As the mid-Atlantic stocks up on supplies to prepare for the coming storm, let's stock up on Quotes of the Day (So Far!). The first is from James M. Buchanan:

Unfortunately, economists, generally, failed to understand that aggregate variables that may be measured with tolerable accuracy ex post may not be variables subject to control, directly or even indirectly. The fundamental misconception here lies in the understanding of what ‘the economy’ is. The ‘economic problem’ is not (despite Lionel Robbins) an engineering problem that may be defined simply as the allocation of scarce resources among alternative uses. The economy, in some inclusive definitional sense, is perhaps best described as an order that consists of an interlinked set of exchanges, simple and complex, from which outcomes emerge that may in some respects be meaningfully measured but that cannot be chosen, and thereby controlled, by concentrated decision takers.

There's much more at the link. (And a tip of the hat to Tyler Cowen.)

Number two is from Yuval Levin:

The difference between the Left and the Right is not a difference of degree, but of direction, and each side tends to think that moving even a little in the wrong direction is worse than doing nothing. That’s why a compromise won’t be so easy.

The larger public, I think, is not so tied to either direction, but is opposed to doing anything huge. That’s a big part of what the Democrats have done wrong this year: They have proposed too much. Whichever side is smart enough to propose some modest and sensible incremental steps in its preferred direction will have far better luck with the public. Conservatives would be wise to do so in a serious and concerted way before liberals realize that it’s time to employ some different means toward their same misguided end.

"Modest and sensible incremental steps" like those found in the small bill, for example.

Last week, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dennis Blair presented the “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community” to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. While the report notes that Venezuela is “struggling” to deal with the post-2008 drop in oil prices and with production declines, it also outlines a variety of ways in which Hugo Chávez remains a very real threat to U.S. interests in Latin America and beyond.

Start with Iran. The mullahs have identified oil-rich Venezuela as a potential shield against the impact of international energy sanctions. Even if the U.S. and other Western powers further restricted Iran’s access to gasoline, Venezuela (and China) could help soften the blow. As U.S. policymakers evaluate the effectiveness of gasoline sanctions, they must remember that Tehran and Caracas have formed an increasingly close alliance. This past June, after Iran’s stolen election, while government thugs were murdering student demonstrators in the streets, Chávez congratulated Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his “very big and important victory.”

NYT: "Obama Urges Setting Aside 'Petty Politics.'"

CBS: "Robert Gibbs Scrawls Notes on Hand, Mocking Sarah Palin (Video)."

Both headlines came from the same press briefing. What am I missing here?

Politico's Jonathan Martin has the goods on a new poll of Alabama Republicans that shows Mike Huckabee leading likely contenders for the 2012 GOP nomination:

Thirty-three percent of Alabama Republicans polled support the former Arkansas governor for the 2012 presidential nomination, while 23 percent said they would back Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential nominee. The next closest Republican to Huckabee and Palin is former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who takes 12 percent of the vote.

Clearly the scandal over Huckabee's commutation of cop-killer Maurice Clemmons was not enough to sever the governor's gut connection with grassroots Republican voters.

Here's a headline that begs for a "reset" joke:

Moscow claims missile shield is aimed at Russia.

Russia's top general said on Tuesday that U.S. missile defense plans were directed against his country, and differences over the issue were holding up an arms treaty with Washington, Russian news agencies reported.

A memo being passed around by Capitol Hill Republicans:

Sure it's a little-known holiday, but it is as intensely celebrated in Matt Labash's office as National Quilting Day or Wear Too Much Axe Body Spray Day. And, by Matt Labash's office, I mean the inexorably Phoenix-scented, desk-shaped pile of scrap printer paper and Gary Hart memorabilia under which he burrows to write for The Weekly Standard, not the whole Weekly Standard office.

On Christmas Day 2009, the Chinese regime sentenced writer and dissident Liu Xiaobo to 11 years in prison for "incitement to subvert state power."  His crime was co-authoring and circulating on-line a manifesto for democratic change in China called Charter 08, an intentional homage to the Czech dissident movement's Charter 77.  Charter 08 got Mr. Liu into trouble because it challenged the legitimacy of one-party rule by the Chinese Communist Party.

Michelle Obama recently kicked up a mild fuss by discussing her children while talking about childhood obesity. Per ABC News, Obama said at an event kicking off her childhood obesity awareness campaign: "I didn't see the changes. And that's also part of the problem, or part of the challenge.

Iran's Supreme Leader raised some eyebrows yesterday, claiming that Tehran would deliver a "punch" that would leave Western powers "stunned."

Unlikely. Here's why:

In a White House briefing where the president showed up (because Howard Kurtz wrote a column) to talk about his bipartisan health-care summit and getting beyond politics to solve problems, the White House press secretary used the dumbest political story of the week to take a shot at a former governor and Fox News Contributor from the podium.

As if there isn't enough for the French to worry about these days: climate change, the global financial crisis, the World Cup, farm subsidies, Cannes, terrorism. But now they are facing a threat to that which is most sacred—their language. According to the Financial Times, "Senior French officials are mounting a rearguard action to defend the use of French at the UN and other international institutions as a language of diplomacy, in the face of the inexorable rise of English." It seems the reaction was "partly prompted by the appointment of Britain’s Lady Ashton to head the European Union’s foreign policy in November."

It was not too long ago that Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer took to the USA Today op-ed page to accuse Obamacare opponents of being "un-American," and today President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan lashes out on that same page at critics of the White House: "too many in Washington are now misrepresenting the facts to score political points, instead of coming to

As Republican leaders and the White House haggle over the details of the February 25 health care summit, conservatives have an opportunity to highlight the ideas they think could improve the health care marketplace while lowering costs, increasing the number of insured, and protecting what Americans like best about their health care system. Many of those ideas are included in Jeffrey Anderson's "small bill" proposal for health care reform. Read it!

The Obama White House is apparently very serious about learning absolutely nothing from Massachusetts or the public's rapidly dwindling faith in Washington to solve any problem.

When Republican leaders Eric Cantor and John Boehner sent a letter looking for assurances that they and their ideas might be considered at Obama's proposed bipartisan health-care forum, they got this response:

Two recent polls show former U.S. Representative Tom Campbell, who recently entered the California Republican primary for a U.S. Senate nomination, with a lead over his Republican opponents Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore. While the resume on his website shows a very impressive candidate, Campbell has a long troubling record as an anti-Israel public official. Here are some examples from the record that Campbell built up over a decade in the House (Jennifer Rubin helps chronicle it here): 

Andrew Malcolm writes:

Many political observers are coming to see that the ex-state senator from the South Side is running his federal administration in Washington much the way they run things back home: with a small....

...claque of clout-laden people from the same school who learned their political trade back in the nation's No. 3 city, named for an Indian word for a smelly wild onion.

That style is tough, focused, immune to any distractions but cosmetic niceties. And did we mention tough. A portly, veteran Chicago alderman once confided only about 40% jokingly, that he had taken up jogging to lose weight but quickly gave it up as boring because "you can't knock anyone down." That's politics the Chicago way.

Obama and his top advisers Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, and David Axelrod all hail from the Chicago school. Press secretary Robert Gibbs is an Alabaman who worked for North Carolinian Democrats, but he's adapted to the Chicago method with ease. Together, this band of operatives has not deviated from the themes and goals of Obama's 2008 campaign. They do not admit errors of substance. Faced with a troublesome midterm election, Obama did not search out new figures and guides for his party. He reached back to his 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe.

Check out this nifty time-lapse movie of a teddy bear being buried under Snowpocalypse, round one:

Here's hoping the bear is rescued before round two begins later today.

A tip of the hat to DCist, incidentally.

Mark Halperin says David Brooks's column today "cracks the code of the Obama White House."

What does the decrypt reveal? Here's what:

The atmosphere in the White House appears surprisingly tranquil. Emanuel is serving as a lighting rod for the president but remains crisply confident in his role as chief of staff. It’s true that several top administration officials did not want to attempt comprehensive health care reform this year. But they are not opening recrimination campaigns. It’s no secret that many think the president needs to be more assertive with Congress, yet administration officials still talk about Obama in awestruck tones, even in private.

Some would say the administration is underreacting to the incredible shift in the public mood. Some would say they need more voices from the great unwashed. But no one could accuse them of panicking, or of scrambling about incoherently. In their first winter of discontent, they are offering continuity and comity. Whatever their relations with the country might be, inside they seem unruffled. The bonds of association, from the top down, seem healthy — especially for a bunch of Democrats.

Hence Obama's decision to re-litigate health care reform even though public opposition brought his plan to a standstill in Congress; even though he said in the State of the Union that his "number one focus" was jobs; even though his approval ratings began falling precipitously at the moment when health care took center stage in the national debate. His post-State of the Union bounce is gone: Marist pegs Obama's job approval at 47 percent. Rasmussen also has it at 47 percent.

The future of journalism? Laid-off Washington Times sports reporter asks for cash to cover Nats.

While everyone seems to be all atwitter (quite literally) about Sarah Palin's hinting that she will run in 2012 "if I believe that that is the right thing to do for our country," it is worth noting the only actual name she mentioned in her Fox News Sunday interview last Sunday—Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. As she told Chris Wallace,

Last week was a big one for nuclear news.  First, the Obama administration submitted its proposed budget for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (that’s the agency that, among other things, maintains our warheads).  Second, an unnamed administration official announced an “agreement in principle” with the Russians for the START follow-on treaty. 

These two things are connected beyond the obvious point of contact.  The former is meant to be a down payment on the latter.  The administration has been put on notice that it faces substantial opposition in the Senate, not only to the ratification of this new treaty (whatever it ends up being called), but to its other arms control priorities as well.  The price, say a coalition of 41 mostly (but not entirely) Republican senators, is a serious commitment to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal. 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t claim to have developed an economic stimulus plan of his own. But he does favor a cluster of proposals that, when packaged together, are a simple, sensible program for rejuvenating the economy.

I take the liberty of dubbing it the McConnell Plan (without asking the Republican leader’s approval). If enacted, the plan would do a great deal more to boost the economy and increase employment than the “jobs bill” that President Obama and congressional Democrats are cooking up.

Arnold Kling:

My point here is not to champion Republicans. It is not to champion democracy. My point is that the ones throwing the temper tantrum right now are the Progressives. They think that the 2008 election gave them the right to operate like China's autocracy, and they are lashing out hysterically at those they perceive as preventing them from doing so. On the one hand, the villains are a small minority in the Senate. Or maybe the villains are the incoherent majority of the people.

The important point is that Progressives are never wrong. Top-down reform is the only way to fix the health care system. Anthropogenic global warming is scientifically proven, and its solution requires strenuous exercise of political control over individual behavior. Deficit spending is necessary and sufficient to create jobs. Technocrats can make banks too regulated to fail. Markets without technocratic control are like adolescents without adult supervision. Individual happiness can be improved by political authorities using scientific knowledge. Concentrated political power is the wave of the future, and it is good.

I am not a populist. I fear the mob. But how can I fear the Progressives any less?

Also read Gerard Alexander on liberal condescension. It occurs to me that American liberals are re-learning the lesson of the old left-wing chant: The people united can never be defeated. And it's driving them up a wall.

Is NOW's president similarly outraged by Snickers' 'celebration' of 'violence against women'?

Rachel Abrams launches a must-read blog (Don't worry! She'll still be contributing here too.)