WASHINGTON EXAMINER: ‘We’re not the other guys’ isn’t good enough, GOP. “Today, most Americans are ready as never before to shrink government and stop the spending madness. This presents the GOP with an opportunity it didn’t have in 1994: an electorate exhausted by Washington politicians and their doubletalk. But the GOP so far seems unwilling to lay out specifics about how it plans to respond to what Americans are saying if they restore the party to majority status in the House and perhaps the Senate.”

PETER WALLISON: When Economic Policy Became Social Policy. “Watching the Treasury conference on housing finance earlier this week, I was struck by the gloomy thought that we will never get out of this housing mess until we are ready to face facts. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s remark that the demise of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was caused by their pursuit of short-term profits was not a constructive contribution to the resolution of the major issues before us. In reality, Fannie and Freddie were doomed by a badly designed government housing policy, and government efforts to disguise its responsibility with a false narrative will only make a solution more difficult. . . . When in 1992 Congress dragooned Fannie and Freddie into lowering their underwriting standards, it confused the economic goal of creating a viable national mortgage market for good quality mortgages with the social policy of increasing home ownership by making mortgage credit available to low-income borrowers. The added benefit for Congress was that it could achieve the social goal without budgetary consequences; the operations of Fannie and Freddie were and still are off-budget.”

COVERING THE REALLY IMPORTANT NEWS.

AN OVERLOOKED ESSENTIAL FOR COOKING WITH KIDS: The step stool. When the Insta-Daughter was about 2, I brought one home from Target — just a one-piece plastic stool, nothing fancy — but she was so excited she carried it around the house. A whole new world of things within reach!

HOW PROMISCUOUS ARE YOU? An Online Quiz.

DANA LOESCH: Sarah Palin And The Rise Of The Feminist Right.

PRIORITIES: Jobs Take Second Place, Again.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD REVIEWS Rajendra Pachauri’s new novel, Return to Almora.

CHART OF THE DAY: Deficits, With And Without The Iraq War. “Do you see alarming deficits or trends from 2003 through 2007 in the above chart? No. In fact, the trend through 2007 is shrinking deficits. What you see is a significant upward tick in 2008, and then an explosion in 2009. Now, what might have happened between 2007 and 2008, and then 2009? Democrats taking over both houses of Congress, and then the presidency, was what happened. Republicans wrote the budgets for the fiscal years through 2007. Congressional Democrats wrote the budgets for FY 2008 and on.”

UPDATE: The Anchoress emails: “That deficit graph is going to go viral. This piece in the NY Times from 2006 reinforces it.”

Yeah, note this excerpt:

An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year, even though spending has climbed sharply because of the war in Iraq and the cost of hurricane relief.

Well, that was back when the Bush tax cuts were kicking in. Now, in the Age Of Obama, the “unexpectedly” language is in regard to very different kinds of developments . . .

GREEDY GOVERNMENTS: Philly requiring bloggers to pay $300 for a business license. As our profligate politicos get more and more desperate for cash, look for more stuff along these lines.

UPDATE: Reader Trent Nix thinks it’s about more than money:

One thing that you didn’t mention on Philadelphia requiring bloggers to pay $300 for a “license” is that it has the side effect of giving the city a weapon to use against those pesky anonymous bloggers. If you don’t pay, they have empowered themselves to go after you, attempting to ensure nobody is going to lob any grenades behind the veil of anonymity.

The losers who put this nonsense in place should have their pictures plastered everywhere as enemies to free speech. City politics tend to be the place where the nexus of stupidity and vanity are at their greatest.

Amen.

DAVID LAT ON the Judge Gertner book controversy.

HMM: WH Visitor Logs Suggest J Street Contributed To U.S.-Israel Diplomatic Crisis.

THE ANCHORESS ON MISSING GEORGE W. BUSH: “Bush is missable, because we miss having a president whose affection for his country and its people–even the ones who hated him–was never in doubt.”

More people do seem to be missing him these days. His book is certainly doing well on Amazon, considering it doesn’t come out for over two months.

CAN WILILEAKS FOUNDER BE PROSECUTED FOR ESPIONAGE? Julian Ku and Kenneth Anderson think so.

THE HILL: A year after claiming the economy as his own, Obama points finger at predecessor.

WELL, LAWYERS NEED WORK TOO, THESE DAYS: The ADA In Action.

SHOCKER: Howard Dean: I can’t shake the feeling that Obama’s advisors are out of touch with the country.

UPDATE: WAPO: Poll numbers in 1994, a bad year for Democrats, don’t bode well for them in 2010.

NOBODY TELL STEPHEN GREEN: Gym Mixes Vodka With Fitness. “It’s better to work out and drink than to not work out and drink.”