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Looking at events in Egypt, Spengler sees little reason for optimism.

… If Obama succeeds in forcing the Muslim Brotherhood into a new Egyptian regime, Mubarak’s cronies really would be better off in London exile. That implies a tsunami of capital flight and the disappearance of Egypt’s managerial class who, feckless as they might be, nonetheless keep the economy working day by day. As I noted last week, Egypt’s $12 billion a year in tourist revenue has gone to zero and would take years to restore under the best of circumstances.

At this point, Egyptians will begin to starve. The government’s immediate response is to spend more. Egypt’s new Finance Minister Samir Radwan promised on February 5 that government subsidies would offset the rise in the world market price of food. The government budget would help to “achieve social justice”, Radwan told reporters.

The trouble, as the rating agency Standard and Poor’s explained, is that the government deficit will climb into the teens, from the 8.1% deficit registered last year.

How long Egypt can finance its external deficit, or its internal deficit, without recourse to the printing press, depends less on internal events than on the weather in China.

The Times’ Friedman writes rapturously that Egyptians “want to shape their own destiny”. Unless Egyptian intelligence has secretly mastered weather modification, Egyptians have very little say about their own destiny.

The New York Times on February 8 quotes Mohamed ElBaradei, the figurehead opposition leader, complaining that the Arab world is “a collection of failed states who add nothing to humanity or science” because “people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education. That will change with democracy.”

It’s too late. A country that still practices female genital mutilation cannot undertake a grand leap into modernity (by way of comparison, China began to abolish foot-binding in 1911 and eradicated it entirely shortly after 1949).

In this case, Oswald Spengler’s motto applies: Optimism is cowardice. Memo to the temporary residents of Tahrir Square: pray for rain in China.

Ed Morrissey traces some of the recent missteps in Egypt.

In my latest column for The Week, I ask if Barack Obama truly knows what he wants as an outcome from the Egyptian crisis.  After getting off to a good start in a near-impossible situation for the US, Obama then jumped the gun by demanding a “transition” from the Mubarak regime, which Robert Gibbs emphasized the next day by saying “now means yesterday.”  At the same time, Obama sent a personal envoy to Hosni Mubarak, and the choice of envoy turned out to be a predictable disaster.  Within a few days, the US was in retreat from its earlier demands:

“In the middle of this vacillation, Obama chose former Ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner to go to Cairo and handle Mubarak personally. Wisner, who has served as ambassador to five countries in twenty years, went to review the crisis and speak directly with Mubarak on Obama’s behalf. Within days, Wisner publicly insisted that Mubarak needed to stay in office, saying that “President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical.” The Obama administration had to distance itself from its own special envoy, who got promptly recalled and this week returned to his day job.”

We will leave it to Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post to illuminate the many errors of this administration in Egypt – not the least of which was the childish effort to be the unBush. 

During her first visit to Egypt as secretary of state, in March 2009, Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked whether human rights violations by the Egyptian government that had been documented by the State Department would interfere with a visit to the White House by President Hosni Mubarak. It was a good question: Mubarak had not been to Washington in five years, thanks to his clashes with the Bush administration over his political repression.

“It is not in any way connected,” Clinton replied. “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.”

Thus began what may be remembered as one of the most shortsighted and wrongheaded policies the United States has ever pursued in the Middle East. Admittedly, the bar is high. But the Obama administration’s embrace of Mubarak, even as the octogenarian strongman refused to allow the emergence of a moderate, middle-class-based, pro-democracy opposition, has helped bring the United States’ most important Arab ally to the brink of revolution. Mass popular demonstrations have rocked the country since Tuesday; Friday, when millions of Egyptians will assemble in mosques, could be fateful.

The administration’s miscalculation about Mubarak was threefold. First, it assumed that the damage done to relations by George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” was a mistake that needed to be repaired. In fact, Bush’s pushing for political liberalization was widely viewed, in Egypt and in the region, as the saving grace of an otherwise bad administration.

Second, the Obama administration’s Middle East experts concluded that there was no chance of serious reform – much less revolution – under Mubarak. So they plotted at playing a “long game” of slowly nurturing grass-roots movements and promoting civil society, in preparation for the day when Egypt might be ready for real reform. In this they badly underestimated the secular opposition that was rapidly growing in the blogosphere and that months ago began rallying behind former U.N. nuclear director Mohamed ElBaradei.

Third, as an emboldened Mubarak stepped up repression, staged a blatantly rigged parliamentary election in November and began laying the groundwork to present himself for “reelection” this year, the administration chose to mute its criticism. Bland, carefully balanced statements were issued by second- and third-level spokesmen, while Clinton and Obama – who regularly ripped Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – remained silent.

The balance of today’s Pickings covers the prospects for the election in 2012. Roger Simon kicks it off by watching Ariana Huffington.

… Arianna has read the tea leaves. Progressivism, which was riding the crest of popularity on the election of Obama, is over. It is no longer good for business. And just as the stock market is said to be a leading indicator on business cycles, I submit Arianna’s track record has shown her to be a leading indicator on the zeitgeist. She knows when to get out. Obama, and by extension progressivism, is fini. It is best left to fringey looneys like Code Pink. Put simply: progressivism is no longer good business. …

Charlie Cook, in the National Journal, has a more normal approach.

… It is highly unlikely that unemployment will drop to 7.2 percent by November 2012. A decline to around 8 percent would likely bode well for Obama’s reelection chances. If it remains around 9 percent, one can argue that most any major Republican nominee has a good chance of winning. Under this argument, the tipping point is between 8 and 9 percent.

Among 49 top economists surveyed this month by Blue Chip Economic Indicators, the consensus gross domestic product forecast was 3.2 percent for this year and 3.3 percent for next year, nowhere near the levels of growth that worked to benefit Reagan—4.5 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984.  

The 10 most optimistic forecasts among the 49 projected an average GDP growth rate of 3.9 percent for 2012, while the pessimists were at 3.2 percent.  

For unemployment, the consensus forecast was 9.3 percent for 2011 and 8.6 percent for 2012. The 10 most pessimistic averaged 9 percent, and the 10 most upbeat averaged 8.2 percent.

Obviously, there are economic indicators beyond GDP growth and unemployment that are important. Economists watch inflation carefully, particularly with energy, food, and other commodity costs. They also eye real disposable income, which will be goosed by the temporary cut in payroll taxes enacted during the recent lame duck session of Congress.

None of this is to suggest millions of Americans rush to their computers at 8:30 a.m. on the first Friday of every month to find out the latest unemployment rate, and allow that to solely drive their assessment of the president.

But a strong economy and improving jobs picture does tend to validate a president’s economic stewardship, while a weak economy and poor job growth tends to repudiate it, fairly or not. …

And so does Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics.

Coverage of the 2012 elections has recently gone into overdrive, with attention focused largely on two issues: President Obama’s standing in the polls and the Electoral College. The two are obviously interrelated. Though it’s a bit early to be discussing all of this (there’s almost no correlation between a president’s standing in the polls at this point and where he ends up in November two years later) it is always useful to examine where things stand today – with the understanding that things may change for the better or for the worse for either party over the next 18 months.

One thing the polling data have confirmed over the last two years is this: President Obama is more popular than his policies. Going back to the earliest days of his presidency, Obama’s overall job approval rating has typically been higher than the ratings he’s received from voters on most individual issues – particularly on top domestic concerns like the economy, spending, the deficit and health care.

It isn’t hard to see why this is so. The president continues to be viewed in the public’s eye as a likeable person, a faithful husband and a good father. African American voters and liberal voters continue to adore the president. The historic nature of his presidency drew independent voters to him in 2008, and while they have abandoned him and his party in droves over the last two years over policy issues, they continue to have a certain level of affection for him personally.

Because the president generates so much personal goodwill, then, it isn’t clear that his approval rating has the same political effects that other presidents’ approval ratings do. Consider the following chart, which plots the percentage of the House caucus lost by the president’s party in post-World War II midterm elections against the president’s approval rating in the Gallup poll:

Peter Wehner is here too.

A few weeks ago, Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota announced he will not seek re-election in 2012. A few days ago, Representative Jane Harman of California announced she will resign immediately. And last week Senator James Webb of Virginia announced he will not seek re-election in 2012, “confirm[ing] the news Democrats have been dreading for weeks,” according to Politico. Taken together, the resignations of these Democratic lawmakers are signs of a damaged party, one that is getting weaker rather than stronger.

The Obama Undertow is alive and well. …

Nile Gardiner thinks the president should we worried about 2012.

… It is of course far too early to be making concrete predictions for the outcome of the 2012 presidential race, and a great deal depends on the fortunes of the US economy as well as who the Republicans pick as their candidate. But with good reason, President Obama and his supporters should be nervous about their prospects 21 months from now. The November mid-terms were not a flash in the pan but part of a broader political change in the United States away from liberalism towards conservatism, as well as an emphatic rejection of the Big Government policies that continue to be promoted by the Obama presidency in the face of intense public opposition. President Obama may be experiencing a temporary bounce with his own personal ratings, but much of his agenda remain hugely unpopular.

A blogger at Weekly Standard says the same thing.

A CNN poll released this week asked Americans whether they plan to vote for or against President Obama in 2012. The options were “probably vote for,” “probably not vote for,” “definitely vote for,” and “definitely not vote for.” The most popular answer was “definitely not vote for” – chosen by 35 percent of respondents. Only 25 percent say they’ll “definitely vote for” the president. 51 percent predict he will lose. …

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Der Spiegel remembers who, in the West, promoted democratization in the Muslim world.

…The free world has fewer friends outside Europe than it would care to admit. It would obviously be desirable to work exclusively with governments who share our democratic beliefs. That would only leave Israel in the region that we are currently watching with such fascination, as only Israel guarantees full, Western human rights to its citizens, including women, homosexuals and dissidents. But somehow that would also not be right.

The sympathies of many honorable, left-thinking people do not currently lie with the Israelis, who grant the Arab inhabitants in their midst much more freedom than all the neighboring states combined. Astoundingly, their sympathies lie with the Muslim Brotherhood in the surrounding countries, a movement that hates homosexuals, keeps women covered and despises minorities. This is puzzling.

…Painful as it may be to admit, it was the despised former US President George W. Bush who believed in the democratization of the Muslim world and incurred the scorn and mockery of the Left for his conviction. …

In Frum Forum, David Frum makes a good point about how the administration should handle the despicable activists who are going after Bush. It would be worth Congress investigating whether the UN or any countries receiving foreign aid are funding these activists. Budget cuts are needed, and we could reduce the number of organizations that think our leaders should be targets.

CNN International is reporting that George Bush canceled a trip to Switzerland after – and possibly because – a so-called human rights group filed with a Swiss court a request for the ex-president’s arrest.

…It’s hard to know how much of this story is true, and how much is fundraising bluster. But if even a small portion of the news is true, President Obama has a duty to speak up and to warn foreign governments that further indulgence of this kind of nonsense by their court systems will be viewed as an unfriendly act by the United States. It is one more reminder of why the concept of an International Criminal Court is such an invitation to mischief.

And for those inclined to enjoy the mischief: Just wait until somebody serves an arrest warrant in Luxembourg on ex-President Obama for ordering all those drone strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

You won’t believe what Thomas Sowell writes about. With friends like this president…

While everyone’s attention seems to be focused on the crisis in Egypt, a bombshell revelation about the administration’s foreign policy in Europe has largely gone unnoticed.

The British newspaper The Telegraph has reported that part of the price which President Obama paid to get Russia to sign the START treaty, limiting nuclear arms, was revealing to the Russians the hitherto secret size of the British nuclear arsenal. This information came from the latest WikiLeaks documents.

To betray vital military secrets of this country’s oldest, most steadfast and most powerful ally, behind the back of the British government, is something that should set off alarm bells. Following in the wake of earlier betrayals of prior American commitments to put a nuclear shield in Eastern Europe, and the undermining of Israel and calculated insults to its prime minister, this pattern raises serious, and perhaps almost unthinkable, questions about the Obama administration’s foreign policy. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on the administration giving UK nuclear information to Russia. Perhaps the UK should put out a warrant for Obama’s arrest for espionage (in the style of the obnoxious Swiss activists).

…In December I wrote extensively on the White House’s relentless drive to sign the New START Treaty with Moscow as part of its controversial “reset” policy, despite the fact that it represented a staggeringly bad deal for the United States, and a remarkably good one for the Russians. The Telegraph report confirms the extraordinary lengths to which Washington stooped to meet Russian demands, which stunningly included passing on British nuclear secrets to a major strategic adversary.

As the Prime Minister and senior British ministers head to Germany this weekend to take part in the Munich Security Conference, key questions must be asked of their US counterparts, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as to the exact nature of the deal struck with Russia, and what more has been compromised in relation to British national security.

The matter is serious enough to merit Congressional hearings in Washington as well as parliamentary hearings in London. It is easy to see why the Obama team refused to allow the US Senate access to the negotiating documents for New START, as they would have sparked outrage on both sides of the Atlantic that would almost certainly have killed the Treaty. The Telegraph report clearly contradicts repeated claims by the Obama negotiating team that no side deals were struck with their Russian counterparts. Not for the first time, the current US administration has been eager to appease America’s enemies while shamelessly undercutting her allies.

In the Daily Beast, Andrew Roberts gives us more details on the State Department’s espionage and betrayal of the UK.

…Here’s what happened: According to WikiLeaks, a series of classified cables were sent from the U.S. negotiators to the State Department explaining that the Russians wanted to know the full extent of Great Britain’s nuclear capability. This was hardly surprising, as throughout the Cold War they had been trying to get this information. Now they were insisting on it as a price for Russian support for the New START deal. They could gauge this information from examining the “unique identifier” serial numbers on the Trident missiles that the U.S. has sold the UK over the years. The State Department has called these reports “bunk”.

Instead of telling Moscow that Britain was an independent power not party to the treaty, and therefore information about her nuclear deterrent was non-negotiable, the leaked cables show that the Obama administration lobbied the British Foreign Office and Ministry of Defense in 2009 for permission to simply tell Moscow this data about the number, age, and performance capabilities of Trident.

Needless to say, the U.K refused, because not letting the Russians know the full extent of its deterrent has long been key to its success. Yet astonishingly—and in my view despicably—the Obama administration seems to have simply rode roughshod over British objections and—according both to WikiLeaks and the Daily Telegraph of London—“The U.S. agreed to hand over the serial numbers of Trident missiles it transfers to Britain.”

If it turns out that it is WikiLeaks and not the State Department that is right, this represents a clear violation of the agreement made between Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Hyde Park in June 1942 over Anglo-American nuclear cooperation. The idea that any American president would browbeat or simply ignore a British government and give U.K.  nuclear secrets to the Russians in order to secure a treaty with Moscow would be unconscionable to Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, probably Carter, certainly Reagan, both Bushes and probably Clinton too. Yet Obama, who has treated Britain with a thinly veiled sneer throughout his presidency, has not only countenanced but actually done it. …

David Harsanyi comments on corporate welfare big government is doling out.

…”Right now, businesses across this country are proving that America can compete,” Obama explained, listing a number of businesses that get it like Caterpillar, Whirlpool, Dow and a company named Geomagic.

All of these phenomenal success stories (thanks to Ira Stoll at The Future of Capitalism blog for pointing this out) also share, in one way or another, the privilege of feeding at gumit’s welfare trough. Oh yes, these exemplars of good corporate citizenry prove they can compete in a marketplace with taxpayer funds. Which will no doubt make them more compliant with the administration’s wishes.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who Obama recently appointed to lead his new panel on “job creation,” understands this new reality. One of the nation’s most effective cronies, Immelt’s company has benefited from government bailouts, waivers and lines of credit. …

The Streetwise Professor explains the slippery slope of corporate social responsibility.

…imposing some sort of vague duty on corporate officers to “do good” is subject to no such checks.  Some may try to do good, but may do ill instead because they lack the incentive or information to do real good.  Others may use “social responsibility” to indulge their own preferences while imposing great costs on others whose resources they utilize in the cause.

But more ominously, creating a presumption that corporations have some broader social responsibility subjects them to political pressure… It effectively subordinates corporations…to politicians who arrogate to themselves the role of speaking in the public–”social”–interest.  This is exactly why the idea is catnip to progressives like Obama.  They don’t like government power constrained by Constitutional and procedural checks and limits.  They don’t like limits on their discretion.  Passing laws or imposing regulations that are subject to legal challenge are a lot harder than executing a shakedown.  Once corporate executives concede that their responsibility is not limited to maximizing shareholder value, they become political puppets always vulnerable to such shakedowns.  There are always competing claims on corporate resources, and political entrepreneurs more than willing to exert those claims.

If you want to see extreme examples of how this works, look at Chavez in Venezuela, or Putin, both of whom browbeat corporations and investors to direct resources to their pet causes in the name of “social” objectives.  And no, I’m not saying Obama=Chavez.  I’m only saying that looking at something in its most purified or extreme forms is often the best way of identifying the essential principle.

The corporate responsibility movement is just another flavor of corporatism.  A conscription of private resources to achieve political (and usually redistributive) objectives, but without the procedural hurdles that constrain such conscription via legislation, regulation, or adjudication.  Which is exactly why progressives like Obama find it so attractive.

The Economist reports on new military technology: antennas made from seawater.

…To make a seawater antenna, the current probe (an electrical coil roughly the size and shape of a large doughnut) is attached to a radio’s antenna jack. When salt water is squirted through the hole in the middle of the probe, signals are transferred to the water stream by electromagnetic induction. The aerial can be adjusted to the frequency of those signals by lengthening or shortening the spout. To fashion antennae for short-wave radio, for example, spouts between 18 and 24 metres high are about right. To increase bandwidth, and thus transmit more data, such as a video, all you need do is thicken the spout. And the system is economical. The probe consumes less electricity than three incandescent desk lamps.

A warship’s metal antennae, which often weigh more than 3½ tonnes apiece, can be damaged in storms or combat. Seawater antennae, whose components weigh next to nothing and are easily stowable, could provide handy backups—and, eventually, more than backups. Not all of a ship’s antennae are used at once, so the spouts could be adjusted continuously to obtain the types needed at a given moment. According to SPAWAR, ten such antennae could replace 80 copper ones.

Fewer antennae mean fewer things for enemy radar to reflect from. Seawater is in any case less reflective of radar waves than metal. And if a ship needed to be particularly stealthy (which would mean keeping its transmissions to a minimum), her captain could simply switch the water spouts off altogether. …

If you are a “Jeopardy” fan, Monday thru Wednesday will be when IBM’s “Watson” challenges the shows two major champions. WSJ has the story.

Watson paused. The closest thing it had to a face, a glowing orb on a flat-panel screen, turned from forest green to a dark shade of blue. Filaments of yellow and red streamed steadily across it, like the paths of jets circumnavigating the globe. This pattern represented a state of quiet anticipation as the supercomputer awaited the next clue.

It was a September morning in 2010 at IBM Research, in the hills north of New York City, and the computer, known as Watson, was annihilating two humans, both champion-caliber players, in practice rounds of the knowledge game of “Jeopardy.” Within months, it would be playing the game on national TV in a million-dollar man vs. machine match-up against two of the show’s all-time greats.

As Todd Crain, an actor and the host of these test games, started to read the next clue, the filaments on Watson’s display began to jag and tremble. Watson was thinking—or coming as close to it as a computer could. The $1,600 clue, in a category called “The eyes have it,” read: “This facial wear made Israel’s Moshe Dayan instantly recognizable world-wide.”

The three players—two human and one electronic—could read the words as soon as they appeared on the big “Jeopardy” board. But they had to wait for Mr. Crain to read the entire clue before buzzing. That was the rule. At the moment the host pronounced the last word, a light would signal that contestants could buzz. The first to hit the button could win $1,600 with the right answer—or lose the same amount with a wrong one. (In these test matches, they were playing with funny money.)

This pause for reading gave Watson three or four seconds to hunt down the answer. …

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John Fund writes that many who are celebrating Reagan’s life aren’t Americans.

…Some of the celebrations won’t be held in America but rather in Eastern European countries where many people credit Reagan with playing a key role in their liberation from communism. “A good number of people we’re dealing with were in prison or threatened during Reagan’s presidency,” says John Heubusch, executive director of the Reagan Presidential Foundation. “They’re very emotional about this.”

I met several of those people at Sunday’s birthday gathering at the Reagan Library. Balazs Bokor, Hungary’s consul general in Los Angeles, regaled me with tales of his country’s plans. They include a major international conference on Reagan’s role in world affairs, the unveiling of a statue and a proclamation in his honor. Prague also plans to build a statue, while Krakow is preparing a special Catholic mass to honor both Reagan and Pope John Paul, his partner in anti-communism. In addition, Grosvenor Square, the current site of the U.S. Embassy in London, will see a statue raised in Reagan’s honor.

“Ronald Reagan was a figure who inspired many in Eastern Europe to hope they would someday be free,” says Horst Schakat, a former political prisoner in East Germany who now lives in California. “When he said the Soviet Union was an ‘evil empire,’ that resonated with so many average people in Eastern Europe while at the same time unnerving their illegitimate leaders.”

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, gives a Brit’s view of Reagan.

It is heartening to know that a statue of Ronald Reagan will be unveiled in London’s Grosvenor Square on July 4th this year to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. It is hard to think of a president who loved Britain more than President Reagan, a great leader who embodied the spirit of the Anglo-American Special Relationship. And it was his alliance with Margaret Thatcher that ultimately brought down the seemingly invincible might of the Soviet Empire, and defeated an evil, totalitarian ideology in the shape of Communism that had placed its boot firmly on the throats of hundreds of millions of people across Eastern and Central Europe for nearly half a century.

As Lady Thatcher noted in her tribute to President Reagan, at his memorial service in Washington National Cathedral in June 2004:

When his allies came under Soviet or domestic pressure, they could look confidently to Washington for firm leadership, and when his enemies tested American resolve, they soon discovered that his resolve was firm and unyielding. … With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world. And so today, the world – in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw and Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev, and in Moscow itself, the world mourns the passing of the great liberator and echoes his prayer: God bless America.

“The Gipper” will always be remembered as one of the greatest presidents in American history, and in my view the greatest of the 20th Century…

John Fund has an interesting article about a book that had a tremendous impact on Reagan.

…When Reagan was 11, his mother gave him an inspirational novel called “That Printer of Udell’s,” the story of a young man who combines a belief in “practical Christianity” with Horatio Alger-like grit. Reagan biographer Edmund Morris noted in a 1999 interview in the American Enterprise magazine that the novel’s central character, Dick Falkner, is “a tall, good-looking, genial young man who wears brown suits and has the gift of platform speaking and comes to a Midwestern town just like Dixon, Illinois, and figures out a workfare program to solve the city’s social problems. He marries this girl who looks at him adoringly with big wide eyes through all his speeches, and eventually he goes off with her to represent that shining city in Washington, D.C.”

Years later, Reagan was uncharacteristically revealing about himself in a 1984 letter to the daughter-in-law of Harold Bell Wright, the author of “That Printer of Udell’s.” He noted that all of his boyhood reading “left an abiding belief in the triumph of good over evil,” but he singled out Wright’s work for having “an impact I shall always remember. After reading it and thinking about it for a few days, I went to my mother and told her I wanted to declare my faith and be baptized. . . . I found a role model in that traveling printer whom Harold Bell Wright had brought to life. He set me on a course I’ve tried to follow even unto this day. I shall always be grateful.”

…For Ronald Reagan, the heroes he admired and the hero he aspired to become demonstrated what individuals in a free society like America were capable of achieving. The essence of Ronald Reagan’s personal American Dream was that the next generation should always strive to be better than the previous one. There’s no mystery about that part of Ronald Reagan’s legacy.

Charles Krauthammer discusses the possible outcomes in Egypt. He ends with a hopeful scenario.

…The Egyptian military, on the other hand, is the most stable and important institution in the country. It is Western-oriented and rightly suspicious of the Brotherhood. And it is widely respected, carrying the prestige of the 1952 Free Officers Movement that overthrew the monarchy and the 1973 October War that restored Egyptian pride along with the Sinai.

The military is the best vehicle for guiding the country to free elections over the coming months. Whether it does so with Mubarak at the top, or with Vice President Omar Suleiman or perhaps with some technocrat who arouses no ire among the demonstrators, matters not to us. If the army calculates that sacrificing Mubarak (through exile) will satisfy the opposition and end the unrest, so be it.

The overriding objective is a period of stability during which secularists and other democratic elements of civil society can organize themselves for the coming elections and prevail. ElBaradei is a menace. Mubarak will be gone one way or the other. The key is the military. The United States should say very little in public and do everything behind the scenes to help the military midwife – and then guarantee – what is still something of a long shot: Egyptian democracy.

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Toby Harnden discusses the differences between Reagan and some of the Dems and Republicans who are currently lauding him.

…There is little doubt that Reagan would have been dryly derisive of Obama’s policies and presidency. “Government is like a baby,” Reagan once quipped. “An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

Obama, by contrast, views government as a kindly nurse and the people as the baby. According to his mindset, the people should submit to those in government who know better and whose role is to make decisions and control the purse strings.

…Although Obama has been paying lip service to American greatness in recent months, he made it clear in his first two years in office that he saw the United States as a flawed nation with much to apologise for and dismissed the notion of American exceptionalism as mere patriotism. …

John Stossel has an excellent article that helps us to understand the magnitude of the problem that politicians have created by overspending. And even more importantly, Stossel offers an interesting solution of budget cuts that leads to a budget surplus this year. He gives some final options that highlight just how irresponsibly the politicians have been behaving.

…As the bureaucrats complain about proposals to make tiny cuts, it’s good to remember that disciplined government could make cuts that get us to a surplus in one year. But even a timid Congress could make swift progress if it wanted to. If it just froze spending at today’s levels, it would almost balance the budget by 2017. If spending were limited to 1 percent growth each year, the budget would balanced in 2019. And if the crowd in Washington would limit spending growth to about 2 percent a year, the red ink would almost disappear in 10 years.

As you see, the budget can be cut. Only politics stand in the way.

Kimberley Strassel reviews Donald Rumsfeld’s new book, and Rumsfeld’s perspective on some issues.

…History, meet Mr. Rumsfeld’s view. With today’s release of “Known and Unknown”—the 78-year-old’s memoir of his tenure as defense secretary under George W. Bush and Gerald Ford, his years in the Nixon administration and his three terms as an Illinois congressman—”Rummy” is offering his slice of history. As befits a man who has spent decades provoking Washington debate, his chronicle is direct and likely to inspire some shouting.

The usual Rumsfeld critics (including some in the Bush family circle) are rushing to categorize it as a “score-settling” account, but that’s a predictable (and tedious) judgment. At the heart of Mr. Rumsfeld’s book is an important critique of the Bush administration that has been largely missing from the debate over Iraq. The dominant narrative to date has been that a cowboy president and his posse of neocons went to war without adequate preparation and ran roughshod over doubts by more sober bureaucratic and strategic minds.

…Mr. Rumsfeld tells me that he sees his 815-page volume as a “contribution to the historic record”—not some breezy Washington tell-all. In his more than 40 years of public service, he kept extensive records of his votes, his meetings with presidents, and the more than 20,000 memos (known as “snowflakes”) he flurried on the Pentagon during his second run as defense secretary. Mr. Rumsfeld uses them as primary sources, which accounts for the book’s more than 1,300 end notes. He’s also digitized them so readers and historians can consult the evidence first-hand at www.rumsfeld.com. …

We have enjoyed John Tierney’s myth-busting stories about garbage and resource scarcity. In his latest, Tierney looks at discrimination against conservatives in the social sciences.

…Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.” …

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In celebrating Reagan’s 100th, we are including a favorite piece that Mark Steyn wrote about Reagan in 2004.

…the elites were stupid about Reagan in a way that only clever people can be. … 

…I once discussed Irving Berlin, composer of “God Bless America”, with his friend and fellow songwriter Jule Styne, and Jule put it best: “It’s easy to be clever. But the really clever thing is to be simple.” At the Berlin Wall that day, it would have been easy to be clever, as all those Seventies détente sophisticates would have been. And who would have remembered a word they said? Like Irving Berlin with “God Bless America”, only Reagan could have stood there and declared without embarrassment:  

Tear down this wall!

- and two years later the wall was, indeed, torn down. Ronald Reagan was straightforward and true and said it for everybody – which is why his “rhetorical opportunity missed” is remembered by millions of grateful Eastern Europeans. The really clever thing is to have the confidence to say it in four monosyllables.

…“The Great Communicator” was effective because what he was communicating was self-evident to all but our decayed elites: “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around,” he said in his inaugural address. And at the end of a grim, grey decade – Vietnam, Watergate, energy crises, Iranian hostages – Americans decided they wanted a President who looked like the nation, not like its failed government. Thanks to his clarity, around the world governments that had nations were replaced by nations that have governments. Most of the Warsaw Pact countries are now members of NATO, with free markets and freely elected parliaments. …

The Telegraph, UK, editors add their comments on Reagan.

Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old yesterday, and for many of us who remember him there is a twinge of sadness that he is not around to witness America’s celebrations of his centenary. … 

During his two terms in office, President Reagan was subjected to relentless, mean-spirited mockery from the Left. These days, however, the verdict of history is pretty clear, and even liberal US politicians are attempting to appropriate his legacy. …no one was better than Reagan at delivering a self-deprecating wisecrack. In 1981, as he was being lifted on to the operating table after being shot, the 70-year-old president looked around at his surgeons and said: “I hope you’re all Republicans.” One-liners don’t come more spontaneous than that. No wonder we remember Ronald Reagan as the Great Communicator.

President Obama is not the only politician to try to hijack the brand, however. Populist Republicans are at it, too (as are self-styled mainstream conservatives here). They flatter themselves. It is not just Reagan’s sense of humour they lack: it is his spirit of tolerance and the calm purpose that lay behind the jokes. President Reagan was not just a communicator – he won the Cold War. It’s hard, not to say impossible, to imagine either Barack Obama or Sarah Palin pulling off such a feat. Let them salute him by all means, but they should jump off the bandwagon.

David Warren hopes the outcome of the current Egyptian revolution is better than the last.

There are two, and only two, credible sources of power in Egypt, at the national level. One is the army, and the other is the Muslim Brotherhood. The former seized power in the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, overthrowing the royal dynasty of that extraordinary Albanian, Muhammad Ali, which had ruled Egypt and Sudan (with unwanted British help) since 1805.

…The western powers very slowly grasped that they had contrived to replace a narcissistic fool with a socialist madman. Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, almost whimsically; in the course of provoking another disastrous war with Israel in 1956; then another in 1967; while enmiring his country in dysfunctional authoritarian bureaucracy. As the West declined to support him any further, he manoeuvred into the Soviet orbit. But such was his charisma, and the resonance of Israel as his rhetorical bete noire, that he was able to embody pan-Arab nationalist aspirations, so well that we remember that defunct ideology as “Nasserism.”

Nasser was no “Islamist,” and for broader reasons the Egyptian army has long been consciously identified with secular rule. It has remained the only effective bulwark against the expanding influence and demands of the Muslim Brotherhood.

…Mubarak’s greatest difficulty has been securing reforms which have included the gradual replacement of incompetent (and usually army-managed) state enterprises with free markets, and the “normalization” of relations with Israel, from behind a rhetorical cover. His very survival in office has been an extraordinary accomplishment, to which Egypt owes what peace and prosperity it has had. …

In the Corner, Andrew Stiles has CBO numbers on the unbelievable and unconscionable increases in government spending under the Obama administration.

The ink was barely dry on House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s proposal to set an appropriations ceiling for the remainder of fiscal year 2011 — a move that would save $74 billion compared with the amount initially requested last year by President Obama — before top-ranking Democrats began trashing it.

…From Ryan’s perspective, however, the cuts are only the beginning. “This is just a down-payment by Republicans to get spending under control,” he said in a statement. “House Republicans will continue to tackle the country’s fiscal problems by advancing spending cuts and spending reforms, and by charting a new course with a new budget for the upcoming fiscal year.”

…Now that House Republicans are seeking a return to pre-stimulus levels — and targeting many of these same propped-up federal agencies in the process — Harry Reid thinks its too extreme for his liking. But compared to the spending increases that took place over the past two years, Ryan’s cuts are strikingly modest — and yet only the beginning of what’s required. A closer look at just how much, and how rapidly, some of these federal agencies’ discretionary budgets have ballooned under the Obama administration reveals that well, yes, deep cuts will be necessary if lawmakers are even remotely serious about restoring fiscal sanity to the budget process. …

Michael Barone notes how out-of-touch Obama is with America. Barone points out how oddly antiquated and two-dimensional is Obama’s vision for the country. And the One-Trick President thinks he is going to make the future happen by spending more of your money.

Barack Obama, like all American politicians, likes to portray himself as future-oriented and open to technological progress. Yet the vision he set out in his State of the Union address is oddly antique and disturbingly static.

“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” he said. But Sputnik and America’s supposedly less advanced rocket programs of 1957 were government projects, at a time when government defense spending, like the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, drove technology.

…And then there is transportation. “Within 25 years,” Obama said, “our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. This could allow you,” he said breathlessly, “to go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying.”

…If you put together Obama’s resistance to just about any serious changes in entitlement spending with his antique vision of technological progress, what you see is an America where the public sector permanently consumes a larger part of the economy than in the past and squanders the proceeds on white elephants like faux high-speed rail lines and political payoffs to the teacher and other public-sector unions. Private-sector innovation gets squeezed out by regulations like the Obama FCC’s net neutrality rules. It’s a plan for a static rather than dynamic economy. …

We have Debra Saunders, in the San Francisco Chronicle, with an excellent article on how money is being wasted on green subsidies.

After receiving at least $43 million in aid from the state of Massachusetts, Evergreen Solar announced last month that it would be closing its manufacturing plant in Devens, Mass., laying off its 800 workers and moving its manufacturing operations to China.

Warning: These are the “green jobs” that President Obama has touted as part of his “winning the future” agenda.

The problem isn’t that Obama wants to direct federal dollars toward research for alternative energy. It is in the national interest to have affordable options when oil sources are depleted.

The problem is that Obama thinks green jobs are the answer to the anemic economy recovery. And he clings to that belief in the face of contrary evidence.

…With the unemployment rate at 9.4 percent, Washington should be looking to create jobs that aren’t going to run to China. Or, as Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, told the New York Times, “If the president really were serious about job creation, he would be working with us to develop American oil and gas by American workers for American consumers.”

American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Steven F. Hayward likes to ask people which state has the lowest unemployment rate. The answer is North Dakota, with an unemployment rate of 3.8 percent. “The reason is they’ve had a huge oil and gas boom,” Hayward explained. …

The Investor’s Business Daily editors report on a federal judge finding the Interior Department in contempt. The Interior Department has refused to comply with the federal court’s injunction on the drilling moratorium: the government bureaucrats are running a de facto moratorium by dramatically decreasing the number of oil permits issued.

Energy Policy: An administration that has no respect for Congress, the courts or the Constitution has been found in contempt for reissuing a drilling moratorium that a U.S. district judge found overly broad.

The Obama administration’s trouble with the courts has continued with a judge’s ruling last week that the Interior Department’s reinstating of a drilling moratorium followed by a de facto moratorium via an overly restrictive permitting process constituted contempt.

…In June, Martin Feldman of the Eastern District Court of Louisiana struck down Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s original moratorium, saying it was overkill based on flawed reasoning. …

…So the administration went back, rearranged a few words and a few deck chairs, and reissued its moratorium. That one was officially lifted in October, although the permitting process…has had the effect of continuing the moratorium.

Feldman was not amused. “Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance,” the judge said in his ruling. “Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the reimposition of a second moratorium . .. provides this court with clear and convincing evidence of its contempt.”…

Kimberley Strassel details how the first piece of Obamacare was repealed.

Mark this date: On Feb. 2, 2011, a Democratic Senate killed the first piece of the health-care law it passed less than a year ago. Bowing (finally) to reality, 34 Democrats rushed to be among the 81 senators who axed the bill’s odious 1099 tax reporting requirement.

Let the ObamaCare dismantling begin.

…The 1099 provision was a new requirement that businesses report to the IRS annual purchases from any contractor above $600. The provision targeted 40 million businesses and other organizations, crushing them under a costly bookkeeping mandate. But hey, desperate Democrats needed funds to pay for their $1 trillion healthathon. By closing this “loophole,” they claimed, the IRS could commandeer a whole $17 billion in previously uncollected taxes.

…If the GOP is to dismember ObamaCare, it must pressure Democrats into helping. That’s what Republicans did this week. Next up for debate will be other odious elements: the individual mandate, taxes on kids’ braces, restrictions on health savings accounts, cuts to Medicare. The GOP will highlight each one and then ask 2012 Democrats what they are willing to defend. …

In Contentions, Alana Goodman has another example of how perverse and cancerous the liberal elite has become.

President Bush was forced to cancel a visit to Switzerland, where he was slated to be the keynote speaker at a Jewish Zionist charity gala next week, because he risked getting arrested for torture, Reuters is reporting:

Human rights groups said they had intended to submit a 2,500-page case against Bush in the Swiss city on Monday for alleged mistreatment of suspected militants at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. naval base in Cuba where captives from Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts in the so-called War on Terror were interned. …

And it isn’t just foreign NGOs involved in this. Human Rights Watch reportedly helped draft the criminal complaint, which claims that Bush is guilty of war crimes because he admitted to ordering the waterboarding of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

Yes, this is the kind of nonsense human-rights groups are wasting their time on. President Bush can’t attend a Swiss charity event, but Hamas leaders can fly to Switzerland for meetings with government officials without fear.

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In Contentions, Jason Maoz discusses Ronald Reagan’s pro-Israel and pro-Judaism convictions.

Ronald Reagan, who would have been 100 this Sunday, had an instinctive affinity for Jews and Israel. As an actor who spent decades in the heavily Jewish environment of Hollywood and who counted scores of Jews among his friends and colleagues, he moved easily in pro-Israel circles. Both as a private citizen and as governor of California, he was a familiar sight and a favored speaker at various functions for Israel.

“I’ve believed many things in my life,” Reagan states in his memoirs, “but no conviction I’ve ever had has been stronger than my belief that the United States must ensure the survival of Israel.”

…Beyond the Middle East, the plight of Soviet Jews was bound to strike a sympathetic chord with someone as unbendingly anti-Communist as Reagan.

…The Reagan administration was instrumental in gaining the release in 1986 of prominent Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, imprisoned for nine years on trumped-up treason charges. Sharansky has written of his reaction when, in 1983, confined to a tiny cell in a prison near the Siberian border, he saw on the front page of Pravda that Reagan — much to the ridicule and outrage of American and European liberals — had labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

As Sharansky describes it:

“Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan’s “provocation” quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth — a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us. I never imagined that three years later I would be in the White House telling this story to the president. … Reagan was right and his critics were wrong.”

Rich Richman adds a footnote to the story of Reagan And Sharansky.

… What few people knew, because Reagan had intentionally kept it secret, was that his first effort to free Sharansky had been undertaken back in 1981, when he wrote a handwritten letter to Brezhnev. He attached the script of the letter to his diary, and it was published in The Reagan Diaries after his death. …

Steven Hayward notes the irony of GE’s current sales campaign.

General Electric is right to celebrate their connection with Ronald Reagan, as they are doing with a splashy ad campaign. It was during Reagan’s years traveling the nation for GE in the 1950s that he developed his political views, and much of his rhetorical skill, as is recounted well in Thomas Evans’s book, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism. …

…According to Federal Election Commission records, in 1980 GE’s political action committee gave $2,000 to the Reagan campaign, but gave Carter’s campaign . . . $3,000.

…Above all one wishes that GE today were less of a rent-seeking company jumping on the “green energy” bandwagon for government mandates that help them sell otherwise uncompetitive products such as windmills. Reagan wouldn’t have thought that was bringing good things to life.

Richard Epstein explains qualities that made Ronald Reagan great.

…Leadership cannot thrive on nuance or uncertainty. It depends on unshakable commitments to sound principles.

That is where Ronald Reagan excelled as a president. On the domestic front, Reagan insisted that the essence of a free society rested on these key building blocks: individual freedom, personal security, limited government and states’ rights. …

…The values articulated will in the end become presumptions that should yield in time to prudent exceptions. But the key insight is that free society has to start with the right presumptions. It must reject the absolute power of the state to impose whatever laws it conjures up in the name of community and the common good. …

…Forthright pronouncements also defined Reagan’s triumphs in foreign affairs. He knew in his bones that the want of inner conviction disarms any president engaged in international diplomacy. Moral relativism in international affairs is not a sign of intellectual discernment. It is a sign of moral weakness. Lots of hard political issues come in all shades of gray. But by the same token, the words for which Ronald Reagan is most remembered drew sharp contrasts. In March 1983, he called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” Speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in June 1987, Reagan stated his major premise: “We believe that freedom and security go together.” This was followed by his direct challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, his Russian counterpart: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Which Gorbachev did by November 1989.

These simple declarative sentences define the man and his massive achievements. They are what all Americans should remember about Ronald Reagan on Sunday’s centennial of his birth. He knew that in politics, as in life, Dooley Wilson had it right. The fundamental things do apply. Ronald Reagan was a great president because he stood for what is great and enduring in the human condition.

The administration still thinks the Sputnik rhetoric is inspiring, Jonah Goldberg has this reply. We highlight Goldberg’s discussion of the laughable energy efficiency of China.

…Apparently, our Sputnik moment requires that we launch an updated arms race with China, but instead of bombs and tanks, we must build windmills and brew the government moonshine we call ethanol.

No metaphor can withstand too much scrutiny. But Obama’s effort to recast America’s plight as a replay of the last Sputnik moment fails in every intended regard.

…For starters, America is vastly more energy efficient than China and has been getting better at it for years. Since the oil shock of 1973, America’s economy has nearly tripled and the population has more than doubled but we only use about 20 percent more oil than we did then. Meanwhile, China — thanks largely to its insatiable appetite for coal — is far less green. In 2006, according to the Heritage Foundation, China and America had generally the same greenhouse emissions, by 2009 China’s were 50 percent greater.

Ironically, China achieves abysmal numbers like these precisely because it pursues the sorts of policies Obama says we need more of: bureaucratic micromanagement, costly subsidies, arbitrary timetables, political goals that are unrelated to the market and unhinged from the science. China is hardly the leader in technical, scientific, intellectual or artistic innovation. That’s where we’re still No. 1 and that’s why authoritarian China is trying to copy our economic model as best it can without adopting our political system. …

Noemie Emery writes that Obama is missing his opportunity to be a great president.

…It turns out Obama does have a big job, just not the one he signed on for. Presidents become great when they fit the times and the mood of the moment, which is Obama’s great problem.

He can give up his dream of expanding the government, and become great by addressing the problem and saving the safety net by making it viable. Or he can cling to his mission, and fail.

…With… the tsunami of debt rolling toward the country — he is pretending it doesn’t exist. In his State of the Union, he proposed still more spending, all on nonessentials.

…It was as if FDR gave a speech in 1940 on foreign affairs, and ignored Nazi Germany while he touted our friendly relations with Canada. This is not the way men of destiny act. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Janet Daley says what many conservatives are thinking.

The editors of ConservativeHome USA have taken a deep breath and uttered the unsayable: the only real media star on the Republican stage is not a serious contender for the presidency. Publishing a compendium of comments from highly regarded commentators and Republican party figures, it makes a case for facing the truth that Sarah Palin cannot be regarded as presidential material, particularly at a time of such economic peril and global instability.

What it does not say (but does imply) is that the party would do real damage to its own reputation by nominating her. It would appear both desperate and unserious – a deadly electoral combination. I had a good deal of time for the Palin phenomenon when she was John McCain’s surprise choice of running mate: she seemed to represent the voice of an America which was too often treated with contempt by the political class and, after all, this was the vice-presidency we were talking about. The virulent attacks on her from the liberal establishment reminded me uncannily of that mix of misogyny and snobbery which had been thrown at Margaret Thatcher, and if only for that reason, I was inclined to defend her.

But enough is enough. She is not another Thatcher – nor is she another Reagan. …Given her star quality and wide support, she could be a plausible king-maker and power broker for some more credible candidate. Some of my senior Republican friends are disappointed that Governor Chris Christie has decided not to run this time around, and fear that the party may not be able to find a big enough figure in time. But developing the profile of a relative unknown would be better than going with a super star who would burn out spectacularly under fire.

In the Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz reviews Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, Known and Unknown.

…In Known and Unknown, which was purchased by a reporter at a Washington bookstore in advance of its official release, Rumsfeld offers a muscular, uncompromising defense of his tenure, the military operations he helped direct in Afghanistan and Iraq and the president he served. He settles his share of scores, most notably with Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Dick Armitage and the media. While he acknowledges some missteps along the way, Rumsfeld also chastises high-ranking Democrats and insists—as does George W. Bush—that even if he had known in 2003 that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the former defense secretary would still have favored going to war. …

…The book retraces familiar ground—the U.S. intelligence estimates in 2002 that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons—with Rumsfeld arguing that “recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning.” This, of course, was the mother of all intelligence failures…

…Rumsfeld takes direct aim at Colin Powell in recounting the former general’s famous U.N. speech in February 2003, laying out the administration’s case that Saddam indeed possessed a stockpile of banned weapons. “Over time a narrative developed that Powell was somehow innocently misled into making a false declaration to the Security Council and the world,” Rumsfeld writes. He seems particularly offended that Powell has said that some in the intelligence community knew “that some of these sources were not good,” “didn’t speak up,” and “that devastated me.”

Rumsfeld fires back that the secretary of State had once been “the most senior military officer in our country” and no one else in the administration had “even a fraction of his experience” on intelligence matters. “Powell was not duped or misled by anybody, nor did he lie about Saddam’s suspected WMD stockpiles. The president did not lie. The vice president did not lie. Tenet did not lie. Rice did not lie. I did not lie. The Congress did not lie. The far less dramatic truth is that we were wrong.” …

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Ed Feulner reminds us of the true Reagan legacy.

… so many politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, seek to portray themselves as a latter-day Reagan. To decide whether they deserve this mantle, however, consider this quote from his farewell address:

“‘We the people’ tell the government what to do, it doesn’t tell us. ‘We the people’ are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast.”

Only a politician who agrees with this — and governs accordingly — can be considered Reagan’s true heir.

In Fortune, Keith McCullough says the Fed’s monetary policy is causing global inflation and fueling the unrest we are seeing.

…Captains of Keynesian economics don’t use the word ‘stagflation’ very much for a reason. The last time these bubble-makers plugged the world with stagflation was in the mid-to-late 1970s. That’s when US Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns was attempting to monetize America’s debt as President Jimmy Carter bet that it would not create any globally interconnected risk. Sound familiar?

We call it stagflation when real-world inflation readings are growing faster than economic growth. …

…It’s time to recognize what America’s debauchery of the US Dollar is doing to global inflation. If US monetary policy makers are still in the camp of the willfully blind and want to believe there’s no real-world inflation out there because Ben Bernanke’s conflicted and compromised calculation of CPI says so, Godspeed having the world agree with them on that. …

In the Washington Examiner, Lynn Mitchell tells us about the healthcare repeal vote of the Virginia senators who were Obama stooges last year.  

Many in Virginia are questioning the votes Wednesday (or lack thereof) of their Democratic Senators Jim Webb and Mark Warner when the U.S. Senate took a vote on whether to repeal the health care law known as ObamaCare. It was defeated, falling along party lines and ending up 51-47 against repeal.

…Jim Riley at Virginia Virtucon blog noted Warner was a no-show even though he was in Washington that day to address the centrist think tank Center for American Progress. So the question begs to be asked … where was he for the Senate vote? Could he have skipped it, as some have suggested, to avoid a record of voting against the people of Virginia — again — or to avoid showing his lemming status voting lockstep with the Democrats?

 Meanwhile, Webb lined up against repeal despite the outcry from Virginians who were for it, despite two election cycles that saw the Commonwealth’s citizens vote overwhelmingly for Republicans while throwing out Democrats, and despite two federal judge rulings declaring ObamaCare as unconstitutional.

…With this latest round, Webb and Warner continue to show that adhering to party lines is more important than listening to all the citizens they represent.

In the American Spectator, Ross Kaminsky comments on the defeat of the Senate repeal of Obamacare.

…Despite the rhetoric of the left, the vote was far more than symbolic as it forced some key vulnerable Democrats, including Claire McCaskill (MO) and Ben Nelson (NE), to show whether they stood with the citizens of their states or with the arm-twisting of Harry Reid and Barack Obama. In a vote in August, 71% of those Missourians who cast ballots voted to prohibit the government from requiring that a person purchase health insurance, the lynchpin of Obamacare’s takeover of the American health insurance system. McCaskill gave those 71% of voters the finger and, I predict, sealed her fate in the 2012 elections, as did Ben Nelson whose state is 2-to-1 against Obamacare.

“Conservative” Democrat Joe Manchin (WV) also voted with the Democrats to preserve Obamacare, proving right his Republican challenger in the 2010 Senate race who said that Manchin’s late-in-the-race conversion to being against Obamacare was a lie and that his earlier support of Obamacare represented who Manchin really is. A Rasmussen Reports poll of West Virginia likely voters in August, 2010 showed 69% of the state opposed to Obamacare, with 80% of those “strongly opposed” and almost twice as many supporting the state suing to block the law’s health insurance mandate as opposing such a lawsuit. &%^$! the people, says Manchin!

…If you want to understand the implication of the Republican assault on Obamacare (and of the Democrats’ defense of it), don’t bother with the lamestream media. Instead, look at betting on 2012 Senate control. It’s trading around 70% for the Republicans to win back control, the all-time high for that bet and up 15% from the November elections.

In the WaPo, Charles Lane explains that Congress cannot lie to the American people in order to enact a law. Lane is the Post’s Supreme Court reporter, so him leaving the dark side is an indication the legal challenge to healthcare is gaining momentum.

…Ezra says this is all about “semantics.” Congress has the power to levy taxes; and the “penalty” attached the mandate really is a tax, but Congress couldn’t use the word “tax,” because it’s politically “toxic.” “I don’t believe our forefathers risked their lives to make sure the word ‘penalty’ was eschewed in favor of the word ‘tax,’” he writes. Wrong again: Actually, one purpose of the Constitution is to prevent government from engaging in politically expedient deception. …

This passage from New York v. United States, from which Judge Vinson also aptly quoted, puts it rather well:

Some truths are so basic that, like the air around us, they are easily overlooked. Much of the Constitution is concerned with setting forth the form of our government, and the courts have traditionally invalidated measures deviating from that form. The result may appear “formalistic” in a given case to partisans of the measure at issue, because such measures are typically the product of the era’s perceived necessity. But the Constitution protects us from our own best intentions: It divides power among sovereigns and among branches of government precisely so that we may resist the temptation to concentrate power in one location as an expedient solution to the crisis of the day.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — not exactly a right-wing nut — wrote those words, in 1992. What she was basically saying is that, under our Constitution, the ends do not justify the means.

In the Agenda from National Review, Avik Roy puts together an excellent review of the verdict in Florida v HHS. Roy highlights Judge Vinson’s compelling rejection of the Necessary and Proper Clause.

Florida v. Health and Human Services, if upheld by the Supreme Court, could go down as an important landmark in the history of American liberty. But that’s a big “if.”

Most people expected Judge C. Roger Vinson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida to rule that the individual mandate was unconstitutional, based on his questions and comments during hearings on the case. Less expected was his decision to overturn the 2010 health care law in its entirety.

…Indeed, Judge Vinson has penned a persuasive, well-researched, and tightly-reasoned opinion, one that will surely have some impact on what the Supreme Court eventually ends up doing. Judge Vinson marshals statements from both sides to show that PPACA indeed represents an unprecedented expansion of federal power, one that, if upheld, makes it difficult to argue that the Constitution restrains Congress in any way. Equally importantly, he points out that even the White House believes that the PPACA’s other provisions will destabilize the health insurance market without an individual mandate, thereby making it difficult to uphold the rest of PPACA in the mandate’s absence.

There are four key components to Judge Vinson’s opinion: (1) a ruling that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s dramatic expansion of Medicaid is not coercive to the states; (2) that the individual mandate exceeds Congressional powers to regulate interstate commerce; (3) that the individual mandate exceeds Congressional prerogatives to enact laws that are “necessary and proper” for executing its delegated powers; (4) that the individual mandate was essential to the functioning of other critical components of PPACA, and therefore the entire law must be overturned. …

…3. The Necessary and Proper clause does not allow Congress to impose an individual mandate

…Judge Vinson spends more intellectual energy in this area, pointing out that the Constitution only allows Congress to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers” that were explicitly laid out in the Constitution (p. 58).

Vinson points out that advocates of the law assert that the mandate is essential because without it, the law’s requirement that insurers take all comers, without regard to preexisting conditions, would “[bankrupt] the health insurance industry.” But that doesn’t rise to the level of Constitutional justification (p. 60):

Thus, rather than being used to implement or facilitate enforcement of the Act’s insurance industry reforms, the individual mandate is actually being used as the means to avoid the adverse consequences of the Act itself. Such an application of the Necessary and Proper Clause would have the perverse effect of enabling Congress to pass ill conceived, or economically disruptive statutes, secure in the knowledge that the more dysfunctional the results of the statute are, the more essential or “necessary” the statutory fix would be. Under such a rationale, the more harm the statute does, the more power Congress could assume for itself under the Necessary and Proper Clause. This result would, of course, expand the Necessary and Proper Clause far beyond its original meaning, and allow Congress to exceed the powers specifically enumerated in Article I. Surely this is not what the Founders anticipated, nor how that Clause should operate. …

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Mort Zuckerman remembers Reagan.

… Reagan provided what Americans wanted most: a strong leader who could and would lead in a principled way. To refresh a phrase once used about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, this man was “not for turning.” He made that clear early on, to the gratified astonishment of the nation, when he fired the striking air traffic controllers—who quickly learned that this commander in chief was not to be taken casually.

Reagan had come into office when the United States was mired in an economic and even psychological downturn, reflecting the doldrums of the Carter years and the perception of his administration as feckless and naive. Reagan was determined that more of the same would not do. Shortly into his presidency, he set about convincing the American public that there had to be a decisive change in direction. His map was stereoscopic: He created a vision of where we’d been and where he intended to take us, unafraid to spell out what was to be feared, unabashed in the evocation of dreams for the future. He personified Harry Truman’s definition of a leader—a man who had the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do and to like it. It was never easy, even when he made it look so.

As if born with the instinct to be a transformational president, Reagan knew how to instill confidence in a nation that felt it had lost its way. Add to that his transparent likability, and you can understand why Americans felt so good about him and better about themselves when they listened to him. In the process, he earned an enormous presumption of credibility, affection, and support from the American public, even among those, like myself, who hadn’t voted for him.

How much we miss that quality of leadership today, when it is the political system itself that raises disquiet. Much of our contemporary leadership passes off tough decisions to some other body (the perpetual commissions!) or, worse, to some future generation. The resulting political vacuum has created a sense of government in disarray, unable to make the wise and tough decisions required. … 

At the end of Zuckerman’s article is a link to a Reagan photo essay. We picked one from 1959 with Marilyn Monroe.

David Warren has additional Egyptian thoughts; especially about ElBaradei.

… To my observation, ElBaradei — now presenting himself as a Kerensky for Egypt — is a creature governed by vanity. He is an opportunist, whose peculiar combinations of malice and naiveté exactly suit his prospective coalition partners. He declared himself only recently against the Mubarak regime — having enjoyed a favoured friendship with the Egyptian dictator, until last year. Having judged that his octogenarian friend is now done for, he has generously come home to lead the opposition.

History is littered with figures of his sort.

To say ElBaradei is two-faced would be misleading, for no one advances in Middle Eastern politics with only two faces. But we can already distinguish the face which supplies sweet plausibilities to the western media, while dispensing to each Egyptian class what he thinks it wants to hear.

He is the smooth presence before the western cameras, assuring us that the Muslim Brotherhood has been misrepresented, and that they will make perfectly safe partners on the usual roads to peace. And only the Copts of Egypt, and the Jews of Israel, will not be fooled. El-Baradei will even fool himself: for as I said, he is a man of formidable vanity.

He will eat, and then be eaten. …

If you, like Pickerhead, are a Rush Limbaugh fan you will enjoy this piece from Commentary. If you’re not a fan, at least you will understand his appeal.

One of the many strategic errors made by the Obama administration in the early days of 2009 was its decision to take on talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh—though it was, perhaps, hard to blame the president and his people for trying. After all, they were riding the wave of a big electoral win and feeling pretty invincible, with large majorities in both houses of Congress and a messiah in the White House, and Limbaugh had just stunned the country, days before Obama was inaugurated, by summarizing his feelings about the new president in four simple words: “I hope he fails.” Limbaugh impatiently brushed aside the happy talk about compromise and bipartisan cooperation and scoffed at the claim that Obama was a pragmatic, post-ideological, post-partisan, post-racial conciliator and healer. Instead, he saw every reason to believe that Obama would aggressively pursue a leftist dream agenda: an exponential expansion of government’s size and power, a reordering of the American economic system, and a dismantling of America’s role as a world power. Limbaugh was not alone in such views, but he was the only major figure on the right willing to stick his neck out at a time when the rest of the nation seemed dazed into acquiescence by the so-far impeccably staged Obama ascendancy.

Such was the mood of the moment that it seemed a sullen breach of etiquette to utter any such criticism. In any event, the White House quickly concluded that Limbaugh’s statement was a rare blunder and that hay was to be made of it. What better way to sow division among the Republicans, and confine them to a tiny corner of American political life, than to identify Rush Limbaugh as the “real head” of their party and brand him as an unpatriotic extremist and sore loser—or, in the light-touch description of longtime Clinton adviser Paul Begala, as “a corpulent drug addict with an AM radio talk show”? If they could succeed in this angle of attack, they would kill two birds with one stone, marginalizing their most popular antagonist while rendering the opposition party impotent with embarrassment and internal squabbling. Each Republican would face a choice of embracing the glittering “new age” of Obama and gathering a few scraps from beneath the Democratic table or following Rush into the fever swamps of an embittered permanent minority and getting nothing at all.

The Democrats’ strategy backfired. Limbaugh’s vocal opposition to the stimulus package, which he dubbed “Porkulus,” helped galvanize a unanimous Republican vote in opposition—an astonishing achievement of partisan unity that would be repeated in subsequent lopsided votes on health care and other issues—and would lay the blame for these failed policies entirely on the Democrats’ doorstep, culminating in a huge and decisive electoral pushback against the Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. …

… In retrospect, the amazing part of the story is how thoroughly the White House misunderstood Limbaugh’s appeal, his staying power, and his approach to issues. It also points to a curious fact about Limbaugh’s standing in the mind of much of the American media and the American left. Even though they talk about him all the time, he’s the man who isn’t quite there. By which I mean that there is a stubborn unwillingness, both wishful and self-defeating, to recognize Limbaugh for what he is, take him seriously, and grant him his legitimate due. Many of his detractors have never even listened to his show, for example. Some of his critics regularly refer to him as Rush “Lim-bough” (like a tree limb), as if his name is so obscure to them that they cannot even remember how to pronounce it.

In short, he is never quite acknowledged as the formidable figure he clearly is. Instead, he is dismissed in one of two ways—either as a comic buffoon, a passing phenomenon in the hit parade of American pop culture, or as a mean-spirited apostle of hate who appeals to a tiny lunatic fringe. These two views are not quite compatible, but they have one thing in common: they both aim to push him to the margins and render him illegitimate, unworthy of respectful attention. This shunning actually works in Limbaugh’s favor because it creates the very conditions that cause him to be chronically underestimated and keeps his opposition chronically off-balance. Indeed, Limbaugh’s use of comedy and irony and showmanship are integral to his modus operandi, the judo by which he draws in his opponents and then uses their own force to up-end them. And unless you make an effort to hear voices outside the echo chamber of the mainstream media, you won’t have any inkling of what Limbaugh is all about or of how widely his reach and appeal extend. …

David Harsanyi has kudos for some kinds of judicial activism.

For discussion’s sake, let’s just concede that every four years or so the American public is fooled into voting for a demagogue who’s mastered a pleasant-sounding, market-tested populism. Let’s then imagine — this is for discussion only — that this person’s resulting agenda, cheery but mildly authoritarian, passes with public support.

Does the federal court system exist to rubber stamp legislation? Should they check in and see if it’s cool with the public? Or, do we have courts to decide the constitutionality of laws? Do we insulate judges from democracy for a reason? Do we have a Constitution to keep a check on government or to bend to the constant predilections of the electorate?

The White House’s position is clear. When U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson ruled this week that Obamacare was unconstitutional — due to its individual mandate — the White House’s first reaction was to call the ruling “out of the mainstream,” as if it were remotely true or that it even mattered.

The decision, you may not be surprised to hear, is also a case of “judicial activism” and an “overreach.”

Co-opting conservative terms like “judicial activism” is a cute way of trying to turn the tables on those who have some reverence for the original intent of the Founders. …

Joel Kotkin says parts of the Midwest are making a comeback.

… For nearly a half century … the American Midwest has widely been seen as a “loser” region–a place from which talented people have fled for better opportunities. Those Midwesterners seeking greater, glitzier futures historically have headed to the great coastal cities of Miami, New York, San Diego or Seattle, leaving behind the flat expanses of the nation’s mid-section for the slower-witted, or at least less imaginative.

Today that reality may be shifting. While some parts of the heartland, particularly around Detroit, remain deeply troubled, the Midwest boasts some of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, luring back its native sons and daughters while attracting new residents from all over the country.

For example, Des Moines, Omaha, Kansas City, Columbus, Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Madison have all kept their unemployment rates lower than the national average, according to a recent Brookings survey. They are also among the regions that have been able to cut their jobless rates the most over the past three years.

This contrasts sharply with the travails of the metropolitan economies of the Southeast, Nevada, Arizona and California. Of course, other regions are doing better than the Sun Belt sad sacks. The stimulus and TARP benefited some parts of the Northeast, but even those areas haven’t performed as well as the nation’s mid-section. The only other arc of prosperity has grown around the Washington leviathan, largely a product of an expanded government paid for by the rest of the country. …

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Spengler gives us much more on the food crisis in the Middle East. He also provides examples of the Mubarak efforts made towards modernization which have been poorly received by a recalcitrant Muslim public.

Even Islamists have to eat. It is unclear whether President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt will survive, or whether his nationalist regime will be replaced by an Islamist, democratic, or authoritarian state. What is certain is that it will be a failed state. Amid the speculation about the shape of Arab politics to come, a handful of observers, for example economist Nourel Roubini, have pointed to the obvious: Wheat prices have almost doubled in the past year.

Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, beholden to foreign providers for nearly half its total food consumption. Half of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day. Food comprises almost half the country’s consumer price index, and much more than half of spending for the poorer half of the country. This will get worse, not better.

Not the destitute, to be sure, but the aspiring and frustrated young, confronted the riot police and army on the streets of Egyptian cities last week. The uprising in Egypt and Tunisia were not food riots; only in Jordan have demonstrators made food the main issue. Rather, the jump in food prices was the wheat-stalk that broke the camel’s back. The regime’s weakness, in turn, reflects the dysfunctional character of the country. 35% of all Egyptians, and 45% of Egyptian women can’t read.

Nine out of ten Egyptian women suffer genital mutilation. US President Barack Obama said Jan. 29, “The right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny … are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.” Does Obama think that genital mutilation is a human rights violation? To expect Egypt to leap from the intimate violence of traditional society to the full rights of a modern democracy seems whimsical.

In fact, the vast majority of Egyptians has practiced civil disobedience against the Mubarak regime for years. The Mubarak government announced a “complete” ban on genital mutilation in 2007, the second time it has done so – without success, for the Egyptian population ignored the enlightened pronouncements of its government. Do Western liberals cheer at this quiet revolt against Mubarak’s authority?

Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt’s First Lady, continues to campaign against the practice, which she has denounced as “physical and psychological violence against children.” Last May 1, she appeared at Aswan City alongside the provincial governor and other local officials to declare the province free of it. And on October 28, Mrs Mubarak inaugurated an African conference on stopping genital mutilation.

The most authoritative Egyptian Muslim scholars continue to recommend genital mutilation. Writing on the web site IslamOnline, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi – the president of the International Association of Muslim Scholars – explains:

‘The most moderate opinion and the most likely one to be correct is in favor of practicing circumcision in the moderate Islamic way indicated in some of the Prophet’s hadiths – even though such hadiths are not confirmed to be authentic. It is reported that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said to a midwife: “Reduce the size of the clitoris but do not exceed the limit, for that is better for her health and is preferred by husbands.” ‘

That is not a Muslim view (the practice is rare in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan), but an Egyptian Muslim view. In the most fundamental matters, President and Mrs Mubarak are incomparably more enlightened than the Egyptian public. Three-quarters of acts of genital mutilation in Egypt are executed by physicians.

What does that say about the character of the country’s middle class? Only one news dispatch among the tens of thousands occasioned by the uprising mentions the subject; the New York Times, with its inimitable capacity to obscure content, wrote on January 27, “To the extent that Mr. Mubarak has been willing to tolerate reforms, the cable said, it has been in areas not related to public security or stability.

For example, he has given his wife latitude to campaign for women’s rights and against practices like female genital mutilation and child labor, which are sanctioned by some conservative Islamic groups.” The authors, Mark Landler and Andrew Lehren, do not mention that 90% or more of Egyptian women have been so mutilated. What does a country have to do to shock the New York Times? Eat babies boiled?

Middle East historian Bernard Lewis is interviewed at The Corner.

… And here is a question of the hour: Is Egypt 2011 like Iran 1979? Lewis: “Yes, there are certain similarities. I hope we don’t repeat the same mistakes.” The Carter administration handled events in Iran “poorly.”

The Obama administration should ponder something, as should we all: “At the moment, the general perception, in much of the Middle East, is that the United States is an unreliable friend and a harmless enemy. I think we want to give the exact opposite impression”: one of being a reliable friend and a dangerous enemy. “That is the way to be perceived.”

These revolts are catching, and long have been. Tunisia precipitated Egypt. “One country throws out its tyrant, and the rest are immediately encouraged to do the same.” I ask whether the Jordanians will revolt. Lewis answers, “Depends on what happens in Egypt.”

He notes that “many of our so-called friends in the region are inefficient kleptocracies. But they’re better than the Islamic radicals.” Democrats, however, are best of all: “and they do exist.”

Paul Johnson takes a measure of our place in the world.

… China would be more likely to become an economic–as opposed to a military–threat to the U.S. if it embraced democracy and freedom. Therein lies the paradox, for a truly free and democratic China–and thus an increasingly prosperous and friendly one–must be a welcome phenomenon.

Another factor to consider is India. China has chosen to expand its economy via traditional smokestack industries and cheap, mass-produced exports. In contrast, India is moving more rapidly into high tech. For the time being this means a less showy performance than China’s. But in the long run this offers India a much more promising future, which by 2050 may be apparent.

What is clear today is that India, as a working democracy, a respecter of the rule of law and a potentially hightech superpower, will be an immensely valuable U.S. ally. Therefore, a cardinal object of American policy must be to cultivate India’s friendship and cooperation in every sphere. And at the same time, if the U.S. remains a firm friend and ally of Japan, I doubt there will be much to fear in China’s creating a huge economy. On the contrary, that might well prove, in the end, to be a blessing for mankind.

Thomas Sowell tells us about more EPA regs.

Despite the old saying, “Don’t cry over spilled milk,” the Environmental Protection Agency is doing just that.

We all understand why the Environmental Protection Agency was given the power to issue regulations to guard against oil spills, such as that of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska or the more recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But not everyone understands that any power given to any bureaucracy for any purpose can be stretched far beyond that purpose.

In a classic example of this process, the EPA has decided that, since milk contains oil, it has the authority to force farmers to comply with new regulations to file “emergency management” plans to show how they will cope with spilled milk, how farmers will train “first responders” and build “containment facilities” if there is a flood of spilled milk.

Since there is no free lunch, all of this is going to cost the farmers both money and time that could be going into farming– and is likely to end up costing consumers higher prices for farm products. …

Democracy in America Blog posts on the healthcare court decision.

MONDAY Roger Vinson, a district court judge in Florida,  ruled that Obamacare’s controversial individual mandate is, as the federal government maintains, necessary for the law to function as intended, but that it is not proper, because it oversteps Congress’ commerce-clause powers. Moreover, because the legislation failed to include a severability provision, which would permit the excise of unconstitutional elements while leaving the rest intact, Judge Vinson struck down not only the individual mandate, but the entire act.

Now, the inclusion of a severability clause is not strictly necessary for a judge to void only part of a bill on constitutional grounds, which is why liberal legal eagles were hoping that the Democrats’ failure to do so would not be a problem. However, as National Review’s Avik Roy argues in an excellent post, Judge Vinson makes an independently compelling case for the inextricability of the individual mandate, but really drives it home simply by citing Obamacare’s own advocates and the text of the bill itself. “In order to overturn Judge Vinson’s ruling upon appeal,” Mr Roy notes, “it will be necessary for the government to rebut itself: to disprove its own arguments that the individual mandate is essential to PPACA.”

If the Supreme Court buys this, then a final decision against the constitutionality of the individual mandate on commerce-clause grounds would kill Obamacare entirely, leaving us at the status quo ante. A more humiliating reversal for the Democrats is hard to imagine. …

Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen write on the healthcare bill and the problems it causes the Dems.

Despite talk earlier this week that the health care law was gaining favorability in the wake of the House repeal effort, polls now show it continues to be unpopular among a majority of the American public.

Indeed, directly after the House voted to repeal, a few polls showed slight upticks in favorability. But whatever ground the health care law appeared to have gained proved fleeting. A poll released Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health shows the law remains unpopular — with 50 percent of respondents viewing it unfavorably, up 9 percentage points from the last survey.

The health care law is at its “lowest level of popularity ever,” said Jake Tapper of ABC News, citing a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. Rasmussen Reports, which has measured support for repeal since the bill passed, continues to find more than 50 percent of respondents in favor of repeal.

It could even be that no such piece of major legislation has created the continued, vehement public opposition that health care has provoked since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 — which resulted in the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise.

The Republican Party was created in opposition to that act — and went on to win control of the House in the 1854 elections. Last year’s health care bill in great part spawned the tea party, a driving force behind the GOP’s big House wins. …

Al Gore has actually surfaced to claim the snow storms are caused by global warming. His blog has a pic of his office. We enlarged it so it is now as fuzzy as Gore’s thinking. We also have a link to a bunch of Dems claiming the lack of snow five years back was caused by global warming. Sound like a good start to the humor section?

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At the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, Michael Barone reviews Reagan’s life.

…Another way up was college. Only 6 percent of Americans graduated from college in the late 1920s, and Reagan’s parents had not even attended high school. But at 17 Reagan made the remarkable decision to attend Eureka College, 95 miles from Dixon, financing his education with his earnings as a lifeguard, an athletic half-scholarship he talked his way into, and a job washing dishes. Every so often his mother would send him 50 cents for expenses, and by the end of his college days he was sending money home — and bringing Moon to Eureka with him.

…When he graduated from college in June 1932, unemployment stood at 24 percent, just about the highest rate in American history. He hitchhiked to Chicago and applied for jobs as a radio announcer. He was told that Chicago was the big time and that he should get some seasoning at a small station in “the sticks.” He hitchhiked home, borrowed the Oldsmobile his father could not afford to buy gas for, and drove to Davenport, Iowa, the home of WOC, owned by the Palmer Chiropractic School (the station’s call letters stood for world of chiropractic). Told that there was no opening, he talked the station manager into letting him audition by announcing an imaginary football game between Eureka and Western Illinois. He got the job: $5 and round-trip bus fare to broadcast a University of Iowa football game.

That break surely fortified an innate optimism. In 1933 Reagan moved to another Palmer station, WHO in Des Moines, where as a sports announcer he did what he had heard Chicago announcers do in the 1920s — narrate games from a pitch-by-pitch account received by telegraph (with lots of foul tips when the telegraph broke down). He became something of a local celebrity and a frequent speaker to civic groups, and sent one-third of his paycheck home to his family. He also did political commentaries with future Republican Rep. H.R. Gross. He got raises and made $75 a week (more than $1,200 in today’s dollars), twice what his father had ever made. …

In WaPo, Kevin Huffman reports on what may be the tipping point in the school choice movement. The title is ‘A Rosa Parks moment for education.’

Last week, 40-year-old Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar was released after serving nine days in jail on a felony conviction for tampering with records. Williams-Bolar’s offense? Lying about her address so her two daughters, zoned to the lousy Akron city schools, could attend better schools in the neighboring Copley-Fairlawn district.

…conservatives view the case as evidence of the need for broader school choice. What does it say when parents’ options are so limited that they commit felonies to avoid terrible schools? Commentator Kyle Olson and others across the political spectrum have called this “a Rosa Parks moment for education.”

…The intellectual argument against school choice is thin and generally propagated by people with myriad options. …

…But kids are getting hurt right now, every day, in ways that take years to play out but limit their life prospects as surgically as many segregation-era laws. We can debate whether lying on school paperwork is the same as refusing to move to the back of the bus, but the harsh reality is this: We may have done away with Jim Crow laws, but we have a Jim Crow public education system. …

We’re sorry to see that Newt Gingrich has gone to the dark side: standing up for ethanol subsidies. The WSJ editors take him to task.

…The former Speaker blew through Des Moines last Tuesday for the Renewable Fuels Association summit, and his keynote speech to the ethanol lobby was as pious a tribute to the fuel made from corn and tax dollars as we’ve ever heard. Mr. Gingrich explained that “the big-city attacks” on ethanol subsidies are really attempts to deny prosperity to rural America, adding that “Obviously big urban newspapers want to kill it because it’s working, and you wonder, ‘What are their values?’” …

…Yet today this now-mature industry enjoys far more than cash handouts, including tariffs on foreign competitors and a mandate to buy its product. Supporters are always inventing new reasons for these dispensations, like carbon benefits (nonexistent, according to the greens and most scientific evidence) and replacing foreign oil (imports are up). An historian of Mr. Gingrich’s distinction surely knows all that.

…Now Republicans have another chance to reform government, and a limited window of opportunity in which to do it. The temptation will be to allow their first principles to be as elastic as many voters suspect they are, especially as Mr. Obama appropriates the language of “investments” and “incentives” to transfer capital to politically favored companies. Many Republicans have their own industry favorites, and such parochial interests could undercut their opposition to Mr. Obama’s wider agenda.

…Some pandering is inevitable in presidential politics, but, befitting a college professor, Mr. Gingrich insists on portraying his low vote-buying as high “intellectual” policy. This doesn’t bode well for his judgment as a president. Even Al Gore now admits that the only reason he supported ethanol in 2000 was to goose his presidential prospects, and the only difference now between Al and Newt is that Al admits he was wrong.

In the NYTimes, Landon Thomas gives us a look at the laws and government culture in Greece that hold entrepreneurs back. You will like the picture of a modern day Sisyphus.

…MR. POLITOPOULOS says his problems began when distributors refused to take Vergina and the other brands that he produced. Then, he would contend in a complaint letter he filed with the European Union in 2006, things became worse: his car tires were slashed, threatening calls were received at the brewery, employees were offered money to resign, and trucks carrying his beer were tampered with.

…In 2007, Mr. Politopoulos agreed to drop his complaint and to let the competition commission in Greece — which already had an open investigation into the local beer market — take the lead on the matter.

The Greek competition authority has been investigating antibusiness practices in the beer market since 2002, and a spokesman for the commission said that a decision should be forthcoming within the year. …

…Still, there has been some improvement lately, in the view of Achilles V. Constantakopoulos, a shipping industry scion. He is in the process of investing 1.5 billion euros in a series of high-end tourist resorts on the underdeveloped coastline of the southwest Peloponnese region. But this plan was first conceived a good 25 years ago by Mr. Constantakopoulos’s father and founder of the family fortune, Vasilis, who died last week. The plan has suffered numerous legal setbacks. Only recently did Mr. Constantakopoulos complete the first of four planned resorts, Navarino Dunes.

“There is a problem in Greece,” he said. “In order to do something it has to be provided for in law,” and that can take decades.

But he says he believes that things are changing — and that he expects that the fast-track law for large investments will benefit not only his family’s project, but others as well. “The laws that are in place encourage investment,” he said in his office in Athens, as he nibbled from a plate of figs and nuts. “These days it is easier to get things done.”

Nonetheless, the grinding work of scrapping old laws and creating an open, commercial climate that attracts foreign investors cannot be completed overnight. …

The Country Store points out some revealing quotes from the president’s retainers.

Even when John Heilemann tries to write an Obama puff piece at New York magazine he can’t help revealing some mighty dirty laundry…

…’The president’s friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett sometimes pointed out that not only had he never managed an operation, he’d never really had a nine-to-five job in his life. Obama didn’t know what he didn’t know, yet his self-confidence was so stratospheric that once, in the context of thinking about Emanuel’s replacement, he remarked in all seriousness, “You know, I’d make a good chief of staff.” 

Those overhearing the comment somehow managed to suppress their laughter. ‘

Barack Obama is a legend in his own mind.

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Tony Blankley starts off a section on events in Egypt.

… President Obama may be facing one of those fateful moments now. Of course, if the path were obvious, it would not be fateful. But history and current conditions would suggest that the odds of the revolution resulting in a Western-oriented democracy that serves the interests of the Egyptian people are slim.

Providing public and private support of President Hosni Mubarak and helping to keep some semblance of the status quo (perhaps in the form of an army-led regime) is likely to serve both our immediate geopolitical interests and our ability to shape that regime in the interest of the Egyptian people.

Mr. Obama had a chance in 2009 to respond with strong support for Iran’s Green Revolution – but his near silence crushed the hope of many young Iranians and surely aided (inadvertently) the hated enemy Iranian regime.

Now the president risks getting it wrong in the other direction: undercutting a friendly regime by sincere but ill-considered support for a revolution that is more likely to result in a government adverse to our – and the Egyptian people’s – interests. Note that a recent Pew poll of the Egyptian public disclosed that they preferred “Islamists” over “modernizers” by 59 percent to 27 percent (cited by Barry Rubin at the Gloria Center website). Instant democracy, anyone?

Also, and importantly, if America undercuts its ally of 30 years, we would be seen as feckless – and thus we would undermine the value of our support for allies current and future.

As Ari Shavit wrote in Israel‘s leading liberal paper, Haaretz, the failure to support Mr. Mubarak “symbolizes the betrayal of every strategic ally in the Third World. Throughout Asia, Africa and South America, leaders are now looking at what is going on between Washington and Cairo.” …

Christopher Hitchens doesn’t quite see it that way and since he’s here often, we include his vent.

Not long ago, a close comrade of mine was dining with a person who I can’t identify beyond telling you that his father is a long-term absolutist ruler of an Arab Muslim state. “Tell me,” said this scion to my friend, “is it true that there are now free elections in Albania?” My friend was able to confirm the (relative) truth of this, adding that he had once even acted as an international observer at the Albanian polls and could attest to a certain level of transparency and fairness. The effect of his remarks was galvanic. “In that case,” exclaimed the heir-presumptive, thumping the table, “what does that make us? Are we peasants? Children?” The gloom only deepened, apparently, as the image of the Arab as a laughing stock—lagging behind Albania!—took hold of the conversation.

Who could have predicted that such a comparison would have turned out to be such a catalytic one in the mind of this nervous dauphin? So multifarious are the sources of grievance in the Arab world that it could have been any one of a host of pretexts that ignited a revolt, or revolts. This ought to make one beware of too glibly selecting the ostensibly crucial one. Poverty and unemployment? These are so pervasive that they could explain any rebellion at any time—and in any case Tunisians are among the richest per capita in North Africa. Dictatorship and repression? Again, these are commonplaces, and so far the most conspicuously authoritarian despotisms—Syria and Saudi Arabia, for instance—have been spared the challenge of insurrection. (May these words of mine go out of date with all speed.) …

We get a history lesson as Investor’s Business Daily editors compare El Baradei to Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky, head of Russia’s pre-communist 1917 provisional goverment, died at 89 in New York City.

… ElBaradei brings little to a new government apart from name recognition. He has no power base, no governing philosophy, no party. As such, the terrorists of the Muslim Brotherhood will use him as a moderate figurehead in a unity government, then discard him when convenient to seize power for themselves.

In this, he resembles the hapless Alexander Kerensky, the ardent socialist who served as prime minister of Russia after its revolution of 1917, only to be discarded and sent into exile by the far more devious and ruthless communists.

At a minimum, the U.S. should let it be known that while we respect Egypt’s genuine democratic urges, an unelected Egyptian regime headed by the extremist Muslim Brotherhood and its soon-to-be puppet ElBaradei is entirely unacceptable.

The Corner and Powerline remind us of the 2004 election and El Baradei’s efforts to defeat Bush.

I’d all but forgotten this — but Powerline remembered:

El Baradei achieved his greatest renown in connection with the pre-war weapons inspections in Iraq, which he headed on behalf of the IAEA. One particularly discreditable moment in his tenure, which sheds considerable light on El Baradei, requires a walk down memory lane.

You probably don’t remember the Al Qaqaa affair, but it dominated the last days of the 2004 presidential campaign. In a last-ditch effort to pull out the race, John Kerry and the Democrats fabricated a story that was intended to undermine President Bush’s national-security credentials: They claimed that the U.S. Army had failed to secure 377 tons of explosives at a weapons depot near Baghdad (Al Qaqaa) that subsequently disappeared, presumably into the hands of terrorists. The story turned out to be a lie, and the day after the election it was completely forgotten — having failed to serve its purpose — but in the last week before the election, the liberal media gave it all the play they could.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph, UK, would have us take a Malthusian view. We don’t agree, totally. Nor does he. But it is worth exploring the thought.

… The surge in global food prices since the summer – since Ben Bernanke signaled a fresh dollar blitz, as it happens – is not the underlying cause of Arab revolt, any more than bad harvests in 1788 were the cause of the French Revolution.

Yet they are the trigger, and have set off a vicious circle. Vulnerable governments are scrambling to lock up world supplies of grain while they can. Algeria bought 800,000 tonnes of wheat last week, and Indonesia has ordered 800,000 tonnes of rice, both greatly exceeding their normal pace of purchases. Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Bangladesh, are trying to secure extra grain supplies.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said its global food index has surpassed the all-time high of 2008, both in nominal and real terms. The cereals index has risen 39pc in the last year, the oil and fats index 55pc.

The FAO implored governments to avoid panic responses that “aggravate the situation”. If you are Hosni Mubarak hanging on in Cairo’s presidential palace, do care about such niceties?

France’s Nicolas Sarkozy blames the commodity spike on hedge funds, speculators, and the derivatives market (largely in London). He vowed to use his G20 presidency to smash the racket, but then Mr Sarkozy has a penchant for witchhunts against easy targets. …

Closing this section is Bret Stephens who channels Mubarak and appreciates his unfolding strategy.

… there are the middle-class demonstrators, the secular professionals and minor businessmen. In theory they’re your biggest threat. In practice they’re your ace in the hole.

What unites the protesters is anger. But anger is an emotion, not a strategy, much less a political agenda. What, really, does “Down With Mubarak” offer the average Egyptian?

If the Brotherhood has its way, Egypt will become a Sunni theocracy modeled on Iran. If the democracy activists have theirs, it’ll be a weak parliamentary system, incapable of exercising authority over the army and a cat’s paw for a Brotherhood that knows its revolutionary history well enough to remember the name of Alexander Kerensky.

Luckily for you, this analysis is becoming plainer by the day to many Egyptians, especially since Mr. ElBaradei, imagining he has the upper hand, stumbled into a political alliance with the Brotherhood. Also increasingly plain is that it’s in your hands to blur the “fine line between freedom and chaos,” as you aptly put it last week, and to give Egyptians a long, hard look at the latter. No, it wasn’t by your cunning design that thousands of violent prisoners made a jailbreak last week. And the decision to take police off the streets was done in the interests of avoiding bloody scenes with protesters.

Yet all the same, the anarchy unleashed on Egyptian streets has played straight into your hands. The demonstrators want a freedom that looks like London or Washington. Your task is to remind them that it’s more likely to look like Baghdad, circa 2006. …

Next we turn to the subject of the president’s attempts at saving his skin. Bill Kristol is first.

So the much-anticipated pivot to the center in the State of the Union speech has happened. As pivots go, President Obama’s wasn’t the most elegant—there were no triple lutzes or extended camel spins—but he didn’t fall on his face either. It seems clear that, for the next two years at least, President Obama is going to give us a break from claims of transforming America, à la FDR, and will work on triangulating to stay in office, à la Bill Clinton. The question is, can Obama pull a Clinton?

We’re skeptical.

First, Clinton’s pivot in 1995 was all well and good, but the reason he was reelected in 1996 was that the economy was growing at more than 4 percent, and unemployment on Election Day was 5.4 percent. The budget deficit was lower than it had been when Clinton took office. His landmark piece of economic legislation, the 1993 budget—passed despite Republican opposition—seemed more or less vindicated by events.

Will the real world be as friendly to the incumbent president in November 2012? It’s doubtful. …

Jennifer Rubin looks to 2012 also.

… As exemplified by the State of the Union address, Obama turned out to be a political adolescent, full of himself, but, ultimately, irresponsible and lightweight. He is unable or unwilling to face up to our greatest domestic challenge: our fiscal mess.

Republicans need to find the grown-up who is both tough and appealing (the two often don’t go hand in hand). The unserious and the irresolute need not apply. And oh, by the way, the same seriousness of purpose candidates display on fiscal matters, coupled with their ability to delineate the bad and good guys in the world (and be candid about the fact that there are good and bad actors), may give us some indication how they are going to conduct foreign policy. It’s no coincidence that Obama finds it difficult to confront Congress on entitlements and to confront despots abroad.

The dig on Obama from many conservatives has been that he doesn’t grasp the essence of America or embrace the role America must play in the world. There’s plenty of evidence for both of those critiques. But in 2012, the most effective Republican is going to be the one who makes the case that he, not Obama, is willing to do the hard and big and important things to restore American prosperity at home and influence abroad.

Michael Barone likes 2012 for the GOP.

… In the Senate, where Democrats have a 53-47 majority, but not iron control, the situation is different. In the 2012 cycle 23 Democrats come up for re-election and only 10 Republicans. You can get a good idea of their political incentives by looking at the 2010 popular vote for the House in their states. Since the mid-1990s, when partisan percentages in presidential and House elections converged, the popular vote for the House has been a pretty good gauge of partisan balance.

Of the 10 Republican senators up for re-election, only two represent states where Democrats won the House vote — Olympia Snowe of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts. They’re both well ahead in local polls.

For the 23 Democrats up for re-election, the picture is different. Eight represent states where the House vote was 53 to 65 percent Democratic and where Barack Obama got more than 60 percent in 2008. Count them all as safe.

But 12 represent states where Republicans got a majority of the House vote in 2010. These include big states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Virginia, and states like Montana and Nebraska where Republican House candidates topped 60 percent. Missouri, New Jersey, North Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin round out the list.

In another three states — New Mexico, Washington, Minnesota — Republicans won between 46 and 48 percent of the House popular vote. These were solid Obama states in 2008. They don’t look like solid Democratic states now. …

Debra Saunders thinks “government innovation” is a hoot. 

… The problem with left-leaning elites trying to run the U.S. economy from the top down is simple: They think the answer to America’s economic woes is to create more jobs that replicate managers just like them.

They cannot comprehend that, to a good number of American voters, the theme of President Obama’s State of the Union address – government innovation – is an oxymoron.

And so they nodded their heads in recognition of their own greater wisdom as the president intoned, “We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology and especially clean-energy technology – an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet and create countless new jobs for our people.” As if more of the same deficit spending is the answer.

They fail to recognize that so-called green jobs are the most over-hyped jobs in America. (After years of subsidies and special treatment, they represent 174,000 jobs – less than 1 percent of the total – in California, according to the public policy group Next Ten.) …