Wildly inaccurate statements from news commentators, financial analysts, politicians and even administration officials have most people believing that if Congress does not increase the debt limit in March, the U.S. government will default on its debt obligations, thus ending the government's ability to borrow. Nonsense.

The big-government crowd claims huge hardships would result from the mandatory spending reductions. Again, nonsense. Spending would only have to be reduced to roughly the 2006 level to avoid an ongoing deficit.

Another widespread myth is that if the government reduces its spending, that will cost jobs.  The fact is that the percentage of adults in the labor force has fallen to its lowest level in three decades even as the government has grown by a quarter in relative size in the past three years.

The destructive myth persists that if only we could get the rich to cease engaging in tax avoidance, which is legal, and stop tax evasion, which is illegal, government would have adequate revenue. The fact is that rich people already pay most of the taxes.

To give the impression they’re on top of things, President Obama and his aides have spoken out frequently during the crisis in Egypt.  But the many shifts in their position are alienating both supporters of the regime and those who are protesting it.

“The official U.S. position is that (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak needs to go immediately, he needs to stay indefinitely, he needs to stay for a bit and then go, he needs to stay for a bit longer and then go sooner rather than later, unless he decides to stay until September,” summarized humorist Mark Steyn.

“The improvisational -- critics say closer to schizophrenic -- nature of U.S. diplomacy during the crisis leaves the administration in the unwelcome position of having to make amends with whichever side emerges from the Egyptian tumult as the governing power,” wrote Ben Smith in the Webzine Politico.  “The anti-Mubarak forces clearly will wonder whether the White House ever had their back -- but Mubarak and those close to him also will question whether Washington was ready to throw him over the side.”

Mr. Obama appears to have backed away from his demand that Mr. Mubarak resign “yesterday” because under the Egyptian constitution, he would be succeeded not by Vice President Omar Suleiman, the administration’s preference, but by the Speaker of the House, and that new presidential elections must be held within 60 days, a timetable that would give the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood a big advantage.

I don’t expect the president or his aides to have the details of the Egyptian constitution at their fingertips.  I do expect them to familiarize themselves with it before they pop off in public.

TTP Member, Ella forwarded this from Michael Pack (Archangel):   "My wife was just diagnosed with cancer.  We don't have all the tests done yet, but the doc feels very strongly about her prospects.  We have a 3 1/2 yr old boy, and a 4mo old daughter.

The bottom line is, we will take all the prayers we can get." Her name is Stacey Pack.

Let's take a minute to ask God's intercession for Stacey and her family.

We don’t know yet who will emerge as winners from the turmoil in the Middle East.  But it’s pretty clear who is the biggest loser.

“The White House has not looked weaker and more indecisive in decades,” said Sultan al Qassemi, a columnist for a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates.

“Nobody’s listening to America anymore,” Rami Khouri, director of the Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut told the Washington Post.  “It’s become irrelevant.”

The decline of Western influence is a product of bad leadership, wrote Ari Shavat in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

“How can it be that Bush’s America understood the problem of repression in the Arab world, but Obama’s America ignored it until last week?” he asked.  “How can it be that in May, 2009, Hosni Mubarak was an esteemed president who Barack Obama respected, and in January 2011 Mubarak is a dictator whom even Obama is casting aside?”

So what’s that got to do with the price of wheat?

Quite a lot...if the topic is unrest in the Middle East.

The price of wheat has nearly doubled in the last year. Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat.  For Egyptians -- half of whom live on less than $2 a day -- that can be the difference between feeding your family and starving.

Egyptians have known only authoritarian governments.  But starvation can make political arrangements long tolerated seem intolerable.

President Barack Obama belatedly has concluded a lack of democracy is the source of instability in Egypt. 

He overstates enthusiasm for democracy.  The middle class in Egypt is very small.  There are more than three times as many illiterates as there are college graduates.

A Pew poll released Dec. 2 indicates few Egyptians share the outlook of the middle class.  Given a choice between “Islamists” and “modernizers,” 59 percent preferred the Islamists, only 27 percent the modernizers.

“A population that was convinced just two months ago that sharks in the Red Sea were implanted by the Israeli Intelligence Services is hardly at a stage of creating a liberal democracy in Egypt,” Egyptian student Sam Tadros said in an email to Clarice Feldman of the American Thinker.