WHY THEY’D RATHER TALK ABOUT SARAH PALIN (CONT’D): Foreclosure activity up across most US metro areas. “The foreclosure crisis is getting worse as high unemployment and lackluster job prospects force homeowners in an increasing number of U.S. metropolitan areas into dire financial straits.”

READER GREGG MARQUARDT WRITES: “Has anyone suggested that the uprisings we are witnessing in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen are due to the seeds of democracy that Bush planted in Iraq? The left’s reaction to that would be entertaining!”

Unfortunately — and I certainly hope I’m wrong — this may turn out to be a populist Islamist explosion of the sort that better followthrough on the original neocon plans for middle east democracy (then bashed by Kissinger et al. as unrealistic) might have forestalled. Had we pushed the overthrow of tyrannical Arab regimes post-Iraq (as some unsuccessfully urged) there might have been a wave of truly democratic revolutions, with Iraq explicitly the model, leading to Egypt as the “prize.” We are now seeing, at least potentially, such a wave, but the U.S. has been propping up Mubarak — thanks, Joe! — the Saudis, and other despots since we lost our pro-democracy mojo in 2005 after the Cedar Revolution, for reasons that are still not entirely clear. That means the risk that power will coalesce around the only organized groups on the ground — the Islamists — is much greater now than it would have been then, and we are likely to be less favorably perceived. It’s possible, of course, that things will still go well — don’t write off people’s enthusiasm for freedom — but circumstances aren’t as congenial as they might have been.

UPDATE: An excellent point from Stephen Clark:

Unfortunately, Mubarak’s response by cutting off internet communications is likely to hobble the non-Islamist forces in comparison with the better organized Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood has a leadership structure and cadres developed over the decades. Spontaneous democratic forces tend to have no inherent leadership and have of late come to rely heavily on social networking and other web-based communications to function and mobilize. Fragmentation resulting from communication blackouts may render ineffective any numerical superiority non-Islamist forces enjoy to the advantage of numerically inferior but better armed and organized groups like the Brotherhood.

Our government should give some thought to actions that lead to reopening communications over there.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Marian Booker writes: “Egypt off the internet – Does this make you nervous about Obama wanting to have the power to unplug the internet in the US, ‘just in case’?” Well, not any more than I was before. . . .

MORE: Conor Friedersdorf — who was enjoying puberty back then, or something close — thinks this discussion of 2005 is wrong. Well, my blogging then that Iraq wasn’t lost, when his current patron Andrew Sullivan had flipped to saying that it was all over, turned out to be correct, didn’t it? But nothing in the post above suggests that pushing for democracy in 2005 was a guaranteed success, only that we were in a better position then than we are now. For one thing, we had better leadership, and more moral credibility. Also, no Joe Biden issues.

JAMES POULOS: Not a Sputnik Moment, a Stalingrad Moment.

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.

Indeed.

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Biden: Hey, Mubarak’s not a dictator.

NO, THEY’RE NOT: Libertarians Are Not Anarchists.

CHANGE SAME: White House chooses new guy to lie to you about how bad our fiscal situation is.

Congrats, Jay. Remember, answering any question about debt and sustainability is an easy three-step process. First, acknowledge in terms as vaguely as possible that we’re near a “tipping point” before quickly steering the conversation back towards, say, high-speed rail. If the press corps won’t let you get away with that, acknowledge that the White House is always willing to have a conversation about “bipartisan solutions” but take care not to suggest any actual solutions yourself. And third, needless to say, be sure to finish by touting the “savings” in ObamaCare.

And if all that fails, pretend to be offended by something a Republican said. E.g., according to Bloomberg News, Michele Bachmann responded to Obama’s absolutely shameless call for a balanced budget in the SOTU by calling it “absolutely shameless.” Highly uncivil. You never see Democrats behaving like that, do you?

The country’s in the very best of hands.

LET HIM WHO HAS NO GUN SELL HIS ROBE AND BUY ONE.

RAND PAUL: The President Has Been Co-Opted By The Tea Party.

A READER WHO KNOWS THINGS EMAILS: “Egypt is completely cut off the internet. Amid widespread rioting, and right on the heels of a video of a man shot down in the street, the entire nation of Egypt appears to be cut off the Internet. Entirely. You cannot even ping the US Embassy there, as of 27 minutes ago.”

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails: “I’m not sure how things are in Egypt, but if you cut off the internet in the United States don’t you think it would cause unrest? People would have nothing better to do than protest in the streets. The internet isn’t working. I think it’s a mistake.” Well, people in Egypt are past the point where the Internet serves as a distraction, but yes — in similar circumstances I would take an Internet shutoff to be a signal to riot, burn the local Federal Building (or whatever the equivalent would be in Egypt) and so on. On the other hand, unless there’s been preparation, it’ll be much less coordinated. I wonder how many walkie-talkies and shortwave sets the protesters have?

MORE: “So, if you were there, what would you do to get communications for everyone? Do you still have a POTS modem?”

STILL MORE: Reader Steve White was right.

MORE STILL: Reader Alex Charyna writes: “You would turn on your HF ham radio and listen. Hopefully there is someone out there able (and with the balls) to talk out to the world. The ham radio guys are big on emergency preparedness. In this case, it’s govt caused. But if you look at what hams did on 9/11 and the Haiti earthquake, you would be surprised. I don’t have a HF rig handy but if I could, i’d certainly give a listen.”

I really need to get a ham license. Meanwhile, C.J. Burch, like the novelist he is, thinks outside the box:

Amateur radio guys would be the answer here and probably there as well. There are going to be areas the government has to protect. The rioters would be wise to make feints at them and hit the shopping malls and the electronics stores. Take every two way radio they can lay their hands on. The multi channel ones would be the best, but even the small time kiddie things would be better than nothing. Also flares can signal from roof top to roof top at night. Fires on the top of big buildings can be seen all over the place. Flashlights could be a help too.

Remind me never to be on the opposite side of an insurrection from you, C.J.

YET MORE: Egypt Leaves The Internet: “In an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.”

DAN MITCHELL: New CBO Numbers Re-Confirm that Balancing the Budget Is Simple with Modest Fiscal Restraint.

CHANGE: Sen. Rand Paul to introduce Social Security bill ‘in the next two to three weeks.’

DOES COLLEGE make you smarter?

MARKDOWNS ON Valentine’s Day gifts.

DID YOU WIN THE FUTURE TODAY?

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” That’s Their Story, And They’re Sticking To It.

SILICON GRAFFITI: Steer The Coverage.

PRIVATE-SECTOR HEALTHCARE REFORM: MinuteClinic Goes Viral, It Plans to Double the Number of Its Retail Clinics Over the Next 5 Years.

MARKDOWNS ON DVD and Blu-Ray Releases.

INSTAVISION: Why Judges Are Biased In Favor of Lawyers and the Legal Profession, And What to Do About It. I talk with Prof. Ben Barton, author of The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Legal System, from the rarely-seen appellate courtroom in the basement of Stately InstaPundit Manor. (Bumped).

And here’s a YouTube version for those who’d rather go there than to PJTV.

LEE STRANAHAN: Is the right-wing blogosphere afraid of Pigford?

THINGS THAT DON’T SUCK: So I gave my brother a Roku box for his birthday, since I heard they’d dropped cable.

His response: “Holy cow… this thing works great! Totally beats cable!!!” That’s my experience, too. Especially if you like movies.

UPDATE: Alex Nunez emails: “I gave my brother-in-law a Roku for Christmas. He was a bit of a streaming-media skeptic, and a user of the old Apple TV. He’s basically been floored by how much the Roku offers. I’m at a point where I’m considering one, and I already have a Playstation 3 that I use for Netflix.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: Me-Too Drugs: Herd Animals, Not Copycats. “I’ve never really understood the objections to ‘me-too’ drugs. Somehow, the topic of health care makes otherwise sensible people forget everything they ever knew about economics and start spouting Victorian-era Socialist rhetoric about wasteful competition and superfluous duplication. These same people would think you were crazy if you started ranting about how many societal resources are wasted by having three kinds of unsalted butter available in the supermarket. And yet, this is the same argument.”

I had some related thoughts here.

THE TWELVE WORST COLLEGES FOR FREE SPEECH. Syracuse is No. 1.

Related item: Tyler Clementi Act a Serious Threat to Free Speech. “An anti-harassment bill being introduced in Congress threatens to stifle freedom of expression even more on college campuses.” If I am ever elected to Congress, I pledge to vote against every bill named after someone who has died tragically. I don’t see how that pledge can lead me astray.

I THINK THEY USED TO CALL THEM “RUNNING DOGS:” Roger Simon: Rabbis Spend $100K to Slam Beck for Slamming Soros. “According to the clerics, Beck has been unfairly attacking George Soros for collaborating with the Nazis in WWII when the billionaire was a fourteen-year old — something that Soros himself admits and, incredibly, doesn’t feel guilty about.”

Related: Jeff Dunetz isn’t happy either.

ARE YOU GETTING ENOUGH CALCIUM AND VITAMIN D? I take Vitamin D supplements in the winter (1000 iu); not so much in the summer, when I make a point of getting moderate sun exposure.