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Abe Greenwald looks at a cast of international characters and wonders if Obama is up to dealing with them.

… But what common purpose can we find with the above-mentioned leaders. While there are natural resource dimensions to some of our problems, the heads of Russia, Iran, North Korea, and al Qaeda are driven, above all else, by messianic totalitarianism. (As Peters points out, even Putin’s sense of Russian destiny is informed by a delusional mysticism). Obama went to Berlin and told hundreds of thousands of Germans that “Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity.” It’s a nice thought, but humanity, as such, is far less common than Obama realizes.

Good WSJ OpEd on the accounting rules that rile markets.

… The current meltdown isn’t the result of too much regulation or too little. The root cause is bad regulation.

Call it the revenge of Enron. The collapse of Enron in 2002 triggered a wave of regulations, most notably Sarbanes-Oxley. Less noticed but ultimately more consequential for today were accounting rules that forced financial service companies to change the way they report the value of their assets (or liabilities). Enron valued future contracts in such a way as to vastly inflate its reported profits. In response, accounting standards were shifted by the Financial Accounting Standards Board and validated by the SEC. The new standards force companies to value or “mark” their assets according to a different set of standards and levels.

The rules are complicated and arcane; the result isn’t. Beginning last year, financial companies exposed to the mortgage market began to mark down their assets, quickly and steeply. That created a chain reaction, as losses that were reported on balance sheets led to declining stock prices and lower credit ratings, forcing these companies to put aside ever larger reserves (also dictated by banking regulations) to cover those losses. …

Ed Morrissey posts on McCain’s 2006 attempt to dig into the Fannie/Freddie mess.

With the financial sector in turmoil today, the media and the politicians have started throwing around blame with the same recklessness as lenders threw around credit to create the problem.  Politically, the pertinent question is this: Which candidate foresaw the credit crisis and tried to do something about it?  As it turns out, John McCain did — and partnered with three other Senate Republicans to reform the government’s involvement in lending three years ago, after an attempt by the Bush administration died in Congress two years earlier.  McCain spoke forcefully on May 25, 2006, on behalf of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 (via Beltway Snark): …

WaPo Op-Ed says exports saved us from recession in the past year and are should do the same this year.

From the way the presidential candidates have been talking, you might think that American factories and workers are unable to compete in the global economy. John McCain has promised to open new markets for American goods and provide help for workers who lose their jobs. Barack Obama has expressed doubts about past trade agreements and has proposed changes in tax laws that he says now encourage companies to ship jobs overseas.

The candidates deserve credit for recognizing the challenges posed by trade and foreign investment. But their tone obscures a major success story: the dramatic improvement in our balance of international trade. This export boom has saved us from recession over the past year and, despite the recent financial turmoil, is likely to continue doing so. It is generating at least 2 million new and high-paying jobs, about half of them from increased foreign sales by the beleaguered manufacturing sector.

Fresh evidence of the trend came last month, when the second-quarter growth rate for the U.S. economy was revised upward, to 3.3 percent. A record surge in net exports accounted for almost all of that expansion. Since the housing and financial crises erupted in mid-2007, there has been a decline in final domestic demand. We would have been in recession throughout this period had we relied wholly on internal economic forces.

International trade has saved the day. Our external balance has improved by more than $200 billion as calculated for gross domestic product (GDP) purposes, cutting the previous deficit by more than one-third. This dramatic progress has kept the overall economy growing by modest amounts. The prophets of recession ignored the international engagement of the U.S. economy. …

Karl Rove says Obama should sell himself and pass on the McCain attacks.

… It is a mistake for Mr. Obama to spend a lot of time attacking Mr. McCain. In the past week, he, his surrogates or his ads have mocked Mr. McCain’s inability to use a keyboard (an activity, like combing his hair or tying his tie, that Mr. McCain has difficulty with because of war wounds), claimed his administration would be riddled with lobbyists, tried to make an issue of his age and successful cancer treatment, missed no chance to suggest he’d be President George W. Bush’s third term, and called him “dishonorable.” This last charge is particularly foolish. It’s one of the last things voters will believe about John McCain.

The people who can be won over by shouting “McCain is Bush” long ago sided with Mr. Obama. That message does not resonate with undecided voters. The Democrat should instead spend every moment spelling out what he would do to address the country’s challenges.

This election is not fundamentally about Mr. McCain. It is much more about people’s persistent doubts concerning Mr. Obama. The only way to reassure them is to provide a compelling, forward-looking agenda. That sounds obvious, but the Obama campaign seems to be betting on making Mr. McCain an unacceptable choice by striking at his character. Mr. McCain has absorbed many harder blows than anything the Obama campaign can throw his way. …

Laura Ingraham defends Sarah Palin against nay-sayers on the right.

In today’s New York Times, David Brooks launches a critique of Sarah Palin, essentially concluding that her populist appeal is dangerous and ill-conceived. He yearns for the day when “conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement,” one that stressed “classical education, hard-earned knowledged, experience, and prudence.” Brooks, like a handful of other conservative intellectuals, believes Palin “compensates for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.”

Well, at the risk of appearing brash, let me say that I am glad to see my old friend finally pushed to the point where he has to make an overt defense of elitism, after years of demonstrating covert support for elitism. We conservatives who believe Governor Palin represents a solid vice-presidential pick should be extremely comfortable engaging this issue.

Brooks’s main argument against Palin is that she lacks the type of experience and historical understanding that led President Bush to a 26 percent approval rating in his final months in office. Yet the notion that the Bush Administration got into trouble because it didn’t have enough “experience” is absurd. George W. Bush was governor of Texas for six years. His father was president. His primary advisors on matters of foreign policy were Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell. …

Lets have a look at the David Brooks column.

… Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.

Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.

And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice. …

Jake Tapper of ABC’s Political Punch reports on Obama’s dishonest Spanish language ads.

… The greater implication the ad makes, however, is that McCain is no friend to Latinos at all, beyond issues of funding the DREAM act or how NCLB money is distributed. By linking McCain to Limbaugh’s quotes, twisting Limbaugh’s quotes, and tying McCain to more extremist anti-immigration voices, the Obama campaign has crossed a line into misleading the viewers of its new TV ad. In Spanish, the word is erróneo.

LA Times story on the guilt of the Rosenbergs.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed 55 years ago, on June 19, 1953. But last week, they were back in the headlines when Morton Sobell, the co-defendant in their famous espionage trial, finally admitted that he and his friend, Julius, had both been Soviet agents.

It was a stunning admission; Sobell, now 91 years old, had adamantly maintained his innocence for more than half a century. After his comments were published, even the Rosenbergs’ children, Robert and Michael Meeropol, were left with little hope to hang on to — and this week, in comments unlike any they’ve made previously, the brothers acknowledged having reached the difficult conclusion that their father was, indeed, a spy. “I don’t have any reason to doubt Morty,” Michael Meeropol told Sam Roberts of the New York Times.

With these latest events, the end has arrived for the legions of the American left wing that have argued relentlessly for more than half a century that the Rosenbergs were victims, framed by a hostile, fear-mongering U.S. government. Since the couple’s trial, the left has portrayed them as martyrs for civil liberties, righteous dissenters whose chief crime was to express their constitutionally protected political beliefs. In the end, the left has argued, the two communists were put to death not for spying but for their unpopular opinions, at a time when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were seeking to stem opposition to their anti-Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War.

To this day, this received wisdom permeates our educational system. …

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David Warren comments on Wall Street’s problems.

… Lehman Brothers went down over the weekend; A.I.G. is falling as I write. Their assets get dumped, the value of other companies’ similar assets is reduced accordingly, and this in turn erodes the capital base under the entire banking system. The collapse of Lehman has, moreover, just kicked away the argument that some firms are, by nature, too tall to fall. And all because of a few million dicey consumer loans, that no one thought twice about at the time.

The problem must be solved, or so everyone says, by increasing government regulation. Am I perhaps alone in observing that this regulation is already as dense and complex as the industry, and that it might well make more sense to make the regulations not denser and more complex, but rather, simpler, more transparent and effective. For to my mind, we ought to have learned by now that the more complex a system grows, and the farther removed from the hard facts of nature, the more susceptible it becomes to catastrophic failure.

Over several generations we have rebuilt an economy that once rested on goods, services, and tangible assets. It now depends also on kiting, with wonderfully sophisticated credit instruments — like a postmodern building, supported as much from above as below. In the longer view, it is well that gravity asserts itself the sooner, and we reacquire the benefit of a solid foundation.

In the meanwhile, consider Matthew 5:45. The sun rises alike on the evil and the good, and the rain falls on the just and the unjust. To which we might add, that it is usually the unjust who are whining.

Robert Samuelson columns on Wall Street’s unraveling.

… How Wall Street restructures itself is as yet unclear. Companies need more capital. Merrill went to Bank of America because commercial banks have lower leverage (about 10 to 1). It seems likely that many thinly capitalized hedge funds will be forced to reduce leverage. Ditto for “private equity” firms. In time, all this may prove beneficial. Financial firms may take fewer stupid and wasteful risks — at least for a while. Talented and ambitious people may move from finance, where they were attracted by exorbitant pay, into more productive industries.

But the immediate effect may be to damage the rest of the economy. People have already lost their jobs. States and localities, particularly New York City and New Jersey, that depend on Wall Street’s profits and payrolls will face further spending cuts. Banks and investment banks may tighten lending standards again and impede any economic recovery. The stock market’s swoon may deepen consumers’ pessimism, fear and reluctance to spend. There may be more failures of financial firms. It’s hard to know, because financial crises resemble wars in one crucial respect: They result from miscalculation.

John Stossel writes on racism and privilege.

Complaints about racism still dominate media discussion of the disparity between black and white success. Comedian Chris Rock tells white audiences, “None of ya would change places with me! And I’m rich! That’s how good it is to be white!”

I assumed that the success of Barack Obama, as well as thousands of other black Americans and dark-skinned immigrants — many of whom thrive despite language problems — demonstrates that America today is largely a colorblind meritocracy. But a white campus lecturer, Tim Wise, gets tremendous applause from students by saying things like, “[W]hite supremacy and privilege continue to skew opportunities hundreds of years after they were set in place” and in America, “meritocracy is as close to a lie as you can come.” His message is in demand — he is invited to more than 80 speaking engagements a year.

But black writer Shelby Steele argues that whites do blacks no favors wringing their hands about white privilege.

“I grew up in segregation,” Steele told me. “So I really know what racism is. I went to segregated school. I bow to no one in my knowledge of racism, which is one of the reasons why I say white privilege is not a problem.”

Steele claims, “the real problem is black irresponsibility. … Racism is about 18th on a list of problems that black America faces.” …

von Mises Institute asks if hurricanes cause shortages.

The Huntsville Times reported on September 12 that, in response to the looming threat from Hurricane Ike, Alabama Governor Bob Riley declared a formal state of emergency. The governor’s declaration of emergency activated the state’s price-gouging law, which makes “unconscionable pricing” illegal during times of emergency. The Times quoted Riley as saying that he thinks “a threat to public health is a strong possibility due to the shortage of fuels.”

Hurricanes don’t cause shortages, however.

Price controls do. …

WSJ editors destroy other economic nonsense.

It was said to be the year of speculators gone wild. Seemingly everyone in Washington, including Barack Obama and John McCain, decided that oil prices were soaring because profiteers and middlemen were manipulating the futures markets. “Speculators” were spotted everywhere this side of the grassy knoll.

The only problem is that there’s no evidence to support the conspiracy theories — and sure enough, federal regulators dismantled this Beltway consensus late last week. In one of the broadest and most authoritative studies to date, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has offered hard statistical data that financial trading hasn’t been driving price moves. The CFTC conducted an unprecedented Wall Street data sweep and scrutinized millions of transactions worth billions of dollars between January and June of this year. …

The American reports on trends in micro-finance.

Over the past two decades, “microfinance”—the extension of small loans and other financial services to individuals in poor countries—has become a darling of the international development community. The movement’s founding father, Muhammad Yunus, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006; the United Nations says that microfinance can help countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Given the newness of the industry and the informal nature of many microfinance institutions (MFIs), relatively little is known about the size and quantity of the lenders, the kinds of loans that are disbursed, or the conditions under which clients are served—but the available data tell an impressive story. According to the most recent figures from the nonprofit Microfinance Information Exchange, more than 2,200 MFIs are currently lending to around 77 million borrowers worldwide. The Microcredit Summit Campaign reckons that the numbers are even higher: it counts more than 3,300 MFIs serving 133 million clients, including 92.9 million of the world’s poorest people (representing an increase of over 700 percent from 1992). In 2006, capital investment in MFIs eclipsed $4 billion, more than triple the level in 2004. The global MFI industry has also attracted hefty amounts of U.S. aid, including $245 million in 2008. …

LA Times editors think the sun should shine on CA bar results.

Americans have been debating the fairness and efficacy of racial preferences in college and graduate school admissions for more than 30 years. Now a UCLA professor is seeking to test his hypothesis that affirmative action programs actually hurt the career prospects of minority law school graduates. But he has been hampered in his research by the indefensible failure of the State Bar of California to provide the statistics he needs. …

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Spengler has a look at the US financial crisis.

Lehman Brothers survived the American Civil War, two world wars and the Great Depression, but today, Monday, the firm that set the standard in fixed income markets will be liquidated. Potential losses are so toxic that none of the major financial institutions was willing to acquire it.

Lehman’s demise follows the failure last week of the two American mortgage guarantee agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It is remarkable that the US authorities, exhausted from their efforts to bail out the mortgage guarantors and other firms, have left Lehman to its fate.

An enormous hoax has been perpetrated on global financial markets during the past 10 years. An American economy based on opening containers from China and selling the contents at Wal-Mart, or trading houses back and forth, provides scant profitability. Where the underlying profitability of the American economy was  poor, financial engineering managed to transform thin profits into apparently fat ones through the magic of leverage.

The income of American consumers might have stagnated, but the price of their houses doubled during 1998-2007 thanks to the application of leverage to mortgage finance. The profitability of American corporations might have slowed, but the application of leverage in the form of mergers and acquisitions financed with junk bonds multiplied the thin band of profitability. …

Editors at IBD discuss the background to the credit meltdown.

Obama in a statement yesterday blamed the shocking new round of subprime-related bankruptcies on the free-market system, and specifically the “trickle-down” economics of the Bush administration, which he tried to gig opponent John McCain for wanting to extend.

But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions. …

A month and a half ago, Village Voice published a long piece on the origins of the problems at Fannie and Freddie. That’s right, Village Voice. And they most of their finger pointing was in the direction of Andrew Cuomo. Of course, that would confirm Pickerhead’s world view that almost all problems in our society are caused by big government liberal Dems and their crazy schemes. It seems to be a good time to include this in Pickings.

There are as many starting points for the mortgage meltdown as there are fears about how far it has yet to go, but one decisive point of departure is the final years of the Clinton administration, when a kid from Queens without any real banking or real-estate experience was the only man in Washington with the power to regulate the giants of home finance, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), better known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded “kickbacks” to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.

What he did is important—not just because of what it tells us about how we got in this hole, but because of what it says about New York’s attorney general, who has been trying for months to don a white hat in the subprime scandal, pursuing cases against banks, appraisers, brokers, rating agencies, and multitrillion-dollar, quasi-public Fannie and Freddie.

It all starts, as the headlines of recent weeks do, with these two giant banks. But in the hubbub about their bailout, few have noticed that the only federal agency with the power to regulate what Cuomo has called “the gods of Washington” was HUD. Congress granted that power in 1992, so there were only four pre-crisis secretaries at the notoriously political agency that had the ability to rein in Fannie and Freddie: ex–Texas mayor Henry Cisneros and Bush confidante Alfonso Jackson, who were driven from office by criminal investigations; Mel Martinez, who left to chase a U.S. Senate seat in Florida; and Cuomo, who used the agency as a launching pad for his disastrous 2002 gubernatorial candidacy.

With that many pols at the helm, it’s no wonder that most analysts have portrayed Fannie and Freddie as if they were unregulated renegades, and rarely mentioned HUD in the ongoing finger-pointing exercise that has ranged, appropriately enough, from Wall Street to Alan Greenspan. But the near-collapse of these dual pillars in recent weeks is rooted in the HUD junkyard, where every Cuomo decision discussed here was later ratified by his Bush successors. …

Division of Labour posts on the media’s economic analysis.

On campus this afternoon I overheard the following remark by a non-economist, trying to explain to another non-economist the Lehman failure and today’s stock market decline: “It’s a combination of deregulation and greed. Boy, if you deregulate enough, the greed will follow.”

If I had butted in, I would have made two points. (1) If an unusually large number of airplanes crash during a given week, do you blame gravity? No. Greed, like gravity, is a constant. It can’t explain why the number of crashes is higher than usual. (2) What deregulation have we had in the last decade? Please tell me. On the contrary, …

David Harsanyi plays “whose a liar.”

There are many brands of truth. Some are poetic truths, others are political truths and some are staggering exaggerations — or what politicians frequently refer to as “talking.”

These days, there is an outbreak of artificial indignation over the “lies” of Republicans. John McCain, claims Barack Obama’s national press secretary Bill Burton, has run the “sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history.”

Ouch. We can attribute one of the following to this claim: 1) Burton has just landed on the planet Earth; 2) Burton is attempting to manipulate the media; 3) Burton is “lying.”

I pick 2. After all, we’ve all heard the self-serving myth that pits helpless, meek, high-minded, issue-oriented Democrats against mendacious and mean Republicans, who not only detest America — especially children and small vulnerable creatures — but will lie and cheat to keep all oppressed.

The facts betray a more equitable story. …

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WSJ Editors take an important lesson form Woodward’s new book.

… The success of the surge in pacifying Iraq has been so swift and decisive that it’s easy to forget how difficult it was to find the right general, choose the right strategy, and muster the political will to implement it. It is also easy to forget how many obstacles the State and Pentagon bureaucracies threw in Mr. Bush’s way, and how much of their bad advice he had to ignore, especially now that their reputations are also benefiting from Iraq’s dramatic turn for the better.

Then again, American history offers plenty of examples of wartime Presidents who faced similar challenges: Ulysses Grant became Lincoln’s general-in-chief in 1864, barely a year before the surrender at Appomattox. What matters most is that the President had the fortitude to insist on winning. That’s a test President Bush passed — something history, if not Bob Woodward, will recognize.

Pickerhead’s favorite media line on Sarah Palin was from the incredulous Roger Ebert, “And how can a politician her age have never have gone to Europe?” Speaking of Europe, Bret Stephens reports on Obama’s popularity there.

Told he had the support of “every thinking person” for his second presidential bid in 1956, Democrat Adlai Stevenson famously replied: “That’s not enough, madam. We need a majority!” It’s a line that springs to mind in this presidential season, amid polls and reports that the current Democratic contender from Illinois has the support of just about every non-American interested in our politics.

The latest data come courtesy of the BBC, which commissioned a survey of 23,531 people in 22 countries for their views about the U.S. election. The not-so-astounding result: Barack Obama is the favorite in all 22 countries. The Illinois Democrat’s numbers are especially striking in Britain (where he leads Republican John McCain by a 59% to 9% margin, with the rest not expressing a preference) and Canada (66% to 14%). They also hold up in China (35% to 15%), Egypt (26% to 13%), Brazil (51% to 8%) and, of course, France (69% to 6%). Broad majorities in most countries also believe an Obama administration would do more than a McCain one to heal America’s relations with the wider world.

But here’s a question: Should we — that is, voting-age Americans — care? …

… More recently, the British columnist Jonathan Freedland has written in the Guardian that “if Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger.” … Works for Pickerhead

Free speech is important because it makes it easier to spot the idiots. Canada has one. David Warren has the story.

… Typical “conservatives,” my outraged correspondents were, to a man (and woman), careful to say they don’t want Ms. Mallick censored or prosecuted for writing such things, that she has “a right” to say what she pleases. They only contest her right to be paid by the Canadian taxpayer, through her gig at the CBC. Now, if I were the Generalissimo of Canada, the CBC would be the first billion dollars I’d save, but until that happy hour arrives, I only wish they’d publish Ms. Mallick’s scribblings more prominently.

Several reasons for this. The first, of course, is that by doing so, they will bring the day nearer when the CBC will be, ahem, “privatized.”

But my second reason is more generous. I think Ms. Mallick expresses openly what many, quite possibly most, of her MSM colleagues are actually thinking, and in my experience, actually saying in social gatherings and while working away from the microphones — though seldom with such ebullience. Ms. Mallick is rare in being so refreshingly candid, on the record.

Where such prejudices as hers exist, it is an advantage to everyone to have them expressed openly, discussed openly, demolished openly. Far worse is the poison in people who think like Ms. Mallick, but contain themselves within the shallow literary conventions of “journalistic objectivity.” …

Charles on Charles; Krauthammer on Gibson, that is.

… There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”

Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”

Wrong.

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. …

Dick Morris on the reasons Sarah scares the Dems.

… Why do Democrats feel so threatened? They’ve even stopped attacking McCain and President Bush to launch a vicious and sexist barrage at her that would normally make a feminist angry and a Democrat blush.

Basically, it’s this: John McCain only endangers Democratic chances of victory this November, but Sarah Palin is an existential threat to the Democratic Party.

She threatens a core element of the party’s base – women

When an African-American like Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell or Condi Rice rises to prominence as a Republican, he or she endangers the Democratic coalition. So would a Republican labor leader.

And so, above all, does the woman Republican running for vice president.

Democrats can’t stomach seeing the feminist movement’s impetus for greater female political participation and empowerment “hijacked” by a pro-life woman who espouses traditional values. They must obliterate her, lest her popularity eat away at their party’s core. …

Peter Wehner on the sudden interest of the press in accuracy in the campaign.

… My own view is that the debate about “lipstick on a pig” was silly and will soon be forgotten. Yet it’s not as if it broke any barriers in that regard. To take just one arguably more serious example: Recall that in February, Barack Obama said, “We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years.”

It’s a charge Obama repeated, even though he knew it was untrue. (The Annenberg Political Fact Check said, “It’s a rank falsehood for the DNC to accuse McCain of wanting to wage ‘endless war’ based on his support for a presence in Iraq something like the U.S. role in South Korea.”) The fact that the accusation was false didn’t seem to matter; one Obama aide told the Politico, “It’s seldom you get such a clear shot.” But for some reason, the press didn’t go into a tizzy on this matter. Puzzling. …

Melanie Phillips blogs on the “Stasi” tactics of Obama’s fans.

… Apparently Camp Obama has parachuted dozens of operatives into Alaska to find the skeletons in the Palin closet that it just knows must exist. Unable to process the fact that the left might not come into its rightful inheritance of power, which as we all know is the natural order of the universe, it is behaving like an American Stasi.

And the more it behaves in this grotesque manner, the more counter-productive it all is. Palin is a kind of barium meal for the US body politic: as she is ingested deeper into the system, the nastiness and sheer malevolence of the Democratic party and its bullying cheerleaders in the media are being sickeningly illuminated all around her. As a result, the media and the Democrats are merely doing untold damage to themselves, particularly since the blogosphere is shredding the smears being hurled at Palin as fast as they are being produced. …

Another view of the media firestorm from Tod Lindberg of the Weekly Standard.

… Now, you might think it hypocritical to criticize the inexperience of a vice presidential nominee who has similar experience to your presidential nominee, but that’s just a failure of the imagination. Indeed, hypocrisy was the strange charge Democrats decided to make against McCain and Palin: Having run against Obama all summer for his lack of experience and accomplishment, how dare John McCain pick as his running mate someone with (ahem) experience comparable to that of the Democratic candidate for president McCain had been criticizing?

Well, maybe because it is not a sign of the strength of a candidate at the top of a ticket to need the experience of Joe Biden (or Dick Cheney) in order to allay concerns that he’s not quite up to some aspects of the job. And, contrariwise, it is a sign of strength at the top when the nominee can look to the future and make a priority of party-building. Does anybody think that if Obama loses, he will have left his party in a stronger position by advancing the prospects of Joe Biden? Fortunately for Democrats, at least they’ve got Hillary in the wings.

But these weren’t the only hypocrisies in the air. Remember reading the discussions of Vice President Al Gore’s parenting skills in all the papers the day after his teenage son got busted for dope at high school? No? That would be because Gore called around to all the papers (including the Washington Times, where I was editorial page editor at the time) and asked us not to publish it, kids being kids and being owed some privacy. The newspapers didn’t. That was then: Given a preposterous Internet rumor that Sarah Palin was never pregnant with her four-month-old baby but faked it to cover up for her daughter, Bristol was fair game. This was a judgment shared among Democrats and, coincidentally, the media (the same ones who were also all over the John Edwards love-child story, remember?). …

NY Post has the story of photographer who blindsided McCain for creepy shots.

Controversial celebrity photographer Jill Greenberg, a self-professed “hard-core Dem,” deliberately took a series of unflattering shots of Republican nominee John McCain for the current cover of The Atlantic – and then bragged about it on a blog.

Greenberg, known for her heavily retouched pics of apes and babies, boasted to Photo District News that she submitted photos of the Arizona senator to the mag while barely airbrushing them.

“I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she boasted. …

On one level this Economist story on traffic research would seem to say it’s hopeless. But it also shows the sophistication of the effort. In itself, that shows promise.

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Amir Taheri writes on the conflicting lessons of 9/11.

… McCain believes that America is at war; Obama doesn’t. McCain believes the United States can win on the battlefield; Obama doesn’t.

For Obama, the problem is one of effective law enforcement. His model is the way Clinton handled the first attack on World Trade Center in 1993. Obama says: “We are able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial.” This means the United States reacting after being attacked.

McCain, however, doesn’t fear the politically incorrect term “pre-emption” – hitting the enemy before he hits you.

WHEN all is said and done, this election may well have only one big issue: the existential threat that Islamist terrorism poses to America’s safety. Since McCain and Obama offer radically different policies for facing that threat, American voters do have a real choice.

Gerard Baker tries to explain to Obama-worshipping Euros how it is The One might lose.

… Travelling in Britain this week, I’ve been asked repeatedly by close followers of US politics if it can really be true that Barack Obama might not win. Thoughtful people cannot get their head around the idea that Mr Obama, exciting new pilot of change, supported by Joseph Biden, experienced navigator of the swamplands of Washington politics, could possibly be defeated.

They look upon John McCain and Sarah Palin and see something out of hag-ridden history: the wizened old warrior, obsessed with finding enemies in every corner of the globe, marching in lockstep with the crackpot, mooseburger-chomping mother from the wilds of Alaska, rifle in one hand, Bible in the other, smiting caribou and conventional science as she goes.

Two patronising explanations are adduced to explain why Americans are going wrong. The first is racism. I’ve dealt with this before and it has acquired no more merit. White supremacists haven’t been big on Democratic candidates, whatever their colour, for a long time, and Mr Obama’s race is as likely to generate enthusiasm among blacks and young voters as it is hostility among racists.

In a similarly condescending account, those foolish saps are being conned into voting for Mr McCain because they like his running-mate. Her hockey-mom charm and storybook career appeals to their worst instincts. The race is boiling down to a beauty contest in which a former beauty queen is stealing the show. Believe this if it helps you come to terms with the possibility of a Democratic defeat. But there really are better explanations. …

And Charles Krauthammer recounts the Obama trajectory as it seems to be crashing to earth.

…Palin is not just a problem for Obama. She is also a symptom of what ails him. Before Palin, Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great. Which is why McCain‘s Paris Hilton ads struck such a nerve. Obama’s meteoric rise was based not on issues — there was not a dime’s worth of difference between him and Hillary on issues — but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.

The unease at the Denver convention, the feeling of buyer’s remorse, was the Democrats’ realization that the arc of Obama’s celebrity had peaked — and had now entered a period of its steepest decline. That Palin could so instantly steal the celebrity spotlight is a reflection of that decline.

It was inevitable. Obama had managed to stay aloft for four full years. But no one can levitate forever. …

James Pethokoukis who writes on money and politics for US News is uniquely situated to comment on the bubble that was Barack.

… Has the “revolutionary optimism” of Obamamania faded? Let’s turn to a second event. I was recently chatting with a top Obama adviser who was explaining in detail the campaign’s ambitious 50-state strategy, how legions of Obamamaniacs were turning up in the reddest counties of the red states. If that was all true, I asked him, how come the polls were so close? If Obama was surging in places where John Kerry and Al Gore got clobbered, shouldn’t the Democratic nominee be ahead by a country mile? The only answer I got was something about how the structure of the American electorate is historically biased against Democrats.

Huh? I felt like a Wall Street analyst during the tech boom sitting through a glitzy PowerPoint presentation—filled with buzzwords like “stickiness” and “eyeballs” and, of course, “sticky eyeballs”—who finally had the temerity to ask: “So if things are so great, why aren’t you making any money?” It’s like the old joke, “Sure, we lose money on each sale, but we make up for it on volume!” (The adviser finally admitted that Obama hadn’t closed the deal on national security.)

Is Obama doomed to go from hero to zero, bubble to complete bust? I don’t think so. Politicians, unlike stocks, don’t go to zero—though Howard Dean did come awfully close in the 2004 Democratic primaries. …

Byron York tries to understand why Obama supporters go crazy contemplating Sarah.

What is it about Sarah Palin that seems to have driven so many smart, thoughtful Obama supporters around the bend?

Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, wrote that Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman” and denounced “the Republican Party’s cynical calculation that because [Palin] has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies … she speaks for the women of America.”

Carol Fowler, the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, said that Palin’s “primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”

Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan, wrote that Palin’s values “more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers” and asked: “What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.” …

Perhaps the strangest episode in the Charlie Gibson interview of Sarah Palin was his willingness to believe the bogus AP reports of her supposed claim our Iraq efforts were a “mission from God” in Blues Bros speak. Jim Lindgren of Volokh has the story.

One thing I learned tonight is that neither Charlie Gibson nor anyone on his staff reads the Volokh Conspiracy (or Hot Air for that matter).

Outrageously, in his interview Gibson claimed that Sarah Palin had called the Iraq War “a task . . . from God.”

No she didn’t. She prayed that it was a task from God. As I said a few days ago:

I find it hard to believe that Anderson Cooper [and now, Charlie Gibson] does not understand the difference between praying for something you hope is true and stating that it is true.

Is praying for peace throughout the world the same as saying that there is peace throughout the world?

If I had prayed for the press to be fair to Sarah Palin that would not be the same as stating that the press is being fair to Sarah Palin.

Here was the exchange between Palin and Gibson tonight:: …

More on this from Hot Air.

Jay Nordlinger posts on Gibson attitudes at the Corner.

ABC News is so stupid they are flagging the “holy war” parts of the interview for promotional purposes. Dartblog with the story

We have snippets of CBS News interview with Hillary’s Mark Penn.

… CBSNews.com: So you think the media is being uniquely tough on Palin now?

Mark Penn: Well, I think that the media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they’re not doing on the other candidates. And that’s going to subject them to people concluding that they’re giving her a tougher time. Now, the media defense would be, “Yeah, we looked at these other candidates who have been in public life at an earlier time.”

What happened here very clearly is that the controversy over Palin led to 37 million Americans tuning into a vice-presidential speech, something that is unprecedented, because they wanted to see for themselves. This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility with them. …

Wisconsin is this week’s bellwether state in The Economist.

… Wisconsin is best known for its dairy products and its love of American football. The Packers, a team from the small city of Green Bay, claim some of the sport’s most obsessive fans, known as “cheeseheads”, a term also used to denote Wisconsans generally. But among politicos, Wisconsin is the swing state that has failed to swing.

Earlier in the last century, the state was at the heart of America’s Progressive movement, enacting liberal social reforms such as compensation for injured workers before the rest of the country did. But Wisconsin pioneered conservative welfare reform in the 1990s, and its voters now plainly prefer divided government on the state level: Wisconsin currently has a Democratic governor, Jim Doyle, and a Republican-controlled state Assembly. And they have split almost exactly evenly when it comes to the presidency. Al Gore took the state by only 5,700 votes in 2000, and John Kerry won it by 11,400 in 2004—0.2% and 0.4% of the vote, respectively. The margins were a lot closer than those in nearby Michigan, which gets a lot more attention. …

Adam Smith blog post on the disruptions of bio-fuel.

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David Warren marks the anniversary looking at Canada’s contributions to the war on terror.

… Canada took a pass on helping the American enterprise in Iraq — the justification for which we did not so much dispute as ignore. We left the British and Australians, the Poles, Georgians, and others, to do our share of the lifting there. The wisdom of the Chrétien government was to focus our embarrassingly limited resources on the task of clearing the Taliban out of Afghanistan.

In this, we have played a modest but distinguished role. Even if our government has not, our soldiers in that theatre of war have recalled Canada’s finest martial traditions, in some wonderfully aggressive campaigns. Our scandalously under-equipped and under-manned units have taken casualties proportionally higher than our allies — but more to the point, they have inflicted casualties far out of proportion to what they have sustained.

It has been a mostly thankless task Their accomplishments have been almost entirely ignored in Canadian media back home, while their losses have been prominently reported. In the last fortnight, for instance, I was aghast to be unable to find, anywhere in the mainstream Canadian media, mention of our soldiers’ part in one major, obviously heroic operation.

Their instruction was to escort a 200-tonne hydroelectric turbine — too large for any helicopter to lift — on a five-day journey across Taliban-infested territory to the Kajaki reservoir in Helmand province. The expedition, led by the British, and including Australian, New Zealand, and American troops, as well as Canadian and Afghan, was under attack throughout the journey. The turbine was successfully delivered, intact. …

Fouad Ajami looks at the foreign policy differences between the candidates.

… When we elect a president, we elect a commander in chief. This remains an imperial republic with military obligations and a military calling. That is why Eisenhower overwhelmed Stevenson, Reagan’s swagger swept Carter out of office, Bush senior defeated Dukakis, etc.

The exception was Bill Clinton, with his twin victories over two veterans of World War II. We had taken a holiday from history — but 9/11 awakened us to history’s complications. Is it any wonder that Hillary Clinton feigned the posture of a muscular American warrior, and carried the working class with her?

The warrior’s garb sits uneasily on Barack Obama’s shoulders: Mr. Obama seeks to reassure Americans that he and his supporters are heirs of Roosevelt and Kennedy; that he, too, could order soldiers to war, stand up to autocracies and rogue regimes. But the widespread skepticism about his ability to do so is warranted. …

American Spectator suggests Sarah fans might want to cool their jets a little.

In the less than two weeks since she was introduced as John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin has become a political sensation.

She has united the Republican base behind McCain’s candidacy in a way that few could have predicted. She has energized conservatives. She’s attracted more than 15,000 to rallies. And her speech to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul last week has prompted comparisons to Ronald Reagan.

With all due respect to the governor of Alaska, are conservatives getting ahead of themselves?

For months, conservatives have mocked the celebrity appeal of Barack Obama, but now they are flocking to Palin in a similar manner. …

Ann Coulter’s great column on 9/11 and seven years of no attacks here at our home.

Morose that there hasn’t been another terrorist attack on American soil for seven long years, liberals were ecstatic when Hurricane Gustav was headed toward New Orleans during the Republican National Convention last week. The networks gave the hurricane plenty of breaking-news coverage — but unfortunately it was Hurricane Katrina from 2005 they were covering.

On Keith Olbermann’s Aug. 29 show on MSNBC, Michael Moore said the possibility of a Category 3 hurricane hitting the United States “is proof that there is a God in heaven.” Olbermann responded: “A supremely good point.”

Actually, Olbermann said that a few minutes later to some other idiotic point Moore had made, but that’s how Moore would have edited the interview for one of his “documentaries,” so I will, too. I would only add that Michael Moore’s morbid obesity is proof that there is a Buddha.

Hurricane Gustav came and went without a hitch. What a difference a Republican governor makes! …

Karl Rove says Barack needs to stop running against Sarah.

Of all the advantages Gov. Sarah Palin has brought to the GOP ticket, the most important may be that she has gotten into Barack Obama’s head. How else to explain Sen. Obama’s decision to go one-on-one against “Sarah Barracuda,” captain of the Wasilla High state basketball champs?

It’s a matchup he’ll lose. If Mr. Obama wants to win, he needs to remember he’s running against John McCain for president, not Mrs. Palin for vice president.

Michael Dukakis spent the last months of the 1988 campaign calling his opponent’s running mate, Dan Quayle, a risky choice and even ran a TV ad blasting Mr. Quayle. The Bush/Quayle ticket carried 40 states.

Adlai Stevenson spent the fall of 1952 bashing Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate, Richard Nixon, calling him “the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, and then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.” The Republican ticket carried 39 of 48 states.

If Mr. Obama keeps attacking Mrs. Palin, he could suffer the fate of his Democratic predecessors. These assaults highlight his own tissue-thin résumé, waste precious time better spent reassuring voters he is up for the job, and diminish him — not her.

Sarah Palin returned today to Alaska. Perfunction.com has the story.

Good Corner post on the enthusiasm at McCain/Palin rally in NOVA.

… One good indication of the enthusiasm were the number of creative signs and campaign paraphenalia by those present. I saw two high-school girls together — one had a custom T-Shirt that said “The Future Mrs. Track Palin,” and her friend’s shirt said “Piper Can Do My Hair” (my memory may not be exact). There were also lots of special needs children and mothers present. One mother had a rather lovely and affecting sign with a picture of her son with Down syndrome that read “47 Chromosomes from Heaven.” Geraghty and I saw another woman with a sign that said “McCain Hero with a Heart and a Veep Just Like Me.” Just like me? Women really seem to identify with Palin. …

Jonah Goldberg on how lucky we are the crazy Dem left nominates their candidate.

… Psephologist and columnist Michael Barone noticed during the primaries that, with the exception of the black vote, Obama’s support within the Democratic party is comprised almost entirely of cultural liberals. He dubbed this intra-Democratic split a divide between “academics and Jacksonians.” The Jacksonians are working-class, culturally conservative whites. The academics are the same people who formed the base for Howard Dean, Bill Bradley, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart, George McGovern, and other successful presidents in the anti-matter universe where Spock has a goatee. …

VDH on Biden.

… He seems to have established a new Biden’s Law: if one makes enough gaffes, they soon reach a point that none of them matter. And even stranger is Biden’s Second Law of Politics: the more you sound obnoxious and offend, you soon reach a point where the shocked listener turns from anger to indifference and finally no less to empathy! …

This week The Economist bellwether state is Missouri.

AT A park in downtown St Louis, three women are drinking Bud Light and watching a demonstration of Scottish tossing-the-caber. It is a peaceful scene at the Festival of Nations, but worries simmer beneath the surface. The women supported Hillary Clinton, and are now undecided. Barack Obama is “a wonderful young man”, but inexperienced in foreign policy. John McCain is “honourable”, but perhaps not up to the task.

These are typical concerns from an average undecided voter in this state. Missouri has 5.8m people and 11 electoral votes. Its moderate size belies its traditional role in presidential elections. There are ways to win the White House without winning Missouri, but few candidates have managed it. The state has voted for the victor in 25 of the last 26 elections. The exception was in 1956, when America went for Dwight Eisenhower, a popular Republican war hero, in a landslide. Missourians gave it to Adlai Stevenson, a cerebral Democrat from neighbouring Illinois. …

Remember the hilarious movie Thank You For Smoking? Christopher Buckley, who wrote the book has written another. This time on the Supreme Court.

Think George W. Bush is unpopular? Pity Donald P. Vanderdamp, the blandly honest bowling enthusiast occupying the White House in “Supreme Courtship.” Congress, which has tagged him “Don Veto” for rejecting every spending bill that lands on his desk, hates him so much it’s trying to amend the Constitution to limit presidents to one term — beginning with him. And now a fresh collision awaits. President Vanderdamp has a Supreme Court seat to fill, and in a stroke of genius, he has nominated America’s most popular TV judge: Pepper Cartwright, star of “Courtroom Six.”

Beautiful and headstrong, Cartwright spews folksy Texas wisdom when not quoting Shakespeare, packs a LadySmith revolver and delivers judicial decisions from the hip. She was once a real judge — a good one — on the Los Angeles Superior Court before her husband-cum-producer, Buddy Bixby, plucked her from the bench and turned her into a star. “I doubt I’m qualified to be a clerk at the Supreme Court,” she admits in a news conference, though she’s better at the media rodeo than her adversaries on the Hill. They include Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dexter Mitchell, a shiny, botoxed Amtrak supporter from Connecticut who bears a passing resemblance to Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. (“Mitchell loved — lived — to talk”) and who is determined to quash Cartwright’s appointment, not least because he lusts after a seat on the court himself. …

Slate’s Explainer tells us who first put lipstick on a pig.

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Last week’s Asia Times column by Spengler predicting Obama would lose, referred to a column he wrote in late February – Obama’s women reveal his secret. It is here today.

“Cherchez la femme,” advised Alexander Dumas in: “When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman.” In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama’s women reveal his secret: he hates America.

We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man – least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father – can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.

America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its creative success is so enormous that its global influence hastens the decline of other cultures. For those on the destruction side of the trade, America is a monster. Between half and nine-tenths of the world’s 6,700 spoken languages will become extinct in the next century, and the anguish of dying peoples rises up in a global cry of despair. Some of those who listen to this cry become anthropologists, the curators of soon-to-be extinct cultures; anthropologists who really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama’s mother, the University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice.

Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother’s revenge against the America she despised. …

… Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama’s campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator. “I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon. He’s an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there’s the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive,” she told a fundraiser in February 2007.

“For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, “She added that the TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she’d like to meet him sometime.” Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.

“Frustration” and “disappointment” have dogged Michelle Obama these past 20 years, despite her US$300,000 a year salary and corporate board memberships. It is hard for the descendants of slaves not to resent America. They were not voluntary immigrants but kidnap victims, subjected to a century of second-class citizenship even after the Civil War ended slavery. Blackness is not the issue; General Colin Powell, whose parents chose to immigrate to America from the West Indies, saw America just as other immigrants do, as a land of opportunity. Obama’s choice of wife is a failsafe indicator of his own sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his mother’s milk. …

Corner post on Obama’s sacrifices.

Another post on the late-night Obama/Biden jokes.

And a post on Obama’s Monday.

James Taranto catches AP trying to help Obama, and making him look ridiculous in the process.

We follow Jennifer Rubin through a number of posts in Contentions.

While Obama supporters flail about and bemoan the state of the race, here’s something to consider: the fix which Barack Obama is now in is entirely of his own making. The obvious blunder was in bypassing Hillary Clinton as VP. With Clinton, the frenzy of excitement would have been for the Democrats and Sarah Palin would be back in Alaska. But that is not Obama’s only flub, not by a long shot. Consider:

– Reneging on his public financing promise: Had he not done that, he might have saved his New Politics reputation and avoided his current money woes.

– Going on the Magical Mystery Tour: Had he not done that, we likely wouldn’t have had the “I still don’t think the surge was worth it” interview, there wouldn’t have been the priceless Berlin rally footage and he might have spent the summer at home talking about energy policy.

– Nixing the townhalls: Had he not done that, he — again — might have sustained the New Politics moniker and could have kept the focus on domestic issues and McCain’s association with George Bush.

– Losing the opportunity of a lifetime: Had he not done the angry liberal routine in Denver he might not be trailing among independents by an unbelievable margin of 52-37%.

There are a host of other, smaller errors (e.g. the atrocious Rick Warren forum, hiding from the press in Hawaii during the invasion of Georgia), but the conclusion is inescapable: if Barack Obama does lose this, there won’t be anyone to blame but himself.

Pickerhead’s been patiently waiting for Sarah Palin in the eyes of Camille Paglia. It’s here today.

… As I said in my last column, I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama’s efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development and which are painfully wrong for the target audience of rural working-class whites that he has been trying to reach. Obama on the road and even in major interviews has been droppin’ his g’s like there’s no tomorrow. It’s analogous to the way stodgy, portly Al Gore (evidently misadvised by the women in his family and their feminist pals) tried to zap himself up on the campaign trail into the happening buff dude that he was not. Both Gore and Obama would have been better advised to pursue a calm, steady, authoritative persona. Forget the jokes — be boring! That, alas, is what reads as masculine in the U.S.

The over-the-top publicity stunt of a mega-stadium for Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention two weeks ago was a huge risk that worried me sick — there were too many things that could go wrong, from bad weather to crowd control to technical glitches on the overblown set. But everything went swimmingly. Obama delivered the speech nearly flawlessly — though I was shocked and disappointed by how little there was about foreign policy, a major area where wavering voters have grave doubts about him. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary event with an overlong but strangely contemplative and spiritually uplifting finale. The music, amid the needlessly extravagant fireworks, morphed into “Star Wars” — a New Age hymn to cosmic reconciliation and peace.

After that extravaganza, marking the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s epochal civil rights speech on the Washington Mall, I felt calmly confident that the Obama campaign was going to roll like a gorgeous juggernaut right over the puny, fossilized McCain. The next morning, it was as if the election were already over. No need to fret about American politics anymore this year. I had already turned with relief to other matters.

Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy — one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama’s triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football — or one of the great light-saber duels in “Star Wars.” (Here are the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, going at it with Darth Maul in “The Phantom Menace.”) This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment. …

John Stossel looks at Obama’s “green jobs.”

Amazing story from the London Times on EU farming rules.

… European Union rules ban farmers from using combine harvesters on wet land to protect soil quality. Those who flout the ban can be prosecuted. …

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Nick Cohen in The Observer, UK writes on how the liberals in the press paved the way for Sarah Palin’s success.

My colleagues in the American liberal press had little to fear at the start of the week. Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually every poll. George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were scrambling around for reasons not to invite the Republican President to the Republican convention. Democrats had only to maintain their composure and the White House would be theirs. During the 1997 British general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.

For once, the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was ‘the other’ – the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against. They might have soberly examined her reputation as an opponent of political corruption to see if she was truly the reformer she claimed to be. They might have gently mocked her idiotic creationism, while carefully avoiding all discussion of the racist conspiracy theories of Barack Obama’s church.

But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor’s office. …

Speaking of ugly and berserk, John Fund says the Dems have sent 30 lawyers to Alaska to dig into Sarah’s past.

Jonah Goldberg says Team Obama is rattled.

Barack Obama, a famous fan of pickup basketball, must recognize his plight: It’s two on one now. John McCain drafted Gov. Sarah Palin, the star point guard from the Wasilla Warriors, to double-team Obama.

(McCain’s team doesn’t care if no one covers Joe Biden, who seems to spend most of his time yelling to the media, “I’m open! I’m open!” But when he gets the ball, all he does is talk about what a great player he is and dribble in place.)

So after the halftime show of the political conventions, to strain the sports metaphor a bit further, it looks as if the change-up in strategy has Team Obama rattled and in danger of choking. Polls — the closest thing we have to a scoreboard — show that McCain, at least temporarily, has taken the lead. The Real Clear Politics average of national polls since Friday shows McCain ahead by a razor-thin (and statistically meaningless) 2.9 percentage points. The USA Today-Gallup poll has McCain leading by a whopping 10 points among likely voters (and four points among registered voters), though that’s almost surely an overstatement.

The McCain-Palin convention bounce also all but closed the ticket’s gender gap. According to Rasmussen, Obama had a 14-point lead among women; now it’s three. According to the latest ABC/Washington Post poll, McCain now has a 12-point lead among white women. …

Roger Simon thinks it’s sweet how McCain got his big bounce just when Olbermann and Matthews got yanked.

I must say it’s amusing that on the day John McCain bounced to a ten-point lead (likely voters) over his unprepared opponent, MSNBC gave the hook to its “nattering nabobs” of bourgeois pseudo-leftism – Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews. Somehow parent company NBC got the idea these clowns were not up to moderating a serious political debate.  So much for sideshows.

Meanwhile the mainstream media must be in a state of shock.  Their hero is in serious jeopardy of losing. …

Byron York says painting Palin as an extremist won’t work.

Jonah Goldberg finds Pelosi touting raising five children as preparation for the work in Congress.

… That experience forced me to be disciplined, diplomatic, focused, and successful, and I brought that discipline and focus to the Congress. Also, having a family keeps you focused on the future, which is the biggest inspiration in politics. …

Say What? Ed Morrissey says now Obama thinks tax cuts might not be a good idea.

… Obama has campaigned successfully on economics mostly through populist rhetoric and class warfare.  He has cast the Bush cuts as egregious without explaining the five years of solid growth they produced.  Now that he has to start getting past the slogans and start producing specifics, he seems lost and self-contradictory.  Small wonder that McCain has closed the gap on economic stewardship from 19 points to three in the latest polling.  Voters have begun to realize that Obama is making it up as he goes along.

Nor does Morrissey think the old “cell phone mime” will save Barack.

Barack Obama’s sudden decline in the polls have some of his supporters, and even some of John McCain’s backers, wondering whether the nosedive accurately reflects popular opinion.  Obama’s strength comes with younger voters, they note, and younger voters use cell phones more often as a substitute for land lines — and pollsters don’t call cell phones.  The implication is that Obama may be underrepresented by these polls and is performing stronger than people suspect.

Well, anything is possible, but as John Kerry can tell you, building hopes on massive youth turnout usually sets a candidate up for severe disappointment. …

Want a great example of how the media is biased against Palin. Jim Lindgren of Volokh catches Anderson Cooper with his pants down.

And Samizdata catches a lie from The Economist.

The Corner catches WaPo. Not a lie per se, but a half truth nonetheless.

Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard with some of the background of the Palin pick.

… With the nomination in hand, McCain decided that he wanted his vice-presidential selection to be bold and leaned toward picking Joe Lieberman. But after an extensive look at the practical realities of selecting Lieberman and listening to the arguments for and against taking that dramatic step, McCain realized it wouldn’t work. He turned his sights to three other candidates: Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, and Sarah Palin. Romney was always a default candidate, but never a likely pick. Pawlenty had several backers among McCain’s top advisers and, though McCain likes Pawlenty, he saw the pick as too conventional. There was a bold if risky choice remaining: Sarah Palin.

McCain had been impressed by Palin during a 15-minute conversation back in February and spoke to her again on August 24. She did not have a strong advocate among McCain’s top advisers, and more than one cautioned him about the risks of picking someone with such limited experience. And as he had on Iraq, McCain listened to that advice, considered the politically safe choice, and then rejected it in favor of something bolder and riskier.

The early results have been promising, and McCain’s team is confident that she will be a major asset over the next two months.

“You do not get to 80 percent approval by not being a good politician,” said a senior McCain adviser. “I don’t care how red your state is or how blue it is–if it’s Alaska or California–you don’t get to 80 percent without being good.” …

David Harsanyi with a dim view of the Fannie/Freddie bailout.

… Isn’t it ironic that government bars a citizen from risking his own Social Security funds because it’s too chancy, yet it uses your money to bail out companies that have engaged in the very behavior government is supposedly safeguarding us from?

And really, what’s more risky than letting Washington handle your money?

Tunku Varadarajan interviews a world-class travel writer.

I knew Paul Theroux could turn a phrase, but I hadn’t realized that he could turn heads, too. As we walk to dinner at the restaurant at the Taj Boston hotel — formerly the dowdy old Ritz, now elegantly restored to world-class panache — a number of ladies of a certain age are . . . how else to put it? . . . checking him out. “It’s this suit,” Mr. Theroux observes. Hand-stitched by a tailor in Bombay, the suit — of Italian white linen, with pinstripes — is indeed eye-catching.

Mr. Theroux has not gone through life unnoticed. How could he? He travels widely, talks to anyone who will talk to him — on trains, planes and buses, in cities, villages and jungles — and then writes about all of it in prose too highly spiced for some prissy palates. “They don’t read me in English departments, you know. I’m too rude about people, they say.”

Rudeness-in-print is not, of course, Mr. Theroux’s only skill. Nor is he rude all the time: In fact, much of his writing reflects affection for the people in whose midst he is apt to find himself, and a spirit of inquiry that is part anthropological and part autobiographical. Yet he hates to be thought of as a “travel writer” — in spite of the fact that he practically invented the modern genre of travel writing. “A traveling writer is what I am, and at times a romantic voyeur.” …

Columbia Journalism Review with the story of Times of London snide remark about Wasilla, Alaska. Local paper responds.

… A description which Wasilla’s Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman calls in an editorial today “as inaccurate and unfair as it would be for anyone else to define England by a stereotypical lack of dental hygiene.”  …

Dilbert posts on the campaign and the Palin pick

Recently I was gigantic. Or so it seemed because I was attending a school open house and sitting in a tiny chair designed either for a small child or an elf with one buttock. Context is everything.

I was thinking about context as I observed with fascination McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. The immediate response from my lefty friends was that McCain was insane to pick a running mate with such a thin resume. That’s one possibility. The other explanation is more interesting.

My first response to McCain’s decision was to assume that Republicans did not suddenly forget how to win elections. If selecting Palin was a brilliant strategy in disguise, how exactly was it supposed to work?

Context.

McCain had a context problem. He was an old (too old) white guy from the failed establishment running against a younger and more exotic agent of change. It was a losing context. His choice of Palin changed the context.

Since selecting Palin, the discussion in the media and in kitchens across America has shifted from “Can you be too old to be President?” to “Can you be too young and inexperienced?” McCain has cleverly put his critics in the position of arguing that experience is a good thing. And McCain has more of it than Obama. If you believe that people only vote for presidents, not vice presidents, this was a clever move. …

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David Warren says our election season could be worse, we could be bored to death with Canadian elections.

The prospect of a Canadian general election leaves me, and I would guess most of my countrymen, bored. Now, boredom comes in slightly different flavours, and I will admit that the emotions associated with betrayal enter into mine. But it is like the vanilla in the ice cream; one is so used to it.

We have about five parties representing five slightly different grades of vanilla. The Tories perhaps anger me the most, because they promise chocolate chips, and don’t deliver. Well, maybe a couple of chocolate chips, but the irritation value of the false packaging more than compensates for them.

The chocolate chips in my analogy correspond to the “faith and freedom” values that are baldly presented in any Republican manifesto, and more timidly even in Democrat ones, in the republic to our south. …

John Fund with notes on Sarah’s Surge.

… In fact, since 1968, no Republican has done worse on Election Day than he was doing in major polls taken around Labor Day. On that basis, Mr. Obama should worry that Mr. McCain has now tied him or is leading in current polls.

Willie Brown too in his SF Chronicle blog.

The Democrats are in trouble. Sarah Palin has totally changed the dynamics of this campaign.

Period.

Palin’s speech to the GOP National Convention on Wednesday has set it up so that the Republicans are now on offense and Democrats are on defense. And we don’t do well on defense.

Suddenly, Palin and John McCain are the mavericks and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are the status quo, in a year when you don’t want to be seen as defending the status quo.

From taxes to oil drilling, Democrats are now going to have to start explaining their positions. …

Mark Steyn popped up for a few Corner posts.

A couple of Piper Palin videos.

One of the very good speeches last week that was overlooked in the Palin madness was the one by Rudy. Jay Nordlinger introduces us to it in a Corner post.

… 19.  My friend and colleague, the sagacious Rick Brookhiser, not long ago said this:  “Rudy is a liberal who hates liberals.  John McCain is a conservative who hates conservatives.”  There’s a lot of truth in that.  Only Rudy is not all that liberal.  And I wonder how conservative he would have been, or would be, in an office outside New York City (where he was plenty conservative — on crime, most prominently and crucially).

20.  This man gave one of the most engaging, rollicking, and fun — yes, fun — speeches I can remember hearing.  That’s if you’re a partisan Republican, of course.  And even if you’re not — you might have gotten some sort of kick out of it.

Way to go, Rudy G.  And, following Mike Bloomberg:  Can’t you run for mayor again?  You don’t want your gains reversed by some Dinkinsian Democrat, do you?

Here’s the written version of Rudy’s speech. The You Tube version follows in Pickings (WORD and PDF).

… Look at just one example in a lifetime of principled stands — John McCain’s support for the troop surge in Iraq. The Democratic Party had given up on Iraq. And I believe, ladies and gentlemen, that when they gave up on Iraq they were giving up on America. The Democratic leader in the Senate said so: “America has lost.”

Well, if America lost, who won? Al Qaida? Bin Laden? In the single biggest policy decision of this election, John McCain got it right and Barack Obama got it wrong.

If Barack Obama had been President, there would have been no troop surge and our troops would have been withdrawn in defeat.

Senator McCain was the candidate most associated with the surge. And it was unpopular.

What do you think most other candidates would have done in that situation? They would have acted in their own self-interest by changing their position.
How many times have we seen Barack Obama do that?

Obama was going to take public financing for his campaign, until he didn’t.

Obama was against wiretapping before he voted for it.

When speaking to a pro-Israel group, Obama favored an undivided Jerusalem. Until the very next day when he changed his mind.

I hope for his sake, Joe Biden got that VP thing in writing. …

Podhoretz, and Rubin posts from Contentions.

… The meme that Sarah Palin is some uncouth, unaccomplished and unqualified hick is crumbling under the weight of actual facts. The Washington Post editors have the blow-by-blow on her role in renegotiating a natural gas pipeline in Alaska. The editors observe that:

while her style has been minutely analyzed, very little commentary has focused on one of the few substantive claims she made about her brief tenure as governor of Alaska: that she “fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history . . . a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence.” Is Ms. Palin right about the importance of the pipeline and her role in moving it forward? Ms. Palin is indeed correct about the need to tap the 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under Alaska’s North Slope, the same region whose oil made the state wealthy but which has begun to run dry.

And it is not just that she had the right idea — it is that she overrode a plan of the incumbent Republican governor, a plan championed by Senator Ted Stevens and Vice President Dick Cheney, and threw the project open to bidding. The Post editors conclude:

Meanwhile, BP and Conoco Phillips have announced plans to build a pipeline of their own without the state’s backing — a sign that the political and economic wrangling over this immense and risky project is far from over. But it is also a sign that Ms. Palin’s outflanking of the oil companies injected some competition and urgency into a process that was previously stalled. Perhaps her Democratic opponent for the governorship in 2006, who campaigned on similar ideas, would have achieved these results. Nevertheless, Ms. Palin actually did.

This raises several issues. First, is there a single item in Barack Obama’s record that compares to this? Nothing comes to mind. Little wonder that the Democrats want to stop talking abut Palin. It turns out she is an accomplished person with demonstrable skills and good judgment. …

And Abe Greenwald.

Barack Obama’s slip-up, in which he referred to “my Muslim faith,” is interesting for a few reasons. Obama’s critics residing in various anti-Muslim fever swamps are harping on it as evidence of Obama being a closet Muslim–he’s not and that’s not what’s interesting.

Obama’s slip of the tongue demonstrates three things. First, he’s getting rattled. While Obama is a bit gaffe-prone, his gaffes are usually political misinterpretation or naïve reactions to world events. (In truth, his gaffes are usually more serious than this, and perhaps not really gaffes at all, but genuine errors in judgment.) That the master of mellifluous oratory would get tripped up on a word shows that he’s off his game. …

WSJ Op-ed on possible auto bail-out.

It was only a matter of time, unfortunately. And now that Michigan is an election-year swing state and Detroit’s auto makers are posting sales declines topping 20% each month, the time has arrived. The issue of a government bailout for General Motors, Ford and Chrysler is moving to center stage.

Barack Obama has said yes to this proposal early on, and last week John McCain climbed on board. So much for change and fighting pork-barrel spending. We’re moving beyond moral hazard here, folks, and into a moral quagmire. At least the Chrysler bailout of 1980 was structured so that taxpayers could reap a reward for taking a financial risk on the company’s future. That’s not what’s happening now. …

Interesting piece from Bob Novak on his brain tumor.

The main reason I am writing this column is that many people have asked me how I first realized I was suffering from a brain tumor and what I have done about it.

But I also want to relate the reaction to my disease, mostly compassionate, that belies Washington’s reputation.

The first sign that I was in trouble came on Wednesday, July 23, when my 2004 black Corvette struck a pedestrian on 18th Street in downtown Washington while I was on my way to my office.

I did not realize I had hit anyone until a shirt-sleeved young man on a bicycle, whom I incorrectly thought to be a bicycle messenger, jumped in front of my car to block the way. In fact, he was David A. Bono, a partner in the high-end law firm Harkins Cunningham. The bicyclist was shouting at me that I could not just hit people and then drive away. That was the first I knew about the accident. Mr. Bono called the police, and a patrolman soon arrived.

After I said I had no idea I had hit anyone until they flagged me down and informed me, Mr. Bono told The Washington Post, “I would not believe that.” Fortunately, the investigating officer, P. Garcia, was a policeman who listened and apparently believed me. While Mr. Bono and other bystanders were taking on aspects of a mob, shouting “hit-and-run,” Officer Garcia issued a right-of-way infraction against me, costing me $50, instead of a hit-and-run violation that would have been a felony. …

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We are heavy with more of our favorites with their Sarah Palin thoughts.

She continues to have a stunning effect on the race. The swing states identified by Karl Rove (CO, VA, MI, and OH) and by The Economist (NV, NM, NC, CO, OH, MN, and MO) are some of the most susceptible to Sarah’s wiles.

If the polls continue to go south on Obama, he’ll have to consider the Torricelli option. (Bob Torricelli gave up his 2002 Senate re-election bid five weeks before the vote, and was replaced by Frank Lautenberg.) Obama needs for Biden to have a health event, and then Hillary can be put on the ticket.

In the meantime, Biden mentioned on Meet the Press he is going to Montana tomorrow. That’ll work. Bush won the state’s 3 electoral votes 59 to 38.

Gerard Baker’s Sarah Palin take.

The best line I heard about Sarah Palin during the frenzied orgy of chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion that greeted her nomination for vice-president a week ago came from a correspondent who knows a thing or two about Alaska.

“What’s the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”

“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let’s be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.

“The other kills her own food.”

Now we know, thanks to her triumphant debut at the Republican convention on Wednesday, that Mrs Palin not only slaughters her prey. She impales its head on a stick and parades it around for her followers to jeer at. For half an hour she eviscerated Mr Obama in that hall and did it all without dropping her sweet schoolmarm smile, as if she were handing out chocolates at the end of a history lesson. …

David Warren says vote for the peace candidates; McCain and Palin.

… The election will necessarily be close, since the American people themselves are about equally divided between “conservative” and “liberal” assumptions about reality, and the swing vote between them is not very large. But in the campaign viewers’ oddly criss-crossed comparison — Obama versus Palin, and Biden versus McCain — the Republicans now have two winners.

The consequence, not merely to the U.S. but to the planet, of a McCain as opposed to an Obama presidency, is almost impossible to overestimate.

As I’ve argued before, the enemies of America and the West will tend to be cautious with John McCain, incautious with Barack Obama. (And with Palin behind him, they’ll be toasting McCain’s health.) It follows that a vote for McCain favours peace and stability, a vote for Obama, instability and worse.

Barbara Amiel, wife of Conrad Black, renews her political columnist vows for a WSJ piece on Sarah Palin, and Margaret Thatcher at age 49.

The glummest face Wednesday night might have been, if only we could have seen it, that of Hillary Clinton.

Imagine watching Sarah Palin, the gun-toting, lifelong member of the NRA, the PTA mom with teased hair and hips half the size of Hillary’s, who went … omigod … to the University of Idaho and studied journalism. Mrs. Palin with her five kids and one of them still virtually suckling age, going wham through that cement ceiling put there exclusively for good-looking right-wing/populist conservative females by not-so-good-looking left-wing ones (Gloria Steinem excepting). There, pending some terrible goof or revelation, stood the woman most likely to get into the Oval Office as its official occupant rather than as an intern. …

… American feminists have always had a tough sell to make. To the rest of the world, no females on earth have ever had it as easy as middle-class American women. Cosseted, surrounded by labor-saving devices, easily available contraception and supermarkets groaning with food, their complaints have always seemed to have no relationship to reality.

Education was there for the taking. Marriages were not arranged. Going against social mores had no serious consequences. Postwar American women (excluding those mired in poverty or the odious restrictions of race) have always had the choice of what they wanted to be. They simply didn’t decide to exercise it until it became more fashionable to get out of the home than to run it.

Sarah Palin has put the flim-flam nature of America feminism sharply into focus, revealing the not-so-secret hypocrisy of its code and, whatever her future, this alone is an accomplishment. As she emerged into the nation’s consciousness, a shudder went through the feminist left—a political movement not restricted to females. She is a mother refusing to stay at home (good) who had made a success out in the workplace (excellent) whose marriage nevertheless is a rip-roaring success and whose views are unspeakable—those of a red-blooded, right-wing principled pragmatist. …

Bill Kristol thanks the people responsible for the GOP success last week.

… Third: A special thank you to our friends in the liberal media establishment. Who knew they would come through so spectacularly? The ludicrous media feeding frenzy about the Palin family hyped interest in her speech, enabling her to win a huge audience for her smashing success Wednesday night at the convention. Indeed, it even renewed interest in McCain, who seems to have gotten still more viewers for his less smashing–but well-received–presentation the following evening.

The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media’s prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.

By the end of the week, after Palin’s tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren’t being narrow-minded enough. …

Sally Quinn provides a graceful exit for her harsh words about Sarah. Jennifer Rubin has the details in Contentions.

… But now Quinn has seen Palin with her own eyes and is singing a different tune. On Fox today with Bill O’Reilly, Quinn had this to say:

I thought that she was amazing. in her speech. She was funny and smart and poised and confident. She gave a great speech, beautifully delivered. I think she is going to be a formidable opponent. all of that I think is — I was wrong about her. and I didn’t know anything about her. I probably didn’t know any more than John McCain did a few days before he picked her.

(Well, perhaps McCain knew plenty and chose her on this basis, but that’s a quibble.) O’Reilly went on to ask her if  ”your column and other columns like yours rallied the folks to her side and actually helped the McCain-Palin ticket dramatically.” Quinn answered “I  think you’re absolutely right.” …

Jennifer also links to a WSJ Kimberly Strassel piece on Palin’s successes in Alaska.

The notion that Sarah Palin is unaccomplished and untested is frankly a media invention. For those who bother to examine her actual record, the facts tell a different story. Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal rightly notes that from media coverage ” you’ve heard plenty about her religious views and private family matters,” but precious little about what she has done in office. Strassel tries to correct this  by describing in blow-by-blow fashion Palin’s record in bringing down a corrupt machine and taking on the oil companies. …

Volokh reports on the Israeli flag in Sarah Palin’s office.

The Economist bellwether series continues. This time with Minnesota.

ON A hot summer day at Shady Oak Lake, teenagers line up for the high-diving board. Parents with small children wade in the shallows near the sandy beach. This suburban idyll, surrounded by leafy trees and big houses, lies near Edina, a town just west of Minnesota’s Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. Despite appearances, it is a political ground zero in a state the Republicans are fighting to snatch from the Democrats.

Minnesota is famous as a liberal bastion. It is the only state not to have voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, and has its own (traditionally leftier) brand of Democrats in the Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party. …

… But look a little closer, and Minnesota seems a more attractive target. Presidential votes in the state have been very close lately, decided by fewer than four points. Barack Obama leads by only low single digits in most recent polls. Minnesota has a Republican senator, Norm Coleman, who beat Mr Mondale in 2002. Many predicted that the state’s Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, would be Mr McCain’s running-mate. The state also tends to move along with fellow “Frost Belt” states such as Iowa and Wisconsin, with which it shares media markets. Combined, that block has as many electoral votes as Florida, a perennial battleground.  …

Instapundit spots an important story about Chicago and its failed administration.

I think we should just pull out of Chicago: …

Here’s the story from CBS News in Chicago.

CHICAGO (CBS) ? An estimated 123 people were shot and killed over the summer. That’s nearly double the number of soldiers killed in Iraq over the same time period.

In May, cbs2chicago.com began tracking city shootings and posting them on Google maps. Information compiled from our reporters, wire service reports and the Chicago Police Major Incidents log indicated that 123 people were shot and killed throughout the city between the start of Memorial Day weekend on May 26, and the end of Labor Day on Sept. 1.

According to the Defense Department, 65 soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq. About the same number were killed in Afghanistan over that same period.

In the same time period, an estimated 245 people were shot and wounded in the city. …