I’m not into twittering — but this might be a good use for it.

The administration needs a new surgeon general. “Several other candidates are now under serious consideration, including Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, according to people who have been briefed on the situation.” Now if that’s not the perfect preparation for the Obama administration I don’t know what is.

Is all the president’s data on health care as junky as his bankruptcy statistic? Let’s hope not.

Howard Kurtz asks if the Obama adminstration got caught in the Rush Limbaugh gambit with its cynicism and hypocrisy showing.

Pat Toomey is in the Pennsylvania senate race, it is reported. It is debatable whether he or Arlen Specter would have a better chance to hold the seat but the fact of a primary challenge is bringing a smile to the faces of conservatives. Sill, is there really any sign Specter cares about conservative opinion?

“Every time the government tries to do something they make things worse,” says Peter Schiff.

Fred Barnes is onto the scam: “Given the moderate-to-conservative viewpoint of voters, Obama has a motive in pushing to have his uniformly liberal agenda approved by Congress as rapidly as possible–before voters catch on to the fact it’s not what they voted for.”

Or to put it differently, the Wall Street Journal editors conclude that “economies don’t spiral down forever without a reason and without policy encouragement. What’s worrying about the plunge in equities since January 2, and especially in the last week since Mr. Obama released his radical budget, is that it has come amid the unveiling of the President’s policy agenda. Equity prices have reacted to those proposals by signaling that they expect a much deeper and longer recession.”

Max Baucus discovers we are not Canada. Perhaps he could explain to the president we are not Western Europe.

Would card check cost jobs? “For every three percentage points gained in union membership through card checks and mandatory arbitration, the following year’s unemployment rate is predicted to increase by one percentage point and job creation is predicted to fall by around 1.5 million jobs.”

But don’t take that economist’s word for it. Larry Summers knows: “High union wages that exceed the competitive market rate are likely to cause job losses in the unionized sector of the economy.”

It’s about time: “Top General Motors Corp. executives are more open to a speedy bankruptcy reorganization financed by the government, pushing aside earlier concern that such a move would scare away so many customers the company wouldn’t survive, said a person familiar with the matter.”

Did Obama cause the stock crash? A lot of business people think “the honeymoon is over”: “[A]mong investors, fairly or unfairly, there is griping that the new Obama Administration is at least partly to blame for the recent slide in stocks. Since Nov. 4, Election Day, the broad Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index is off about 25%, and since Jan. 20, when Obama took office, the “500” is down 15%.  . . Obama and Geithner missed the chance—if they ever had such an opportunity—to “wow” the market and help restore some market confidence early in his Administration.”

Dumping the gaffe-prone Virginia state GOP chair would probably be a welcome development for the Republican gubernatorial candidate.

When Republicans stand firm they can at least delay bad things from happening: “Senate Republicans blocked a $410 billion omnibus spending measure on Thursday night, forcing Congressional Democrats to prepare a stop-gap budget resolution to keep the federal government from shutting down. The delay of the bill was a setback for the Obama administration and a striking, if temporary, victory for critics of so-called earmark spending initiatives, who had criticized the bill as bloated with wasteful expenditures.”

Richard Just asks an excellent question: why aren’t Stephen Walt and his ilk more upset about Chas Freeman’s “views on how authoritarian governments should treat their own people–a topic they don’t seem to want to engage”?

Rich Lowry pens a devastating column on Freeman. Apparently Democrats have stopped caring about the politicization of intelligence.

Charles Krauthammer calls Obama on the bait-and-switch: “Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy — worthy and weighty as they may be — are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.” Actually the proposals not only aren’t the cure, the taxes and regulatory regime which accompany these plans are likely to make things worse.