to challenge the status quo would end their poverty, the latter that student action would remake the human spirit. Kristol’s “neo” views included a decisive skepticism about both claims.

…Kristol decided that the success of neoconservatism arose from its having enlarged “the conservative vision to include moral philosophy, political philosophy, and even religious thought,” thereby making this persuasion “more politically sensible as well as politically appealing.” Perhaps, he added, this has helped make the Republican Party more interested “in the pursuit of happiness by ordinary folk” rather than just in the success of the business community.

Kristol’s neoconservative persuasion put him in opposition not only to conventional liberalism but to parts of American conservatism: He accepted many aspects of the New Deal (Social Security, unemployment insurance) and was upset when business leaders urged him to teach his students about the virtues of the profit motive—there are such virtues, he conceded, but he believed that we may accept them without celebrating them. As for “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” it certainly merits celebration. The publisher’s decision not to provide an index is the only defect in this wonderful book.

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Mark Steyn is back with a sobering discussion of British and American decline.

…It’s interesting to learn that “anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups” litany of evil—“the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. Before William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky. Britain expunged it from most of the globe.

…When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia. As I always try to tell my American neighbors, national decline is at least partly psychological—and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Thus, Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom, which he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944:

“…The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.”

Within little more than half a century, almost every item on the list had been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (some 40 percent of Britons receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority”—the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something.” …

This has consequences. …In cutting off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, the British state has engaged in what we will one day come to see as a form of child abuse, one that puts a huge question mark over the future. Why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it’s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that’s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country? And what if you don’t have Islam to turn to? The transformation of the British people is, in its own malign way, a remarkable achievement. Raised in schools that teach them nothing, they nevertheless pick up the gist of the matter, which is that their society is a racket founded on various historical injustices. The virtues Hayek admired? Ha! Strictly for suckers. …

…Does the fate of the other senior Anglophone power hold broader lessons for the United States? …you cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without profound consequence. Without serious course correction, we will see the end of the Anglo-American era, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world. Even as America’s spendaholic government outspends not only America’s ability to pay for itself but, by some measures, the world’s; even as it follows Britain into the dank pit of transgenerational dependency, a failed education system, and unsustainable entitlements; even as it makes less and less and mortgages its future to its rivals for cheap Chinese trinkets, most Americans assume that simply because they’re American they will be insulated from the consequences. …

David Harsanyi laughs at the absurdity of President Obama claiming he’s going to simplify regulations.

…I can’t recall a single federal program, legislation or proposal in the past two years that was initiated to ease the burden on consumers or businesses. (If you know of any, please send specifics to sorry@dowelooklikesuckers.com.)

Obama doesn’t have to look far, if he’s serious. Nor does he need an executive order. Right now the EPA is drafting carbon rules to force on states, even though a similarly torturous 2,000 pages on a cap-and-trade scheme intending to make power more expensive was rejected. …

Right now, the FCC is shoving net neutrality in the pipeline — again, bypassing Congress — so government can regulate the Internet for the first time in history, though the commissioners themselves admit that, as of now, any need for rules are based on the what-ifs of their imaginations.

There exists no legislation more burdensome and expensive than the “job-crushing”  “Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act,” formerly known as Obamacare and presently being symbolically repealed by House Republicans. …

And the WSJ editors are also skeptical of Obama’s lip service to more balanced regulation.

…Sarbanes-Oxley delegated 16 rule-makings to the executive branch, yet the Dodd-Frank financial law calls for literally hundreds of new rules by dozens of agencies, and two entirely new agencies. The Congressional Research Service reports that ObamaCare “gives federal agencies substantial responsibility and authority to ‘fill in the details’ of the legislation,” a process that may take “years, or even decades” to complete.

Other hyperactive regulators include the Federal Communications Commission (net neutrality), the Food and Drug Administration (food safety, medical devices) and the Labor Department (the SEIU’s wish list). But the worst offender is the Environmental Protection Agency, which is rewriting environmental law with almost no scrutiny.

The EPA’s goal is to impose carbon emissions limits that even Democrats in Congress rejected, in particular through its “endangerment finding”—which unless Congress intervenes will become the costliest regulation in government history. EPA is also re-regulating conventional air pollutants, often bypassing the usual notice and public comment. It isn’t a good omen that Mr. Obama singled out the EPA and its carbon-emissions rules (as related to auto fuel efficiency) as a model of “smart” regulation. …

Robert Samuelson was in November 2nd’s Pickings writing on the waste from “high speed” rail. Michael Barone does the same today saying it is a fast way to waste money.

…Take the $2.7 billion, 84-mile line connecting Orlando and Tampa that incoming Florida Gov. Rick Scott is mulling over.

It would connect two highly decentralized metro areas that are already connected by Interstate 4. Urban scholar Wendell Cox, writing for the Reason Foundation, found that just about any door-to-door trip between the two metro areas would actually take longer by train than by auto, and would cost more. Why would any business traveler take the train?

…So we are spending billions on high-speed rail that isn’t really high-speed, that will serve largely affluent business travelers and that will need taxpayer subsidies forever. This should be a no-brainer for a Congress bent on cutting spending.

Scott Adams shares his adventures in yoga.

I’ve heard good things about yoga. People say it’s an excellent way to manage stress. I convinced my wife, Shelly, to try it with me.

Shelly sensibly suggested that we try a yoga video at home before we sign up for classes. Let me tell you how well the yoga video managed my stress.

…I suggested that we randomly select one of the classes and just see what happens. But this, my friends, is not how shopping is done. First you read each of the descriptions then you read them again. Then you read them aloud. Then you discuss. Then you narrow it down to two. Then you forget what the other three were, and wonder if maybe they were better than the two you had first selected, so you start over. Halfway through this process, my tension could have powered a Chevy Volt. I was red and vibrating. I wasn’t getting any of my cartooning work done, we would be late for the Apple Genius Bar, and I was shopping in my own home.  I was so tense that I worried I would actually snap in half if I tried anything bendy.

Eventually we picked the class we wanted. It only took a few minutes, but in shopping years, I was 106. We fired up the DVD menu and looked for the class we had selected on the DVD cover.

…A granola-eating, bare-chested yoga dude appeared on screen. He was on the beach of some sort of tropical ocean paradise. I call that cheating. I wouldn’t need any yoga at all if I were on that beach. But whatever. …

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David Warren does not think we will see real change in Tunisia. Yet we can always hope for a miracle for the Tunisian people.

In a startling development, the “Arab Street” has exerted itself, spontaneously… But the explosion in Tunisia — of all places, with its reputation for stability, and only two presidents since independence from France more than half a century ago — runs off the chart of precedent.

…We should not now assume there will be any fundamental changes in Tunisia, no matter how much blood is shed. The new “president for life” — whether for minutes or decades — is one of Ben Ali’s flunkies, just as Ben Ali was one of Bourguiba’s. Mohamed Ghannouchi is working on consolidating his power and will succeed or fail. Even without being able to read his mind, I can assure my reader that he isn’t fantasizing about some new dawn of representative democracy and a limited government of laws, not of men. Nor is any potential rival.

For the dictators of Third World countries would not be so if they did not appreciate another of Chairman Mao’s memorable apophthegms, that: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” To gloss this: Democracy happens when the preponderance of guns is on the democratic side.

There is no such side in places like Tunisia. In my view, perhaps jaded by the recent historical experience of Iraq, it would be false to hope for anything but the appearance of a new strongman, wherever in the Arab world an old strongman falls. This is because the conditions for constitutional government have not developed in any of these countries; and where there was promise of a responsible opposition, it was thoroughly erased. …

In her latest article in the Jewish World Review, Caroline Glick addresses a number of events in the Middle East, and the blundering US responses to each. She also criticizes some of the tired ideas that our foreign policy bureaucracy still hold as sacrosanct.

…The Tunisian revolution provides several lessons for US policymakers. First, by reminding us of the inherent frailty of alliances with dictatorships, Tunisia demonstrates the strategic imperative of a strong Israel. As the only stable democracy in the region, Israel is the US’s only reliable ally in the Middle East. A strong, secure Israel is the only permanent guarantor of US strategic interests in the Middle East.

…Saudi Arabia has to be balanced with Iraq, and support for a new regime in Iran. Support for Egypt needs to be balanced with close relations with South Sudan, and other North African states.

…At the same time, the US should fund and publicly support liberal democratic movements when those emerge. It should also fund less liberal democratic movements when they emerge. So too, given the strength of Islamist media, the US should make judicious use of its Arabic-language media outlets to sell its own message of liberal democracy to the Arab world. …

Jennifer Rubin says that Tunisia’s revolution may be contagious.

The revolution in Tunisia is resonating in Egypt. This AP report tells us:

…News of the Tunisian uprising has dominated the Egyptian media over the past few days, with opposition and independent newspapers lauding the fall of Ben Ali and drawing parallels between his toppled regime and that of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled for nearly 30 years.

…Nearly half of all Egyptians live under or just below the poverty line set by the U.N. at $2 a day. Mubarak and his ruling National Democratic Party have been pledging to ensure that the fruits of economic reforms benefit more Egyptians.

Stephen McInerney of the Project on Middle East Democracy e-mails me, “The Egyptian activists are all definitely energized. Two hundred of of them spontaneously went to the Tunisian Embassy to celebrate within an hour after Ben Ali stepped down on Friday, and they shouted chants for Ben Ali to take Mubarak with him.”

It seems that freedom is catching.

Bret Stephens notes that Stuxnet did not end Iran’s nuclear program.

…And yet the Iranian nuclear program carries on. Stuxnet appears to have hit Iran sometime in 2009. As of last November, U.N. inspectors reported that Iran continued to enrich uranium in as many as 4,816 centrifuges, and that it had produced more than three tons of reactor-grade uranium. That stockpile already suffices, with further enrichment, for two or possibly three bombs worth of fissile material.

Nor can it be much comfort that even as Stuxnet hit Iran, North Korea began enriching uranium in a state-of-the-art facility, likely with Chinese help. Pyongyang has already demonstrated its willingness to build a secret reactor for Syria. So why not export enriched uranium to Iran, a country with which it already does a thriving trade in WMD-related technologies and to which it is deeply in debt? Merely stamp the words “Handle With Care” on the crate, and the flight from Pyongyang to Tehran takes maybe 10 hours.

…And so Iran has fallen for a neat computer trick. That may be a source of satisfaction in Jerusalem, Washington and even Riyadh. But it cannot be a cause for complacency. …

P. J. O’Rourke was in January 18th’s Pickings with a broadside against the NY Times. James Taranto wishes to differ in some respects.

… We do not dispute O’Rourke’s opinion of this report, but we are prepared to defend reporter Zernike (Hulse we don’t know from Adam), for we are familiar with her work outside the Times. She is the author of “Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America,” a 2010 book that we happen to have reviewed for the January issue of Commentary. Our review began:

“The author of Boiling Mad is a New York Times reporter, and the title suggests a hostile view of the Tea Party movement as a cauldron of undifferentiated rage. The book itself is a pleasant surprise. Kate Zernike has produced a largely fair and measured account of the populist rebellion against Barack Obama’s aggressively liberal presidency.”

“Boiling Mad” wasn’t perfect. We faulted it for weak analysis and occasional tendentious liberal asides. But it convinced us that Zernike, whatever her political leanings, is a fair and honest reporter. If yellow journalism appears under her byline in the Times, it is the fault of her editors and the paper’s corrupt culture.

How corrupt? So corrupt that the Hulse-Zernike piece was, by the standards of the Times last week, a relatively minor case of journalistic malpractice. Even the editors who assigned it at least have the excuse of having been under deadline pressure at a time when the facts were not yet in about the suspect’s motives. The same cannot be said for the Times editorial board and Paul Krugman, who on Jan. 10, as we noted last Tuesday, were still linking the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to “uncivil rhetoric” from the right, even after the facts had disproved any connection. The Times has made no acknowledgment yet of this gross journalistic wrong.

Pinch Sulzberger, the Times scion who became publisher in 1992, is said to be a fan of “putting the moose on the table,” a management-consulting gimmick. Like the elephant in the living room and the hippopotamus at the water cooler, the moose is an ungainly animal that serves as a metaphor for an uncomfortable and unacknowledged truth. During the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003, it was reported that Sulzberger carries around a stuffed moose and literally puts it on tables to encourage honesty among his company’s executives.

This past weekend, the metaphorical moose was very much off the table in the pages of the Times. Writer after writer weighed in on what had happened without mentioning their own newspaper’s scurrilous conduct. …

The Economist reports on something else that will agitate the green fascists.

…Dust aloft cools the land below, as Europe’s meteorologists found out in May 2008. It does this directly, by reflecting sunlight back into space, and indirectly, by helping clouds to form. The effect is significant. The carbon dioxide which has been added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began has a greenhouse effect equivalent to the arrival of about 1.6 watts of extra solar power per square metre of the Earth’s surface. The direct effects of dust are estimated to provide a countervailing cooling of about 0.14 watts per square metre. Add the indirect effect on clouds and this could increase markedly, though there are great uncertainties.

This dust-driven cooling, though, is patchy—and in some places it may not even be helpful. Dust that cools a desert can change local airflow patterns and lessen the amount of rain that falls in surrounding areas. This causes plants to die, and provides more opportunities for wildfires, increasing the atmospheric carbon-dioxide level.

To get a better sense of the net effects brought about by the ups and downs of dust, it would help to have a detailed historical record of the dustiness of the planet. And this is what Natalie Mahowald of Cornell University and 19 colleagues have achieved. They analysed cores from glaciers, lake bottoms and coral reefs and measured how the levels of some telltale chemicals changed with depth, and thus with time. They then used models of global wind circulation to deduce which dust sources have become stronger and which weaker. Their conclusion, published recently in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, is that in fits and starts over the past century the air became twice as dusty. …

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Samizdata sports an interesting analysis on current U. S. politics from a Brit who has never visited, but shows some insight. We attached some comments. We’ll see if they continue to be interesting.

… Voters used to think that Democrats were good people with bad ideas, clever, but mostly only at excusing their bad ideas. Democrats sincerely believed in bloating the government, taxing, regulating and generally screwing things up. But they applied these bad ideas to all, without fear or favour. Personally, there had blue collars and were honest hardworking folks. They did not lie or cheat. They looked you in the eye and treated you right.

Voters used to think that Old School Republicans were bad people with good ideas. Republicans believed in business success, low taxes, less regulation, and generally getting the US economy motoring along. Trouble is that they were also rich and nasty snobs, and corrupt. They used their grasp of economics mostly to get rich themselves. Politically, they applied their ideas only in ways that suited them. If a tax or a regulation happened to suit them or their huge country club network of rich and nasty and snobbish friends, then they would, on the quiet, be for it. For them, business-friendly government meant a government friendly to their own businesses. If, on the other hand, your collar was blue, they’d deregulate and tax-cut the hell out of you, for the good of all, and for the good of themselves especially.

Hard to choose, wasn’t it? No wonder it was a dead heat, decade after decade. Good but stupid idiots versus clever but sneaky bastards. …

Mark Steyn selects an article from the archives that is still relevant today: problems with big government.

…Government is simple provided two conditions are met: You do it locally, and you do it without unions.

The first is the reason America is one of the few large countries that hasn’t disintegrated. If it were as centrally governed as the USSR or Yugoslavia, it would have bust up in the early 19th century. And, while the Obama Administration is certainly testing that proposition to the limits, they’re hardly starting from scratch. I’m a big fan of Laura Bush, and found her utterly charming on the one occasion we met, but I can think of no good reason why taxpayers should fund a “Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program”. Sample disbursement: $420,000 to the State Library of Illinois to fund a program to help its employees master “social networking” tools such as Facebook and Blogger. Across the land, every illiterate and innumerate Third Grader can master Facebook and Blogger without getting the best part of half a million taxpayer bucks. But apparently it would be unreasonable to expect a state library to get the hang of it without a massive federal program. …

…The other obstacle to effective localism is unionization. …whatever the arguments for private sector unionization as a protection against the robber barons of capitalism red in tooth and claw, there is no justification whatsoever for public sector unions. After all, government is a monopoly: Even if it goes bankrupt, it’s never going to go out of business, much as one might long to see the “Final Liquidation. Everything Must Go” shingles hanging in the windows in Sacramento and Albany. A snapshot of America in the 21st century would show a motivated can-do,small businessman working round the clock till he’s 78 to pay for a government worker who retires at 52 with pension and other benefits the private sector schmuck could never dream of. That’s why Big Government produces no economies of scale. The bigger the government the more everything it does costs…

…The metastasization of the public-sector workforce eventually becomes an existential threat to democracy. One in every eight workers in New York State – or 1.2 million – is a unionized government employee, and thus a reliable vote for the Democrats, the Party of Government. Recently I heard Herbert London of the Hudson Institute put it this way – that, on the first day of any Empire State election campaign, the Democrat starts with those 1.2 million votes and the Republican starts with zero and attempts to play catch-up.  It’s hardly surprising very few do. …

Charles Gasparino, in the NY Post, looks at similarities and differences between the housing bubble and the bond bubble.

…The municipal-bond market’s assumption is that cities and states won’t default on their debt because they need to keep selling bonds to build roads and bridges. Investors will keep buying munis because they think the state will always make good on its obligations (and with the added incentive that these bonds are free of state, local and federal taxes).

But suppose taxes are so high that people leave cities or states in droves, depleting the pool of revenue need to pay bondholders? Suppose these states have so many other obligations — from federal mandates, massive “guaranteed” pensions to government workers and more — that they can’t or won’t make the vast cuts needed to keep paying on their bonds?

…Sure, a huge degree of paranoia is sweeping the muni market. The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a wide examination of whether states and cities are properly disclosing budget issues to investors in municipal debt.

That review is prudent because even a few defaults would hit average investors hard. Munis, more than other bonds, are overwhelmingly held by individuals, not institutions.

Prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney (who accurately predicted the banking crisis in late 2007) recently warned that 50 to 100 municipal-bond defaults will happen over the next year, likely amounting to more than $100 billion in defaulted debt. …

There are so many ways Paul Krugman is stupid. This dimming star of the fading NY Times firmament lately has been pounded for his comments on the Tucson shooting. Now John Tamny in Forbes takes on a Krugman column about commodity prices. 

… In a New York Times column titled “The Finite World”, Krugman reminds the mildly sentient among us that history always repeats itself in ways that fool the gullible.

In an article meant to explain the ongoing commodity boom, Krugman argues that it has “no bearing, one way or the other, on U.S. monetary policy.” To him the run-up is firstly the result of a “global recovery”, but more to the point, he asserts that “the commodity markets are telling us we’re living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of emerging economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw materials, pushing up their prices.”

Specifically Krugman notes that “Oil is back above $90 a barrel” as evidence supporting his claim of a global scarcity, but the problem for him is that $90 oil wrecks the very foundation of his argument. Had he simply bothered to do a currency comparison of oil prices he would know that oil’s rise in recent months is once again a dollar phenomenon; thus exposing as false his suggestion that the commodity boom is unrelated to U.S. monetary policy.

Sure enough, since the middle of 2010 the Australian dollar has risen 27% against our wilting greenback. During that time oil has risen 33% in dollars against a fairly pedestrian 6% increase in the cost of crude measured in Aussie dollars. The recent commodity spike that Krugman deems global has in fact confined itself to the countries that have mimicked our devaluation. …

In the National Review, Matthew Shaffer talks with meteorologist Joe Bastardi about global warming inaccuracies, and where global temps are actually headed.

…But unlike most climate skeptics, Bastardi is in a position to change the conversation. He’s a meteorologist and forecaster with AccuWeather, and he proposes a wager of sorts. “The scientific approach is you see the other argument, you put forward predictions about where things are going to go, and you test them,” he says. “That is what I have done. I have said the earth will cool .1 to .2 Celsius in the next ten years, according to objective satellite data.” …

…What’s his reasoning? Here are some specific topics on which Bastardi disagrees with mainstream climate scientists:

… Third, Bastardi sees modern climate scientists as inordinately fixated on carbon dioxide at the expense of other major factors (an example of their narrow, model-focused approaches, versus his tendency toward holistic empirical observation). “It’s almost the equivalent of saying, ‘Your big toe runs your body,’” he says. “Carbon dioxide is a trace gas, a tiny gas, part of this huge system. You’re trying to tell me that’s going to control the system and influence the energy of the system? When you have things like the sun, which is obviously the greatest contributor to the world’s energy? It almost defies common sense.”

…he notes that in recent years, “CO2 is still increasing, and the overall temperature has leveled off.”

…Whereas a significant portion of today’s climate scientists are politically motivated, Bastardi has only one incentive in his job: accuracy. He won’t be denied tenure or publication if he ends up on the wrong side. He gets paid handsomely — he won’t tell me just how much — for long-term weather forecasts by traders who have an interest in commodities whose production is affected by the weather. And he still gets hired, despite his rising to fame and infamy as a global-warming skeptic. His credential, in other words, is that he’s passed the market test: “Because I know the physical drivers of the atmosphere…I get calls from companies when money is on the line.” …

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A simple Democracy in America blog post, expressing a libertarian’s frustrations talking with a confirmed statist, does an excellent job explaining the free market logic of Hayek and Friedman.

… If we compare the Affordable Care Act to Friedman’s ideal, it’s clear that its changes are not in the “right direction”.  Now, I don’t agree with all the details of Friedman’s ideal, but I agree with most of it, and, more generally, I share his and Hayek’s way of thinking about social insurance. First, set up dynamic free-market institutions and enjoy the blessings of their efficiency and innovation. High levels of growth and technical invention are the best social insurance, period. Then, use some portion of our enlarged national income to buy insurance for those who can’t afford it and to buy care for those who are uninsurable. If a mandate to purchase insurance is really necessary, I don’t mind. If some version of an IPAB is needed to decide how much of what care to provide to those who are houses afire, that’s fine. But let there be competitive markets. Let there be prices.  

One of my complaints about this debate is that the left has been committed to a fundamentally dirigiste vision of universal health care for so long that it has difficulty even conceiving of a system that combines relatively laissez faire market institutions with generous social insurance. My colleague’s insistence that Obamacare represents some kind of culmination of liberals’ appreciation and incorporation of Hayekian concerns only reinforces my complaint and leaves me in despair.

Thomas Sowell looks back at how Clinton and the MSM hurt the Republicans during the government shutdown of 1995. Sowell thinks that this time Republicans and Tea Partiers will have to win the political battle to be effective.

…The last time the government shut down, back during the Clinton administration, the Republicans were riding high as a result of their capture of the House of Representatives– where all spending bills must originate– for the first time in decades.

…Congress had increased the amount of money appropriated for the government to spend, though not by as much as President Clinton wanted. So it was Clinton who shut down the government, though it was the Republicans who got blamed.

…Often, in politics, it doesn’t matter what the facts are. What matters is how well you make your case to the voting public.

Back in 1995, Bill Clinton and the Congressional Democrats, with the aid of the media, pounded away on the theme that the Republicans had “cut” government programs, even where the Republicans had appropriated more money than these programs had ever had before. …

Roger Simon appears in our pages frequently, but there was one post back in September that did not make the cut. Simon posted then about the Stuxnet Worm that was causing problems in the Iranian nuclear program and he speculated the German firm Siemens was involved. The post was not well organized and seemed too fantastic for belief. Turns out now he was correct. So the NY Times wrote yesterday in a lengthy and fascinating article. We have the Times story. If you want to read Simon you must follow the link above.

…The biggest single factor in putting time on the nuclear clock appears to be Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed.

In interviews over the past three months in the United States and Europe, experts who have picked apart the computer worm describe it as far more complex — and ingenious — than anything they had imagined when it began circulating around the world, unexplained, in mid-2009.

Many mysteries remain, chief among them, exactly who constructed a computer worm that appears to have several authors on several continents. But the digital trail is littered with intriguing bits of evidence.

In early 2008 the German company Siemens cooperated with one of the United States’ premier national laboratories, in Idaho, to identify the vulnerabilities of computer controllers that the company sells to operate industrial machinery around the world — and that American intelligence agencies have identified as key equipment in Iran’s enrichment facilities.

Siemens says that program was part of routine efforts to secure its products against cyberattacks. Nonetheless, it gave the Idaho National Laboratory — which is part of the Energy Department, responsible for America’s nuclear arms — the chance to identify well-hidden holes in the Siemens systems that were exploited the next year by Stuxnet.

The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.

The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts of Iran’s operations ground to a halt, while others survived, according to the reports of international nuclear inspectors. Nor is it clear the attacks are over: Some experts who have examined the code believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults. …

P.J. O’Rourke criticizes the NY Times.

…In the matter of self-serving, bitter, calculated cynicism, there wouldn’t seem to be much left to prove against the Times. Judging by what I’ve heard from my fellow conservatives, the issue is decided. The New York Times is a worthless, truthless, vicious institution. But I disagree. I think things are worse than that.

…We observe in the Times a bizarre overreaction to people and things that can be construed as “antigovernment.” (And all people and most things often can be so construed, e.g., the man who just got a speeding ticket.) The Times has become delusional, going from advocating big government to believing that it is the big government. …

Ross Douthat wrote a calm, well-reasoned Monday Times opinion column about how most contemporary attacks on American politicians have been of greater interest to psychiatrists than ideologues. “From the Republican leadership to the Tea Party grass roots, all of Gabrielle Gifford’s political opponents were united in horror at the weekend’s events.” The newspaper probably heard this as a hallucinatory voice in its head urging self-destruction. If we’re going to discuss dark, paranoid corners of the Internet that have an unwholesome influence on our national life, there’s the New York Times online. …

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asks NJ Governor Chris Christie why he won’t run in 2012.

… CHRISTIE: Listen, I think every year you have as a governor in an executive position in a big state like New Jersey would make you better prepared to be president. And after one year as governor, I am not arrogant enough to believe that after one year as governor of New Jersey and seven years as the United States attorney that I’m ready to be president of the United States, so I’m not going to run.

WALLACE: Yes, but you know, and I heard you say it might make more sense somewhere down the line, 2016, 2020, whatever. But one of the things that Obama learned and showed us all in 2007, when it’s your moment, you have got to move.

CHRISTIE: Listen, that is a decision that he made. And he’s obviously was successful in winning the presidency. My view is I want to, if I ever would have run for the presidency, if I was ever to do it, I want to make sure in my heart I feel ready. And I don’t think you run just because political opportunity is there. That’s how we wind up with politicians who aren’t ready for their jobs. …