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Items of note:

Conformity's Seduction by Mark Steyn:
On Obama:

Susan Sarandon compared him to Jesus. “He is a community organizer like Jesus was,” she said, “and now we’re a community and he can organize us.” What sort of community should we be? Surveying the “rapt eyes” of the congregation, Ethan Baron, writing in the Vancouver Province, said he hadn’t seen anything like it “since a guy I used to work with brought me to visit his weird sex cult in California.” And he meant it as a compliment.

And Hollywood is on board:

To mark the inauguration, Ashton Kutcher released a video pledge-a-thon in which various bigtime celebrities, two or three of whom you might even recognize, “pledge to be a servant to our president and to all mankind because together we can, together we are, and together we will be the change that we seek.” No doubt it sounds better when Jessica Simpson, Céline Dion, and Whitney Houston are bellowing it as an all-star power ballad. It was when the celebrity O-bots start fleshing out the program that it all gets more problematic: One celeb pledges to buy a hybrid. Another pledges to flush the toilet only after a, er—well, let’s not get into that. And most of the rest just pledge to support programs to “emphasize the importance of raising the awareness of finding mentors to promote voices to speak out for arts education mentoring in our schools” (as the blogger Iowahawk paraphrased it). It’s all very back-to-the-Nineties, a time when Bill Clinton declared that the era of Big Government was over and we seemed on the brink of a golden era of a billion gazillion bits of tiny itsy-bitsy micro-government that cumulatively add up to the biggest government you’ve ever seen.

Victor Davis Hanson on "unreal expectations":

Candidate Obama once adopted a presidential-like seal. He held a mass rally at Berlin’s Victory Column (after his request for the more dramatic Brandenburg Gate was refused).

He adopted Greek temple sets at the Democratic convention. And like Zeus on Mt. Olympus, he talked about making the planet cool and the oceans recede.

And now he’s capped all that by warning us to lower our expectations!

G'night.