It’s not often (well, ever) that a Friday Link Wrap-up would have breaking news, but as I type this, Hosni Mubarak has stepped down as President and put the military in charge, not his recently-named VP. This is a historic day for Egypt, as it now has its first living ex-President. Barry Rubin runs down the "now what?" scenarios.

Some town in the US, including one suburb of Atlanta, have a law requiring each household to own a gun. These towns have much lower crime rates than their neighbors. But with the cases going through the courts on the constitutionality of the ObamaCare individual mandate to buy health insurance, and with South Dakota considering a bill requiring gun ownership, Glenn Reynolds goes over the major differences between the two.

Reaganomics vs Obamanomics and getting us out of a recession.

In his first speech as Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron argued that a shared national identity prevents extremism more so than multiculturalism, and indeed, the latter may encourage it. If you have no connection to your country, you have no problem burning it.

In more Civil Discourse Watch, here’s folks on the Left calling for riots, or at least pointing to rioting as a good example.

The failure of the repeal of ObamaCare can be laid at Democrats feet. We’ll see how well that works for them in 2012. (Didn’t work so well in 2010.)

In which country in the Middle East do Arabs have the greatest civil liberties? Click here to find out.

We keep hearing this refrain.

Shortly after taking office, President Obama traveled to Cairo to declare a new day in U.S. relations with the Muslim world – saying there was "no straight line" to building democratic societies in the Middle East.

The June 2009 address was in part intended to show a clean break from a George W. Bush-era "freedom agenda" of promoting electoral democracies across the region. Yet Obama now finds himself forced to move much closer to that world view as he escalates pressure on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to make immediate changes.

Regarding national defense and now foreign policy, Dubya had it right. Slowly, but too slowly, Obama is realizing this.

Law enforcement could have stopped the Fort Hood shooting by Major Hasan if political correctness hadn’t prevented them.

And finally, some bad investments. Click for a larger version.

Another Middle East dictator long-time ruler is stepping down.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh says he will not seek another term after three decades in power. This comes as violence and protests continue in Egypt, even after the country’s President Mubarak announced that he himself will step down before September’s elections.

Depending on who fills all these power vacuums, this could be really good or really bad. For those of us who believe end-times prophesies about Israel, we’re watching closely.

When George W. Bush went into Afghanistan and Iraq, the Left predicted that the "Arab street" would erupt in protest against America. Other than the timing, under which US President, and the reason they would protest, they got it absolutely correct. >grin<

In Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan, the "Arab street" is indeed flooding the streets in protest, but years after the Left predicted it, and against their own governments. The Jordanian government has been dissolved, and it’s not at all sure that Egypt’s Mubarek will survive this uprising.

And what needs to change? King Abdullah II of Jordan put it this way.

The king also stressed that economic reform was a "necessity to provide a better life for our people, but we won’t be able to attain that without real political reforms, which must increase popular participation in the decision-making."

More democracy. Turns out, the Arab street wants to be more like America. Or even (heh) Israel. The human rights records of all these countries are pretty bad as well.

Part of this depends on who fills the leadership void, especially in Egypt. If it is radical Muslims, this could turn into another Iran. But that is not a foregone conclusion, so let’s pray for the best for the Arab people.

Most notably in the middle east (Egypt, Iran), Christians are coming under an increasing number of attacks, and an increase in their brutality.  Also, when the Pope asked for religious tolerance in Pakistan, he was burned in effigy.

A longer list this time.  I took a vacation from blogging during — if you’ll forgive the expression — Christmas vacation, and this video comes out.  Nina Totenberg apologizes for using the term "Christmas party".  Is this really a taboo among liberals?  Or are liberals in the press really this out of touch with the rest of America?

Here are six good reasons why embryonic stem cells will never make it out of the lab and into the bodies of sick people.  But money will still pour into it because, hey, it’s money!

Palestinians fired a Qassam rocket at a kindergarten, hurting one teen passing by.  I didn’t watch much news over vacation, but I’m sure this was all over it.  Right?  I mean, it would have been if Israel had done it, so I’m just supposing.

It’s amazing how stark the double standards are regarding leaks.  Julian Assange didn’t mind dumping data that is life-or-death to some of our Afghani informers, but hated it when leaks about his own legal troubles came out.  Really?  And there are other news reporter groups that hate it when they get leaked. 

Iran is shipping missiles to Venezuela.  Hey Hollywood, this is just fine, right?  (Chavez blames all the failures of socialism on others, and so this paranoia is bound to give him cause to use such weapons.  So, no, it’s not al right.)

No, the polar bear is not endangered.  So says the Obama administration.  Really.  And Bruce McQuain notes that, really, endangered status is more about power than it is about the environment.

The (Democrat-controlled) Congress blocked the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the US.  I guess Obama has no one to blame for this other than … Bush.

Twenty years ago, and continuing as recently as 2009, it was predicted that global warming would bring much milder winters with less snow because of the temperatures.  Ski slopes would be barren and snow would vanish from places as far north as Scotland. Now, however, they’re saying that all that snow we got, even in the deep south, is because of global warming.  The link has a good round-up of weather vs predictions.

More power to this guy, who quit his job, got some legal education, and started suing e-mail spammers.

Why do atheists whine about not being invited to a prayer event?  Hey, you don’t like an inauguration that includes a prayer service?  Go out and win an election, and run your inauguration any way you want.

They existed, and probably still exist, though in other hands.  Again, this comes to us from the Wikileaks espionage, but it at least confirms what we already knew (and what the media wouldn’t tell us nor the Left believe).

The release by Julian Assange’s web site Wikileaks of classified documents reveals that U.S. military intelligence discovered chemical weapons labs, encountered insurgents who were specialists in the creation of toxins, and uncovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, Washington, DC officials and the news media have ignored this information.

One of the WikiLeaks document dumps reveals that as late as 2008, American troops continued to find WMD in the region.

Granted, this was not the huge weapons program that many national intelligence services thought was going on, but it wasn’t nothing, either.

WikiLeaks documents don’t reveal evidence of a massive weapons program by Saddam Hussein — the Bush administration’s leading rationale for invading Iraq — or some enormous stockpile of WMD, but do reveal that chemical weapons did vanish from the Iraqi battlefield.

According to the latest WikiLeaks document "dump," Saddam’s toxic arsenal, significantly reduced after the Gulf War, remained intact. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict and may have brewed up their own deadly agents, according to the WikiLeaks web site.

During that time, former Iraqi General Georges Sada, Saddam’s top commander, detailed the transfers of Iraq’s WMD. "There [were] weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."

The shift to Syria has long been discussed, but now at least we see more evidence that the diplomatic and intelligence communities all believe this.

Worth a read to see what other things our troops found in Iraq, especially if you didn’t see any of that reported in the media.

Venezuelans are getting tired of the food shortages, the electricity shortages, the soaring crime, the deep recession (i.e. everything that comes part and parcel with socialism) and have started taking back the country, starting with last weekend’s elections.  American voters are poised to do the same in November.

The "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza is apparently mostly about symbolism, false narratives and propaganda.  Flotillas are required to keep up the narratives.

The United Nations will appoint an Earth contact for aliens.  No, really.  "Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN’s little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire."  Doesn’t it strike anyone as unintentionally humorous that "Unoosa" sounds like some alien specie you’d see on "Star Trek"?

When the Bilderbergers met last June (cue paranoid music), one of the topics they discussed was Global Cooling.  No, really.  (Al Gore was apparently not invited.)  But indeed, global cooling, were it happening, would be worse than global warming.  Crops, for starters, kinda’ like the heat.

Tea Partiers uncover rampant voter fraud in Houston.  Would it surprise you if I said that most of this was related to a former SEIU employee’s voter registration group?  Yeah, me neither.

"Scientists have invented an efficient way to produce apparently safe alternatives to human embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos…."  They start with ordinary skin cells.  As Glenn Reynolds would say, "Faster, please."

And finally, from Mike Lester, two views of the Constitution.  (Click for a larger image.)

College and university professors seem to be a very social-justice-conscious bunch.  900 of them, from over 150 college campuses, signed a petition urging the US to abandon Israel as an ally because of its human rights abuses, for example.

But Prof. Fred Gottheil decided to try an experiment.

"Would these same 900 sign onto a statement expressing concern about human rights violations in the Muslim Middle East, such as honor killing, wife beating, female genital mutilation, and violence against gays and lesbians?" he wondered. "I felt it was worth a try."

The results? "Almost non existent," he told Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov. Only 27 of the 675 "self-described social-justice seeking academics" agreed to sign Gottheil’s Statement of Concern – less than 5 percent of the total who had publicly called for the censure of Israel for human rights violations.

Politics trumps social justice for this paragon of the Left; the academic.  I would really like to know how deep this penetrates other areas of the Left.  How about liberal churches that has divested themselves from Israel; do they also actively divest themselves from Islamic countries for the same reasons?

Which country is not allowed to defend itself?