ON THE PAGE FOR HER NEW BOOK, Amity Shlaes talks with Paul Volcker about Calvin Coolidge. Volcker: “Coolidge balanced the budget. Saving, we don’t do that anymore.”

AT AMAZON, Up To 30% Off On Sunny Health & Fitness Equipment.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Unions, bundlers and special interests fund Obama’s second inauguration party.

WHY AL FRANKEN IS LOOKING IFFY ON GUN CONTROL: Minnesotans Buying Guns In Record Numbers. “Across the country, firearms industry analysts point to soaring numbers — including first-time gun buyers now making up a quarter of all sales and nearly 75 percent of gun retailers reporting sales boosts over last year. Minnesotans are riding that same wave, prompting more than 25,000 law enforcement queries tied to permit applications since Dec. 18. That’s more than double the 10,681 checks run for permits during the same period a year ago. . . . Those burgeoning numbers worry gun control advocates, who are puzzled that the reaction to the Newtown tragedy has been this massive firearms buildup.”

They don’t understand things very well, do they? But then, the gun-control movement is a bunch of old, out-of-touch white people, clinging to the politics of the last century.

POINTS AND FIGURES: The Debt Crisis. “America is on a bullet train to debt hell. The numbers speak for themselves.”

BAYLEN LINNEKIN: The FDA’s Pathetic Food Safety Proposal: Federal regulators want to impose costly new rules that won’t make our food any safer.

The new rules would cost about half a billion dollars per year. The cost of FSMA will be borne by farmers and food producers of all sizes. The FDA estimates the FSMA will cost America’s small farms about $13,000 each per year. Larger farms—much more capable of bearing the costs—will be out about $30,000 per year. Other food producers are likely to face varying fees. . . . In truth, the law’s real impact on food safety will be minimal.

The FSMA would permit the FDA to hire about 2,000 new food-safety inspectors in order to increase the frequency of food-safety inspections. Specifically, the proposed rules would require that “[a]ll high-risk domestic facilities must be inspected within five years of enactment and no less than every three years, thereafter.” Given that the FSMA rules are just now open to public comment and won’t be final for another year or two, this translates into a likely total of exactly two inspections of what the FDA refers to as the most “high-risk domestic facilities” over the next decade.

How’s that for impact?

Even if these inspections were to take place more than once in a blue moon, just how effective at preventing foodborne illness are FDA inspections? Not very.

Shocking.

BILL QUICK: “Any parent who sends their kids to public schools should understand that they are sanctioning the long term abuse of their own child. Sit them down in front of a computer screen loaded up with Khan Academy courses. They’ll end up healthier, happier, better adjusted, better educated, and far, far more safe. Nobody ever got an STD, bullied, or shot through an online educational course. And no kid ever got harmed by predatory edu-bots that way, either.”

How many parents have to start thinking this way before the K-12 Implosion becomes a reality?

By the way, that book is now available on Kindle, too.

INGRATITUDE: George Takei does not care much for William Shatner.

12-YEAR-OLD GIRL SHOOTS HOME INTRUDER: “Deputies say the girl was home alone when a man she’d never seen before, rang the front doorbell. They say when no one answered the door, the man went around to the back of the house and kicked a door open. That’s when authorities say, the girl grabbed a gun and hid in a bathroom closet. . . . Under sheriff Ken Golden says the girl is a hero and that under the circumstances, she did everything right to protect herself.”

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Thousands of 2nd Amendment Supporters Rally in Albany. If they’re smart, they’ll follow this up with personal visits to their legislators. That’s more effective, generally, than a rally, though rallies do help remind people that there’s a dispute here.

UPDATE: Here are pictures of rallies around the country. And here’s a report from Boston.

BRAIN SCIENCE: Why do we remember more from young adulthood than from any other time of our lives?

MICHELLE CATALANO: MySpace Attempts to Rise from the Ashes. The Insta-Daughter loved the old MySpace because you could customize the page — she learned CSS in 6th grade as a result. She finds Facebook utterly dull.

FIGHTING THE POWER: Kim Dotcom: the internet cult hero spoiling for a fight with US authorities.

After spending almost a month in prison in early 2012, Dotcom and his co-accused were awarded bail – the first of a series of court victories that have left the prosecution case looking increasingly wobbly. With any hearing for extradition to the US to face criminal copyright charges having been pushed back, it is hard not to see the extravagant unveiling of the new site as a two-finger gesture aimed at US authorities. . . .

The series of setbacks to the prosecution case has prompted speculation that the extradition hearing itself may never be heard – a scenario that Dotcom, who turns 39 next week, says he would regret. “We want to expose what has happened here. We have a lot of information that shows the political interference. We feel that what happened here was manufactured to destroy Megaupload, and we want to show that. . . . I have a much better understanding now of how the US government operates and how much spying is actually going on, how much privacy intrusion is the reality today.”

Overreaching at the DOJ seems to be producing some blowback.

FREE ON KINDLE, TODAY AND TOMORROW: A Different View: Travels with Team Easy, Iraq 2007. By Blake Powers, with a foreword by Matt Burden, and an introduction by J.D. Johannes.

HOW YOU CAN save $1000 this year.

THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE MY COLUMN FOR NEW YEAR’S DAY: John Tierney On Procrastination.

ALGERIA: Crisis Over, Hostages Dead.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: $16 trillion in debt but still no Democrat budget for 1,361 days.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: GAO: IRS service bad–and getting worse. “Fewer taxpayers are getting through on the Internal Revenue Service hotline, th