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June 23rd is an infamous date. It was three years ago the Supreme court issued the Kelo decision. Susette Kelo is here with a request.

My name is Susette Kelo.

On Monday, June 23, 2008, I need your help in making a little bit of history.

June 23 is the third anniversary of the infamous Kelo eminent domain case, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed perfectly well-maintained private homes like mine to be taken by the government and handed over for someone else’s private use. Under that ruling, any home could be taken and destroyed to make way for high-end condos.  Any small business could be bulldozed to make way for a big box store.  And, tragically, that is what is happening in too many parts of our country.

The Captain is here from Pickings of June 24, 2005 commenting on the Kelo case.

Karl Rove says Obama’s right, words do mean something. So, he writes about Obama’s words to AIPAC.

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter!” Sen. Barack Obama thundered at a Wisconsin Democratic Party dinner in February. He should have remembered that at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference last week.

There, Mr. Obama defended the outrageous promise he made last July to meet, during his first year as president and without precondition, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Mr. Obama’s eagerness to undertake a “World Tyrants Tour” is both naive and foolhardy, and how he dealt with those concerns at AIPAC raises the question of whether he’s done his homework.

Mr. Obama knew the audience was wondering what could come from such meetings, except propaganda victories for thugs and a loss of prestige for America. He tried to mitigate the damage of his promised meetings. But the man who criticizes George W. Bush for unilateralism ended up denouncing a multilateral approach to Iran, saying it would “outsource the sustained work to our European allies.” …

David Warren says the terrible thing about the Steyn trial in Canada is not Mark’s problems, but the ones that don’t make the news.

… My own political education was provided in part by several impressive Czech exiles from communism, with whom I fell in as a young man. What I learned from them is that under an ideological regime, the best men live in jail, or are assigned to work in tanneries and collieries, where other good men may be found. The worst men live in luxury and power.

As free speech disappears in Canada, one looks, for instance, not at the more celebrated cases of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant, but at the much less publicized fate of Rev. Stephen Boisson, convicted by an Alberta kangaroo court (“human rights tribunal”) last November for publicly expressing the Christian and Biblical view of homosexuality, on the say-so of an anti-Christian activist from his home town.

Rev. Boisson has now been ordered to desist from communicating his views on this subject “in newspapers, by e-mail, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the Internet” so long as he should live. He has been ordered to pay compensation to Darren Lund, the anti-Christian activist in question, and further to make a public recantation of beliefs he still holds.

Meanwhile, Fr. Alphonse de Valk, editor of the magazine Catholic Insight, is being prosecuted by a gay rights activist in Edmonton, for having upheld both sides of the Catholic teaching on homosexuality in the pages of his magazine over more than a decade: that homosexual behaviour is sinful, but that we are nevertheless to love the sinner. …

Ann Coulter with a full-throated defense of W’s record.

In a conversation recently, I mentioned as an aside what a great president George Bush has been and my friend was surprised. I was surprised that he was surprised.

I generally don’t write columns about the manifestly obvious, but, yes, the man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents.

Produce one person who believed, on Sept. 12, 2001, that there would not be another attack for seven years, and I’ll consider downgrading Bush from “Great” to “Really Good.”

Merely taking out Saddam Hussein and his winsome sons Uday and Qusay (Hussein family slogan: “We’re the Rape Room People!”) constitutes a greater humanitarian accomplishment than anything Bill Clinton ever did — and I’m including remembering Monica’s name on the sixth sexual encounter.

But unlike liberals, who are so anxious to send American troops to Rwanda or Darfur, Republicans oppose deploying U.S. troops for purely humanitarian purposes. We invaded Iraq to protect America.

It is unquestionable that Bush has made this country safe by keeping Islamic lunatics pinned down fighting our troops in Iraq. In the past few years, our brave troops have killed more than 20,000 al-Qaida and other Islamic militants in Iraq alone. That’s 20,000 terrorists who will never board a plane headed for JFK — or a landmark building, for that matter.

We are, in fact, fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them at, say, the corner of 72nd and Columbus in Manhattan — the mere mention of which never fails to enrage liberals, which is why you should say it as often as possible. …

WaPo’s Jim Hoagland on Obama’s Jim Johnson mess.

Say this for Sen. Barack Obama: He is a lot quicker in these post-Jeremiah Wright days to walk away from controversy caused him by others. By the time he finished distancing himself from Jim Johnson, his former vice presidential vetter, Johnson must have felt like he was on Mars.

After Johnson was portrayed in the Wall Street Journal as having received favorable treatment from Countrywide Financial Corp., a mortgage company Obama has frequently attacked, the Democratic presidential candidate immediately labeled Johnson as being only “tangentially related to our campaign.”

Shifting into overdrive, Obama added that “these aren’t folks who are working for me,” referring to Johnson and his two associates on the vice presidential vetting team, Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder.

It was enough to make you wonder if the three had somehow broken into Obama’s office, stolen his letterhead stationery and appointed themselves to interview the capital’s good and great about who should join Obama on the Democratic ticket.

But that was not all. “First of all, I am not vetting my VP search committee for their mortgages. . . . I would have to hire the vetter to vet the vetters.” He was equally dismissive of questions about Holder’s role in Bill Clinton’s 2001 pardon of financier Marc Rich.

Johnson got the message and yesterday announced his resignation from what I guess had become his non-job.

Jennifer Rubin with a couple of great Contentions posts summarizing the Jim Johnson flap.

… It is becoming easier to understand how Obama got swept into the orbit of Tony Rezko: he seems to lack basic common sense about the appearance of ethical improprieties and possesses the arrogance to believe no one will question his motives. It’s a deadly combination. As the Wall Street Journal editors put it:

As for Mr. Obama, Mr. Johnson now joins an intriguing and growing list of Mr. Obama’s ex-associates that includes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, and former terrorist bomber William Ayers. We might call this list eclectic, except that there is a consistent pattern of bad judgment followed by an initial defense, then followed by rapid disassociation and regret that none of them were the men Mr. Obama “knew.” We can only wonder if Eric Holder, who is also among Mr. Obama’s veep vetters, will be the next to join this club. As Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration, he played a role in the Marc Rich pardon that also deserves to be fully vetted – all the more so if Mr. Holder is on the short list to be Mr. Obama’s Attorney General.

And, finally, can you imagine the Clintons’ reaction–this is Mr. Clean-Hands-Pure-Heart? At least with Hillary Clinton expectations would have been low and a character like Johnson would have elicited only yawns.

Ed Morrissey gets his Jim Johnson swipes

It’s probably silly to waste ink or electrons on anything written by Madeline Albright, but her latest gets the full treatment from James Taranto.

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The Kagans, Kimberley and Frederick, review recent gains in Iraq.

America is very close to succeeding in Iraq. The “near-strategic defeat” of al Qaeda in Iraq described by CIA Director Michael Hayden last month in the Washington Post has been followed by the victory of the Iraqi government’s security forces over illegal Shiite militias, including Iranian-backed Special Groups. The enemies of Iraq and America now cling desperately to their last bastions, while the political process builds momentum.

These tremendous gains remain fragile and could be lost to skillful enemy action, or errors in Baghdad or Washington. But where the U.S. was unequivocally losing in Iraq at the end of 2006, we are just as unequivocally winning today.

By February 2008, America and its partners accomplished a series of tasks thought to be impossible. The Sunni Arab insurgency and al Qaeda in Iraq were defeated in Anbar, Diyala and Baghdad provinces, and the remaining leaders and fighters clung to their last urban outpost in Mosul. The Iraqi government passed all but one of the “benchmark” laws (the hydrocarbon law being the exception, but its purpose is now largely accomplished through the budget) and was integrating grass-roots reconciliation with central political progress. The sectarian civil war had ended.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), swelled by 100,000 new recruits in 2007, was fighting hard and skillfully throughout Iraq. The Shiite-led government was showing an increasing willingness to use its forces even against Shiite militias. The announcement that provincial elections would be held by year’s end galvanized political movements across the country, focusing Iraq’s leaders on the need to get more votes rather than more guns. …

Thomas Sowell on the “cocky ignorance” of Barack Obama.

Now that Senator Barack Obama has become the Democrats’ nominee for President of the United States, to the cheers of the media at home and abroad, he has written a letter to the Secretary of Defense, in a tone as if he is already President, addressing one of his subordinates.

The letter ends: “I look forward to your swift response.”

With wars going on in both Iraq and Afghanistan, a Secretary of Defense might have some other things to look after, before making a “swift response” to a political candidate.

Because of the widely publicized statistic that suicide rates among American troops have gone up, Senator Obama says he wants the Secretary of Defense to tell him, swiftly: …

… All this sounds very plausible, as so many other things that Senator Obama says sound plausible. But, like so many of those other things, it will not stand up under scrutiny. …

Jake Tapper of ABC and John Dickerson of Slate post on Obama’s Jim Johnson problem.

Dickerson:

The Obama Standard
Barack Obama called out Countrywide by name on the campaign trail during the primaries. He particularly criticized the company’s CEO for his excessive compensation and more generally “infecting the economy and helping to create a home foreclosure crisis,” which he linked not only to the 2 million who lost their houses but to school districts that couldn’t purchase supplies and pay teachers. This is the same CEO who gave Johnson his sweetheart deal. Obama’s aides also criticized Clinton’s then-campaign strategist, Mark Penn, for giving PR advice to the company.

Now the man Obama has entrusted with what he has called the most important decision of his campaign is wrapped up in Countrywide and tied to the CEO. There are lots of unanswered questions about the Johnson deal, though no evidence as yet that he did anything wrong. But the Obama standard isn’t wrongdoing. It’s mere connection to the company. By that standard, this is bad news.

Since Obama has just held a national seminar for 16 months on changing politics and shedding the old insider way of doing things, you might expect that he’d take these disclosures seriously, if for no other reason than to show that even when it might hurt him, he’s committed to letting the light shine on his associates. Nope—his campaign has called the issue irrelevant. Double bad.

The Corner spots a Dem member of congress who says Obama is too liberal.

John Fund saw the same thing.

It’s only a trickle, but still remarkable to see several Democratic House members shying away from their party’s presumptive presidential nominee because of his liberalism. Barack Obama should hope it doesn’t turn into a widening seepage of support. …

Jim Taranto likes the Obama/Carter dig.

… Democrats kept running against Hoover for decades thereafter. As recently as 1992, some were referring to the incumbent president as “George Herbert Hoover Bush.” And it worked: Bush got trounced.

So maybe this “Barack Jimmy Carter Obama” thing will catch on. And at least it isn’t as invidious as calling him “Barack Hussein Obama.”

John Stossel says “entitlements” will soon eat the federal budget.

Congress is spending us into a hole. We hear about the cost of earmarks and the Iraq war. But what about “entitlements”?

That’s the government’s ironic term for programs that transfer money from people who earned it to people who didn’t.

Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else’s money?

To finance “entitlement” programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy?

But I digress. Today’s big problem with entitlements is that their growth will soon eat everything in the federal budget.

Last month, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed the growth of government spending and deficits for Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.), ranking member of the Budget Committee. The report estimated that spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which in 2007 represented about 8 percent of GDP, would balloon to 14.5 percent in 2030 and 25.7 percent in 2082.

There is no way that can fly. …

American.com on the problems with organic foods.

Organic agriculture has been growing rapidly in recent years—by a factor of 10 from 1992 to 2005—but still accounts for a tiny 0.5 percent of total farmland in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Yet organic food has garnered an extraordinary amount of attention from the media and, along with “local” food, is a darling of foodies and environmentalists, who talk up its civic virtues and benefits to the environment. There’s just one problem with this: agriculture has moved away from small-scale, local, and organic farming because these types of farms are land- and labor-intensive and don’t do a very good job of feeding lots of people. In addition, they are not definitively better for the environment, and their growth would lead to higher food prices than most Americans are willing to pay. …

Larry Kudlow says the voters want us to drill.

The recent spike in oil prices and unemployment is dramatically changing this presidential campaign — virtually overnight. The near $20 jump in oil to $140 a barrel, the unexpected half-point increase in the jobless rate to 5.5 percent (the biggest monthly increase in twenty years), and the resulting 400-point plunge in stocks has created a new campaign issue right before our eyes.

Public worry number one is now oil, jobs, and the economy, with the inflationary woes of the U.S. dollar right underneath. The candidate who can connect with these issues will win in November. But so far neither Obama nor McCain are dealing with the new political reality.

In fact, it’s all about oil right now. The price has doubled over the past year while the economy has slumped.

But here’s an eye opener. Recent polling data from Gallup show the percentage of voters blaming oil companies for skyrocketing gasoline prices has dropped from 34 percent to 20 percent over the past year. At the same time, support for more drilling in U.S. coastal and wilderness areas has increased to 57 percent from 41 percent.

And the candidates remain blind to these shifts. …

Fortune magazine says oil prices are going to fall.

High-flying tech stocks crashed. The roaring housing market crumbled. And oil, rest assured, will follow the same path down.

Not everyone agrees. In an echo of our most recent market frenzies, some experts pronounce that the “world has changed,” and that the demand spikes, supply disruptions, and government bungling we face now will saddle us with a future of $4, $5 or even $10 a gallon gasoline.

But if you stick to basic economics, it’s clear that the only question is when – not if – prices will succumb.

The oil bulls are correct in their explanations of why prices have jumped, to a record $138.54 a barrel on Friday. It’s indisputable that worldwide demand has surged, chiefly driven by strong growth in China, India and the Middle East. It’s also true that most of the world’s reserves are controlled by governments in places like Russia and Venezuela that mismanage production, thus curtailing supply growth.

But rather than forming a permanent new plateau for prices – as the bulls contend – those forces are causing a classically unstable market that’s destined for a steep fall. …

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Chris Hitchens wonders why Mandela is AWOL when it comes to the Mugabe mess next door.

The scale of state-sponsored crime and terror in Zimbabwe has now escalated to the point where we are compelled to watch not just the systematic demolition of democracy and human rights in that country but something not very far removed from slow-motion mass murder a la Burma. The order from the Mugabe regime that closes down all international aid groups and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations is significant in two ways. It expresses the ambition for total control by the state, and it represents a direct threat—”vote for us or starve”—to the already desperate civilian population. The organization CARE, for example, which reaches half a million impoverished Zimbabweans, has been ordered to suspend operations. And here’s a little paragraph, almost buried in a larger report of more comprehensive atrocities but somehow speaking volumes:

The United Nations Children’s Fund said Monday that 10,000 children had been displaced by the violence, scores had been beaten and some schools had been taken over by pro-government forces and turned into centers of torture.

While this politicization of the food situation in “his” country was being completed, President Robert Mugabe benefited from two things: the indulgence of the government of South Africa and the lenience of the authorities in Rome, who allowed him to attend a U.N. conference on the world food crisis—of all things—despite a five-year-old ban on his travel to any member of the European Union. This, in turn, seems to me to implicate two of the supposed sources of moral authority on the planet: Nelson Mandela and the Vatican. …

Rich Lowry columns on Steyn’s trial in Canada.

At its best, Western civilization has fostered freedom of speech and of thought. But Canada has a better idea.

Last week, a Human Rights Tribunal in British Columbia considered a complaint brought against journalist Mark Steyn for a piece in the Canadian newsweekly Maclean’s. The excerpt from Steyn’s best-selling book “America Alone” argued that high Muslim birthrates mean Europeans will feel pressure to reach “an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots.”

The piece was obviously within respectable journalistic bounds. In fact, combining hilarity and profound social analysis, the article could be considered a sparkling model of the polemical art — not surprisingly, given that Steyn is one of North America’s journalistic gems.

The Canadian Islamic Congress took offense. In the normal course of things, that would mean speaking or writing to counter Steyn. Not in 21st-century Canada, where the old liberal rallying cry “I hate what you say, but will fight for your right to say it” no longer applies.

The country is dotted with human-rights commissions. At first, they typically heard discrimination suits against businesses. But since that didn’t create much work, the commissions branched out into policing “hate” speech. Initially, they targeted neo-Nazis; then religious figures for their condemnations of homosexuality; and now Maclean’s and Steyn. …

Mickey Kaus turns his attention to one of Obama’s early appointments.

Obama’s Friend of Angelo: Barack Obama’s choice of Jim Johnson to vet his VP prospects is already embarrassing his campaign, thanks to a WSJ story reporting that Johnson (according to the NY Sun)

took at least five real estate loans totaling more than $7 million from Countrywide Financial Corp. through an informal program for friends of the company’s CEO, Angelo Mozilo. …

Mozilo and Countrywide were deeply enmeshed in the subprime meltdown, of course, and Mozilo has been denounced by Obama for his business practices and multi-million dollar compensation. …

Andrew Ferguson tells us about Hyde Park – Obama’s neighborhood.

When Barack Obama was briefly embarrassed earlier this year by his association with the onetime bomb-builder and wannabe bomb-exploder William Ayers, he blamed his neighborhood, sort of. “He’s a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” Obama said with a shrug, as if to say, “Don’t we all have to put up with these cranky old domestic terrorists wandering through the yard?” But of course not every neighborhood has a former Weatherman and his wife, former Weathermoll Bernardine Dohrn, living in it, especially not as twin pillars of the community. Obama’s casual dismissal led people all across America, people who live in all kinds of communities without bombers, to look at each other and say: “Wow, what kind of neighborhood does Barack live in?”

It’s not a trifling question. Like a gabby relative or a crooked business associate, a membership in a restrictive golf club or a long-forgotten bisexual fling, a neighborhood can be a problem for a candidate. Voters often feel that incidentals like these reveal something essential about a potential president. Just as important, political consultants often go to great lengths to make voters feel that way. Recall poor Michael Dukakis, the hapless Democratic presidential nominee in 1988. He lived in the Boston suburb of Brookline–a “progressive” village where the townsfolk congratulate themselves for riding mass transit, eating fibrous bread, holding Winter Festivals in place of Christmas parties, joining committees, attending meetings that last many hours and result in the appointment of more committees, growing organic Chinese vegetables in sideyards, and hanging potted plants in macramé hammocks on the front porch. Brookline was an eddy of American life, a pocket of preciosity set apart from the world that most Americans struggle through, and Republican operatives made it a symbol of Dukakis’s disconnection from the common man. Maybe this was a low blow, but the Republicans had a point. Anyone who knew Brookline would not have been surprised to learn that Dukakis, as one of its favorite sons, liked to take books about Swedish land-use planning with him to the beach, thus disqualifying himself from the presidency. …

… The comedian (and later movie director) Mike Nichols, who got his start in a club on the old 55th Street, defined Hyde Park liberalism for all time: “Black and white, marching arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder against the poor.” …

Daily Telegraph blogger says Ethiopia needs free markets.

Peter Schweizer says liberals are cheapskates and misers.

Samuel Johnson once reported on a man who was privately stingy but publicly touted the merits of sharing. Dr. Johnson said sarcastically that the man was a “friend of goodness.” What he meant was that flesh-and-blood goodness is very different from supporting “Goodness” in the abstract.

Many modern liberals like to openly discuss their altruism. Garrison Keillor explains that “I am liberal and liberalism is the politics of kindness.” But it rarely seems to turn into acts of kindness, especially when it comes to making charitable donations.

Consider the case of Andrew Cuomo, current New York Attorney General and advocate for the homeless. He has, according to his website, “compassion toward the most vulnerable of us.” And this is how the New York Times described the courtship of Kerry Kennedy (of guess which family): “Ms. Kennedy-Cuomo, 43, said she fell in love with Mr. Cuomo, 45, when he took her on a tour of a homeless shelter on their first date and agreed to fast for the labor leader Cesar Chavez.”

But that advocacy should not be confused with actually giving to the less fortunate. Cuomo was a homeless advocate throughout the 1990s, but according to his own tax returns he made no charitable contributions between 1996 and 1999. In 2000 he donated a whopping $2,750. In 2004 and 2005, Cuomo had more than $1.5 million in adjusted gross income but gave a paltry $2,000 to charity.

Cuomo made no charitable contributions in 2003, when his income was a bit less than $300,000. …

The world is in balance. While we’re getting slammed with heat on the east coast, Aspen is opening up the slopes this weekend. Story from Channel 9 Denver.

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Mugabe is in Rome. Anne Applebaum says it illustrates the uselessness of the U. N. and the E. U.

With an unerring sense of timing, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe arrived in Rome last week, thereby demonstrating the profound limitations of international diplomacy. Indeed, it’s hard to think of any other single gesture that would so effectively reveal the ineffectiveness of international institutions in the conduct of human rights and food aid policy. Even someone standing atop the dome of St. Peter’s, megaphone in hand, shouting, “The U.N. is useless! The E.U. is useless!” couldn’t have clarified the matter more plainly.

For Mugabe is in Rome at the invitation of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, which is holding a conference on the international food crisis. He is also in Rome despite the fact that he has been formally forbidden from traveling to Europe by the European Union, which considers him persona non grata: For the past several years, he has beaten and murdered his political opponents in Zimbabwe so blatantly that even the Europeans noticed.

Nevertheless, it seems that the Italians can’t prevent Mugabe from being there this week. Since the summit is a U.N. event, U.N. rules take precedence over European or Italian border rules. This is not the first time Mugabe has taken advantage of this little loophole, either: He attended a U.N. food conference in Rome in 2002, during which he stayed at a five-star hotel on the Via Veneto, sent his wife out shopping and bragged about how his “land reform” program — i.e., the wholesale theft of land from white Zimbabwean farmers and its redistribution among political supporters — was going to enrich his nation’s food supply.

It hasn’t. According to Oxfam, 80 percent of Zimbabwe’s population now lives on less than $1 a day, thanks to Mugabe’s policies, and lacks access to basic foods and clean water. Inflation is at 100,000 percent, this year’s harvest was poor, and Zimbabweans are fleeing their country in large numbers. …

Editors of Las Vegas Review-Journal note Obama’s words and thoughts.

Around this time in the presidential election cycle, Democratic candidates traditionally start “running to the center.”

With a wink and a nod to their core, far-left constituencies, the candidates in effect say, “For the next five months I’m going to sound like a small-government Republican, talking about tax cuts and free enterprise and a strong defense and cutting back the welfare rolls. But don’t worry, this is just to have a calming effect on all those oxen we’re going to get back to collectively goring next year.”

The rhetoric then shifts to the right — until the day after the election, of course.

We hope our congratulations are not premature, but it’s worthy of note that, so far, presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama does not seem to be taking this path. If Sen. Obama is elected president, it will not be because he has disguised the fact that he is a dyed-in-the-wool collectivist. …

Kimberley Strassel sums up what we know about Obama.

Barack Obama has finally secured the Democratic Party’s nomination. The question now for voters, and for Republican John McCain, is what have we learned over the past 16 months?

We’ve learned Mr. Obama is a gifted politician, with a knack for reading the public mood. His success came from tapping in, early, to the country’s deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo, and orienting his campaign around a “change” message. Other presidential aspirants – Republican and Democrat – ultimately adopted a version of this tune. But they couldn’t match what was by then a well-rehearsed Obama number.

To GOP strategists’ frustration, focus groups still show that many people don’t know what Mr. Obama proposes policy-wise – and don’t care. They are drawn to his promise to move past political business as usual. John “My Friends” McCain won’t be able to match his rival’s verbal mojo. He’s instead going to have to counter with a compelling theme of his own. First, he’ll have to find one.

We’ve learned Mr. Obama’s political skills include an ability to adapt. When the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright broke, Mr. Obama hemmed and hawed and guaranteed a long discussion. Last week, when another controversy burbled over another spiritual mentor, Father Michael Pfleger, the Democrat quickly condemned the priest, and for good measure quit his Chicago church. …

Jennifer Rubin wonders if Big Brown’s Belmont loss is a metaphor for this year’s election.

David Warren attempts to explain the growing acceptance of globalony and the rise of Obama.

… The trend towards “global crazing” was not always there, however. If we go back half a century, differences between Liberals and Conservatives up here, as between Democrats and Republicans down there, did not hinge on “ability to discern reality.” On the facts of life; on moral, legal, and religious principles; on the need to keep government out of our lives and resist tyranny in any other form, there was broad agreement. A “very liberal” voter from the 1950s would pass for a “right-wing dinosaur” today.

This has become a signal threat to democracy. For where we once had broad agreement on facts, and relatively mild disagreements on what should be done about them, we now have one-half of the electorate drifting off into Cloud Cuckooland.

I have attributed this to many things, but chiefly to the effects of mass urbanization. People living in vast conurbations become disconnected from nature, and thus increasingly suggestible. The press of crowds enforces conformity, so that we get “school of fish” movements in public opinion. The individual fish believes that the direction of the school has been determined by “experts,” and anyway fears being eaten if he deviates from the consensus in any way.

And then you realize that the “experts” are people like Al Gore, and it is too late to panic. …

American.com reviews a book that tries to explain American exceptionalism.

“America is indeed exceptional by any plausible definition of the term and actually has grown increasingly exceptional [over] time.” This is the conclusion of the editors of a new volume, Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation (PublicAffairs, $35). At an American Enterprise Institute conference on April 22, Peter H. Schuck and James Q. Wilson introduced the collection of essays, which is designed to probe Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that America is “exceptional,” or qualitatively different from other countries. The book, which examines 19 different areas, marshals the best and most current social science evidence to examine America’s unique institutions, culture, and public policies.

During his introductory remarks, AEI president Christopher DeMuth said that no effort to understand the meaning of American exceptionalism had been “more ambitious and far-reaching” than this book. Not only does it describe the ways—both good and bad—in which Americans differ from people in other nations, DeMuth said, it also considers whether American exceptionalism is likely to continue, and how it matters to the world. DeMuth noted that Americans are more individualistic, self-reliant, anti-state, and pro-immigration than people in many other countries. They work harder, are more philanthropic, and participate more in civic activities. …

Samizdata with another reason to cancel your Economist.

City Journal reviews Sean Wilentz’s Reagan bio.

Nearly 20 years since he left the White House, Ronald Reagan has begun taking his place in the small gallery of most consequential presidents. Though his admirers accorded him a prominent spot long ago, the story of recent years has been the gradual recognition of Reagan’s achievements among more liberal-minded scholars. John Patrick Diggins’s 2006 book, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, ranked Reagan among America’s three greatest presidents, with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Now comes Sean Wilentz’s The Age of Reagan, and Wilentz’s judgment is only slightly less sweeping: “In American political history,” he writes, “there have been a few leading figures, most of them presidents, who for better or worse have put their political stamp indelibly on their time. They include Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt—and Ronald Reagan.”

Those words are especially significant because Wilentz is not only a respected historian—albeit of the Age of Jackson—but also a committed political liberal, a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton’s who testified as an expert witness before the House Judiciary Committee against the impeachment of her husband. He also penned a freewheeling article about George W. Bush in Rolling Stone a few years back, titled “The Worst President in History?”—one of those rhetorical questions that supplies its own answer. …

According to Country Store, the UN is suggesting we can help save the world by using wind-up alarm clocks.

Thursday is Carbon Belch Day. Go to the site and sign the pledge.

On June 12, we’re calling on people around the globe to do their part to save the planet by unleashing a healthy Carbon Belch.

There’s so much you can do to increase your carbon footprint on Carbon Belch Day — mow your lawn, go for a drive, gather neighbors for a barbecue (calculate your carbon belch here). In fact, there’s something for everyone. It’s never been so easy to do your part. …

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Frederick Kagan says the McCain/Obama approaches to the “surge in Iraq” retail the essential differences between them.

It would be hard to design a better test for the job of commander in chief than the real-life test senators John McCain and Barack Obama have undergone in the last two years. As the situation in Iraq deteriorated during 2006 and the war reached its most critical moment, both senators served on national security committees: McCain on Armed Services, Obama on Foreign Relations. From those positions, with access to classified situation reports as well as the public testimony and private advice of those who knew the situation in Iraq best, each man reached an understanding of the facts on the ground and the interests at stake. And each proposed a strategy. It was as close as a presidential candidate could get to showing how he would respond to a national security crisis without already being in the White House.

Both men’s proposals are a matter of public record, available on the Internet. McCain set forth his in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on January 5, 2007 (at an event marking the release of AEI’s “Choosing Victory,” which I wrote, outlining a strategy like the one Bush later ordered). Obama presented his in the “Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007 ” (S. 433), which he introduced in the Senate on January 30. We also know the strategy the president chose–the surge of forces he announced on January 10, very similar to what McCain described–and the outcome it has brought. …

OK, so Obama was wrong on the surge, how’s he doing correcting the moron’s foreign policy mistakes? Jennifer Rubin has answers.

Barack Obama routinely says the Bush administration has left us more isolated internationally and that America’s image in the world must be repaired, even going so far as to suggest that our citizens are not proud to identify themselves as Americans when traveling overseas. Whether or not you think that is true, Obama so far has not demonstrated he would be very adept at improving matters.

We had the Colombia flap over his opposition to the free trade agreement. We saw the leaders of Mexico and Canada upset over his suggestion to rip up NAFTA. The Brits were concerned about Obama’s Iran remarks. And the latest flip-flop on Jerusalem generated not just upset here in the U.S., but anger and confusion abroad, as the New York Times reported: …

Times, UK says Mugabe’s thugs are now attacking Brit and US diplomats.

Relations between Zimbabwe and the West hit a new low yesterday after a convoy of British and American diplomats on their way to meet opposition activists was attacked by President Mugabe’s militiamen and police.

Five American and four British diplomats were detained for several hours after the confrontation at a police roadblock, during which officers slashed their tyres, seized their mobile phones and beat up a driver employed by the US Embassy.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, described it as a serious incident. He said that it served as a window into the lives of Zimbabweans for whom “this kind of intimidation happens daily”. …

Mark Steyn on the crowning of Obama.

The short version of the Democratic Party primary campaign is that the media fell in love with Barack Obama but the Democratic electorate declined to.

“I felt this thrill going up my leg,” said MSNBC’s Chris Matthews after one of the senator’s speeches. “I mean, I don’t have that too often.” Au contraire, Chris and the rest of the gang seem to be getting the old tingle up the thigh hairs on a nightly basis. If Obama is political Viagra, the media are at that stage in the ad where the announcer warns that, if leg tingles persist for more than six months, see your doctor.

Out there in the voting booths, however, Democrat legs stayed admirably unthrilled. The more the media told Hillary she was toast, and she should get the hell out of it and let Obama romp to victory, the more Democrats insisted on voting for her. The more the media insisted Barack was inevitable, the less inclined the voters were to get with the program. On the strength of Chris Matthews’ vibrating calves, Sen. Obama raised a ton of money – over $300 million – and massively outspent Sen. Clinton, but he didn’t really get any bang for his buck. In the end, he crawled over the finish line. The Obama Express came a-hurtlin’ down the track at 2 miles an hour. …

… Speaking personally, I don’t want to remake America. I’m an immigrant, and one reason I came here is because most of the rest of the Western world remade itself along the lines Sen. Obama has in mind. This is pretty much the end of the line for me. If he remakes America, there’s nowhere for me to go – although presumably once he’s lowered sea levels around the planet there should be a few new atolls popping up here and there. …

John Fund shorts on those close to Obama.

Jonah Goldberg wonders if we have a messiah in our midst.

Is Barack Obama the Messiah?

Before we answer that question, let me vent for a moment. In 2000 I was cruelly denied the Pulitzer despite being the only columnist in America to ask the pressing question: Is Al Gore an alien? The evidence was there for all to see. He was born nine months after the mysterious alien sighting at Roswell, N.M. His weird syntax and verbal rhythms are otherworldly. He often refers to “earth” or “this planet” as if he’s just passing through, and he once angrily complained to the Washington Post that it had printed a picture of the earth from outer space “upside down.”

There is no “upside down” in space — unless Gore had his childhood view in mind.

At least I’m not in the wilderness this time. Lots of people have pondered the possibility that Barack is our Divine Redeemer. There are Web sites dedicated to the question “Is Barack Obama the Messiah?” Google that question and you’ll get more than 35,000 hits. (Enter just the words “Messiah” and “Obama” and you’ll get nearly 10 times that.)

But there’s more concrete evidence. Since Obama declared his candidacy, there have been remarkably few biblical plagues. And lions and lambs seem open to bilateral negotiations. …

Club for Growth’s Pat Toomey roughs up Alaska’s Don Young, the poster child for GOP excess.

Today, the Club for Growth Political Action Committee endorses Alaska Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell in his bid to unseat Republican Rep. Don Young in the state’s August primary.

The reason for the endorsement is simple. Mr. Parnell is a solid conservative who led the fight for lower taxes and spending in the state legislature, and joined Gov. Sarah Palin in pushing for reform in the state. The man he is hoping to replace isn’t economically conservative in the least. Mr. Young is actually a poster child for what has gone wrong with the Republican Party in Washington.

Over his 35 years in Congress, Mr. Young made himself into the most powerful Republican on the House Transportation Committee. But instead of using his power to steer Republicans down a principled, conservative track, he helped derail the GOP train in 2006.

Mr. Young spends taxpayer money so wastefully he could make a liberal Democrat blush. As chairman of the Transportation Committee (from 2001 to 2007), Mr. Young was directly responsible for one of the biggest boondoggles of the Republican majority – the 2005 highway bill. With a price tag of $296 billion, the highway bill contained a record 6,371 pork projects.

One of those projects was the $223 million Bridge to Nowhere, inserted by Mr. Young. The notorious bridge was meant to connect the city of Ketchikan, Alaska – population 8,000 – to an airport on Gravina Island – population 50. Instead, it came to symbolize Republican excess, and helped cost the GOP its majority. …

Ed Morrissey says the Dems are even worse.

… Republicans didn’t cover themselves in glory during their porkfest from 2001-2006, and many of them still haven’t learned from their mistakes. However, the Democrats have managed to outdo the GOP during their short run at leadership. Their transparency efforts fell far short of what was required, they air-dropped over 9,000 pork items into the last budget despite supposedly prohibiting that practice, and now they’re preparing a pork roast on a scale not yet seen or contemplated.

If the GOP had any sense, they would take this opportunity to declare an immediate and unilateral moratorium on pork and defy the Democrats to match them. They have an opportunity to take action on reform instead of just talking incessantly about it. Republicans will not win a majority in either chamber unless they demonstrate real leadership on real reform and demonstrate a clear difference between themselves and the Democrats on spending.

Jonah Goldberg notes Seattle about to ban beach bonfires and Andrew Stuttaford reacts.

An entertaining story, Jonah, and yet another example of how certain aspects of environmentalism are, in some ways, taking on the characteristics of a religion. You can read the banning of the beach bonfires both as ritual sacrifice and as no less ritual renunciation of pleasure. The whole thing is, in all likelihood, futile, but it generates a comfortably shared illusion that ‘something’ is being done, as well, of course, as providing an excellent opportunity for those in charge to demonstrate their moral superiority and for those beneath them to be bossed about. In its own remarkably petty way, it’s perfect.

In a NY Times op-ed, Greg Mankiw argues for cutting the corporate tax rate.

AT this point in the presidential campaign, Senator John McCain is the candidate of ideas on issues of tax policy. Too many ideas, in fact. While some of his ideas are great, others are almost laughable.

The one that has received the most attention recently — a gas-tax holiday — falls in the second category. Many economists and policy wonks advocate raising the tax on gasoline to address problems ranging from global climate change to local traffic congestion. It is hard to find one who thinks that a temporary cut in the gas tax is a sensible response to the current spike in gas prices.

Lost in this hubbub, however, is a bigger idea that Mr. McCain and his economic team have put forward: a cut in the corporate tax rate, to 25 percent from 35 percent. It is perhaps the best simple recipe for promoting long-run growth in American living standards. …

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Thomas Sowell says our duty as voters is clear.

Now that the two parties have finally selected their presidential candidates, it is time for a sober– if not grim– assessment of where we are.

Not since 1972 have we been presented with two such painfully inadequate candidates. When election day came that year, I could not bring myself to vote for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I stayed home.

This year, none of us has that luxury. While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor of terrorism in the world– Iran– is moving step by step toward building a nuclear bomb. …

Karl Rove has tips for the candidates.

Politics has become hi-tech with sophisticated databases, the Internet, TV ads, focus groups and polls.

But a lanky Sangamon County, Ill., lawyer described the essential task of politics in 1840 in a letter to his Whig campaign committee. Make a list of the voters, he wrote, ascertain for whom they will vote, have undecided voters talked to by someone they hold in confidence, and, on Election Day, get all Whig voters to the polls.

Abraham Lincoln was a great president, but he was also a very practical politician. And Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama would be wise to take his advice. In a close election, organization matters a lot. …

VDH with words for revisionist historians who have set their sights on WWII.

… In the luxury of some 60 years of postwar peace and affluence — and perhaps in anger over the current Iraq war — Buchanan and Baker and other revisionists engage in a common sort of Western second-guessing. The result is that they always demand liberal democracies be not just better and smarter than their adversaries, but almost superhuman in their perfection.

Buchanan and others, for example, fault the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I as too harsh on a defeated Germany and thus an understandable pretext for the rise of the Nazis, who played on German anger and fear.

Those accords may have been flawed, but they were far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, or Russia after its collapse in 1917 — or what it had planned for Britain and France had it won the First World War. What ultimately led to World War II was neither Allied meanness to Germany between the two wars nor an unwillingness to understand the Nazis’ pain and anguish.

The mistake instead was not occupying all of imperial Germany after the first war in 1918-19. That way, the Allies would have demonstrated to the German people that their army was never “stabbed in the back” at home, as the Nazis later alleged, but instead defeated by an Allied army that was willing to stay on to foster German constitutional government and its reintegration within Europe. The Allies later did occupy Germany after World War II — and 60 years without war have followed. …

Boston Globe offers thoughts on Hillary’s failure.

At a social event last spring at the home of Mark Penn, then Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist and one of the most prominent and well-compensated Democratic consultants in the business, a fellow Democrat wondered aloud if freshman Senator Barack Obama might wrest the nomination from the well-connected New York senator.

Penn, the dinner guest said, waved his hand dismissively. “Flash in the pan,” Penn said, adding that the Clinton campaign saw former North Carolina senator John Edwards as her biggest challenge.

Indeed, few at that time expected that Obama would overcome the political and financial head start the wife of the former president appeared to have at that phase of the campaign, even though Obama had already drawn exuberant crowds in early primary states. But Penn’s offhand remark reveals the mistakes made by a Clinton campaign that failed to take Obama’s candidacy – or his supporters – seriously enough at the outset, and did not prepare for the long-haul fight Obama was ready to wage for the nomination, according to political specialists. …

Bob Novak writes on Hillary’s VP provocation.

Just when it seemed on the last Tuesday of the presidential primary season that Hillary Clinton would bow to the inevitable, she enraged Democrats who expected her to start strengthening Barack Obama as their party’s nominee. During a conference call between Clinton and other New York members of Congress, Rep. Nydia Velazquez suggested that only an Obama-Clinton ticket could secure the Hispanic vote. “I am open to it,” Clinton replied, according to several sources.

That message, promptly made public, infuriated Democratic activists outside the Clinton camp. Clinton was horning in on the climax to Obama’s amazing political feat. Worse yet, she was going public on a vice presidential bid she knows Obama does not want to offer. Talking about an unlikely dream ticket further slows the party unification process that Clinton’s critics say already comes two months too late because of her.

She showed that her exchange with Velazquez was no aberration by not delivering a concession speech Tuesday night. Clinton’s extraordinary bid for the vice presidency is a new provocation, in keeping with her repeated insistence that she is electable — implying that Obama is not. …

According to James Taranto, Jimmy Carter tells Obama to stay away from Hillary as VP.

Daniel Henninger says Obama’s identity politics were better than Hillary’s identity politics.

… Some in the Clinton tong profess not to understand what happened to her. “We are filled with disappointment and amazement,” said Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who helped deliver unto her the Keystone State. “Why haven’t these results caused the superdelegates to come around?”
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Did Ed Rendell ever believe that the 794 superdelegates, weeded from the party’s topsoil, would decide that of the two candidates’ constituencies – Hillary’s “women” and “white” voters and Barack’s black voters – they would stiff Sen. Obama’s nearly 90% black base? So long as he led her by one delegate, this was never going to happen.

Writing last week in the Boston Globe, Geraldine Ferraro now says that “sexism” contributed to Hillary’s defeat. She wants a study to determine “whether either the Clinton or Obama campaign engaged in sexism and racism.” Isms abound.

The irony too bitter to swallow is that Barack Obama’s identity politics trumped Hillary Clinton’s identity politics. Put differently, what goes around comes around.

“Identity politics,” something new, emerged from the dank vapors of the late 1960s and 1970s. The theory came hard-boiled and soft-boiled. …

Marty Peretz posts on the Clintons.

Bill Clinton is a bully, a coy bully. But a bully nonetheless. Given the ups and downs of Hillary’s campaign, however, — and they have mostly been downs — he has lost much of his coyness and even his trickiness. He is now just a resentful bully, as most bullies are and as his rant two days ago demonstrated.

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Fouad Ajami reminds why we are in Iraq.

… Liberal opinion in America and Europe may have scoffed when President Bush drew a strict moral line between order and radicalism – he even inserted into the political vocabulary the unfashionable notion of evil – but this sort of clarity is in the nature of things in that Greater Middle East. It is in categories of good and evil that men and women in those lands describe their world. The unyielding campaign waged by this president made a deep impression on them.

Nowadays, we hear many who have never had a kind word to say about the Iraq War pronounce on the retreat of the jihadists. It is as though the Islamists had gone back to their texts and returned with second thoughts about their violent utopia. It is as though the financiers and the “charities” that aided the terror had reconsidered their loyalties and opted out of that sly, cynical trade. Nothing could be further from the truth. If Islamism is on the ropes, if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq.

We should give the “theorists” of terror their due and read them with some discernment. To a man, they have told us that they have been bloodied in Iraq, that they have been surprised by the stoicism of the Americans, by the staying power of the Bush administration. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld posts on our country’s conduct when it wasn’t hamstrung by CAVE* people. (*Citizens Against Virtually Everything)

More than 6 1/2 years after devastating suicide attacks against the United States launched the Bush administration’s fight against global terrorism, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, plot is scheduled to appear in a Guantanamo Bay courtroom tomorrow morning.

In the current issue of COMMENTARY, I have an article entitled In the Matter of George W. Bush v. the Constitution, which takes up, as part of a more extended discussion of the legal knots in which we have tied ourselves, the issue of military commissions. Drawing on Jack Goldsmith’s brilliant book, The Terror Presidency, I made a comparison to our practices in this area during World War II. …

David Warren covers Mark Steyn’s trial in Vancouver.

The writings of Canada’s most talented journalist, Mark Steyn, went on trial in Vancouver on Monday, in a case designed to challenge freedom of the press. It is a show trial, under the arbitrary powers given to Canada’s obscene “human rights” commissions, by Section 13 of our Human Rights Act.

I wrote “obscene” advisedly. A respondent who comes before Canada’s “human rights” tribunals has none of the defences formerly guaranteed in common law. The truth is no defence, reasonable intention is no defence, nor material harmlessness, there are no rules of evidence, no precedents, nor case law of any kind. The commissars running the tribunals need have no legal training, exhibit none, and owe their appointments to networking among leftwing activists.

I wrote “show trial” advisedly, for there has been a 100 per cent conviction rate in cases brought to “human rights” tribunals under Section 13. …

… While media attention to Mark Steyn’s show trial is inadequate, it is nevertheless the best publicized case ever to come before our “human rights” bureaucracies. Most of the victims of these neo-Maoist tribunals have been “little people,” with nothing like the resources Maclean’s magazine has put in play to defend itself and Steyn, and no media reporting whatever. They have been persecuted, stripped of their livelihoods and savings, demonized among their neighbours, made to endure humiliating “re-education” programs – without lawyers, without assistance of any kind — all for exercising rights that any Canadian would have taken for granted a mere generation ago.

I want justice for Mark Steyn. But I also want justice for all these little people, who have been crushed under the jackboot of “political correction.”

Speaking of Steyn, we have a January 2001 goodbye Bill Clinton piece he wrote for the Spectator, UK.

So here we are. The Clinton Administration is finally reaching, in the preferred formulation of the Starr report, “completion”. In his political life, as in his sexual adventures, Bill Clinton is doing all he can to avoid that happy state. But whatever role awaits him – elder statesman, Arkansas Senator, executive vice-president at Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks, night manager of the Erotic Pussycat lap-dancing bar – he will no longer be, so to speak, in our face. I take my hat off to him. Indeed, I take my pants off to him.

He is an amazing paradox: a man whose smallness loomed large, in every sense. We may never get the full measure of the man, but then neither did Monica. In the meantime, herewith an alphabet of fragrant memories from the Clinton era:

A IS FOR AFFIDAVIT
This was the first administration in US history to keep a standardised denial-of-sex form on file. When Paula Jones’ lawyers were sniffing round Arkansas for women who’d undergone similar experiences, a nervous Juanita Broaddrick called her attorney, who in turn contacted an old friend, White House counsel Bruce Lindsay. Shortly afterwards the President’s lawyer, Bob Bennett, faxed back the affidavit of another woman who’d denied involvement with Mr Clinton. Mrs Broaddrick’s counsel replaced the original name with that of his client and dropped it in the mail. “I [Your Name Here], being of sound body, did not have sexual relations with William Jefferson Clinton”: with the convenient do-it-yourself Clinton Home Affidavit Kit, you may get groped but there won’t be a lot of paperwork. …

John Stossel wants to protect ultimate fighting from nanny types like John McCain.

If John McCain becomes president, will he leave me alone?

You might think so. After all, he’s got Grover Norquist in his corner, and Norquist wrote “Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives”.

The book makes a good case for “Americans who simply wish to be left alone by the government. They are not asking the government for others’ money, time, or attention. Rather, they want to be free to own a gun, homeschool their children, pray, invest their money, and control their own destiny.”

What if people want to fight each other?

I ask because mixed martial arts (MMA) competitions are booming. …

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Christopher Hitchens says if you want to read a “tell-all” book that informs about Bush and the war, read Douglas Feith’s book.

… It’s also of considerable interest to learn that the main argument for adhering to the Geneva Conventions was made within the Pentagon and that the man who expressed the most prewar misgivings concerning Iraq was none other than Donald Rumsfeld. Feith doesn’t deny that he has biases of his own. One of these concerns the widely circulated charge that his own Office of Special Plans was engaged in cherry-picking and stovepiping intelligence. Another is the criticism, made by most of the neocon faction, of Paul Bremer and the occupation regime that he ran in Baghdad. In all instances, however, Feith writes in an unrancorous manner and is careful to supply the evidence and the testimony and, where possible, the actual documentation, from all sides.

Without explicitly saying so, Feith makes a huge contribution to the growing case for considering the Central Intelligence Agency to be well beyond salvage. Its role as a highly politicized and bewilderingly incompetent body, disastrous enough in having left us under open skies before Sept. 11, 2001, became something more like catastrophic with the gross mishandling of Iraq. For these revelations alone, this book is well worth the acquisition. (I might add that, unlike McClellan, Feith is contributing all his earnings and royalties to charities that care for our men and women in uniform.)

I don’t know Feith, but I can pay him two further compliments: When you read him on a detail with which you yourself are familiar, he is factually reliable (and it’s not often that one can say that, believe me). And his prose style is easy, nonbureaucratic, dry, and sometimes amusing. If a book that was truly informative was called a “tell-all” by our media, then War and Decision would qualify. As it is, we seem to reserve that term for the work of bigmouths who have little, if anything, to impart.

Daniel Pipes notes interesting contrasts between Obama and McCain over Mid-East policy.

How do the two leading candidates for president of the United States differ in their approach to Israel and related topics? Parallel interviews with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, who spoke in early May with Democrat Barack Obama and in late May with Republican John McCain, offer some important insights.

Asked roughly the same set of questions, they went off in opposite directions. Obama used the interview to convince readers of his pro-Israel and pro-Jewish bona fides. He thrice reiterated his support for Israel: “the idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea, and a necessary idea”; “the need to preserve a Jewish state that is secure is … a just idea and one that should be supported here in the United States and around the world”; and “You will not see, under my presidency, any slackening in commitment to Israel’s security.” …

As far as their prospects go in the November vote, David Brooks says a pox on both their houses.

It took Christopher Columbus about 70 days to get to the New World — a bit less than half as long as it took us to get through the 2008 primary calendar. But by Tuesday night, we’ll have reached our destination, and people in the Obama and McCain camps are feeling good about themselves.

Neither campaign is planning a major pivot for the fall. Both are confident they have a strategy for victory.

So my role today is Dr. Doom — to break through unmerited confidence and raise the anxiety level in both camps. …

Thomas Sowell says we should pay attention to what Obama has done.

It is amazing how seriously the media are taking Senator Barack Obama’s latest statement about the latest racist rant from the pulpit of the church he has attended for 20 years. But neither that statement nor the apology for his rant by Father Michael Pfleger really matters, one way or the other. Nor does Senator Obama’s belated resignation from that church. For any politician, what matters is not his election year rhetoric, or an election year resignation from a church, but the track record of that politician in the years before the election.

Yet so many people are so fascinated by Barack Obama’s rhetorical skills that they don’t care about his voting record in the U.S. Senate, in the Illinois state senate, the causes that he has chosen to promote over the years, or the candidate’s personal character and values, as revealed by his actions and associations. Despite clever spin from Obama’s supporters about avoiding “guilt by association,” much more is involved than casual association with people like Jeremiah Wright and Father Pfleger. In addition to giving $20,000 of his own money to Jeremiah Wright, as a state senator Obama directed $225,000 of the Illinois taxpayers’ money for programs run by Father Pfleger. In the U.S. Senate, Obama earmarked $100,000 in federal tax money for Father Pfleger’s work. Giving someone more than 300 grand is not just some tenuous, coincidental association. Are Barack Obama’s views shown by what he says during an election year or by what he has been doing for decades before? …

David Harsanyi writes on “cap and trade.”

How does Washington plan to resolve our energy problems and control atmospheric temperatures? Well, how do they fix anything? By proposing a gargantuan boondoggle.

A “cap and trade” bill, one that will supposedly cut 66 percent of our emissions by 2050, is being debated in Congress this week.

To begin with, proponents of America’s Climate Security Act have been misleading the public by claiming that cap and trade is a “market- based” solution. In truth, cap and trade does to the market what “American Idol” does to music.

The idea sounds harmless: government caps emissions, and corporations trade the allotted credits among themselves. Some of the credits will be auctioned off by government. The Wall Street Journal estimates these auctions will net $6.7 trillion for government coffers by 2050. …

Daily Mail with a monster fish story. This is here for the halibut.

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So, what’s it like in South Africa for Zimbabwean refugees.

… “It is better to be killed by my young brother than to be killed by someone I do not know,” said Douglas, 28, a mechanic from Harare. “I was beaten here and lost everything I worked for for two years.”

As he talked about the 80 per cent unemployment in his home country and the prospect of voting in the presidential run-off election on June 27, three burly men in leather jackets appeared out of the night. From now on the agents of Mr Mugabe’s regime would never be far from Douglas. Yet he felt he had no choice but to return.

The same was true of John, 32, who had spent 15 years in the Tokoza township. He married a South African and was a proud father. But a mob wielding clubs and knives drove him from his home. “I ran away and had to leave my wife and kid. Imagine how terrible it makes me feel being forced to leave the people I love,” he said. But when the men in leather jackets appeared, his tone changed. “Given the opportunity I have been given by my Government, I will go home a happy man,” he boomed. “I want to equate this journey to the journey made by the Israelites to the Promised Land.” …

Mark Steyn says the Clintons aren’t going to win this time.

The conventional wisdom on the Clintons was promulgated by my then-senator, Bob Smith of New Hampshire, back at the end of the impeachment trial. “He’s won,” said Senator Smith, after dutifully if vainly casting his vote to nail Slick Willie’s puffy butt. “He always wins. Let’s move on.”

They won through the Nineties. The Clintons’ Democratic party was great for the Clintons, lousy for the Democratic party, which in the course of the decade lost Senate seats, House seats, governors’ mansions, state legislatures, and on and on, until, in a final snook cocked at his comrades, Bill Clinton was unable to bequeath the White House to his vice president in a time of peace and prosperity — but his wife, campaigning for her first political office, managed to pick up a Senate seat in a state she’d barely spent 20 minutes in.

Yet even iron rules have their exceptions. This time the Clintons won’t win. And it’s the Democratic machine that wants to move on — notwithstanding that in the past three months former president-presumptive Rodham has won more votes from actual Democratic voters than Senator Obama, a weak candidate being propelled in slow motion across the finish line, the sputtering engine of his “inevitability” frantically augmented by media bobbysoxers pushing at the rear. …

David Harsanyi says to Obama, “You want change? Why not start in schools?

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama visited a Denver-area school this week, offering his characteristically uplifting words — and not much else.

“I’m here to hold up this school and these students as an example of what’s possible in education,” Obama told those gathered at the Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts, “if we’re willing to try new ideas and new reforms based not on ideology but on what works to give our children the best possible chance in life.”

Should all “ideology” be discarded? Or only the “ideology” Obama finds distasteful? What if parental choice and competition offer kids the “best possible chance” for success? Would Obama then support any substantive reforms that embrace those precepts?

Up to this point, Obama has peddled a tired canard linking education failure to lack of funding. Nothing about obstructive unions? Nothing about increased teacher accountability? I wonder why. …

Bill Kristol points out Obama’s omission.

… But at an elite Northeastern college campus, Obama obviously felt no need to disturb the placid atmosphere of easy self-congratulation. He felt no need to remind students of a different kind of public service — one that entails more risks than community organizing. He felt no need to tell the graduating seniors in the lovely groves of Middletown that they should be grateful to their peers who were far away facing dangers on behalf of their country

Nor did Obama choose to mention all those college graduates who are now entering the military, either for a tour of duty or as a career, in order to serve their country. He certainly felt no impulse to wonder whether the nation wouldn’t be better off if R.O.T.C. were more widely and easily available on elite college campuses.

Obama failed to challenge — even gently — what he must have assumed would be the prejudices of much of his audience and indulged in a soft patriotism of low expectations.

Was this a public service?

John Warner has become even more of an embarrassment to Virginia since he’s decided he’s on “grandfather duty.” (“I am worried about the world that my grandchildren will inherit.” Bwa Wa!) His latest is to sign on to the latest power grab from Washington – this in the form of Joe Lieberman’s “cap and trade” bill. George Will comments.

… Lieberman’s legislation also would create a Carbon Market Efficiency Board empowered to “provide allowances and alter demands” in response to “an impact that is much more onerous” than expected. And Lieberman says that if a foreign company selling a product in America “enjoys a price advantage over an American competitor” because the American firm has had to comply with the cap-and-trade regime, “we will impose a fee” on the foreign company “to equalize the price.” Protectionism-masquerading-as-environmentalism will thicken the unsavory entanglement of commercial life and political life.

McCain, who supports Lieberman’s unprecedented expansion of government’s regulatory reach, is the scourge of all lobbyists (other than those employed by his campaign). But cap-and-trade would be a bonanza for K Street, the lobbyists’ habitat, because it would vastly deepen and broaden the upside benefits and downside risks that the government’s choices mean for businesses.

McCain, the political hygienist, is eager to reduce the amount of money in politics. But cap-and-trade, by hugely increasing the amount of politics in the allocation of money, would guarantee a surge of money into politics.

Regarding McCain’s “central facts,” the U.N.‘s World Meteorological Organization, which helped establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — co-winner, with Al Gore, of the Nobel Peace Prize — says global temperatures have not risen in a decade. So Congress might be arriving late at the save-the-planet party. Better late than never? No. When government, ever eager to expand its grip on the governed and their wealth, manufactures hysteria as an excuse for doing so, then: better never.

So does Robert Samuelson.

We’ll have to discard the old adage, “Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” In this era of global warming, it is inoperative, because the whole point of controlling greenhouse gas emissions is to do something about the weather. This promises to be hard and perhaps futile, but there are good and bad ways of attempting it. One of the bad ways is cap-and-trade. Unfortunately, it’s the darling of environmental groups and their political allies.

The chief political virtue of cap-and-trade — a complex scheme to reduce greenhouse gases — is its complexity. This allows its environmental supporters to shape public perceptions in essentially deceptive ways. Cap-and-trade would act as a tax, but it’s not described as a tax. It would regulate economic activity, but it’s promoted as a “free market” mechanism. Finally, it would trigger a tidal wave of influence-peddling, as lobbyists scrambled to exploit the system for different industries and localities. This would undermine whatever the system’s abstract advantages.

The Senate is debating a cap-and-trade proposal, and although it’s unlikely to pass, it will return because all the major presidential candidates support the concept. Cap-and-trade extends the long government tradition of proclaiming lofty goals that are impossible to achieve. We’ve had “wars” against poverty, cancer and drugs; but poverty, cancer and drugs remain. President Bush called his landmark education law No Child Left Behind rather than the more plausible Few Children Left Behind. …

Some of our favorites comment on Obama’s escape from church. Jennifer Rubin is first.

… This one gets the trifecta for dishonesty, or perhaps cluelessness. First, it is, of course, not the case that his Christian faith is being questioned. I know of no commentator, critic, or political opponent who has done that. What is at issue is his propensity to hang out with hatemongers who suggest his current post-racial theme is a pose. Second, he apparently lacks any cultural or political compass if he really believed that Wright et al. would not become an issue. Was it self-delusion? Or is he so out of touch with average Americans that he was unable to predict what would be deeply offensive to millions of Americans? And finally, notice how he impugns the motives of those who raise concerns about his association with Trinity. They are on a footing, in his book, with those perpetrating the “He’s a Muslim” canard. But the former are not perpetrating a lie. They are discussing and probing the beliefs, sincerity, and character of the man who wants to be President.

The Trinity cast of characters and Obama’s reaction to them have been more revealing than more a dozen-plus debates, all the speeches, and just about anything that has happened in over a year of campaigning. It might be even more revealing if the media would take their role seriously and press Obama on some of these obvious points. But Obama, however inadvertently, has done a fairly good job of letting us know how he makes both political and moral judgments. And that is perhaps the most important thing to know about a potential President.

Then Scott Johnson from Power Line.

… Perhaps the entire saga is little more than a tribute to the incomprehension of unsophisticated outsiders. Such outsiders lack the tools necessary to understand the reflections of Reverend Wright and his ilk in churches espousing black liberation theology. As in “Cool Hand Luke,” according to Obama, what we have here is failure to communicate. Unfortunately, not a single member of the press sought further elaboration from Obama on that point.

Every installment of this saga reveals Obama to be a deeply opportunistic politician, ready to beat a hasty retreat from yesterday’s statement of cherished principle in order to fight another day. Each installment of the saga also reveals the organs of the mainstream media to be Obama’s handmaidens. From March 18 forward they have cheered on Obama’s every step, even when Obama’s succeeding steps proved them fools.

In the aftermath of this saga, it should begin to dawn on attentive observers that Barack Obama represents a type that flourishes on many college campuses. The technical term that applies to Obama is b.s. artist. Obama is an overaged example of the phenomenon, but his skills in the art have brought him great success and he’s not giving it up now.

Marty Peretz wonders if we can learn something from airport security in Israel.

News Biscuit, Borowitz and Scrappleface are here.

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Charles Krauthammer on Carbon Chastity.

I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier. I’m a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can’t be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.

Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems — from ocean currents to cloud formation — that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.

Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. “The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity,” warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, “is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.”

If you doubt the arrogance, you haven’t seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton’s laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming — infinitely more untested, complex and speculative — is a closed issue.

But declaring it closed has its rewards. It not only dismisses skeptics as the running dogs of reaction, i.e., of Exxon, Cheney and now Klaus. By fiat, it also hugely re-empowers the intellectual left. …

David Warren celebrates high oil prices.

… Huge investments are now going into vast petroleum fields discovered offshore Brazil. There are further indications of undersea reserves on that scale from Arctic to Antarctic in all the seven seas. Iraq has been (thanks to the U.S. invasion) methodically prospected at last, and discovered to be lying over oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia. North America sits on numerous grand oilfields, that have hardly been touched (thanks to our friends, the eco cherubs), and Canada is especially smiled on by fortune, for as the oil price rises to levels where they’ll be well worth extracting, our eyes can only glint in reflecting the sparkling treasure of our tar sands.

Those are all reasons in themselves to be happy, and confident about the material future, for they take away all unreasonable fear that the world will run short of carbon fuels, before technological advances obviate our need for them — perhaps in the next century.

It also means that the lock on oil supply which very nasty regimes, such as those which control Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela have been enjoying, must soon crack loose. As in 1973 and 1979, the current high price was inspired by their efforts at extortion through the OPEC cartel (and decidedly not by the oil companies), but will end, as all things end, even in this world, with the spankers spanked. We can further be sure that such regimes, which pride themselves on tactical cunning, are not smart enough to see what’s truly coming in a decade or less, when all the alternative sources start pouring onto the market. Or if they get wiser, God bless them.

Better yet, soaring oil prices are the best possible assurance of clean air and water, for the excess demand creates tremendous pressure to conserve the resource, and use it more efficiently. Indeed, the more profit the large oil companies make (Exxon-Mobil is my personal favourite), the more they can invest in the cleanest high-tech operations — from the pipeheads through the refineries to the oil tankers and depots — for they won’t want to waste a single drop. …

Ed Morrissey on some Kerry comments. And reacts to the news Obama quit his church. And posts on the gaffer.

Corner posts on the church exit.

Amy Holmes – There goes that historic, transcendent, life-changing, not since the Gettysburg Address, “I have a dream,” must-be-taught-in-every-school race speech. It didn’t hold up three months, let alone the time it would take to print up new textbooks. …

Peter Wehner – It’s been just over two months since Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race — the one that was compared by the historian Garry Wills to Lincoln’s Cooper Union address. In that speech Obama famously said he could not more disown the Reverend Jeremiah Wright than he could disown the black community or his own grandmother and spoke about how Trinity United “embodies the black community in its entirely.”

Since that speech Wright has been tossed under the bus — and now, so has Trinity United. …

The Obama Gaffe Machine gets John Fund’s attention.

For months, Barack Obama has had the image of an incandescent, golden-tongued Wundercandidate. That image may be fraying now.

As smart and credentialed as he is, Sen. Obama is often an indifferent speaker without a teleprompter. He has large gaps in his knowledge base, and is just as likely to dig in and embrace a policy misstatement as abandon it. ABC reporter Jake Tapper calls him “a one-man gaffe machine.”

Take the Auschwitz flub, where Mr. Obama erroneously claimed last weekend in New Mexico that his uncle helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp. Reporters noted Mr. Obama’s revised claim, that it was his great uncle who helped liberate Buchenwald. They largely downplayed the error. Yet in another, earlier gaffe back in 2002, Mr. Obama claimed his grandfather knew U.S. troops who liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka – even though only Russian troops entered those concentration camps. …

Mark Steyn says Hillary was beaten by Democrat Party sexism, not Obama.

“Someone wins, someone doesn’t win, that’s life,” Nancy Kopp, Maryland’s treasurer, told The Washington Post. “But women don’t want to be totally dissed.” She was talking about her political candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Democratic women are feeling metaphorically battered by the Obama campaign. “Healing The Wounds Of Democrats’ Sexism,” as the Boston Globe headline put it, will not be easy. Geraldine Ferraro is among many prominent Democrat ladies putting up their own money for a study from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard to determine whether Sen. Clinton’s presidential hopes fell victim to party and media sexism.

How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a resume you could print on the back of his driver’s license, a Rolodex apparently limited to neosegregationist race-baiters, campus Marxist terrorists and indicted fraudsters, and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates.

“On this Memorial Day,” said Barack Obama last Monday, “as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes – and I see many of them in the audience here today.”

Hey, why not? In Obama’s Cook County, Ill., many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It’s not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too. …

Roger Simon reacts to the news about the priest Michael Pfleger, and the fact that Obama’s top campaign aide, David Axelrod was due to make a documentary about him.

Dick Morris says for the Clintons …

… Winning is still everything. No matter who gets destroyed, offended or hurt in the process.

We’ve seen it throughout Hillary’s campaign: the race-baiting by Bill Clinton in South Carolina and by Hillary in Kentucky. His comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson and her talk about “hard-working whites” was not accidental. The Clintons don’t make verbal mistakes.

Everything they say is deliberate. And then Bill Clinton actually had the nerve to say that it was the Obama campaign and not him — that they had played the race card. Once again, he’s the victim.

Now Bill and Hillary are desperate to keep Hillary in the race. Despite mathematical impossibility, the Clintons are biding their time. Out of money and out of delegates, they are waiting for some unknown force to suddenly emerge and change the race. That’s why Hillary made the reference to Bobby Kennedy.

Because the Clintons know, better than most people, that time has often been a friend. …

Michael Barone gives a reality check on the economy.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” James Carville famously said during the 1992 campaign, when a young Bill Clinton was running against the other President Bush. The same could be said during this presidential campaign. The headlines are full of economic bad news — mortgage foreclosures, the collapse of an investment bank, higher gas and food prices and lower home prices. Voters routinely list the economy as their chief concern, and consumer confidence has sunk to low levels.

Yet at the same time, the economic numbers are not so bad. A recession is defined as two quarters of contraction. But we haven’t had one yet. The gross domestic product has grown, albeit only by 0.6 percent, in the last two quarters. As my U.S. News colleague James Pethokoukis blogged after the most recent numbers came in, “Dude, where’s my recession?” …