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Theodore Dalrymple’s Solzhenitsyn obit is first.

Contrary to popular belief, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died last week at 89, told the world nothing that it did not already know, or could not already have known, about the Soviet Union and the Communist system. Information about their true nature was available from the very first, including photographic evidence of massacre and famine. Bertrand Russell, no apologist of conservatism, spotted Lenin’s appalling inhumanity and its consequences for Russia and humanity as early as 1920. The problem was that this information was not believed; or if believed, it was explained away and rendered innocuous by various mental subterfuges, such as false comparison with others’ misdeeds, historical rationalizations, reference to the supposed grandeur of the social ideals behind the apparent horrors, and so forth. Anything other than admission of the obvious.

Solzhenitsyn’s achievement was to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid but wicked. With a mixture of literary talent, iron integrity, bravery, and determination of a kind very rarely encountered, he made it impossible to deny the world-historical scale of the Soviet evil. After Solzhenitsyn, not to recognize Soviet Communism for what it was and what it had always been was to join those who denied that the earth was round or who believed in abduction by aliens. Because of his clear-sightedness about Lenin’s true nature, it was no longer permissible for intellectuals who had been pro-Soviet to hide behind the myth that Stalin perverted the noble ideal that Lenin had started to put into practice. Lenin was, if such a thing be possible, more of a monster than Stalin, not so much inhumane as anti-human. …

Couple of shorts from John Fund. One introduces the current William Ayers flap.

… Also unexplained is the sudden sensitivity on Team Obama’s part. It’s already known that Mr. Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, hosted a key fund-raising party during Mr. Obama’s first bid for public office and also served with Mr. Obama on the board of a Chicago-based charity until 2002. Today, the University of Illinois will finally release documents it tried to keep from the public on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the liberal school reform effort founded by Mr. Ayers and chaired by Mr. Obama. Obama campaign aides insist the two men had only a casual relationship. During a Democratic primary debate last April, Mr. Obama said that “the notion that . . . me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense.”

We may know more about the relationship between the two men later this week, after reporters have plowed through the once-suppressed Annenberg Challenge records.

Jonah Goldberg follows the Ayers thoughts.

I am amazed, simply amazed, at the amazement of many liberals that Ayers and Dohrn should matter to anyone. I was one of the first to write about Ayers (for which Alan Colmes denounced me as some kind of McCarthyite, though not in so many words) and I’ve been getting email ever since for my mule-headedness. Apparently the groupthink is so thick that at the Obama campaign they actually think this rightwing or Republican obsession is a weakness. How else to explain the stupidity of their Ayers’ ad? …

Hugh Hewitt posts on the unease the Democrats are exhibiting in Denver.

The Washington Post reports on the great unease at the Democratic Convention:

As the Democrats kicked off a convention designed to unite support behind Obama, interviews with several dozen delegates pointed to an undercurrent of anxiety among many from key swing states who will be charged with leading the push in their communities. They expressed doubts bordering on bewilderment: Why, in a year that had been shaping up as a watershed for Democrats, amid an economic downturn and an unpopular Republican presidency, is the race so tight?

Why, indeed.  The answers:  Jeremiah Wright. Tony Rezko. Michael Pfleger. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

“Above my pay grade.”  “Bitter and clinging to God and their guns.” “Citizen of the world.”  Tire gauges.  “First time I have been proud of my country.”  “Vastly superior infrastructure.”  The Born Alive Infant Protection Act.

And now Slow Joe Biden.

That’s just part of the list.  The Dems are nominating the most radical major party candidate in history, whose thin record is relentlessly hard left, and whose rhetoric of change and hope cannot cover the fact that he has never worked across the aisle, has never sought to reform the deeply corrupt Chicago or Illinois political machines, and that he is hopelessly out of his depth on foreign policy and national security issues. …

David Harsanyi reacts to the Biden pick.

… And there is a noteworthy difference between Biden and Clinton: The loquacious Biden entertained the press corps for a handful of primary debates before dropping out. Hillary convinced 18 million primary voters to support her.

So, then, why not Clinton? If you erode your theme of “change” by choosing a longtime Washington insider, why not pick the one who can unite your party?

Perhaps a clue can be found in the words of Nancy Pelosi, who said Democrats need to “begin anew.” At a convention that features Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy (in order of most annoying), who can argue?

Most observers say Biden is the “safe” pick. Maybe. But there is one thing for certain: Picking Biden over Clinton helps a presidential candidate. And that candidate is not here in Denver.

Ed Morrissey has a bunch of good posts. First on Ayers.

Barack Obama did a double-twist on free speech yesterday in reaction to the ad produced by an outside political group regarding his association with William Ayers.  After his own campaign produced an ad that Factcheck called a “smear” tying Jack Abramoff to John McCain through Ralph Reed, American Issues produced an ad that pointed out Obama’s political ties to the unrepentant former domestic terrorist, William Ayers.  Instead of letting it drop, Obama’s campaign took two really stupid actions: they produced a response ad and then demanded that the Department of Justice investigate American Issues while pressuring television stations to reject the ad: …

And Ed catches Time going gaga over Obama.

One of the pitfalls of reporting from the conventions is that people tend to lose perspective amidst the fervor.  Mainstream journalists supposedly have immunity from this phenomenon, and sometimes chide bloggers for cheerleading rather than retaining a more objective point of view.   Maybe Amy Sullivan’s colleagues should perform an intervention for her and Time magazine, then, because she’s obviously been drinking the Kool-Aid in Denver with this passage:

Given all that buildup, it may come as a surprise that the Democrats who will gather around the gavel in Denver are actually more united than perhaps at any other point in the past 30 years. When Obama accepts the Democratic nomination on Thursday night, he will inherit a party focused on its determination to take back the White House, and that overarching goal should paper over any lingering resentments or policy differences, at least until after Election Day.

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me.  More united than at “any other point in the past 30 years”?  How old is Amy Sullivan — three? …

Slate’s Press Box on Biden’s plagiarism.

Joe Biden’s return as a vice-presidential candidate signals forgiveness—at least from Barack Obama—for having plagiarized a leading British politician during Biden’s campaign for the Democratic Party’s 1988 presidential nomination.

The Biden episode merits revisiting because as acts of plagiarism go, it was spectacular, and because it points to other dicey chapters in his life. To know Biden in full, you must appreciate his parts.

Biden’s puttering campaign for president effectively died on Sept. 13, 1987, when the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd reported that he had pinched major elements of a recent and celebrated speech by Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. That speech, included in this May 1987 Labor Party broadcast, begins at the 7:23 mark.

But Biden didn’t merely borrow words and phrasings from Kinnock, which is a time-honored practice of candidates and their speechwriters and is almost never regarded as plagiarism. He became Kinnock, as David Greenberg writes today, claiming things about himself and his family that were untrue and that he knew to be untrue. …

Thomas Sowell’s random thoughts.

… One of the problems with successfully dealing with threats is that people start believing that there is no threat. That is where we are, seven years after 9/11, so that reminding people of terrorist dangers can be dismissed as “the politics of fear” by Barack Obama, who has a rhetorical answer for everything.

There are countries in Europe that would love to have their unemployment rate fall to the 5.7 percent unemployment rate to which ours has risen. Yet those who seem to want us to imitate European economic and social policies never seem to want to consider the actual consequences of those policies. …

Bernie Marcus, Home Depot’s founder, writes on the Dems new labor laws.

I recently said that America “would become France” if a certain bill now in Congress — which would virtually guarantee that every company becomes unionized — ever became law. Deceptively named the Employee Free Choice Act, this bill would in most cases take away an employee’s right to a secret ballot in a union election and give unions the option to have federal arbitrators set the wages, benefits, hours and all other terms and conditions of employment. …

Borowitz reports Clinton’s Denver speech will be on a 5 second delay.

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Jeff Jacoby signs off on China’s “totalitarian” Olympics.

… A million and a half residents expelled. Free speech strangled. Elderly women jailed. That’s what it means when a police state like China hosts the Olympics. That’s what you get when the IOC and its corporate supersponsors care more about television ratings and market share than about the values of the Olympic movement. That’s what happens when the free world cons itself into believing that China’s Communist rulers, who sustain genocide in Sudan and torture nuns in Tibet, will refrain from doing whatever it takes to turn the Olympics into a vehicle for totalitarian self-glorification.

The cruelty and deceit were on display right from the start, from the digitally faked fireworks to the last-minute yanking of a 7-year-old singer because a Politburo member decided she wasn’t pretty enough. …

Speaking of China, Obama had praises for the country’s infrastructure last week. Ed Morrissey tells us how they made their improvements. They stole from their citizens.

… Beijing at first thought that water demand would increase dramatically during the Games.  Instead of finding ways to increase water supply, they simply stole the water from the poor farmers in Baoding.  The government allowed the reservoirs to fill, tripled the price of water to keep farmers from using much of it, and then built hundreds of miles of pipeline to carry the hoarded water directly to Beijing.

The result?  A housing and land collapse in Baoding in which 31,000 became homeless.  And the most ironic part of the story is that the water wasn’t really needed after all.  When it became apparent that tourists had decided to skip the 2008 Olympics over the Tibet issue, or just because of the Chinese government in general, the need for the water evaporated.  And the infrastructural work that Obama hailed as a model for the rest of the world stopped abruptly, leaving half-build aqueducts and pipelines all over Baoding. …

Here’s the story from China in the London Times.

THOUSANDS of Chinese farmers face ruin because their water has been cut off to guarantee supplies to the Olympics in Beijing, and officials are now trying to cover up a grotesque scandal of blunders, lies and repression.

In the capital, foreign dignitaries have admired millions of flowers in bloom and lush, well-watered greens around its famous sights. But just 90 minutes south by train, peasants are hacking at the dry earth as their crops wilt, their money runs out and the work of generations gives way to despair, debt and, in a few cases, suicide.

In between these two Chinas stands a cordon of roadblocks and hundreds of security agents deployed to make sure that the one never sees the other.

The water scandal is a parable of what can happen when a demanding global event is awarded to a poor agricultural nation run by a dictatorship; and the irony is that none of it has turned out to be necessary.

The blunders began when officials started to worry that Beijing might not have enough water to cope with 500,000 visitors to the Olympics. There was talk of a 30% spike in demand. Their gaze turned to Hebei province, its fields ripe with vegetables, corn and rice, providing a good living for its huge rural population. …

Ed Rendell drops a bomb on the media. John Fund has the story.

… He told the crowd of 300 political luminaries that the media’s coverage of the Democratic primaries had elevated personalities over substance and he complained of sexism in its treatment of Senator Clinton. He called the media’s kid-gloves handling of Barack Obama “absolutely embarrassing,” and suggested that the media had essentially given the presumptive Democratic nominee, whom he now supports, “a free pass.” Journalists, he said, had allowed themselves unprofessionally to be “caught up with emotion and excitement” in the historic nature of the Obama candidacy. He even called MSNBC “the official network of Obama’s campaign.” …

Amir Taheri says the Biden pick indicates a return of Jimmy Carter policy.

… But the third message is that “change” means a return not to the Camelot of President John Kennedy, but to the foreign policies of Jimmy Carter. For Biden, an early supporter of Carter in his quest for the presidency in 1976, shares the former president’s view of the world and the United States’ place in it.

In 2004, I was astonished to hear Biden doing his own bit of America-bashing in front of an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The US, he claimed, had no moral authority to preach democracy in the Middle East. “We don’ have much of a democracy ourselves, ” he said mockingly. “Remember our own presidential election; remember Florida!”

Biden has the experience of more than three decades in the US senate, at least two of them dealing with foreign affairs and defense. But experience is no guarantee of good judgment. And Biden has been wrong on almost every key issue.

* In 1979, he shared Carter’s starry-eyed belief that the fall of the shah in Iran and the advent of the ayatollahs represented progress for human rights. Throughout the hostage crisis, as US diplomats were daily paraded blindfolded in front of television cameras and threatened with execution, he opposed strong action against the terrorist mullahs and preached dialogue. …

Michael Barone wonders why the media won’t question the Obama narrative.

… There is a difference between the two parties, however. The Democrats can usually depend on the mainstream media to accept their narratives uncritically, while the Republicans can expect them to punch holes in their story lines. In 1988, the media didn’t note that Dukakis was less an earthy ethnic than a reformer in the Massachusetts Puritan tradition, but they were eager to point to the senior Bush’s aristocratic eastern background. …

Pastor Rick Warren was the subject of WSJ’s Weekend Interview.

‘Overhyped.” That’s how the Rev. Rick Warren describes the notion that the evangelical vote is “up for grabs” in this election. But what about the significance of the evangelical left, I asked the pastor of Saddleback Church after his forum with the presidential candidates last weekend. “This big,” he says, holding his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart.

Sitting on a small stone patio outside the church’s “green room,” I question him further — has he heard that the Democratic Party is changing its abortion platform? “Window dressing,” he replies. “Too little, too late.” But Rev. Jim Wallis, the self-described progressive evangelical, has been saying that the change is a big victory. “Jim Wallis is a spokesman for the Democratic Party,” Mr. Warren responds dismissively. “His book reads like the party platform.”

If you’ve read any of the hundreds of articles about Mr. Warren that have appeared over the past 10 years, perhaps you think I’ve got the wrong guy. After all, the leader of the fourth-largest church in the U.S. is supposed to be part of a “new breed” of evangelicals, according to the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and dozens of other publications. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof paid him what Mr. Kristof might consider the ultimate compliment earlier this year, referring to Mr. Warren as an “evangelical liberals can love.” …

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Gerard Baker says “Yes we can” might not be magic anymore, and Barack might lose.

… How can it be, you ask? Didn’t we see him just last month speaking to 200,000 adoring Germans in Berlin? Didn’t he get the red carpet treatment in France – France of all places? Doesn’t every British politician want to be seen clutching the hem of his garment?

All true. But as cruel geography and the selfish designs of the American Founding Fathers would have it, Europeans don’t get to choose the US president. Somewhere along the way to the Obama presidency, somebody forgot to ask the American people.

And wouldn’t you know it, they insist on looking this gift thoroughbred in the mouth. Who’d have thought it? You present them with the man who deigns to deliver them from their plight and they want to sit around and ask hard questions about who he is and what he believes and where he might actually take the country. The ingrates! …

Many of our favorites have Biden opinions. Ed Morrissey is first.

… It’s an admission that Obama’s inexperience has finally begun worrying voters, and not just Democratic power brokers.  There really is no other way to see an addition of Biden to the ticket.  Obama can’t be worried about carrying Delaware, after all; it’s as safe a state that Democrats have.  Nor does Biden have a natural national constituency, as his own flop of a presidential campaign proved this cycle.

The Biden choice is an act of desperation borne of a summer-long catastrophe.  There isn’t any other reason for Obama to choose a 35-year veteran of the Senate with as long a history of gaffes and flat-out dishonesty as his second on the campaign for Hope and Change.  In fact, I can’t wait for writers to twist themselves into knots to avoid the cardinal sin of writing, plagiarism, which Biden committed more than once, as Jim Geraghty recounted in 2003: …

Power Line follows.

Few would argue that Joe Biden is among our brightest Senators, but that hasn’t prevented him from obtaining a prominent role on two of the most high-profile Senate Committees – the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. Now that the front-runner in the presidential campaign has tapped Biden to be his running mate, it’s worth taking a few moments to reflect on Biden’s performance on these two committees. We’ll start with the Judiciary Committee.

Biden’s performance there has been disgraceful. He was part of the mob that, during the Bork confirmation process, defeated a highly qualified nominee on no other grounds than disagreement with his views. This step, unprecedented as it was, transformed the rules for judicial confirmation. And it transformed them for the worse, since the long-term effect of the new approach, once the Republicans fully embrace it as they must, will be to create a bias in favor of moderate non-entities, thereby quite possibly depriving the Court of some of its best potential Justices.

Reasonable people can disagree with this assessment, but a reasonable person would be hard-pressed to defend what the Judiciary Committee, under Biden’s leadership, did to Clarence Thomas. Well past the eleventh hour, with Thomas about to sail through to confirmation, Biden decided to hold a “trial” to determine whether, almost a decade earlier, Thomas had committed such outrages as remarking to Anita Hill that dirt on a can of soda looked like pubic hair. Suddenly, it became acceptable to vote against confirming a Supreme Court Justice not just because one disagreed with his views, but also because (according to one witness who had not come forward for years) he had a “potty mouth.”

Over the next dozen or so years, Biden helped extend this new regime to nominees for the U.S. Court of Appeals. Biden’s legacy, then, is a fully politicized system of confirming federal judges – one that will continue to produce ugly spectacles like the Bork and Thomas hearings, undermine respect for the judiciary (a mixed consequence, in my view), and promote mediocrity on the bench. …

Corner Post from Peter Wehner.

I have now watched and read Senator Biden’s speech in Springfield earlier today. From the perspective of the craft of speechwriting, it was quite a thing to behold.

In a speech of just over 16 minutes, Biden used, by my count, the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” 18 times. (Apparently “ladies and gentlemen” is to Biden what “my friends” is to Senator McCain). Biden’s speech was filled with the predictable hackneyed phrases. We were told the American Dream is both “slipping away” and dropping off a cliff. And “the future keeps receding further and further and further away as your reach for your dreams.” Biden feels things with “ever fiber of my being.” Barack Obama possesses “steel in his spine.” And so forth. Biden also made silly claims, such as this being the “last chance to reclaim the America we love, to restore America’s soul.” …

John Podhoretz in Contentions.

… I think the nation should offer profound thanks to Barack Obama for the Biden choice because of the real possibility that there will be unexpected moments of comedy between now and Election Day. For the thing is that Biden doesn’t just have a big mouth. He actually has an identifiable problem. It’s called logorrhea. When he starts speaking, it is nearly impossible for him to figure out how to stop. Almost every blunder he has made in the past decade is due to the free associating that is the ancillary effect of his prolixity.

Surely he has guaranteed the Obama camp that he can keep himself in control. But he’s a man nearing 70, and men nearing 70 do not change. Honestly, this could be fun.

…

… Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, sets the tone for the coming five days: “This looks like the best possible choice.” The Biden choice is the opening of a mainstream-media return to uncritical Obama coverage. …

And Jennifer Rubin.

… John is right that the media is already in overdrive on the Biden-gushing. But does it matter? What we know is that mainstream media fawning has no correlation with real voters’ reactions. They kvelled over the Berlin speech, marveled at the ease with which Barack Obama followed his scripted interludes with heads of state and gasped in reverence at his nuanced answers to Rick Warren. But the public had a different reaction. None of these episodes helped and many, or all, arguably hurt Obama. By now we should know that there are no less reliable predictors of voter reaction than the mainstream pundit class.

Why? Aside from being hopelessly infatuated with The One, they do not represent the views, values or demographic attributes of voters actually in play. MSM  pundits are generally liberal, urban, highly educated, nonreligious, obsessed with rhetoric, and lacking real world experience outside politics/media. In other words, pretty much like Obama. They show no inclination to explore any topic — the Mayor Daley machine, the Bill Ayers connection, Obama’s state senate record — that might throw the Obama narrative off balance. …

Debra Saunders writes on attack dogs, GOP and Dem.

In politics, everyone wants to be seen as a mudslinging virgin – who, like King Lear, is “more sinned against than sinning.” Toward that end, Democrats have crafted the conceit that Republicans are attack dogs, while Democratic candidates are not sufficiently ruthless. After years of calling President Bush every name in the book, the left nonetheless manages to see itself as the victim in the smear game.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama knows how to play to that conceit. In a speech before a Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering in Florida on Tuesday, Obama went into woe-is-me mode as he responded to Republican candidate John McCain’s criticism of Obama’s opposition to the successful U.S. troop surge in Iraq.

“One of the things that we have to change in this country is the idea that people can’t disagree without challenging each other’s character and patriotism,” said Obama. “I have never suggested that Sen. McCain picks his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition. I have not suggested it, because I believe that he genuinely wants to serve America’s national interest. Now, it’s time for him to acknowledge that I want to do the same.”

Poor baby. To hear his lament, you’d never guess that Obama repeatedly has argued that McCain picks his positions out of ambition. Obama recently told a group, “The price (McCain) paid for his party’s nomination has been to reverse himself on position after position.” …

The Economist continues on bellwether states. This week it’s Nevada and New Mexico.

… In both states Mr McCain has a powerful weapon that he has mysteriously failed to deploy so far. He is a local man whose home state touches both New Mexico and Nevada. As a result, he can talk confidently about pressing regional issues like water, grazing on federal lands and the travails of American Indians—none of which will be familiar to someone who cut his political teeth in Chicago. Ronald Reagan did this, and ruled the West. Mr McCain needs to start doing the same

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Contentions posts on the Olympics.

… Isn’t it time we take an adult view of the grotesquerie that is the Beijing Olympics? Americans–most notably, the American President–applaud while teens tumble for prizes and in the shadows aged ladies get a year’s hard labor for attempting civil protest. I’m sympathetic to arguments about not punishing athletes who’ve trained to compete–but not that sympathetic. Dreams are compromised for a lot worse reasons than keeping innocents out of jail and saving lives. By any reckoning, this year’s Olympics resulted in a steep net loss of humanity, justice, and freedom. (This is to say nothing of the fact that Moscow used the events as a global diversion to attempt a takeover of its neighbor.)

And this is to say nothing of the sheer hell required of those who competed for China. When free countries try to make common cause with non-free countries (particularly in the area of individual achievement) the dissonance is bound to overwhelm. American athletes are free to train or not train as they see fit. Chinese athletes: not so much. Any argument about giving American talent its chance to shine has to be weighed against the compulsory servitude instituted by Olympic committees in non-free countries. Sure, Michael Phelps spent years doing laps in preparation for Beijing, but isn’t it worth considering how those years were spent by his Chinese counterparts? …

Slate’s Daniel Gross says don’t worry about a new cold war.

Russia’s occupation of Georgia and the U.S. signing of a missile-defense deal with Poland have grizzled Cold Warriors partying like it’s 1979. Once again, hard-liners are ratcheting up rhetoric and threatening sanctions because the Russian bear has stomped on one of its freedom-loving neighbors. But don’t go dusting off your copies of George Kennan’s “X” Foreign Affairs article and NSC 68 just yet. It’s going to be a lot harder to have a Cold War between Russia and the West in 2008 than it was in 1948.

During the Cold War (this is for all the under-40 set), the world was to a large degree divided between the Communist world—the Soviet Bloc and China—and the free world. And while there were exchanges and a limited amount of trade (in the 1970s, Pepsi began bartering Pepsi-Cola for Stolichnaya vodka, and the United States exported grain to the Soviet Union), commercial ties between the Eastern Bloc and the West were extremely limited.

Today, nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia may not be a free-market paradise. But it has evolved into an important part of the global trading system and has built deep, enduring, and significant economic ties to the West. As a result, the implications of increasing tensions are as much economic as they are geopolitical. And a renewed chill between Moscow and Washington will trouble the sleep of CEOs as much as it will agitate peaceniks. On the other hand, the close economic ties make it less likely that political tensions will erupt into actual warfare since the executives in Moscow and New York (and London, and Frankfurt, and Milan …) will be lobbying for peace. …

Some people complain this congress has done very little. “Au contraire” say the WSJ Editors.

As the 110th Congress continues its August recess, the big legislative news is that it has passed fewer laws than any Congress in the last two decades. An outfit known as Taxpayers for Common Sense reports that the fighting 110th has passed a mere 294 laws, while nonetheless finding time to consider 1,932 resolutions favoring such causes as National Watermelon Month. This is apparently supposed to be a matter of public consternation because Congress should be accomplishing more.

Sorry, but that’s the best thing we’ve heard about this Congress. …

David Harsanyi says this election is just like any other in this divided country.

There is a palpable unease within the Democratic Party. After all, why hasn’t Barack Obama pulled away from John McCain in the polls?

Here we are with a struggling economy, an unpopular war, high gas prices, mortgage meltdown and an old coot with a wicked temper running for the Republicans. Shouldn’t the urbane and unflappable Obama be ahead by at least 14 points? What is wrong with Americans?

Obama himself has questioned the wisdom of voters, wondering at a gathering in San Francisco why, with all our tribulations, voters do not cry, “Toss the bums out, we’re starting from scratch, we’re starting over.”

If only it were so simple.

It’s often said that loathing of an opposing candidate is not enough for victory. And aversion to George Bush is not, on its own, enough reason to spur a realignment of the electorate. This election, in fact, despite the fruitless attempts of Obama, is a traditional battle between the left and the right. It’s about policy and, the worst distraction of all, politics. …

Karl Rove has a history lesson on political conventions.

… How will we know if the candidates achieve their goals? Perhaps by observing the convention bounces — the jump each receives in polls the week after their conventions. Professor Tom Holbrook of UW-Milwaukee says history suggests the candidate thought to be running ahead of where he should be (Mr. McCain) will get a smaller bounce, while the candidate generally thought to be running behind expectations (Mr. Obama) will get a larger one. Mr. Holbrook also finds the earlier convention gets the bigger bump, another Obama advantage.

Even then, the size of the bounce alone isn’t determinative. Barry Goldwater and Al Gore got large bumps and lost, while Presidents Reagan and Bush in their re-elections received small bounces and won. The real question is durability. Are there lasting changes in how a candidate is perceived?

The day is long past when conventions were spontaneous and dramatic. It’s hard to envision anything today like the riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention or the Dixiecrat walkout in 1948. It’s unlikely we’ll see again dramatic floor fights as at the 1964 GOP convention at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, or the 103 ballots it took Democrats to nominate John W. Davis in 1920. But conventions still shape voters’ understanding of the men who want to be president. And because they do, conventions can still shape, and maybe even alter, an election.

Ed Morrissey noticed some slimy DNC tactics.

How many times can the DNC mention that Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) is a Jew?  In their pre-emptive attack website on every potential candidate for John McCain’s running mate, they manage to work it into their text five times in six paragraphs.  They even helpfully note that disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff is also Jewish, just in case Democrats missed that key point about his guilt:

Cantor Was Actually Around a Lot of Suspicious Abramoff Events

Cantor Co-Hosted Improper Signatures Fundraiser With Abramoff. Jack Abramoff and House Deputy Republican Whip Eric Cantor co-hosted a fundraiser for then Rep. David Vitter at Abramoff’s Signatures restaurant. In April 2005, Vitter admitted to the Federal Elections Commission that he failed to pay for the expenses for the fundraiser. According to the Times Picayune, Rep. Eric Cantor was “the marquee guest” at the event which sought to raise money from the Jewish community. Both Abramoff and Cantor are Jewish [emphasis mine -- Ed]. [New Orleans Times Picayune, 4/16/05, NRCC Events List, www.nrcc.org]

They’re both … Jewish?? Must be a cabal!  Next thing you know, they’ll be conspiring to change good-old American white bread with that Hebrew egg bread, because it gives them special powers or something.  Hey, wait a minute …

Sally Quinn had an interesting reaction to the show at Saddleback.

… I want to live in a world where Gen. David Petraeus and Meg Whitman, former chief executive of eBay, are the wisest people I know, where offshore drilling will help ease our energy crisis, where a guy stays in a Vietnamese prison camp even when told he could get out, and has great stories to tell. I want to live in a world where I was absolutely certain that life begins at conception, where a man is a maverick and stands up against his Senate colleagues when he disagrees with them, where the only thing to do with evil is defeat it, where a guy will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell to capture him.

I want to believe that our biggest enemy is radical Islamist terrorists. I want to be part of a world that doesn’t have to raise taxes; where America is a beacon, a shining city on a hill; where our values are simply Judeo-Christian values; and where a man always puts his country first. I want to be one of “my friends.”

By the time McCain finished his interview with pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, Saturday night, part of a forum that also featured Barack Obama, I was curled up in a fetal position in my chair, wrapped in a mohair throw, practically sucking my thumb.

McCain did a great job of making me feel confident. He was clearly in his element at Saddleback, among supportive evangelical Christians, and he went a long way toward alleviating their fears about his inability to communicate with them in their own language. …

Thomas Sowell points out areas where amateurs outdo professionals. Hint: Good old golden rule days.

When amateurs outperform professionals, there is something wrong with that profession.

If ordinary people, with no medical training, could perform surgery in their kitchens with steak knives, and get results that were better than those of surgeons in hospital operating rooms, the whole medical profession would be discredited.

Yet it is common for ordinary parents, with no training in education, to homeschool their children and consistently produce better academic results than those of children educated by teachers with Master’s degrees and in schools spending upwards of $10,000 a year per student– which is to say, more than a million dollars to educate ten kids from K through 12.

Nevertheless, we continue to take seriously the pretensions of educators who fail to educate, but who put on airs of having “professional” expertise beyond the understanding of mere parents. …

The Onion reports Johnson & Johnson introduced a shampoo to toughen up kids named Nothing But Tears.

After decades of coddling young children, Johnson & Johnson unveiled its new “Nothing But Tears” shampoo this week, an aggressive bath-time product the company says will help to prepare meek and fragile newborns for the real world.

A radical departure for the health goods manufacturer, the new shampoo features an all-alcohol-based formula, has never once been approved by leading dermatologists, and is as gentle on a baby’s skin as “having to grow up and fend for your goddamn self.”

“We at Johnson & Johnson have been making bath time a safe and soothing experience for far too long,” company CEO William C. Weldon said. “Years of pampering have left our newborns helpless, feeble, and ill-equipped for the arduous road ahead.”

“It’s time our children got the wake-up call that’s been coming to them,” Weldon continued. “It’s time they cried their precious little eyes out.”

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David Warren reports on Canada’s new “human rights” wrinkle.

… Canada’s taxpayer-supported “human rights” apparatchiks have decided that it is not yet time to directly challenge freedom of the press. They will bide their time, and return to the routine business of staging quasi-legal proceedings against defenceless victims, with no resources for lawyers, and no access to media publicity, until they have acquired more power.

That power is on the way. For instance, Dalton McGuinty’s government has recently committed many millions to a huge expansion of the Ontario kangaroo-court system, opening new star chamber facilities across the province, and providing a fresh supply of publicly funded lawyers and activists to assist the enemies of freedom in making their prosecutions. The argument behind all such “public investments” is the same: that complainants need a “resolution process” that is less “formal” than the one in our legitimate court system. In other words, they need kangaroo courts in which their victims are stripped of due process.

But a much more significant advance has now been proposed by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, to bring the tyranny of “political correction” to bear on its own membership. As usual, the process was being advanced in the dark, away from the possibility of public discussion, and was only pried open in the course of the last week when a large number of physicians, surgeons, and even politicians found out about it.

As I’ve written before, the “human rights” revolution that has been sweeping through Canada’s law schools and legal establishment depends on an Orwellian inversion of the term, “human rights.” For human rights were traditionally conceived as the individual’s legal and moral resort against the arbitrary power of unaccountable organizations. In the new definition, “human rights” become a device by which unaccountable organizations may crush that individual. …

Russia’s Pravda has a columnist as unhinged as Keith Olbermann. This Condi Rice rant was over the top.

… The constant arrogance and hypocrisy of this failed female makes it that much more apparent that here is a person way out of her depth. Instead of regarding sensitive issues from a balanced viewpoint as she is supposed to do, this incompetent loud-mouthed, bad-mannered, bullshit-mongering bimbo takes one side, ignores the other and then speaks down from a holier-than-thou platform as if she were on a lecture dias.

This is not a classroom, Condoleeza Rice, and you are not a diplomat. You are a liar, a cheap, shallow, failed, wannabe actress on the diplomatic stage. This is the real world and out here, you have to be prepared to face up to your responsibilities.

For a start, you have failed to mention one single time the Georgian war crimes against 2.000 Russian civilians on the night of 7/8 August. Why have you systematically refused to admit they happened? Why have you not mentioned the devastation of Tskhinvali by your allies’ forces? Why do you continue to support the Saakashvili regime? …

Pickerhead has been looking for a clear concise explanation of Obama’s votes on protections for children born subsequent to a failed abortion. It is beginning to look like Obama has a real problem with his votes on this subject when a state legislator. And, he has been lying about it. Follow the thread here as we visit various blog and websites that feature many of our favorites writers.

John Fund is first.

… “Senator Obama got caught in the twisting of the truth,” says Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council. “His campaign was later forced to put out a clarifying statement that it was the Senator himself who was actually wrong on the facts. He did indeed vote against a bill in the Illinois State Senate that was identical to the federal legislation that sought to protect babies who survive abortions.”

Mr. Obama’s stand on the issue is significant. The federal “Born Alive Infant Protection Act” sailed through the Senate in 2001 on a vote of 98 to 0. The bill was supported by Senator Barbara Boxer, the body’s leading pro-choice spokeswoman, and was not opposed by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. By getting his facts wrong, Mr. Obama is now in the difficult position of trying to explain why he voted against a bill that the legislative record shows addressed infanticide rather than abortion. …

Jennifer Rubin.

You would think the mainstream media might get interested if a presidential nominee got caught lying–as Barack Obama did–on an issue of intense controversy, which the Born Alive Infant Protection Act certainly is. Still (I know you’re stunned) the mainstream media isn’t much interested, although the reversal combines all the key elements of a good political story: lying, a hot-button issue, and a major candidate gaffe. But it is about Barack Obama. So . . . I guess we get virtually noting from the mainstream media.

Rich Lowry has a helpful summary and cogent take here. He concludes: “Here’s one of the central dilemmas of Obama’s candidacy. Nothing in his career supports his contention that he’s a post-partisan healer. …

Peter Wehner.

… this issue has now traversed into the matter of public character. Obama accused the National Right to Life Committee of lying because it said that he voted to kill legislation that included a “neutrality clause” he now claims was the sine qua non for his support for pro-life legislation. If the neutrality clause was in the legislation, Obama now says, he would have supported legislation protecting the life of newly born children who had survived an abortion. But National Right to Life has, in Rich’s words, “unearthed documents showing that the Illinois bill was amended to include such a clause, and Obama voted to kill it anyway.” So Obama was, at best, wrong in recalling his own past position. At worst, Obama himself is misrepresenting his position and, in accusing the National Right to Life Committee of lying, is doing so himself. …

Rubin again.

As Dean Barnett points out, the only people who had a worse summer than Barack Obama were the Obamaphiles and media pundits (okay, there is an big overlap between those two groups). The latter seemed to have misread utterly the candidates’ performances during the summer. While the Obama’s fans cooed and kvelled, the public slowly but surely seemed to have tired or soured on The One. Could Obama’s shortcomings (”preening narcissism, a fondness for platitudes, a tendency to whine and a potentially fatal lack of substance”) have gone undetected by the media mavens, while ordinary folks — those religion-clinging, gun-hugging, drilling-happy voters — caught on? …

Peter Kirsanow.

… Therefore, even if we accept any one of Obama’s explanations regarding his vote against Born-Alive, we’re holding him to an incredibly low standard for someone who intends to lead the nation. If he supports the principle of Born-Alive, the question isn’t why he voted against it — the question should be, “Sen. Obama, given your education, skills and background why didn’t you take the relatively simple step of amending the draft so that the bill would work?”  Isn’t that what we expect from a leader?

Obama voted “present” more than 100 times in the Illinois state legislature. Why did he rouse himself to vote “No” on this one?

Obama has found time to ponder the habeas rights of foreign terrorists but no time to ponder the rights of babies born alive? Is it that far above his pay grade?

Wehner again.

… It doesn’t help matters, of course, that Obama’s story is falling apart. Obama has been insisting that if the wording of the Illinois Born-Alive Infant Protection legislation had been similar to the wording of federal legislation, he would have voted for the legislation. But as the Washington Post reports today, “Obama aides acknowledged yesterday that the wording of the state and federal bills was virtually identical.”

Oops.

It’s worth noting as well that the effort by the New York Times to provide a political life-raft to Obama on this issue has been taken apart by my colleague Yuval Levin here.

While a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama cast the most extreme vote imaginable on abortion, worse even than supporting partial-birth abortion. Children who had been targeted for abortion but were born alive were still not safe; in Barack Obama’s America, they still do not possess rights or the protection of the law. Obama’s effort to explain his vote away is in the process of collapsing. And the gap between him and McCain continues to close. For the first time in this campaign, Obama is on the defensive, a bit rattled, and worried. He has reason to be.

Yuval Levin.

Along with the Washington Post item Seth mentions below, the New York Times also has a “Check Point” piece on Obama and the Born-Alive controversy this morning. It tries in every imaginable way to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and to accept or excuse every one of the contradictory stories the Obama campaign offers to explain his inexplicable vote, but it still cannot avoid the simple fact that, as the article puts it, “The statute Congress passed in 2002 and the one the Illinois committee rejected a year later are virtually identical.” Indeed, they do not differ in substance at all. …

While most on the right are celebrating McCain’s performance Saturday night at the Saddleback Church, Kathleen Parker has another take.

At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister — no matter how beloved — is supremely wrong.

It is also un-American.

For the past several days, since mega-pastor Rick Warren interviewed Barack Obama and John McCain at his Saddleback Church, most political debate has focused on who won.

Was it the nuanced, thoughtful Obama, who may have convinced a few more skeptics that he isn’t a Muslim? Or was it the direct, confident McCain, who breezes through town hall-style meetings the way Obama sinks three-pointers from the back court.

Suffice it to say, each of the candidates’ usual supporters felt validated in their choices. McCain convinced and comforted with characteristic certitude those most at ease with certitude; Obama convinced and comforted with his characteristic intellectual ambivalence those most at ease with ambivalence.

The winner, of course, was Warren, who has managed to position himself as political arbiter in a nation founded on the separation of church and state.

The loser was America. …

John Stossel on energy independence.

It’s amazing how ideas with no merit become popular merely because they sound good.

Most every politician and pundit says “energy independence” is a great idea. Presidents have promised it for 35 years. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were self-sufficient, protected from high prices, supply disruptions and political machinations?

The hitch is that even if the United States were energy independent, it would be protected from none of those things. To think otherwise is to misunderstand basic economics and the global marketplace.

To be for “energy independence” is to be against trade. But trade makes us as safe. Crop destruction from this summer’s floods in the Midwest should remind us of the folly of depending only on ourselves. Achieving “energy independence” would expose us to unnecessary risks — such as storms that knock out oil refineries or droughts that create corn — and ethanol — shortages. …

A couple of important medical breakthroughs reported. London Times reports researchers have discovered how to manufacture blood from stem cells.

Vials of human blood have been grown from embryonic stem cells for the first time during research that promises to provide an almost limitless supply suitable for transfusion into any patient.

The achievement by scientists in the United States could lead to trials of the blood within two years, and ultimately to an alternative to donations that would transform medicine.

If such blood was made from stem cells of the O negative blood type, which is compatible with every blood group but is often in short supply, it could be given safely to anybody who needs a transfusion.

Stem-cell-derived blood would also eliminate the risk of transmitting the pathogens that cause hepatitis, HIV and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) through transfusions. …

The Economist on a new lease on life for the internal combustion engine.

SMALL cars sometimes struggle to climb steep hills. But a converted Chevrolet Lacetti has something special to help it along. Instead of having to keep changing down and revving harder to ascend a winding Alpine-type test track, the engine can cruise almost to the summit in top gear. This is because the car benefits from one of the developments that in these more economical and greener times promises to give the petrol engine a new lease of life.

Old technologies have a habit of fighting back when new ones come along. This is not surprising because they often have an enormous amount of design, engineering and production knowledge invested in them—especially so in the case of car engines. So new hybrid systems, fuel cells and electric motors will be chasing a moving target. The internal combustion engine will be getting better too.

The Lacetti is just one example. It gets its extra oomph from a supercharger forcing more air into the combustion chambers of its engine. This is an old idea that used to speed up 1920s racing cars, like “blower” Bentleys. But their engines tended not to last very long. With stronger engines, superchargers have been staging a comeback in big cars. The one in the Lacetti is different: it is a dual-speed supercharger that provides its highest boost at low speeds. This gives the car a huge 40% increase in torque, or pulling power. …

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David Warren has more thoughts on Russia.

It is years since I hauled out my favourite Josef Stalin quote. Time to carry it up from the basement, dust it off, and put it back on display. “Nuclear weapons are only a problem for people with bad nerves.” That the quote may be apocryphal, does not disturb me. So many of the best quotes are apocryphal, and only a puritan could wish to eliminate them from the quotation books on that account alone. One need only put the asterisk on it, the way the artist’s colourmen do on rose madder, or the Homeric scholars on passages where they suspect interpolation.

But why do I quote it, apparently with approval? It is not from any fondness for the late Soviet tyrant and mass-murderer, let me assure the gentle reader. Nor should he assume, as some readers have in the past, that I favour the casual and reckless use of weapons of mass destruction. For as a more careful meditation upon that quote will establish, not even Stalin was that crazy.

The point is that nuclear weapons, and everything else in that genre, have the power to scare people. And once they are frightened, they will do stupid things. It is important, therefore, to keep one’s nerve; and the paradox in quoting Stalin to make the point, is that one must keep one’s nerve especially in facing down tyrants like him. …

Jeff Jacoby says Iraq hindsight is not always 20/20.

… The prevailing wisdom 18 months or so ago was that invading Iraq had been, in retrospect, a disastrous blunder. It had led to appalling sectarian fratricide and an ever-climbing body count. Iraqi democracy was deemed a naive pipe dream. Worst of all, it was said, the fighting in Iraq wasn’t advancing the global struggle against Islamist terrorism; by rallying a new generation of jihadists, it was actually impeding it. Opponents of the war clamored loudly for pulling the plug – even if that meant, as The New York Times acknowledged in a bring-the-troops-home-now editorial last July, “that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave.”

But what if we had known then what we know now?

We know now that the overhauled counterinsurgency strategy devised by General David Petraeus – the “surge” – would prove spectacularly successful, driving Al Qaeda in Iraq from its strongholds, and killing thousands of its fighters, supporters, and leaders.

We know now that US losses in Iraq would plummet to the lowest levels of the war, with just five Americans killed in combat in July 2008, compared with 66 fatalities in the same month a year ago – and with 137 in November 2004. …

Dick Morris says if the Clintons can roll Obama, he won’t be able to stand up to Putin.

Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia’s invasion of Georgia.

This two-dimensional portrait of weakness underscores fears that Obama might, indeed, be a latter-day Jimmy Carter.

Consider first the domestic and political. Bill and Hillary Clinton have no leverage over Obama. Hillary can’t win the nomination. She doesn’t control any committees. If she or her supporters tried to disrupt the convention or demonstrate outside, she would pay a huge price among the party faithful. If Obama lost – after Hillary made a fuss at the convention – they would blame her for all eternity (just like Democrats blame Ted Kennedy for Carter’s defeat).

But, without having any leverage or a decent hand to play, the Clintons bluffed Obama into amazing concessions. …

Bill Kristol liked what he saw at Saddleback.

While normal people were out having fun Saturday night, I was home in front of the TV. But I wasn’t enjoying the Olympics. Your diligent columnist was dutifully watching Barack Obama and John McCain answer the Rev. Rick Warren’s questions at Saddleback Church. Virtue is sometimes rewarded. The event was worth watching — and for me yielded three conclusions.

First, Rick Warren should moderate one of the fall presidential debates.

Warren’s queries were simple but probing. He was fair to both candidates, his manner was relaxed but serious, and he neither went for “gotcha” questions nor pulled his punches. And his procedure of asking virtually identical questions to each candidate during his turn on stage paid off. It allowed us to see the two giving revealingly different answers to the same question.

So, I say, with all due respect to Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw and Bob Schieffer — the somewhat nondiverse group selected by the debates commission as the three presidential debate moderators — one of them should step aside for Warren.

Second, it was McCain’s night. …

Michael Gerson too.

It is now clear why Barack Obama has refused John McCain’s offer of joint town hall appearances during the fall campaign. McCain is obviously better at them.

Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency — two hours on Saturday night evenly divided between the relaxed, tieless candidates — was expected to be a sideshow. McCain and Obama would make their specialized appeals to evangelicals as if they were an interest group such as organized labor or the National Rifle Association. Evangelicals would demonstrate, in turn, that they are not rubes and know-nothings. And Americans would turn en masse to watch the Olympics.

What took place instead under Warren’s precise and revealing questioning was the most important event so far of the 2008 campaign — a performance every voter should seek out on the Internet and watch. …

Power Line and Corner posts on the race.

David Brooks on the education of John McCain.

On Tuesdays, Senate Republicans hold a weekly policy lunch. The party leaders often hand out a Message of the Week that the senators are supposed to repeat at every opportunity. Sometimes there will be a pollster offering data that supposedly demonstrates the brilliance of the message and why it will lead to political nirvana.

John McCain generally spends the lunches at a table with a gang of fellow ne’er-do-wells. He cracks jokes, razzes the speaker and generally ridicules the whole proceeding. Then he takes the paper with the Message of the Week back to his office. He tosses it on the desk of some staffer with a sarcastic comment like: “Here’s your message. Learn it. Love it. Live it.”

This sort of behavior has been part of McCain’s long-running rebellion against the stupidity of modern partisanship. In a thousand ways, he has tried to preserve some sense of self-respect in a sea of pandering pomposity. He’s done it through self-mockery, by talking endlessly about his own embarrassing lapses and by keeping up a running patter on the absurdity all around. He’s done it by breaking frequently from his own party to cut serious deals with people like Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold. He’s done it with his own frantic and freewheeling style, which was unpredictable, untamed and, at some level, unprofessional.

When McCain and his team set out to win the presidency in 2008, they hoped to run a campaign with this sort of spirit. McCain would venture forth on the back of his bus, going places other Republicans don’t go, saying things politicians don’t say, offering the country the vision of a different kind of politics — free of circus antics — in which serious people sacrifice for serious things.

It hasn’t turned out that way. …

Live Science on how cooking strengthened the human brain.

… In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.

Instead of growing even larger (which would have made birth even more problematic), the human brain most likely used the additional calories to grease the wheels of its internal functioning.

Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and burn 20-25 percent of their calories running their brains. For comparison, other vertebrate brains use as little as 2 percent of the animal’s caloric intake.

Does this mean renewing our subscriptions to Bon Appetit will make our brains more efficient? No, but we probably should avoid diving into the raw food movement. Devoted followers end up, said Khaitovich, “with very severe health problems.” …

Strong humor section with a News Biscuit piece on BBC camera crews who gave beer to meerkats.

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MEMRI reports a Saudi columnist has called for the bombing of Iran’s nukes.

… “In my estimation, confronting this country, which is trying to gain the time necessary to acquire nuclear weapons, is unavoidable. The possession of nuclear weapons by a state like Iran, which is ideological to the core, is more or less like Osama bin Laden having a nuclear bomb. They are two of a kind. Despite the difference in their turbans and in their religious beliefs, the end result is the same.

“Perhaps it is our bad luck that we [i.e. Saudi Arabia] and the Gulf states would be the first to suffer from a military confrontation with Iran and from its response, and the problem would become even more grave if Iran succeeded in closing the Straits of Hormuz, as the IRGC commander threatened. But our situation with Iran is like that of the sick man who refuses to have his illness treated with cauterization. Yes, the pain of the burning is horrible, but this malady can only be treated through this military confrontation -cauterization.

“History has taught us that ideological countries only pay heed to victory over their ideology… They never accept any halfway situation, even when they find themselves on the brink of disaster.” …

David Warren is following events in Georgia.

As I write this, I have just read a short account — an admirable piece by a BBC correspondent in the Black Sea port of Poti, Georgia, writing under their noses — of the Russians “in control and on the move.” Together with many other short reports from around Georgia, it is very clear that the Russians have not honoured the ceasefire that President Sarkozy of France brought to Moscow, and also induced the president of Georgia to sign.

In Poti, the Russians have been systematically destroying port facilities, and sinking all Georgian naval and patrol vessels. From other reports we can know that they continue operations well inside Georgia, and well outside the agreed buffer zones around the disputed regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

In Gori, as well as directly intimidating local people with gratuitous displays of force and firepower, it would appear that they have also encouraged ethnic Ossetians and others travelling with them to smash, torch, and loot property around town, and behave murderously towards its defenceless inhabitants — most of whom were induced to flee.

These things are happening on undisputed Georgian territory, after a formal agreement to cease hostilities. They confirm that the word of the Russian government is worthless. …

Byron York reports on events at Pastor Rick’s megachurch.

… The idea was for Warren to question Obama for an hour — they tossed a coin to see who would go first — and then ask the same questions of McCain, who was not allowed to hear what Obama had answered before him. Not a few people in the press thought it was a bad idea. Asking each man the same questions meant Warren couldn’t tailor his queries to each man; sure, he could ask Obama about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but what sense would it make to ask McCain, too? It seemed like a recipe for nothing much at all.

But Pastor Rick hasn’t built a huge church and sold more than 25 million copies of The Purpose-Driven Life for nothing. By the time Warren finished questioning Obama, people were eager to hear how McCain would handle the same subjects. In a debate, candidates are often asked the same question, but the second guy has always heard what the first guy said and tailors his answer accordingly. At Saddleback, there was something much different — and more revealing — going on.

The contrast was striking throughout each man’s one-hour time on stage. When Warren asked Obama, “What’s the most gut-wrenching decision you’ve ever had to make?” Obama answered that opposing the war in Iraq was “as tough a decision that I’ve had to make, not only because there were political consequences but also because Saddam Hussein was a bad person and there was no doubt he meant America ill.” But Obama was a state senator in Illinois when Congress authorized the president to use force in Iraq. He didn’t have to make a decision on the war. That fact was a recurring issue in the Democratic primaries, when candidates Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, Christopher Dodd, and John Edwards argued that they, as senators, had to make a choice Obama didn’t have to make. And now he says it’s his toughest call.

When McCain got the question, he was able to tell an old story with a sense of gravity and poignancy that he seldom shows in public. He described his time as a prisoner of war, when he was offered a chance for early release because his father was a top naval officer. “I was in rather bad physical shape,” McCain told Warren, but “we had a code of conduct that said you only leave by order of capture.” So McCain refused to go. He made the telling even more forceful when he added that, “in the spirit of full disclosure, I’m very happy I didn’t know the war was going to last for another three years or so.” In one moment, he showed a sense of pride and a hint of regret, too; he came across as a man who did the right thing but not without the temptation to take an easy out. In any event, the message was very clear: John McCain has had to make bigger, more momentous decisions in his life than has Barack Obama. …

WSJ editors react to Obama’s smear of Clarence Thomas saying, by all means, let’s compare the background of the two.

… Even more troubling is what the Illinois Democrat’s answer betrays about his political habits of mind. Asked a question he didn’t expect at a rare unscripted event, the rookie candidate didn’t merely say he disagreed with Justice Thomas. Instead, he instinctively reverted to the leftwing cliché that the Court’s black conservative isn’t up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are.

So much for civility in politics and bringing people together. And no wonder Mr. Obama’s advisers have refused invitations for more such open forums, preferring to keep him in front of a teleprompter, where he won’t let slip what he really believes.

And now Part II of the Atlantic article on the chaos in Hillary’s campaign.

In the hours after she finished third in Iowa, on January 3, Clinton seized control of her campaign, even as her advisers continued fighting about whether to go negative. The next morning’s conference call began with awkward silence, and then Penn recapped the damage and mumbled something about how badly they’d been hurt by young voters.

Mustering enthusiasm, Clinton declared that the campaign was mistaken not to have competed harder for the youth vote and that—overruling her New Hampshire staff—she would take questions at town-hall meetings designed to draw comparative,” but not negative, contrasts with Obama. Hearing little response, Clinton began to grow angry, according to a participant’s notes. She complained of being outmaneuvered in Iowa and being painted as the establishment candidate. The race, she insisted, now had “three front-runners.” More silence ensued. “This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself,” she snapped, and hung up.

In the days leading up to her stunning New Hampshire comeback, on January 8, Clinton’s retail politicking, at last on full display, seemed to make the most difference. But any hope of renewal was short-lived. Not long after New Hampshire, in a senior-staff meeting that both Clintons attended at the campaign’s Arlington headquarters, Ickes announced to his stunned colleagues, “The cupboard is empty.” The campaign had burned through its money just getting past Iowa. And the news got worse: despite spending $100 million, it had somehow failed to establish ground operations in all but a handful of upcoming states. Now, urgently needing them, it lacked the money. …

Writing for the WSJ, Stephen Moore on the totalitarians in the green movements.

Earlier this month, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, I almost spilled my latte in my lap when I read this on the front page of the Chronicle: “S.F. Mayor Proposes Fines for Unsorted Trash.”

The story began: “Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents’ trash to make sure pizza crusts aren’t mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom.” Isn’t that what homeless people do — rooting around in other people’s garbage? If Bay Area residents are caught failing to separate the plastic bottles from the newspapers, according to the newspaper story, they could face fines of up to $1,000.

“We don’t want to fine people,” the mayor is quoted saying reassuringly. “We want to change behavior.” Translation: Do exactly as we say and no one gets hurt. And San Francisco considers itself one of the most progressive cities in America!

When I was a kid, the environmentalists promoted their clean skies and antilittering agenda mostly through moral suasion — with pictures of an Indian under a smoggy sky with a tear rolling down his cheek or the owl who chanted on TV: “Give a hoot, don’t pollute.” Such messages made you feel guilty about callously throwing a candy bar wrapper on the ground or feeling indifferent toward car fumes. Back then I was a devoted recycler, but not for sentimental reasons. It was the financial incentive: You got up to a nickel for every bottle you brought back to the grocery store. So I would scavenge the landscape to find unredeemed bottles to buy baseball cards and candy.

But now the environmental movement has morphed into the most authoritarian philosophy in America. …

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WSJ Editors on how to make Russia pay.

Vladimir Putin proved last weekend that Russia’s army can push over Georgia’s army. In the past 48 hours, the West has begun to push back. If its leaders stay the course, they may yet turn Mr. Putin’s meager military success into a significant political defeat. …

Andrei Illarionov says Russia lost much in the exchange.

… Russia is now in nearly complete international isolation. Russia’s intervention in Georgia was backed only by Cuba. Neither Iran, nor Venezuela, nor Uzbekistan, nor even Belarus has said anything in support of Russia.

The political Group of Eight has de facto been transformed into a G7. The series of political defeats suffered by the Russian leadership, starting with the Rose Revolution in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and continuing through the NATO summit in Bucharest in April, has been extended by a new failure.

The main achievement of the Russian leadership — which the modern world could not (or did not want to) believe — is the resurrection of fear of the “Russian bear.” The world will long remember its fear and (albeit temporary) helplessness. …

Jonah Goldberg introduces us to an article in The Atlantic on the chaos in the Clinton campaign. The folks that burned through a quarter of a billion dollars.

… reporter Joshua Green picks through the internal e-mail viscera of the Clinton campaign and finds that the destructive nature of the Clintons is not always aimed at their enemies.

Indeed, shocking as this may be to people naive enough to believe that a woman with no executive experience, no security clearance, no significant successes under her belt, who was catapulted to presidential prominence solely because her husband treated her like a cautionary tale in a country-music song, was nonetheless a co-president for eight years: It turns out that the Bride of Clintonstein was an awful chief executive. Infected by her husband’s passive-aggressiveness, she stood paralyzed as the HMS Hillary took on more and more water, until even the string quartet on the deck was leaping for the flotation devices.

As Green pulls memo after memo from the great white’s carcass like so many Florida license plates, we discover that the Clintons knew long, long ago that they couldn’t beat Barack Obama to the nomination. But winning was secondary, carnage was king. You might even say of her decision to stay in the race: This was no polling accident. …

Craig Crawford comments on the article also.

… But giving so many campaign documents to the press? That suggests a certain hostility between candidate and underlings that should give pause to those who believed that Clinton was ready “on day one” to take command of the White House.

Beyond this mutiny, the behind-the-scenes paperwork shows how Clinton horribly mismanaged her own people. Postponing critical decisions until the roof caved in, and then forcing her staff to manage the damage control. Not a pretty picture for running the country.

Here is Part I from The Atlantic.

For all that has been written and said about Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the Democratic primaries, one issue still nags. Everybody knows what happened. But we still don’t have a clear picture of how it happened, or why.

The after-battle assessments in the major newspapers and newsweeklies generally agreed on the big picture: the campaign was not prepared for a lengthy fight; it had an insufficient delegate operation; it squandered vast sums of money; and the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia—one day a shots-’n’-beers brawler, the next a Hallmark Channel mom. Through it all, her staff feuded and bickered, while her husband distracted. But as a journalistic exercise, the “campaign obit” is inherently flawed, reflecting the viewpoints of those closest to the press rather than empirical truth.

How did things look on the inside, as they unraveled?

To find out, I approached a number of current and former Clinton staffers and outside consultants and asked them to share memos, e-mails, meeting minutes, diaries—anything that would offer a contemporaneous account. The result demonstrates that paranoid dysfunction breeds the impulse to hoard. Everything from major strategic plans to bitchy staff e-mail feuds was handed over. (See for yourself: much of it is posted online at www.theatlantic.com/clinton.)

Two things struck me right away. The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency. What follows is the inside account of how the campaign for the seemingly unstoppable Democratic nominee came into being, and then came apart.

Wondering what to make of Corsi’s Obama Nation? Peter Wehner has a cautionary note.

There has been a lot of attention given in the last few days to Jerome Corsi’s new book, The Obama Nation, which will debut at #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. It seems pretty clear, I think, that conservatives should not hitch their hopes to it.

Corsi himself, based on press accounts, is a leading advocate of the North American Union conspiracy. The NAU, for those who believe in it, is, according to a Boston Globe story, “a supranational organization that will soon fuse Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a single economic and political unit.” In an interview, Corsi said he believes in the existence of the NAU because, according to Corsi, President Bush was not securing the Southern border.

According to reports, Corsi has suggested that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lesbian, called John Kerry “anti-Christian, anti-American” and called Pope John Paul II “senile,” and said pedophilia “is OK with the Pope as long as it isn’t reported by the liberal press.”

As for the book: it seems to be riddled with factual errors–some relatively minor  … and some significant …

John Podhoretz watched Saddleback.

… Obama talked around most issues; perhaps most oddly, he said Clarence Thomas was the one Supreme Court justice he would not have selected because he hadn’t had enough experience (Thomas had been on the federal bench for a year and a half before he was nominated, which is about as long as Obama was in the Senate before he began seriously considering a run for the presidency). …

Roger Simon too.

And a Corner post from Mark Hemingway.

I don’t want to get to overheated about what occurred last night, but I do think McCain had a clear and decisive victory over Obama. It all comes down to something that Phil Bredesen, the Democratic governor of Tennessee recently said about Obama: “Instead of giving big speeches at big stadiums, he needs to give straight-up 10-word answers to people at Wal-Mart about how he would improve their lives.”

By that standard, McCain did extremely well and Obama did very poorly. McCain’s answers were direct, confident and, most importantly, serious. When asked about what leaders he would consult as president, he first suggested Gen. Petraeus, architect of the surge, who he correctly praised as one of America’s all-time great military leaders. By way of contrast, Obama suggested he would seek out the advice of a typical white person, er, his grandmother and his wife Michelle, who’s still trying to decide whether she’s proud of her country. …

Daily Mail piece says the Sahara was lush and green 5,000 years ago. Then the climate changed, without SUV’s.

Borowitz and Scrappleface have Olympic reports.

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Picli has stunning moon pic.

Victor Davis Hanson says it looks like a “Brave Old World.”

Russia invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at levels previously unimaginable. Gulf monarchies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing. Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch — all in a globalized world that tunes into the Olympics each night from Beijing.

“Citizens of the world” were supposed to share, in relative harmony, our new “Planet Earth,” which was to have followed from an interconnected system of free trade, instantaneous electronic communications, civilized diplomacy and shared consumer capitalism.

But was that ever quite true? …

David Warren looks at Russia.

Russia has long been a very pedagogical country. She likes to teach lessons to her neighbours. The smaller the neighbours, the more lessons they can expect to receive.

Through most of the 20th century, Russia was at her most expansive. Thanks to the Yalta settlements, and the miracle of nuclear weapons technology, the whole world became Russia’s “near abroad,” and various little countries of eastern and central Europe became her disciplined pupils. She taught us all lessons in dialectical materialism and scientific socialism, until she collapsed under the strain of it.

Vladimir Putin — the strongman of Russia, regardless of passing titles — is, in addition to being an old KGB officer thoroughly schooled in the ruthless barbarism of Communist power politics, also tsar from an older school of Russian imperialism. The notion that Russia — whose land area makes her by far the planet’s largest single state — could be threatened by a neighbour 1/245th her size, should not be confused with paranoia.

We need no more believe that, than believe that the large, fully-organized Russian military force that invaded Georgian sovereign territory over the weekend, while the world was watching the Olympics, was responding to a “provocation” by Georgia’s elected president, Mikheil Saakashvili. Unquestionably the latter has exercised poor practical judgment in dealing with the bear pawing at his little realm, but that is beside the point. …

Tony Blankley too.

Charles Krauthammer says we have ways of stopping Russia’s new Putintate.

… We are not without resources. There are a range of measures to be deployed if Russia does not live up to its cease-fire commitments:

1. Suspend the NATO-Russia Council established in 2002 to help bring Russia closer to the West. Make clear that dissolution will follow suspension. The council gives Russia a seat at the NATO table. Message: Invading neighboring democracies forfeits the seat.

2. Bar Russian entry to the World Trade Organization.

3. Dissolve the G-8. Putin’s dictatorship long made Russia’s presence in this group of industrial democracies a farce, but no one wanted to upset the bear by expelling it. No need to. The seven democracies simply withdraw. (And if Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, who has been sympathetic to Putin’s Georgia adventure, wants to stay, he can have an annual G-2 dinner with Putin.) Then immediately announce the reconstitution of the original G-7.

4. Announce a U.S.-European boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. To do otherwise would be obscene. Sochi is 15 miles from Abkhazia, the other Georgian province just invaded by Russia. The Games will become a riveting contest between the Russian, Belarusan and Jamaican bobsled teams.

All of these steps (except dissolution of the G-8, which should be irreversible) would be subject to reconsideration depending upon Russian action — most importantly and minimally, its withdrawal of troops from Georgia proper to South Ossetia and Abkhazia. …

Slate tells us why Georgia and Georgia have the same names.

The execrable Barbara Boxer goes after Tom Coburn, one of the few Senators who represent our interests. Debra Saunders has the story.

Karl Rove sees four key battleground states.

Presidential campaigns ultimately come down to who can win 270 Electoral College votes. With most states favoring one candidate or the other, this year’s contest could come down to a few battleground states.

Based on visits this past week with party leaders and old pros, it’s clear that Barack Obama will focus on Colorado and Virginia. Both have large concentrations of white, college-educated voters with whom Mr. Obama is popular. And both have seen Democrats surge recently. …

… If Mr. McCain lost Colorado and Virginia, he would likely have 264 electoral votes (assuming he carried the other states President Bush won in 2004). To win, he would have to pick up a state Democrats are counting on winning, such as Michigan. …

… Then there is Ohio. Ground zero in ’04, its 20 electoral votes will be hotly contested again this year. No Republican has won the White House without winning the Buckeye State. …

The Economist continues it’s series on bellwether states. This time North Carolina. Pickerhead thinks anyone who thinks Obama has a chance in NC must have scored some good dope.

THE past few years have been difficult for Mark Paylor, a pig, cattle and grain farmer. On a sunny summer morning in Greensboro he complains that rising petrol and feed prices have driven up his costs so far that it is impossible to compete with cheap imports. He is disgusted by trade agreements that let Mexico send America jalapeños riddled with salmonella, when American farmers have to play by stricter rules. Mr Paylor is a black and a Democrat, and he clearly wants change. He will not vote for John McCain. But he does not have much faith in Barack Obama, either: “He might put on a show to win, but he don’t understand.”

That comment suggests why Mr Obama faces an uphill climb in North Carolina. As swing states go, North Carolina is an unlikely prospect for the Democrats. It is a culturally conservative southern state that has voted for the Republican in every presidential election since 1976. In 2004 George Bush clobbered John Kerry here by a 12-point margin, even though Mr Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards, was North Carolina’s senator at the time. …

Walter Williams looks at what made some achieving black schools.

Most people know the tragic state of black education today. We know that billions of dollars are spent on federal government programs such as No Child Left Behind and the billions spent by state and local governments. If you were to ask an education “expert” to explain the tragedy, you’d get answers such as racial discrimination and underfunding.

My colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell has written volumes on black education and an article worth reading is one he wrote some years ago in The Public Interest (Spring 1976) and reprinted in his book “Education: Assumptions Versus History.”  …

Ever wonder why so many Olympic records are being broken? Slate has answers.

Can we please stop fussing over every new Olympic record?

A new record means that an athlete using today’s equipment outperformed an athlete using yesterday’s equipment. It’s not a fair fight.

In swimming alone, today’s advantages include:

1. LZR Racer suit. It reduces friction (compared with skin) and is structurally designed to compress and streamline the body for maximum speed. Estimated drag reduction: 5 percent to 10 percent. Estimated average improvement in top swimmers’ best times: 2 percent. Designed by NASA scientists and computers, among others. Cost: $500.

2. Pool depth. This is the deepest pool ever used in the Olympics. Depth disperses turbulence, reducing resistance. …

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Victor Davis Hanson says Russia’s move was six wins for them.

Lost amid all the controversies surrounding the Georgian tragedy is the sheer diabolic brilliance of the long-planned Russia invasion. Let us count the ways in which it is a win/win situation for Russia.

The Home Front
The long-suffering Russian people resent the loss of global influence and empire, but not necessarily the Soviet Union and its gulags that once ensured such stature. The invasion restores a sense of Russian nationalism and power to its populace without the stink of Stalinism, and is indeed cloaked as a sort of humanitarian intervention on behalf of beleaguered Ossetians.

There will be no Russian demonstrations about an “illegal war,” much less nonsense about “blood for oil,” but instead rejoicing at the payback of an uppity former province that felt its Western credentials somehow trumped Russian tanks. How ironic that the Western heartthrob, the old Marxist Mikhail Gorbachev, is now both lamenting Western encouragement of Georgian “aggression,” while simultaneously gloating over the return of Russian military daring. …

Can Hillary find a way to ruin Obama’s convention? “Yes she can,” says Maureen Dowd.

While Obama was spending three hours watching “The Dark Knight” five time zones away, and going to a fund-raiser featuring “Aloha attire” and Hawaiian pupus, Hillary was busy planning her convention.

You can almost hear her mind whirring: She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.

Now they’ve made Barry’s convention all about them — their dissatisfaction and revisionism and barely disguised desire to see him fail. Whatever insincere words of support the Clintons muster, their primal scream gets louder: He can’t win! He can’t close the deal! We told you so!

Hillary’s orchestrating a play within the play in Denver. Just as Hamlet used the device to show that his stepfather murdered his father, Hillary will try to show the Democrats they chose the wrong savior.

Her former aide Howard Wolfson fanned the divisive flames Monday on ABC News, arguing that Hillary would have beaten Obama in Iowa and become the nominee if John Edwards’s affair had come out last year — an assertion contradicted by a University of Iowa survey showing that far more Edwards supporters had Obama as their second choice.

Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama’s big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds of being the nominee in 2012. …

Contemplating the Clintons, Michael Goodwin says, “They’re baaaccckk!”

… Rested and ready, the Clinton crew is busy stirring the pot again.

Fresh from a nearly six-week layoff, Hillary and her team are picking up where they left off in June. Her pledges of unity and wholehearted acceptance of Barack Obama as the Democratic Party‘s nominee seem to be, well, halfhearted.

One day she’s on a YouTube video talking about the need for a “catharsis” at the Democratic convention, which sounds suspiciously like a demand to have her name put in nomination for a roll call. Then an interview surfaces of Bubba refusing to say Obama is ready to be President. And close aide Howard Wolfson rips the scab off the primary wounds by saying Hillary would have won if the media had exposed John Edwards‘ affair earlier.

This is definitely not the vacation Obama had in mind. From the headlines about Edwards’ sordid romps to the Russians’ brutal reminder of their Evil Empire days, his downtime before the convention begins Aug. 25 hasn’t been stress-free. …

Almost every disgusting thing our country has done with race has been the policy of Democrats. American Spectator on their record.

As Democrats prepare to nominate Senator Barack Obama to be the first black president, the Democratic National Committee and its chairman Howard Dean have whitewashed the party’s horrific and lengthy record of racism. The omission is in the section of the DNC website that describes the party’s history. The missing history raises the obvious question of whether the Democrats, unable or simply unwilling to put their party on record as taking direct responsibility for one of the worst racial crimes of the ages, will be able to run a campaign free of the racial animosities it has regularly brought both to American presidential campaigns and American political and social life in general.

What else to make of the official party history as presented by the DNC on its website? It is a history so sanitized of historical reality it makes Stalin look like historian David McCullough.

The DNC website section labeled “Party History,” linked here, is in fact scrubbed clean of the not-so-little dirty secret that fueled Democrats’ political successes for over a century and a half and made American life a hell on earth for black Americans. Literally, the DNC official history, which begins with the creation of the party in 1800, gets to the creation of the DNC itself in 1848 and then…poof!…the next sentence says: “As the 19th Century came to a close, the American electorate changed more and more rapidly.” It quickly heads into a riff on poor immigrants coming to America.

In a stroke, 52 years of Democrat history vanishes. Disappeared faster than the truth in the Clinton administration. Why would this be? Allow me to sketch in a few facts from those missing 52 years. For that matter, lets add in the facts from the party history before and after those 52 years, since they aren’t mentioned by the Democrats’ National Committee either.

So what’s missing? …

… * Last, but certainly not least, there is no reference to the fact that Birmingham, Alabama Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, who infamously unleashed dogs and fire hoses on civil rights protestors, was in fact — yes indeed — both a member of the Democratic National Committee and the Ku Klux Klan. …

Seattle Post -Intelligencer compares the offices of McCain and Obama. Obama fails the test. He is one of those sick people with a neat desk and office.

By their offices ye shall know them.

The personalities and personal histories of John McCain and Barack Obama are as evident in the artwork, books and mementoes in their Senate offices as in any words they may utter.

McCain’s office oozes comfy clutter and informality: random piles of books, a fortune-cookie message taped to the desk, an abundance of tchotchkes and bric-a-brac.

Obama’s office feels more like a gallery of modern art: precisely placed objects, sparsely adorned surfaces, clean lines, choreographed displays.

Both offices show their occupants’ sentimental streak: McCain has a picture of his favorite high school teacher, and a 1904 Navy register that lists his grandfather as a midshipman. Obama has a photo of the cliff in Hawaii where his mother’s ashes were scattered into the Pacific, and a tiger-beating stick from his grandmother’s village in Kenya.

A walking tour of the Senate offices of the two presidential candidates tells a tale of their occupants: …

Charles Murray says for most people, college is a waste of time. He proposes a series of certification exams.

… Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.

Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough — four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you’re a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school. …