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Mark Steyn likes God and guns.

I think a healthy society needs both God and guns: It benefits from a belief in some kind of higher purpose to life on Earth, and it requires a self-reliant citizenry. If you lack either of those twin props, you wind up with today’s Europe – a present-tense Eutopia mired in fatalism.

A while back, I was struck by the words of Oscar van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay humanist (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool). Reflecting on the Continent’s accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved, but what could he do? “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. If you don’t understand that there are times when you’ll have to fight for it, you won’t enjoy it for long. That’s what a lot of Reade’s laundry list – “gun-totin’,” “military-lovin’” – boils down to. As for “gay-loathin’,” it’s Oscar van den Boogaard’s famously tolerant Amsterdam where gay-bashing is resurgent: The editor of the American gay paper the Washington Blade got beaten up in the streets on his last visit to the Netherlands.

God and guns. Maybe one day a viable society will find a magic cure-all that can do without both, but Big Government isn’t it. And even complacent liberal Democrats ought to be able to look across the ocean and see that. But, then, Obama did give the speech in San Francisco, a city demographically declining at a rate that qualifies it for EU membership. When it comes to parochial simpletons, you don’t need to go to Kansas.

Something fun this way comes. Baracky.

Samizdata post on acceptance of libertarianism.

As suggested by a Samizdata reader called Hugo, I am going to kick off a Friday discussion which takes the following line: “A barrier to people accepting libertarianism is the notion that we’d let people starve in the streets.”

I think the contention would be grossly unfair, to put it mildly. Libertarians oppose the welfare state, we do not oppose welfare. …

… The one place where starvation of the poor is a likely occurrence, of course, is under collectivism. Just look at the great socialist disasters of the 20th Century.

Great piece on the media’s reaction to the last debate from John Harris and Jim VandeHei from Politico.

… Many journalists are not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon.

(Harris only here: As one who has assigned journalists to cover Obama at both Politico and The Washington Post, I have witnessed the phenomenon several times. Some reporters come back and need to go through detox, to cure their swooning over Obama’s political skill. Even VandeHei seemed to have been bitten by the bug after the Iowa caucus.)

(VandeHei only here: There is no doubt reporters are smitten with Obama’s speeches and promises to change politics. I find his speeches, when he’s on, pretty electric myself. It certainly helps his cause that reporters also seem very tired of the Clintons and their paint-by-polls approach to governing.)

All this is hardly the end of the world. Clinton is not behind principally because of media bias; Obama is not ahead principally because of media favoritism. McCain won the GOP nomination mainly through good luck and the infirmities of his opposition. But the fact that lots of reporters personally like the guy — and a few seem to have an open crush — did not hurt.

But the protectiveness toward Obama revealed in the embarrassing rush of many journalists to his side this week does touch on at least four deeper trends in the news business. …

Patrick Michaels in the WSJ tells what is wrong with out climate numbers. First of all, they are a product of government effort. That right there should tell you they are bogus. This could have been better written, but we pulled out a few gems.

… it was discovered that our orbiting satellites have a few faults. The sensors don’t last very long and are continually being supplanted by replacement orbiters. The instruments are calibrated against each other, so if one is off, so is the whole record. Frank Wentz, a consulting atmospheric scientist from California, discovered that the satellites also drift a bit in their orbits, which induces additional bias in their readings. The net result? A warming trend appears where before there was none. …

… The removal of weather-balloon data because poor nations don’t do a good job of minding their weather instruments deserves more investigation, which is precisely what University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick and I did. Last year we published our results in the Journal of Geophysical Research, showing that “non-climatic” effects in land-surface temperatures – GDP per capita, among other things – exert a significant influence on the data. For example, weather stations are supposed to be a standard white color. If they darken from lack of maintenance, temperatures read higher than they actually are. After adjusting for such effects, as much as half of the warming in the U.N.’s land-based record vanishes. Because about 70% of earth’s surface is water, this could mean a reduction of as much as 15% in the global warming trend. …

… Finally, no one seems to want to discuss that for millennia after the end of the last ice age, the Eurasian arctic was several degrees warmer in summer (when ice melts) than it is now. We know this because trees are buried in areas that are now too cold to support them. Back then, the forest extended all the way to the Arctic Ocean, which is now completely surrounded by tundra. If it was warmer for such a long period, why didn’t Greenland shed its ice?

This prompts the ultimate question: Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there’s little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you’re liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn’t such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world with bold plans to stop climate change?

But as we face the threat of massive energy taxes – raised by perceptions of increasing rates of warming and the sudden loss of Greenland’s ice – we should be talking about reality.

Speaking of government failure, WSJ has more on the current air travel mess.

… Indeed, the fundamental problem with most regulation is that the regulatory agency does not have sufficient information, flexibility and immunity from political pressure to regulate firms’ behavior effectively. Fortunately, the market, and in some cases the liability system, provide sufficient incentives for firms to behave in a socially beneficial manner.

Consider why economic regulation of the U.S. airline industry failed. The Civil Aeronautics Board used to be responsible for regulating fares and the number of carriers serving each route. …

… In a nutshell, the CAB did not have sufficient understanding of industry operations and strategy, the flexibility to facilitate and account for possible changes in industry competition, and immunity from political pressure to set efficient fares. When fares and entry were deregulated, market competition accomplished in large measure what the CAB could not.

Airline safety presents similar problems for the regulator. The FAA knows much less about aircraft technology and airline operations than do the airlines and aircraft manufacturers. In principle, the agency can be educated about such matters, and through consultation with the airlines, aircraft manufactures and expert advisers can develop certain rules and procedures that the airlines agree to follow.

But the airlines will always be far more informed than the FAA is about the condition of their planes. …

…Unfortunately, the FAA’s inadequacies are shared by other federal agencies that attempt to regulate safety. In our research on the subject, examining available empirical evidence, we could not find any discernible improvement in safety that was associated with regulations promulgated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and Mine Safety and Health Administration, among others.

At first blush, the FAA appears to differ from these agencies because its drawbacks do not include stimulating consumers and workers to engage in “offsetting behavior” that compromises efforts to improve safety. Maybe so. But in response to the FAA’s overly aggressive actions that caused American Airlines to cancel thousands of flights, many travelers shifted from air travel to highway travel. In the process, they greatly increased their probability of dying in an accident on their journey

Speaking of government failure, (we love doing that) The Economist this week centers on the food crisis. Their lead article starts calling for the usual government efforts and then in the final four graphs comes to grip with the real culprit.

… In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene in them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn, from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food chain: the international market.

For decades, this produced low world prices and disincentives to poor farmers. Now, the opposite is happening. As a result of yet another government distortion—this time subsidies to biofuels in the rich world—prices have gone through the roof. Governments have further exaggerated the problem by imposing export quotas and trade restrictions, raising prices again. In the past, the main argument for liberalising farming was that it would raise food prices and boost returns to farmers. Now that prices have massively overshot, the argument stands for the opposite reason: liberalisation would reduce prices, while leaving farmers with a decent living.

There is an occasional exception to the rule that governments should keep out of agriculture. They can provide basic technology: executing capital-intensive irrigation projects too large for poor individual farmers to undertake, or paying for basic science that helps produce higher-yielding seeds. But be careful. Too often—as in Europe, where superstitious distrust of genetic modification is slowing take-up of the technology—governments hinder rather than help such advances. Since the way to feed the world is not to bring more land under cultivation, but to increase yields, science is crucial.

Agriculture is now in limbo. The world of cheap food has gone. With luck and good policy, there will be a new equilibrium. The transition from one to the other is proving more costly and painful than anyone had expected. But the change is desirable, and governments should be seeking to ease the pain of transition, not to stop the process itself.

More on food shortages and how they can be overcome from the Telegraph,UK.

It is remarkable how rapidly the world has moved from worrying about deflation to worrying about inflation; from cheer to despondency about the reduction of poverty; and from concern about food surpluses to panic about shortages.

The hand of rising food prices is suddenly seen everywhere: in the riots in Tibet against Chinese rule; in drastic measures in the Philippines, Egypt, India and many African countries to restrict food exports; in calls for more aid; and even in the Bank of England’s reluctance to cut interest rates as fast as its American counterpart.

For agricultural commodity prices (what we call “food”) to have more than doubled in the past three years is an astonishing and worrying turn of events. But in responding to it, we need to understand the true nature of the problem.

And we must recognise that a big part of this problem is our own fault – because of our ill thought-out enthusiasm for using food to fuel cars as well as stomachs; and because of our longer-established but also ill considered opposition to the use of genetic engineering to help us grow more food. …

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One last Carter item. This from Haaretz.

Senior Israeli officials were not the first to try to get out of meeting Jimmy Carter. A number of members of Bill Clinton’s administration have already tried, including the former president and his wife the candidate; most members of Bush senior’s administration, including George H. W. himself; and it goes without saying the same applies to his son and his administration.

Carter has a strange characteristic: He finds it easier to make friends with dictators. If a person’s companions testify to his personality and character, then here is a partial list of people with whom Carter has gotten along well: Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat and Kim Il Jong. …

Tony Blankley takes the Bush administration to task for yesterday’s global warming speech.

The last months of a presidential administration are often dangerous. Presidents — looking to their legacies — go to desperate lengths to try to enhance their reputations for posterity. A pungent example of such practices by the Bush administration was reported above the fold on the front page of The Washington Times Monday: “Bush prepares global warming initiative.”

Oh, dear. Just as an increasing number of scientists are finding their courage to speak out against the global warming alarmists and just as a building body of evidence and theories challenge the key elements of the human-centric carbon-based global warming theories, George W. Bush takes this moment to say, in effect: “We are all global alarmists now.”

It reminds me of the moment back in 1971 when Richard Nixon proclaimed, “We are all Keynesians now” — eight years after Milton Friedman had published his book “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960″ and about an hour and a half before a consensus built that Friedman’s work consigned Keynes to the dustbin of economic history. …

Manchester Guardian columnist sees thru the green rhetoric.

… While antagonism to science merely impedes progress, antagonism to economics is regressive. American subsidies to ethanol fuel are not just causing “tortilla riots” but costing American taxpayers a staggering $5.5bn a year. Biofuel tankers are circling the globe, burning gasoline and chasing subsidies. They have joined carbon emissions certificates among the world’s greatest trading scams.

If I have changed my mind, I am not sure the same applies to many greens. I have rarely encountered so much fanaticism and blind faith. Did those demanding fuel subsidies not realise that palm oil would wipe out rainforests and that ethanol from corn would use as much carbon as it saved? Did those pleading for wind farms really think they could ever substitute for nuclear power; or those wanting eco-towns not realise they would just add to car emissions? Did they not understand that, once the tap of public money is turned on, lobbyists will ensure it is never turned off – however harmful?

If all these fancy subsidies and market manipulations were withdrawn tomorrow and government action confined to energy-saving regulation, I am convinced the world would be a cheaper and a safer place, and the poor would not be threatened with starvation.

Just now, for reasons not all of which are “green”, commodity prices are soaring. Leave them. Send food parcels to the starving, but let demand evoke supply and stop curbing trade. The marketplace is never perfect, but in this matter it could not be worse than government action. Playing these games has so far made a few people very rich at the cost of the taxpayer. Now the cost is in famine and starvation. This is no longer a game.

The Dem debate last night has received a lot of comment mostly centered around the toughness of the questions. David Brooks has some thoughts.

Three quick points on the Democratic debate tonight:

First, Democrats, and especially Obama supporters, are going to jump all over ABC for the choice of topics: too many gaffe questions, not enough policy questions.

I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.

We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues. …

John Fund next.

And Peter Canello from the Boston Globe.

Barack Obama last night staked his presidential campaign on the idea that the American people will look beyond the inevitable gaffes and errors and character attacks of a 24-hour campaign cycle to meet the challenges of a “defining moment” in American history.

Hillary Clinton staked her campaign on the idea that Americans won’t – and that her tougher, more strategic approach to countering Republican attacks is a better way for Democrats to reclaim the White House.

The first half of last night’s debate in the august National Constitution Center in Philadelphia was a tawdry affair, as ABC news questioners called on Obama and Clinton to address a year’s worth of dirty laundry, and each combatant eagerly grabbed at the chance to besmirch their rival a little more.

But while some in the audience groaned, the litany of nasty questions – about such matters as Obama’s comments on the working class and Clinton’s exaggerations about dangers she faced in Bosnia – helped to flesh out a long-simmering subtext to the Clinton-Obama battle: The Clinton campaign’s insinuation that Obama is more vulnerable to GOP-style attacks on his patriotism.

For Obama, the harsh questioning by Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News probably felt as though the media were trying to make up for a year’s worth of allegedly ginger treatment all in one night. But it clarified the sharply different postures of the two campaigns. …

Michael Goodwin from NY Daily News.

It seems like ancient history now, but not long ago Hillary Clinton argued that Barack Obama was getting a free pass from the media.

Those days are over, with moderators, a private citizen and Clinton herself peppering Obama on Wednesday night with a barrage of the kind of tough questions he escaped for more than a year.

He answered some better than others, and some not at all. But the mere fact that at least five damaging issues were thrown at him within 30 minutes was testament to how much the race has changed in the six weeks since anti-American remarks by Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeramiah Wright, became public.

That was the high-water mark of Obama’s campaign, and now the cracks are showing. My bet is that his ineffective answers on Wednesday night will mean more doubts among voters and more concern among Democratic superdelegates about whether Obama is electable in November.

The result is that Clinton, despite her own electability issues and an imperfect evening, scored a debate victory just a week before the Pennsylvania primary. A loss would knock her out. …

Ann Coulter has comments on Obama’s most excellent adventure in San Francisco where he explained the country to folks on billionaire’s row.

… Obama informed the San Francisco plutocrats that these crazy working-class people are so bitter, they actually believe in God! And not just the 12-step meeting, higher power, “as you conceive him or her to be” kind of G-d. The regular, old-fashioned, almighty sort of “God.”

As Obama put it: “(T)hey get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The rich liberals must have nearly fainted at the revelation that the denizens of small towns in Pennsylvania have absolutely no concern for the rich’s ability to acquire servants from Mexico at a reasonable price.

We don’t know much about Obama’s audience, other than that four fundraisers were held on April 6 at the homes of San Francisco’s rich and mighty, such as Alex Mehran, an Iranian who went into daddy’s business and married an IBM heiress, and Gordon Getty, heir to the Getty Oil fortune.

It is not known whether any of Getty’s three illegitimate children attended the Obama fundraiser — which turned out to be more of a McCain fundraiser — but photos from the event indicate that there were a fair number of armed (and presumably bitter) policemen providing security for the billionaire’s soiree.

In 1967, Gordon sued his own father to get his hands on money from the family trust — and lost. So Gordon Getty knows from bitter. It’s a wonder he hasn’t turned to guns, or even to immigrant-bashing. God knows (whoever he is) there are enough of them working on his home.

These are the sort of well-adjusted individuals to whom Obama is offering psychological profiles of normal Americans, including their bizarre theories about how jobs being sent to foreign countries and illegal-alien labor undercutting American workers might have something to do with their own economic misfortunes. …

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Hadn’t planned anything for the anniversary, but daughter Liza, a reporter for the Tech paper sent me her latest. The most common thing you hear from students is how tired they are of the media. They’ve even come up with their own rump commemoration, knowledge of which, Liza tells me, has yet to be discovered by the press.

The University and the town of Blacksburg will be holding many events in commemoration of those lost on April 16, 2007. While some students are excited for all the things the campus has to offer, many are interested in making no plans at all.

“I think it’s great that there’s going to be so much to do,” said Sia Mallios, a junior finance major. “But I just don’t want to battle the crowds and the media. The last thing I want to do is be questioned more.”

Mallios said she remembers being pestered by news media last year, which tried to get her to answer questions at a time she wanted to least. She said she’s not sure what she’ll do tomorrow, but that she knows she won’t come to campus until the candlelight vigil planned for 8:15 p.m. on the Drillfield.

“It was sad enough that day,” Mallios said. “I don’t want to relive that.” …

Ed Koch must be feeling old since he wrote a short review of his political life. It’s a fun read. And some of it touch on one of today’s topics.

… I came to know Carter well.

When he ran for reelection, he asked me to campaign for him in 1980 – I was by then Mayor of New York City — and I said that I would vote for him, but not campaign for him because he was then engaging in hostile acts towards Israel. I was popular with the Jewish community and when I would not campaign for him unless he changed his position, he called me to his hotel in New York when attending a fundraiser and said, “You have done me more damage than any man in America.” I felt proud then, and even more today, since we now know what a miserable president he was then and the miserable human being he is now as he prepares to meet with Hamas.

Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. On one of his visits to New York City, I drove with him from the helicopter pad to Reagan’s hotel. The streets were lined with tens of thousands of people and, as he looked out the car window while were crossing 42nd Street, he suddenly yelled, “Look at that guy – he gave me the finger!”

Sure enough, there was a guy with his middle finger extended upright. I said, “Mr. President, don’t be so upset. Thousands of people are cheering you and one guy is giving you the finger. So what?” He replied, “that’s what Nancy always says. She says I only see the guy with the finger.” I never voted for him, but I loved him. …

Frank Gaffney on Jimmy Carter, the man who never met a tyrant he didn’t like.

Jimmy Carter’s pathetic need for political rehabilitation following a presidency widely regarded as one of the worst in American history is once again making news. He reportedly will meet this week with Khaled Mashaal, the Syrian-based leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian arm, Hamas – an internationally recognized terrorist organization.

Mr. Carter maintains this is no big deal since he has met with Hamas officials before. Indeed, in keeping with his Carter Center’s self-appointed status as global election monitor, the former president did officiate in January 2006 when the Brotherhood’s terrorists defeated those of Fatah led by Yasser Arafat’s longtime crony, Mahmoud Abbas.

In point of fact, it seems there is scarcely a serious bad actor on the planet with whom Jimmy Carter has not met. He is a serial tyrant-enabler, the very personification of Rodney King’s risible appeal, “Can’t we all get along?” Mr. Carter has come to epitomize the notion that “dialogue” is always in order, no matter how odious or dangerous the interlocutor – or the extent to which they or their agendas will benefit from such interactions.

As Barak Obama (whom Carter has all but endorsed) is as wedded as the former President to the idea of condition-free dialogue with tyrants, it is worth reflecting on just a few of the many example’s of how this Carteresque practice has produced disastrous results: …

James Kirchick brings up the Logan Act for Carter.

… The station of ex-president carries a diplomatic heft, and no one has used it with more inelegance and opportunism than Jimmy Carter, whose sabotage of American foreign policy has not been limited to Republican presidents (see Bill Clinton and North Korea). By calling on the United States to include Hamas in peace talks, and by meeting with the leader of said terrorist group in the capital of a country with which the United States does not even maintain diplomatic relations, Carter undermines a crucial plank in America’s Middle East policy. …

Townhall’s Ben Shapiro with harsh works for Jimmy.

Jimmy Carter is an evil man. It is painful to label a past president of the United States as a force for darkness. But it is dangerous to let a man like Jimmy Carter stalk around the globe cloaked in the garb of American royalty, planting the seeds of Western civilization’s destruction.

On Tuesday, former President Carter met with leaders of the terrorist group Hamas. He embraced Nasser al-Shaer, the man who has run the Palestinian education system, brainwashing children into believing Jews are the descendants of pigs and dogs. He laid a wreath at the grave of Yasser Arafat, the most notorious terrorist thug of the 20th century. Then, he had the audacity to offer to act as a conduit between the Palestinian Arabs and the Israeli and U.S. governments. This is somewhat like Lord Haw-Haw offering to broker peace between the German and British governments during World War II.

Carter is a notorious anti-Semite and an even more notorious terrorism- enabler. In particular, he is a huge supporter of Palestinian violence. …

John Stossel answers a critic from the legal community.

“Stossel, who often touts his belief in ‘market magic,’ attacks lawyers who represent consumers and others harmed by corporations, and wants instead to let corporate America police itself. This is the same corporate America that today is making the dreams of millions of Americans ‘disappear’ in the form of home foreclosures and job losses. … “

That’s what a class-action lawyer (who boasts he recovered “more than $2 billion in cash for average everyday American consumers”) wrote to the Wall Street Journal in response to my op-ed about the parasite circus of class-action lawyers who practice legal extortion.

As I expect from litigators, his letter was aggressive, well written and convincing. And he was right about my belief in “market magic.” That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned in 35 years of consumer reporting: The market performs miracles so routinely that we take it for granted. Supermarkets provide 30,000 choices at rock-bottom prices. We take it for granted that when we stick a piece of plastic in a wall, cash will come out; that when we give the same plastic to a stranger, he will rent us a car, and the next month, VISA will have the accounting correct to the penny. By contrast, “experts” in government can’t even count the vote accurately.

That’s why I talk about market magic.

But I digress. The class-action lawyer, like so many who go to law school, gets the big stuff wrong. …

Dartblog came up with the Eulogy for WFB delivered by his son Christopher.

… He was — inarguably — a great man. This is, from a son’s perspective, a mixed blessing, because it means having to share him with the wide world. It was often a very mixed blessing when you were out sailing with him. Great men always have too much canvas up. And great men set out from port in conditions that keep lesser men — such as myself — safe and snug on shore. …

Speaking of Buckley, Sam Tanenhaus did a send-off of him and Norman Mailer in last Sunday’s NY Times.

Every now and again, the jostling frenzy of intellectual life in New York City, with its relentless fixation on the newest, the hottest, the coolest, the ins and the outs, pauses for a moment and the speed slows to a stately, reflective pace.

A striking example of this occurred when, in the space of a week, two of the city’s cultural giants received tribute, each in one of Manhattan’s most hallowed venues. On April 4, a memorial mass was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for William F. Buckley Jr., who died in February at age 82. Five days later, last Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, homage was paid to Norman Mailer, who died in November at age 84.

One could easily imagine the two men, friendly combatants for nearly five decades, robustly arguing about who received the better send-off. Was it Mr. Buckley, whose A-list mourners included Henry Kissinger, George McGovern and Tom Wolfe? Or Mr. Mailer, who reeled in John Didion, Don DeLillo and Gay Talese? Best to call it a tie — not least since Charlie Rose and Tina Brown were on view at both events. …

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Notable Corner post. Michael Ledeen on the Berlusconi victory in Italy.

… And there’s an even more annoying feature to these elections, as seen by the chattering classes: Berlusconi is an outspoken, even passionate admirer of George W. Bush and the United States of America. Reminds one of the elections that brought Sarkozy to the Elysee, doesn’t it? Best to keep that quiet, or somebody might notice that hatred of America doesn’t seem to affect the voters in Italy, France or Germany. … That moron Bush sure is lucky.

John Fund on the Obama whistleblower.

Everyone knows that Barack Obama got caught on tape accusing Pennsylvania primary voters of being people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” What isn’t well known is that his campaign tried to prevent Mayhill Fowler, the HuffingtonPost.com blogger who broke the story, from getting into the San Francisco mansion where the candidate made the remarks. …

John Fund writes about Obama’s many flaws.

Barack Obama’s San Francisco-Democrat comment last week – about how alienated working-class voters “cling to guns or religion” – is already famous. But the fact that his aides tell reporters he is privately bewildered that anybody took offense is even more remarkable.

Democrats have been worrying about defending Mr. Obama’s highly liberal voting record in a general election. Now they need to fret that he makes too many mistakes, from ignoring the Rev. Wright time bomb until the videotapes blew up in front of him, to his careless condescension towards salt-of-the-earth Democrats. Mr. Obama has a tendency to make such cultural miscues. Speaking to small-town voters in Iowa last year, he asked, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?”

Mr. Obama is the closest thing to a rookie candidate on the national stage since Dwight Eisenhower, who was a beloved war leader. Candidates as green as Mr. Obama make first-timer mistakes under the searing scrutiny of a national campaign. Even seasoned pols don’t understand how unforgiving that scrutiny can be. Ask John Kerry, who had won five statewide elections before running for president. …

… While Republicans tend to nominate their best-known candidate from previous nomination battles (Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and now John McCain), Democrats often fall in love during a first date. They are then surprised when all the relatives don’t think he’s splendid. ..

Peter Wehner has a good take on Obama and his troubles.

… On a deeper level, what we saw in Obama’s comments is a glimpse into a particular worldview, one that animates his political philosophy (contemporary liberalism). Senator Obama seems to view ordinary Americans as bitter, often broken, small-minded objects of pity rather than anger, ostensibly in need of instruction from — you guessed it — Barack Obama. The words of Michelle Obama are worth recalling in this context. She has spoken about her husband pushing us out of our “comfort zones,” saying “Barack knows at some level there is a hole in our souls” and “Barack is the only person in this race who understands that before we can work on the problems as a nation, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.”

This is the Politics of Meaning on steroids. If one views Americans as fundamentally needy children rather than competent citizens, one embraces the precepts of the nanny state — the state that (in Margaret Thatcher’s memorable phrase) takes too much from you in order to do too much for you. This provides an enormous opening for Senator McCain, who can frame this election as pitting a candidate who believes in self-government, against a candidate who believes in the nanny state. …

Thomas Sowell on Obama.

An e-mail from a reader said that, while Hillary Clinton tells lies, Barack Obama is himself a lie. That is becoming painfully apparent with each new revelation of how drastically his carefully crafted image this election year contrasts with what he has actually been saying and doing for many years.

Senator Obama’s election year image is that of a man who can bring the country together, overcoming differences of party or race, as well as solving our international problems by talking with Iran and other countries with which we are at odds, and performing other miscellaneous miracles as needed.

There is, of course, not a speck of evidence that Obama has ever transcended party differences in the United States Senate. Voting records analyzed by the National Journal show him to be the farthest left of anyone in the Senate. Nor has he sponsored any significant bipartisan legislation — nor any other significant legislation, for that matter.

Senator Obama is all talk — glib talk, exciting talk, confident talk, but still just talk.

Some of his recent talk in San Francisco has stirred up controversy because it revealed yet another blatant contradiction between Barack Obama’s public image and his reality. …

Noemie Emery has a good Obama take.

… Whether this will do for Barack Obama in Pennsylvania and in Indiana what Hart’s remarks did for him in New Jersey remains unknown, but condescension towards the people by the party that loves them has a lineage that goes well beyond Hart.

In Our Country, Michael Barone traces this strain back to 1956 and the second campaign of Adlai E. Stevenson, who, when told “thinking people” were for him, said, “Yes, but I need to win a majority,” and when praised for having educated the voters, said that too many had not passed the course. “Stevenson,” Barone says, “was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture–the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting,” and since Stevenson, there have been many such. Hart and Michael Dukakis were brought down by this failing, as was John Kerry, whose 2006 swipe at George W. Bush and those forced into the armed forces brought this response from some servicemen: “Halp us, Jon Carry–We R Stuck HEAR N Irak.” …

What’s it like when Obama goes to a mutual grope fest at an Associated Press gathering? Power Line has the transcript.

Monday, Barack Obama addressed the Associated Press’s Annual Meeting. That’s sort of like the Virgin Mary talking to a Knights of Columbus convention. The only way to read the transcript is for laughs. For example:

OBAMA: I don’t blame them for this. That’s the nature of our political culture. If I had to carry the banner for eight years of George Bush’s failures, I’d be looking for something else to talk about, too.

(LAUGHTER)

Talk about a receptive audience! Pretty much like the Democratic National Convention. Obama addresses “bittergate,” sort of: …

Jennifer Rubin’s comments in Contentions. On Bill first.

… With a rich selection of targets that might benefit Hillary, Bill chooses none of the above. Instead he latches onto the slur-in-passing on his reputation. There is no message control with him; it is just all about Bill 24/7, no matter what the circumstances. It’s enough to make you sympathize with her and her hapless campaign. …

Then on Hill’s skills as she grasps Barack by the throat and kicks him in the crotch.

… she makes the connection between Obama, a “good man,” and other recent “good men” (meaning Kerry and Dukakis) who bombed at the ballot box because they were perceived as elitists. And she comes across  as almost sincere:  she really does believe Obama is electoral poison for the Democrats.

She really has learned a couple things in her years in the White House: how Democrats lose elections and how to go in for the kill.

An Oxford University Press blog posts on Bill Clinton’s perks.

… The Clintons’ tax returns raise one further issue which also requires public discussion: The federal subsidy the Clintons have received over the last seven years while earning in excess of $100 million. Mr. Clinton’s aggressive pursuit of post-presidential income is incompatible with the extensive public support he has received from federal taxpayers since leaving office. That public support was designed to preclude the nation’s chief executives from facing financial hardship after their terms of office. It was not intended to subsidize the aggressive pursuit of a post-presidential fortune.

The federal taxpayer’s subsidy of Mr. Clinton has several components. First, as a former president, Mr. Clinton is entitled to receive, for the remainder of his life, the salary of a cabinet secretary. That salary is today $191,000 per annum. In addition, as a former president, Mr. Clinton also receives, at taxpayer expense, “suitable office space appropriately furnished and equipped.” Mr. Clinton’s office in New York City costs federal taxpayers over $700,000 per year to lease and operate. Federal taxpayers also defray the salary and benefits for office staff and some of Mr. Clinton’s travel outlays. The General Services Administration currently budgets for all of these costs a yearly total of $1,162,000 for Mr. Clinton. The equivalent annual figures for former President Bush and former President Carter are $786,000 and $518,000 respectively.

In addition, Mr. Clinton is also entitled, at taxpayer expense, to Secret Service protection for the remainder of his lifetime – even though, as president, Mr. Clinton signed legislation limiting Secret Service protection for his successors to the first ten years after they leave office. …

Ed Feulner on the dim bulbs that are elected to congress.

… Americans are smart enough to decide for themselves which products they’d prefer to use. It’s only inferior or unnecessary products (think of ethanol) that require congressional intervention to survive. Useful or innovative products (iPods, cell phones) thrive on their own.

The light bulb ban isn’t the first time Congress has attempted to protect Americans from wastefulness. Some years ago, lawmakers outlawed toilets that use more than 1.6 gallons per flush. The low-flow toilets don’t work as well, of course. Ironically they often require several flushes to, shall we say, get the job done.

Reflecting on the failure of a well-intentioned federal law, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said it made him “wonder what ever became of our capacity to govern ourselves.” Simply put, that ability goes away when Washington tries to regulate everything.

Here’s a brighter idea: Let’s allow Americans to choose our own light bulbs. And let the best bulb burn on.

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This weekend, the NY Times reminded us why we miss Milton Friedman. It is the NY Times, so don’t expect too much.

… In the United States, the reconsideration of the Friedman doctrine came via the global financial crisis that has resulted from the collapse of American real estate. Many economists blame regulators for ignoring warning signs that banks and investors were growing reckless. One Friedman acolyte has taken the brunt of such criticisms — Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

But as America reaches for regulation to tame the markets, the keepers of the Friedman flame remain resolute that government is no solution.

“Friedman taught some fundamental long-run truths and he was adept and skilled and almost brilliant at getting them into the public domain,” said Allan H. Meltzer, an economist at Carnegie Mellon. “Now we’ve come into a crisis that has dampened enthusiasm for those policies, and we’re headed back into a period of more regulations that will do the same bad things as in the past.”

George Will puts the current economy in perspective.

During presidential elections, when candidates postulate this or that “crisis” for which each is the indispensable and sufficient cure, economic hypochondria is encouraged, so a sense of suffering is rampant. Recently the Wall Street Journal, like Joseph Conrad contemplating the Congo, surveyed today’s economic jungle and cried, “The horror! The horror!”

Declines in housing values and the stock market are causing some Americans to delay retirement. A Kansas City man had been eager to retire to Arizona but now, the Journal says, “figures he’ll stay put for another couple of years.” He is 59.

So, this is a facet of today’s hydra-headed “crisis” — the man must linger in the labor force until, say, 62. That is the earliest age at which a person can, and most recipients do, begin collecting Social Security.

The proportion of people aged 55 to 64 who are working rose 1.5 percentage points from April 2007 to February 2008, during which the percentage of working Americans older than 65 rose two-tenths of one percentage point. The Journal grimly reported, “The prospect of millions of grandparents toiling away in their golden years doesn’t square with the American dream.” …

John Fund writes on the inability of Congress to get jobs filled in DC.

During last month’s Bear Stearns financial crisis, the Federal Reserve was in the awkward position of having two empty seats on its seven-member Board of Governors. Two new nominees, along with a holdover member, have been awaiting Senate confirmation for a year. This was a problem because the votes of five governors were required to exercise the economic rescue clause that allowed the Fed to lend emergency funds. One governor was unavailable to vote, so a special rule had to be invoked for the Fed to act.

Back in 2000, then-Fed chairman Alan Greenspan warned the Senate that it must fulfill its duty to confirm nominees. Failure to do so, he said, “would effectively create a problem for us should a major financial crisis emerge.” That almost happened last month. But the vacancies remain.

The problem goes far beyond the Federal Reserve. Partisan politics has brought Washington a “Home Alone” government, in which more than 200 nominees for the judicial and executive branches are waiting for Senate confirmation. …

Bill Clinton was stupid some more. MoDo has the delicious details.

… In a mystifying burst of nuttiness, right in time for the Sunday talk shows, Bill twice dredged up Hillary’s rococo story about sniper fire in Bosnia.

He defended his wife on confusing her facts by confusing his facts — a disconcerting reminder about what climbing back on a presidency-built-for-two would be like.

“A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me,” the unamused former president said Thursday night in Boonville, Ind.

He’s absolutely crazed, and not just because he feels that he never got the sort of incandescent press coverage that Obama gets — except maybe when he and Al Gore were on that bus, hailed as “Heartthrobs of the Heartland.” Bill is also crazed about the ineluctable fact that he isn’t Obama.

“He can’t compute that he’s not the new kid on the block,” said a former Clinton adviser. “It’s about his mortality — and immortality. He needs her to win because if she doesn’t become president, he goes down as a minor president. If she wins, it’s the Adamses and the Roosevelts and the Clintons.”

But he knows it’s going down the drain, and that Obama is the hot new thing and they’re the establishment retreads. …

Writer for the LA Times provides background for Bill Richardson’s Obama endorsement.

… There were some ham-fisted phone calls from Clinton backers, who questioned Richardson’s honor and suggested that the governor, who served in President Clinton’s Cabinet, owed Hillary Clinton his support. “That really ticked me off,” Richardson said.

Still, even as he moved from Clinton toward Obama — “the pursuit was pretty relentless on both sides” — Richardson wrestled with the question of loyalty. After 14 years in Congress and a measure of fame as an international troubleshooter, Richardson was named Clinton’s U.N. ambassador, then Energy secretary: “two important appointments,” Richardson said.

He finally concluded that he had settled his debt to the former president: He had worked for Clinton’s election in 1992, helped pass the North American Free Trade Agreement as part of his administration, stood by him during the Monica S. Lewinsky sex scandal, and rounded up votes to fight impeachment.

“I was loyal,” Richardson said during an extended conversation over breakfast this week at the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe. “But I don’t think that loyalty is transferable to his wife. . . . You don’t transfer loyalty to a dynasty.” …

Bill Kristol columns on Obama’s embarrassment.

… But Obama in San Francisco does no courtesy to his fellow Americans. Look at the other claims he makes about those small-town voters.

Obama ascribes their anti-trade sentiment to economic frustration — as if there are no respectable arguments against more free-trade agreements. This is particularly cynical, since he himself has been making those arguments, exploiting and fanning this sentiment that he decries. Aren’t we then entitled to assume Obama’s opposition to Nafta and the Colombian trade pact is merely cynical pandering to frustrated Americans?

Then there’s what Obama calls “anti-immigrant sentiment.” Has Obama done anything to address it? It was John McCain, not Obama, who took political risks to try to resolve the issue of illegal immigration by putting his weight behind an attempt at immigration reform.

Furthermore, some concerns about unchecked and unmonitored illegal immigration are surely legitimate. Obama voted in 2006 (to take just one example) for the Secure Fence Act, which was intended to control the Mexican border through various means, including hundreds of miles of border fence. Was Obama then just accommodating bigotry? …

Abe Greenwald in Contentions too.

The radiant charm; the verbal agility; the promise of change; the post-racial unity; the deferential press; and most importantly, the vagueness of character and intent that sustained the whole façade. These were the hallmarks of Barack Obama’s run for the Democratic nomination, and bit-by-bit, associate-by-associate, gaffe-by-gaffe, the junior senator from Illinois has given all of it back. The extraordinary bounty that had made his campaign a nearly unstoppable force of nature is gone.

With last Sunday’s revelation—that he looks at smalltown America and finds armed, hate-filled, irredentist religious zealots—the last piece of the Obama puzzle fell into place. He is not, it turns out, an agent of change; he is a walking checklist of modern liberal inanities. Big government: check. Crippling taxes: check. Arrogance: check. Identity divisiveness: check. Moral superiority: check. Softness on enemies: check. Shakiness on Israel: check. Questionable patriotism: check. …

Fascinating WaPo piece on gains in computer power.

MIT was so advanced in 1965 (the year I entered as a freshman) that it actually had a computer. Housed in its own building, it cost $11 million (in today’s dollars) and was shared by all students and faculty. Four decades later, the computer in your cellphone is a million times smaller, a million times less expensive and a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion-fold increase in the amount of computation you can buy per dollar.

Yet as powerful as information technology is today, we will make another billion-fold increase in capability (for the same cost) over the next 25 years. That’s because information technology builds on itself — we are continually using the latest tools to create the next so they grow in capability at an exponential rate. This doesn’t just mean snazzier cellphones. It means that change will rock every aspect of our world. The exponential growth in computing speed will unlock a solution to global warming, unmask the secret to longer life and solve myriad other worldly conundrums. …

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Gerard Baker thinks the demonstrations against the Olympic flame have a refreshing time warp about them.

There’s a nostalgic quality to the angry demonstrations that have greeted the arrival of the Olympic flame in Europe and the United States this week.

For some time now the modern wisdom that has brought young malcontents on to the streets of London, Paris and San Francisco has held the US and its dependable ally Britain to be the root of all evil. Governments from Beijing to Caracas could trample their citizens into the ground and you wouldn’t fill a telephone box with people upset about it. But call for the heads of the warmongers Bush and Blair and a million pairs of brave feet would take to the streets to support you.

So it’s a quaint departure for those same crowds, albeit in much smaller numbers, to protest loudly against the actions of men for whom tyranny is a chosen method of governing rather than a silly label attached by adolescent-brained politicians.

The mêlées this week actually have real historical resonance, an echo of the Cold War. They are a reminder of the days when the Olympics were a battlefield in the great ideological struggle of the time. The US-led boycott of Moscow in 1980 and the Soviet Union’s retaliation in Los Angeles four years later were in the end no more than gestures, as meaningful as all the other Games of the era when the two superpowers fought for gold medals as keenly as they fought for the affections of Third World leaders.

The 2008 version of the battle is lower key but this little struggle is a mirror on the most important simple political fact of our times – the global struggle for supremacy between liberalism and its enemies. …

Mark Steyn has a look at the idiots we have let loose in our schools.

Is American public education a form of child abuse? The Washington Post’s Brigid Schulte reported this month on a student named Randy Castro, who attends school in Woodbridge, Va. Last November at recess he slapped a classmate on her bottom. The teacher took him to the principal. School officials wrote up an incident report and then called the police.

Randy Castro is in the first grade. But, at the ripe old age of 6, he’s been declared a sex offender by Potomac View Elementary School. He’s guilty of sexual harassment, and the incident report will remain on his record for the rest of his school days – and maybe beyond.

Maybe it’ll be one of those things that just keeps turning up on background checks forever and ever: Perhaps 34-year-old Randy Castro will apply for a job, and at his prospective employer’s computer up will pop his sexual-harasser status yet again. Or maybe he’ll be able to keep it hushed up until he’s 57 and runs for governor of Virginia, and suddenly his political career self-detonates when the sordid details of his Spitzeresque sexual pathologies are revealed.

But that’s what he is now: Randy Castro, sex offender. The title of the incident report spells out his crime: “Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive.” The curiously placed comma might also be offensive were it not that school officials are having to spend so much of their energies grappling with the first-grade sexual-harassment epidemic they can no longer afford to waste time acquiring peripheral skills such as punctuation.

Randy Castro was not apprehended until he was 6, so who knows how long his reign of sexual terror lasted? …

Barack Obama has been caught dropping some “bon mots” you would have expected his spoiled wife to say. This seems bound to have a telling effect on his campaign. Many of our favorites have things to say. Roger Simon is first.

Excuse me for finding Barack Obama a disingenuous creep. The candidate has now been widely quoted as saying as per rural America: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” …

Power Line is next.

… Obama stands revealed as a bigot of the elite, high-minded variety. With respect to embittered anti-trade sentiment to which Obama refers, the bitterness is one to which he himself caters. …

… Barack Obama’s arrogance has been evident for some time, and it’s no shock, perhaps, to learn that he shares this bigoted opinion, common among urban liberals, of people who live in “small towns.” But to actually express it, in public, at a campaign event, is stunningly stupid. Nevertheless, Obama did it …

Contentions’ Jennifer Rubin.

… This raises several questions. First, is the Clinton campaign minimally competent so as to be able to make this into the quote for the next 10 days in Pennsylvania and convince voters there and elsewhere Obama is a sneering snob? Second, if that is these people’s reason for adopting an uninformed view on trade what is his explanation for embracing protectionism? Third, just how many religious voters and NRA members could there be in Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina, Kentucky and West Virginia? …

Victor Davis Hanson.

… So here we have the essential Obama, a walking paradox between the postmodern hip-Ivy-Leaguer who sneers at middle-class America’s supposed prejudices and parochialism, while at the same time courting an anti-Enlightenment, prejudicial demagogue like Jeremiah Wright. For free trade or anti-free trade? For 2nd-amendment rights or not? Post-religious or pious and fundamentalist? For public campaign financing or not? A uniter of various groups or someone who sees America in terms of “they”? Straight-talking or someone who evokes “context” to explain away the inexplicable?

Again, we will see more and more of these condescending statements of the Michelle Obama strain, more and more of Revs. Wright, Meeks, Lee and others peddlers of division like them, and more and more clues to a long hostility to Israel—in what will eventually become the most disastrous chapter in recent Democratic history.

And pundits keep wondering why Hillary won’t give up?

Mark Steyn.

… If you’re running as a glamorous blank slate on which people project their own utopian fantasies, you’ve got to be very careful not to give the game away – especially when the game turns out to be the usual clichéd elite disdain for the great unwashed. I mention in the current issue of NR how odd it is that Michelle Obama is in many ways more condescending on the stump than Teresa Heinz Kerry. Now her husband’s at it, too. As Ed Driscoll says:

Leave it to Obama to make John Kerry’s Brahmin hauteur seem earnestly goofy in retrospect. …

John Podhoretz.

… Obama’s astonishing sentence offers a syllogistic string of superciliousness: Gun ownership is equated with religious fanaticism, which is said to accompany hatred of the other in the form of opposition to  immigration and support for trade barriers. It drips with an attitude  so important to the spiritual well-being of the American liberal — the paternalistic attitude that says, “Oh, well, people only do thing differently from me because they are ignorant and superstitious and backward” — that it has survived and thrived  despite the suicidal impact it has had on the achievement of liberal political goals and aims. …

The Captain – Ed Morrissey.

… What makes this so breathtaking is the mindless, casual way in which Obama reveals his snobbishness and elitism. We saw hints of this from Michelle Obama, in her assertions about never being proud of her country until her husband ran for President. (Soren Dayton has more on this.) We had not seen it from Obama himself in such a blatant and unmistakable manner. The matter-of-fact style in which he spoke this shows the unthinking contempt he has for people he has never engaged — an acceptance of stereotypes without questioning them that shows his own bigotry, not to mention foolishness and poor judgment.

At times, we have remarked that Obama only really performs well with a script. Once he has to speak extemporaneously, not only does he fare worse as an orator, but he tends to get lost and make unforced errors. It’s hard to imagine one worse than this. It’s all the worse because it’s not a gaffe in the normal sense, but a revealing moment that shows how Obama really views Americans. With this statement, it’s not hard to understand why he sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20 years and heard nothing that moved him to dissent. …

ChiTrib editors take a dim view of Carter’s trip to Hamas.

… Carter hasn’t said publicly why he may be going. Maybe the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize laureate is convinced he can turn Mashaal into a peacenik. He better talk fast: Hamas is undertaking the most significant military buildup in its history, according to recent reports.

Or maybe Carter can’t resist a public and obvious rebuke to the Bush administration’s policy of isolating and weakening Hamas.

Mashaal and his cronies are overseeing the descent of Gaza into further violence, misery and hopelessness, all because they can’t envision a Middle East where Palestinians and Israelis can live side by side in peace.

Can a Nobel be revoked?

Shorts from John Fund.

If you’re wondering where the current airline mess came from, WSJ Editors think it’s congress.

… After the Federal Aviation Administration fined Southwest Airlines more than $10 million last month for inspection lapses, Congress rounded up the usual scapegoats for some hearings. FAA officials told the House Transportation Committee that the Southwest situation was “an isolated problem, not a systematic one.” But James Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the panel, was unpersuaded.

“It’s clear we have a structural problem at the FAA,” declared Mr. Oberstar, to nationwide headlines. “I fear that complacency may have set in at the highest levels of FAA management, reflecting a pendulum swing away from vigorous enforcement of compliance, toward a carrier-favorable, cozy relationship.”

The regulators got the message and went into panic mode. As is wont with government bureaucracies like the FAA, it proceeded to swing the pendulum waaaay back in the other direction – and hasn’t stopped. An industry-wide “audit” commenced, and FAA inspectors set about finding something – anything – awry with an aircraft to show Mr. Oberstar and other Congressional overseers that the agency was up to the job of enforcing federal maintenance requirements to the letter. …

Volokh spots yet another problem with our ethanol foolishness.

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London Times’ Gerard Baker sees some irony in Petraeus visit to Senate.

Something quite strange happened in Washington today. Three US Senators took a day off from their usual working routine and showed up in the US Senate.

John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama swapped for a day the life of campaign flights across the country, adoring crowds in airport hangars and soft-focus interviews with television chat show hosts for a brief trip back to their regular place of work.

The man who forced the remaining US presidential candidates to make this sacrifice was General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Iraq, who was giving his long-awaited progress report on the war to two legislative committees. …

Marty Peretz shows us the UN’s latest slap at Israel.

WaPo editorial on the continued Dem assault on free trade.

THE YEAR 2008 may enter history as the time when the Democratic Party lost its way on trade. Already, the party’s presidential candidates have engaged in an unseemly contest to adopt the most protectionist posture, suggesting that, if elected, they might pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared her intention to change the procedural rules governing the proposed trade promotion agreement with Colombia. …

Roger Simon noticed some confusion at the NY Times over who supported free trade.

Sometimes I think the NYT is a secret comedy act and I am missing the joke, their bias is so extreme. Take a look at today’s editorial “Some Truth About Trade” in which the solons at the Times urge Obama and Clinton to stop pandering on trade protection. Of course, the NYT seems to be blaming Rove for what the Democrats are doing. But never mind that. It’s a reflex. …

Daniel Henninger writes on the airline bomb plot unfolding in a courtroom in London.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain brought their presidential campaigns to the Petraeus-Crocker hearings on Iraq this week. An Iraq-based reporter appearing on one of the cable networks in the evening said the hearings struck him as oddly decoupled from the daily reality of war for the Iraqi people and U.S. troops there. Yup, never hurts to pinch yourself hard on entering presidential campaign space right now.

The three candidates addressed Gen. David Petraeus in tones of high gravitas equal to the thin altitude of the American presidency. Sen. Obama colloquied with Gen. Petraeus about the status of al Qaeda in Iraq – asking whether the terrorist organization could “reconstitute itself” and said that he was looking for “an endpoint.”

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Here’s another hypothetical: Would this conversation be different today if in August 2006 seven airliners had taken off from Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport, bound for the U.S. and Canada and each carrying about 250 passengers, and then blew up over the Atlantic Ocean?

It is a hypothetical because, instead of the explosions, British prosecutors this week presented their case against eight Muslim men arrested in August 2006 and charged with conspiring to board and blow up those planes. …

We haven’t heard from the Captain for awhile. Here’s three posts from Hot Air.

In June 2004, Hillary Clinton outlined the statist philosophy in a speech to a San Francisco audience when she explained that “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” In 2008, that task has fallen to Michelle Obama. In an appearance in Charlotte yesterday, Mrs. Obama made it just a little more specific (via Instapundit):

Should she become first lady, she said she’d focus on family issues.

“If we don’t wake up as a nation with a new kind of leadership…for how we want this country to work, then we won’t get universal health care,” she said.

“The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”

This statement should make clear exactly what either Democrat represents. Both Hillary and Obama want to extend the power of the federal government over choices that have nothing to do with their Constitutional mandate. Both want to spend more money and expand systems that already fail to operate efficiently and deliver on their promises. And both want Americans across the board to give up more of their income to pay for bigger bureaucracies.

Neither of these candidates are moderate, center-left politicians. They’re both statists, and they both make the same basic mistake of all statists. ..

Thomas Sowell advises how the GOP might appeal to blacks.

… A sober presentation of the facts– “straight talk,” if you will– gives Senator McCain and Republicans their best shot at a larger share of the votes of blacks. There is plenty to talk straight about, including all the things that the Democrats are committed to that work to the disadvantage of blacks, beginning with Democrats’ adamant support of teachers’ unions in their opposition to parental choice through vouchers.

The teachers’ unions are just one of the sacred cow constituencies of the Democratic Party whose agendas are very harmful to blacks.

Black voters also need to be told about the 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.

The black population of San Francisco, for example, has been cut in half since 1970– and San Francisco is the very model of a community of liberal Democrats, including green zealots who are heedless of the consequences of their actions on others. …

Speaking of Dem payoffs to teachers, dig this NY Post editorial.

Diane Gordon, the Brooklyn assembly woman convicted Tuesday of bribe- taking, must be wondering why she’s facing 10 years in the slammer – while Speaker Shelly Silver, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno and their respective henchmen are not.

It’s a good question.

After all, what lawmakers did this week in barring the use of student test scores in teacher tenure decisions was every bit as much a commercial transaction – a bribe deal – as what Gordon had planned.

Lawmakers OK’d the new rule, which handcuffs school districts and virtually guarantees even lousy teachers lifetime job security, for one reason only: The teachers unions paid them – outright – to do so, by shipping them boatloads of “campaign donations” over the decades.

Schoolkids? Never on the radar.

Indeed, no one even bothered to argue that the bill would help students. The sole question was whether the legislators would stay bought.

And the answer was easy: Yep. …

Victor Davis Hanson wonders where all the liberals have gone.

These days Democrats are not sounding very liberal. Classic liberals, after all, would support free markets, internationalism and the universal desire for constitutional government, while downplaying racial affinity. But the following examples highlight how far from these ideals today’s liberals are. …

CNN.Money reports on life in Canada’s oil boomtown.

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Joe Klein had unkind things to say about Peter Wehner. So, Wehner started quoting Klein. Turns out that was unkind.

… On February 22, 2003, he told Tim Russert on his CNBC program that the war was a “really tough decision” but that he, Klein, thought it was probably “the right decision at this point.” Klein then offered several reasons for his judgment: Saddam’s defiance of 17 U.N. resolutions over a dozen years; Klein’s firm conviction that Saddam was hiding WMD; and the need to send that message that if we didn’t enforce the latest U.N. resolution, it “empowers every would-be Saddam out there and every would-be terrorist out there.”

Earlier this year Klein called the Iraq war the “stupidest foreign policy decision ever made by an American President.” This raises a question: does Klein’s statements to Russert qualify as the stupidest endorsement of the stupidest foreign policy decision ever made by an American President? One difference between President and Klein is that the President didn’t pretend, as Klein has, that he was against the war after he was for the war. Another difference is that the President favored the surge, which Klein opposed. On January 8, 2007, for example, Klein wrote this:

I’m afraid I’m going to get cranky about this: The Democrats who oppose the so-called “surge” are right. But they have to be careful not to sound like ill-informed dilettantes when talking about it.

And on April 5, 2007 Klein wrote this:

Never was Bush’s adolescent petulance more obvious than in his decision to ignore the Baker-Hamilton report and move in the exact opposite direction: adding troops and employing counterinsurgency tactics inappropriate to the situation on the ground. “There was no way he was going to accept [its findings] once the press began to portray the report as Daddy’s friends coming to the rescue,” a member of the Baker-Hamilton commission told me. As with Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the decision to surge was made unilaterally, without adequate respect for history or military doctrine.

Klein, then, favored going to war with Iraq and was a critic of the strategy that has been succeeding and may actually help bring about a decent outcome in Iraq. All of which makes Klein’s effort to portray himself as an expert on and prescient about Iraq not terribly convincing. …

Mark Steyn on Mrs. Obama’s America.

… Her “adult lifetime” has been spent in some of the most unrepresentative quarters of American life: Princeton, the ever-metastasizing bureaucracy of diversity enforcement, and Jeremiah Wright’s neo-segregationist ghetto of Afrocentric liberation theology and conspiracy theory. If young people were to follow the Obamas’ message and abandon “corporate America” for the above precincts, the nation would collapse. Michelle Obama embodies a peculiar mix of privilege and victimology, which is not where most Americans live. On the other hand, it does make her a terrific Oprah guest: Unlike her sonorous, dignified, restrained husband, she has exactly the combination of wealth and vulnerability prized by connoisseurs of daytime talk shows.

There’s something pitiful about a political culture that has no use for Mitt Romney, a hugely successful businessman, but venerates a woman who gets more than 300 grand for running a “neighborhood outreach” and “staff diversity” program. They seem curious career choices for the closest confidante of a man who claims to be running as a “post-racial” candidate. Which Barack Obama certainly could have been: He’s no tired old race-baiter making a lucrative career out of grievance-mongering, like Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the Republic of Himself. In many ways, he’s similar to Colin Powell, a bipartisan figure born to a British subject (in Powell’s case, from the Caribbean; in Obama’s, from colonial Kenya) and thus untinged by the bitterness of the African-American experience. And yet the two most important figures in Obama’s adult life exemplify all the tired obsessions he was supposed to transcend. …

John Fund with a short on Condi Rice as VP.

Camille Paglia likes a question she gets about Hillary.

Corner post with good economic and politcal comparison.

John Stossel continues his knock on abuse by lawyers.

“We cannot use force.”

That was my response last week when a lawyer shouted at me, “You media types are bullies, too!”

We were arguing about my Wall Street Journal op-ed that called class-action and securities lawyers bullies and parasites who enrich themselves through extortion. It’s legal extortion, but extortion nonetheless.

These aggressive lawyers and their Naderite defenders don’t get it. Or they pretend they don’t.

There are only two ways to do things in life: voluntarily or forced. We reporters may be obnoxious, intrusive, stupid, rude, etc., but we cannot force anyone to do anything. All our work is in the voluntary sector.

But litigation is force. When a plaintiff sues, a defendant is forced to mount a defense. If he settles or loses, he’s forced to pay. Government is the enforcer. …

Weekly Standard says the polar bears wil be able to bear it.

… Lindzen flatly describes worry over polar bears as “gibberish.” “Polar bears are going up in number,” he says. “They’re not worried; they can swim a hundred kilometers.” The notion of threatened polar bear populations was recently challenged by J. Scott Armstrong, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. In an article for the journal Interfaces, Armstrong and his coauthors argued that a series of complex and “erroneous assumptions” undergird much of the research showing polar bears at risk, and they offer compelling evidence that the animals have survived far warmer conditions in the past.

Still there is a push to have the polar bear officially listed as a “threatened species.” Hugh Hewitt, who practices natural resources law in addition to hosting a radio show, explained in a recent column that the move would clear a path for environmentalists to “argue that every federal permit that allows directly or indirectly for increased emissions of hydrocarbons is a federal act that might impact the polar bear.” Such permits would thus be subject to a new range of environmental regulations affecting all manner of industry.

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It takes a Canadian paper, The National Post, to point out an important Katrina lesson.

Shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, gathered his subordinates and ordered a memorandum sent to every single regional and store manager in the imperiled area. His words were not especially exalted, but they ought to be mounted and framed on the wall of every chain retailer — and remembered as American business’s answer to the pre-battle oratory of George S. Patton or Henry V.

“A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level,” was Scott’s message to his people. “Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and above all, do the right thing.”

This extraordinary delegation of authority — essentially promising unlimited support for the decision-making of employees who were earning, in many cases, less than $100,000 a year — saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. The results are recounted in a new paper on the disaster written by Steven Horwitz, an Austrian-school economist at St. Lawrence University in New York. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency fumbled about, doing almost as much to prevent essential supplies from reaching Louisiana and Mississippi as it could to facilitate it, Wal-Mart managers performed feats of heroism. In Kenner, La., an employee crashed a forklift through a warehouse door to get water for a nursing home. A Marrero, La., store served as a barracks for cops whose homes had been submerged. In Waveland, Miss., an assistant manager who could not reach her superiors had a bulldozer driven through the store to retrieve disaster necessities for community use, and broke into a locked pharmacy closet to obtain medicine for the local hospital. …

Daniel Henninger reminds that Viet Nam is one of the roots of today’s anti-war ideas.

Is it uncharitable to suggest that when the fighting erupted in Basra last week between Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the U.S.-trained Iraqi army, some opponents of the war hoped it would become George Bush’s Tet Offensive? That is, a battle whose military details are largely irrelevant, but whose sudden violence “proves” to voters that a U.S. military commitment is unwinnable and should be abandoned?

It was hard not to miss the antiwar spin coming off reports of the fighting, after a year of unmistakable gains from the Petraeus surge strategy.

An Obama foreign policy adviser, Denis McDonough, said it “does raise a handful of concerns as it relates to the surge and, more importantly, about the prospect of political reconciliation.” The New York Times noted that Hillary Clinton, campaigning in Pennsylvania, said the Bush commitment to keeping up troop levels in Iraq is a “clear admission that the surge has failed to accomplish its goals.”

The Democrats appear so invested in a failure that a half-week of violence erases a year of progress. What is the source of such instincts?

Walter Cronkite’s Feb 17, 1968 broadcast about the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive concluded with words that remain famous even now: “[I]t is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Attend an Obama or Hillary rally and the message in those 40-year-old words echoes loudly, and are cheered again. …

Victor Davis Hanson provides a good overview of the campaign so far.

2008 was supposed to have been an ideal year for the Democratic Party. There’s an unpopular, lame-duck Republican president presiding over an iffy economy and an unpopular war. Plus, the Democrats won big in the 2006 elections, and there’s no Republican vice president in the race to draw on the power of incumbency.

No wonder that for much of 2007, the polls suggested that the only mystery would be by how much Sen. Hillary Clinton would beat former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the general election.

Indeed, for Democrats not to walk into the presidency in November 2008, the conventional wisdom was that the absolute unthinkable would have to transpire.

And now it almost has.

The Republicans have done something unimaginable in making Sen. John McCain the presumptive nominee. And so have the Democrats in allowing their primary season to drag on. …

Great analysis by Michael Barone of the Academic/Jacksonian split exemplified by the Clinton/Obama struggle. This was very long. The detailed state by state paragraphs have been deleted. A link to the whole piece is provided at the deletion.

… When I first noticed Obama’s weak showings among Appalachians, I chalked them up, as many in the press will be inclined to do, to an antipathy to blacks. But that simply doesn’t hold up. Go back to 1995, and look at the polls that showed that most Americans would support Colin Powell for president. I don’t think you’ll find any evidence of resistance by Jacksonian voters to the Powell candidacy. Rather the contrary, I suspect. He was a warrior, after all, and always exudes a sense of command. Or go back and look at the election returns in 1989 in which Douglas Wilder became the first black governor in our history, in Virginia. Jacksonians in southwest Virginia showed no aversion to Wilder; rather the contrary. Take Buchanan County, which runs along both West Virginia and Kentucky, and which voted 90 percent to 9 percent for Clinton over Obama on February 12. In 1989, it voted 59 percent to 41 percent for Wilder over Republican Marshall Coleman. Overall, Wilder lost what is now the Ninth Congressional District (long known as the Fighting Ninth) by a 53 percent-to-47 percent margin. But that is far less than the 59 percent-to-39 percent margin by which George W. Bush beat John Kerry in the district in November 2004 or the 65 percent-to-33 percent margin by which Clinton beat Obama there in February 2008. Jacksonians may reject certain kinds of candidates, but not because they’re black. A black candidate who will join them in fighting against attacks on their family or their country is all right with them.

Of course, the real Jacksonian in this race is John McCain. He is descended from Scots-Irish fighters who settled in Carroll County, Miss. Former Sen. Trent Lott, who once worked as a fundraiser for the University of Mississippi and therefore knew the folkways of elite types in his state very well, once told me that he had relatives who had known McCain’s relatives in Mississippi. “They were fighters,” he said, as best I can remember his words. “They would never stop fighting you. Those people would never stop fighting.” Obama gives the impression, through his demeanor and through his statements on Iraq, that he would never start fighting. …

Fascinating book reviewed by American.com.

How’s this for a crazy idea: a guy moves to a randomly selected city with $25 and plans to have a place to live, a car, and $2,500 in the bank—all within one year. Adam Shepard performed this exact feat and then wrote a book about it, titled Scratch Beginnings (SB Press, 240 pp, $13.95). According to Shepard, his experience proves that the American dream can come true.

In college, Shepard read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, which argues that only government intervention can rescue the working poor from what Ehrenreich portrays as a desperate plight. Shepard doubted her thesis and wanted to test it. So after graduating, he went to Charleston, South Carolina, with a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, $25, and a made-up tale of woe. He spent the first two months in a homeless shelter while he worked as a day laborer. He later found a permanent position with a moving company, which gave him a stable income. This allowed Shepard to buy a (very) used pickup truck, rent and furnish an apartment with a coworker, and start saving.

During this time, he was on a strict budget, buying clothes at Goodwill and lunching on peanut butter crackers and Vienna sausages. After ten months, he left Charleston due to an illness in his family. By that point, he had saved over $5,000. Along the way, he had met dozens of marginal citizens whose lives he found relentlessly fascinating.

Self-published earlier this year, Scratch Beginnings quickly climbed the charts on Amazon.com. Besides being a compelling story, it is a breezy read. …

Robert Samuelson on how not to save housing. He examines the proposal most often touted today and shows why, yet again, government stupidity will probably make the problem worse.

… The justification is to prevent an uncontrolled collapse of home prices that would inflict more losses on lenders — aggravating the “credit crunch” — and postpone a revival in home buying and building. This gets the economics backward. From 2000 to 2006, home prices rose 50 percent or more by various measures. Housing affordability deteriorated, with home buying sustained only by a parallel deterioration of lending standards. With credit standards now tightened, home prices should fall to bring buyers back into the market and to reassure lenders that they’re not lending on inflated properties. …

The Economist says scientists who study stools have pushed back the time humans first arrived in the Americas. No Sh-t!

A GOOD doctor can tell a lot from a stool sample, but Dr Thomas Gilbert can tell more than many. Indeed, he thinks he can tell when a continent was first populated, and by whom, for the stools he is examining were produced by some of North America’s earliest inhabitants.

Dr Gilbert, who works at Copenhagen University, in Denmark, is one of the leaders of a team that has just published its findings in Science. The team had examined 14 coprolites, as fossil faeces are termed by polite scientists. These coprolites came from a complex of caves in Oregon. Radiocarbon dating showed some of them to be more than 14,000 years old. And they appeared to be human.

The reason that excites researchers is that it helps to push back the date when humanity arrived in the Americas. …