DANA LOESCH INTERVIEWS RICHARD DREYFUSS.

WHEN YOU PUT IT THIS WAY, IT DOESN’T SOUND LIKE SUCH A SURPRISE: Mubarak Surprises U.S. With Decision To Stay In Power.

CHANGE: Rep. Sean Duffy (R., Wisc.) introduced a bill today that would require unspent and unobligated stimulus funds to be used to reduce the deficit.

CBO CHIEF: Yes, ObamaCare Is A Job Killer. To the tune of 800,000 jobs, give or take.

LOTS OF CPAC COVERAGE on PJTV.

Also at The Tatler.

AN INTERVIEW with Col. John Alexander, author of UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities. “Alexander says there was, in the end, no government conspiracy to cover up reports on UFOs, but he also insists that enough credible UFO sightings have been documented to warrant a closer look.”

AT AMAZON, warehouse deals.

REASON TV: Gay Wars: What We Saw At CPAC.

HOSNI MUBARAK Refuses to step down. Reader C.J. Burch emails: “It’s as if a third world tin pot dictator just told the President of the United States to stick it without fear of any reprisal at all. Now that’s smart diplomacy.” Well, stay tuned but our diplomacy does seem to have been rather confused.

UPDATE: Mubarak 1, Obama 0. “Obama was just played.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Spooks’ Black Thursday:

Bad day for the “Intelligence Community” here in Washington. CIA chief Leon Panetta opined that Mubarak was very likely going to resign in a few hours, while DNI (Director of National Intelligence) General James Clapper declared the Muslim Brotherhood “largely secular” and has “eschewed violence.” These analyses from our mastodontic Intel establishment no doubt encouraged the president to gush about living through an historic moment in world history, and to proclaim that young people were primarily to praise for the epic events of the day.

Except that Mubarak didn’t resign, and the Brothers aren’t secular and have long embraced and practiced violence, and we don’t yet know exactly what history is being made, let alone who is making it.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

MORE: Mubarak takes a shot at Obama.

STILL MORE: Oops! “Now, with Mubarak thumbing his nose at the president, the Obama administration may manage to achieve what only few governments in history have done: alienate their enemies as well as their friends. Worse, Obama’s actions have regionalized the Egyptian conflict. KSA has belayed Mubarak on the sheer cliff that he dangles from. It has forced a public confrontation between Mubarak and his regional allies and the unrest sweeping the Arab world. If Mubarak goes spinning into the abyss, the House of Saud will find itself pulled right after it. The narrative is set. One the one side are the aging Sunni autocrats, on the other side are the Shi’ite autocrats who are in an alliance of convenience with protesters in Egypt. And on both sides, like a ping-pong ball being swatted back and forth, is President Obama, as noisy and nearly as comical.”

Remember when I said that a Carter-era rerun was the best plausible scenario? Well . . .

Also: Protests in Iraq.

And, via Facebook: “If Mubarak was smart he’d have gotten the Black Eyed Peas to empty out Tahrir Square two weeks ago.” That would have done it . . .

Plus, flummoxed: White House silent after Mubarak shocker.

Well, they did finally release a statement, but it’s getting bad reviews: White House statement on Egypt: Blah blah blah blah.

WHEN A GUN THAT’S TOO “SAFE” CAN COST A LIFE: Vickie Graves says she tried to shoot intruder, gun wouldn’t go off.

Graves has hated guns ever since her father died from an accidental shooting, but with Holman distracted by the gunfire, she said she pushed him and grabbed a gun her husband kept stashed beside his chair.

“I kept pulling the trigger,” she said. “I was trying to get that gun to go off, and I just couldn’t.”

The gun, as it turned out, had three separate safety mechanisms.

It’s not safe if it won’t work when you need it.

JAMES LILEKS REMINDS ME why I’m glad not to live in Minnesota. “It’s two below. I think we might have hit five above today. The house is a meat locker, because it would be ruinously expensive to heat the pile to habitable temps, so we huddle and layer and close doors to the rooms that warm up nicely.”

WELL, IF IT IS, I’M GOING TO WISH I’D LISTENED TO GLENN BECK AND BOUGHT A LOT OF GOLD: America: Poised For A Hyperinflationary Event?

UPDATE: Reader David Good writes:

You’re going to wish you had some food storage first before you wish you had gold. In Weimar Germany there were people in the cities that starved because they had no food. Sure you can buy food with gold, but gold denominations (even the 1/10 oz American Gold Eagle) are not practical for buying groceries or a sack of potatoes. Jus’ sayin’.

Well, you can always hoard nickels. But yeah, in a hyperinflationary environment you want a stock of necessities, and then a stock of wealth that will still be good when it settles out, as it generally does when it’s not externally supported.

WELL, I TOOK THREE YEARS OF IT, SO I GUESS THAT’S WHY I’VE DONE SO WELL: Forget Mandarin. Latin is the key to success. If only Maryville High had offered Latin IV, who knows where I might be. . . .

OKAY: NASA and DARPA Want a “100-Year Starship,” As Long as They Don’t Have to Build It. “So the goal of the “100-Year Starship” is really just to get the ball rolling and then hand over the funding, organizing, and building of any eventual interplanetary starship to someone else who has the resources and resolve to see the job through. That is, someone with more technological and financial resources than the government of the United States of America.”

Well, snark notwithstanding, this is probably a good approach, based on other recent developments.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, politicized science at the FDA would inhibit women’s contraceptive choices. And they were right!

MARKDOWNS ON DVD and Blu-Ray.

REASON TV: The Dumbest Thing Ever Said!…by Hillary Clinton, about the Drug War.

WHEN A “HIDDEN AGENDA” IS OUT IN THE OPEN: Roger Kimball mocks the NYT’s budget-crisis editorial. “The goal of the idea the Times calls ‘pernicious’ is to restore fiscal sanity to America. Along the way, public sector unions should be decertified and once again made illegal, as they were until the late 1960s when the spendocrats got put in charge. There is nothing hidden about this agenda, or rather call it a goal, an ambition, a consummation devoutly to be wished for. I only hope that its lack of hiddenness becomes ever more obvious so that the people who pay the bills understand what a racket has been going on in their state and local legislatures, to say nothing of the monstrousness that is Washington.”

UPDATE: Union boss thinks Roger Kimball is mentally retarded. And you, too, if you want these cuts.

FEMTOCELLS: A Cellphone Tower For Your Pocket.

JOHN CLAPPER: Muslim Brotherhood “largely secular.” Uh huh.

LIVE CPAC COVERAGE, streaming on PJTV. (Bumped).

CHANGE: Average rate on 30-year fixed mortgage surpasses 5 percent this week as Treasury yields jump. “The average rate on the 30-year mortgage topped 5 percent this week for the first time since April. Higher rates could further hamper the struggling housing market ahead of the spring’s prime home-buying season. . . . Rates are following the yields on the 10-year Treasury note, which are spiking on fears of higher inflation. Investors have been demanding higher Treasury yields since the Federal Reserve began its $600 billion bond-buying program to boost the economy.”

GREEN SUBSIDIES: Senator Stabenow re-pitches $7,500 plug-in vehicle point-of-purchase rebate.

PETER BERKOWITZ: Crticizing Elites, Cultivating Excellence. “From the perspective of our founding fathers, our elites deserve rigorous criticism. But we mustn’t stop there.”

DANA LOESCH joins CNN.