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David Warren does the Solzhenitsyn honors today.

Prophetic writers are a holy nuisance to everyone, but especially to themselves. The gift of prophecy renders a man incapable of a quiet life, incapable of enjoying idle pleasures, incapable of looking the other way — when it is to no immediate personal advantage to be staring at the truth. But it cannot take away the normal human desire for such comforts.

Nobody could have wished to be Alexander Solzhenitsyn, poet of the Gulag, and of its “zeks” (hapless prisoners). Providence compelled him to experience at first hand everything he would immortalize, from the prison camps to the terminal wards to betrayals of every imaginable kind. And to these it added something more cruel: moments in which victories were achieved against improbable odds, each overturned in the next moment.

Yet providence also instilled the strength to resist illusion, and few men have endured what Solzhenitsyn repeatedly endured, more stoically. From the moment of his first arrest in 1945, he ceased to entertain the illusion that communism could reform itself; and later the illusion that after the final collapse of communism, the Russian people would emerge in any other condition than they did: scarred and debilitated by their experience of enslavement, and by their complicity in the machinations of evil. …

Paul Greenberg too.

Our final essay on Reagan by Mark Steyn is from the Daily Telegraph, UK.

‘We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.” Of all the marvelous Ronald Reagan lines retailed over the weekend, that’s my favourite. He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and it encapsulates his legacy at home and abroad.

I like it because too often we “small government” conservatives can sound small ourselves – pinched and crabbed and reductive. Reagan made small government a big idea. I always think of him in those broad-shouldered suits, arms outstretched, an inch of cuff: he was awfully expansive about shrinking government.

In the speech, he meant it domestically: it was an age when every government cure for inflation only doubled it. He slew that double-digit dragon so comprehensively that today the word “inflation” is all but obsolescent, at least as a political issue.

But, in the broader sense, Reagan’s line about nations that have governments is a good way to weigh up the world. Across central and eastern Europe, from Slovenia to Lithuania to Bulgaria, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments – serving at the people’s pleasure.

The intelligentsia persist in believing this had nothing to do with Reagan or Thatcher: they maintain that the Soviet empire would have collapsed anyway, their belated belief in the inevitable failure of communism being in no way inconsistent with their previous long-held belief in the inevitable triumph of communism. And anyway, they continue, if anyone was responsible, it was Mikhail Gorbachev. …

In his weekly campaign piece for WSJ, Karl Rove outlines McCain’s path to a win.

Notwithstanding the hype about Barack Obama, here is where the presidential race stands: John McCain was within an average of 1.9% of his Democratic opponent in last week’s daily Gallup tracking poll.

It shouldn’t be this close. Sen. Obama should be way ahead. It’s not that Sen. McCain has made up a lot of ground. Pollster.com1 shows that the Republican steadily declined from March through June as the Democratic contest dominated the news. Mr. McCain stabilized in July, and then ticked up slightly. But the most important political fact of July is that Mr. Obama has lost altitude. Gallup now projects that 23% of this year’s electorate will be swing voters, more than twice the share in 2004.

It seems that each candidate is underperforming with his base. Mr. Obama’s problem is that only 74% of Democrats in the latest Fox Poll support him, while Mr. McCain gets 86% of Republicans. But Mr. McCain’s support lacks the same intensity Mr. Obama receives. The latest Pew poll found that 24% of voters “strongly” support Mr. Obama, compared to 17% for Mr. McCain. …

Tony Blankley writes about this year’s anointed one.

It’s getting tricky to know how to refer to he who presumes to be the next president. It was made clear several months ago that mentioning his middle name is a forbidden act. (Pass out more eggshells.) Then, having nothing honorable to say, Obama warned his followers last week that Sen. McCain would try to scare voters by pointing to Obama’s “funny name” and the fact that “he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills.”

Now, putting aside for the moment the racial component of His warning, what are we to make of the “funny name” reference? Many people have “funny” names. Some people think my last name — being very close in spelling to the adverbial form for the absence of content — is funny.

Certainly, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s name is funny. Many on the left have had great fun with President Bush’s last name. But we all have found our names perfectly serviceable and would expect people to call us by the names by which we identify ourselves.

But He has made it clear that the mere use of His name would be freighted with coded innuendoes of something too horrible to say straightforwardly. One has to go back to Exodus 3:13-14 to find such strict instructions concerning the use of a name. Moses explained: “Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they say to me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?” And God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.” And He said, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” …

Karen Tumulty asks a rhetorical, “Have the Clintons Gotten Over It” and answers, “No.”

… Meanwhile, if Hillary Clinton’s feelings are still bruised, her husband’s are positively raw. The former President is particularly resentful of suggestions—which he believes were fueled by the Obama camp—that he attempted to play upon racial fears during the primaries. Not helping is the fact that Obama has yet to follow up on the tentative dinner plans he and Bill Clinton made at the end of the primary season. “It’s personal with him, in terms of his own legacy,” says a friend of Bill Clinton’s. “And the race stuff really left a bad taste in his mouth.”

Bill Clinton’s resentment came through in an interview with ABC News during his recent trip to Africa. Asked what regrets he might have about his role in his wife’s campaign, he bristled and then shot back, “I am not a racist. I never made a racist comment.” He struggled to render a positive comment about Obama’s qualifications for his old job. “You could argue that nobody is ever ready to be President,” Clinton said. “You could argue that even if you’ve been Vice President for eight years, that no one can ever be fully ready for the pressures of the office.” Pressed again, he responded with an endorsement that could hardly have been a weaker cup of tea: “I never said he wasn’t qualified. The Constitution sets qualification for the President. And then the people decide who they think would be the better President. I think we have two choices. I think he should win, and I think he will win.”  …

Politico writes on Jon Voight coming out of the closet. The Hollywood closet occupied by those who love freedom and think we are best served by market solutions.

Jon Voight intended to turn heads with the “very strong points” in his Washington Times op-ed last week. But he probably didn’t expect so many of them to reside in Hollywood.

In a sign of the growing interest in politics this election year, bloggers who normally focus on the entertainment industry are expanding their presence in one of the Internet’s other spheres of influence.

Voight’s piece slammed Democratic candidate Barack Obama, praised GOP contender John McCain and even repudiated his own Vietnam War protests as the naive flailings of a deluded youth. It was a stunning bit of self-revelatory memoir from the now-conservative “Coming Home” star.

The political blogsosphere, of course, went ballistic. …

Roger Simon has rough words for Random House.

Although it has for some time been a division of German media giant Bertelsmann, Random House has been one of the distinguished names in American publishing since the halcyon days of Bennett Cerf. So it is particularly repugnant to see the company knuckling under to  essentially the same reactionary, anti-democratic, anti-free speech forces that repressed the Danish cartoons.  As we learned in the Wall Street Journal today, the company has decided not to publish Sherry Jones’ historical novel “The Jewel of Medina” about Mohammed’s child bride Aisha.  The book was part of a $100,000 two-book contract with the author. …

Walter Williams says we’re becoming a nation of thieves.

… Much of the justification for the welfare state is to reduce income inequality by making income transfers to the poor. Browning provides some statistics that might help us to evaluate the sincerity and truthfulness of this claim. In 2005, total federal, state and local government expenditures on 85 welfare programs were $620 billion. That’s larger than national defense ($495 billion) or public education ($472 billion). The 2005 official poverty count was 37 million persons. That means welfare expenditures per poor person were $16,750, or $67,000 for a poor family of four.

Those figures understate poverty expenditures because poor people are recipients of non-welfare programs such as Social Security, Medicare, private charity and uncompensated medical care. The question that naturally arises is if we’re spending enough to lift everyone out of poverty, why is there still poverty? The obvious answer is poor people are not receiving all the money being spent in their name. Non-poor people are getting the bulk of it. …

We close today with a couple of items that prove God has a sense of humor. Bill Clinton, in his AIDS fighting role, has come out for monogamy. And Al Gore has a new 100 foot boat named Bio Solar One. That’s right, BS One.

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Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History, gives her Solzhenitsyn send-off.

… In the week of his death, though, what stands out is not who Solzhenitsyn was but what he wrote. It is very easy, in a world where news is instant and photographs travel as quickly as they are taken, to forget how powerful, still, are written words. And Solzhenitsyn was, in the end, a writer: A man who gathered facts, sorted through them, tested them against his own experience, composed them into paragraphs and chapters. It was not his personality but his language that forced people to think more deeply about their values, their assumptions, their societies. It was not his television appearances that affected history but his words.

His manuscripts were read and pondered in silence, and the thought he put into them provoked his readers to think, too. In the end, his books mattered not because he was famous or notorious but because millions of Soviet citizens recognized themselves in his work: They read his books because they already knew that they were true.

James Lileks says after reading Gulag;

…  I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.

Today’s Mark Steyn piece on Reagan came from July 2001 in The Spectator, UK .

… But, of course, it is not necessary for Friedman’s metaphor to make sense, as all the smart people who read The New York Times already agree with him. Missile defence has been a joke ever since it was cooked up a generation ago by President Reagan, the noted B-movie cowboy moron, and instantly dismissed as Star Wars, a comic-book fantasy. Then, as now, the smart set lined up to pour scorn on the presidential clod: according to JFK/LBJ national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, renowned Kremlinologist George F. Kennan, veteran arms control negotiator Gerald Smith, former defence secretary Robert S. McNamara, and a zillion others of one mind, Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative was an ‘act of folly’, a ‘dream’ that ‘cannot be achieved’. Worse, the whole scam was a ‘telling commentary on his presidential style’, according to Philip Geyelin in The Washington Post in 1984:

Reagan had no proposal worked out when he first floated the idea almost casually in a speech devoted to other, known quantities in his military program. He had only a fatuous, personal vision of a nuclear-free world.

Just as President Kennedy had no proposal worked out – only a fatuous personal vision of putting a man on the moon within the decade. …

John Fund adds his personal note to Bob Novak’s health news. John also writes on Pelosi’s interview with Stephanopoulos this past Sunday. A link to that interview is provided below. And, a great cartoon from Lisa Benson.

… On Sunday, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos became exasperated by Ms. Pelosi’s refusal to stray from her rote talking points. Several times he asked variations of the same question: “Why won’t you permit a straight up or down vote?”

“We have a debate every single day on this subject,” she coolly replied. “What you saw in the Congress this week was the war dance of the handmaidens of the oil companies.”

Mr. Stephanopoulos didn’t give up. “But why not allow votes on all that? When you came in as Speaker you promised in your commitment book ‘A New Direction for America’ — let me show our viewers — you said that ‘Bills should generally come to the floor under a procedure that allows open, full, fair debate consisting of full amendment process that grants the Minority the right to offer its alternatives.’ If they want to offer a drilling proposal, why can’t they have a vote?” …

The Economist starts a series on the bellwether states. First up – Ohio.

BARACK OBAMA is doing everything he can to make it look as if the election is a mere formality, and adoring media types are keen to play along. Yet the latest USA Today-Gallup poll puts John McCain four points ahead, while the RealClearPolitics average of polls gives Mr Obama a meagre two-and-a-half-point lead. Optimistic Republicans recall that Michael Dukakis was 17 points ahead of George Bush senior in the summer of 1988, and still lost. So there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this election, like the previous two, could boil down to a tight race settled by close results in a handful of “swing” states.

Ohio is the quintessential battleground state. Bill Clinton won it by some of the narrowest of his margins for any big state—just two points in 1992 and six in 1996. In 2004 George Bush won Ohio, with its precious 20 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to secure the presidency, by a mere 118,600 votes. Had 60,000 Ohioans gone the other way, John Kerry would have been president.

Ohio is also a bellwether. It has voted for the winning candidate in all 11 presidential elections since 1960. In doing so, it has deviated from the national vote shares by only a couple of points. In 2004 it matched the national average exactly. …

Power Line posts on Obama.

For some time I have been trying to make the case that Barack Obama doesn’t know much about anything except how to win friends and influence people, and that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. See, for example, the columns “The Kennedy-Khrushchev conference for dummies” and “Anti-terror oops.” In short, Obama is a BS artist. He is an extraordinary specimen, perhaps approaching the great American type of confidence man explored in literature by Herman Melville, Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison.

In “Emperor Obama’s new clothes,” James Lewis invokes Hans Christian Andersen to explore the same phenomenon. Lewis does a good job with “one little example.” He writes:

On May 19 Senator Obama proclaimed Iran to be just “a tiny country.” That’s a tiny country with seventy million people, half of it covered with mountains that you can tunnel under for your nuclear hidey holes. A half-million men in the army plus the fanatical martyrs of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, a domestic terror apparatus to keep the people down, a growing nuclear and missile program, enough oil to finance it all, a strategic position at the head and the tiny choke-point of the Persian Gulf, a long, long imperial tradition, and an Islamofascist suicide ideology, thanks to Jimmy Carter’s good friend Ayatollah Khomeini. The regime of this tiny country had a habit of sending hundreds of young boys to blow up mine fields with their bodies, wearing green plastic “Keys to Paradise” around their necks. It controls the “Shiite Crescent” from Lebanon to the Gulf using its powerful alliance with Syria and Hezb’allah, supplied by our good friends the Russians and Chinese. The regime has a habit of blowing up American soldiers in Iraq with state-of-the-art shaped-charge explosives. Iran has performed high-altitude missile tests that could only be used to set off a nuclear EMP explosion, designed to cripple any modern nation by zapping its electrical and communication grids. It’s just a “tiny threat,” said Obama — until his staff told him that wasn’t quite right, and he quickly changed his tune. …

Steve Malanga on the red ink in anti-business states.

… Of the approximately $48 billion in accumulated budget shortfalls that the 29 states with projected deficits are facing, $33 billion, or two-thirds of the gap, is concentrated in those five states considered by corporate executives to be the least friendly to business. Meanwhile, among the five states ranked as having the best business environment, Texas and North Carolina have no projected budget gaps, and Georgia, Tennessee and Florida are facing shortfalls amounting to about $4.1 billion, or less than one-tenth of the states’ total.

An idealist would assume that those stark numbers would jump out at legislators in the most anti-business states and prompt a bracing re-evaluation of their spending, tax and regulatory regimes, as Paterson advocates. But no such luck. Paterson’s former colleagues in the state legislature are lobbying for a new tax on millionaires, while across the country California’s legislators have called for boosting the state’s top tax rate from 9.3 percent to 11 percent. Since many firms, especially small ones, are organized corporately in such a way that they pay taxes on profits at their owners’ personal income tax rate, any increase in the top rate of income taxes will hit small firms hard, to say nothing of the impact on the personal taxes of executives at big firms. …

Thoughtful Robert Samuelson column on our affinity neighborhoods.

People prefer to be with people like themselves. For all the celebration of “diversity,” it’s sameness that dominates. Most people favor friendships with those who have similar backgrounds, interests and values. It makes for more shared experiences, easier conversations and more comfortable silences. Despite many exceptions, the urge is nearly universal. It’s human nature.

Perhaps America’s greatest glory is to rise above this self-absorption. People with many different heritages and beliefs have blended into a cohesive society. At some point, most people subordinate their own firmly held convictions and loyalties to the larger nation. This is more than patriotism; it’s the identity of “being an American.” But it is in constant tension with the differences that divide Americans.

The latest manifestation of this is what Bill Bishop calls “the Big Sort.” By that, he means that Americans have increasingly “clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and, in the end, politics.” Republican fundamentalists congregate with other Republican fundamentalists. Liberal Democrats herd with other liberal Democrats. Environmentalists decamp to Portland, Ore. Child-centered Republican families move to the exurbs of Dallas and Minneapolis. …

Op-Ed in The Australian says it’s been a tough year for the globalony folks.

IT has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world’s oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.

In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans’s article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can’t be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.

Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.

The reason is that precisely that they are believers, not scientists. No amount of empirical evidence will overturn what has become not a scientific theory but a form of religion. …

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Christopher Hitchens with his send off for Solzhenitsyn.

Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken. Should they manage to survive, such heroes have a good chance of outliving the state or the system that so grossly underestimated them. Examples are rather precious and relatively few, and they include Nelson Mandela refusing an offer to be released from jail (unless and until all other political detainees were also freed) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn having to be deported from his country of birth against his will, even though he had become—and had been before—a prisoner there.

Two words will always be indissolubly connected to the name of Alexander Isayevich: the acronym GULAG (for the initials of the Stalinist system of penitentiary camps that dotted the Soviet landscape like a pattern of hellish islands) and the terse, harsh word Zek, to describe the starved and overworked inhabitants of this archipelago of the new serfdom. …

Pickerhead has learned to pay attention to David Warren, even when he starts out in obtuse fashion. Turns out his essay on the “truths we know in our hearts” is timed perfectly for the passing of one of the 20th Century’s bravest truthtellers.

… A university professor has told me, “A certain amount of discretion is necessary. You must say things in a way sufficiently cumbersome, that those who can handle the truth will get it, and those who can’t, will not.” This was his prescription for academic survival, in the age of the “politically correct.”

Prudent advice, to be sure, but then one remembers the proverb of William Blake: “Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid, courted by Incapacity.”

We (royal) ought consistently to seek the obvious truth. That is the calling. Why do we hesitate?

Low motives easily suggest themselves. “I should like to keep my job. I should like to stay out of prison. I should like to avoid being hauled before a Human Rights Tribunal. I should like to have a quiet life, and continue paying my spousal support. Things may seem bad sometimes, but they could be worse.”

The cock crows thrice. There are saints, there are people who know that there are saints, and there are people who don’t know. One should aspire to rise at least to the middle condition. Not everyone is called to martyrdom, but everyone is called to witness.

Even journalists.

To witness what? To witness the news, or what appears to be news; to witness the unusual or significant; to describe or explain some aspect of current history.

Getting the facts straight — a far more difficult task than most readers or even journalists realize — is one of those ethical absolutes. It is a precondition for truth, though not the truth itself. For it is easy to lie with all your facts straight. …

Speaking of truth telling; in Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn asked himself what he would have been like had he been recruited into the NKVD organs rather than becoming an artillery officer.

“So I would (try) to imagine: if, by the time war broke out, I had already been wearing an NKVD officer’s insignia on my blue tabs, what would I have become? Nowadays, of course, I can console myself by saying that my heart wouldn’t have stood it, that I would have objected and at some point slammed the door. But later, lying on a prison bunk, I began to look back over my actual career as an officer and I was horrified.”

The June 2004 week when we celebrated Reagan’s life found five essays on the Gipper written by Mark Steyn. We had one yesterday. Today two more. One from the Sun-Times and one from National Review.

… Ronald Reagan is beyond the Clark Cliffords and Arthur Schlesingers now. When it comes to his reputation as a great president, the people are way ahead. In that respect, if the citizens of this great republic will forgive a monarchical comparison, let me return to the passing of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

She was 102, so it wasn’t exactly unexpected. The BBC and other broadcasters had long ago decided that most of the people who cared about the old girl were themselves long dead. So, come the day, they sloughed it off. Old woman, no big deal, all in the past. And then they spent the rest of the week trying to explain why they’d got it so wrong.

Outside the studios, over half a million people solemnly filed past her coffin as she lay in state at Westminster Hall, and a million lined the streets for her funeral, including some who’d flown in from Canada and other far-flung realms.

Something similar happened last week. Hundreds of thousands of Americans waited quietly in line in California and then in Washington to say goodbye to their president. Meanwhile, back on the air, the big networks struggled to find the tone. On the day itself, the assembled media grandees agreed that he was an amiable fellow with a big smile who told a good joke. If you’d tuned in 10 minutes late to ”Larry King Live,” you’d have assumed he was doing one of his special tributes to some half-forgotten comic or TV host from the ’50s that no one had very much to say about.

Back in the real world, the people waiting hours to get in to the Rotunda were there not just because Ronald Reagan was amiable but because they grasped that he was a significant figure in the life of this country and the world. Here too the events of two years ago are instructive: The Queen Mother was the last living representative of Britain’s wartime leadership. She didn’t win any battles, of course, but, advised to go to Canada, she instead stayed on in London, toured bombed-out streets in the East End, and took a direct hit at Buckingham Palace. To those on the streets of Westminster in 2002, she symbolized resolve and then victory in a great cause.

That’s what this week’s mourners understand about Reagan, too. He also symbolizes resolve and victory — in a slyer, slipperier war, but one which he won just as decisively. Some saw it then. More see it now. One day even the network anchors and Ivy League professors will get it.

Why is it Liberals think they’re so much smarter than those on the right? Peter Schweizer has some answers.

During the 2000 election, George W. Bush was often given the moniker “stupid.” A Boston television reporter tripped him up with a “pop quiz,” asking him the names of foreign leaders. At the same time, his opponent, Vice President Al Gore, was presented as the consummate intellectual. He went out of his way to drop phrases like “Cartesian revolution” and used complex metaphors like “the clockwork universe” in his speeches.

Indeed, Gore seemed obsessed with proving how smart he was — and the media was his willing accomplice. The media reported at least a dozen times that Gore was “the smartest kid in the class.” Bloomberg News observed that Gore had little patience for those “a few IQ points short of genius.” The New York Times asked (in all seriousness), “Is Gore too smart to be president?” His biggest challenge, the paper explained, was “to show that he is a regular guy despite a perceived surplus of gravitas, which at least some Americans seem to find intimidating.” This liberal assumption that a candidate can be just too darn smart to win a presidential election in this country goes back to Adlai Stevenson.

What proof was there of Gore’s alleged gravitas? How exactly did the media know that Gore was so smart and Bush so dumb? In fact, the record did not indicate any of this was true. It was often alleged, probably with reason, that Bush only got into Yale because his father had gone there and his grandfather had been a Connecticut senator. Yet Gore, with high school Bs and Cs (his only As were in art), got into Harvard in part because (like other politicians’ sons, including a raft of Kennedys) his father was a famous senator. At Harvard, Gore’s grades did not improve. In his sophomore year he earned a D, a C-minus, two Cs, two C-pluses and one B-minus. He was in the bottom fifth of his class his first two years in school. Later he flunked out of divinity school (failing five of his eight classes) and dropped out of Vanderbilt University Law School. Gore was once asked (after having served in the U.S. Senate for several years) to name his favourite president. “President Knox,” he replied. …

Emmett Tyrrell has interesting ideas for history reading this summer.

Slate reviews a new GPS/Traffic device.

Most of the time, you can get along fine without in-car GPS. Your daily commute is marked by well-worn drudgery: You drive to work, to the store, and back home, rote trips for which you don’t need help. And nowadays when you are lost, your phone can probably assist you. So it’s no surprise that GPS firms are suffering. This week, shares of Garmin, the once-high-flying market leader, plummeted after the company lowered its revenue expectations for the year and delayed the launch of its long-promised smartphone, a device investors hoped would unshackle Garmin’s fortunes from the apparently sinking GPS market.

But a few months ago, a Silicon Valley start-up called Dash Navigation put out a product that could well revive the sagging business. The Dash Express navigator packs a killer feature that other GPS systems lack: the Internet. Network connectivity powers Dash’s primary attraction: what the company calls “crowd-sourced traffic.” As you traverse your favored metropolis, the Dash Express anonymously transmits information about its location and speed to a central server. Every other Dash driver does the same. Using this data, Dash can paint a stunningly accurate picture of traffic patterns. Have you ever been stuck in a jam and wished there were some way to look two miles ahead to see whether things are still ugly? Dash essentially does that for you.

I’ve been testing the Dash Express for a week, and I’m floored. …

Humor section starts with the story about trash inspections in San Francisco. If you don’t recycle, do you get sent to the garbage gulag?

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Ilya Somin at Volokh has Solzhenitsyn thoughts.

John Podhoretz too.

And Victor Davis Hanson.

Which got Pickerhead thinking about Reagan, gone now for four years since that Saturday in June. And thinking about Steyn too, temporarily gone now for four weeks. How ’bout Steyn writing on Reagan? This is from Pickings’ Reagan Week four years ago, Mark Steyn in the Atlantic Monthly.

All Saturday across the networks, media grandees who’d voted for Carter and Mondale, just like all their friends did, tried to explain the appeal of Ronald Reagan. He was “The Great Communicator”, he had a wonderful sense of humour, he had a charming smile… self-deprecating… the tilt of his head…

All true, but not what matters. Even politics attracts its share of optimistic, likeable men, and most of them leave no trace – like Britain’s “Sunny Jim” Callaghan, a perfect example of the defeatism of western leadership in the 1970s. It was the era of “détente”, a word barely remembered now, which is just as well, as it reflects poorly on us: the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the free world had decided that the unfree world was not a prison ruled by a murderous ideology that had to be defeated but merely an alternative lifestyle that had to be accommodated. Under cover of “détente”, the Soviets gobbled up more and more real estate across the planet, from Ethiopia to Grenada. Nonetheless, it wasn’t just the usual suspects who subscribed to this grubby evasion – Helmut Schmidt, Pierre Trudeau, Francois Mitterand – but most of the so-called “conservatives”, too – Ted Heath, Giscard d’Estaing, Gerald Ford.

Unlike these men, unlike most other senior Republicans, Ronald Reagan saw Soviet Communism for what it was: a great evil. Millions of Europeans across half a continent from Poland to Bulgaria, Slovenia to Latvia live in freedom today because he acknowledged that simple truth when the rest of the political class was tying itself in knots trying to pretend otherwise. That’s what counts. He brought down the “evil empire”, and all the rest is fine print. …

Pelosi the Planet Protector cannot stand scrutiny from Charles Krauthammer.

… Places such as Nigeria, where chronic corruption, environmental neglect and the resulting unrest and instability lead to pipeline explosions, oil spills and illegal siphoning by the poverty-stricken population — which leads to more spills and explosions. Just this week, two Royal Dutch Shell pipelines had to be shut down because bombings by local militants were causing leaks into the ground.

Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.

The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling. Today, directional drilling — essentially drilling down, then sideways — allows access to oil that in 1970 would have required a surface footprint more than three times as large. Additionally, the United States has one of the most extensive and least corrupt regulatory systems on the planet.

Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?

The net environmental effect of Pelosi’s no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world — thereby increasing net planetary damage. …

Jim Lindgren in Volokh gives us some excerpts of a lengthy Weekly Standard piece on Obama and his time in the Illinois legislature.

Stanley Kurtz has a long profile on Barack Obama’s years in the Illinois State Senate: “Barack Obama’s Lost Years: The senator’s tenure as a state legislator reveals him to be an old-fashioned, big government, race-conscious liberal.”

Kurtz’s primary sources are the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender. Over the last few months, I have gone through a lot of the Chicago Defender stories myself. While I wouldn’t spin the facts as negatively as Kurtz does, there are a lot of facts in Kurtz’s story that people may not yet realize. …

Ed Morrissey notes how Rush Limbaugh tagged Obama with Carter’s “malaise” talk.

You know, Rush Limbaugh celebrates his 20th anniversary in syndication this week, an amazing accomplishment in any entertainment medium but especially so in radio.  Why has he succeeded so completely?  Perhaps because he can connect the dots, and the dottiness, as he does with Barack Obama’s energy policy as explained yesterday.  Take a listen to Rush’s deconstruction:

LIMBAUGH: This is Obama yesterday at a campaign event in Springfield, Missouri:

OBAMA: All the oil they’re talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups, you could actually save just as much.

LIMBAUGH: This is unbelievable! My friends, this is laughable of course, but it’s stupid! It is stupid! How many of you remember the seventies? When we had these shortages, all through the Jimmy Carter years and we have all these tips, all these tips on how to save gasoline? Avoid jackrabbit starts, keep your tires properly inflated, there’s a list of about ten or twelve these things. I said if I follow each one of these things I’ll have to stop the car every five miles, siphon some fuel out, for all the fuel I’m going to be saving.

This is ridiculous. This is a presidential candidate and he’s talking about keeping your tires inflated and getting regular tune-ups and that would save as much oil as drilling would produce. And this guy is the Democrat presidential nominee. Who has filled his head with this stuff? …

Slate covers the “nanny state” as it bans fast food restaurants in LA neighborhoods. Areas we can best describe as “The Hood.”

The war on fat has just crossed a major red line. The Los Angeles City Council has passed an ordinance prohibiting construction of new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area inhabited by 500,000 low-income people.

We’re not talking anymore about preaching diet and exercise, disclosing calorie counts, or restricting sodas in schools. We’re talking about banning the sale of food to adults. Treating French fries like cigarettes or liquor. I didn’t think this would happen in the United States anytime soon. I was wrong.

The mayor hasn’t yet signed the ordinance, but he probably will, since it passed unanimously. It doesn’t affect existing restaurants, and initially it will impose only a one-year moratorium. But that period is likely to be extended to two years or more, and the prohibition’s sponsor hopes to make it permanent. …

Christopher Buckley on the “age thing.”

… Senator Obama’s boosters pooh-pooh his Youth Thing problem, sometimes a bit grandiosely. Al Gore (44 when he became vice president) was moved to quote something President Kennedy (after Teddy Roosevelt, our youngest president) used on one of his detractors: “To exclude from positions of trust and command all those below the age of 44 would have kept Jefferson from writing the Declaration of Independence, Washington from commanding the Continental Army, Madison from fathering the Constitution, . . . and Christopher Columbus from discovering America.” He quoted this in the presence of a beaming Obama, and beam the senator might, having just been not so subtly compared to Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Columbus. If he lives up to those paradigms, we will be in excellent hands indeed.

Back to McCain: Experience is no guarantor of greatness, or even wisdom, as George Will recently reminded us wittily:

The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to being ranked as America’s worst president. Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow. …

US News covers the election of 1864, one of the most momentous in our nation’s history.

… On March 4, 1865—in his second inaugural address—Lincoln gave one of the most eloquent and stirring speeches in history. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” he said, “let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

The following month, five days after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate forces at Appomattox, Lincoln was shot by an assassin. He died the next morning, on April 15, 1865.

In the end, Lincoln’s profound legacy was created and propelled by two elections—the one in 1860, which triggered the war, and the election of 1864, which enabled Lincoln to win it. Historian Henry Adams once wrote that a president “resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.” Lincoln understood this to his core. Added historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: “The Constitution offers every president a helm, but the course and the port constitute the first requirement for presidential greatness. Great presidents possess, or are possessed by, a vision of an ideal America. Their passion is to make sure the ship of state sails on the right course.” Defining that vision and setting that course are what Lincoln’s presidency was all about.

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David Warren details how the bombings in India relate to the war we are in.

… Thanks to the leadership shown by Bush and Blair, thanks to the stamina the West has shown in Afghanistan and Iraq, thanks to special forces operations that continue unpublicized in remote locations, thanks to European governments that have gradually withdrawn toleration and even encouragement to the radical Wahabi subculture spawned among Europe’s Muslim youth, thanks to international police co-operation — outward progress has been made against the Islamist enemy.

The progress is in two forms, of which the physical destruction of Al Qaeda cells and related terror infrastructure is the necessary condition for the second and more important. The prestige of the Islamist ideology, within Islam, appears to be fading, as it fails to achieve its objectives.

Soon after 9/11, I made the hopeful analogy to the triumph of Nasserism in an earlier generation. The Arab socialist movement associated with the Egyptian dictator and ideologue enjoyed international prestige in its day, of a kind comparable to the later prestige of the Islamists. Nasserite socialism appealed in a similar way to an earlier generation of young men, frustrated by the failure of Arab and Muslim societies to master conditions in the late modern world.

The death of Nasserism was sharply portended in the Six-Day War of 1967, as the Israelis routed the soldiers of Egypt and all her allies. Nasserism began to be associated with humiliating defeat.

Our common enemy cannot be Islam — for that is too vague — but rather, a political ideology within Islam. Our task is to defeat its partisans wherever they show themselves. The end is to make it a movement that no one could want to join. From this, there must be no retreat.

John Fund says the GOP has to choose between Tom Coburn or Ted Stevens.

The Republican Party is facing what Ronald Reagan called “a time for choosing.” A real argument is raging over how much it should turn its back on the bad habits that cost it control of Congress in 2006.

Just after that debacle, Alaska’s Sen. Ted Stevens, the father of the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” encountered Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, the antipork crusader who had held up many of the projects so many members believe are the key to their re-election. Mr. Stevens said, “Well, Tom, I hope you’re satisfied for helping us lose the election.” Mr. Coburn replied, “No, Ted, you lost us this election.”

The data favored Mr. Coburn: 2006 exit polls revealed that corruption in government was second only to the Iraq war as the driving force behind the Democratic takeover. A major part of that corruption was earmarks — pork projects members often secure in secret. Earmarks were at the heart of the scandals that sent Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Calif. Rep. Duke Cunningham to jail. …

More on Stevens and the Senate from the Economist’s Lexington.

… Is Mr Stevens’s disgrace proof that people have had enough of all this? There are some encouraging signs. Alaskans once named Mr Stevens “Alaskan of the century”. Now they seem ashamed of what he stands for. Even before this week, he was stuck in a close re-election race against his Democratic rival, Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage, and also facing a primary challenge from a disgruntled Republican. Sarah Palin, the Republican governor of Alaska, has made her name campaigning against the state’s corruption and nepotism.

Mr Stevens has also become a national symbol of out-of-control spending. His voluble support for a $400m “bridge to nowhere”—in fact, to a sparsely populated island where his friends owned land—helped to create a huge backlash against “earmarks”, particularly among fiscal conservatives. Tom Coburn, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, tried to divert the largesse from Alaska to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. John McCain is a long-standing campaigner against pork-barrel spending.

Mr Stevens managed to roll over the objections to his bridge in the Senate. “I will put the Senate on notice—and I don’t kid people—if the Senate decides to discriminate against our state, to take money from our state, I’ll resign from this body. This is not the Senate I came to.” It would be nice to think that Mr Stevens is right for once about his last point. But the Senate is pretty hard to shame. Mr Stevens’s successor as chairman of the Appropriations Committee is Robert Byrd, a 90-year-old Democrat from the pork-gobbling state of West Virginia.

Matthew Continetti tells the amazing story of McCain and the surge.

… Contrary to conventional wisdom, experience cannot be separated from judgment. Experience matters. It was a lifetime of service and involvement in national security issues that gave McCain the perspective and insight to urge a change in strategy as early as 2003. When it came to Iraq it was the old man, McCain, not the young, fresh, and cool Obama, who was flexible in judgment and willing to try a new approach. And Obama has been inflexible in his error. He continues to advocate a political timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and states that he still would have opposed the surge regardless of its clear success. But a precipitous and premature withdrawal would undermine all the gains made in the last year and a half, and a timeline would breathe new life into the enemies of a stable and democratic Iraq. Barack Obama not only lacks experience and judgment; he lacks the capacity to admit he made a mistake and is therefore willing to risk everything the surge has achieved. Obama got it wrong when the stakes were greatest, and on the central issue of our time. Why on earth would we choose to reward him for it?

Michael Barone says it’s an unstable presidential campaign.

Just when you think you’ve got the presidential race figured out, something comes along to upend your carefully wrought conclusions.

Mainstream media provided lavish coverage of Barack Obama’s trip abroad the week of July 21-25 and predicted he would get a bounce in the polls. Some of his supporters believe he has put the election away. Other observers employ the hackneyed and meaningless phrase, “It’s his to lose.”

The poll numbers tell a different and more nuanced story. The two national tracking polls showed Obama getting a bounce while he was in Europe, especially after his speech before 200,000 or so Berliners in the Tiergarten. Gallup showed him rising from a 46 percent-42 percent lead on July 22 to a 49 percent-40 percent lead on July 26. The Rasmussen tracking poll showed him rising from a 47 percent-45 percent lead on July 23 (reflecting the previous days’ polling) to 49 percent to 43 percent on July 26.

But over the next several days, Obama bounced back down. Gallup showed him leading by a statistically insignificant 45 percent to 44 percent as of July 31. That’s the closest the race has been in Gallup all that month. Rasmussen had him down to 48 percent to 46 percent on the same day. The world tour bounce has begun to look like a bubble. …

David Harsanyi calls one of Obama’s tactics a reverse Willie Horton.

… “Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama explained. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name, you know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

We know this is just a prefabricated attack, because last month in Florida, Obama brandished a similar, less opaque, comment, saying, “They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

It’s true; Obama is black. And the person who keeps mentioning that Barack Obama is black most often is Barack Obama.

In fact, Obama has preemptively accused the entire McCain campaign of racism and the entire electorate of being susceptible to racism.

So now, those of you who find Obama’s inexperience or his policy prescriptions — or even his personality — lacking, have fallen prey to bigoted politics. You are too frightened to see the light. The hope.

Yet, in reality, the typical American, according to a recent Gallup poll, is far more prone to spurn an elderly candidate (or gay, atheist, Hispanic, Jew, etc.) than they are to reject an African-American candidate.

One of the appealing aspects of Obama’s early run this year was that he transcended these stale tactics — even as his own party, mind you, was injecting race into the campaign.

Then again, with this much power at stake, it was bound to get ugly.

Change? Not exactly.

Same with Jennifer Rubin.

Jake Tapper started the day by lacing into Barack Obama for his unfounded and egregious claim that John McCain is fanning the flames of racism. Yesterday Obama claimed that McCain is saying, ” ‘Well, we know we’re not very good but you can’t risk electing Obama. You know, he’s new, he’s… doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency, you know, he’s got a, he’s got a funny name.’ ” Of course, McCain has done no such thing. Tapper writes:

There’s a lot of racist xenophobic crap out there. But not only has McCain not peddled any of it, he’s condemned it. Back in February, McCain apologized for some questionable comments made by a local radio host. In April, he condemned the North Carolina Republican Party’s ad featuring images of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. With one possible exception, I’ve never seen McCain or those under his control playing the race card or making fun of Obama’s name — or even mentioning Obama’s full name, for that matter! …

And Power Line.

It’s not even quite August yet and he’s still ahead in the polls, but Barack Obama has played the race card, claiming that he expects Republicans to inject race into the campaign. In Missouri, he told a crowd:

Nobody [ed: nobody?] thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, ‘he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name,’ you know, ‘he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

The Obama campaign denied that the comment about “presidents on the dollar bills” was a reference to race. It claimed that Obama was referring to the fact that “he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington.” But, of course, neither did the presidents on the dollar bills (Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant). Thus, the campaign’s spin does not pass the straight face test. …

About that Obama prayer note in the Western Wall, Melanie Phillips has words.

Business Insurance.com posts on Minnesota Blue Cross & Blue Shield waiving co-payments for use of retail health clinics. Carpe Diem says, “Another example of market-based, market-driven health care reform that didn’t require a government takeover of health care.”

Figures don’t lie, but liars figure. Pajamas Media on the socialist’s claim about infant mortality.

… According to the way statistics are calculated in Canada, Germany, and Austria, a premature baby weighing <500g is not considered a living child.

But in the U.S., such very low birth weight babies are considered live births. The mortality rate of such babies — considered “unsalvageable” outside of the U.S. and therefore never alive — is extraordinarily high; up to 869 per 1,000 in the first month of life alone. This skews U.S. infant mortality statistics.

When Canada briefly registered an increased number of low weight babies previously omitted from statistical reporting, the infant mortality rose from 6.1 per 1,000 to 6.4 per thousand in just one year.

According to research done by Canada’s Bureau of Reproductive and Child Health, “Comparisons of infant mortality rates by place and time should be adjusted for the proportion of such live births, especially if the comparisons involve recent years.”

Norway boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world. But when the main determinant of mortality — weight at birth — is factored in, Norway has no better survival rates than the United States. …

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Michael Crowley in WaPo with a send off for Ted Stevens, one of the most corrupt Republicans holding office.

If the charges announced yesterday are true, the powerful Alaska Republican Ted Stevens will end his four-decade Senate career in a sleazy flameout; the conservative committee baron is accused of concealing more than $250,000 in payments from the oil firm of an Alaska businessman who was allegedly seeking legislative rewards. Stevens says he is innocent, but if he’s convicted, few tears will be shed in Washington. Stevens cultivated a tyrannical image and personalized politics to an extreme degree, dividing the world into friends and enemies and showing no mercy. This outlook carried him to great heights. But, nourished by the culture of a Republican-dominated Congress, it eventually became toxic.

Stevens succeeded in Washington by understanding that fear can be a formidable weapon. “I’m a mean, miserable SOB,” he once boasted. Congressional staffers frequently cite him as one of the meanest and most temperamental members of Congress. When girding for battle on the Senate floor, the cantankerous 84-year-old Stevens would often don his signature Incredible Hulk necktie. He has branded certain critics of his record “psychopaths” and once cracked during a clash with House Republicans, “I’m just sorry they repealed the law on dueling. I’d have shot a couple of the sons of [expletive].” …

A writer for Real Clear Politics says McCain should run against Stevens.

Senator Ted Stevens’ seven-count indictment looks like it couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Republican Party, which is already in mid-soul search.

But in every crisis there is opportunity – and for John McCain this latest congressional Republican scandal offers an opportunity to revive his reputation as an independent reformer. It has the added advantage of being brand consistent.

John McCain has been a constant critic of the unprecedented levels of pork barrel spending that took hold of the Republican Congress during the Bush Administration. And there is no better symbol of that excess then Senator Ted Stevens’ infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” the $398 million dollar boondoggle to an island in Alaska where less than 10,000 people lived.

McCain also took early aim at the culture corruption that emerged from all the overspending and lobbying by GOP-leaning special interests – holding early hearings into the Jack Abramoff scandals that ultimately engulfed House Majority Leader Tom Delay, Congressman Bob Ney and others. It didn’t make him popular with RNC apparatchiks, but it did make him right.

The Republicans’ rejection by the voters in 2006 was swift and vicious. But the war in Iraq was not – counter to conventional wisdom – the primary reason for the loss of their 12-year Congressional majority. Exit polls showed that voters were more disgusted by the corruption and ethics allegations – the steady stream of scandals from Duke Cunningham to Mark Foley. …

David Ignatius thinks McCain is hiding the best parts.

In the dog days of summer, John McCain‘s political personality has become so fuzzy that even some Republicans are worrying about his viability. But if you want a reminder of why McCain should be a formidable candidate, take another look at his remarkable 1999 autobiography, “Faith of My Fathers.”

McCain’s account is as revealing as Barack Obama‘s memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” Both candidates have written powerful accounts of their formative experiences. Each tale is woven around the universal theme of fathers and sons. Given the psychological torments that often drive politicians, it’s a blessing to have two candidates who have examined their lives carefully and appear to understand their inner demons.

But these two memoirists couldn’t have more different stories to tell, and that’s what should make the 2008 campaign so interesting. Where Obama describes a quest for an absent father and an African American identity, McCain’s early story is about learning to accept the legacy of a famous family where both his father and grandfather were four-star admirals.

McCain was a wild man in his youth, drinking and chasing women like a renegade prince of Navy royalty. He is brutally frank in his description of this protracted adolescence, describing his years at the Naval Academy as “a four-year course of insubordination and rebellion.”

McCain’s burden, and ultimately his salvation, was the military code of honor that his forefathers embodied. He was from a family of professional warriors, as far back as he could trace his ancestors, and he says this gave him a “reckless confidence” and a sense of fatalism. But it also produced an unshakable bond with his fellow officers and enlisted men — and to the nation they had pledged to serve. Leadership, the art of guiding men courageously in war, was the family business. …

According to Karl Rove, Iraq creates problems for both candidates.

In a race supposedly dominated by the economy, both Barack Obama and John McCain have spent a lot of time talking about Iraq. Why? Because both men have Iraq problems that are causing difficulties for their campaigns.

How each candidate resolves his Iraq problems may determine who voters come to see as best qualified to set American foreign policy.

If Mr. McCain wins the argument on Iraq, he will add to his greatest strength — a perceived fitness to be commander in chief and lead the global war on terror. As the underdog, Mr. McCain needs to convince voters that he is overwhelmingly the better choice on the issue.

Mr. Obama needs to win the argument because his greatest weakness is inexperience and a perceived unreadiness to be president. That’s dangerous. Voters believe keeping America safe and strong is a president’s most important responsibility. …

Tony Blankley will lead off today’s consideration of Obama’s ego.

… But man persists in liking to have things and organizing around groups smaller than humanity. Specifically, modern Western civilization — and the United States, in particular — has done rather well organizing into nations and permitting its people to be free to produce and keep most of the fruits of our labor.

Reading Obama’s Berlin speech, I see dangerous suggestions that he doesn’t share that happy view of American prosperity. As he said, while he came to Berlin as “a proud citizen of the United States,” he also came to Berlin as “a fellow citizen of the world.” Putting aside the thought that a rally in Berlin in front of a quarter-million glistening-eyed, bosom-clenching, swooning Germans is a historically awkward spot for a leader to proclaim his worldwide goals for tomorrow, his actual words are disconcerting enough — even if they had been delivered in peaceful Switzerland.

He said: “The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between natives and immigrants cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down. We know that these walls have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a union of promise and prosperity.”

That last sentence would suggest that Obama is not terribly keen about nation-states. It suggests that he believes that nation-states have outgrown their practical and moral utility. That is why, presumably, he says that we must tear down the walls between the countries “with the most” — that would be the United States — and those with the least. That is why he calls for tearing down walls between “natives and (illegal?) immigrants.” That is why he is for strict reductions in carbon emissions for the United States, even if it reduces our prosperity more than it does poorer countries. …

Corner posts on Barack’s ego.

Now we know why Obama took the American flag off his lapel. On July 24, in Berlin, he told us. The American flag is too small to contain him. He is not comfortable being an American citizen, only fully comfortable as a citizen of the world.

But “citizen of the world” is a utopian, unreal, angelic, inhuman term, an abstraction of the sort that leads to immense bloodshed as human irregularities are hacked off and angularity is loudly planed away. I agree with Pete Wehner’s observation on Commentary’s website that one can be a citizen of the United States, but not — in anything like the same sense — of the world.  One can enjoy the natural rights protected by the U.S. Constitution, but will not find such rights protected globally, not even in France, as Byron York pointed out last month and again on Friday.

The Berlin speech also explains why Obama is more likely to praise an “ideal” America than the real America. He is bewitched by abstractions and lofty ideals. That is how he touches the secret chords of the heart of so many millions, the teenage romanticism of a world without different real interests, without the clashes of culture, the force of political arguments about who gets what, when, and how. …

And another Corner post on Obama’s insinuations of racism.

NY Times notes the upcoming 100th anniversary of the first airplane fatality. A reminder of how safe air travel has become.

For the 100th anniversary of powered flight, President Bush in 2004 went to Kitty Hawk, N.C., for a re-enactment of the Wright Brothers’ feat. September will mark another major centennial in aviation history, though no ceremony has been announced: the first death of an airplane passenger.

It was Sept. 17, 1908. Orville Wright was showing off a new “aeroplane” at Fort Myer, Va., for about 2,000 people, including Army brass. He took up a 26-year-old lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps, Thomas E. Selfridge, “an aeroplanist himself,” according to the report in this newspaper. Contemporary accounts vary, but the pair apparently made three and a half successful circuits at an altitude of about 75 feet, before a propeller split and hit other parts of the plane, causing it to crash. Orville was badly hurt.

Still, the Army was impressed, so much so that the War Department eventually bought the Wrights’ invention. Aviation endured, punctuated by occasional catastrophic crashes that have, in the end, made flying much safer, especially in the United States, where the airlines carry some two million people a day on tens of thousands of flights. …

The Onion reports Gore places infant son in spaceship to escape dying earth.

Young Gore sets out for his new home, where the sky is clear,the water is clean, and there are no Republicans.

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Blog post in Canada’s National Post tries to explain male Muslim anger.

Before resting its recent case against Mohammed Momin Khawaja under Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act, the prosecution presented Momin’s former fiancée, Zeba Khan, as the final witness via a video link from Dubai. Ms. Khan reportedly stated in her testimony: “You will not meet a young Muslim man in the world who is not angry about something. Anyone who watches the news, if he wasn’t mad then, a) there’s something wrong with him, or b) he’s ignorant.”

Obviously, not all angry young Muslim men are engaging in violence — nor, of course, are all Muslims terrorists. But many terrorists are found to be Muslims. Ms. Khan’s remark purports to explain the linkage. …

John Fund notes the Ted Stevens indictment.

Now the libs are starting to make fun of Obama. Here’s WaPo’s Dana Milbank.

Barack Obama has long been his party’s presumptive nominee. Now he’s becoming its presumptuous nominee.

Fresh from his presidential-style world tour, during which foreign leaders and American generals lined up to show him affection, Obama settled down to some presidential-style business in Washington yesterday. He ordered up a teleconference with the (current president’s) Treasury secretary, granted an audience to the Pakistani prime minister and had his staff arrange for the chairman of the Federal Reserve to give him a briefing. Then, he went up to Capitol Hill to be adored by House Democrats in a presidential-style pep rally.

Along the way, he traveled in a bubble more insulating than the actual president’s. Traffic was shut down for him as he zoomed about town in a long, presidential-style motorcade, while the public and most of the press were kept in the dark about his activities, which included a fundraiser at the Mayflower where donors paid $10,000 or more to have photos taken with him. His schedule for the day, announced Monday night, would have made Dick Cheney envious: …

John Tierney helps you remove 10 things from your worry list this summer.

For most of the year, it is the duty of the press to scour the known universe looking for ways to ruin your day. The more fear, guilt or angst a news story induces, the better. But with August upon us, perhaps you’re in the mood for a break, so I’ve rounded up a list of 10 things not to worry about on your vacation.

Now, I can’t guarantee you that any of these worries is groundless, because I can’t guarantee you that anything is absolutely safe, including the act of reading a newspaper. With enough money, an enterprising researcher could surely identify a chemical in newsprint or keyboards that is dangerously carcinogenic for any rat that reads a trillion science columns every day.

What I can guarantee is that I wouldn’t spend a nanosecond of my vacation worrying about any of these 10 things. (You can make your own nominations in the TierneyLab blog.)

1. Killer hot dogs. What is it about frankfurters? There was the nitrite scare. Then the grilling-creates-carcinogens alarm. And then, when those menaces ebbed, the weenie warriors fell back on that old reliable villain: saturated fat.

But now even saturated fat isn’t looking so bad, thanks to a rigorous experiment in Israel reported this month. The people on a low-carb, unrestricted-calorie diet consumed more saturated fat than another group forced to cut back on both fat and calories, but those fatophiles lost more weight and ended up with a better cholesterol profile. And this was just the latest in a series of studies contradicting the medical establishment’s predictions about saturated fat.

If you must worry, focus on the carbs in the bun. But when it comes to the fatty frank — or the fatty anything else on vacation — I’d relax.

2. Your car’s planet-destroying A/C. No matter how guilty you feel about your carbon footprint, you don’t have to swelter on the highway to the beach. After doing tests at 65 miles per hour, the mileage experts at edmunds.com report that the aerodynamic drag from opening the windows cancels out any fuel savings from turning off the air-conditioner. …

WSJ’s Kim Strassel interviews the heretical environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg.

… Bjorn Lomborg busted — and that is the only word for it — onto the world scene in 2001 with the publication of his book “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” A one-time Greenpeace enthusiast, he’d originally planned to disprove those who said the environment was getting better. He failed. And to his credit, his book said so, supplying a damning critique of today’s environmental pessimism. Carefully researched, it offered endless statistics — from official sources such as the U.N. — showing that from biodiversity to global warming, there simply were no apocalypses in the offing. “Our history shows that we solve more problems than we create,” he tells me. For his efforts, Mr. Lomborg was labeled a heretic by environmental groups — whose fundraising depends on scaring the jeepers out of the public — and became more hated by these alarmists than even (if possible) President Bush.

Yet the experience left Mr. Lomborg with a taste for challenging conventional wisdom. In 2004, he invited eight of the world’s top economists — including four Nobel Laureates — to Copenhagen, where they were asked to evaluate the world’s problems, think of the costs and efficiencies attached to solving each, and then produce a prioritized list of those most deserving of money. The well-publicized results (and let it be said here that Mr. Lomborg is no slouch when it comes to promoting himself and his work) were stunning. While the economists were from varying political stripes, they largely agreed. The numbers were just so compelling: $1 spent preventing HIV/AIDS would result in about $40 of social benefits, so the economists put it at the top of the list (followed by malnutrition, free trade and malaria). In contrast, $1 spent to abate global warming would result in only about two cents to 25 cents worth of good; so that project dropped to the bottom.

“Most people, average people, when faced with these clear choices, would pick the $40-of-good project over others — that’s rational,” says Mr. Lomborg. “The problem is that most people are simply presented with a menu of projects, with no prices and no quantities. What the Copenhagen Consensus was trying to do was put the slices and prices on a menu. And then require people to make choices.” …

Walter Williams on the strangle hold greens have on Congress.

Let’s face it. The average individual American has little or no clout with Congress and can be safely ignored. But it’s a different story with groups such as Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy. When they speak, Congress listens. Unlike the average American, they are well organized, loaded with cash and well positioned to be a disobedient congressman’s worse nightmare. Their political and economic success has been a near disaster for our nation.

For several decades, environmentalists have managed to get Congress to keep most of our oil resources off-limits to exploration and drilling. They’ve managed to have the Congress enact onerous regulations that have made refinery construction impossible. Similarly, they’ve used the courts and Congress to completely stymie the construction of nuclear power plants. As a result, energy prices are at historical highs and threaten our economy and national security.

What’s the political response to our energy problems? It’s more congressional and White House kowtowing to environmentalists, farmers and multi-billion dollar corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland. Their “solution,” rather than to solve our oil supply problem by permitting drilling for the billions upon billions of barrels of oil beneath the surface of our country, is to enact the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that mandates that oil companies increase the amount of ethanol mixed with gasoline. Anyone with an ounce of brains would have realized that diverting crops from food to fuel use would raise the prices of corn-fed livestock, such as pork, beef, chicken and dairy products, and products made from corn, such as cereals. Ethanol production has led to increases in other grain prices, such as soybean and wheat. Since the U.S. is the world’s largest grain producer and exporter, higher grain prices have had a huge impact on food prices worldwide. …

American.com tells us what happened to the climate nonsense of Great Britain’s Tories.

With less than two years remaining until the next general election, Britain’s Conservative Party has surged to an historic 22-point opinion-poll lead over the incumbent Labour Party. This turnabout has followed an energetic campaign by the Tory leader, David Cameron, to wrench the party out of its ideological comfort zone and overhaul its public image. Cameron has indeed handled many issues deftly. However, his initial attempt to spark a bidding war over climate alarmism backfired enormously, and it should serve as a warning to other Western political parties that are trying to burnish their green credentials.

From the moment he was elected Conservative leader in 2005, Cameron was eager to woo the upper-class voters who had shunned the party in the post-Thatcher era. He chose to make environmental policy the focus of his stylistic revolution, and he commissioned Zac Goldsmith (a fellow Eton graduate and director of The Ecologist magazine) to chair a “Quality of Life” policy group. Goldsmith, an heir to a billion-dollar fortune and well-known green activist, claimed “an invitation to be radical.” …

Does it feel like gas prices go up faster than they go down? Slate’s Explainer says you’re right.

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Bill Kristol says running against Congress will be a winning strategy.

… Given the unpopularity of the current Democratic Congress, given Americans’ tendency to prefer divided government, given the voters’ repudiations of the Republicans in 2006 and of the Democrats in 1994 — isn’t the prospect of across-the-board, one-party Democratic governance more likely to move votes to McCain than to Obama?

So I cheered up once again. For it will become increasingly obvious, as we approach November, that the Democrats will continue to control Congress for the next couple of years. But if the voters elect Obama as president, they’ll be putting Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in untrammeled control of our future.

In 1948, a Republican Congress, which had taken power two years before with great expectations after a decade and a half of Democratic control, had become unpopular. Harry Truman lambasted it as a no-good, do-nothing Congress — and he rode that assault to the White House. We’ll soon start hearing more from McCain about the deficiencies of today’s surge-opposing, drilling-blocking, earmark-loving Congress.

And McCain will then assert that if you don’t like the Congress in which Senator Obama serves in the majority right now, you really should be alarmed about a President Obama rubber-stamping the deeds of a Democratic Congress next year. A President McCain, on the other hand, could check Congressional appetites — as well as work across the aisle with a Democratic Congress in a bipartisan spirit where appropriate. …

Byron York says, “What do you mean Obama’s not funny?”

… Last week, Jon Stewart on The Daily Show got an enthusiastic reception from his audience with a routine about Obama’s media entourage. Stewart tossed to the team of reporters who were said to be traveling with the Obama campaign, some of whom had abandoned John McCain to cover the more exciting Democrat.  They were positively giddy about Obama.

“The commander-in-chief,” said one.

“Did you see when the president hit that three-pointer?” asked another.

“Nothing but net,” said a third.

Stewart interrupted. “He’s not the president.” Pause.“Barack Obama’s not the president.”

A confused silence. “Are you sure?” the reporters asked.

Stewart wondered whether the reporters were “nervous that this maybe plays into the idea of the press being a little Obama-centric, a little sycophantic.” Not at all, they said, exchanging stories of this or that treasured contact with the Great One. A moment later, Stewart asked what they learned during the trip.

“I’ll tell you something, Jon,” said one. “Barack Obama kinda gives me a boner.”

Stewart dutifully faked embarrassment and exasperation. “Anything else?” he asked. All the others raised their hands. They, too, were, well, thrilled to be in Obama’s presence.

“I’m not talking about boners,” Stewart said.

“Seriously,” said one last reporter. “They should call this guy Barack O-Boner.” …

Ever wonder why Europeans like Obama? VDH has answers.

Let us count the ways:

1) Obama’s tax code, support of big government programs and redistribution of income, and subservience to UN directives delight the European masses—especially at a time when their own governments are trying to cut taxes, government, seek closer relations with the US, and ask a petulant, pampered public to grow up. …

David Harsanyi says media bias won’t win the election.

Once again the ugly shadow of “media bias” is darkening the otherwise wholesome world of partisan politics.

Actually, media bias is so terrible, so unjust, so despicable, just about everyone wants to be offended by it.

Take, for instance, the recent flap over the New York Times editorial page decision to reject a John McCain op-ed regarding Iraq only a week after running a Barack Obama column on the very same topic.

As the adults among us probably already know, “fairness” is only a fairy tale. So The Times had no obligation to publish an opinion it found objectionable.

Yet, for McCain, the snub worked miracles. Rather than being handed another mind-numbing essay on Iraq policy, Republicans were allowed to come together and protest the liberal media’s refusal to publish an op-ed none of them would have taken the time to read in the first place. …

Speaking of media bias, this is a good place to put the second part of the Columbia Journalism Review piece on the NY Times.

Random thoughts from Thomas Sowell.

… When New York Times writer Linda Greenhouse recently declared the 1987 confirmation hearings for Judge Robert Bork “both fair and profound,” it was as close to a declaration of moral bankruptcy as possible. Those hearings were a triumph of character assassination by politicians with no character of their own. The country is still paying the price, as potential judicial nominees decline to be nominated and then smeared on nationwide television.

Some of the most emotionally powerful words are undefined, such as “social justice,” “a living wage,” “price gouging” or a “fragile” environment, for example. Such terms are especially valuable to politicians during an election year, for these terms can attract the votes of people who mean very different‘ and even mutually contradictory‘ things when they use these words. …

John Fund spots a new book ranking presidents.

In November, we will definitively rank our two presidential candidates, but whoever wins the election will eventually be subject to yet another ranking effort — that of historians who, every decade or so, compare all the U.S. presidents from the Founding to the current day. Inevitably, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington end up at the top of such lists, and Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan — both notoriously ineffectual, among other things — at the bottom. But the judgments of historians can often seem arbitrary or recondite, not to mention politically weighted, making the whole effort seem like a mysterious parlor game.

Alvin Felzenberg is not an academic historian, although he holds a doctorate in politics from Princeton. He has also held senior staff positions in Congress and most recently served as the spokesman for the 9/11 Commission. He thinks presidential ratings should be demystified and opened up to laymen with an interest in American history. He wants to restart the conversation about what we want in a leader. It is a good time to ponder such things.

In “The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn’t),” Mr. Felzenberg draws up a report card for each U.S. chief executive, assigning numerical scores to six categories. …

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Last week, fresh off running an op-ed by Obama, the NY Times refused to run one by McCain. Power Line posts on the subject. That refusal and McCain’s complaining last week about the biased media coverage of Obama was almost too rich for words. McCain sucked up to the press for years. It’s nice to see him getting the short end of that stick.

Along those lines, Ann Coulter had some thoughts.

ck before the Republican Party was saddled with John McCain as its nominee, The New York Times called him “the only Republican who promises to end the George Bush style of governing from and on behalf of a small, angry fringe.” The paper praised him for “working across the aisle to develop sound bipartisan legislation” and predicted that he would appeal to “a broader range of Americans than the rest of the Republican field.”

At the same time, the Times denounced “the real” Rudy Giuliani as “a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man” and Mitt Romney as “shape-shifting,” claiming it’s “hard to find an issue on which he has not repositioned himself to the right since he was governor of Massachusetts.”

Here are a few issues I found that Romney hadn’t switched positions on, and it wasn’t “hard”: tax cuts, health care, same-sex marriage, illegal immigration and the surge in Iraq. The only issue on which Romney had changed his position was abortion, irritating people who would prefer for Republicans to refuse to run in places like Massachusetts and New York City in order to preserve their perfect pro-life credentials.

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof echoed the editorial page in early February with a column titled: “Who Is More Electable?” In the very first sentence, Kristof concluded that McCain is “the Republican most likely to win the November election.” Kristof touted McCain’s “unusual appeal among swing voters” and cited polls that showed McCain would do “stunningly well” in a general election.

Also in February, CNN produced polls showing McCain doing better than “generic Republican” in a general election, which Jeffrey Toobin said was a tribute to how “well respected” McCain is. Hey, is it too late for us to nominate “generic Republican”?

And on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” from the way Chris Matthews carried on about McCain, you’d think he had caught a glimpse of Obama’s ankle. Matthews said that McCain was “the real straight talker … a profile in courage … more seasoned than the current president, a patriot, of course … honest and respected in the media. He has all the pluses in the world of a sort of a, you know, an Audie Murphy, if you will, a real war hero.”

I guess the party’s over. …

Now is an opportunity to include part one of an item from the Columbia Journalism Review on the present condition of the NY Times. Pickerhead has been holding this for a week or so. It is 6,000 words so part two will be in Pickings tomorrow. This comprehensive review of Pinch Sulzberger’s tenure is more balanced than some of the items that merely celebrate the continuing collapse of the paper. There is not much doubt Pinch has been a disaster, and there’s not much doubt the paper has a more pronounced left-wing bias.

Corporate annual meetings are generally drowsy affairs—a pep talk by management, some PowerPoint graphics, a little predetermined voting, all topped off by a parade of cranks to the microphones to excoriate management about their pet causes. April’s annual gathering of shareholders in The New York Times Company certainly featured all of those ingredients, down to the codger who shuffled in late, grabbed the seat next to mine, and promptly dozed off.

But beneath the surface routine there was an undercurrent of tension. Shareholders in the Times Company have been taking it on the chin recently, to say the least. In the five years between 2003 and the end of 2007, the Times’s stock lost about two-thirds of its value before rebounding slightly this year. As with most newspapers, daily circulation has been steadily eroding for years, dropping about 4 percent in the six months before the meeting. Sunday circulation has done even worse, declining almost 10 percent in those same six months.

The company’s “challenging” (to use CEO Janet Robinson’s word) first quarter of 2008 pointed to an even bumpier road ahead as the economy softens. Some bright spots poke through the gloom, but company-wide revenue was down about 9 percent year-over-year, with newspaper classifieds free-falling almost 23 percent compared to the first quarter of 2007. Despite the steep decline in the Times’s stock, an April report by media analyst Paul Ginocchio at Deutsche Bank concluded it was still overpriced: “We believe NYT’s valuation has been inflated well above fundamental levels, and continue to see a near-term selling opportunity,” his report said. …

… The company’s financial problems are hardly unique in the print world; no one has yet solved the challenge to newspapers posed by the digital revolution. Still, the pall hanging over the annual meeting seemed especially striking given the setting, the sleek new TimesCenter, a 378-seat auditorium appended to the company’s new fifty-two-story Renzo Piano-designed headquarters, a building that cost the company about $600 million. The Times Building is just one of several big outlays the company undertook in recent years, even as its financial fortunes worsened. From 2003 through 2006, the company spent hundreds of millions buying back its own stock only to see its value steeply depreciate. Last year, it chose to substantially raise its cash dividend to shareholders, a principal source of income for members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family that controls the company.

Despite pressure from large shareholders, Times management has also been reluctant to shed some of its under-performing assets, such as The Boston Globe, which the company acquired in 1993 for $1.1 billion, a price that many critics called absurdly high even at the time. That judgment was vindicated last year when the company had to absorb a painful $814 million write-down on the Globe deal and a later acquisition of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. …

Roger Simon comments on the troubles of John Edwards.

… But now that the cat is out the bag, I will say what I wanted to say then. John Edwards–he of constructing a 28,000 square foot home while preaching about the two Americas and remonstrating about the environment–is one of the most reprehensible schmucks to appear on the American political scene in some time. And that’s saying something. That he played this game while his wife had cancer makes it contemptible beyond words. Now we know why he was always primping in the mirror. It is narcissism unbounded. …

Slate wonders why the media is ignoring the current John Edwards story.

Everybody had a good laugh last August when Roll Call broke the story about Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, getting arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for playing footsies in a toilet stall. The late-night talk show hosts mined the material for days; Slate produced a re-enactment of the bathroom ballet; and newspapers, magazines, and cable channels shredded Craig.

The angle taken by most reporters and commentators wasn’t that Craig’s restroom conduct was particularly shameful. The press doesn’t object to same-sex sex at all, nor should it. Craig’s true offense, said the press and the clowns, was hypocrisy, which they consider an inexcusable crime. Craig had supported both federal and Idaho bans on same-sex marriage, had opposed hate crime legislation that would extend protections to gays, and had earned a perfect 0 rating (PDF) from the Human Rights Campaign, a gay lobby. And he had denied and denied any and all gayness while trying to recruit some action in a bathroom!

Although the Craig story and the John Edwards story, currently unfolding thanks to the National Enquirer, aren’t directly analogous, they have a bit in common. Edwards, too, may be a sex hypocrite. The tabloid called Edwards a cheater last October and the father of a love child in December, and last night the Enquirer posted a story about Edwards’ visit to his alleged mistress and child at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night. …

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Before we get into the normal news of the day, (beginning with a hilarious column by Gerard Baker) a WSJ Op-ed contains an important germ of thought about the overall robust condition of the world’s economy. The author argues for better metaphors that acknowledge that strength.

… There’s an old saying that if your neighbors are losing their jobs it’s a recession; if you are losing yours it’s a depression. It’s therefore unfortunate that such a large fraction of prominent forecasters hails from the financial community. Their views are colored by the turmoil suffered in their industry. In an earlier generation, many of the best-known forecasters ran economics departments in nonfinancial companies. Today these are a dying breed, thanks to the past decades of corporate cost-cutting.

We are not a nation of whiners, but we do have a lot of alarmists. It is becoming politically incorrect to suggest that the economy is basically sound.

We shouldn’t expect forecasters to shrug off the depressing effects of what’s happening in their own back yards. This is human nature. We just need to keep things in perspective when we listen to them. A more objective diagnosis is especially needed during an election year, in which many unfounded fears are broadcast and amplified by the media.

A natural system has built-in redundancy. It manages and heals itself. The economic system is no exception. On this page about 10 years ago, Penny Russell and I argued against the idea that the economy is a “house of cards,” susceptible to collapse as soon as a few cards are dislodged. We suggested that it’s more like a beehive. The future of the hive does not depend on full employment for all the worker bees. In fact, an accident can put many bees out of action without compromising the hive as a whole.

Metaphors are important. If they are off the mark, they can deceive. But good metaphors can help maintain perspective amid chaos. …

Gerard Baker has fun with The Tour.

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.

And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth – for the first time – to bring the light unto all the world. …

David Brooks too. He’s been absent from these pages lately, having drunk the Obama Kool-Aid and all. But, now he’s come back to earth.

… Obama’s tone was serious. But he pulled out his “this is our moment” rhetoric and offered visions of a world transformed. Obama speeches almost always have the same narrative arc. Some problem threatens. The odds are against the forces of righteousness. But then people of good faith unite and walls come tumbling down. Obama used the word “walls” 16 times in the Berlin speech, and in 11 of those cases, he was talking about walls coming down.

The Berlin blockade was thwarted because people came together. Apartheid ended because people came together and walls tumbled. Winning the cold war was the same: “People of the world,” Obama declared, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa, I have to confess my American soul was stirred. It seemed like the overture for a new yet quintessentially American campaign.

But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more.

When John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, their rhetoric soared, but their optimism was grounded in the reality of politics, conflict and hard choices. Kennedy didn’t dream of the universal brotherhood of man. He drew lines that reflected hard realities: “There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin.” Reagan didn’t call for a kumbaya moment. He cited tough policies that sparked harsh political disagreements — the deployment of U.S. missiles in response to the Soviet SS-20s — but still worked. …

Debra Saunders comments on the tour.

Should Americans become more like Our Betters in Europe?

Clearly the 200,000 Germans who gathered to watch Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama at Berlin’s Tiergarten on Thursday thought so. And in that Obama liberally challenged U.S. policies on the war in Iraq, global warming and U.S. interrogation measures, he gave the German audience the affirmation it craved.

A Pew Research Center poll showed 82 percent of Germans had confidence that Obama would do the right thing on world affairs. No wonder.

In Germany, it was all wunderbar. Addressing the throng as a “proud citizen of the United States,” but also “a fellow citizen of the world,” Obama seemed to be giving Europeans a role and a voice in an election in which they have no vote.

Not that Europeans haven’t tried to play a role in U.S. electoral politics before. Who can forget Operation Clark County? That was the campaign waged by British paper the Guardian that encouraged Brits to write to voters in a swing county in the swing state of Ohio to urge them to vote for 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry — because “the result of the U.S. election will affect the lives of millions around the world, but those of us outside the 50 states have had no say in it.”

Well, they had their say, and Clark was the only county in Ohio to switch from supporting Gore in 2000 to Bush GOP in 2004. George W. Bush garnered some 25 percent more votes than in 2000. …

More of our favorites – David Warren.

‘People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time.”

That is what Barack Obama said, to a crowd of a couple hundred thousand, on Thursday, after stepping out of his spaceship in Germany. From where? From Amerika, we understand.

The very next sentence: “I know my country has not perfected itself.”

But Obama’s transition team is only beginning its work. America might be fixed during his first week in office. And then, Europe can be fixed. …

For a change of subject, Sam Thernstrom says it’s good to have a climate debate just leave Al The Poseur out of it.

Al Gore continues to build a remarkably mixed legacy as the leader of the movement to combat global climate change. For many years, the climate debate focused primarily on the scientific questions; today, that controversy continues but it is increasingly marginal in political circles, where attention has turned to the far more difficult task of developing an effective policy response to warming.

Mr. Gore’s activism on the science of climate change has earned him the attention of the world; when he speaks, everyone listens. But what they hear from him on climate policy is sheer nonsense. Worse, it is dangerous nonsense; Gore deliberately obscures the critical questions that need to be carefully considered when crafting climate policy. Gore’s proposal to produce 100 percent of American electricity from renewable sources within a decade should be rejected–indeed, ridiculed–even by those who share Gore’s goal of combating climate change.

Almost no one believes Gore’s proposal is even technically feasible, much less economically realistic. This is the sort of goal that a politician plucks out of thin air just because it sounds bold; it has no bearing on reality whatsoever. Renewables produce roughly 2.3 percent of our power today; it may be possible to increase that number significantly, but the idea of generating all of America’s electricity with renewables within a decade is simply laughable. Underscoring the absurdity of this agenda is Gore’s silence on the one source of energy that realistically could quickly produce significant amounts of reliable, affordable, zero-emissions energy: nuclear. …

And Michael Barone says the enviro-lunatics may be on their way out.

Sometimes public opinion doesn’t flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn’t change anybody’s mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. Evidently, the experience of paying more than $50 for a tankful gets people thinking we should stop worrying so much about global warming and the environmental dangers of oil wells on the outer continental shelf and in Alaska. Drill now! Nuke the caribou!

Our system of divided government and litigation-friendly regulation makes it hard for our society to do things and easy for adroit lobbyists and lawyers to stop them. Nations with more centralized power and less democratic accountability find it easier: France and Japan generate most of their electricity by nuclear power and Chicago, where authority is more centralized and accountability less robust than in most of the country, depends more on nuclear power than almost all the rest of the nation.

In contrast, lobbyists and litigators for environmental restriction groups have produced energy policies that I suspect future generations will regard as lunatic. We haven’t built a new nuclear plant for some 30 years, since a Jane Fonda movie exaggerated their dangers. We have allowed states to ban oil drilling on the outer continental shelf, prompted by the failure of 40- or 50-year-old technology in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969, though current technology is much better, as shown by the lack of oil spills in the waters off Louisiana and Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina.

We have banned oil drilling on a very small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that is godforsaken tundra (I have been to the North Slope oil fields, similar terrain — I know) for fear of disturbing a herd of caribou — a species of hoofed animals that is in no way endangered or scarce. …

English speaking peoples have much to be proud of; nothing more so than the abolitionist movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries which was led by William Wilberforce. WSJ’s Bookshelf reviews a new biography.

… Full success would come only two decades later, as a result of a persistent campaign to shift public opinion, principally by showing the horrors of the slave trade while arguing that its abolition would not wreck the economy or merely benefit foreigners who would step into the market. Wilberforce guided a coalition to make the case for abolition. Mr. Hague’s insider knowledge of politics — he is himself a member of Parliament and a former leader of Britain’s Conservative Party — sharpens his analysis of Wilberforce’s own campaign and deepens his admiration for its success. Winning over both public opinion and key politicians eventually allowed Wilberforce to push abolition through. Lord Grenville, as prime minister, introduced a motion in the House of Lords in 1807 that made its passage in the House of Commons a foregone conclusion.

As the debate in the Commons reached a climax, Samuel Romilly rose to give a speech that poignantly contrasted Wilberforce’s victory with Napoleon Bonaparte’s career. When Bonaparte seemed to have reached the summit of his ambition, he could not escape “recollection of the blood he had spilled and the oppressions he had committed.” Wilberforce, by contrast, could enjoy the consciousness of having saved “so many millions of his fellow creatures.” When Romilly concluded his tribute, the House of Commons rose to its feet and cheered. …