FEELING THE HOPE AND CHANGE: Iran says Obama’s offer to talk shows US failure. Wait, I thought only an evil neocon would have suggested this reaction . . . .

TOM MAGUIRE ON TOM DASCHLE’S TAX PROBLEMS: “Daschle supported Obama, eventually opposed the war after falling victim to Bush’s lies in 2002, and has been reliably pro-choice and in favor of legislating higher taxes on high earners (despite a more flexible attitude about actually paying them), so I assume he will get a pass on this. Obviously, if he were a greedy Republican this would be disqualifying.”

And evidence of the hypocrisy and dishonesty of his entire party!

LIST: The 100 Greatest Romantic Albums of All Time. Okay, Marvin Gaye is obligatory, and I was glad to see Thievery Corporation — but The Carpenters?

AMY ALKON: What’s wrong with looking beautiful? Nothing, it just attracts a certain amount of leveling behavior from those who aren’t . . . .

STATE DEPARTMENT PRESS CONFERENCE: A bad review.

DAN RIEHL ON THE G.O.P.: Some Old Dogs Have No Tricks.

FOR C.A.I.R., “major damage control.”

OUTRAGE: Obama and FEMA leave Americans to die in Kentucky. Media firestorm in . . . well, never.

Plus, “Obama dozed, people froze.” And Juliette Ochieng emails: “President Obama doesn’t care about white people…and neither do the MSM.” Well, that wouldn’t fit the narrative.

EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY: Not as reliable as some suppose?

THE LATEST CONSUMER REPORTS has a big section on recommended TVs that makes me think two things: (1) I wish everything got better and cheaper as fast as electronics do; and (2) brand-dominance seems to be the thing of the past.

This time around, Samsung leads in most categories. Sorry, Sony and JVC! Plus, things are so much cheaper. The top-rated 58″ plasma TV is cheaper than my 46″ LCD JVC was a couple of years ago. And the 50″ version — also top-rated in its category — is absurdly cheaper.

Likewise in LCD TVs, the top-rated 52″ (as big as they get), also by Samsung, is much cheaper, and probably better, than my JVC 46″. Are these ratings reliable? I think so. The JVC that I own was their top choice when I bought it, and it did look better than the other sets I compared it to. And we have this relatively cheap Panasonic (42″ and under $700) in our bedroom, and it’s their top set in its category and I think the picture is great. If only, say, medical care were improving as fast. Or politicians . . . .

UPDATE: Yes, I know LCD TVs get bigger than 52″. (Here’s a 108″ model!) That’s just as big as the ratings went.

OBAMA’S TROUBLE GETTING REPUBLICAN VOTES:

It was not for lack of effort on the part of the new president. Obama went to the Capitol to visit Republican as well as Democratic lawmakers, and he encouraged the Democratic draftsmen to scrap a couple of egregiously irrelevant spending programs they had penciled into the bill. But the complaint I heard from Republicans was that Pelosi and her lieutenants, committee chairmen Charlie Rangel and David Obey, had used the tight timetable and their control of legislative procedures to block virtually all efforts to open the bill to compromise.

Obey and Rangel say that’s not the case, but I’m skeptical even if David Broder is not.

HOPE AND CHANGE: Obama praises Iraqis on provincial elections.

“TANGIBLE PROOF” that “the news is propaganda?”

OBAMA’S PLAN HAS ALREADY BOOSTED TAX COLLECTIONS!

In office less than two weeks, President Barack Obama has already increased tax receipts at the U.S. Treasury with an innovative plan to get tax-dodgers to pay up, in full, immediately.

“The president’s plan is simple but ingenious,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, “He targets wealthy individuals who filed inaccurate tax forms, cheating the government out of tens of thousands of dollars. Then he just nominates them for cabinet positions. They suddenly see the error of their ways, and they cut checks for the full amount owed, plus interest.”

Now that really is a new kind of politics!

UPDATE: Jim Treacher emails: “Has David Corn sneered about Joe the Plumber’s taxes lately?”

MORE MEDIA RETRENCHMENT: L.A. Times to cut 300 more jobs.

ALREADY? Love affair between Canada and President Obama appears to be coming to an end. “The honeymoon appears to be over between Canada and newly elected U.S. President Barack Obama, as Obama’s first foreign visit to Ottawa in February will likely focus on a protectionist bill now before Congress. The $820 billion American economic stimulus package will have some strings attached. The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation that includes a provision barring foreign iron and steel for infrastructure projects.”

OUCH: “Tom Daschle never met a tax hike he didn’t like for us. But why the hell can’t he pay his own taxes?”

WHERE’S FEMA? Nearly 1M without power 5 days after ice storm. “Local officials grew angrier at what they said was a lack of help from the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

Obama’s turning up the thermostat, and Taylor Marsh is already snarking: “Well, this certainly seems fitting in the afterglow of Republican stiffing the new, popular President, all the while people are freezing because of a failed power grid. Nope, can’t spend money on that.”

UPDATE: Bill Quick:

“Where’s FEMA?” is not the appropriate question. The appropriate question is, “Where is the mainstream media, screaming in one united voice, that the absence of FEMA demonstrates the utter fecklessness and failure of the current President and all his policies?”

Plus his barely concealed racism, of course.

Yeah, not seeing much of that.

MURTHA UPDATE: Federal raid on plant has residents worried. “Much of the speculation centers on the company’s multi-million dollar federal defense contracts, among the hundreds of millions steered into this region by its powerful congressman, John P. Murtha, a Democrat from neighboring Johnstown. Kuchera began as a modest, computer-based business in 1985 and has since grown into a major contractor that does work on weapon guidance systems and recently developed a bomb-searching robot for the defense department.”

AZIZ POONAWALLA: Dump Daschle – Howard Dean for Health and Human Services.

ILYA SOMIN: Why the size of government matters:

In his inaugural address, President Obama said that “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” This is a commonly heard argument in response to concerns about the growth of government. Who could possibly be against government when it “works”? Why not instead consider each proposed expansion of the state on a case by case basis, supporting those that “work” and opposing any that don’t?

Taken seriously, this argument leads to the rejection of any systematic constraints on government power. Why should we have a general presumption against government regulation of speech or religion? Why not instead support censorship when it “works” by improving the marketplace of ideas, and oppose it when it doesn’t? Think of all the misleading speech and religious charlatans that government regulation could potentially save us from! The answer, of course, is that government regulation of speech and religion has systematic dangers that are not unique to any one particular regulation. Given those systematic flaws, it makes sense to have a general presumption against it.

The same holds true for government intervention more generally, including in the economy. It too has systematic flaws that justify a presumption against it. Three of those flaws are particularly relevant to current policy debates.

Read the whole thing.

A LOOK AT geoengineering techniques for climate change.

IN THE MAIL: By Larry Niven et al., — mostly the et al. — Man-Kzin Wars XII. The Kzinti are very interesting aliens, and Larry Niven has done better than most in creating a shared universe where other writers can do interesting work.

TIGERHAWK: Tom Daschle’s tax fraud. “There is no ambiguity in the law, or no theory that he did not know that he owed the money. It is obviously an in-kind payment for services. Of course he knew he owed the taxes. Finally, there is no tedious extra bureaucratic obstacle to paying this tax. You just drop a number right on to the 1040. You know, that document that you signed under penalty of perjury.”

Really, I’m starting to wonder if anybody in this crew is paying all their taxes.

BITES FROM THE APPLE: A roundup of news from the Apple Empire. Including a look at the new iLife ’09.