As the New York Times reports, the Illinois Supreme Court on Tuesday restored Rahm Emanuel's name to the ballot, and will decide whether he may run for mayor.

The Illinois appellate court had little ground to deny Rahm Emanuel a place on the ballot for mayor of Chicago.  This has nothing to do with whether one likes Emanuel.  I, for one, think that Emanuel and the City of Chicago deserve each other.  I don't practice Illinois election law, which must be a joy in and of itself, but the law seems pretty straightforward here.  Chicago's law apparently states that a candidate must be "a qualified elector of the municipality and has resided in the municipality at least one year next preceding the election or appointment."  Illinois law says that no elector "shall be deemed to have lost his or her residence in any precinct or election district in this State by reason of his or her absence on business of the United States."

Since Emanuel was in DC, serving as Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, the law does not consider him to have lost his residence in Chicago.  Am I wrong about this?  If not, then the Illinois Supreme Court should order the lower court decision stayed and order that Emanuel be included in the ballot.  And then Emanuel can win election and get down to business overseeing the usual amount of Chicago political corruption.

So, as several of our most psychopathic members correctly guessed, she did it because she figured the hot guy would show up at that funeral, too.

A number of readers kindly sent me Snopes' debunking of this story. I figured it sounded fishy from the start. But I do find it interesting as a puzzle. It seems a certain category of people solve it right away, me included. I wonder what such people in fact do have in common, if not psychopathy? 

Thanks to everyone who commented on this thread: It definitely helped me understand where to focus. 

Here's the very short argument. Give this to your friends.

US military aid to Egypt totals over $1.3 billion annually. Your money, in other words, is keeping Mubarak in power. That government is now doing this to its people. Listen to the audio. It's hard to say just what's happening, given the media blackout, but clearly terrible things are happening in Egypt. 

Many of the people now protesting in Egypt want what every American takes as his birthright: democracy, dignity, rule of law, civil rights.

Many of them, however--I would wager--do not.

Though the blackout makes it hard to understand exactly what's happening, it is highly improbable that anti-democratic forces would not try to exploit this unrest. This is a dream come true for Egypt's Islamists, obviously. Quite some number of those Islamists, for sure, wish you and your children dead.  Even if nothing about these photos and images touches you in any way, I can promise you that total anarchy in Egypt, or an Islamist regime there, would end up touching you. 

The fact that we are supporting the Mubarak regime may not be immediately obvious to most Americans, but it is the central fact about America to every Egyptian alive--to 83 million people in the heart of the Middle East.

The Mubarak government is basically friendly to the United States, but it is right now crushing its own people. If it succeeds, we will not be identified with the man above in red. We will be identified with the men above in black. In fact, we already are.  

If it doesn't succeed, God knows what will happen. Maybe something good--maybe the blossoming, at last, of real democracy in this region.

Or maybe something so awful as to make Iran look like a bagatelle. 

Certainly, this is a spontaneous, indigenous, authentic democracy movement. That's real. No doubt about it. Supposedly, this is what we wanted to happen in the Middle East when we went into Iraq. This was the desired outcome of the Bush Doctrine. 

We are not powerless to influence the outcome of these events. Our Secretary of State could get on the phone and say, "Touch one more hair on the head of one more protester and we pull the plug."

Or she could get on the phone and say, "Crush it. We'll help. Do what needs to be done. Egypt isn't ready. Remember Iran."

We elect our governments: No one is beating us. We're responsible for what they do. Hilary Clinton is our employee.  We've got a democracy already and we're free to speak about this without getting our heads cracked in. We're free to try to influence our government's policy. 

They're not. 

We owe it to them at least to try to understand what's happening. 

More By Claire Berlinski

With Friends Like This, Egypt Doesn't Need Enemies

"PLEASE ASK YOUR MEDIA TO COVER #EGYPT NOW"

Punching Through

The neo-conservative cabal that diabolically pulled the strings in the Bush administration made many claims about their illegal invasion of Iraq.

(That was a fun sentence to write, by the way.  Really takes you back, doesn't it?)

One of the claims was: a free and democratic Iraq might inspire other democratic movements in the region.  The only other free country in the neighborhood is Israel, went the thinking, so maybe Arab and Muslim countries need a democracy to call their own.

Sowing democracy in an anti-democratic region struck some as naive, and maybe even stupid.  It would be destabilizing.  Autocratic regimes that were reliably sane might fall, and be replaced by crazier Iran-revolutionary kind of loonies.

It boiled down to this basic argument:  Destabilizing the region is too risky -- the upside is murky and the downside is disastrous.  Democracy is a good thing, but it'll have to come gradually, through slow and steady diplomacy with corrupt, autocratic regimes.  And the counter-argument:  Destabilizing the region is necessary -- corrupt, autocratic regimes in the region have created the culture of paranoia and they've exported their nutjobs to the United States, to take flying lessons on student visas.  It's time for bold action.

The neo-con dreamers won that argument.  Iraq is now a shaky, sometimes violent democracy.  (But then, so is Baltimore.)

As the great Jennifer Rubin wrote in WaPo:

Even President Obama and his secretary of state recognized the remarkable achievement [of Iraq's democratic government]. Each released statements praising the Iraqis' accomplishment. 

It's hard to miss the irony: The candidate who wanted to accelerate U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, which likely would have doomed the country to chaos and genocide, is now sounding indistinguishable from his predecessor. 

Two more data points.  1.  The corrupt, autocratic regime in Tunisia has held one-party power since 1956.  Until a couple of weeks ago.  And 2. The corrupt, autocratic regime in Egypt has been in power since 1981.  But that's looking shaky, as of this morning.

If events in Tunisia have inspired events in Egypt, what inspired the events in Tunisia?

Hard to say, of course.  But perhaps a small nod and a tip of the hat is due to the diabolical neo-cons, and the naive president they conned into trying this absurd gamble on democracy.

More than anything, I was struck last night by the generational aspect of the President's address. Sorry, young people: galvanizing the under-30 set makes great campaign material, but now it's all about helping the aged. You heard it in the feel-your-pain reference to the bygone era of local factory jobs. You heard it in the human-interest stories of heroically repurposed near-retirement-age businessfolk. Above all, you heard it in the surrealistically repurposed Sputnik Moment, which became in Obama's hands a way to get older Americans to imagine that the reliable, stable world of their past was actually a cavalcade of personal reinvention and societal reeducation.

Young Americans? To the extent that we heard anything, we heard that our future is cut and dried: science and math education, because that's what they do in China; a career as a scientist, an engineer, or a science and math teacher, because in South Korea those people are celebrated as "nation builders;" a lifetime of work spent in an economy propped up by spending, subsidies, and a perpetual partnership between big government and big business.

Cheer up, kids. You're the ones you've been waiting for. Remember?

Which generation's Sputnik moment is this, again? If we're fated to work with metaphors from the middle of the twentieth century, let's at least choose one that resonates with people who are coming of age in the twenty-first.

Say, perhaps, the Hitler Finds Out metaphor. From the vantage of the young, for the President -- and, indeed, virtually the entire leadership class of the United States of America -- this is their Stalingrad moment: the moment at which the vast armies they continue to maneuver around the gigantic battle map turn out to be gone, destroyed, never to return again. The bold challenges, the arbitrary and random numerical goalposts (80% more of these, 100,000 more of those) -- it all gave off the disconnected feel of denial-driven fantasy. It's not that the emperor has no clothes. It's that he has no divisions.

Young Americans already face a future defined by an inescapable reckoning. They already tend to look at our grand entitlements as phantoms, as dead entitlements walking. They already know the problem isn't that we have too few college graduates, but that we -- like Tunisia and (gasp!) China, to mention a few -- have too many for the market to absorb. And they already know that all the science and math in the world can't serve to nourish our personal and cultural convictions about the purpose and character of American life in transformed times.

When will Obama's generation reckon with that?

Obama’s supposedly “centrist” commitment in the SOTU to “rein in frivolous lawsuits” is pure bluff, and the GOP should call his bluff immediately.  

A frivolous lawsuit is one that has absolutely no basis in law or fact.  Suing a dry cleaner for $65 million for losing a pair of pants -- that's frivolous. There’s nothing remarkable about limiting frivolous lawsuits.  As the Washington Examiner points out, even the trial lawyer lap dogs Kerry/Edwards promised to reduce “frivolous lawsuits.”  A lawsuit can be weak without being frivolous.  And even a comparatively weak lawsuit can be used to shakedown a deep pocket defendant for millions, due to the risk of sky-high damages (pain and suffering and “punitives”). 

To deter the shakedown effect you need: a cap on non-economic damages and a system of “loser pays.”  The GOP should bring these reforms to the floor immediately and allow the President to put his hypocrisy on full display.

The lead of my December 10 Wall Street Journal column:

As President Obama and his speechwriters prepare for his upcoming State of the Union address, here's a modest suggestion:

When you take the victory lap you are entitled to for ending the prohibition on gays serving openly in the military, follow up with a call to end the remaining discrimination faced by members of our military—the second-class status of Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) cadets on some of our leading college campuses.

President Obama's State of the Union last night:

Our troops come from every corner of this country -– they’re black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American.  They are Christian and Hindu, Jewish and Muslim.  And, yes, we know that some of them are gay.  Starting this year, no American will be forbidden from serving the country they love because of who they love.  (Applause.)  And with that change, I call on all our college campuses to open their doors to our military recruiters and ROTC.  It is time to leave behind the divisive battles of the past.  It is time to move forward as one nation.  (Applause.)

A year ago the 2010 budget deficit was supposed to come in at $1.2T and the red ink for 2011 was forecast at about $900B.  The actual 2010 budget deficit totaled over $1.4T and now the CBO tells us that this year's deficit will hit a new record:  $1.5T.  But don't worry, the deficit will decline next year--it's always next year, isn't it?--to only $1.1T.

Last night the president hardly noticed the deficit.  How can we save our country from certain financial ruin--right now it's just a question of timing--when Mr. Obama remains fixated on "investing" rather than cutting?

(H/T Matt Drudge)

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to participate in last night’s SOTU discussion among Ricochet members. The last time we had such a “meeting” (on election night) proved to be very enjoyable, so I really regret not being there yesterday. I could tell you my taping schedule interfered. I could tell you I was traveling. I guess there would be any number of acceptable excuses for missing an opportunity to interact with my fellow Ricocheters, but I have to confess the real reason: I didn’t want to have to watch the speech.

State of the union addresses are generally forgettable anyway, and most post-speech analysis by the press has to do with who applauded and who didn’t or with things like Supreme Court members being dissed. The words are generally pedestrian and meaningless, and the proposals are usually forgotten before the president leaves the chamber. This one, however, promised to be a particularly vapid example of kabuki theater, with an attempt by both sides to appear bipartisan.

So, while I suppose this makes me a bit of a cynic, I’d like to report that I had a wonderful dinner with some dear friends last night, and I read about the speech today. As for my friends here at Ricochet, my apologies, and I hope you’ll accept a rain check. I look forward to interacting during a future event that has some meaning.

Okay, I didn't watch them all the way through, but ...when you watch these, what do you think?

My initial reactions: Reagan exudes joyful patriotism. He also gets *right* to the point of the speech early on. Peter, did you write this?

Clinton is overconfident, right? A little too pleased to show how great he was. Still, the point is clear. We know where he's going within the first minute or so. (I also think how unfortunate his speech is considering that 18 months later comes 9/11.)

What do you guys think?

Keeping in mind that it's School Choice Week, consider one mom's dilemma in trying to secure a higher-quality education for her children: Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar, mugshot below, will be jailed for sending her daughters to a better school.

After her home in the "rubber capital of the world"--Akron, Ohio--was broken into, Williams-Bolar decided to lie about her residency and falsify records in order to send her daughters to a highly ranked school in the nearby Copley-Fairlawn district:

Williams-Bolar decided four years ago to send her daughters to a highly ranked school in neighboring Copley-Fairlawn School District.

But it wasn't her Akron district of residence, so her children were ineligible to attend school there, even though her father lived within the district's boundaries.

The school district accused Williams-Bolar of lying about her address, falsifying records and, when confronted, having her father file false court papers to get around the system.

Williams-Bolar said she did it to keep her children safe and that she lived part-time with her dad…..

While her children are no longer attending schools in the Copley-Fairlawn District, school officials said she was cheating because her daughters received a quality education without paying taxes to fund it.

"Those dollars need to stay home with our students," school district officials said. 

Undoubtedly, Williams-Bolar committed a crime--fraud, after all, is fraud. But isn't the bigger issue here why Williams-Bolar had to go to criminal measures to ensure a quality education for her girls in the first place? 

Sandmonkey Approaching the syndicate. If I don't send a "I am safe" tweet, then am arrested. #jan25 #da3awatkomwelnaby 1 minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®

AhmadFahmy Facebook got blocked!!!!!!!!!!!! #Egypt #Jan25 less than 20 seconds ago via HootSuite

URGENT: REQUEST to ALL EUROPE & US tweeps on #Jan25 PLEASE ASK YOUR MEDIA TO COVER #EGYPT NOW  

Yesterday we were all Tunisian; today we're all Egyptian. Tomorrow we will all be free." #Egypt #jan25 via @lumineole @inkorrupt

Sandmonkey Everyone in cairo. Head to lawyers syndicate at abdel khale2 sarwat. GO NOW! #jan256 minutes ago via Twitter for BlackBerry® Retweeted by monaeltahawy and 18 others  @shmpOngO

I will tweet lively from Mansoura protests after 20 minutes. retweet and support me if something bad happenned @mfatta7 #jan25

RT @bencnn: Egyptian stock market crashing. Loses 21 billion pounds in first 15 minutes of trading #jan25 #egypt about 3 hours ago via Twitter for Mac

Al-Jazeera is reporting that police forces have laid siege on Cairo's Press Syndicate, detaining Yehia Qallash, its sec gen. #Jan25 22 minutes ago via Dabr  RT @simonjhanna

London Reuters office say their journalists in Cairo were arrested and beaten last night #egypt #jan25

not a single senior #NDP official is answering my calls to confirm who from the party's senior leadership is in the country #jan25 #egypt ?? about 1 hour ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®

▬█► I am trapped inside Mansoura Uni. Some thugs r walking behind us and I dun know how to get out #Egypt #Jan25 via @Cer

▬█► I think I will be arrested in max 30 mins. Rbna yostor #Jan25 #Egypt via @Cer24 minutes ago via web

US official says America supports Egyptians' right to self expression http://ow.ly/3Ks4Z #Jan25 #US #Egypt via @AlMasry

AlYoum_E There is a total media blackout on the real things happening. Social media is what is left to us. Stay strong ppl #jan25 via @mfatta727 minutes ago via web

Inviting me to appear for a few moments this morning--I'm scheduled to appear on "Happening Now" at about 11.30AM Eastern--a Fox News producer just sent me a few questions about SOTU.  Below, my answers.

Care to offer yours?

Q: What did Obama do right in the speech?

A:  He called for tax reform—with suspicious brevity, and a complete absence of any detail, but still—and he urged universities to bring back ROTC (not that even Harvard hasn't announced plans to do something along those lines already).  

Q:  What he did wrong?

A:  Everything else.  This was a speech that represented a long, meandering, and only semi-coherent pretext for still more government intervention in the economy and still more government spending.  Nothing he said—for that matter, nothing in his body language—suggested in any way that he cared about the vast and unsustainable federal deficit or that he understood the importance of low taxes and limited government in promoting economic growth.  This was no move to the center.  This speech was aggressively liberal.

Q:  Did he break the ice with the Republicans?  What was his best moment?

A:  The best moments had nothing to do with the president.  They came from the new seating plan.  Instead of the spectacle of recent SOTU addresses, with competing standing ovations—first one side of the chamber, then the other—yesterday evening we saw Congress behave like a regular audience, applauding, laughing, and cheering together.  It was almost enough to make you suppose for a moment that members of Congress are normal.

Q:  Did he convey a compelling theme? 

A:  Sure.  We can compete in the future and do big things—because we have Barack Obama and the federal government behind us.

Q:  What will be the lasting memory from this speech?

A:  Obama delivered no memorable line.  He announced no memorable initiative.  But when he spoke about protecting ObamaCare, he seemed, for one moment, to come alive, speaking with real feeling.  That struck me as the one authentic and memorable moment in the entire address.  Health care reform—passed in the face of widespread opposition from the American people and without a single Republican vote—is what Obama cares about.  To the working politicians in the chamber, I suspect, the speech came down to just that:  Whereas he seemed unserious in nearly everything else he said, on health care Obama drew a line.  To protect it, he’ll fight.

First: Mubarak's family has fled.

Second: Watch this--go to 1:20. 

Third: In response to my post about the events in Egypt yesterday, our member CJRun made a request:

I know you want people to pay better attention to what is happening around the world, but I need your help. Were I to post a link to this to Facebook, it would get lost, amongst people with other concerns. Like tornadoes.

May I request a post that is a distillation of the recent past and a summary of the present that might help me to get the attention of my friends and loved ones, that might punch through?

A quick summary of recent events--that's easy. 

Getting the attention of people who are busy and preoccupied with their own problems--that's hard. 

I've been thinking about this problem a lot. What I need to understand better is the sticking point. To me, these events seem close, dramatic, gripping, hugely consequential, and impossible to ignore. Obviously, to many people, they don't.  

Is that because they don't know what's happening? Is this receiving so little coverage in the American media that they are literally unaware of it? 

Or is it because they do know, but it doesn't seem real? Is the Middle East geographically so far away that this news seems distant and abstract? Might it help if I try to find stories of people to whom CJRun's relatives might be able to relate? Striking photos, video images? Does that video I posted help?

Might it be because they don't appreciate that these are not ordinary events, by the standards of this region, but historic events? In other words, do I need to provide more historic context?

Or might it be because they do not appreciate the way these events might ultimately affect them, personally? Do I need to make those connections more explicit?

What would get your attention, if that video didn't? That's not a Hollywood production. That just happened. These events are really happening, right now, as I type. But does it feel like Hollywood? Is that the effect of Hollywood on the human brain--to make even the real look undramatic?

What does get your attention, in a media-saturated world? 

Huh. I know it was a state of the union address, not a state of other unions address or a state of our union in relation to other unions address. Still, there were some striking omissions.

Not a peep about that pesky Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Surprising though that is -- I could have sworn it was a fairly high priority for the administration -- there was something rather refreshing about the choice not to subject the parties concerned to all the familiar empty bromides. (Besides, al-Jazeera is busy orchestrating the process anyway. Why commit yourself when you can leave matters in the capable hands of the Emir of Qatar?)

Not a peep about Egypt, either. Thousands of Egyptians poured into the streets yesterday, facing down riot police bearing tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons, to protest years of human rights abuses, poverty, unemployment, and the thirty-year grip of an unpopular president. Now, that's an awkward one. Mubarak's an ally, and who knows who might arise in his place if he's tossed out? Obama's speech contained a shout-out to the revolutionaries in Tunisia, so presumably he figured he was covered on the hooray-for-freedom-around-the-world side. Best to keep mum on Egypt. Hey, it's fresh; it's complicated. Cut the guy some slack.

But I ask you. How do you not mention Lebanon after what happened this week? A US-friendly prime minister -- a guy you just hosted in the Oval Office two weeks ago, Mr. President; remember him? -- was overthrown by an Iran- and Syria-backed terrorist organization that assassinated his pro-Western father and has handpicked his successor. Hello? Lebanese citizens took to the streets yesterday to protest the theft of their country by the enemies of freedom --  people who, lest we forget, have been committing terrorist acts against Americans for decades, including the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 American servicemen in 1983 -- and you have nothing to say to the protesters in support? I know -- this one is complicated too. You're trying to get Syria to like you right now. You're trying to find a way to get Iran to knuckle under without doing anything icky or scary. I get it. But if you're worried about their opinion of you rather than the other way around, you've already lost. And so has Lebanon.

Ah, well. At least they're not alone. The Lebanese protesters can console themselves with the thought that when Iranian citizens went out in the streets to try to stand up for freedom against tyranny, Obama had nothing to say to them, either.

Sorry I wasn't more of a live wire last night. Remember, that was four in the morning for me. Or thereabouts. And nothing about that speech so electrified the blood as to counteract the four-in-the-morningness of it. 

I think Megan McArdle captured it really well:

Listening to earnings calls means listening to quite a few CEOs in analogous situations. ...

So what do those CEOs do?  They spend a lot of time talking about their company's proud history, even if that history only stretches back a few years. They lavish extravagant praise on their awesome, dedicated workforce.  And they deftly avoid talking about the big problems, for which they have no solutions, by talking about strategic areas for potential growth ("green jobs"), and going over a laundry list of new initiatives that do nothing to solve any of the core problems.  When they are forced to talk about the core problems--and if the company is big enough to attract analyst coverage, they will rudely draw his attention to the problematic areas on the financial statements during the Q&A--he responds in vague generalities that restate the problem as if doing so constituted a solution ...

The absolute favorite tactic, however, is the management reorganization.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Oh, yeah, you can't. 

Okan sent this to me yesterday, and I'm still not sure whether I'm dismayed that I got it right immediately or kind of proud because I love doing well on tests, even when the test measures total derangement. (I was once looking up the signs of clinical depression on the Internet to see if I was depressed and in need of treatment, rather than just blue. I cheered up so much when I got a perfect score on the Hamilton Depression Index that no further intervention was necessary.)  

I maintain that calling it "the psychopath test" is such a huge giveaway that the question couldn't possibly have any diagnostic value. But because there's that little niggling concern in my mind, I figured I'd run it up the Ricochet flagpole and see who else shoots it dead without so much as a measurable change in his galvanic skin response and then goes out for a box of donuts and never thinks about it again.

So, the e-mail goes like this:

Read this question, then come up with an answer. This is not a trick question. It is as it reads. No one I know has gotten it right. Few people do.

A woman, while at the funeral of her own mother, met a man she did not know. 

She thought the man was amazing.  She believed him to be the man of her dreams--so much that she fell in love with him right there, but she never asked for his number and afterwards couldn't find him.   

A few days later she killed her sister.

Question: What was her motive for killing her sister?

Suggest your answers; I'll tell you the right answer at the end of the day. Apparently, if you come up with that answer, it's a bad, bad sign.

The e-mail says it was a test used by an American psychologist to determine whether the subject had a killer's mind. (This could of course be nonsense, and I'd guess probably is.) But the legend says that many arrested serial killers answered the question correctly. And so did I--without having to think about it much, frankly. I mean, it's obvious, isn't it?

Isn't it? 

UPDATE: The Psychopath Answer

Well, folks, we made it another year. Thanks to all those who joined the Ricochet State of the Union live chat. It was great fun. For those of you who didn’t participate – you missed out. Join us next time.

A few thoughts from the still-warm chair of this erstwhile presidential speechwriter:

• The tone of this address was all wrong. Obama’s cadence and vocal tone were reminiscent of his days back on the campaign trail. We’re far enough removed from the midterm elections that he didn’t have to spend 45 minutes eating humble pie – that’s what the post-election press conference was for. What he did have to do, however, was to acknowledge the new political reality of Washington and define his place within it. Shockingly, he did not. He still acted as if he was going to break the nation to the saddle of the presidency. This will not help his case going forward.

• It was inevitable, and not inappropriate, that this speech would end up revisiting the Tucson shootings. The execution was clunky, however. This was a speech without drama and that wasn’t helped at all by the fact that the section on Congresswoman Giffords was frontloaded. Had the President kept it in his pocket until the speech’s climax, the audience would have held on to see what he was going to say. Instead, the writers dumped it in the speech’s opening and it led to an awkward and (to be frank) tasteless transition into policy.

• The basic hurdle everyone expected the president to cross was finding common ground with the center. He didn’t. The gesture towards tax reform was nice, but expected. It doesn’t get him much he didn’t already have. The only artful use of the new reality was coupling repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” with a call for college campuses to open their doors to ROTC. It was a savvy move, particularly because it cost Obama nothing but gained him some goodwill.

• Robert Gibbs turned out to be right when he said this speech wouldn’t be a laundry list. Sadly, a laundry list would have been an improvement. State of the Union speeches are usually exercises in tortured construction. This one sounded like the product of Martin Heidegger on a three-day bender. It was too long, too abstract, too clichéd and too condescending (the shot at oil companies, in particular, was ungracious).

• Unlike many of my ecstatic Ricochet compatriots, I found Paul Ryan’s response to be a solid, workmanlike effort. It even had a few flashes of brilliance. By the debased standards of State of the Union responses, it was an absolute home run. But, in my estimation, it was not by any measure a game-changer.

The White House has released a handful of paragraphs from the address the president will deliver, including this:

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon....But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of jobs.

Set aside the sloppy writing--whatever else you might do with a "wave," you wouldn't "unleash" it--what we have here is a fundamental misreading of American history.  When Obama talks about "investment," he's talking about federal spending.  So he's asserting here that the federal government was responsible for the technical and economic dynamism that enabled us to win the Cold War.  That's just nuts.

Now, over to our live chat.

Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, in his State of the Union rebuttal Tuesday night, will call for an end to “Washington’s spending binge” that Republicans contend has hampered job creation and piled debt on future generations.

In rejecting Obama’s planned call for “targeted investments”—which Republicans contend is a metaphor for more stimulus spending—Ryan reportedly will respond that the “spending binge” of the past two years failed to stem historic unemployment and the nation’s largest deficits. Instead, he will emphasize the need to cut federal spending in order to boost job creation.

Ryan also plans to make clear that Congress will not approve Obama’s call for an increase in the debt ceiling until a sweeping agreement has been reached in the coming months on both spending cuts and longer-term spending reforms.

Continue reading 

My WSJ column -- with the help of Ricochet -- focused on "monuments to me," i.e., bridges, buildings, and the like that bear the names of the Congressmen and Senators who used the public's dollar to pay for them. It generated some interesting mail, including suggestions from people that the standard should be no public monuments paid for taxpayers while the pol is living.

One of the more interesting reader suggestions was that before we slap a politico's name on a building, we first exhaust the list of our Medal of Honor recipients. This suggestion came at almost the same moment I received an email from the mother of one of our recent MOH recipients, reporting that the family had just put up a headstone for her son, Army Staff Sergeant Robert J. Miller.

If you read the presidential remarks and citation at the Army website, you will see that Sergeant Miller should be a household name in America but is not. How much better I would feel, if on our way to New York, instead of riding thru the Frank R. Lautenberg Rail Station I would take my children through the Sgt. Robert Miller Rail Station. Wouldn't that make for what the President calls a splendid "teaching moment" -- in this case, about a man whose family's service to our nation goes back to the Revolutionary War?

This graphic (via Trulia) demonstrates the rent to buy ratio in 50 of America's largest cities.  The darker the green, the more affordable it is to buy; yellow, orange and red progressively signify markets in which it's more affordable to rent than to buy; and the olive/beige color represents cities in which it makes just as much sense to buy as it does to rent.

Some interesting factoids from Trulia:

• Only 8% of America's largest cities are markets where renting is more affordable than buying a home.
• 20% of large American cities fall in a grey area where buying may actually be more financially sound even though it is less expensive to rent
• In the wake of the housing crash, it's now more affordable to be a homeowner in 72% of major U.S. cities

So do you live in an area where it's more affordable to rent or to buy?

(h/t Daily Intel)

I do not know – but I would bet my last dollar that, just as he rejected the speech I wrote for him last year at this time, so he will reject the draft speech I posted on BigGovernment.com this morning.

To begin with, it is for the most part the same speech – with a tweak here or there – and it is hardly reasonable to expect him to acknowledge faults that he thought great virtues in the recent past. But the obstacles are greater than that. I cannot imagine him embracing the one extended passage that I added:

There is one more matter that I need to mention, and it weighs heavily on my heart. This last week in Philadelphia, a grand jury issued a three-hundred page report detailing the conduct of Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his staff at the Women’s Medical Society in that city. I have read that report. It sickened me, and it made me profoundly ashamed. I have long been a supporter of abortion. As a state senator in Illinois, I did what I could to prevent the outlawing of partial birth abortion, and this past Saturday, on the 38^th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, I issued the following statement:

Today marks the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects women's health and reproductive freedom, and affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters.

I am committed to protecting this constitutional right. I also remain committed to policies, initiatives, and programs that help prevent unintended pregnancies, support pregnant women and mothers, encourage healthy relationships, and promote adoption.

And on this anniversary, I hope that we will recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights, the same freedoms, and the same opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.

I regret my deeds and I regret my words. The massacre of the innocent does not, as I so cynically claimed, fall within the sphere of “private family matters,” and no one has the right and no one’s daughter or son should have the freedom and the opportunity to kill another human being simply because the existence of that human being is an inconvenience. I apologize for my conduct and I call on Congress to frame a constitutional amendment restoring moral police in this particular to the states and the localities where, I am confident, this matter will be properly dealt with. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

As I put it in my piece, “if the President were to do as I suggest, I have no doubt that his speech would really be a game-changer. My bet, however, is that he opts to continue playing the same old game and that his rhetoric this evening will be no less disingenuous than that found in his statement commemorating the 38^th anniversary of a Supreme Court decision that has sanctioned by now our bringing to an abrupt and violent end more than 50 million human lives.”

Am I being unfair?

Man-made climate change works both ways, according to the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology.  Sometimes, in the case of you, me, and our SUV, it's bad.  And sometimes, in the case of Genghis Khan's Mongol conquest, it's not so bad at all.  From the London Daily Mail:

Genghis Khan has been branded the greenest invader in history - after his murderous conquests killed so many people that huge swathes of cultivated land returned to forest.

The Mongol leader, who established a vast empire between the 13th and 14th centuries, helped remove nearly 700million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, claims a new study.

The deaths of 40million people meant that large areas of cultivated land grew thick once again with trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

And, although his methods may be difficult for environmentalists to accept, ecologists believe it may be the first ever case of successful manmade global cooling. 

Julia Pongratz, who headed the research, likes to use the word "events" to describe mass-scale human suffering:

‘We found that during the short events such as the Black Death and the Ming Dynasty collapse, the forest re-growth wasn't enough to overcome the emissions from decaying material in the soil,’ explained Pongratz.

‘But during the longer-lasting ones like the Mongol invasion... there was enough time for the forests to re-grow and absorb significant amounts of carbon.’

Though the Khan will remain known as Genghis the Destroyer and not Genghis the Green, Dr Pongratz hopes that her research will lead to future historians examining environmental impact as well as the more traditional aspects of study.

‘Based on the knowledge we have gained from the past, we are now in a position to make land-use decisions that will diminish our impact on climate and the carbon cycle,’ she said.

'We cannot ignore the knowledge we have gained.’

That's what I love about environmentalists.  They can see the upside in everything.  For them, the human misery glass is always half full.

The New York Times reported this weekend that the National Institutes of Health has announced that it would be engaging in a billion-dollar effort to encourage the development of new pharmaceutical therapies.  The Times' headline for this story sounded innocuous: “Federal Research Center Will Help Develop Medicines.”  Fox News, in contrast, re-ran the Times story under the header: “Obama Creating Billion Dollar Gov’t-Run Drug Company.”  I address the proposal in today's Daily Caller, in which I argue that the government should not waste time and resources making the NIH do something it is unsuited to; if HHS wants to advance the cause of pharmaceutical development, it should focus on improving the expensive, cumbersome, and uncertain FDA approval process.

Last week, President Obama ordered all federal agencies to weigh the costs and benefits of federal regulations – and get rid of the ones that fall on the wrong side of the ledger.  Huzzah!  Fire up the shredders!  Right?

Well, not exactly.  As the Wall Street Journal  pointed out yesterday, in weighing the costs and benefits of regulations, federal agencies must take into account intangible “benefits” such as “equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts.”  There have been cost-benefit reviews since the Reagan administration, but not even Bill Clinton suggested that federal agencies had an independent mandate to redistribute wealth.  Obama's order is not - as some have suggested - a step towards more business-friendly policies.  It's a decisive step in the other direction: formalizing the adminstration's radical preferences as a matter of administrative law. 

What is the Left saying?  Over at the Pace Law School “Green Law” blog, Karl Coplan states “So, this executive order will actually be news if EPA announces it is revoking a significant rule based on this review. I am not terribly worried.”  Which is why I am.

Those who said the Tunisia revolution couldn't spread may wish to revise those predictions. 

The Washington Post is running a Twitter feed translator (not sure where these are coming from, given reports of the block) and a live stream of downtown Cairo (which is now ominously offline). 

Live updates here.  A few Tweets that struck me:

Hillary Clinton on #Egypt unrest: "we urge all parties to exercise restraint" That's usually what they say before the storm hits. #jan25about 1 hour ago via web

Saw Muhamed Baltagi from the Muslim Brotherhood but otherwise protests were had very little, indeed almost no religious overtones. #jan25about 1 hour ago via web

Just left tahrir square. Tear gas being bombed and all mobile lines not working mostly #jan25less than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®

Armed forces in #Egypt have abandoned shock-sticks for more potent weapons, crowds are massing. Pictures of leader burned. #jan25

Pictures of Husni Mubarak have been torn down in public. 100+ arrested. 3 Major news channels prevented from covering #Egypt #jan25

The art of writing cursive, script, or "swirly writing" (as my daughter calls it) is going out of style. It is being stripped from some state curricula and replaced with typing skills, in some cases.

Do we care?

I want to recommend some essential reading from Walter Russell Mead. The Bard professor, author, and blogger at the American Interest has been penning a fantastic  series of web essays on what he calls the "blue social model."  That's a model of large institutions—big business, big government, big labor—that organizes society and provides for human welfare from the cradle to the grave. Mead's point is that this type of social organization has been undergoing a slow-motion demolition for more than three decades. The blue social model is not only broke, it's not equipped to deal with the challenges of our postmodern, technologically advanced, globalized world.

What makes the most recent entry in this series so interesting is how it suggests that the blue social model is old—very, very old. Here's Mead:

Over the centuries, New England has changed its theology while remaining loyal to its cultural foundations.  The Calvinist orthodoxy of the seventeenth century yielded increasingly to Deism and Unitarianism in the eighteenth — and Harvard officially became Unitarian in 1803, dropping its belief in the divinity of Christ.  In the nineteenth century literary and intellectual New England hedged its bets, backing a range of horses from Emersonian transcendentalism to the more evangelically flavored Calvinism of the Victorian years.  During the second half of the twentieth century the mind of New England became more secular than in past generations– but nothing has ever changed the deep belief in this cultural stream that, however defined, morality exists and that it is the job of the state to enforce true morals and uphold right thinking.

We too often forget that our contemporary political debates are tied to cultural and geographical factors that are centuries old. Kudos to Walter Russell Mead for reminding us that American politics is a set of recurring debates over big issues—the nature of the best state, the tension between central and peripheral authority, individual liberty versus social equality, free enterprise versus progressive leveling. Only the names of the participants change.