MICHAEL BARONE: Voting For The National Interest, Not Self-Interest.

The recoil in 2010 against the Obama Democrats’ vast expansion of the size and scope of government seems to have a cultural or a moral dimension as well. It was a vote, as my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy P. Carney wrote last week, expressing “anger at those unfairly getting rich — at the taxpayer’s expense.”

Those include well-connected Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs that got bailed out and giant corporations like General Electric that shape legislation so they can profit. They include the public employee unions who have bribed politicians to grant them pensions and benefits unavailable to most Americans.

A government intertwined with the private sector inevitably picks winners and losers. It allows well-positioned insiders to game the system for private gain. It bails out the improvident and sticks those who made prudent decisions with the bill.

Modest-income Americans think this is wrong. They want it fixed more than they want a few more bucks in their paychecks.

Traditionally, most Americans have opposed crony capitalism and corruption. But people in Washington have tended to misunderstand what’s behind this, interpreting it as a negotiating strategy rather than a values question.

BEWARE OF Food-Related Injuries.

PROTESTS IN CHINA: “Large numbers of police – and new tactics like shrill whistles and street cleaning trucks – squelched overt protests in China for a second Sunday in a row after more calls for peaceful gatherings modeled on recent democratic movements in the Middle East.”

VIRGINIA POSTREL: How to make the Oscars less boring.

THE HILL: Libyan turmoil, $100 per barrel oil fuel Republican drilling push on Capitol Hill.

Related: Interior officials won’t offer timeline for issuing offshore drilling permits.

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Also, markdowns in Exercise & Fitness.

CLAYTON CRAMER ON HARRY REID’S CAMPAIGN TO END PROSTITUTION IN NEVADA: “Remember when people called Harry Reid’s opponent a crazy right-wing religious fanatic? Now Senator Reid says that Nevada should prohibit prostitution in the rural counties that still allow it — and his reasoning makes me wonder who is paying him to push this. . . . What always causes me to shake my head in disbelief is how strongly the Democratic Party imagines Republicans as a bunch of Puritans about to sew scarlet letters on the clothes of today’s Hester Prynnes. I can see a legitimate argument about whether prostitution should be legal. What I can’t see is why one of the most prominent leaders of the Democratic Party is making this argument — and making it on such astonishingly moralistic grounds.”

FRIENDS OF ANGELO IN HIGH PLACES: Angelo Mozilo Skates. And there’s more: “Most of the other Wall Street bigwigs whose firms took unconscionable risks — risks that nearly brought the global financial system to its knees — aren’t even on Justice’s radar screen. Nor has there been a single indictment against any top executive at a subprime lender. The only two people on Wall Street to have been prosecuted for their roles in the crisis are a pair of minor Bear Stearns executives, Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, whose internal hedge fund, stuffed with triple-A mortgage-backed paper, collapsed in the summer of 2007, an event that anticipated the crisis.” Well we know — some of — the people who got bargain loans from Countrywide as “Friends Of Angelo.” And we know who Wall Street gave money to in record amounts in 2008. So no big surprise here.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Harlow writes: “They told me if I voted for McCain, Wall Street millionaires who caused the financial crisis would get off scot-free, and they were right!”

TEN WAYS rising oil prices endanger the U.S. recovery. Such as it is.

SOBRIETY, LIKE TAXES, IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Former President of MADD Arrested For DUI. I thought maybe this was a case of defining intoxication down to catch even social drinkers, but blowing a .239 on a breathalyzer is more serious than that . . . .

UPDATE: Reader John Bade points out that this is just a local story, really, and he’s right — she’s the former President of a chapter, not the national organization. “Any large organization is going to have hypocrites and backsliders. In my opinion It’s when they get through their organization’s vetting process to high levels of national leadership that they become legitimate targets for national news stories.” True enough.

ERIC SCHEIE: Breaking The Narratives That Enslave Us.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: The administration’s pathetic, dithering response to the Arab uprisings has been both cynical and naive.

I think what we’re seeing is a sort of John Birmingham-lite scenario. In Birmingham’s page-turner books Without Warning and After America, the mysterious disappearance of most of the United States causes all sorts of economic and security chaos to unfold, once America is no longer there to keep the lid on things.

Whether deliberately or accidentally, the Obama Administration has substantially reduced the United States’ military and economic leverage over the past couple of years. The result is that we’re seeing a lot of stuff bust loose. America hasn’t vanished. We’ve just become, as Hitchens says, about as important as Switzerland.

UPDATE: The CNN folks just emailed me a transcript from Candy Crowley’s State of the Union, — sorry, not online yet — but here’s a key bit from John McCain:

CROWLEY: You sound slightly critical, if I’m reading between the lines, of the Obama administration kind of holding back on its criticism of Libya, administration officials tell us because they were worried that Americans in Libya would be taken hostage or worse.

MCCAIN: Well, the British prime minister and the French president and others were not hesitant and they have citizens in that country.

America leads. America is — here we’ve been to these countries and every place we go they are looking to America for leadership, for assistance, for moral support and ratification of the sacrifices they have made in defense of democracy. America should lead.

The president should reverse the terrible decision he made in 2009 to not support the demonstrators in Tehran. Stand up for democracy in Iran and tell those people that we are with them. And that should be true not only throughout the Arab countries but as far as china and other parts of the world as well.

Emphasis added. Looking, but not finding.

GOVERNOR RICK PERRY: Make the federal government as innocuous as possible.

I BOUGHT SOME DELICIOUS MILK YESTERDAY from Cruze Farm Dairies in Knoxville. Here’s a thought for you disaster-prep people — if we really face a disaster that introduces big and lasting disruptions into transport and the economy, wouldn’t it be nice to have people producing food somewhere close by? Not a reason to bankrupt yourself buying only “locavore” food, but something to think about.

MESSAGE TO CHRIS MATTHEWS: You’re next.

Better listen to Jerry Springer before it’s too late.

WHO TO TRUST? “Benjamin Barber, who only resigned this week from the Qadaffi Foundation and still belives Saif Gadaffi could be a saviour of his country?” Or “Bush and Reagan advisor Elliot Abrams, who wants Colonel Gadaffi to go down in history as a grotesque and bloody dictator like Bokassa and Idi Amin.” Stupid Neocons. Obviously we should trust Barber!

UPDATE: Pretense And Delusion: Libya Edition. Paid pretense, it seems.

YOU KNOW, I’ve never bought a drink for a strange woman. Not now and not when I was single. That’s for suckers. Are there really men who don’t know this? Apparently.

UPDATE: Phil Bowermaster emails:

You link to these game sites every now and then. Do you buy into their worldview?

I think it’s important for a guy not to be taken advantage of. But I find the arrogance of these game douchebags unbearable, and their contempt for the majority of the human race — virtually all men are sniveling “betas;” virtually all women are manipulative gold-digging whores — has a kind of Taliban ring to it.

Imagine the Taliban was totally focused on getting laid, rather than enforcing Sharia. I think they’d sound a lot like these guys.

The “game” stuff pretty much is for douchebags, or at least the otherwise hopeless. It involves taking the sophisticated approach that someone with actual interpersonal skills might employ, and boiling it down to a set of simplified rules that produce a sort of cartoon version — much as you might boil down social interactions into rules for an autistic person; the result is better than nothing, but not the real thing. But although it’s a cartoon — and focused largely on picking up women in bars, a fairly limited and artificial environment to begin with — the simplification process does reveal things that might otherwise be obscured or ignored. And it’s interesting to see some of these insights going mainstream. (The other thing you learn from perusing some of these sites is just how much some men need the help. And I’m not sorry to see them get it.)

The Taliban are about cartoonishly oversimplified rules of a different sort, but hey — if we could get them to start cruising singles’ bars instead of dynamiting them, that would be progress. As with all the Islamist fanatics, much of their energy comes from blocked and distorted sexual impulses, after all.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some surprisingly non-profane thoughts from Ace. And reader Anthony Argyriou writes: “I’ll cop to having bought drinks for strange women, but only after I was already dating them.” Heh.

MORE: Reader Jeff Younger emails:

You’re uncharitable towards “game” and PUAs. You shouldn’t be. Here’s why:

* Boys aren’t taught basic social skills, because they lack males to teach them.
* Most boys are raised by divorced women with an axe to grind against men. These women teach boys to be the perfect romance novel, self-sacrificial clod. They teach boys to put women on a pedestal.
* “Game” fills the avuncular void and educates young men about how modern women really are: hypergamous.
* Every new skill is broken down into rules, at first. You progressively gain judgement until you become prudent, and then you know how and how to apply and break the rules to achieve a good outcome. There’s nothing wrong with teaching rules to learn successful social behavior.

Well, I thought that was more or less what I said, but all of this is basically right. It’s a second-best solution, but much of the world runs on second-best solutions.

AN L.A. TIMES EDITORIAL ON the public-pension crisis:

Many state and local government employees have been promised pensions that the public couldn’t have afforded even had there been no crash. . . . The commission is right about the importance of reducing the liabilities posed by current employees. And though picking a fight with unions over unilateral reductions in pensions probably isn’t the solution, the report should persuade both sides to do more at the negotiating table to prevent pension costs from swamping state and local budgets. As the commission notes, public employees in California enjoy some of the most generous pension plans in the country. Those plans won’t do them much good, however, if their employer can’t afford to keep them on the payroll.

Read the whole thing.

WELL, THIS ISN’T THE “HOPE,” SO I GUESS IT’S THE “CHANGE:” Analysis: Oil prices could be game-changer for world economy. “Soaring oil prices are reaching levels that could threaten to brake improving but tentative global economic recovery, with an outside chance of a new recession or that most destructive of conditions, stagflation.”

MISERABLE FAILURE? Prof. Jacobson: 50-State Union Protest Falls Far Short Of Predicted Turnout.

UPDATE: Dems Left Red-Faced; Protesters Fail to Materialize at National MoveOn Rallies.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Troy Hinrichs emails: “It seems that unless government workers get a paid day off (from us) they’re not too interested in taking their unpaid days off to protest.”

MORE: DaTechGuy notes that it’s all about maintaining the fiction.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY of government-employee unions.

WISCONSIN FUGITIVE SENATOR UPDATE: Hundreds Turn Out for Recall Senator Wirch Rally in Wisconsin.

MARKDOWNS ON bestselling power tools.

ERIC LIPTON RESPONDS, and the verdict is in. “Eric Lipton and the New York Times owe Tim Phillips, Americans For Progress and Charles and David Koch an apology, and they owe their readers a correction.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

The story of a NYT reporter bastardizing statements made by a conservative is an excellent example of why cell phone cameras, digital recorders and the like are necessary instruments for any conservative in the public light. There should be a record of everything so that the truth has a chance to embarrass the S.O.B.s. The Army of Davids can’t travel without today’s version of a slingshot with which to repel the Goliaths.

The reporter makes it a point that he doesn’t record his own interviews. How convenient! It’s as if he wants to create no record, no paper trail, no evidence of actual malice. That’s fine. But now that the ground rules are abundantly clear conservatives must do some heavy lifting of their own.

To all potential 2012 GOP candidates for President, listen well: Record every encounter with the press. Tape everything. And then try to push back, twice as hard, when the inevitable attacks begin.

Good advice. I had some related thoughts here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

In this post, http://instapundit.com/115783/, your reader says politicians should record every encounter with the press. In fact, conservative politicians should record every moment of their day, not just encounters with the press. There is too much opportunity for misleading clips or snippets to derail a potential campaign. And more important than recording everything is keeping it. The price of storage has decreased to the point that days and days of decent resolution footage can be stored for little money. I own multi-drive NAS that can store a few thousand hours of 720p video. The cost was less than $2500 with the drives. Campaigns by conservatives will need to be able to fight the active opposition they can expect from the news media, and there is no better way of doing so than with video.

BTW, I work in the news bureau of a major international/financial news service. The comments I have heard are astounding. The only saving grace is that since I work with financial journalists, there are several libertarians/conservatives in the mix. Sadly though, there are none in the regular news units.

Please do not use my name if you decide to publish this.

I understand.

THE CHANGING FACE OF FAME: Comparing modern stars with stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age: “There seem to be two correlated trends here: 1) more feminine features for both males and females, and 2) more youthful features for both males and females.”