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Last week’s prisoner/cadaver exchange between Lebanon and Israel has attracted a lot of comment for which we provide a round-up today. David Warren is first.

… It is right to recover the bodies. But at what cost?

This is something the postmodern mind, which I find increasingly unhinged, is incapable of processing. There are costs involved in obtaining any benefit: the world is constructed in that way. These costs are not always denominated in money; and even when they are, we forget that money stands as a counter for the labour and sacrifice expended to obtain it.

Whether we are dealing with indifferent small purchases — when, as the Yorkshireman says, “You can’t have (both) the penny and the bun” — or with huge political transactions touching everyone — the cost of what we propose must be calculated. And the bigger the measure, the more prudence (i.e. sanity) requires that we consider all the foreseeable costs — including, of course, the costs of not taking action. …

David Bernstein in Volokh wonders if Israel should have a death penalty for terrorists.

The farce plays itself out over and over. Israel captures terrorists, some of whom are guilty of horrific mass murders. Capturing the terrorists often requires the sacrifice of great human, financial, and intelligence resources. The terrorists’ allies respond by planning various operations to obtain human “bargaining chips,” dead or alive, to use in exchange for their captured allies. Israel then agrees to release anywhere from a handful to hundreds of terrorists in exchange for dead bodies or one or a handful of live captives. The released terrorists become heroes, and some go on to commit new murders.

The prisoner exchange taking place today is hardly the worst of them, but it illustrates the point. Israel is releasing Samir Kuntar, guilty of the horrific, cold-blooded murder of a child (and who is shamefully apparently a national hero in Lebanon) and two adults, in exchange for the bodies of two dead soldiers. The soldiers themselves were abducted in an attempt to gain Kuntar’s release, an incident that provoked the 2006 Lebanon Hezbollah war, and led to the death of dozens of more Israelis.

I simply don’t understand why Israel doesn’t put an end to this madness and institute the death penalty for murder caused by terrorism. I have mixed emotions about the death penalty in general, but this is one circumstance in which I think the arguments in favor are overwhelming. …

Mona Charen writes on the culture that celebrates a child killer.

… This week, Kuntar, dressed in fatigues and sporting a Hitlerian mustache and haircut, walked down a red carpet arrayed for him in Beirut. The government closed all offices and declared a national day of celebration. Tens of thousands of Lebanese cheered, waved flags, threw confetti, and set off fireworks as Hezbollah staged a rally to celebrate their “victory” over Israel. Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” leader of the Palestinian Authority, sent “blessings to Samir Kuntar’s family.” PA spokesman Ahmad Abdul Rahman sent “warm blessings to Hezbollah on the return of the heroes of freedom headed by the great Samir Kuntar.” …

Mitch Albom too.

… “Samir! Samir!” the crowd reportedly yelled. This for a man convicted of smashing a child’s head into pieces.

You can take whatever side you like in the Israeli-Palestinian debate. You can argue who is entitled to land and statehood and borders.

But you cannot defend the frenzied lovefest that took place for Kuntar in Lebanon, as if he were some long-lost statesmen, instead of a common murderer who did the worst thing you can do: take the life of a child. What religion condones that? What holy book says that is a good thing? A banner in Beirut, according to the New York Times, read “God’s Achievement Through Our Hands.”

What God would have a child’s murder on anyone’s hands? How do people celebrate such a killer? …

Contentions says prisoner prices will go up.

The logic of prisoner swaps dictates that, over time, successive swaps between states and terrorist organizations become more expensive to states.  This is because terrorist organizations typically exchange prisoners only when they can declare victory – and victory can hardly be declared if a given deal looks paltry compared to one that preceded it.  (On the other hand, when terrorist organizations lose, their captives are, ideally, liberated in the process of their defeat.)  For this reason, states engaging in prisoner swap negotiations with terrorist organizations need to keep the possibility of future prisoner negotiations firmly in mind: giving away too much might make future – and possibly more important – prisoner exchanges cost-prohibitive. …

Do you ever wonder how the Arab world got to the point of worshipping brutality? Anne Applebaum looks at textbooks in Saudi schools.

Because they are so clearly designed for the convenience of large testing companies, I had always assumed that multiple-choice tests, the bane of any fourth grader’s existence, were a quintessentially American phenomenon. But apparently I was wrong. According to a report put out by the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom last week, it seems that Saudi Arabians find them useful, too. Here, for example, is a multiple-choice question that appears in a recent edition of a Saudi fourth-grade textbook, Monotheism and Jurisprudence, in a section that attempts to teach children to distinguish “true” from “false” belief in god:

Q. Is belief true in the following instances:
a) A man prays but hates those who are virtuous.
b) A man professes that there is no deity other than God but loves the unbelievers.
c) A man worships God alone, loves the believers, and hates the unbelievers.

The correct answer, of course, is c). According to the Wahhabi imams who wrote this textbook, it isn’t enough just to worship god or just to love other believers—it is important to hate unbelievers as well. By the same token, b) is also wrong. Even a man who worships god cannot be said to have “true belief” if he loves unbelievers.

“Unbelievers,” in this context, are Christians and Jews. In fact, any child who sticks around in Saudi schools until ninth grade will eventually be taught that “Jews and Christians are enemies of believers.” They will also be taught that Jews conspire to “gain sole control of the world,” that the Christian crusades never ended, and that on Judgment Day “the rocks or the trees” will call out to Muslims to kill Jews. …

Karl Rove says both candidates have flip-flopped.

… Sen. McCain has changed his position on drilling for oil on the outer continental shelf. But because he explained this change by saying that $4-a-gallon gasoline caused him to re-evaluate his position, voters are likely to accept it. Of course, Mr. McCain doesn’t explain why prices at the pump haven’t also forced him to re-evaluate his opposition to drilling on 2000 acres in the 19.2-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But, then, what politician is always consistent?

Mr. McCain flip-flopped on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. He’d voted against them at the time, saying in 2001 that he’d “like to see more of this tax cut shared by working Americans.” Now he supports their continuation because, he says, letting them expire would increase taxes and he opposes tax hikes. Besides, he recognizes that the tax cuts have helped the economy.

At least Mr. McCain fesses up to and explains his changes. Sen. Obama has shifted recently on public financing, free trade, Nafta, welfare reform, the D.C. gun ban, whether the Iranian Quds Force is a terrorist group, immunity for telecom companies participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the status of Jerusalem, flag lapel pins, and disavowing Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And not only does he refuse to explain these flip-flops, he acts as if they never occurred.

Then there is Iraq. …

Thomas Sowell continues the column from two days ago.

We don’t look to arsonists to help put out fires but we do look to politicians to help solve financial crises that they played a major role in creating.

How did the government help create the current financial mess? Let me count the ways.

In addition to federal laws that pressure lenders to lend to people they would not otherwise lend to, and in places where they would otherwise not invest, state and local governments have in various parts of the country so severely restricted building as to lead to skyrocketing housing prices, which in turn have led many people to resort to “creative financing” in order to buy these artificially more expensive homes.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve System brought interest rates down to such low levels that “creative financing” with interest-only mortgage loans enabled people to buy houses that they could not otherwise afford.

But there is no free lunch. Interest-only loans do not continue indefinitely. After a few years, such mortgage loans typically require the borrower to begin paying back some of the principal, which means that the monthly mortgage payments will begin to rise.

Since everyone knew that the Federal Reserve System’s extremely low interest rates were not going to last forever, much “creative financing” also involved adjustable-rate mortgages, where the interest charged by the lender would rise when interest rates in the economy as a whole rose. …

Paul Gigot has details on some of the ways the government helped create this crisis.

Angelo Mozilo was in one of his Napoleonic moods. It was October 2003, and the CEO of Countrywide Financial was berating me for The Wall Street Journal’s editorials raising doubts about the accounting of Fannie Mae. I had just been introduced to him by Franklin Raines, then the CEO of Fannie, whom I had run into by chance at a reception hosted by the Business Council, the CEO group that had invited me to moderate a couple of panels.

Mr. Mozilo loudly declared that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I didn’t understand accounting or the mortgage markets, and that I was in the pocket of Fannie’s competitors, among other insults. Mr. Raines, always smoother than Mr. Mozilo, politely intervened to avoid an extended argument, and Countrywide’s bantam rooster strutted off.

I’ve thought about that episode more than once recently amid the meltdown and government rescue of Fannie and its sibling, Freddie Mac. Trying to defend the mortgage giants, Paul Krugman of the New York Times recently wrote, “What you need to know here is that the right — the WSJ editorial page, Heritage, etc. — hates, hates, hates Fannie and Freddie. Why? Because they don’t want quasi-public entities competing with Angelo Mozilo.”

That’s a howler even by Mr. Krugman’s standards. Fannie Mae and Mr. Mozilo weren’t competitors; they were partners. Fannie helped to make Countrywide as profitable as it once was by buying its mortgages in bulk. Mr. Raines — following predecessor Jim Johnson — and Mr. Mozilo made each other rich. Which explains why Mr. Johnson could feel so comfortable asking Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) to discuss a sweetheart mortgage with Mr. Mozilo, and also explains the Mozilo-Raines tag team in 2003. …

Times, UK thinks oil prices might be at their tipping point.

The Economist reports on East Africa’s pirates.

ON A dazzling morning in April, the Playa de Bakio, a Spanish fishing boat, limped into paradisal Port Victoria in the Seychelles, damaged by grenades. Its crew of 26 was shaken. A Spanish military aircraft flew them to momentary fame in Spain. The fishermen had been held by Somali pirates for a week and freed after a ransom of $1.2m—so it was rumoured—was paid, in contravention of Spanish law.

The boat, a big industrial vessel known as a purse seiner, was easy prey. The pirates attacked on a speedboat launched from a mother ship, a captured Asian fishing ship known as a longliner. Once on board, they regaled the crew with tales of famine in their villages. Some of the Spaniards felt sorry for them. When one of the pirates stripped his shirt off, “he was all bones, no meat at all,” said a Basque crewman. The Spaniards were less enamoured of the pirates when they threatened them with machineguns and knives. “They valued life less than cockroaches,” said the skipper. …

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Peter Wehner of Contentions was surprised by Obama’s continued refusal to acknowledge the value of the surge.

In an interview yesterday with Senator Obama, ABC’s Terry Moran listed just a few of the by now seemingly endless data points demonstrating that the so-called surge, which Obama opposed at the time it was announced, is a success. Moran then asked this (excellent) question: Knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?”

Obama’s answer was, “No.”

This must surely rank as among the most misinformed, ideological, and reckless statements by a presidential candidate in modern times. The McCain campaign should do everything they can to make Obama pay a high price for it. That one word answer, “No,” should be advertised in bright neon lights. It should become Exhibit A that Obama not only doesn’t have the “judgment to lead;” he has now supplied us with evidence that few people possess judgment as flawed as his. …

Jennifer Rubin agrees. Are they preaching to the choir?

… How will all this play? It depends if the American people, after learning of the surge’s great success and the brilliance of our commander there, find it troubling that the candidate with no national security experience would throw it all away and disregard knowledgeable advice. It is peculiar in the extreme to have a nominee who when presented with potential victory says ” I wouldn’t have tried to win.” One can imagine that a victory he would not himself have pursued himself (and is apparently sorry we did) is one he has little interest in securing. Hence, his light regard for the advice of Petraeus.

The McCain camp must be celebrating. They have finally gotten lucky.

Jonah Goldberg thinks the surge is yesterday’s news. That elections are about the future.

… Politically, the surge is a bit like the Supreme Court’s recent decision affirming the constitutional right to own a gun. Obama’s position on gun rights, a miasma of murky equivocation, would hurt him if gun control were a big issue this year. It isn’t, thanks to the high court’s ruling. That’s a huge boon.

The surge has done likewise with the war. If it were going worse, McCain’s Churchillian rhetoric would match reality better. But with sectarian violence nearly gone, al Qaeda in Iraq almost totally routed and even Sadrist militias seemingly neutralized, the stakes of withdrawal seem low enough for Americans to feel comfortable voting for Obama. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s support for an American troop drawdown pushes the perceived stakes even lower.

Recall that Bill Clinton, with his dovish record and roster of “character issues,” would never have been elected if the Soviet Union hadn’t collapsed in 1991. With the Cold War over, the successful Reagan surge (and Bush pere’s cleanup efforts) made rolling the dice on Clinton tolerable. The McCain surge (and Bush fils’ success at averting another 9/11) produces the same effect for Obama.

A silver lining for McCain is that Obama’s arrogance and sense of indebtedness to his party’s antiwar base have elicited a series of credibility-damaging zigzags on Iraq. Obama would do better to promise peace with honor as soon as possible, then quickly move on to economy talk. The subsequent bleating from the bug-out lefties would be useful testament to Obama’s rumored centrism. …

David Warren comments on the tour.

Seriousness is a perception, and I am struck by the tone of American media, even from the conservative side, as they review the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. (John McCain is also running, but they’re not covering that.) The welter of his empty rhetorical gestures and contradictions are analyzed with a gravity to suggest deep thought had gone into his “evolving” electoral manifesto.

Running for the Democrat nomination, Obama posed as the reliable progressive, free of all Clintonian baggage — as a kind of “Hillary Clinton you can believe in.” He would get out of Iraq, cut a deal with Iran, bomb Pakistan, trash America’s free trade agreements, deliver socialist medicine, cool global warming, and “heal” everything that ails you. Shades of John F. Kennedy: at least in his supporters’ imagination.

Running now against a Republican, and with the progressive vote safely in the bag, he will stay the course in Iraq, confront Iran, show diplomacy in Pakistan, defend free trade, spend cautiously, ignore global warming, and “heal” everything that ails you. Shades of Ronald Reagan.

The most laughable part of the campaign is the new, first-ever, “I am the world” tour, currently in progress. Obama, realizing he has no credentials in this field, but is even more a rock star abroad than at home, seeks photo ops looking presidential in front of backdrops such as the Brandenburg Gate. Of course, he cannot get all the backdrops he wants, since his demand for them as a mere candidate for office is unprecedented, and leaves foreign leaders embarrassed that he asked. …

David Harsanyi too. He thinks Barack could learn a lot there.

The Barack Obama “Change Is Coming” World Tour touches down in Europe this week after a triumphant jaunt through the Middle East.

The trip is significant in more than one respect. After all, there is genuine (if incremental) “change” budding in European politics — most of it an attempt to turn back the kinds of stifling economic controls and regulations that the presumptive Democratic nominee seems to support here at home.

Obama will visit Germany, France and England this week. It just happens that those Western European nations have turned to right-of-center coalitions to remedy corrosive welfare systems, never-ending entitlements, unchecked union power and overregulation of industry.

In England mere months ago, the left-of-center Labor Party lost more than 400 seats in local elections, including finishing off the reign of London Mayor Ken “The Red” Livingstone.

In France, Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy swept into power in 2007, promising to cut back welfare rolls and revitalize the floundering French economy. In Germany, Angela Merkel vowed free-market reforms to undo theoretical social “safety nets” that have led to “terrifyingly high unemployment.”

Then, Silvio Berlusconi unexpectedly won Italy’s election this year, in part on the pledge to unknot the tangle of economic regulations hampering that nation.

Those are the top four economic powers in Europe. That’s officially a trend. …

Popular Mechanics has a great article on MIT engineers with simple ideas to improve living conditions in underdeveloped parts of our world.

The Peruvian village of Compone lies 11,000 ft. above sea level in El Valle Sagrado de los Incas, the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Flat but ringed by mountains, the tallest capped year-round in snow and ice, the valley is graced with a mild climate and mineral-rich soil that for centuries has produced what the Incas called sara—corn.

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EU regulations prohibit continued use of vintage DC – 3′s. Samizdata proposes a salute to the rule makers in Brussels.

In case you like the idea of Condi Rice as VP, read Noah Pollak’s post on how she’s gone native at State.

David Aaronovich in the London Times says if its Obama, Europeans will come to hate him too.

… George W.Bush, of course, represents a particular kind of offence to European sensibilities. He blew out Kyoto, instead of pretending to care about it and then not implementing it, which is what our hypocrisies require. He took no exquisite pains to make us feel consulted. He invaded Iraq in the name of freedom and then somehow allowed torturers to photograph each other in the fallen dictator’s house of tortures. He is not going to run Franklin Roosevelt a close race for nomination as the second greatest president of the US.

But even if he had been a half-Chinese ballet-loving Francophone, he would have been hated by some who should have loved him, for there isn’t an American president since Eisenhower who hasn’t ended up, at some point or other, being depicted by the world’s cartoonists as a cowboy astride a phallic missile. It happened to Bill Clinton when he bombed Iraq; it will happen to Mr Obama when his reinforced forces in Afghanistan or Pakistan mistake a meeting of tribal elders for an unwise gathering of Taleban and al-Qaeda. Then the new president (or, if McCain, the old president) will be the target of that mandarin Anglo-French conceit that our superior colonialism somehow gives us the standing to critique the Yank’s naive and inferior imperialism. …

Writing for Vanity Fair, Dee Dee Myers asks if the media are trying to elect Barack.

Tomorrow, CBS’s Katie Couric will interview Barack Obama from Jordan. On Wednesday, ABC’s Charlie Gibson will chat with him from Israel. And on Thursday, NBC’s Brian Williams will do the honors from Germany. Call it the presidential campaign equivalent of Shooting the Moon.

And to think, a few short months ago the Washington establishment was buzzing about the press’s pending dilemma: With Obama and John McCain looking like the all-but-certain nominees of their respective parties, how would the media choose between its new crush, Obama, and its long-time paramour, McCain? The Illinois senator has been a media darling since he burst onto the scene at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2004, and during the Democratic primary season, he bested Hillary Clinton in both quantity of coverage (he got more) and tenor (his was way more positive). But McCain has gotten so much favorable media attention over the years that he often joked that the press was his political base. In a head-to-head competition, who would win?

So far, the answer is clear: Obama is The One. In the first quarter of the general election, he has simply gotten more and better coverage than McCain. For those who need more evidence than the enormous press entourage that is treating Obama’s current trip not like the campaign swing of a presidential candidate, but like the international debut of the New American President, there are several new studies which help quantify the disparity. …

David Harsanyi interviews Douglas Feith.

John Fund shines a light on the edifice complex gripping the country’s criminal class.

Charles Rangel, chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, is intent on raising $30 million for a new academic center in his New York district — a center with his name on it. After securing an earmark and two other federal grants totaling some $2.6 million for the project, the Democratic congressman wrote letters on his congressional stationery to businesses with interests before his committee. They sought meetings to help him fulfill his “personal dream” of seeing the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service completed.

The House Ethics Committee will examine the legality of Mr. Rangel’s requests, but the bigger question is why Congress hands out money to name buildings, bridges — everything under the sun — after its own living members. Until roughly the 1960s, people had to die before a grateful nation memorialized them in granite. The Lincoln Memorial wasn’t dedicated until a full half century after the Great Emancipator’s death. Ditto for Franklin Roosevelt. George Washington had to wait 89 years for his memorial.

Now it seems almost every committee chairman gets some “Monument to Me” named after himself with the tab going to the taxpayer. There’s a navigation lock in Pennsylvania named after Rep. C.W. “Bill” Young, the former GOP chair of the House Appropriations Committee. He represents St. Petersburg, Fla. — his only connection to Pennsylvania is that he happened to be born there. Nor is that Mr. Young’s only monument. The C.W. Young Center for Bio-Defense and Emerging Infectious Disease was dedicated at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., last year. …

Thomas Sowell wishes to understand how the lenders with serious loan problems were “exploiting” the poor.

Blaming the lenders is the party line of Congressional Democrats as well. What we need is more government regulation of lenders, they say, to protect the innocent borrowers from “predatory” lending practices.

Before going further down that road, it may be useful to look back at what got us into this mess in the first place.

It was not that many years ago when there was moral outrage ringing throughout the media because lenders were reluctant to lend in certain neighborhoods and because banks did not approve mortgage loan applications from blacks as often as they approved mortgage loan applications from whites.

All this was an opening salvo in a campaign to get Congress to pass laws forcing lenders to lend to people they would not otherwise lend to and in places where they would not otherwise put their money.

The practice of not lending in some neighborhoods was demonized as “redlining” and the fact that minority applicants were approved for mortgages only 72 percent of the time, while whites were approved 89 percent, was called “overwhelming” evidence of discrimination by the Washington Post. …

It was government intervention in the financial markets, which is now supposed to save the situation, that created the problem in the first place.

Laws and regulations pressured lending institutions to lend to people that they were not lending to, given the economic realities. The Community Reinvestment Act forced them to lend in places where they did not want to send their money, and where neither they nor the politicians wanted to walk.

Now that this whole situation has blown up in everybody’s face, the government intervention that brought on this disaster in is supposed to save the day.

Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others– regardless of what the facts may be. Politicians get away with this to the extent that we gullibly accept their words and look to them as political messiahs.

Paul Greenberg compares the tolerance he experienced in part of the academy 50 years ago, to the conformity of today.

… At the time — the 1950s — conservatives were widely assumed to have no ideas at all. But only “irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas,” as the literary critic Lionel Trilling put it. All too accurately. For back then the right was as devoid of ideas as the left is now.

My staunchly Jeffersonian teacher — James L. Bugg — questioned me closely about the Federalist positions I defended. Nevertheless, he didn’t just tolerate but encouraged other opinions. He even took me on as a graduate assistant. I wonder if such a thing would be possible now, in our ideologically driven day.

Now I realize how blessed I was to have encountered such teachers. At the time I took it as a matter of course. Talk about spoiled; I thought all graduate schools were like that.

I found out they weren’t when I went on to an Ivy League school. Columbia University in the early 1960s was quite a step from the University of Missouri in the late 1950s. Quite a step down. At Columbia, ideology was already all. Even then education was rapidly giving way to indoctrination. Fail to toe the party line and you’d pay the price. …

Division of Labour likes one of Gore’s arguments against drilling.

… Gore is suggesting that it isn’t worth undertaking any cost today for a benefit that won’t arrive for ten years. Isn’t this the same Al Gore who says we need to start taking costly steps today to slow global warming, in order to save us from rising sea levels, etc., that will otherwise arrive in thirty to fifty years?

Trans Central Station interviews immigrant who started Pay Pal.

… I think the United States is the greatest country that’s ever existed on earth. And I think that it is difficult to argue on objective grounds that it is not. I think the facts really point in that direction. It’s the greatest force for good of any country that’s ever been. I think it would be a mistake to say the United States is perfect; it certainly is not. But when historians look at these things on balance and measure the good with the bad — and I think if you do that on a rational basis and make a fair assessment — I think it’s hard to say that there is anything better. I wasn’t born in America – but I got here as fast as I could.

Obama tours the world for five days. Andy Borowitz says McCain will visit the internet for five days.

And Scrappleface notes Obama’s submission was rejected by Reader’s Digest.

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Contentions on Beijing bigots.

Sarah Baxter of the London Times with yet another perceptive view of American politics. She comments on his world tour.

… Yet the global coming of the Obamessiah is manna for critics who claim the Illinois senator has embarked on a humourless cult of personality. Exhibit A last week was his po-faced reaction to a satirical cartoon on the cover of The New Yorker showing Obama as a turban-wearing Muslim and his wife Michelle with a black-power Afro, wearing military fatigues.

It was “an insult against Muslim Americans”, he claimed, tweaking a nerve aroused by the riots over a Danish newspaper’s cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

Although Obama has continued to raise money at a breathtaking pace, hauling in $52m in June, he leads McCain by only 46% to 42%, according to RealClearPolitics’ poll of polls, at a time when approval ratings for President George W Bush and the Republicans are in the mire.

Lanny Davis, a prominent supporter of Hillary Clinton during the primary campaign, said: “Why is he basically in a dead heat? If you are a Democrat ahead of a Republican by five or six points; and if you are polling under 50% and that stays the same through October, the Republican wins.”

Democrats are torn between the conviction that 2008 is their year and a rising sense of terror that they could blow yet another election.

The ever-ambitious Clinton has already sensed an opening. It emerged last week that she is sending hand-written letters to campaign donors asking them to roll over their contributions to her Senate re-election fund – with “any amount in excess” of the maximum $2,300 contribution going to the 2012 presidential election. …

Ed Morrissey notes the second Berlin location is a bust for Obama too.

After receiving a hailstorm of criticism for considering Brandenburg Gate for a public speech, as well as official German dissuasion, Barack Obama moved the venue to the Siegessäule monument.  Obama will speak about “historic” US-German relations, but once again, Obama’s own grasp of history has been proven deficient.  Not only does the site contain a monument to Prussian victories over other American allies in Europe, its placement was decided by Adolf Hitler — in order to impress crowds in his idealized version of Berlin called Germania: …

… Obama could be excused for his gaffe, except for two reasons.  His team certainly understood the historical weight that the Brandenburg Gate would have lent his event, so why didn’t they bother to ask the Germans about the Siegessäule?  Quite obviously, the Germans understand the meaning and subtext of the monument, and most of them wonder why Obama does not.  Maybe this is a better example of clueless Americans traveling abroad than those who can only say Merci, beaucoup.

The more basic question is why Obama feels the need to conduct a campaign event among Germans.  Meeting with foreign leaders makes sense for a man with no foreign policy experience whatsoever, but that doesn’t require massive rallies among people who aren’t voting in this election.  In his rush to look impressive for no one’s purposes but his own, Obama has made himself look ignorant and arrogant all over again.

Peter Robinson Corner post shows what spendthrifts Bush and the GOP have been.

Last Friday, I posted a chart on what can only be termed, alas, Republican overspending—that is, the enormous increase in domestic spending during this administration, most of which, of course, took place while the GOP held not only the White House but both chambers of Congress—from an article by Glenn Hubbard, the dean of the Columbia business school, and John Cogan, a colleague of mine here at the Hoover Institution.  (You’ll find the article, “The Coming Tax Hike,” in the most recent issue of the Hoover Digest.)  Readers instantly began peppering me with questions about the chart, and over the weekend I swapped emails with John Cogan.  Below, the chart once again—and below that, answers to most frequently asked questions. …

Kimberley Strassel says it’s going to be tough to purge the GOP of the porkers.

The 11th commandment of politics is that elected officials shall not take sides in their party primaries. Then again, Missouri Republicans are burdened with so many sins, what’s one more?

For an insight as to why the GOP is down and out in Washington, take a look at Jefferson City. That’s where Sarah Steelman, the state treasurer, is running in an Aug. 5 primary for the Missouri governorship. And it’s where her reform campaign against earmarks and self-dealing is threatening the entrenched status quo, causing her own party to rise against her.

So bitter are House Minority Whip Roy Blunt and Sen. Kit Bond at Ms. Steelman’s attack on their cherished spending beliefs that last month they rallied the entire Missouri congressional delegation to put out a public statement openly criticizing her campaign against six-term U.S. Rep. Kenny Hulshof. Joining them in their support of Mr. Hulshof has been the vast majority of the state Republican machine. Ms. Steelman is clearly doing something right. …

John Fund points out it can be done.

Last July, Paul Broun shocked Georgia pundits when the poorly funded physician narrowly defeated a longtime legislative leader in a GOP primary for a special election in an overwhelmingly Republican U.S. House seat. Party grandees were convinced Dr. Broun’s victory was a fluke and this year backed a challenge from state Rep. Barry Fleming, who hails from the district’s population center of Augusta. Mr. Fleming promptly raised nearly $1 million and proceeded to throw the kitchen sink at Dr. Broun, including mailers claiming he was soft on Internet perverts and chiding him for failing to bring home earmarks for the district.

Well, Dr. Broun will be going back to Washington next year …

Posts on the Grand Old Party should be followed by a review of the Grand New Party.

… The timely thesis of Grand New Party is that the party that captures “the non-college-educated voters who make up roughly half of the electorate” will dominate politics for the foreseeable future, as has been the case ever since the New Deal. The book’s thesis, which was in effect the rationale for both the Huckabee campaign and the latter stages of the Hillary Clinton campaign, is likely to be given another test in the general election — in which middle-class swing voters, who’ve deserted the GOP but have doubts about Barack Obama, hold the winning cards.

Authors Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, who both work for The Atlantic, are among the brightest lights in the younger generation of political thinkers. …

The Australian publishes a piece by a man who ran the computer models for his country’s “Green” office.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” …

We can’t drill fast enough says David Harsanyi.

One day Americans are moaning about the harmful impact of cheap oil and the next they’re grousing about the harmful impact of expensive oil.

Which one is it?

As a disreputable sort, I freely confess to having a fondness for oil. Actually, I have a mild crush on all carbon-emitting fuels that feed our prosperity. But I’m especially fond of cheap oil. For many years, those who spread apocalyptic global-warming scenarios have warned me that a collective national sacrifice was needed to save the world.

One option, we were told, was to make gas artificially expensive, forcing our ignorant, energy-gobbling neighbors to alter their destructive habits.

Well, here we are. At $4 a gallon for gas, we already have a flailing economy. Isn’t it glorious? And isn’t it exactly what many environmentalists desired?

The problem is that there is no feasible “alternative” fuel that can haul food from farms to cities, produce affordable electricity for your plasma TV and drive your kids to school. Not yet. It can happen, of course, but only (to pinch a word from enlightened grocery shoppers) organically.

The problem is that when “green” fantasies crash onto the shores of economic reality (as they did with corn-based ethanol), we all suffer.

Don’t worry, though, congressional Democrats have a bold plan. Hold on for 10 or 15 years and they’ll have a bounty of energy options. They promise. But no oil shale. No clean coal. No nuclear power. And definitely no more oil. …

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Ralph Peters on the disaster for al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the world.

IF you think the US markets have problems, look at the value of al Qaeda shares throughout the Muslim world: A high-flying political equity just a few years ago, its stock has tanked. It made the wrong strategic investments and squandered its moral capital.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Osama bin Laden was the darling of the Arab street, seen as the most successful Muslim in centuries. The Saudi royal family paid him protection money, while individual princes handed over cash willingly: Al Qaeda seemed like the greatest thing since the right to abuse multiple wives.

Osama appeared on T-shirts and his taped utterances were awaited with fervent excitement. Recruits flocked to al Qaeda not because of “American aggression,” but because, after countless failures, it looked like the Arabs had finally produced a winner.

What a difference a war makes.

Yes, al Qaeda had little or no connection to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – but the terrorists chose to declare that country the main front in their struggle with the Great Satan. Bad investment: Their behavior there was so breathtakingly brutal that they alienated their fellow Muslims in record time. …

Charles Krauthammer says;

… Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself. There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history — “generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment” — when, among other wonders, “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” As Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, “Moses made the waters recede, but he had help.” Obama apparently works alone.

Obama may think he’s King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty. …

Michael Barone is surprised by Obama’s shallow knowledge of history.

Mr. Barone will dazzle you with his knowledge of history; particularly his knowledge of how close Gerald Ford was to beating the village idiot from Plains.

… Ford’s political situation then was far more parlous than McCain’s today. An early summer Gallup poll showed him trailing Carter by 62 percent to 29 percent. He had barely limped through the primary contests against Ronald Reagan, who continued his campaign up through the mid-August national convention. His political ads had been disastrous, and on Aug. 1 he did not have a general election media team in place.

Yet by November, the race was about even. Ford ended up losing by just 50 percent to 48 percent. A switch of 5,559 votes in Ohio and 3,687 in Hawaii — 9,247 votes out of 81 million — would have made Ford president for four more years.

How this came about is an interesting story, and one of obvious relevance to the McCain campaign this year. Much of it is told in a book two copies of which are currently available new and used on amazon.com, “We Almost Made It,” by Malcolm MacDougall — a professional advertising man, still active, who had played no significant role in presidential campaigns before 1976 and has not done so since. …

A true believer has come back to earth. Nat Hentoff has become disillusioned.

During my more than 60 years of covering national politics, I have never seen a candidate’s principles and character so effectively tarnished — after so extraordinarily inspiring a start — as Barack Obama’s. He has come to resemble another mellifluous orator I came to know in Boston during my first time reporting on a campaign — James Michael Curley, the skilful prestidigitator whom Spencer Tracy masterfully played in the movie “The Last Hurrah.” Obama’s deflation has not been due to ruthless opposition research by John McCain’s team but by the “change” candidate himself. Like millions of Americans, I, for a time, was buoyed by not only the real-time prospect of our first black president but much more by the likelihood that Obama would pierce the dense hypocrisy and insatiable power-grabbing of current American politics. …

Ed Morrissey on the “in the Obama tank” media.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign complained loudly that the media treated Barack Obama like a rock star instead of a presidential candidate.  Saturday Night Live made itself relevant for the first time in a generation by skewering the love affair that the mainstream media had with Obama, finally embarrassing them into asking a few tough questions of Obama — after more than a year.  Now, with Obama embarking on his world tour, all three broadcast networks will have their anchors trailing him, apparently hoping to record every bon mot that escapes from his lips: …

We get David Harsanyi’s take on the New Yorker cover.

WSJ editors warn us about the lawnmower men.

Al Gore blew into Washington on Thursday, warning that “our very way of life” is imperiled if the U.S. doesn’t end “the carbon age” within 10 years. No one seriously believes such a goal is even remotely plausible. But if you want to know what he and his acolytes think this means in practice, the Environmental Protection Agency has just published the instruction manual. Get ready for the lawnmower inspector near you.

In a huge document released last Friday, the EPA lays out the thousands of carbon controls with which they’d like to shackle the whole economy. Central planning is too artful a term for the EPA’s nanomanagement. Thankfully none of it has the force of law — yet. However, the Bush Administration has done a public service by opening this window on new-wave green thinking like Mr. Gore’s, and previewing what Democrats have in mind for next year. …

We probably should ignore Al Gore, but John Tierney had three questions for him.

Jennifer Rubin compares Ed Begley, a committed green to a trend surfer like Gore.

Economist reports on food for thought.

CHILDREN have a lot to contend with these days, not least a tendency for their pushy parents to force-feed them omega-3 oils at every opportunity. These are supposed to make children brainier, so they are being added to everything from bread, milk and pasta to baby formula and vitamin tablets. But omega-3 is just the tip of the nutritional iceberg; many nutrients have proven cognitive effects, and do so throughout a person’s life, not merely when he is a child.

Fernando Gómez-Pinilla, a fish-loving professor of neurosurgery and physiological science at the University of California, Los Angeles, believes that appropriate changes to a person’s diet can enhance his cognitive abilities, protect his brain from damage and counteract the effects of ageing. Dr Gómez-Pinilla has been studying the effects of food on the brain for years, and has now completed a review, just published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, that has analysed more than 160 studies of food’s effect on the brain. Some foods, he concludes, are like pharmaceutical compounds; their effects are so profound that the mental health of entire countries may be linked to them. …

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Jennifer Rubin summarizes a Hitchens column on the false choice between Iraq and Afghanistan.

John McCain tried yesterday to argue that Barack Obama is setting up a false choice between Iraq and Afghanistan. Christopher Hitchens does a better job of it today, explaining “any attempt to play off the two wars against each other is little more than a small-minded and zero-sum exercise.” Hitchens argues that the problem of Afghanistan is not one of simply too few troops which might be eased by shifting troops from elsewhere. And then he concludes:

If we had left Iraq according to the timetable of the anti-war movement, the situation would be the precise reverse: The Iraqi people would now be excruciatingly tyrannized by the gloating sadists of al-Qaida, who could further boast of having inflicted a battlefield defeat on the United States. I dare say the word of that would have spread to Afghanistan fast enough and, indeed, to other places where the enemy operates. Bear this in mind next time you hear any easy talk about “the hunt for the real enemy” or any loose babble that suggests that we can only confront our foes in one place at a time. …

Then Rubin does the same with Tom Friedman’s column questioning Obama’s quest for popularity in the world. Rubin closes with;

… And that I think is what is troubling about Obama’s formulation — that we have somehow made it oh-so-hard to be loved by the world. If we are really looking out for our own and the world’s best interests, we are going to ask our allies to do things they had rather not — like contribute more troops to Afghanistan and draw the line with tyrants and bullies. And we’re going to do a whole lot of things that our adversaries don’t like, such as impose sanctions and use military force when needed. That doesn’t mean we can’t be constructive, cooperative, and cordial in getting our allies on board, or go the extra mile to avoid military conflict with our foes. But this notion that we can get everyone to like us by simply sending George W. Bush into retirement is hooey.

We can and should be firm (like world leaders we will meet with), predictable (with regard to seeing through our military and moral commitments in a war, for instance), respectful of our agreements (trade agreements, even) and look for common ground. But unless we put our own interests on the back burner and allow the world to run amok, as Friedman puts it, a lot of countries aren’t going to like what we’re doing. And being resented or even disliked? Not always a bad thing.

Here’s Friedman’s column. (We’re not doing the Hitchens column because it’s poorly organized and poorly written. Rubin has a link if you want to go there anyway.)

Much ink has been spilled lately decrying the decline in American popularity around the world under President Bush. Polls tell us how China is now more popular in Asia than America and how few Europeans say they identify with the United States. I am sure there is truth to these polls. We should have done better in Iraq. An America that presides over Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo Bay deserves a thumbs-down.

But America is not and never has been just about those things, which is why I also find some of these poll results self-indulgent, knee-jerk and borderline silly. Friday’s vote at the U.N. on Zimbabwe reminded me why.

Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power? With America’s overextended military and overextended banks, that is the world into which we may be heading.

Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power.

I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something truly filthy about Russia’s and China’s vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s ruling clique in Zimbabwe. …

What Pickerhead had originally intended for today was a review of some more of the Tony Snow tributes. So here’s some of them. Byron York writes about his effective work at the White House.

… Snow’s arrival was an immediate breath of fresh air for the White House communications operation. He set out to talk to reporters in front of the camera. That didn’t cause them to stop criticizing the White House, and it didn’t cause the war in Iraq to go better, but it did give George W. Bush an appealing and effective voice appearing daily on television. “Here they had a guy who could really parry with you, who could really joust with you, and who was not afraid to do that,” says David Gregory, the NBC White House correspondent who has done his share of jousting with spokesmen. “He could go on as a guest and really kick it around.”

So Snow became the best face the administration ever had. “Tony raised the bar for all future press secretaries,” Dana Perino, Snow’s deputy who now holds the press secretary’s job, told me. “He was especially effective talking about matters of national security — he understood the threat, he believed in the mission, and he had tremendous respect for our troops. He held the podium during the toughest days in Iraq, and we were grateful for his steadfastness in communicating that we would prevail if we didn’t let politics get in the way.” …

Fred Barnes too.

… But I think Tony will be especially remembered for something else: his time as White House press secretary for President Bush. Tony did the job differently. Most press secretaries are uninformative and defensive, none more so than Tony’s predecessor, Scott McClellan. Reporters grow to dislike them, at least at a professional level.

During some of the toughest days of the Bush presidency, Tony was on offense. He not only could articulate and explain Bush’s foreign and domestic policies, he could promote them. At the pressroom podium, Tony was an ardent and effective polemicist. When reporters argued with him, they usually lost. Yet Tony was so nice and civil and informative that the press hounds generally liked him while loathing his boss.

After 20-plus years of writing columns and yapping on TV, Tony knew a lot. He knew much more about policy and politics and the ideological wars in Washington than the vast majority of the reporters covering the White House. He had thought through and come to (mostly conservative) conclusions about nearly everything on the agenda. This gave him a distinct advantage. More often than not, he was a step ahead of the reporters.

Tony was press secretary during the darkest days of the Bush presidency. The Iraq war had turned into a sectarian bloodbath in 2006, but Tony understood how critical Iraq was to winning the war on terror and transforming the Middle East. He defended the president’s Iraq policy before and after the surge, never blinking or backing down. He was better at this than the president was. …

Lisa Schiffren finishes with a Corner post on Snow.

In the end, which came too soon, Tony Snow was a well-known TV personality, who gave it up to articulate the views of a White House that couldn’t talk straight. In the beginning, he was the deputy editorial page editor at the Detroit News, the place he became the man everyone knew later. I worked with Tony there, for the three years that I was an editorial writer on his staff. Our editor, Tom Bray, had come to Detroit from the Wall Street Journal in 1983 to turn a stodgy, traditionally Republican editorial page into an exciting, powerful voice of the Reagan Revolution. For this mission he assembled a staff of mostly very young people — there weren’t many seasoned Reaganites back then, and fewer still willing to leave Washington. …

Every four years someone proposes abolishing the electoral college. Playing the part of the ignoramus this year is Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida. Jeff Jacoby takes the part of intelligent grown-up.

… The Electoral College (like the Senate) was designed to preserve the role of the states in governing a nation whose name – the United State of America – reflects its fundamental federal nature. We are a nation of states, not of autonomous citizens, and those states have distinct identities and interests, which the framers were at pains to protect. Too many Americans today forget – or never learned – that the states created the central government; it wasn’t the other way around. The federal principle is at least as important to American governance as the one-man-one-vote principle, and the Electoral College brilliantly marries them: Democratic elections take place within each state to determine that state’s vote for president in the Electoral College. …

Ann Coulter comments on our lack of will to drill.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or as she is called on the Big Dogs blog, “the worst speaker in the history of Congress,” explained the cause of high oil prices back in 2006: “We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect.”

Yes, that would explain why the price of oral sex, cigars and Hustler magazine skyrocketed during the Clinton years. Also, I note that Speaker Pelosi is a hotelier … and the price of a hotel room in New York is $1,000 a night! I think she might be onto something.

Is that why a barrel of oil costs mere pennies in all those other countries in the world that are not run by “oilmen”? Wait — it doesn’t cost pennies to them? That’s weird.

In response to the 2003 blackout throughout the Northeast U.S. and parts of Canada, Pelosi blamed: “President Bush and Rep. Tom DeLay’s oil-company interests.” The blackout was a failure of humans operating electric power; it had nothing to do with oil. And I’m not even “an oilman.”

But yes — good point: What a disaster having people in government who haven’t spent their entire lives in politics!  …

Jonah Goldberg’s column on “evil oil speculators” is priceless.

Contrary to nearly all received wisdom in Washington, not to mention the rhetoric of the presumptive nominees of both major parties, the scariest moments in American politics are often its most bipartisan. Some would say this was demonstrated in the wake of 9/11, when all those allegedly terrible national security laws were enacted by both parties, or in the run-up to war, when Democrats and Republicans united to topple Saddam Hussein. But I find it is most true when Washington takes a populist turn, which it is doing now with pugnacious stupidity, attacking that classic populist boogeyman: the “oil speculator.”

Sen. John McCain has declared the profits of American oil companies “obscene” and wants to hunt down “speculators” with congressional investigations. Sen. Barack Obama also sees “speculation” as the culprit behind our energy woes. Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.) blames Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street star chambers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warns that “we are putting oil speculators on notice.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid vows to “end speculation on the oil markets.” Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — who actually knows how markets work and is better at explaining them than any other politician today — says we have to “punish the speculators” for “betting against America.”

Et tu, Newt? …

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Great piece on the danger to our freedom posed by environmentalists. In the Guardian, UK, no less, by an iconoclast named Brendan O’Neill. The title and sub-title are;  Greens are the enemies of liberty, Environmentalists want to curb our freedom far more than the government’s anti-terrorist laws ever will.

… In the current debate on liberty, we hear a lot about the attack on our democratic rights by the government’s security agenda, but little about the grave impact of environmentalism on the fabric of freedom. It seems to me that green thinking – with its shrill intolerance of dissenting views, its deep distaste for free movement and free choice, and its view of individuals, not as history-makers, but as filthy polluters – poses a more profound threat to liberty even than the government’s paranoid anti-terrorist agenda.

Environmentalists are innately hostile to freedom of speech. Last month James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate change scientists, said the CEOs of oil companies should be tried for crimes against humanity and nature. They have been “putting out misinformation”, he said, and “I think that’s a crime”. This follows green writer Mark Lynas’s insistence that there should be “international criminal tribunals” for climate change deniers, who will be “partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths”. They will “have to answer for their crimes”, he says. The American eco-magazine Grist recently published an article on deniers that called for “war crimes trials for these bastards… some sort of climate Nuremberg.” …

Neal Boortz has an example.

The Environmental Protection Agency is determined to do everything it can to regulate your lives. Last Friday the EPA issued an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking … that’s a fancy way of saying “asinine government regulations on the economy and your lives.”

Take this one for example. The EPA wants to get its hands on your lawnmower. Yep. …

Speaking of losing liberty, John Stossel thinks there are too many traffic laws.

… Please. I’m all for highway safety, but I suspect that America’s roads have too many rules, and that gives cops too much arbitrary power to harass people or profit off them. As the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tse said, “The more laws that are written, the more criminals are produced”.

I bet most Americans roll through stop signs. I do. It makes for a smoother ride, and it saves gas.

“ABC News” put cameras by stop signs in Warren, Mich., and in New York City. The video showed that in Warren, 72 percent of drivers did not come to a complete stop. In New York, 82 percent kept going.

Warren and other towns probably have too many stop signs. There’s no proof that more signs save lives. Studies show that sometimes installing stop signs lowers accident rates, but in some cases more accidents occurred after signs were installed. …

James Kirchick thinks the Dems have strange ways to improve our image abroad.

… In the simplistic narrative of the Obama boosters, President Bush and his party’s successor, John McCain, are cranky nationalists who view the world through the barrel of a gun. But the fact is, in this election it is the Democratic candidate who is proposing policies profoundly at odds with his promise to restore America’s preeminent place in the world.

Take the issue of trade. In Senate debates earlier this year, Obama vocally opposed free trade deals with both South Korea and Colombia. Asked what Congress’s failure to pass the Colombia Free Trade Act would mean for bilateral relations between his country and the United States, Colombian president Alvaro Uribe replied, “It would be very serious.” …

Power Line lists three of the many groups that own the Dems.

WSJ Op-Ed outlines the GOP’s record on race.

John McCain is scheduled to address the NAACP’s annual convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, today. Although he is unlikely to gain many black votes this year, he should use the occasion to increase Republican efforts to reach out to African-Americans. He can start by setting the record straight on the records of the two parties on race.

Everyone knows this, but it’s worth repeating: the Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln and was established in 1854 to block the expansion of slavery. The Democratic Party was the party of slavery: Its two founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, owned large numbers of slaves, and every party platform before the Civil War defended the institution unequivocally.

After the war, it was the Republican Party that rammed through the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution over Democratic opposition. Republicans also enacted a series of civil-rights laws that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which basically did what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 accomplished. …

Clint Bolick points the way to another chance for McCain.

Education is slipping in priority among many voters but not among Hispanics, many of whom see school choice as a deciding factor in whom to vote for this fall. This has implications for the presidential election.

A new poll shows that 82% of Hispanics consider education as one of three most important issues facing this country. The survey also shows that, even while Hispanics trust Democrats over Republicans on education by more than a two-to-one margin, that ratio could change if Republicans heavily promote school choice while Democrats oppose it. …

David Remnick, New Yorker editor, defends the cover saying, in effect, they were just trying to help. Maureen Dowd, to her credit, is having none of that in, “May We Mock, Barack?”

… If Obama keeps being stingy with his quips and smiles, and if the dominant perception of him is that you can’t make jokes about him, it might infect his campaign with an airless quality. His humorlessness could spark humor.

On Tuesday, Andy Borowitz satirized on that subject. He said that Obama, sympathetic to comics’ attempts to find jokes to make about him, had put out a list of official ones, including this:

“A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, ‘I was expecting the farmer’s daughter.’ Barack Obama replies, ‘She’s not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American dream.’ ” …

If the GOP wants to win, they should read this Dick Morris column everyday until November.

… Obama’s breathtaking flips and flops are materially different from McCain’s. While McCain had opposed offshore oil drilling and now supports it, the facts have obviously changed. Obama’s shifts have nothing to do with altered circumstances, just a change in the political calendar.

As a candidate who was nominated to be a different kind of politician, Obama has set the bar pretty high. And, with his flipping and flopping, he is falling short, to the disillusionment of his more naïve supporters. One wag even called him the “black Bill Clinton,” a turnaround of the “first black president” moniker that had been pinned on Bill.

Meanwhile, McCain and the Republicans have finally found an issue — oil drilling — exposing how the Democrats oppose drilling virtually anywhere that there might be recoverable oil. Not in Alaska. Not offshore. Not in shale deposits in the West. The Democratic claim that we “cannot drill our way out of the crisis in gas prices” begs the question of whether, had we drilled five years ago, we would be a lot less dependent on foreign market fluctuations.

The truth is that the Democrats put the need to mitigate climate change ahead of the imperative of holding down gasoline prices at the pump. If there was ever a fault line between elitist and populist approaches to a problem, this is it. In fact, liberals basically don’t see much wrong with $5 gas. Many have been urging a tax to achieve precisely this level, just like Europe has done for decades.

Obama said that he was unhappy that there was not a period of “gradual adjustment” to the high prices, but seems to shed few tears over the current levels. After all, if your imperative is climate change, a high gas price is worth 10 times a ratified Kyoto treaty in bringing about change. …

As regards Obama’s campaign, Thomas Sowell asks if facts are obsolete.

In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.

As the hypnotic mantra of “change” is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.

Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.

The New Deal was new then but it is not new now. Moreover, increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression.

Putting new restrictions of international trade, in order to save American jobs? That was done by Herbert Hoover, when he signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff when the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The next year the unemployment rate was 16 percent and, before the Great Depression was over, unemployment hit 25 percent.

One of the most naive notions is that politicians are trying to solve the country’s problems, just because they say so— or say so loudly or inspiringly. …

Corner posts demonstrate why Ohio’s economy is on the skids. A Plain Dealer blog post was the kick-off for this.

A behemoth lies in our midst, sucking in ever greater amounts of cash and growing at twice the rate of inflation.

What’s more, we’re feeding it with billions and billions of tax dollars. An unprecedented study released today shows that the combined cost of government across 16 northeastern Ohio counties — teaching our children, running our cities and tending myriad other public services — had reached at least $16 billion by 2002.

That amounted to $3,750 for every man, woman and child in the targeted region, which includes counties including Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Portage and Summit.

The $175,000 study, paid for by civic and business leaders to gauge government spending, used the latest available U.S. census data to look at 800 publicly funded entities in the region.

And while the numbers are dated and incomplete, they suggest our system of governance is bloated and drags down the region’s economy, according to the people who commissioned the study. …

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Andy McCarthy Corner post on AG Mukasey’s letter to Rep Conyers refusing to appoint a special prosecutor to look into CIA interrogation practices. From Mukasey’s letter;

… Your request for a criminal investigation into the actions Executive Branch policymakers and national security lawyers undertook to defend the Nation reflects a broader trend whose institutional effects may outlast the present Administration and harm our national security well into the future. I spoke in more detail about this problematic trend in a speech at Boston College Law School on May 23, 2008, which in turn drew substantially from former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith’s recent book, The Terror Presidency. In his book, Professor Goldsmith describes what he calls “cycles of timidity and aggression” among political leaders and commentators in their attitudes towards the intelligence community. As I pointed out in my speech, the message sent to our national security policymakers and lawyers in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was clear, it was bipartisan, and it was all but unanimous. As Professor Goldsmith explains, “The consistent refrain from the [9/11] Commission, Congress, and pundits of all stripes was that the government must be more forward-leaning against the terrorist threat: more imaginative, more aggressive, less risk-averse.”

We have gone six and one-half years without another terrorist attack within the United States, and now our intelligence professionals and national security lawyers are hearing a rather different message. Your letter, which urges me to subject those involved in developing or implementing our counterterrorism policies to criminal investigation, reflects that message. Taking such a step would not only be, in my judgment, unjust, but would also have potentially grave national security consequences. …

Yesterday, the NY Times printed an Obama op-ed on Iraq. Many of our favorites had comments. Peter Wehner is first.

… Among the most striking things about Obama’s op-ed is how intellectually dishonest it is, particularly for a man who once proudly proclaimed that he would let facts rather than preconceived views dictate his positions on Iraq.Obama’s op-ed is the effort of an arrogant and intellectually rigid man, one who disdains empirical evidence and is attempting to justify the fact that he has been consistently wrong on Iraq since the war began (for more, see my April 2008 article in Commentary, “Obama’s War“).

Senator Obama is once again practicing the “old politics” he claims to stand against, which is bad enough. But that Obama would have allowed America to lose, al Qaeda and Iran to win, and the Iraqi people to suffer mass death and possibly genocide because of his ideological opposition to the war is far worse. On those grounds alone, he ought to be disqualified from being America’s next commander-in-chief.

Max Boot is next.

Peter has already offered a trenchant response to Barack Obama’s New York Times op-ed, “My Plan For Iraq.” But the article is filled with so many misstatements and distortions that I feel compelled to weigh in as well. Herewith some thoughts on specific passages, from someone who is admittedly part of the McCain team of foreign policy advisers. Obama’s statements are in italics; my responses follow:

The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated.

The lead paragraph of Obama’s article makes it sound as if the Iraqi leader has endorsed the Democratic candidate’s call for withdrawing all U.S. brigades from Iraq within 16 months of assuming office. He has done no such thing. Iraqi leaders have kept talk of timetables vague on purpose because they know how much they still depend on American assistance.

I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

The question of how much of a threat Saddam Hussein posed is certainly debatable. If their public statements are anything to judge by, Bill Clinton and senior members of his administration had a much graver view of the threat than did Obama. So did many Democratic members of the Senate, including Tom Daschle, Joe Biden, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton, who voted to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq. None of them connected Saddam Hussein with 9/11 (neither did George W. Bush) but they believed, as Bill Clinton put it in 1998, “The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow.” …

Power Line gets in on the act.

… Finally, Afghanistan: Obama would have us believe that he urged defeat in Iraq because he was so firmly committed to victory in Afghanistan. Once again, he misrepresents the record.

In fact, Obama has never supported our troops in Afghanistan. On the contrary, he said on August 14, 2007–less than a year ago–that our forces there are mostly committing war crimes:

We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.

Obama has been so uninterested in Afghanistan that when he went to Iraq and other countries in the Middle East with a Congressional delegation in January 2006, he skipped the opportunity to continue on to Afghanistan, which was taken by others who made the trip with him, including Kit Bond and Harold Ford. And, in an embarrassing gaffe, Obama claimed on May 13, 2008, that we don’t have enough “Arabic interpreters, Arab language speakers” in Afghanistan because they are all being used in Iraq. Obama thereby demonstrated the intellectual laziness and incuriosity that characterizes his campaign: they don’t speak Arabic in Afghanistan, and, anyway, interpreters are drawn from local populations, not shipped around the world.

Worst of all, far from being committed to victory in Afghanistan, Obama voted to cut off all funding for all of our military efforts in Afghanistan on May 24, 2007 (H.R. 2206, CQ Vote #181), thereby seeking to bring about defeat there as well as in Iraq. His current effort to portray himself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing on Afghanistan is a complete fraud.

It is possible that at some point in American history there may have been a major politician as dishonest as Barack Obama, but I can’t offhand think of such a miscreant.

Peter Hegseth of Vets for Freedom in National Review.

As someone who monitors the Iraq-war-policy debate closely, I was puzzled to open the New York Times and see an oped authored by Sen. Barack Obama entitled “My Plan for Iraq.” Besides the seemingly moderate tone — and calling for an Afghanistan “surge” (an idea I agree, and one proposed by Sen Joe Lieberman in March)  — not much in the piece is new or newsworthy. In the final analysis, the oped is another dogmatic addendum to Obama’s “withdrawal at any cost” position.

In fact, just one question entered my head when I finished reading: Why now? Why would Sen. Obama — or any legislator, for that matter — write such a piece before visiting the country for himself, seeing the situation with his own eyes, and speaking with commanders and troops who actually know what’s going on?

It strikes me that only someone who is signaling no interest in consulting with commanders on the ground would spell out his “plan” for Iraq just one week before he visits the country for the first time in 918 days. Only someone who is arrogant enough to believe he always knows best would outline his Iraq policy before once meeting one-on-one with General David Petraeus. …

Weekly Standard.

It’s reassuring to hear Sen. Barack Obama, a man who based his presidential bid on the supposed inevitability of defeat in Iraq, recognize the success of the surge, which he also predicted was bound to fail. But his New York Times op-ed today betrays a strategic understanding that is more deeply disturbing; it’s not just his “Plan for Iraq” that’s worrisome, but his plan for America in the world.

In Obama’s view of international politics and power, Iraq is not simply “the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy,” but a diversion, a strategic sideshow. He claims “Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and never has been,” and offers “broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Obama needs to look at a map and a history book. Iraq long has been and today remains one of the two naturally dominant powers in the Persian Gulf region, home to the second-largest proven oil reserves on the planet and a front-line bulwark against revolutionary Iran. ..

Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist defends Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart hammered by judge,” shouted a front-page Star Tribune headline earlier this month. The Dakota County judge — responding to a class-action assault on the giant retailer — labeled Wal-Mart “dehumanizing” and set it up for a possible $2 billion penalty.

Many Minnesotans probably shrugged. What else is new? The story seemed consistent with charges we’ve heard for years: Wal-Mart exploits its workers by paying skinflint wages and skimping on health insurance. Not to mention driving legions of mom-and-pop stores out of business.

With such a reputation for ruthlessness, Wal-Mart must be struggling to find workers, right?

Yet when the company opened a new store in St. Paul’s Midway area in May 2004, about 6,000 applicants vied for 325 job openings, according to Joyce Niska, the store’s acting manager in 2005. That, too, was nothing new. For years, people have beaten down the doors to work at Wal-Mart. …

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Michael Barone with a history lesson on the Berlin airlift.

Sixty years ago this month, the top story in campaign year 1948 was not the big poll lead of Republican nominee Thomas Dewey or the plight of President Harry Truman. It was the Berlin airlift. On June 23, the Soviets cut off land access to West Berlin. Gen. Lucius Clay, the military governor in Germany, called for sending convoys up the autobahns, but Allied troops were vastly outnumbered by the Red Army, and everyone feared it would overrun Western Europe unless the United States retaliated with the atomic bomb. Air Force generals said that there was no way planes could ferry the 8 million pounds of food and coal Berlin would need every day. Secretary of State George Marshall and Joint Chiefs Chairman Omar Bradley, two of America’s most respected generals, felt Berlin was indefensible and we should withdraw. One man disagreed. President Harry Truman, in one crucial meeting after another, said, We’re not leaving Berlin. …

David Warren thinks a free Canada will disappear, not with a bang, but with a whimper

George Will says civilization depends on beer.

… “The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol.”

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol — in beer and, later, wine — which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, “Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.” Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had — what Johnson describes as the body’s ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, “hold their liquor.” So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol’s toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors — by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. “Most of the world’s population today,” Johnson writes, “is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.” …

Jeff Jacoby points to the Dem hypocrisy of worshipping Kerry’s military service and then the systematic denigration of McCain’s.

… Given that effusive show of respect for military experience in 2004, you would think no Democrat this year could even contemplate disparaging John McCain’s far more extensive military career. The presumptive Republican nominee, after all, spent 22 years as a naval aviator; flew 23 combat missions over North Vietnam; earned numerous combat decorations, including the Silver Star and Legion of Merit; and demonstrated courage and self-sacrifice during five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.

Yet in recent months, one Democrat after another has gone out of his way to diminish or criticize McCain’s war record. A partial list:

In April, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia denounced McCain as insensitive – pointing, as evidence, to his military service. “McCain was a fighter pilot who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet,” Rockefeller told the Charleston Gazette. “He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

Rockefeller later apologized, but a few days later, it was George McGovern’s turn. The former Democratic presidential nominee told an audience that he would like to say to McCain: “Neither of us is an expert on national defense. It’s true that you went to one of the service academies, but you were in the bottom of the class.” He added, tauntingly: “You were shot down early in the war and spent most of the time in prison. I flew 35 combat missions with a 10-man crew and brought them home safely every time.” …

Jim Geraghty at NRO’s Campaign Spot wonders why we’re not hearing about Obama’s June fundraising totals.

John Kass of ChiTrib says the left is squealing over Obama’s flips.

… Obama used them to crush the Clintons, but now the left is finally realizing it’s been betrayed, on issue after issue, with Obama changing his positions in order to defeat a tired and disillusioned Republican Party in November.

They’re at the dance now and he’s the one with the keys and he’s the only ride they’ve got. And they don’t like it.

He has flip-flopped again and again, on campaign finance, on government eavesdropping of overseas phone calls, on gun control and even Iraq. Future President Obama now says he’ll listen to his generals about when to withdraw. He didn’t say he’d listen to the commissars of the blogosphere.

And his cheerleaders are beginning to realize that Obama may not be the Arthurian knight in shining armor, that he may not be Mr. Tumnus, the gentle forest faun of our presidential politics. Months after his inauguration, after he makes Billy Daley the secretary of the treasury and Michael Daley the secretary of zoning and promotes Patrick Fitzgerald to become the attorney general of Mars, the political left may figure out that Obama is a Chicago politician.

“Only an idiot would think or hope that a politician going through the crucible of a presidential campaign could hold fast to every position, steer clear of the stumbling blocks of nuance and never make a mistake,” wrote Bob Herbert in The New York Times. “But Barack Obama went out of his way to create the impression that he was a new kind of political leader—more honest, less cynical and less relentlessly calculating than most. . . . Obama is not just tacking gently toward the center. He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash.”

This panic of the left—particularly among many political media types—is profoundly instructive to foreigners seeking to understand American character. The American media elite chose to portray Obama as some kind of knight in armor. They’re analysts. Yet they were desperate to believe in a political fairy tale from Chicago. …

Debra Saunders writes on Obama, McCain and the wiretapping bill.

Hey, it’s politics. In the primary, when Barack Obama wanted to connect with his party’s disaffected left, he said that he would support a filibuster to stop a reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act if it granted retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that had cooperated with the federal government after the 9/11 attacks.

Now Obama has those voters in the bag. So he is reaching out to the majority of Americans who want aggressive international surveillance to prevent another terrorist attack.

And the average voter certainly isn’t going to lose sleep if the price of that security is that the ACLU does not have carte blanche to sue AT&T for cooperating with the government.

Wednesday, Obama was one of 69 senators who voted for the FISA bill that provided retroactive immunity to the telecoms. …

Abe Greenwald with a good take on this week’s New Yorker cover.

Obama doesn’t like the New Yorker cover. American Thinker thinks he ought to “man up.”

A long, yet unsatisfyingly incomplete article in the current issue of The New Yorker about Barack Obama’s Chicago roots, lauding him for many things that might be considered non-laudable, was a passing curiosity in the blogosphere yesterday. We here at AT blogged about it, pointing out that Mr. Lizza had actually uncovered some things that weren’t too flattering about the candidate.

But the piece went from a passing curiosity to a full blown campaign typhoon when the cover of the issue was released. It showed Obama in a turban doing the fist bump with his wife who is dressed up as some kind of revolutionary. An American flag burns in the fireplace of the Oval Ofice:

One look at this and the Obama campaign hit the roof. …

Now for a couple of less than flattering views of Jesse Helms. Juan Williams is first.

… To be sure, for Helms the essence of North Carolina values was keeping taxes low, and fighting against big government. That is a great message. It won him a base of support.

But that base was rural working-class voters and white suburban male voters. He rallied this base by letting everyone know he disliked Chapel Hill intellectuals — the kind of people who protested for equal rights for blacks and challenged U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He showed no compassion for gays coming out of the closet and women who wanted abortion rights; instead choosing to make them demons threatening family values. And he made blunt use of racial politics.

The most infamous example was in his 1990 Senate campaign against Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte and a black man. Helms ran an ad that showed white hands crumpling a rejection letter while a voice announced: “You needed that job. And you were best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority.” …

Hitchens is next with, “Farewell to a Provincial Redneck.”

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Some of our favorites have Tony Snow thoughts. From The Corner; Mark Steyn, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Yuval Levin, Byron York, and Shannen Coffin. From Contentions John Podhoretz.

Since the world is reaching a point of no return regarding the nukes in Iran, the story of the raid 27 years ago that destroyed Saddam’s nuclear program is germane. Jerusalem Post has the story.

It was late afternoon, Sunday, June 7, 1981, and Zeev Raz was leading his squadron of F-16s across Iraq toward the Osirak nuclear reactor. Anxiously, he scanned the terrain ahead for the last checkpoint of their hair-raising mission, a little island in the middle of the Bahr al-Mihl Lake, about 100 kilometers west of the target, from which the pilots would calculate their final assault on Saddam Hussein’s impending bomb factory.

At 5.34 p.m., bang on schedule, Raz spotted the lake. Or at least he thought he did. Except that it looked rather larger than it had in the satellite photos they’d pored over. And that little island – the crucial last reference point – was nowhere to be seen.

Flashing through Iraqi air space at 10 kilometers a minute, Raz was second-guessing himself. Had he miscalculated? Had he strayed from the meticulously planned route? Was he leading his colleagues to disaster? What had gone wrong?

Too late, Raz realized what had happened. The previous winter’s heavy rains had swollen the lake and submerged the island. The satellite image was out of date. He had been in the right place, and should have trusted himself. Quickly, he reset his computer, inputting his new position, obtaining the adjusted parameters for the bombing run.

But minutes later, when Raz closed in on his target, it became appallingly clear that the miscalculation at the sunken island had profoundly distracted him. This expert airman, leading the pride of the Israel Air Force across vast swathes of hostile terrain on a mission deemed by prime minister Begin to be critical to Israel’s very existence – a mission that the chief of the General Staff, Raful Eitan, had told them that day “must be successful, or we as a people are doomed” – found to his horror that he had, almost amateurishly, overflown the target. He had begun his bombing dive too late.

Israel’s legendary destruction of Osirak – a near-impossible operation, pushing the F-16s further than they had been built to fly, evading enemy radar for hundreds of miles, to precision bomb a heavily protected nuclear target – has entered the pantheon of acts of extraordinary Zionist daring as a clinical example of pre-emptive devastation, executed with breathtaking, ruthless accuracy.

But as detailed in American journalist Rodger Claire’s overlooked study of the mission, 2004′s Raid on the Sun – in which he spoke, uniquely, to all the pilots, their commanders, and key players on the Iraqi side of the raid as well – the bombing of Osirak was far from error-free. It was an astonishing, envelope-pushing assault all right. It succeeded, utterly, in destroying Saddam’s nuclear program – a blow from which he would never recover. It safeguarded Israel from the Iraqi dictator’s genocidal ambitions. But Raz’s mistake on the final approach was only one of several foul-ups that could so easily have doomed it.

Recognizing that Raz, the lead bomber, was not going to be able to hit the target, the No. 2 pilot in the squadron, Amos Yadlin, streaking along behind him, made the incredibly risky split-second decision to depart from the bombing sequence, cut in beneath Raz’s plane, and try to drop his two 2,000-pound bombs first. As he would later tell author Claire, Yadlin thought to himself: “I’m not going to end up being hanged in some square in Baghdad because of a screwup.”

Yadlin did indeed get his bombs away, and saw them pierce the Osirak dome and disappear inside as he peeled off.

Simultaneously, Raz was executing an astoundingly ambitious “loop-de-loop” in the skies above the reactor, and was able to come back over Osirak, at the correct angle this time, and hit the target.

The potential consequences of these radical departures from the intended bombing process – the potential for misunderstanding, for collision, for disaster – can hardly be overstated. …

John Fund enumerates the left’s electoral efforts. They think it’s their techniques that need work. When they lose this time will the face up to the fact their ideas suck?

… In 2005, billionaire investor George Soros convened a group of 70 super-rich liberal donors in Phoenix to evaluate why their efforts to defeat President Bush had failed. One conclusion was that they needed to step up their long-term efforts to dominate key battleground states. The donors formed a group called Democracy Alliance to make grants in four areas: media, ideas, leadership and civic engagement. Since then, Democracy Alliance partners have donated over $100 million to key progressive organizations.

Take Colorado, which has voted Republican for president in nine of the last 10 presidential elections. But in 2006, Colorado elected a Democratic governor and legislature for the first time in over 30 years. Denver will be the site for the party’s 2008 presidential convention. Polls show Barack Obama would carry the state today. This hasn’t happened by chance. The Democracy Alliance poured money into Colorado to make it a proving ground for how progressives can take over a state.

Offshoots of leading liberal national groups were set up including Colorado Media Matters in 2006, to correct “conservative misinformation” in the media. Ethics Watch, a group modeled after Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was started and proceeded to file a flurry of complaints over alleged campaign finance violations — while refusing to name its own donors.

Western Progress, a think tank to advance “progressive solutions,” opened its doors as did the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute, one of 29 such groups around the country. Then there’s Colorado Confidential, a project of The Center for Independent Media, which subsidized liberal bloggers. CIM has set up similar ventures in Iowa, Minnesota and Michigan, with funding from groups such as the Service Employees International Union, and George Soros’s Open Society Institute. …

John Fund has a couple of good shorts. The first has a Scalia look.

… Mr. Scalia has some idea for avoiding public anger at the courts in future: Use them less. He thinks the United States is “over-lawed” and has too many lawyers. “I don’t think our legal system should be that complex. I think that any system that requires that many of the country’s best minds, and they are the best minds, is too complex,” he says. “If you look at the figures, where does the top of the class in college go to? It goes into law. They don’t go into teaching. Now I love the law, there is nothing I would rather do but it doesn’t produce anything.” …

Jack Kelly on the campaign so far.

WHEN your approval rating is only 14 percent, there’s nowhere to go but up. Unless you’re the Democrat-led Congress. A Rasmussen poll released Tuesday indicated the approval rating for Congress has declined by 36 percentage points from last year’s “high.” Just 9 percent of respondents said Congress was doing a “good” or “excellent” job, while 52 percent of us think it’s doing a “poor” one. That’s the lowest rating ever.

Much of the dissatisfaction with Congress is due to its unwillingness to do anything about the soaring price of gasoline. “Right now, our strategy on gas prices is ‘Drive small cars and wait for the wind,’•” a Democratic congressional aide told The Hill newspaper.

“So why are the Republicans running scared, and why aren’t they going after the ‘new Democratic Congress’ hammer and tongs?” wondered Web logger Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. “Beats me. Because they’re idiots, I guess.”

I disagree. Some Republicans in Congress are crooks, and many are cowards. But few are idiots. For idiocy, you have to look to the campaign of Sen. John McCain. …

Slate’s Undercover Economist defends speculators.

When the economy is in turmoil, no one is demonized more than the speculator. First, we are told, speculators have driven up the price of oil, condemning us to expensive heating and driving. Then, they have driven down the price of bank shares, dealing vicious blows to the nation’s noblest banks. All of this, we are supposed to believe, is immensely profitable and highly destabilizing. …

Silly Telegraph, UK cow flatulence story is here just for the picture of the cow.