One year ago this week, I stood in front of the Lawyers Syndicate in downtown Cairo and watched as a few thousand protesters suddenly streamed into the area from the north, overwhelmed Egypt's notoriously violent riot police, and pushed onward towards Tahrir Square. That mile-long march, which culminated with the protesters bursting through a human chain of officers and seizing the Square, was the most inspiring thing that I've ever witnessed, and it remains so. Long presumed to be politically passive, ordinary Egyptians bravely amassed with one simple demand: That decades of dictatorship had to end. When Hosni Mubarak resigned eighteen tumultuous days later, the Arab Spring had bloomed.

Or so we wanted to believe. The reality of the past twelve months, however, has undone whatever high hopes one might have held. Egypt is now headed for radical theocratic, rather than liberal democratic, rule. And a befuddled Obama administration has failed to do anything to stop the coming disaster.

Has Barack Obama learned nothing in three years? Last night, during his State of the Union address, he promised "a blueprint for an economy." But economies are crushed by blueprints. An economy is really nothing more than people participating in an unfathomably complex spontaneous network of exchanges aimed at improving their material circumstances. It can't even be diagrammed, much less planned. And any attempt at it will come to grief.

Politicians like Obama believe they are the best judges of how we should conduct our lives. Of course a word like "blueprint" would occur to the president. He, like most who want his job, aspires to be the architect of a new society.

But we who love our lives and our freedom say: No, thanks. We need no social architect. We need liberty under law. That's it.

No explanation is necessary, just watch:

Previously, in a speech endorsing abortion, Barack Obama told an audience that he didn't want his daughters punished with a baby.

The media, the occupiers, and others engaging in "the bitter politics of envy" have it all wrong. If they were concerned with anything other than dividing Americans and punishing success, their full attention would be on the 21%, not the 1%.

Who are the 21%? They are the Americans who, according to The Heritage Foundation, "rely on government subsidies for their existence." Read that again: rely on government subsidies for their existence. That is a fundamentally un-American idea. And in 2009 (the last available data), 20.9% of the entire population in America was dependent upon government programs for their existence.

Over the Christmas holiday I took my family to Pearl Harbor, shortly after the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack that plunged the United States into World War II. I figured that my daughter, now 6 and in first grade, should be old enough to get an up-close and personal experience with this key chapter in world history.

But I was soon consumed by a horrifying event.

While waiting for the boat to take us across the channel to the USS Arizona Memorial, I overheard a group of college students discussing history. Unable to help myself, I lingered to eavesdrop. And this is the gist of what I heard:

"The World War II [sic] started with a bunch of countries on one side and a bunch of countries on the other side," a young man began, his companions listening with rapt attention as if it were a lecture, "and we didn't know which side we wanted to be on and we had a hard time picking sides. But when the Japanese attacked us, that made it easy to go against their side."

I didn't know whether I should be enraged at or take pity on the young man's ignorance. But what was most troubling was that he was the one dispensing "knowledge"! The others -- judging by the fact that no one disputed or challenged his account -- knew less than he did, even after apparently 12 years of compulsory education.

Obama told us that he had a plan to end US dependence of overseas sources of energy.

"If I am President," he told us in 2008, "I will immediately direct the full resources of the federal government and the full energy of the private sector to a single, overarching goal - in ten years, we will eliminate the need for oil from the entire Middle East and Venezuela."

Last March, two years into this ten year plan, Obama gave a major policy speech on energy that the White House pitched for weeks. It was necessary to give the speech because, well gosh, wouldn't you know it? Obama's only energy policy so far was to enrich his favorite Democrat donors.

Martin Luther King Day has arrived once again, and like clockwork, liberals are invoking King's name to support their causes.

In an e-mail to activists, Obama's former "green czar," Van Jones, calls King the "original Occupier." He urges activists to use MLK day meet-ups to energize left-wing campaigning for 2012.

Despite these efforts, conservatives should not surrender King's legacy to the left.

Conservatives, of course, have reservations about certain aspects of King's legacy. For one, he became too close, later in his career, to the welfare state. He was enamored of the theology of the Social Gospel, the movement that undermined much of mainstream Protestantism in the 20th century. Later in life, he was a vocal opponent of American involvement in the Vietnam. And we now know that in his scholarship and personal life King was far from perfect.

Nevertheless, there are three ways in which King's message is profoundly conservative and relevant.

There has been for months a popular parlor game of tallying instances in which President Obama seems to have either ignored or simply bypassed federal law. But what started out as a way of exposing occasional hypocrisy is now getting a little scary.

Most recently, President Obama made several recess appointments - a tactic that as a senator he once criticized - even though Congress was not in recess. In December, the president signed a $1 billion omnibus spending bill, but notified Congress that he might not abide by some of the very provisions he had just signed into law. During the Libya war, Obama felt that bombing Qaddafi's forces did not really constitute military operations, and therefore he had no need to notify Congress under the War Powers Act.

It is clear that Arizona is not trying to circumvent federal immigration law, but rather is desperately trying to find some way to enforce it, given that the Obama administration has selectively chosen not to do so.

President Barack Obama is running for re-election with an unusual pitch: He can't work with others.

He only gets along with yes men. "I refuse to take 'no' for an answer," Obama said last Wednesday of his decision to make a "recess" appointment that placed Richard Cordray as head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Constitution, of course, gives the president the power to make appointments during Senate recesses. Technically, however, the Senate was in session. The imperial president bypassed Senate rules and years of precedent because he wouldn't or couldn't cut a deal.

Later Wednesday, the White House announced three more recess appointments for vacant seats on the National Labor Relations Board. Obama explained, "When Congress refuses to act and, as a result, hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them."