Short answer: No.

Longer answer: Look at the chart, which comes from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report, page 124. 

In the years that the credit bubble was distending, Fannie and Freddie together never represented a majority of the demand for securities made up of "subprime" mortgages.

Nor did either of these two "GSEs" (government-sponsored enterprises) ever comprise a majority of the demand for "Alt-A" mortgage securities -- often, investments backed by mortgages for people with good credit who still couldn't afford the house they were buying. (If I'm making $75,000 a year and have great credit, I can afford a house; I can't afford an $800,000 house. Hence, an Alt-A mortgage, complete with "teaser rate," etc. (If you are confused about these mortgages, go to your local library and ask for a lifestyle section from any newspaper circa 2005, with the obligatory feature about how you, too, can afford to live like millionaire, through the magic of no-down-payment, low-interest mortgages.)

Fannie and Freddie, in fact, struggled to keep up and compete with the other buyers who wanted to buy these supposedly risk-free, AAA-rated, mortgage-backed securities circa 2005 or so. All through the mid-2000s, European investors, in particular, couldn't get enough of these things. (I know this definitely; when I worked for Thomson (now ThomsonReuters), I talked to enough of 'em to get a feel for "market sentiment.")

It's important to make a distinction: Fannie and Freddie, like many others, acted negligently in not understanding what the heck they were buying, and they thus blew themselves up during the course of the crisis.

Furthermore, the twin mortgage giants' willful ignorance about what they were buying and disinterest in delving into the details of "safe" securities helped contributed to the bubble.

Moreover, Washington's lax attitude toward Fannie and Freddie's safety and soundness -- the firms held barely any actual cash back during the good years to absorb potential losses -- accelerated their downfall. 

This laxity, though, was a symptom of the broader problem, not the problem itself. Washington and the financial industry thought that they could perfectly predict which kind of investments were safe and which weren't. They thought, too, that if they were wrong about these calibrations, together, armed with black cars and Blackberries, they could control any problems before they got out of hand.

A big firm (or two) can contribute to a bubble and bust, and magnify effects of a crash on the economy, without having caused it. Similarly, a big firm can fail (absent government support) in a crisis without having caused the crisis.

The now three-year-old fight over whether Fannie and Freddie were cause or effect, or somewhere in the middle, gets annoying, but it is important. If Fannie and Freddie caused the crisis, then you just get rid of them (this may still be a good idea, but that is irrelevant to this discussion).

If they didn't cause it, then you have to think about how to fix other things, including:

• a derivatives market that allowed financial-market participants to incur hundreds of billions of dollars in potential liabilities with no cash cushion for potential losses;
• synthetic securities that magnified the results of any one investment, including a mortgage-related-investment, going wrong, thus amplifying bubble mania and bust panic; 
• a "repo" securities market that invites "runs" on the global financial system and attendant bailouts; 
• dependence on ratings agencies' determinations of risk that encourages everyone to make the same mistake all at once; 
• and other stuff, all detailed in the FCIC book, complete with case studies to illustrate the problems. 

Fannie and Freddie are a problem, but not the problem.

Nicole Gelinas is contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal and author of After The Fall. 

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty proudly shows off a cravat given to him by the White King and Queen to celebrate his un-birthday. An un-birthday, quite simply, is one of the 364 days of the year on which it’s not your birthday (365 in a leap year). Now the federal government, which seems to model many of its policies on Carroll’s book, has created the un-holiday. To commemorate a certain un-holiday in April, we may now file our tax returns as late as the 18th rather than the 15th.

The explanation is simple, in a Humpty Dumpty sort of way: the District of Columbia celebrates Emancipation Day on the 16th, which is all well and good given the significance of that day. However, the 16th falls on a Saturday, and, after all, what’s the fun of celebrating a holiday if you don’t get a day off from work? So many DC employees will be off on the un-holiday, the day before Emancipation day. And it would be unfair, so the thinking apparently goes, to ask DC workers to file tax returns on an un-holiday, so it was decided we could all wait until Monday, the 18th.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining about having three additional days to file my tax return. I’ll just chalk it up as an un-birthday present from the IRS.

My gloominess about the political situation in which the Republicans in Congress find themselves--not their intelligence, the rightness of their analysis, or their determination to cut spending, but the politics--continues.

Years ago, Milton and Rose Friedman published a compelling little book, Tyranny of the Status Quo, on the exceptional difficulty of overcoming sheer inertia.  They were writing about the federal government, and I'll come back to that, but it just occurred to me that their basic insight shows up only too often in everyday life as well.

Want proof?  Here you go:

Only just now did I sign up for Vonage.  I've known for months and months that Vonage would save my family quite a little bundle.  (Whereas I pay MCI $99 a month for our residential phone service, and AT&T another $40 or so a month for a fax line, Vonage will charge only $35 a month for both.)  Friends have told me over and over again that they use Vonage and love it.  Heck, I'd even gone to the Vonage site to perform the "speed test," making sure my Internet connection is fast enough.  (It is, and then some.)  But only just now, when the thought of next year's tuition payments happened to come to mind--I have another kid headed off to college in the fall--did I finally bestir myself.

Which brings me back to the federales.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and, to some extent, even at this early date, ObamaCare--people have gotten used to them.  Even those of us who wish such programs had never been enacted in the first place have made our little accommodations.  We've set up our lives to take them into account.  We've looked at problems--our aging parents, or, for that matter, our aging selves--and decided to permit one program or another to help us deal with it.  Hundreds of millions of Americans who have, in countless ways, worked the federal government into the workings of their daily lives--and would now rather be left alone, thank you very much.

That's what Republicans are up against.

Can someone please cheer me up?

I am no more an expert on Egypt than on Tunisia, but I have been to both places in recent years – and on my visit to Cairo and its environs, two or three years ago, I did precisely what I did when I sojourned in Tunisia earlier in the millennium. I took the opportunity to speak with the Egyptians and the expatriates to whom I was introduced and to read a bit about the place.

Egypt is not like Tunisia. To begin with, it is not now and never has been a backwater. It is, as Herodotus observed long ago, “the gift of the Nile,” and thanks to that great river, it has the largest population of any Arab country. Although it has little in the way of oil, it has water, fertile soil, a hardworking peasant population, and hydro-electric power. It also has a large, well-educated middle class and a sizable indigenous Christian population, said by one of my interlocutors to make up not 10% of the population as a whole (as the Egyptian government claims) but something in the neighborhood of 20%.

Egypt is moreover, the place in the Arab world where books are published and films, made; and Al-Azhar University in Cairo is the world’s chief center for Sunni Muslim learning and for the study of Arabic literature. Egypt exercises cultural hegemony within the Arab-speaking world. The uprising now underway is of the greatest importance. As Egypt goes, so go the Arabs more generally.

Egypt differs from Tunisia in other ways as well. Its ethos is not secular. Its Coptic Christians are fiercely religious, and so are its Muslims – and with every passing year Islam’s hold on the people is greater. Had I visited Cairo in 1955 and moved in circles like those within which I moved on my recent trip, I would not have met a single woman who was veiled. Fashionable Western dress was in vogue, but that is no longer the case. At that time, I would have encountered a great many women who were professionals. There were more women professors in Egypt in 1955 than in the United States.

Yesteryear's Egypt was a product of Arab nationalism. Its model was Europe, and those within its middle class were not particular fervent in their adherence to the tenets of Islam. Their hero was Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, who led the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. Nasser was not like Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba a cosmopolitan lawyer educated abroad, intent on turning his country into an Arab France. He was a military man from a modest background, a lieutenant-colonel who had never studied abroad, and a fierce Pan-Arab nationalist, who helped form the Association of Free Officers after witnessing the ineptitude of the Egyptian army in 1948 when King Farouk dispatched it to Palestine against the Israelis.

After the revolution, he installed a general at the head of the government, then after a time sidelined him. His signature piece of legislation was a land-reform law.  He abolished the monarchy, banned political parties, isolated and cracked down on the communists and the Muslim Brotherhood, and functioned as a modernizing dictator backed by the army. Among those whom in due course he had executed was Sayyed Qutb, the chief ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In effect, Nasser’s Egypt was a modern Mameluk state. When he died in 1970, his close friend, fellow army officer, longtime associate, and vice-president Anwar El-Sadat succeeded him, and when Sadat, who had negotiated a peace treaty with Israel, was assassinated by Muslim extremists in 1981, Hosni Mubarak, a former Air Force officer then serving as his vice-president, succeeded him in turn. What happens next is anyone’s guess. Mubarak, who was born in 1928, is 82 and in bad health, and, of course, now he is beleaguered. Events are moving at a rapid pace.

What I can say with confidence is this. The world that existed in Egypt in 1955 is now gone. Middle-class Egyptian women are far less likely to dress in Western garb now than then, and with every passing year the Muslim Brotherhood grows in influence.

Nasser, who was wildly popular by the end of his life, brought his country defeat in war and economic stagnation. After the peace with Israel, his successors did better in the economic sphere – in recent years the Egyptian economy has grown by leaps and bounds – but they did not satisfy the longings of the people. And what can be said in their regard can be said concerning Arab nationalism as a force. As I wrote in a post on Powerline  not long after I paid a visit to Jerusalem in December, 2009,

Arab nationalism has run its course. The hopes inspired by Gamaliel Abdel Nasser in and after the 1950s, those inspired by the Baathists in Iraq and Syria and by the Palestinian Liberation Organization have come to naught. Opportunistic young men on the make may attempt to sidle up to those in power in Syria, Egypt, Libya, and the West Bank, but these regimes attract no young idealists. Even in Turkey, secular nationalism seems to be on its last legs, and the only politicians who inspire enthusiasm are those who say, "Islam is the answer."

What this will mean down the road is a subject that inspires a great deal of rumination in Israel these days. It can easily be foreseen that Islam will not provide a suitable answer to the political, social, and economic crises that grip the Arab world, but it will take another cycle of history for that to become adequately evident to a people now disillusioned with secular nationalism.

If there is an alternative to Islamic revivalism on the horizon, it is to be found in Iraq. The simple fact that there are free elections in that country, that there is open debate, and that it is drifting in the direction of genuine prosperity -- this stirs dissatisfaction of an entirely different sort in the Arab world -- and, as is abundantly evident in Iran, it does so in the larger Muslim world as well.

As time passes and the dust settles, George W. Bush may come to look more and more like a hero -- both in the Arab world and here in the United States. For, if the Iraqis remain steadfast and succeed, it is to their example that those fed up with Islamic revivalism will look, and it will be remembered just how adamant the second Bush was in his support for the democratic aspirations of the Iraqi people.

I would like to end this post on a positive note, but I cannot. My guess is that the current uprising will eventuate in a military takeover -- and not in the emergence of a liberal democratic state. When I was in Cairo, in the downtown area there were busloads of soldiers everywhere.

My further guess is that, over the next few years, the country will drift in an Islamic revivalist direction. We should certainly not vest our hopes in Mohammed ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize winner though he may be. As Caroline Glick explains on her blog, when he ran the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, he did everything that he could to cover for the Iranian effort to build nuclear weapons, and he is a strong supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt and in the Middle East more generally, we are witnessing the end of an era.

Now that Tommy's got us going at it--see his post below--I thought folks here at Ricochet might enjoy this excerpt from my Uncommon Knowledge interview with Judge Laurence Silberman.  Judge Silberman wrote the decision declaring unconstitutional the District of Columbia's handgun ban--and reopening serious debate over the right to bear arms.

This excerpt lasts just five minutes, but Judge Silberman sketches out all the main issues.  (He's just wonderfully succinct and engaging.)

I'm a gun rights advocate.  The Second Amendment is as important as the First (so too is the Seventh, Tea Partiers, but we will talk about that another time).

I've often pointed out, as I'm sure my fellow Ricochetarians have, that just as matches don't start forest fires, people do - guns don't shoot people, people do.

I lay no blame for the OCCURRENCE of the massacre in Tucson on the gun.  But a seemingly rational argument can be made for blaming the NUMBER OF VICTIMS on the extended magazine.   That argument, for those who have made it to me, is bolstered by the fact that in Tucson, Laughner wasn't stopped until he was changing magazines (he fired 31 times and hit 19 people).

The extent of damages has always been a reason for regulation.  It's why I can buy a cherry bomb, but not dynamite.  The explosion isn't the problem - it's the size of it.

So I need some help.  I want to save extended magazines.  Can anyone give me good reasons why I should save them?

Bonus points: Describe why I need a magazine that may hold more than (picking an arbitrary number here) 10 bullets.  Wouldn't we have less victims in Tucson if we limited magazines to 10 shots?  Describe the scenario where I might need more shots without changing magazines.

Pro-Level:  No slippery-slope arguments.  Two reasons:

First, slippery-slope arguments are too easy to make, and too tough to grade.  Prohibitions against yelling fire in a theater and laws against defamation have not erased the First Amendment and the very heavy restrictions on machine guns since 1934 (which seems to mirror a proposed restriction on extended magazines) hasn't erased the Second Amendment. We will waste a whole agument over "erosion of rights" with no yardstick by which to measure the erosion.

Second, this is Ricochet.  We operate on a higher-level, so we can hash this out without the intellectual automatic weapon known as the slippery-slope argument.

So, a few days ago, China television broadcast some compelling footage of a Chinese air force training exercise.  (Because, you know, they're getting stronger all the time....and they'd like everyone to know that.)

CCTV, the centrally-commanded television network, aired the footage of a fighter jet firing an air-to-air missile.  

Just one problem.  The footage looked...familiar.  From Gizmodo:

But an internet commenter quickly pointed out that the aircraft the J-10 was shown shooting down was an F-5, an American aircraft, and the very one Tom Cruise guns down in a scene from Top Gun. Comparing frames from the CCTV broadcast (left) and Top Gun (right), well, they're lookin' pretty much identical.

See for yourself.  CCTV's screenshots on the left.  "Top Gun" on the right.

Those Chinese have never respected our copyright laws.  So, how long will whoever put this shot-by-shot comparison going to stay out of prison?

And what's next?  Will the Chinese military invent a big iron suit with a glowing central heart?  

Daniel Larison replied to my suggestion that I, in fact, was the realistic one in our discussion of Egypt. You be the judge.

If it weren't for my Facebook friends, I'd probably never know about sites like this.

ARABIST 01/27/2011 A friend in Cairo: "The government can take away my freedom, but if they take away my internet porn, they're going down."

CHRIS REGAN yesterday No internet in Egypt or Syria. Netflix drops leaflets over nations suggesting "The Lake House" as a "Movie You'll Love."

MJ yesterday Hey Egypt: Try unplugging your modem for 30 seconds then plugging it back in. Trust me.

PETER WALDRON yesterday Egypt's Facebook status was just changed to "It's Complicated."

DAVID S. yesterday Is there anything I can do with my Twitter profile pic to support whichever side of this Egypt thing I'm supposed to support? The Pharaoh?

Not exactly news to the Ricochescenti, but clarifying nonetheless: Richard Foster, Medicare's Chief Actuary, provides a remarkably brief and direct answer to Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) in the House a couple of days ago on two of ObamaCare's core promises.

Note that the Congressional Budget Office remains Ezra Klein's preferred source for analysis--insisting against the evidence on the myriad magical virtues of ObamaCare--because the CBO is required to accept at face value whatever premises Congress puts before it, no matter how absurd.  For example, if Congress told CBO to credit five-and-a-half foot tall middle-aged men with the jumping ability of youthful seven-foot-plus athletes--lighter weight canceling out superior height--then CBO would score me as a potential NBA star.  That wouldn't make it true, except for Mr. Klein.

Mr. Foster, as an independent actuary, is able to formulate his own opinion.

This is a small item, by international standards. It will be completely ignored. It will not be reported internationally. No one, anywhere, will have time to think about it. 

A local court in Southeast Anatolia has rejected a family’s claim for reparations in the death of a child hit by a police vehicle, saying he was too young for his loss to cause much pain.

The family of 5-year-old Adem Yiğit, hit and killed by an armored police vehicle in 2004 while he was playing on the sidewalk in Hakkari province, had opened a case against the Interior Ministry, asking for damages of 50,000 Turkish Liras, daily Milliyet reported Thursday.

The court rejected the family’s demand for that amount and ordered that 4,000 liras be paid instead.

“The sadness of the death of a [younger] person for his mother and father will not be the same as the sadness of the death of someone who came to a [greater] social status and age,” the court said in its decision.

Some things speak for themselves. 

Two days ago a friend said to me, "I've never understood why we give Egypt so much military aid." I've actually been waiting patiently since 1993 for someone to say that to me.

I wrote my doctoral dissertation about the formation of American arms transfer policy toward the Arab-Israeli antagonists. In other words, I could actually bore you from now until the end of time with a really serious answer to that question, not just the kind of fine-sounding thing pundits typically pull out of their keisters because there's a microphone in front of them. I really, actually know the answer.

That dissertation has been read, I think, by four people at most, one of them my supervisor, two of them my examiners, and one of them, maybe, my mother. Last I checked, it had never been checked out of the library, not even once. So obviously, this is my big moment.

Are you ready? Are you curious? Here's the answer. Or part of it. There's more, but I'll wait for you all to beg to read the rest.

I'll keep waiting. I've been waiting for eighteen years. I can wait a while longer. 

I found the numbers presented in this Pew study about the future of the Muslim population to be interesting.

I found the video below to be somewhat moving. Not sure why.

You?

White House officials on Wednesday attempted to quell criticism that President Obama dodged a national debate over guns in his State of the Union address and announced that the president would address the issue soon.

But aides sidestepped questions about when Obama will talk about federal firearms policy or what he would say.

"I wouldn't rule out that at some point the president talks about the issues surrounding gun violence," Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said aboard Air Force One on the way to an event with Obama in Wisconsin. "I don't have a timetable or, obviously, what he would say."

As president, Obama has never delivered substantive remarks on gun policy, one of the most volatile and divisive domestic issues, out of fear of roiling swing voters in rural areas, the Midwest and the South.

In this special edition of the Ricochet Podcast, Claire Berlinski in Istanbul and Judith Levy in Israel, discuss unfolding events in the Middle East and take questions from Ricochet members and Twitter. 

The direct link to listen to this podcast is here or download it through iTunes here. 

Our regular weekly podcast is here.

Two notes that add up to a very big problem:

1.)  Here's what the Republicans in Congress need to do, know they need to do, and, according to Speaker Boehner and his top lieutenants, including Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, want to do:  "They should start," as economist John Taylor writes in the Wall Street Journal this morning,

by laying out a credible plan to reduce spending and stop the debt explosion.  If spending as a share of GDP can be brought to 2000 levels and held there with entitlement reforms, then the budget can be balanced without employment-retarding tax increases.

Cut spending.  Cut, cut, cut.  As Congressman Ryan said in his fine reply to the President's State of the Union Address, "Spending cuts must come first."

2.)  Here's are the politics of what the Republicans in Congress need and want to do:  "President Obama," to quote David Brooks's column in today's New York Times,

will emerge as the mature moderate while the Republicans will seem unstable and dangerous.  He will talk about realistic concrete improvements, like higher teacher salaries, while the Republicans will talk of unpopular and devastating spending cuts that never materialize.  He will be optimistic while they will offer austerity and alarm.  Have you seen that only 34 percent of Americans approve of the G.O.P. agenda...?  [David puts these words in the mouth of Edmund Burke, whom he portrays holding an imaginary discussion with Alexander Hamilton.]

For the good of the country, Republicans need to cut.  That strikes me as right.  But in doing so, the Republicans will unnerve millions of Americans.  While the President offers to shower Americans with gifts--higher salaries for teachers, high-speed rail connections, loans for college--the Republicans will look like so many Scrooges, bah-ing and humbugging while trying to snatch all the President's nice gifts away.  Even if they do succeed in cutting spending, will the Republicans get credit in November 2012?  Or will the President ever so deftly step in to take credit instead?

The Republicans in Congress strike me as the most articulate, determined and impressive in my lifetime--maybe since the founding of the GOP itself.

And they're doomed.

Someone--anyone--tell me I'm wrong.

President Obama spoke reasonably well just now in the midst of the Egyptian crisis, but both he and Mr. Mubarak will be judged by how well they follow up. I do not see the Egyptians willing to give Mr. Mubarak the benefit of the doubt, given his record and previous promises.

I do note that my old boss, President Bush, often said that democracy in Iraq would inspire other Arabs to claim their freedom, that Arab moms and dads want for their children what we want for our children -- and he was mocked for it.  

Add me to the Peter Robinson fan club. I was visiting the Reagan presidential library (I'm a presidential library junkie -- are there any others on Ricochet?  If so, what's your favorite?) for a Heritage Foundation event. One of the prize exhibits is the actual air force one that flew President Reagan (it was no 747, and very cramped). And look what speech is in the typewriter on Air Force One!

I want to hear the story from Peter one of these days about typing up these lines in flight to Berlin. Until then, you can see a small piece of Peter's work on display as the library celebrates  the 100th anniversary of Reagan's birth.

A persistent liberal meme, often showing up in, among other places, the pages of the New York Times:  That Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and others constantly substitute mere entertainment and celebrity for serious commentary.

On the front page--the front page!--of today's New York Times:

George Clooney on Malaria

The actor George Clooney recently contracted malaria in South Sudan, and now he is answering reader questions about the disease [on theTimes website]....

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has just approved an expedited schedule for the appeals of two Obamacare challenges: Virginia v. Sebelius and Liberty University v. Geithner.  The two cases will go on parallel tracks, with both being argued in May of this year.  If the Fourth Circuit strikes down the individual mandate (upholding Judge Hudson's decision in Sebelius), it would add some very nice momentum to the drive to overturn this dire law.

But even with this expedited schedule, there are other appeals bubbling up from the circuits, and I can't see how SCOTUS could issue a decision before June 2012, and quite possibly later -- meaning that one way or another Obamacare will still be a fresh issue in the 2012 elections. 

As soon as Judith puts her kids to bed, we're going to do a podcast about Egypt. If you have questions, we'll try to answer them, although I have to warn you in advance--any pundit who says he or she knows what's going to happen now is just yanking your chain. 

Claire, like everyone, I'm watching the Arab world gobsmacked, trying to keep both hopes and fears on the low boil.  Two fragments of uncooked punditry keep popping into my mind.  I'd like to know your opinion - and that of the Ricocheteers.

1.  Like some of your commenters, I can't help wondering if the most important thing to happen in the Obama administration is going to turn out to be the fruition - for good or ill - of the Bush freedom agenda.  How big a role, if any, did W's policies play in the current situation, do you think?

2. In my frequently hopeful moments, I've often wondered if the rise of Islamic extremism was a literally reactionary movement--the last horrific flame-out of an attempt to stop the reformation we all keep praying for in the in Muslim world.  (I keep reminding people that the horrors of the Inquisition and the 30 Years' War were of a piece with Christianity's ultimate reformation.)  Is this just my naturally sunshiny disposition talking, or is there any chance that what we're seeing now is the very reformist wave the terrorists feared?

Send your replies to this address!

Am having much fun going through a new release of Irving Kristol essays that have not before appeared in book form. The older they are, the more interesting -- not least his 1952 piece on McCarthy and the liberals.

But this conclusion to a 1984 piece called "Reflections of a Neoconservative" really captures the man's sensibilities and ability to write without cant:

[F]or myself, I have reached certain conclusions: that Jane Austen is a greater novelist than Proust or Joyce; that Raphael is a greater painter than Picasso; that T.S. Eliot's later, Christian poetry is much superior to his earlier; that C.S. Lewis is a finer literary and cultural critic than Edmund Wilson; that Aristotle is more worthy of careful study than Marx; that we have more to learn from Tocqueville than from Max Weber; that Adam Smith makes a lot more economic sense than any economist since; that the founders had a better understanding of democracy than any political scientists since; that ... well enough. As I said at the outset, I have become conservative, and whatever ambiguities attach to that term, it should be obvious what it does not mean.

This former Trotskyite has left America many wonderful legacies -- not least a grandson who is an officer in the United States Marine Corps now fighting in Afghanistan.

The NDP Headquarters is on fire in downtown Cairo. Watch history here.

My God. 

Twenty-five years ago today, I was walking up Fifth Avenue on my way to my job as a writer at the ABC Radio News Network when I noticed the flags at Rockefeller Center were at half mast.  I arrived at the ABC studios to find the newsroom in a bizarre state:  a sort of frantic silence, full of energy and motion but almost devoid of sound.  I walked into one of the recording booths and said, "What's going on?"  One of the engineers gestured at a television set where they were replaying footage of the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger.  I was literally staggered, lost my legs, sank into a chair.  Moments later, when my shift began, I became part of the newsroom's frenzy, so busy taking in news feeds, doing interviews and writing leads that I had to work to find thirty seconds, later in the day, to sit in a room alone and bury my face in my hands.

Notwithstanding the inspiring brilliance of Reagan's memorial speech, the Challenger Disaster was a disaster indeed:  horrible in itself and a warning that we had, pace Tom Wolfe, screwed the pooch of space.  In a moment of sputnik-inspired panic, we allowed government to swallow the resources of exploration, guaranteeing that we would ultimately be stuck with a space agency that, despite the brilliance and heroism of its individuals, is not only unaffordable but spending what little it has on largely useless small ball projects...  when it's not doing White House-ordered outreach to the Muslim world!

So is this another sputnik moment, as our president says, when panic over economic competition allows government to swallow the tasks of the free market?  If it is, I can foresee some bright young fellow 25 years from now, staggered to see flaming fragments of the American economy tumbling out of the sky, crashing into the sea.  Remember the Challenger.

What is it about Mike Pence? The Indiana congressman passed up the opportunity to run for the Senate in 2010 after Evan Bayh announced his retirement. His decision freed up Republican Dan Coats to win the election and take a seat that could have been Pence's.

Now Pence has passed up the opportunity to run for president. He's decided instead to run for Indiana governor. He's an early favorite to win the office being vacated by Mitch Daniels.

But I still don't understand why Pence decided against a presidential run. The Republican field is wide-open. No one is particularly enthusiastic about any of the candidates. Conservative activists are looking for a white knight to show up and save them from a Romney candidacy. Pence is conservative in every way and has close ties to the Tea Party movement. Even if he failed to win the nomination, he would've been on the shortlist for the vice presidential nod.

I understand that Pence is doing the conventional thing. The last president to come directly from the House of Representatives was James Garfield in the nineteenth century. But that sort of thinking is exactly what keeps politicians from ascending to higher realms. Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency four times, including in 1968 after only two years as governor of California. Pence may think he's doing the sensible thing and laying the groundwork for a presidential run in 2016. But, if Obama is reelected, the 2016 field is going to be much stronger than the 2012 field.

Pence may think this decision increases the chances he'll be president one day. I think it increases the chances he'll be secretary of health and human services in the Christie administration.

Now, as an employee of News Corporation, I have a vested interest in the success of "American Idol." Still, as the father of three young girls, I was wowed by one of this week's contestants. Chicago native Chris Medina was engaged to a beautiful young lady, Juliana, who suffered brain trauma in a car accident just two weeks before they were to be married. But he's still with Juliana, taking care of her. In an interview he said he asked himself a question too few men ask these days: “What kind of man would I be if I left when she needed me the most?”

Fascinating article in National Review about the real consequences of Sputnik -- both for the USSR and the USA. One was federal aid to U.S. schools, which worried Ike. "The process of taking money away from citizens to return it to localities for special (educational) purposes," he said, "implies a centralization of wisdom in Washington that certainly does not necessarily exist.”

Author Taylor Dinerman links the Sputnik moment to the missile gap, education, and the Cuban missile crisis. Well worth a read.