IN THE MAIL: From Yale Press, Paul Rahe’s Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect.

ESCAPING TO COSTA RICA? Lou Minatti is not amused.

“AN EMBARRASSINGLY INCOMPETENT READER:” Ann Althouse takes Barney Frank to the woodshed.

But don’t be distracted into forgetting about Barney Frank’s financial issues, which is what he’d like you to do.

DIAGRAMMING an Obama sentence. (Via Michael Silence).

HOPE AND CHANGE: EU presidency: US economic plans ‘a way to hell’. Let’s hope he’s wrong. At the moment, the markets seem to think he is.

LIMITS: U.K. Bond Auction Fails for First Time Since 2002..

ON THE WHITE HOUSE WEBSITE: President Obama is Taking Your Questions.

ATTACK ON the Second Amendment?

THE KRYPTONITE PRESS CONFERENCE?

FAIRFIELD WEEKLY: The Inglorious AIG: “Obama and his treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, have kept up this system (and our Sen. Chris Dodd rubber-stamped it, according to his own Alberto Gonzales–like recollection of the process).”

ARMED CUSTOMER kills robber at Burger King. (Thanks to my former student Tara Wyllie for the link.)

UPDATE: That link isn’t working anymore for some reason. A later version of the story is here.

ALL THE NEWS that’s fit to print.

THE MEXICAN GUN CANARD REAPPEARS. This despite pretty clear evidence that guns in Mexico are coming from elsewhere. Or from the 150,000 to desert the Mexican Army in the last 6 years.

A LETTER FROM John Galt.

IRONY: Michael Barone notes that they’re using the unregulated financial institutions to bail out the regulated ones.

And yet the solution is always more regulation.

UPDATE: Reader Rick Lang writes: “Do you suppose it’s so the unregulated industries get into financial trouble so they need to be bailed out and therefore, regulated, thus expanding big government further?”

COULD THE KINDLE SAVE FREE SPEECH IN AMERICA?

BILL ALLISON: Give a dollar to a pol, get $18,195 back. He makes a good point. And I’ll repeat something I’ve said before: When the best investment a company can make is an investment in a politician, not a product, that’s a bad thing. I still think that Wall Street folks would be better off under a regime that respected free markets, though. But maybe I’m naive.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY on tea parties and double standards:

Five more “tea parties” took place last weekend to protest runaway congressional spending. Showing up with hand-lettered signs were people not often seen at protests. . . . But the real reason the major media aren’t interested in these protests is that they don’t agree with them. In the final analysis, these affairs are really taking issue with the political party they helped elect without hiding bias in the last election.

That’s why a small scrum of Acorn-financed wackos on a bus tour to intimidate AIG execs last weekend made the news while the tea parties didn’t.

Indeed.

CNN: Should the USA still be AAA? “Some think the U.S. may not be able to hold on to its perfect credit rating indefinitely considering how much money the Fed, Congress and the Treasury Department have thrown at the economy in their attempt to lift it from this recession. ‘The only reason someone who bought a Treasury can get their money is that the government is able to borrow more money to pay them off,’ said Peter Schiff, president of brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital. ‘It’s impossible for us to just keep going deeper and deeper into debt.’ Still, that seems to be exactly what the government will be doing.” Hey Bernie Madoff kept things going for 20 years . . . .

Meanwhile, look at what the Bank of England is saying: “Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has cautioned against further significant government spending to stimulate the economy.” Basically, they’re out of money. Coming here next? It would be a major shift for “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke . . . .

And didn’t President Obama say last night that the way to prevent a recurrence of our present financial problem was to have national healthcare? Doesn’t Britain already have national healthcare? So why are they having the same problems?

L.A. TIMES: Barack Obama’s delivery of no news is quite smooth.

STIMULUS IDEA: How about massive forgiveness of student loans?

MAXINE WATERS unlocks the door.

THE INFLUENCE GAME: Mixing Donations and Earmarks.

Rep. John Murtha celebrated his 35th anniversary as a congressman by getting an early start on his next campaign, staging an invitation-only fundraising luncheon for dozens of lobbyists and defense contractors at the private Army-Navy Country Club in Arlington, Va.

But last month’s event, with tickets starting at $1,400, was missing one longtime friend: Paul Magliocchetti, the founder of a lobbying firm that over the past two decades has been one of Murtha’s biggest sources of campaign donations.

Magliocchetti was absent because of what had happened three months earlier. At 7:30 one evening shortly after Thanksgiving, the FBI raided his lobbying firm, carting off records of the firm’s political action committee and files of some of its lobbyists. The work of those lobbyists took them often to Murtha’s Capitol Hill office, as well as those of fellow Democrats Peter Visclosky of Indiana, Jim Moran of Virginia and others on the defense appropriations subcommittee that Murtha chairs. The FBI says the investigation is continuing, highlighting the close ties between special-interest spending provisions known as earmarks and the raising of campaign cash.

Read the whole thing.

HERE’S A TRANSCRIPT of the Obama press conference.

BUSH DEFICIT VS. OBAMA DEFICIT IN PICTURES. (Bumped).