I've been reading quite a lot lately. Here is the latest take from my trawling:

Victor Davis Hanson on our current state of affairs:

You see, I think the point was never much to build more bike paths on borrowed money or just bail out GM, but rather more to reengineer the tax code, as part of a grander vision of creating a new equality of result in America.

Mark Steyn, opining on ditto:

According to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, we only have 96 months left to save the planet. I'm impressed. 96 months. Not 95. Not 97. July 2017.

I had a similar thought: pretty damned precise for a twit without an education in science or engineering or anything else applicable to the matter at hand. More:

If you were a 19th-century Russian peasant and you got to Ellis Island, you'd be living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, but your kids would get an education and move uptown, and your grandkids would be doctors and accountants in Westchester County. And your great-grandchild would be a Harvard-educated environmental activist demanding an end to all this electricity and indoor toilets.

And last but best, Keith Hennessey's brutal fisking of Our President's op ed in the Washington Post. Ergo:

Pres. Obama: "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was not expected to restore the economy to full health on its own but to provide the boost necessary to stop the free fall. So far, it has done that."

2.6 million fewer Americans are employed now than when the President took office, and the unemployment rate is 9.5% and climbing. Job loss in June was greater than in May. The good scenario is one in which we continue to lose jobs for "only" another six months. Please prove that the stimulus is working. To use the Administration's misleading metric, how many jobs have been "saved or created" so far?

Pres.Obama: "It was, from the start, a two-year program, and it will steadily save and create jobs as it ramps up over this summer and fall."

Uh-oh. Why are the verbs now in the future tense? And what happened to the specific and oft-repeated prediction of 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year? Those are important language changes, along with the implicit admission that the stimulus has not yet "ramped up."

Go read all 3 articles. More understanding of the present crisis is necessary. We are not entering anything like a recovery at this point. We may be 6 months off; we may be 18 months off. We may be looking at 2009 as pretty tall cotton come 2012 or '13. We just don't know. But real reasons for optimism are in very short supply lately. Unless you are a statist.

Which brings us to this: from Philladelphia, on Rand, von Hayek and Our Ruling Class:

...there is a growing disconnect between the country's political class and its citizens. It was manifestly on display last month when the House approved the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, which in its final form was longer than Atlas Shrugged and which none of the members voting on it had read.

That the free citizens of a free country would be served so cavalierly by their elected representatives is the sort of thing any good novelist would hesitate to invent, for fear it would seem too implausible.

Woe.