"A year after the revolution, many Egyptians — already suffering under the weight of a wretched economy — see an undemocratic society where the military and Islamic ideologues are hoarding power while changing nothing. Though some are pleased that a form of law shaped by the Quran is coming to Egypt, others wonder whether they have swapped one corrupt and suppressing dictatorship for another."

"The only thing that is going to stop the Iranians is the fear of a military attack. The U.S. should be helping the Israelis deter Iran’s further nuclear advance by helping them to scare the Iranians into thinking that an attack is coming. Instead, the Obama administration is doing everything possible to telegraph to Iran that we’re terrified of a conflict and are doing everything to prevent it. That’s exactly the same as inviting the Iranians to continue their pursuit of nuclear weapons. If there is an explanation for this, other than incompetence, I would love to know it."

"In 2010, when all this lay hazily in the future, the sheer arrogance of Obamacare energized a popular resistance powerful enough to deliver an electoral shellacking to Obama. Yet two years later, as the consequences of that overreach materialize before our eyes, the issue is fading. This constitutes a huge failing of the opposition party whose responsibility it is to make the opposition argument.

"Every presidential challenger says that he will repeal Obamacare on Day One. Well, yes. But is any of them making the case for why?"

"'Contempt of Congress' is a pretty strong term, and one with tangible legal consequences, but how else to describe Attorney General Eric Holder’s continuing obstructionism in the burgeoning Fast and Furious scandal? ...   

"For months now, Holder has been dodging, obfuscating, withholding evidence and outright lying in his attempt to evade responsibility for the deadly program that has cost the lives of two federal agents and countless Mexican nationals. 

"Contempt of Congress? Contempt for the American people is more like it."

"The Justice Department, beating fierce competition from the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security and others, has won this year’s coveted Rosemary Award, named for President Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods, who somehow erased 18 1/2 minutes of a crucial Watergate tape. 

"The seventh annual award, presented by the George Washington University-based National Security Archive, honors the agency that has done the very most in the last year to enhance government secrecy and keep the public in the dark."

"President Obama’s fourth budget promises a fourth straight year of trillion-dollar deficits, a fourth straight year of masking new spending with lame gimmickry, and a fourth straight year of asking Congress to yoke the American people with a historically massive tax hike. It is a budget with all the courage and resolve of an intentional walk, and just in time for spring training. 

"It is a budget that spends a staggering $47 trillion over ten years and capitulates to the inevitability of a national debt larger than the national economy, assuring that by 2022 our interest payments alone will reach $1 trillion a year. It is a budget that hikes income, estate, and other taxes by $1.9 trillion over ten years, and uses that revenue not to reduce the deficit or shore up our existing entitlement commitments but on a raft of new stimuli that are as substantively dubious as they are politically opportunistic. 

"It is a budget that claims $4 trillion in deficit reduction through a series of cheap tricks that don’t stand up to even the gentlest of scrutiny. ... "

"The bottom line is simple. When people get rich by providing goods and services in a competitive market, that’s capitalism. When they get rich because of subsidies, bailouts, preferences, and handouts provided by the ruling class, that’s Argentina. 

"I have no idea whether Buffett is corrupt, but I know he is benefiting from a corrupt system. So it’s understandable that people like me suspect that his endorsement of higher taxes is not because of a mistaken view of fiscal policy, but rather because he wants to do something nice for the politicians who rig the rules to give him more wealth."

"Someone needs to ask Mr. Obama how an increasingly impoverished nation, limping along on food stamps and housing subsidies, is going to pay for the existing beneficiaries, along with 77 million Baby Boomers set to retire in the next 25 years. A president who has impaired the vibrancy of the private sector so badly has long since forfeited the moral high ground."

"The political furor over President Obama's birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn't be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty. ... 

"The White House is now trying to cauterize the political damage and saying it is open to some 'compromise' on its own contraception decision. But the rule is already final. HHS tried to sell it as a compromise when it was announced, and in any case HHS would revive this coercion whenever it is politically convenient some time in Mr. Obama's second term. Religious liberty won't be protected from the entitlement state until ObamaCare is repealed."

"DENVER—Rick Santorum jolted the Republican presidential race Tuesday with a three-state sweep of nominating contests in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota, puncturing Mitt Romney's claim to be the unstoppable front-runner. 

"Mr. Santorum's three victories—one in the Mountain West and two in the Midwest—give his campaign a much-needed burst of momentum while stirring doubt about Mr. Romney's abilities to woo conservatives to his side in important electoral swing states such as Missouri and Colorado. ..."