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Editors at the LA Times have figured out what Pickings readers have known for years – ethanol directives, from our idiot Congress, are a disaster.

To the annals of market manias and regulatory follies, a new chapter is being added: The Great Ethanol Bubble of 2008. It is possible that someday a fuel made from a cheap, abundant, renewable crop may replace oil. But it won’t be food-based ethanol. It’s time not only to stop subsidizing the stuff but to revamp the chaotic, politicized and wasteful system of subsidies for alternative energy.

It is now well established that inefficient corn ethanol actually pumps out more total life-cycle carbon emissions than gasoline, and total emissions from ethanol coming even from the most advanced refineries offer at most a 25% improvement over gasoline in terms of greenhouse gases — at a staggering environmental and financial cost. …

Michael Barone posts on the London mayoral election.

Abby and Stephen Thernstrom, authors of America in Black and White, ought to know what a Black church looks like. they say the church of Jeremiah Wright is out of the ordinary.

In his recent incendiary remarks, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. claimed that criticism of his views is nothing less “an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition.” Can it really be that millions of black Americans regularly choose to listen to viciously anti-white and anti-American rants on Sunday mornings?

Happily, Chicago’s Trinity Church is an outlier in that regard. Most black churchgoers belong to congregations that are overwhelmingly African-American and are affiliated with one of the historically black religious denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) or the National Baptist Convention. Rev. Wright’s Trinity Church, on the other hand, is a predominantly black branch of a white denomination that is not part of “the African-American religious tradition.” The United Church of Christ (known until 1957 as the Congregational Church) has a little over a million members; a mere 4 percent of them are black. Fewer than 50,000 blacks in the entire nation worship at a UCC church.

In contrast, 98 percent of the National Baptist Convention’s 4 million members are African Americans. Add in black Methodists and Pentecostals, as well as other black Baptists, and the total comes to more than 14 million members of an organized, predominantly African-American church. These churches include a substantial majority of all black adults today. In terms of sheer demographic weight, they clearly represent the “African-American religious tradition”-as Rev. Wright’s branch of a overwhelmingly white denomination does not. …

Heather Mac Donald in City Journal on the truly destructive ideas of Rev. Wright.

The list of Afrocentric “educators” whom the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has invoked in his media escapades since Sunday is a disturbing reminder that academia’s follies can enter the public world in harmful ways. Now the pressing question is whether they have entered Barack Obama’s worldview as well.

Some in Mr. Wright’s crew of charlatans have already had their moments in the spotlight; others are less well known. They form part of the tragic academic project of justifying self-defeating underclass behavior as “authentically black.” That their ideas have ended up in the pulpit of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ and in Detroit’s Cobo Hall, where Mr. Wright spoke at the NAACP’s Freedom Fund dinner on Sunday, reminds us that bad ideas must be fought at their origins — and at every moment thereafter.

At the NAACP meeting, Mr. Wright proudly propounded the racist contention that blacks have inherently different “learning styles,” correctly citing as authority for this view Janice Hale of Wayne State University. Pursuing a Ph.D. by logging long hours in the dusty stacks of a library, Mr. Wright announced, is “white.” Blacks, by contrast, cannot sit still in class or learn from quiet study, and they have difficulty learning from “objects” — books, for example — but instead learn from “subjects,” such as rap lyrics on the radio. These differences are neurological, according to Ms. Hale and Mr. Wright: Whites use what Mr. Wright referred to as the “left-wing, logical and analytical” side of their brains, whereas blacks use their “right brain,” which is “creative and intuitive.” When he was of school age in Philadelphia following the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision, Mr. Wright said, his white teachers “freaked out because the black children did not stay in their place, over there, behind the desk.” Instead, the students “climbed up all over [the teachers], because they learned from a ‘subject,’ not an ‘object.’ ” How one learns from a teacher as “subject” by climbing on her, as opposed to learning from her as “object” — by listening to her words — is a mystery.

One would hope that Mr. Wright’s audience was offended by the idea that acting out in class is authentically black — it was impossible to tell what the reaction in the hall was to the assertion. But one thing is clear: Embracing the notion that blacks shouldn’t be expected to listen attentively to instruction is guaranteed to perpetuate into eternity the huge learning gap between blacks on the one hand, and whites and Asians on the other. …

Jonah Goldberg sets the record straight on one of Wright’s wrongs – Tuskegee.

‘Based on this Tuskegee experiment … I believe our government is capable of doing anything.” So said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright when asked if he stood by his claim that “the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

The infamous Tuskegee experiment is the Medusa’s head of black left-wing paranoia. Whenever someone laments the fact that anywhere from 10 percent to 33 percent of African Americans believe the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill blacks, someone will say, “That’s not so crazy when you consider what happened at Tuskegee.”

But it is crazy. And it’s dishonest.

Wright says the U.S. government “purposely infected African-American men with syphilis.” This is a lie, and no knowledgeable historian says otherwise. And yet, this untruth pops up routinely. In March, CNN commentator Roland Martin defended Wright, saying, “That actually did, indeed, happen.” On Fox News, the allegation has gone unchallenged on Hannity & Colmes and The O’Reilly Factor. Obery Hendricks, a prominent author and visiting scholar at Princeton University, told O’Reilly “I do know that the government injected syphilis into black men at the Tuskegee Institute. Now we know that the government is capable of doing those things.”

To which O’Reilly responded: “All right. All governments have done bad things in every country.”

True enough. And what the U.S. did at Tuskegee was indeed bad, very bad. But it didn’t do what these people say it did. …

Christopher Hitchens has an idea how Rev. Wright got attached to Obama’s life.

… What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright’s pews, and at Wright’s mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama’s part for Wright’s views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to “Minister” Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, “Keep my wife out of it,” or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse’s influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner. …

Gerard Baker of the Times, UK asks where the “depression” has gone.

Whatever happened to the Great Depression? Not the real one from 70 years ago, the lost decade of unimagined misery and Steinbeckian angst, the worst period in the history of modern capitalism. I mean the replay we were promised this year. The one we were told was the inevitable counterpart to the greatest financial crisis since a couple of medieval Italians first sat down on a Florentine bench and invented the word “bank”.

I don’t know about you but I feel a bit cheated. There we all were, led to believe by so many commentators that the sub-prime crisis was going to force the United States into a new era of dust bowls and breadlines, a slump that would call into question the very functioning of the capitalist system in the world’s largest economy. Carried away on the surging wave of their own economically dubious verbosity, the pundits even speculated that this unavoidable calamity might presage some 1930s-style global political cataclysm to match.

Well, it’s early days, to be fair, but so far the Great Depression 2008 is shaping up to be a Great Disappointment. Not so much The Grapes of Wrath as Raisins of Mild Inconvenience. Last week the Commerce Department reported that the US economy – battered by the credit crunch, pummelled by a housing market collapse and generally devastated by the wild stampede of animal spirits – actually grew in the first three months of the year. …

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We open with good news. David Warren is back.

‘Write each column as if it were your last. And sooner or later it will be,” an editor once explained. I recall this sage advice, upon returning to my day job, after annual leave. And with my first deadline falling smack on my 55th birthday. (That is, yesterday. If you haven’t sent a card, it is already too late.) Five weeks of staying as far from the news as I could contrive to get. Some of this time spent fighting curiosity.

But most of it caring for ancient parents, now shifted to a nursing home from their need for constant medical supervision. This is a common experience among baby boomers, as my much younger, current editor explains: no call for “empathy” there. And my many contemporaries, whose parents are neither dead nor disowned, may well have learned that no empathy is appropriate. For the experience, though painful, is full of reward.

Indeed, this is among the forgotten truths of what I call, for shorthand, “post-modernity” – aka “the mall culture” or “the age of abortion” – that all human reward is founded in pain. That all true joy is founded in duty; and freedom in duty, too. That, in the words of my priest, “Principles are something you pay for, not something you collect on.”

And let me add, since we are dealing in old saws this morning, that one cannot begin to appreciate the glory and beauty and preciousness of a human life, until one has grasped how tenuous and transient it is. …

More good news. Global warming is not back. Chris Booker in the Telegraph, UK has the fun details.

Weekly Standard with the story of the latest scandal from UN “peacekeepers.” You’ll be pleased to learn, though, the Indians and Paks have been able to make common cause in this outrage.

IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE the United Nations’ reputation as an international peacekeeping organization could sink any lower, but it just has. The BBC’s flagship investigative news program, Panorama, revealed this week that the UN’s biggest peacekeeping mission, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has been blighted by yet another scandal. The 18-month BBC study into the conduct of the 17,000 strong, $1.1 billion a year operation (known as MONUC) found that UN troops have been involved in arming militia groups and smuggling gold and ivory. This revelation comes just three years after it emerged that UN peacekeepers had perpetrated the widespread abuse of refugees in the war-torn country.

The allegations are hugely embarrassing for the United Nations, and involve peacekeeping contingents from two of the UN’s biggest contributing nations. According to the BBC investigation, Indian peacekeepers (who make up a quarter of the MONUC mission) “had direct dealings with the militia responsible for the Rwandan genocide” in eastern Congo. The BBC states that “the Indians traded gold, bought drugs from the militias and flew a UN helicopter into the Virunga National park, where they exchanged ammunition for ivory.” The BBC also reports that Pakistani peacekeepers, the second largest group in MONUC, “were involved in the illegal trade in gold with the FNI militia, providing them with weapons to guard the perimeter of the mines” in the eastern town of Mongbwalu. …

Newsweek’s Evan Thomas notes the left’s growing regard for Reagan.

The outcome of this November’s election may hinge on a single question: which presidential candidate will prevail among the “Reagan Democrats”? Those traditionally Democratic voters made history—and a place in the political lexicon—in 1980 when they bolted their party’s disarrayed ranks to swing the polls in Ronald Reagan’s favor. Until recently, however, few liberal-leaning historians took a respectful look at the Reagan phenomenon. That’s finally changing, with the publication of Sean Wilentz’s new “The Age of Reagan,” even as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—and John McCain—seek the support of that crucial bloc. NEWSWEEK’s Evan Thomas moderated a conversation about the Gipper between Wilentz, a professed liberal, and NEWSWEEK’s George F. Will, a longtime Reagan admirer.

THOMAS: Sean, why have you taken a look at Reagan, and have other historians started to take another look at Reagan?
WILENTZ: It’s interesting. It’s no secret that intellectuals, generally being liberals, didn’t think much of Ronald Reagan at the time. Unlike Roosevelt, who got covered right away—as soon as he died there were books out about [him]—it took people a long time to catch up with Ronald Reagan. But I think that now they can no longer ignore him. His impact on the world and country, whether you like it or not, was so important that to ignore him is to ignore an entirety of American politics.

THOMAS: And why did it take so long?
WILENTZ: People had to overcome their own passions, their own dislikes. Some people had to grow up. Some people, it was a matter of all their ideas ripening. Ronald Reagan was difficult to read. His own official biographer couldn’t make head or tail out of Ronald Reagan, and he had more access than most. Look, he was a conservative in a conservative age. This is not, normally, what is the stuff of heroic history. It just doesn’t fit the mold in the way that Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln does. It’s just different. …

Shorts from National Review.

Larry Kudlow says when it comes to the economy, W knows.

President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country.

About a month ago he told reporters, “We’re not in a recession, we’re in a slowdown.” At a White House news conference a few weeks later, despite the fact that reporters pressed him to use the “R” word, Mr. Bush refused. And on Friday, after the most recent jobs report — which produced a much-smaller-than-expected decline in corporate payrolls, a huge 362,000 increase in the more entrepreneurial household survey (the best gain in five months), and a historically low 5 percent unemployment rate (4.95 percent, to be precise) — the president told reporters: “This economy is going to come on. I’m confident it will.”

We’re in the midst of the most widely predicted and heralded recession in history. Problem is, so far it’s a non-recession recession. Score one for President Bush. In an election year, it could be a big one.

First-quarter GDP growth came in at 0.6 percent. It wasn’t the widely predicted decline, and economists expect that number to be revised up. GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2007 was also up slightly, while the prior two quarters averaged over 4 percent growth.

My pal Jimmy Pethokoukis quotes Stanford professor Robert Hall, who heads the recession-dating committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research: “It seems unlikely that we would ever declare a peak-date when real GDP continued to rise.”

Interesting — isn’t it? — just how durable and resilient our low-tax, free-market, capitalist economy truly is. Hit by soaring food and energy prices, a bad housing downturn, and a Wall Street credit crunch, the economy continues to expand, albeit slowly. …

Bloomberg News says MIT prof has figured out why China has been able to grow so fast. Maybe.

Humor section starts with a post from the New Editor. Seems Bill Clinton was lying about his record. Bill lie? Who knew?

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Power Line warns us polar bears are the left’s new stalking horse.

That innocent-looking polar bear poses a huge threat to the American economy. It’s not his fault, of course. Liberals are always scheming to get control of the economy, and their latest dodge takes advantage of the myth that “global warming” threatens the bears’ habitat. The Left is now seeking to have the polar bear certified as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. Sounds harmless, you say? Hugh Hewitt–as far as I know, the only person so far to blow the whistle on the liberals’ scam–explains the legal consequences: …

Two of our favorites decided to revisit the “great” speech Obama gave six weeks ago. Mark Steyn is first.

Four score and seven years ago … No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR’s First Inaugural, or JFK’s religion speech, or (if, like Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, you find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860.

And, of course, the senator’s speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates’ Apology, etc.: It’s history. He said, apropos the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that “I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.” But last week Obama did disown him. So, great-speech-wise, it’s a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on.

It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be “required reading in classrooms,” said Bob Herbert in the New York Times; it was “extraordinary” and “rhetorical magic,” said Joe Klein in Time – which gets closer to the truth: As with most “magic,” it was merely a trick of redirection.

Obama appeared to have made Jeremiah Wright vanish into thin air, but it turned out he was just under the heavily draped table waiting to pop up again. The speech was designed to take a very specific problem – the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years – and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Sen. Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes? …

… “Do you personally feel that the reverend betrayed your husband?” asked Meredith Vieira on “The Today Show.”

“You know what I think, Meredith?” replied Michelle Obama. “We’ve got to move forward. You know, this conversation doesn’t help my kids.”

Hang on. “My” kids? You’re supposed to say “It’s about the future of all our children,” not “It’s about the future of my children” – whose parents happen to have a base salary of half a million bucks a year. But even this bungled cliché nicely captures the campaign’s self-absorption: Talking about Obama’s pastor is a distraction from talking about Obama’s kids.

By the way, the best response to Michelle’s “this conversation doesn’t help my kids” would be: “But entrusting their religious upbringing to Jeremiah Wright does?” Ah, but, happily, Meredith Vieira isn’t that kind of interviewer. …

Then Charles Krauthammer.

… Obama’s Philadelphia oration was an exercise in contextualization. In one particularly egregious play on white guilt, Obama had the audacity to suggest that whites should be ashamed that they were ever surprised by Wright’s remarks: “The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning.”

That was then. On Tuesday, Obama declared that he himself was surprised at Wright’s outrages. But hadn’t Obama told us that surprise about Wright is a result of white ignorance of black churches brought on by America’s history of segregated services? How then to explain Obama’s own presumed ignorance? Surely he too was not sitting in those segregated white churches on those fateful Sundays when he conveniently missed all of Wright’s racist rants.

Obama’s turning surprise about Wright into something to be counted against whites– one of the more clever devices in that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud in Philadelphia — now stands discredited by Obama’s own admission of surprise. But Obama’s liberal acolytes are not daunted. They were taken in by the first great statement on race: the Annunciation, the Chosen One comes to heal us in Philly. They now are taken in by the second: the Renunciation. …

… Obama’s newest attempt to save himself after Wright’s latest poisonous performance is now declared the new final word on the subject. Therefore, any future ads linking Obama and Wright are preemptively declared out of bounds, illegitimate, indeed “race-baiting” (a New York Times editorial, April 30).

On what grounds? This 20-year association with Wright calls into question everything about Obama: his truthfulness in his serially adjusted stories of what he knew and when he knew it; his judgment in choosing as his mentor, pastor and great friend a man he just now realizes is a purveyor of racial hatred; and the central premise of his campaign, that he is the bringer of a “new politics,” rising above the old Washington ways of expediency. It’s hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient than renouncing Wright when his show, once done from the press club instead of the pulpit, could no longer be “contextualized” as something whites could not understand and only Obama could explain in all its complexity.

Turns out the Wright show was not that complex after all. Everyone understands it now. Even Obama.

Then more of our favorites have Obama observations. First Victor Davis Hanson.

… Bottom line: unless Obama was caught on tape nodding as Wright screamed his obscenities at the United States, or an angry and spiteful Wright produces some letter, e-mail, etc. that reveals a kindred soul in Obama, or Michelle gives another speech “from the heart” about how hard she has struggled and how in return she has had no pride in this country, or there is another off-the-cuff, but recorded sneer at the white working class (50/50 chance on all four counts), I think he will weather the current storm and get the nomination. Obama evokes pure emotion and raw politics now, and logic, honesty, and accountability have little to do with his nomination bid.

Roger L. Simon.

Al Sharpton criticizing Barack Obama for urging non-violence in the Sean Bell verdict protest puts into dramatic relief the major racial conflict of our time – and it is inside the African-American community, not outside. Outdated racial profiteers like Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and now the formerly obscure Reverend Jeremiah Wright are clinging for dear life to their reactionary views that have impeded progress in their own community for years. …

Ed Morrissey.

Christopher Hitchens in his blog at the Daily Mirror.

If it had been held last Friday, it might well have gone the other way, or a different way. But something about the Obama magic seems somehow to have curdled, or congealed into what some analysts call “buyer’s remorse”. In a few short days, the world’s most charismatic candidate went straight from being able to do nothing wrong to being able to do very little right. ..

Norman Borlaug has in mind improved ways to feed Africa’s poor.

Rapidly increasing world food prices have already led to political upheaval in poor countries. The crisis threatens to tear apart fragile states and become a humanitarian calamity unless countries get their agricultural systems moving.

Now, with conference committee negotiations over the final shape of the Farm Bill at a critical stage, Congress needs to change the foreign food-aid program and help avert this calamity. The Bush administration has urged, rightly, that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) be allowed to buy food locally, particularly in Africa, instead of only American-grown food. …

Ilya Somin of Volokh reminds us of “Victims of Communism Day.”

Today is May Day, the primary holiday of communist parties and regimes. Last year, I put forward my proposal to transform May Day into Victims of Communism Day, in honor of the 100 million or more people murdered by communist regimes in the USSR, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere. …

Jim Taranto shows us a typical day slanting the news at AP, and Obama’s futile complaints to a Federal Election Commission that can’t act in part because he has put a hold on appointees.

On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, upheld Indiana’s requirement that voters present photo identification before casting ballots. Yesterday the Associated Press published a dispatch titled “Advocates: Voter ID Ruling May Disenfranchise US Voters.”

It ran 15 paragraphs, required two reporters (Deborah Hastings got the byline; David Lieb “contributed”), and was totally one-sided, offering not a single argument in favor of voter ID requirements. It’s possible that the AP did another dispatch titled “Advocates: Voter ID Ruling Helps Prevent Fraud,” or some such, but we couldn’t find it in a Factiva search. …

Business Week interviews Google’s CEO to learn about fostering innovation.

Tom Smith in Right Coast reviews Amazon’s Kindle electronic book.

I’m in love, and it’s with a gadget.  Contrary to what some of you may think, I do not frequently fall in love with gadgets or gear.  I am always looking for love there, true, but I rarely find it.  I like iPods, sure, but they didn’t change my life.  XM radio is a big improvement over FM, but it’s still hard to find anything you actually want to listen to.  My seven station weight machine in the garage was a bust. My smartwatch hooked up to some useless Microsoft network was like an ill considered fling with a crazy chick, not that I’ve ever done that.  And so on.  But this little beauty is different.

For those of you who still dial into AOL, a Kindle is Amazon’s new e-book reader gizmo, a “wireless reading device.”  With it you can download as many books as you could conceivably want to carry around with you from a library of 100,000 or so books in Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. …

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Before Rev. Wright’s performances last weekend, there were many reasons to probe the character of Barack Obama. Stuart Taylor, an early fan, mentioned them in the National Journal

“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Many who have been disposed to admire Obama, including me, see these matters as raising troublesome questions about his judgment and character. Many of us have come to wonder whether the purportedly post-ideological Obama is so close to his party’s business-bashing, pacifistic left wing as to skew his judgment on matters ranging from the capital-gains tax to Iraq. Perhaps our suspicions are mistaken. But Obama has hardly laid them to rest.

So said British statesman Edmund Burke in his famous 1774 speech to the electors of Bristol. Similarly, James Madison wrote in Federalist 57 that voters should choose the candidates “who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.”

Wise counsel, albeit forlorn in today’s campaign world in which most people—especially primary voters—back the candidates who are most shameless in sacrificing their judgment to the voters’ opinions.

Burke and Madison might well have approved the judgment-focused questions that pro-Obama journalists have so furiously excoriated moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, of ABC News, for asking at the April 16 debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Washington Post’s Tom Shales accused the two of “shoddy, despicable performances.” The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg said that they had committed “something akin to a federal crime.” The New York Times’s David Carr called it a “disgusting spectacle.”

Such commentators were especially livid that for much of the first half of the two-hour debate the moderators bored in on Obama’s gaffe about “bitter” laid-off small-towners who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them”; questioned his closeness to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright through many years of Wright’s anti-American, white-bashing rants; and brought up his more glancing connection to William Ayers, a University of Illinois professor who was a Weather Underground leader and (by his own admission) bomber almost 40 years ago.

Jennifer Rubin reads between the lines of a NY Times article.

The New York Times today does Barack Obama no favors on the ongoing Reverend Wright fiasco. First, it seems to confirm that a sense of personal pique rather than any “new information” on Wright caused Obama to finally denounce his former pastor. Recounting how Obama read the National Press Club remarks on his blackberry, the Times explains:

As Mr. Obama told close friends after watching the replay, he felt dumbfounded, even betrayed, particularly by Mr. Wright’s implication that Mr. Obama was being hypocritical. He could not tolerate that.

You see, any suggestion that Obama had tolerated, solicited and embraced Wright for political aims and then dumped him when whites got wind of Wright’s hateful radicalism was intolerable. But wasn’t it also true? There are plenty of facts suggesting that this is exactly what occurred. The Times provides additional evidence. …

John Fund says the polls are catching up to Obama’s pastor disaster.

A new Fox News poll may provide some evidence that the Rev. Wright affair is damaging the campaign of Barack Obama.

The poll shows that Mr. Obama’s favorable ratings have declined among Democrats to a point where Hillary Clinton now has higher net positive ratings. …

A target of Weathermen bombs has his say in the NY Daily News.

In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of Feb. 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car.

I still recall, as though it were a dream, thinking that someone was lifting and dropping my bed as the explosions jolted me awake, and I remember my mother pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: Free the Panther 21; The Viet Cong have won; Kill the pigs. …

Gabor Steingart, who writes for Der Spiegel always has interesting insights on the election.

The issue of race has emerged as the key Democratic divide in this year’s primary season. Despite his waning support amongst white voters, though, the superdelegates appear to have no other choice but to vote for Barack Obama. A vote against him could have serious consequences.

There is a phenomenon in opinion research called the Bradley effect, named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. When Bradley, who was black, ran to become governor of California in 1982, he was the frontrunner in all opinion polls until the very end of the campaign. But he lost on election day.

Since then, the term has been used to denote a serious shift in voter preferences caused by racial prejudice against a candidate — prejudice that voters would never admit openly, but then express in all secrecy in the voting booth.

A more intense version of the Bradley effect has taken shape within the Democratic Party in 2008. “There is no white America,” Barack Obama has said. “There is no black America. There is no Latino America. There is no Asian America. There is just the United States of America.” Many prominent politicians of all skin colors, from New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson to Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy to Jesse Jackson, seem to agree with him. But the public euphoria is increasingly bumping up against the resistance of ordinary Democratic voters.

Within the Democratic Party, which likes to call itself the “party of the people,” cheering on and voting for a candidate appear to be two very different things. Voters who say in public that they are inspired are sometimes quick to change their minds and settle scores in the election booth. In fact, perhaps the Bradley effect should be renamed the Obama effect. …

Sam Thernstrom, who should know, doesn’t think much of Bush’s new climate policy.

… Speaking with only nine months left in office, knowing full well that the critical decisions on both domestic and international climate policy will be made in 2009 and 2010 by someone named either McCain or Obama, President Bush seemed to believe he could still influence the climate debate by offering 18 minutes of general observations about his aspirations for climate policy. What did he say? The president opened with this observation.

Climate change involves complicated science and generates vigorous debate. Many are concerned about the effect of climate change on our environment. Many are concerned about the effect of climate change policies on our economy. I share these concerns, and I believe they can be sensibly reconciled.

After seven years of being tagged — fairly or not, we hardly know — a skeptic on the science behind warming, the president now tells us that he “shares the concerns” of those who believe warming is having an effect on the environment. This platitude should please no one. If the president believes that the science behind warming justifies action, he could have made real news explaining that belief and the evidence that supports it. With Senator McCain’s nomination secured, we now know for certain that the next president will not question the science behind warming. This was Bush’s chance either to anticipate — and therefore potentially influence — his successor’s position on climate science, or to oppose it. His vague expression of shared “concern” did neither.

Far more problematic is the concluding sentence of the president’s opening paragraph, in which he assured us that he believes the tension between concerns over the environment and the economy can be “sensibly reconciled.” This is, of course, the core question of climate policy. …

On March 6th, Pickings noted a book soon to be released on the 12 worst decisions by the Supreme Court. Amity Shlaes reviews “The Dirty Dozen” by Bob Levy and Chip Mellor.

… “The Dirty Dozen” tells us how misguided Supreme Court decisions have helped us to arrive at that consensus and others. Robert A. Levy and William Mellor, both constitutional lawyers, examine 12 notorious court opinions affecting everything from wartime internments and medical-school admissions to tax policy and the rights of the homebuyers. The starting point for their survey is 1933, their reasonable assumption being that modern American law began with the New Deal. They went about compiling their list by asking other lawyers and scholars to name the cases they considered to be the most damaging to our constitutional rights.

Some of the dirty dozen are predictable. One is Korematsu v. United States, which produced the 1944 opinion sanctioning the wartime internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans. Another infamous case is Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 ruling that supported the University of Michigan law school’s affirmative-action policies and, as result, endorsed the raising of obstacles to university admission for those who happen not to fall into favored groups.

It is useful, if unsettling, to be reminded of such examples of Supreme Court overreaching. “The Dirty Dozen” adds the most value with its discussion of the court’s astounding subordination of property rights over the past three quarters of a century. By now many of us have heard of Kelo v. City of New London, the 2005 eminent-domain case. Mr. Mellor’s own think tank, the Institute of Justice, represented Susette Kelo, the woman from New London, Conn., who was forced out of her gabled Victorian house by the city so that condos and an office building might be built there. …

Of course, we know government is clueless. USA Today proves that by reporting a hiring binge in all levels of government. We can only hope they don’t do anything.

Federal, state and local governments are hiring new workers at the fastest pace in six years, helping offset job losses in the private sector.

Governments added 76,800 jobs in the first three months of 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

That’s the biggest jump in first-quarter hiring since a boom in 2002 that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. By contrast, private companies collectively shed 286,000 workers in the first three months of 2008. That job loss has led many economists to declare the country is in a recession. …

Have we been lost for 40 years in an energy wilderness? Dilbert says the Israelis will lead us out.

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In his WSJ column, Karl Rove tells us things we don’t know about John McCain.

It came to me while I was having dinner with Doris Day. No, not that Doris Day. The Doris Day who is married to Col. Bud Day, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, fighter pilot, Vietnam POW and roommate of John McCain at the Hanoi Hilton.

As we ate near the Days’ home in Florida recently, I heard things about Sen. McCain that were deeply moving and politically troubling. Moving because they told me things about him the American people need to know. And troubling because it is clear that Mr. McCain is one of the most private individuals to run for president in history.

When it comes to choosing a president, the American people want to know more about a candidate than policy positions. They want to know about character, the values ingrained in his heart. For Mr. McCain, that means they will want to know more about him personally than he has been willing to reveal.

Mr. Day relayed to me one of the stories Americans should hear. It involves what happened to him after escaping from a North Vietnamese prison during the war. When he was recaptured, a Vietnamese captor broke his arm and said, “I told you I would make you a cripple.”

The break was designed to shatter Mr. Day’s will. He had survived in prison on the hope that one day he would return to the United States and be able to fly again. To kill that hope, the Vietnamese left part of a bone sticking out of his arm, and put him in a misshapen cast. This was done so that the arm would heal at “a goofy angle,” as Mr. Day explained. Had it done so, he never would have flown again.

But it didn’t heal that way because of John McCain. Risking severe punishment, Messrs. McCain and Day collected pieces of bamboo in the prison courtyard to use as a splint. Mr. McCain put Mr. Day on the floor of their cell and, using his foot, jerked the broken bone into place. Then, using strips from the bandage on his own wounded leg and the bamboo, he put Mr. Day’s splint in place. …

George Will thinks it’s good we’re getting to know Jeremiah Wright.

Because John McCain and other legislators worry that they are easily corrupted, there are legal limits to the monetary contributions that anyone can make to political candidates. There are, however, no limits to the rhetorical contributions that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright can make to McCain’s campaign.

Because Wright is a gift determined to keep on giving, this question arises: Can persons opposed to Barack Obama‘s candidacy justly make use of Wright’s invariably interesting interventions in the campaign? The answer is: Certainly, because Wright’s paranoias tell us something — exactly what remains to be explored — about his 20-year parishioner. …

Robert Tracinski thinks Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost.

Over the weekend, the Obama campaign suffered a further disaster: the Reverend Jeremiah Wright finally seized his 15 minutes of fame.

Lured by the irresistible glow of the spotlight, the reverend launched a media blitz that took him from a softball interview with Bill Moyers on Friday, to a speech to a Detroit meeting of the NAACP on Sunday, to a press conference at the National Press Club on Monday morning.

Barack Obama is now declaring himself shocked and disappointed at Wright’s unrepentantly racist and anti-American views–but Obama can no longer plausibly claim innocence in this matter, because he is the one who has encouraged Wright by trying to excuse and explain his views. …

Thomas Sowell with a three part series on the economics of college.

A front-page headline in the New York Times captures much of the economic confusion of our time: “Fewer Options Open to Pay for Costs of College.”

The whole article is about the increased costs of college, the difficulties parents have in paying those costs, and the difficulties that both students and parents have in trying to borrow the money needed when their current incomes will not cover college costs.

All that is fine for a purely “human interest” story. But making economic policies on the basis of human interest stories — which is what politicians increasingly do, especially in election years — has a big down side for those people who do not happen to be in the categories chosen to write human interest stories about.

The general thrust of human interest stories about people with economic problems, whether they are college students or people faced with mortgage foreclosures, is that the government ought to come to their rescue, presumably because the government has so much money and these individuals have so little.

Like most “deep pockets,” however, the government’s deep pockets come from vast numbers of people with much shallower pockets. In many cases, the average taxpayer has lower income than the people on whom the government lavishes its financial favors …

Why does college cost so much?

There are two basic reasons. The first is that people will pay what the colleges charge. The second is that there is little incentive for colleges to reduce the tuition they charge.

Those who want the government to provide subsidies to help meet the high cost of college seem not to consider whether government subsidies might have contributed to the high cost of college in the first place.

In any kind of economic transaction, it seldom makes sense to charge prices so high that very few people can afford to pay them. But, with the government ready to step in and help whenever tuition is “unaffordable,” why not charge more than the traffic will bear and bring in Uncle Sam to make up the difference?

The president of a small college once told me that, if he charged tuition that was affordable, even an institution the size of his would lose millions of dollars of government money every year.

In a normal market situation, each competing enterprise has an incentive to lower prices if that would attract business away from competitors and increase its profits.

Unfortunately, the academic world is not a normal market situation. …

John Stossel columns on the conceit of the regulators. His subject is the recent airliner safety scare. No surprise government fools were behind those problems.

… The latest “crisis” was launched when the FAA fined Southwest Airlines, which has an excellent safety record, $10.2 million for missing inspection deadlines. When Rep. Oberstar criticized the FAA for being too close to the airlines, the agency sprung into overreaction. “An industry-wide ‘audit’ commenced, and FAA inspectors set about finding something — anything — to show Mr. Oberstar and other Congressional overseers that the agency was up to the job of enforcing federal maintenance requirements to the letter,” said The Wall Street Journal (http://tinyurl.com/6yfm4x).

One result was the cancellation of 3,300 American Airlines flights and the stranding of 250,000 passengers over several days while 300 MD-80s were grounded so their wiring could be inspected.

American Airlines then did something rare and even heroic. It criticized the agency that regulates it for suddenly changing inspection procedures in ways that have little to do with safety. “We don’t know what the rules are,” said an American technical crew chief for avionics. Some rules contradict each other, the airline said.

The FAA disputes American’s claims, but The New York Times reports that “John Goglia, a maintenance expert and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said that the rules had, in fact, changed. … The differences in American’s work, he said, were so small that ‘those airplanes could have flown for the rest of their careers and those wires would not have been a problem.’”  …

Walter Williams likes some smugglers.

While it’s politically popular to impose confiscatory taxes on America’s 40 million tobacco smokers, there are a number of consequences one might consider, but let’s start out with a quiz. If a carton of cigarettes sells for $160 in New York City, and $35 in North Carolina, what do you predict will happen? If you answered tons of cigarettes will be going up I-95 from North Carolina to New York City, go to the head of the class.

Smuggling cigarettes is illegal; so the next quiz question is: Who is most likely to engage in cigarette smuggling? It’s a mixed answer, but for the most part, organized smugglers will be people with a high disregard for the law. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has found that Russian, Armenian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Middle Eastern (mainly Pakistani, Lebanese, and Syrian) organized crime groups are highly involved in the trafficking of contraband and counterfeit cigarettes. What’s worse is the ATF found that some of these groups use the money to provide material financial assistance to terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

Some smugglers are good people who differ little from the founders of our nation such as John Hancock, whose flamboyant signature graces our Declaration of Independence. The British had levied confiscatory taxes on molasses, and John Hancock smuggled an estimated 1.5 million gallons a year. His smuggling practices financed much of the resistance to British authority — so much so that the joke of the time was that “Sam Adams writes the letters (to newspapers) and John Hancock pays the postage.” Like Hancock, some of today’s cigarette smugglers are providing a service to their fellow man caught in the grip of confiscatory taxation. …

Robert Samuelson says, want more oil, “start drilling.”

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Editors at the WSJ call attention to the abuse potential in the Clinton Foundation.

Transparency is a popular word in this presidential election, with all three candidates finally having released their tax returns. Yet the public still hasn’t seen the records of an institution with some of the biggest potential for special-interest mischief: The William J. Clinton Foundation.

Bill Clinton established that body in 1997 while still President. It has since raised half-a-billion dollars, which has been spent on Mr. Clinton’s presidential library in Arkansas and global philanthropic initiatives. The mystery remains its donors, and whether these contributors might one day seek to call in their chits with a President Hillary Clinton.

That’s no small matter given the former first couple’s history. Yet Mr. Clinton says he won’t violate the “privacy” of donors by disclosing their names, even if his wife wins the Oval Office. What is already in the public record should make that secrecy untenable, however:

Chicago bankruptcy lawyer William Brandt Jr. pledged $1 million for the Clinton library in May 1999, at the same time the Justice Department was investigating whether he’d lied about a Clinton fundraising event. The Clinton DOJ cleared him a few months later.

Loral Space and Communications then-CEO, Bernard Schwartz, committed to $1 million in 2000, at the same time the firm was being investigated for improperly sending technology to China. Loral agreed to a $14 million fine during the Bush Administration.

A major investor in cellular firm NextWave – Bay Harbour Management – pledged $1 million in 1999, when NextWave was waiting to see if the Clinton FCC would allow it to keep its cellular licenses. NextWave didn’t immediately get its licenses, and Bay Harbour never made good on its pledge. …

Marty Peretz thinks Bill Clinton is showing his real colors.

So now Bill Clinton wants us to think that, when he compared Barack Obama’s victory in the South Carolina primary this year to to Jesse Jackson’s win in the same race two decades ago, he was actually complimenting his wife’s opponent rather than deriding him. What’s more, said our Pinocchio president, Jackson himself took the likening as tribute.  Well, why wouldn’t he?

Jackson has been washed up for years.  He has not had real work, perhaps for decades, and does no real work now, sort of like Clinton himself.  You can imagine JJ going from city to city, always with an entourage of more than anyone in his position needs, searching for racist incidents that he can ambulance-chase into an outrage.  But he does have a steady income largely through PUSH (whatever tangible has PUSH ever accomplished?), financed by big corporations and financial institutions, some guilty of racial misbehavior, some not, that would rather pay Jackson off than risk nasty picket lines or even boycotts against them.  When hip-hop came along Jackson seemed like the people’s poet.  Now, almost everyone grasps that he’s simply a wise-ass charlatan. …

Jim Taranto had the best analysis of the Jackson comparison. This from Jan. 31 Pickings.

… Jesse Jackson is not a racial healer but an ambulance chaser. He has made his career exploiting black insecurity and white guilt, seizing on racial disputes and misunderstandings to profit financially and enhance his own status. If racial disharmony disappeared tomorrow, Jackson would be out of a job.

In this sense–the sense that is most important to Jackson’s political identity–Obama is Jackson’s opposite. He has emerged as a national political figure, and a plausible prospective president, by calling for unity, not by seeking to take advantage of division.

When Mr. Clinton likens Obama to Jackson, the clear message to white voters is that a black candidate cannot be better than Jackson, cannot be relied upon to put the interests of the country above those of his race or himself. This is a truly bigoted notion–and it is one that Jackson cannot protest, for to protest it would be to acknowledge the truth about himself.

When speaking of Bill Clinton, Rep Jim Clyburn is ready to call a spade, a spade.

… In an interview with The New York Times late Thursday, Mr. Clyburn said Mr. Clinton’s conduct in this campaign had caused what might be an irreparable breach between Mr. Clinton and an African-American constituency that once revered him. “When he was going through his impeachment problems, it was the black community that bellied up to the bar,” Mr. Clyburn said. “I think black folks feel strongly that that this is a strange way for President Clinton to show his appreciation.”

Mr. Clyburn added that there appeared to be an almost “unanimous” view among African-Americans that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were “committed to doing everything they possibly can to damage Obama to a point that he could never win.” …

Sarah Baxter explains the Dem race to the readers of the London Times.

Given Hillary’s new math, John Fund thinks she might try to sue her way to the nomination. Perhaps she’s been studying at the feet of Al Gore.

Speaking of suing your way to high office, Ann Althouse has a link to tonight’s 60 Minutes interview with Scalia.

“It was Al Gore who made it a judicial question…. We didn’t go looking for trouble. It was he who said, ‘I want this to be decided by the courts.’”

“What are we supposed to say — ‘Not important enough?’

Here’s a CBS link to that interview.

… “I say nonsense,” Scalia responds to Stahl’s observation that people say the Supreme Court’s decision in Gore v. Bush was based on politics and not justice. “Get over it. It’s so old by now. The principal issue in the case, whether the scheme that the Florida Supreme Court had put together violated the federal Constitution, that wasn’t even close. The vote was seven to two,” he says, referring to the Supreme Court’s decision that the Supreme Court of Florida’s method for recounting ballots was unconstitutional. …

Speaking of tonight’s TV, a Pickings reader alerts us to a surprising series starting on PBS.

Starting on PBS this Sunday, April 27th, from 9pm to 11pm, is the documentary on the USS Nimitz.

It’s airing for 5 days in a row, through May 1st, for two hours each day, for a total of 10 hours.

Making the film CARRIER required 17 filmmakers to take a six-month journey aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz during its deployment to the Gulf in support of the Iraq War. They disembarked from Coronado, California on May 7, 2005 and returned there November 8, 2005 with stops at Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, Guam, Kuala Lumpur, Bahrain and Perth, Australia.

http://www.pbs.org/weta/carrier/

Even though it airs on PBS, the documentary was made during the time when a conservative, Ken Tomlinson (forced out since then), was at the helm (pun intended). So, there is a chance that the documentary is more fair and balanced.

Enjoy,    Victor

Mark Steyn says “Feed your Prius, Starve a Peasant.”

… Unlike “global warming,” food rioting is a planetwide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy.

So what happened?

Well, Western governments listened to the ecowarriors and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The United States added to its 51 cent-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a fivefold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most-likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that, to date, the “carbon debt” created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse.

The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized:

“The production of biofuel is devastating huge swaths of the world’s environment. So why on Earth is the government forcing us to use more of it?”

You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you. Here’s the self-same Independent in November 2005:

“At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a ‘biofuel obligation’ on oil companies … . This has the potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol.” …

Jonah Goldberg writes on Time’s cover too.

Time magazine recently doctored the iconic photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima in order to “celebrate” Earth Day. Instead of Marines valiantly struggling to lift the stars and stripes, they are depicted planting a tree.

No doubt Time’s editors think they will be celebrated in poetry and song for generations to come for their high-minded cleverness. Still, if the symbolism wasn’t clear enough, Time writer Bryan Walsh spells it out: “Green is the new red, white and blue.” …

… The yearning for a moral equivalent of war is an understandable desire, perhaps even noble in its intent. But it is not democratic. It is fundamentally authoritarian, which might explain why so many environmentalists envy China’s ability to ban plastic bags without reference to a vote or a court or anything other than the will of the China’s technocratic rulers. Indeed, the authors of “The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy” openly question whether the crisis of climate change should render liberal democracy obsolete. For some it seems the moral equivalent of war requires the moral equivalent of a police state.

This is the atmosphere Time is helping to poison, with pollutants far worse than mere greenhouse gasses.

So, how did we get into the ethanol mess? NewsBusters reports on Al Gore’s contribution.

As the international disaster of ethanol begins taking its toll on the planet — and, maybe more important, as press outlet after press outlet finally begins recognizing it — will media remember that Vice President Al Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate requiring this oxygenate be added to gasoline? …

Corner posts on ethanol.

BreitBart reports on interesting discoveries about our prehistoric beginnings.

Human beings for 100,000 years lived in tiny, separate groups, facing harsh conditions that brought them to the brink of extinction, before they reunited and populated the world, genetic researchers have said.

“Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction,” said paleontologist Meave Leakey, of Stony Brook University, New York.

The genetic study examined for the first time the evolution of our species from its origins with “mitochondrial Eve,” a female hominid who lived some 200,000 years ago, to the point of near extinction 70,000 years ago, when the human population dwindled to as little as 2,000.

After this dismal period, the human race expanded quickly all over the African continent and emigrated beyond its shores until it populated all the corners of the Earth. …

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Karl Rove asks if Obama is ready for primetime.

After being pummeled 55% to 45% in the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama was at a loss for explanations. The best he could do was to compliment his supporters in an email saying, “you helped close the gap to a slimmer margin than most thought possible.” Then he asked for money.

With $42 million in the bank, money is the least of Sen. Obama’s problems. He needs a credible message that convinces Democrats he should be president. In recent days, he’s spent too much time proclaiming his inevitable nomination. But they already know he’s won more states, votes and delegates.

His words wear especially thin when he was dealt a defeat like Tuesday’s. Mr. Obama was routed despite outspending Hillary Clinton on television by almost 3-1. While polls in the final days showed a possible 4% or 5% Clinton win, she apparently took late-deciders by a big margin to clinch the landslide.

Where she cobbled together her victory should cause concern in the Obama HQ. She did better – and he worse – than expected in Philadelphia’s suburbs. Mrs. Clinton won two of these four affluent suburban counties, home of the white-wine crowd Mr. Obama has depended on for victories before. …

Hugh Hewitt interviews Mark Steyn. They cover Hill’s win and we learn more about Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

HH: We begin as we do on any broadcast when we’re lucky with Columnist to the World, Mark Steyn, www.steynonline.com. Mark, what do you make of Hillary’s win?

MS: Well, I would have been surprised if she hadn’t won. I gather Chris Matthews came on the air at 8:00 and predicted an Obama win, which would have ended the race. It would have showed that he was resilient to the worst kind of scandals, which is to say when you yourself put your foot in it, which he did with his guns and God remarks. And it would also have showed that mainstream Democrats in a critical state were prepared to discount those kind of stories. So what would have changed the race would have been an Obama victory. Once it’s as predicted a Hillary Clinton victory, then I think the only question is how big the final figure is. If it isn’t double digits, then it’s a poor night for Hillary and it’s a good night for Obama, because it shows that his numbers can hold up under quite a sustained assault. But I think that both candidates are really getting weaker as this thing goes on.

HH: Terry McAuliffe, campaign director for Hillary Clinton, was out today saying I don’t need to raise twenty, though I could raise $20 million. These media markets ahead in Oregon and Kentucky and West Virginia and Indiana and North Carolina aren’t that expensive, sounding every bit like a campaign guy who’s going all the distance. I just can’t see Hillary Clinton quitting if she won.

MS: No. Hillary Clinton isn’t going to quit, because I think she realizes that Obama is a weak candidate. He’s weak in the sense that he’s unknown. And an unknown candidate always has vulnerabilities. Some of those have been raised on your show, not just long distant past associations, but a lot of current associations. So she’s got to figure that at some point, if he doesn’t get stronger, then her argument to the superdelegates is look, this guy can’t win. He’s not the glamour puss the media make him out to be. The big glamorous Obama guy that they love, and when they do these messianic cover stories on him, it’s simply not reflected in the numbers.

HH: Now Salem producer Guy Benson discovered some audio from a reunion of SDS’ers in 2007. I want to play you four clips, two from Bernardine Dohrn, and two from William Ayers. …

Dorothy Rabinowitz explores the media’s Obama adoration.

… The uproar is the latest confirmation of the special place Mr. Obama holds in the hearts of a good part of the media, a status ensured by their shared political sympathies and his star power. That status has in turn given rise to a tendency to provide generous explanations, and put the best possible gloss on missteps and utterances seriously embarrassing to Mr. Obama.

The effort and intensity various CNN panelists, for instance, expended on explaining what Mr. Obama really meant by that awkward San Francisco speech about bitter small towners clinging to their guns and religion – it seems he’d been making an important point if one not evident to anyone listening – exceeded that of the Obama campaign itself.

Still, no effort in helpful explanations was more distinguished than that of David Gergen, senior CNN commentator, who weighed in just after the first explosion of reports on Mr. Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright. About this spiritual leader – whose sermons declared the September 11 attacks to be America’s just deserts, who instructed his flock that the United States had set forth on a genocidal program to kill black Americans with the AIDS virus, who held forth as gospel every paranoid fantasy espoused by the lunatic fringe about America’s crimes – Mr. Gergen said, “Actually, Rev. Wright may love this country more than many of us . . . but we’ve fallen short.”

It was an attempt at exculpation, as regards Rev. Wright, that no one has equaled, though many have come close. Not least Mr. Obama, who spends considerable time arguing that the press has focused on a few “snippets” taken from years of sermons. …

George Will examines our education establishment.

… After 1962, when New York City signed the nation’s first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students’ scores on standardized tests declined.

In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so “seismic” — Moynihan’s description — that the government almost refused to publish it.

Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools’ effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class — fractured families — would have to be faced.

But it wasn’t. Instead, shopworn panaceas — larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes — were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.

In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA’s behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us “open” classrooms, teachers as “facilitators of learning” rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of “multiculturalism,” and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century. …

Hitchens on Hill’s PA win

Walter Williams follows up a Sowell column.

Dr. Thomas Sowell’s recent column, “Republicans and Blacks,” (April 10, 2008) pointed out the foolhardiness of Republican strategy to secure more black votes. He pointed out that it is a losing strategy to reach blacks through the civil rights organizations and black politicians. It’s like a quarterback trying to throw a pass to a receiver surrounded by a bunch of defenders. The second losing strategy is to appeal to blacks by offering the same kinds of things that Democrats offer — token honors, politically correct rhetoric and welfare state handouts.

Sowell suggests that Republican strategy should be to highlight the liberal Democratic agenda that has done great harm to the poorest of the black community. Among those he mentions is the environmental agenda where “tens of thousands of blacks who have been forced out of a number of liberal Democratic California counties by skyrocketing housing prices, brought on by Democratic environmentalists’ severe restrictions on the building of homes or apartments.” Since 1970, San Francisco’s black population has been cut in half.

Then there are the liberal judges and parole boards who have turned criminals loose to prey on black communities. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1976 and 2005, while 13 percent of the population, blacks committed over 52 percent of the nation’s homicides and were 46 percent of the homicide victims. Ninety-four percent of black homicide victims had a black person as their murderer. …

John Stossel thinks there are a lot of Chicken Littles around.

“Mortgage Crisis,” shouts the New York Times. The Times has used the term “subprime crisis” at least 11 times. Not in opinion columns — in news stories.

The columns are worse. Paul Krugman writes: “A lot of the financial system looks like it’s going to shrivel up and have to be rebuilt.”

The “financial crisis,” says Fortune’s senior editor, “is threatening to bring down the entire system, with dire consequences.”

When the current troubles aren’t a “crisis,” they’re a “disaster”. That’s what John McCain called them, while Hillary Clinton prefers “crisis,” saying, “This market is clearly broken, and, if we don’t fix it, it could threaten our entire housing market.”

Wait a second.

Where is this “credit crisis”? Did the supermarket reject your Visa card? I still see Ditech commercials offering fixed-rate mortgages at around 5.5 percent.

Sure, some lenders are skittish while things play out. Some investment banks and brokerage houses are sitting on shaky mortgage-backed securities. But why call that a “crisis”?

Do we have 25 percent unemployment, as we did during the Depression? Do we even have 7.5 percent unemployment, 12 percent inflation and 20 percent interest rates, as we did during Jimmy Carter’s presidency?

There’s a been a loss of jobs in the past two months, but that comes after years of strong job creation — 25 million net jobs in the last 15 years . At 5.1 percent, unemployment is low by historical standards. …

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P. J. O’Rourke took a ride on an aircraft carrier.

Landing on an aircraft carrier is…To begin with, you travel out to the carrier on a powerful, compact, and chunky aircraft–a weight-lifter version of a regional airline turboprop. This is a C-2 Greyhound, named after the wrong dog. C-2 Flying Pit Bull is more like it. In fact what everyone calls the C-2 is the “COD.” This is an acronym for “Curling the hair Of Dumb reporters,” although they tell you it stands for “Carrier Onboard Delivery.”

There is only one window in the freight/passenger compartment, and you’re nowhere near it. Your seat faces aft. Cabin lighting and noise insulation are absent. The heater is from the parts bin at the Plymouth factory in 1950. You sit reversed in cold, dark cacophony while the airplane maneuvers for what euphemistically is called a “landing.” The nearest land is 150 miles away. And the plane doesn’t land; its tailhook snags a cable on the carrier deck. The effect is of being strapped to an armchair and dropped backwards off a balcony onto a patio. There is a fleeting moment of unconsciousness. This is a good thing, as is being far from the window, because what happens next is that the COD reels the hooked cable out the entire length of the carrier deck until a big, fat nothing is between you and a plunge in the ocean, should the hook, cable, or pilot’s judgment snap. Then, miraculously, you’re still alive.

Landing on an aircraft carrier was the most fun I’d ever had with my trousers on. And the 24 hours that I spent aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt–the “Big Stick”–were an equally unalloyed pleasure. I love big, moving machinery. And machinery doesn’t get any bigger, or more moving, than a U.S.-flagged nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that’s longer than the Empire State Building is tall and possesses four acres of flight deck. This four acres, if it were a nation, would have the fifth or sixth largest airforce in the world–86 fixed wing aircraft plus helicopters.

Don’t you wish that Jimmy Carter would try his hand at getting Robert Mugabe to fold his tent in Zimbabwe. Better that, than hanging around the Middle East showing his anti-Semitism.

Oh wait!

Jimmy did have a hand in Zimbabwe. As a matter of fact, without Carter, Mugabe probably wouldn’t have come to power. James Kirchick has the story in the Weekly Standard. This is long, but an important part of the Jimmy Carter record.

In April 1979, 64 percent of the black citizens of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) lined up at the polls to vote in the first democratic election in the history of that southern African nation. Two-thirds of them supported Abel Muzorewa, a bishop in the United Methodist Church. He was the first black prime minister of a country only 4 percent white. Muzorewa’s victory put an end to the 14-year political odyssey of outgoing prime minister Ian Smith, the stubborn World War II veteran who had infamously announced in 1976, “I do not believe in black majority rule–not in a thousand years.” Fortunately for the country’s blacks, majority rule came sooner than Smith had in mind.

Less than a year after Muzorewa’s victory, however, in February 1980, another election was held in Zimbabwe. This time, Robert Mugabe, the Marxist who had fought a seven-year guerrilla war against Rhodesia’s white-led government, won 64 percent of the vote, after a campaign marked by widespread intimidation, outright violence, and Mugabe’s threat to continue the civil war if he lost. Mugabe became prime minister and was toasted by the international community and media as a new sort of African leader. “I find that I am fascinated by his intelligence, by his dedication. The only thing that frustrates me about Robert Mugabe is that he is so damned incorruptible,” Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, had gushed to the Times of London in 1978. The rest, as they say, is history.

That second election is widely known and cited: 1980 is the famous year Zimbabwe won its independence from Great Britain and power was transferred from an obstinate white ruler to a liberation hero. But the circumstances of the first election, and the story of the man who won it, have been lost to the past. As the Mugabe regime–responsible for the torture and murder of thousands, starvation, genocide, the world’s highest inflation and lowest life expectancy–teeters on the brink of disaster after 27 years of authoritarian rule, it is instructive to go back and examine what happened in those crucial intervening months. …

… Carter is unrepentant about his administration’s support for Mugabe. At a Carter Center event in Boston on June 8, he said that he, Young, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had “spent more time on Rhodesia than on the Middle East.” Carter admitted that “we supported two revolutionaries in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo.” He adopts the “good leader gone bad” hindsight of Mugabe’s early backers, stating that “at first [Mugabe] was a very enlightened president.” While conceding that Mugabe is now “oppressive,” Carter stressed that this murderer of tens of thousands “needs to be treated with respect and assured that if he does deal with those issues [democratization and human rights], he won’t be punished or prosecuted for his crimes.” Though it has supervised elections in over 60 countries, the 25-year-old Carter Center has no projects in Zimbabwe, nor has Carter (who demonstrates no compunction about lecturing others) attempted to atone for the ruin that his policies as president wreaked.

History will not look kindly on those in the West who insisted on bringing the avowed Marxist Mugabe into the government. In particular, the Jimmy Carter foreign policy–feckless in the Iranian hostage crisis, irresolute in the face of mounting Soviet ambitions, and noted in the post-White House years for dalliances with dictators the world over–bears some responsibility for the fate of a small African country with scant connection to American national interests. In response to Carter’s comment last month that the Bush administration’s foreign policy was the “worst in history,” critics immediately cited those well-publicized failures. But the betrayal of Bishop Muzorewa and of all Zimbabweans, black and white, who warned what sort of leader Robert Mugabe would be deserves just as prominent a place among the outrages of the Carter years.

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Even though a year old, a column on Carter by Christopher Hitchens makes some good points for today.

… In the Carter years, the United States was an international laughingstock. This was not just because of the prevalence of his ghastly kin: the beer-sodden brother Billy, doing deals with Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, and the grisly matriarch, Miz Lillian. It was not just because of the president’s dire lectures on morality and salvation and his weird encounters with lethal rabbits and UFOs. It was not just because of the risible White House “Bible study” sessions run by Bert Lance and his other open-palmed Elmer Gantry pals from Georgia. It was because, whether in Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq—still the source of so many of our woes—the Carter administration could not tell a friend from an enemy. His combination of naivete and cynicism—from open-mouthed shock at Leonid Brezhnev’s occupation of Afghanistan to underhanded support for Saddam in his unsleeping campaign of megalomania—had terrible consequences that are with us still. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that every administration since has had to deal with the chaotic legacy of Carter’s mind-boggling cowardice and incompetence. …

Bob Tyrrell in American Spectator with Carter opinions.

In the 1980 presidential election the American people did the best they could with President Jimmy Carter, given the limitations imposed on them by our Constitution. They retired him from office (44 states participated in the ceremony). Looking back, however, on how the scamp has abused his retirement, I, for one, wish we could have done better. Perhaps he could have been put in a jar. He has, in the succeeding twenty-eight years since his exit from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, remained almost as ruinous a nuisance out of office as he was in office. This cannot be said of any other president.

When Jimmy was given the heave-ho, the Misery Index, an index combining rates of inflation and unemployment, was at an all time high of 21.98% — up from 13.5% when he was elected in 1976. After his last full year as president, inflation was at 13.5% and unemployment at 7.2%. Today the Misery Index is at 8.83%, though the Democrats have not a nice thing to say about Jimmy’s Republican successors. In Jimmy’s day the prime rate moved from 7% to 20%, and the home mortgage rate was almost 18%. Think about those figures this autumn when you are asked to choose between Senator John McCain and either Senator Barack Obama or Senator Hillary Clinton, two Democrats with even less experience than Governor Jimmy Carter in matters economic. …

The old Captain, Ed Morrissey too.

Jimmy Carter may have aged considerably since his years at the helm of foreign policy, but that doesn’t excuse his latest debacle; he was just as clueless 30 years ago as he proved himself to be this week. Carter had everything but Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella as he returned with a supposed agreement by Hamas to recognize Israel and accede to a peace deal negotiated by Mahmoud Abbas and approved by referendum. However, Hamas immediately pulled the rug out from under Carter, exposing his idiocy: …

Jeff Jacoby reviews the situation in Zimbabwe.

In retrospect , it was an exercise in naiveté to have imagined that Zimbabwe’s brutal strongman, Robert Mugabe, would relinquish power just because he had lost an election. It has been more than three weeks since the March 29 vote in which Mugabe’s party, known as ZANU-PF, lost control of the lower house of parliament. Yet official results in the presidential contest between Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai have yet to be released.

There isn’t much doubt who won. Public tallies posted at each polling station showed Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, garnering more than 50 percent of the vote. Were the electoral commission to certify those tallies, it would mean Mugabe’s 28 years at the top had come to an end. But the electoral commission, like everything else in Zimbabwe’s government, is controlled by ZANU-PF. So there will be no official results until the books have been cooked to Mugabe’s satisfaction. …

In the occasion of Earth Day, Patrick Moore tells why he left Greenpeace.

In 1971 an environmental and antiwar ethic was taking root in Canada, and I chose to participate. As I completed a Ph.D. in ecology, I combined my science background with the strong media skills of my colleagues. In keeping with our pacifist views, we started Greenpeace.

But I later learned that the environmental movement is not always guided by science. As we celebrate Earth Day today, this is a good lesson to keep in mind.

At first, many of the causes we championed, such as opposition to nuclear testing and protection of whales, stemmed from our scientific knowledge of nuclear physics and marine biology. But after six years as one of five directors of Greenpeace International, I observed that none of my fellow directors had any formal science education. They were either political activists or environmental entrepreneurs. Ultimately, a trend toward abandoning scientific objectivity in favor of political agendas forced me to leave Greenpeace in 1986. …

American.Com with the case for ending ethanol subsidies.

Just in time for today’s Earth Day festivities, President Bush has announced a new initiative to combat global warming. He set a goal of stopping the growth in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2025 and reducing emissions thereafter. But rather than plan for 2025—which is another two or three presidencies away—Bush should immediately fix his ethanol policy, which is increasing GHG emissions and raising food prices not only in the United States but all over the world.

American companies are still trying to digest the ethanol mandates passed by Congress last December. Congress mandated the production of 9 billion gallons of ethanol or other renewable fuels this year; that number will gradually increase until it reaches 36 billion gallons in 2022. In addition, ethanol producers receive a tax break of 51 cents a gallon, and corn growers receive huge subsidies that may increase in the next farm bill.

Using ethanol for energy was supposed to be a win-win situation: the United States has so much corn, we were told, that it could use some to make gasoline, thereby reducing its GHG emissions and also reducing its dependence on foreign oil. But in the real world, unintended consequences are all too frequent. …

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In his blog, Michael Barone, gives a short review of Douglas Feith’s book which he claims is an honest account of the move to war in W’s administration.

I haven’t finished reading Douglas Feith’s War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, but I feel secure in saying that it is an extraordinarily frank and persuasive book. Feith, who served as under secretary of defense for policy from 2001 to 2005, has been criticized harshly and, I think, unfairly for somehow lying us into Iraq. In War and Decision he presents his view, fortified by generous quotes from government documents, reports, and memorandums. He should be saluted for getting many materials declassified so that we can have a clearer idea of what was actually going on at the top levels of government. I have long been struck by the contrast between what we can read today about the acts of leaders in World War II and what I gather was available to readers at the time. This book provides our first in-depth look at the inside of the Bush administration’s national security top leadership from one who was there. …

David Brooks on Obama’s fall to earth. (More like Brooks falling out of love. And since he’s stopped drinking the Kool-Aid, maybe he’ll be in Pickings more often.)

Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new — an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that.

But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.

He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics. He claimed falsely that his handwriting wasn’t on a questionnaire about gun control. He claimed that he had never attacked Clinton for her exaggerations about the Tuzla airport, though his campaign was all over it. Obama piously condemned the practice of lifting other candidates’ words out of context, but he has been doing exactly the same thing to John McCain, especially over his 100 years in Iraq comment. …

… When Obama goes to a church infused with James Cone-style liberation theology, when he makes ill-informed comments about working-class voters, when he bowls a 37 for crying out loud, voters are going to wonder if he’s one of them. Obama has to address those doubts, and he has done so poorly up to now. …

Speaking of drinking the Kool-Aid, the media gets manhandled by John Fund as he reviews their castigation of ABC for Gibson’s and Stephanopoulos’s effrontery towards Obama in the last debate.

George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson of ABC News weren’t just criticized for their tough questioning of Barack Obama during last week’s Democratic debate. They were flayed.

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker called their approach “something akin to a federal crime.” Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s TV critic, said the ABC duo turned in “shoddy and despicable performances.” Walter Shapiro of Salon magazine said the debate had “all the substance of a Beavis and Butt-head marathon.”

Most of the media mauling consisted of anger that the ABC moderators brought up a series of issues that had surrounded Mr. Obama since the last Democratic debate, a long seven weeks ago. They included his remarks that “bitter” Pennsylvania voters “cling” to religion, guns and “antipathy toward people who aren’t them” and his relationships with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayres, an unrepentant former member of the bomb-planting Weather Underground group. Mrs. Clinton also came under some fire over her made-up story of coming under sniper fire in Bosnia.

According to liberal journalists, all these topics are irrelevant. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo said they were “frivolous items . . . that presumed the correctness of Republican agenda items.” Mr. Obama agreed, dismissing the items brought up by ABC as “manufactured issues.” …

Camille Paglia wrote on Hillary for the Telegraph, UK.

… Though she would specialise in women’s and children’s issues, Hillary’s public statements have often betrayed an ambivalence about women who chose a non-feminist path. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies,” she sneered during Bill’s 1992 presidential campaign. Then, defending her husband against the claims of a 12-year affair by Gennifer Flowers, Hillary snapped: “I’m not sittin’ here like some little woman, standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” – a sally that boomeranged when Hillary had to make an abject apology. The irony is that Hillary had offended the very group of stoical, put-upon, working-class women who are now proving to be her staunchest supporters.

Whatever her official feminist credo, Hillary’s public career has glaringly been a subset to her husband’s success. Despite her reputation for brilliance, she failed the Washington, DC bar exam. Thus her migration to Little Rock was not simply a selfless drama for love; she was fleeing the capital where she had hoped to make her mark.

In Little Rock, every role that Hillary played was obtained via her husband’s influence – from her position at the Rose Law Firm to her seat on the board of Wal-Mart to her advocacy for public education reform. In a pattern that would continue after Bill became president, Hillary would draw attention by expressing public “concern” for a problem, without ever being able to organise a programme for reform.

Hillary has always been a policy wonk, a functionary attuned to bureaucratic process, but she has never shown executive ability, which makes her quest for the presidency problematic. Hillary’s disastrous botching of national healthcare reform in 1993 (a project to which her husband rashly appointed her) will live in infamy. Obama may also have limited executive experience, but he has no comparable stain on his record.

The argument, therefore, that Hillary’s candidacy marks the zenith of modern feminism is specious. Feminism is not well served by her surrogates’ constant tactic of attributing all opposition to her as a function of entrenched sexism. Well into her second term as a US Senator, Hillary lacks a single example of major legislative achievement. Her career has consisted of fundraising, meet-and-greets and speeches around the world expressing support for women’s rights. …

WaPo editors on the “intellectual poverty” of the Dem opposition to the Colombia free trade pact.

HOUSE SPEAKER Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says the Bush administration’s free-trade agreement with Colombia may not be dead, even though she has postponed a vote on it indefinitely. If the White House doesn’t “jam it down the throat of Congress,” she said, she might negotiate. Ms. Pelosi wants an “economic agenda that gives some sense of security to American workers and businesses . . . that somebody is looking out for them” — though she was vague as to what that entails. Nor did she specify how anyone could “jam” through a measure on which the administration has already briefed Congress many, many times. …

Matthew Continetti in the Weekly Standard provides background for Pelosi’s nixing of the Colombia agreement.

…Why did Pelosi move to let the Colombia deal die? Politics. It’s an election year. The Democrats need union money, and the unions oppose free trade. Democratic presidential candidates go from coast to coast telling audiences that free trade has devastated our economy. This is nonsense. But it wouldn’t look too good if the Democratic Congress belied this irresponsible, hostile-to-foreigners, belligerent–one might say, unilateralist–rhetoric.

There’s another reason, too: President Bush. Congress has now rejected the White House’s two legislative priorities in 2008: a reform in the eavesdropping law that includes immunity for telecommunications firms and the CFTA. Congress’s top priority is to make sure voters perceive the Bush presidency as a failure. They may think they are well on their way to achieving this goal. That in both of these matters the Democrats’ hatred of Bush will redound to the benefit of enemies of the United States seems not to concern them in the least.

Kevin Hassett in Bloomberg News on deadly ethanol effects.

… Food riots have, by my count, now occurred in nine countries around the world. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization said in a recent report that Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal have also seen food-related violence in recent weeks.

To what extent is ethanol to blame for the high prices? A new study by economist Thomas E. Elam of the consulting firm FarmEcon LLC explored the question.

The study, to be sure, was commissioned by livestock farming interest groups, yet it appears to rely on widely accepted economic models. Elam used his model to simulate what the price of corn today would be if the U.S. hadn’t been subsidizing biofuels. He found that prices are about 50 percent higher than they would have been in a world without subsidies. …