HOPE AND CHANGE: Thanks to the credit collapse, pawn shops becoming more respectable.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.

BUDGET CUTS THAT BARELY SCRATCH THE SURFACE are not “Draconian.” Did Draco even cut budgets? I think his interest lay elsewhere. And do the people calling these cuts “Draconian” have any idea who he was?

Meanwhile, Don Surber thinks that even Bob Corker’s plan isn’t cutting deep enough: Why wait 10 years to balance the budget?

UPDATE: Classical scholarship: While Draco was the Greek for whom “Draconian” cuts are known, the word draco means “dragon,” or, figuratively “clear-sighted” like a Dragon. So “Draconian cuts” can be taken to mean “clear-sighted cuts.” I just hope this doesn’t get me in trouble relating to my earlier Aorist disclaimer.

A DIVIDER, NOT A UNITER: Obama’s Approval Ratings More Polarized in Year 2 Than Year 1.

UPDATE: Reader David Gerstman emails:

It’s always fun going back to the WaPo’s endorsement of Barack Obama. It’s attributed many qualities to him that were not in evidence during the course of his earlier career. Now it’s fun to watch the President’s faults come to the surface showing how one more element of endorsement was bogus.

When I read that the President’s ratings are more polarized after two years, I went back and found:

Mr. Obama is a man of supple intelligence, with a nuanced grasp of complex issues and evident skill at conciliation and consensus-building.

It would be one thing if the endorsement matched the candidate, but it didn’t. It matched the editors’ inflated view of the candidate demonstrating how vulnerable they were to his image. But these are supposed to be the skeptics of the fourth estate whose wisdom is supposed to shield us from folly. Something’s not working.

Yeah, they’re suckers through and through. Obama’s tendencies toward arrogance and tin-eared out-of-touchness were apparent during the campaign to anyone who paid attention. Which didn’t, apparently, include the people who were supposed to be covering the campaign.

Alternatively, they knew this was false then, but hoped that enough people would fall for it to get a Democrat elected President. In which case: Mission Accomplished! But how’s that hopey-changey stuff working out for you now, Washington Post?

HMM: UNEMPLOYMENT FALLS BUT WITHOUT NEW JOBS: “The unemployment rate dropped sharply last month to 9 percent, the lowest level in nearly two years. But the economy generated only 36,000 net new jobs, the fewest in four months.” Does this mean that most of the “fall” came from discouraged workers dropping out of the workforce? That would explain the difference between this and the Gallup survey, which showed unemployment rising to 9.8% instead of falling. Or am I missing something?

UPDATE: Reader Michael Rulle writes:

Hi Glenn—we go through this every time the economy is making a major shift. The household survey, which reports the 9% unemployment rate, and the business survey which counts jobs are most out of whack during large changes in employment. As the name implies, the household survey polls people (its typically a sample size of 10,000 or so last I looked). What it captures that the business survey does not (the latter tries to count every job from existing employers—in my opinion a far more difficult task than sampling) is the creation of new entities and small businesses and the people they hire. For example, I hired 2 people last month. In sampling that could only be captured by the Household survey, not the Business Survey. The Household Survey leads the Business Survey. Jobs are coming back, along with record corporate earnings and tax collections. While I oppose Obama policies almost 100%, they have still not demonstrated to be sufficient (yet) to stop the American machine.

On the other hand, reader Neil Blaney says that the labor-force participation rate is the key:

Its plunging. So “9% unemployment” is so meaningless at this point. I’m surprised it’s reported at all. Also note that U-6 (generally referred to as the ‘real’ unemployment rate) jumped to 17.3 from 16.6 in dec 2010.

So are the books being cooked? I dunno. But this labor-force participation rate chart does look like it’s plunging.

Stay tuned.

MEGAN MCARDLE: THE GOALS AND MEANS OF METH CONTROL:

So with meth, we made it illegal, and then it turned out you could make the stuff from cold medicine in a very dangerous and dirty home production process, so we made it hard to get cold medicine, so they switched to an even more dangerous process, so now we’re going to make it even harder to get cold medicine . . .

At every step, we don’t consider the whole cost of functionally prohibiting cold medicine; we consider only the marginal cost of the new prohibition. And we compare that marginal cost to the whole cost of drug addiction, nasty amateur meth labs, etc. This policy ratchet means we can easily end up in a situation where the sum of our drug laws are worse than the disease of drug addiction, even though no one particular prohibition is.

Are we in that place? Well, if you’re someone who needs a decongestant, particularly someone with chronic allergies or sinus or ear infections, then this is a pretty major cost–as anyone with recurring episodic problems can tell you, it’s getting harder and harder to get doctors to write you prophylactic prescriptions, because of dual pressure from healthinsurers and the government.

I want my goddamn Sudafed. What I’ve noticed is that they keep making it harder to get, but we keep getting more meth labs. Naturally, the political class’s answer is more of the same! And nobody’s held accountable, and nobody’s willing to relax changes that have proven ineffectual — they just accumulate like barnacles.

A DANGEROUS AND EXPENSIVE EDUCATION FOR THE PRESIDENT: Egypt has Obama cautiously shifting worldview on democracy.

Shortly after taking office, President Obama traveled to Cairo to declare a new day in U.S. relations with the Muslim world – saying there was “no straight line” to building democratic societies in the Middle East.

The June 2009 address was in part intended to show a clean break from a George W. Bush-era “freedom agenda” of promoting electoral democracies across the region. Yet Obama now finds himself forced to move much closer to that world view as he escalates pressure on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to make immediate changes.

But what opportunities were missed? Related: “How can it be that Bush’s America understood the problem of repression in the Arab world, but Obama’s America ignored it until last week?”

SHOCKER: Report: Political Correctness Prevented FBI, DoD from Stopping Maj. Hasan. Well, if by “shocker” you mean “yeah, everybody already figured this out, but thanks.”

“STRING HIM UP:” James Taranto reflects on racist and eliminationist rhetoric at a Common Cause rally. “To be sure, there is no reason to think that Bob Edgar or other officials of Common Cause advocate violence against Supreme Court justices or media executives, that they approve of such violent fantasies, or that they personally hold racially or ethnically bigoted opinions. But Common Cause does describe itself as a ‘grassroots organization.'”

A GOOD GIFT FOR THE RIGHT PERSON: Sex And The City: The Complete Series, plus both movies, for $99.

ERIC HOLDER’S ANIMAL FARM: “Do government officials and members of the media actually believe that the law is really meant to protect some but not others?” Yep, pretty much.

THIS SEEMS LIKE A FITTING METAPHOR: Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Debt Problem Could Doom Campaigns.

AT THE CLIMATE-OF-HATE BLOG, Markos Krugman notes lefty protester calls for lynching Clarence Thomas, and spots an(other) irony.

KIMBERLY STRASSEL: ObamaCare’s Repeal Has Begun.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Revolution Wanders From The Script. “Washington’s intervention in the crisis is not (yet) turning out very well. Public pressure on President Mubarak to step down has allowed the Egyptian authorities to wrap themselves in the national flag. ‘Let’s find an Egyptian solution to Egypt’s problems,’ they can say. ‘President Mubarak will not be running for re-election; do not let the Americans dictate our timetable for change.’ Many in the Egyptian army who normally might have wanted to shed Mubarak quickly will now want to let him hang on through the fall to spite Obama if for no other reason. At the same time, foreign pressure gave the government an opening to crack down on foreign (and domestic) journalists, helping to deprive the revolution of the attention and television coverage vital to keeping public excitement and mobilization alive.”

OYSTERS are disappearing worldwide. Upside: North America will soon have a monopoly.

BLAME AMERICA FIRST: Egypt is Burning. But America Has Rampant Inequality!

IMITATION: THE SINCEREST ADMISSION OF FAILURE? Scott Brown in 2010: The People’s Seat. DNC in 2012: The People’s Convention. “Next thing you know Democrats will be saying they’ve been Taxed Enough Already.”

CLINGING to his religion. And perhaps even a trifle bitterly.

INTELLIGENCE FAILURE: How Cairo, U.S. Were Blindsided by Revolution. “From the moment demonstrators began pouring into the street, those leaders have been scrambling to keep up, often responding in ways that have accelerated the crisis.”

THE ARAB REVOLUTION AND WESTERN DECLINE: “How can it be that Bush’s America understood the problem of repression in the Arab world, but Obama’s America ignored it until last week?”

CHANGE: Senate Dems Reject GOP Budget Proposal, Warn Against Government Shutdown.

If they think that cutting a mere $74 billion out of the bloated federal budget is “draconian,” they’re really out of touch with reality.

RAND PAUL takes a Bowie knife to the federal budget.

AT AMAZON, an extra 40% off clearance-sale clothing for men, women, and children.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Who is this defender of free markets against the scourge of government regulation? Has he spoken to the Post’s editorial board lately? Heh. More:

There is a point about government involvement that’s worth making here. If, as critics claim, there is too much money going to these institutions too fast, its at least partly because the government is making so much cheap capital available to attend them. If there’s one thing we should have learned from the housing bubble it’s that the lure of cheap credit is hard to resist. And what happens when lots of dollars chase limited goods or services? Prices go up of course. Take the government money off the table (or reduce the amount) and the market will settle. Eventually, institutions like Kaplan will be forced to lower prices and improve offerings to bring in students.

I think the attacks on for-profit schools like Kaplan have been unfair — and largely meant to protect their traditional-school competitors from the higher-education bubble talk. But this is true.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

All through the health care debate the president and the advocates of his horrible health care bill repeated again and again how we pay more than other leading countries for far worse results. Why do they not make the same argument about public education? Instead it’s always how we need to pump more and more money into the system.

We both know the answer, but it would be nice to see some Republicans ask the question.

Interesting point.