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David Warren uses Friedrich Hayek to explain how environmentalists have become stalking horses for the people who wish to command others.

It was my hero, Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), economist of the “Austrian School,” and historian of ideas, who wrote the book titled Road to Serfdom. It appeared in the spring of 1944, in England, not the most convenient moment given the paper shortages of wartime, and the continuing distractions from the life of the mind offered by Herr Hitler. Nor could it have been calculated to please Keynesians and other supporters of the prevailing economic wisdom — which was that the success of centralized war production, and Roosevelt’s New Deal in America, had permanently validated “central planning” in every national economy.

More than that, the ideologues of the Left, having had to withdraw their pacifist approach to Hitler after the disintegration of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, were now arguing that the Nazi Party of Germany was “capitalism’s answer to the socialism of Mother Russia,” and laying down the rhetorical notion that “capitalism equals fascism,” as a way to tarnish the people who had actually risked their lives in fighting the Nazis tooth, nail and soul.

While the idea that Hitler’s program of “National Socialism” worked on free market principles was utterly absurd, not only on its face but on every possible level of analysis, we must remember that then as now the batty ideas of the Left enjoyed a tremendous cachet in fashionable society, among people who do not so much think as preen themselves. Moreover, those were the days of “Uncle Joe” Stalin, when the western world was too busy fighting a war in which he had become an ally to remember that the socialist system in Russia was an obscene and murderous tyranny. …

A most amazing thing was overshadowed last week by Spitzer and Jeremiah Wright. David Mamet, Pickerhead’s favorite playwright and screenwriter, wrote an article for The Village Voice titled Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain Dead Liberal.’ First spotting was a Mark Steyn Corner post. Since so much else was going on, we left it for this week. That has the virtue of allowing many of our favorite blogs to comment.

Mark Hemingway Corner post offers to suspend some of the rules of the dark side Mr. Mamet has joined.

Russ Roberts in Cafe Hayek with what amounts to a Hayek tribute.

David Mamet has written an extraordinary confessional for the Village Voice (I’ve edited this link, ht: Drudge) where he describes his philosophical change of heart from being an anti-American, anti-market believer in man’s perfectibility to something different. An excerpt:

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. …

The libertarians at Samizdata post twice.

Jonathan Adler in Volokh Conspiracy.

… David Mamet, long one of my favorite living playwrights, thinks Thomas Sowell is “out greatest contemporary philosopher. Go figure.

Roger Simon.

Here is Mr. Mamet.

… I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f–k up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.” …

… I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. …

… I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism. …

Since Mr. Mamet is a fan, we have Thomas Sowell‘s comments on the pastor disaster.

… The bad news is that Barack Obama has been leading as much of a double life as Eliot Spitzer.

While talking about bringing us together and deploring “divisive” actions, Senator Obama has for 20 years been a member of a church whose minister, Jeremiah Wright, has said that “God Bless America” should be replaced by “God damn America” — among many other wild and even obscene denunciations of American society, including blanket racist attacks on whites.

Nor was this an isolated example. Fox News Channel has played tapes of various sermons of Jeremiah Wright, and says that it has tapes with hours of more of the same.

Wright’s actions matched his words. He went with Louis Farrakhan to Libya and Farrakhan received an award from his church.

Sean Hannity began reporting on Jeremiah Wright back in April of 2007. But the mainstream media saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil.

Now that the facts have come out in a number of places, and can no longer be suppressed, many in the media are trying to spin these facts out of existence. ….

American Thinker thinks Obama might be the new Jimmy Carter.

… Barack Obama seems cut of identical cloth. Carefully scripted, Obama quickly corrects statements which show how he truly feels. He rejects anti-Semitic, anti-American supporters only when nudged to do so. His wife “misstates” when she says that she has never been proud of America until now, but Michelle corrects the error only belatedly and without apparent concern for misinterpretation.

It certainly seems as if Obama feels that the problems of America have been her moral shortcomings, which is very much what Jimmy Carter thought. It seems as if Obama feels himself morally superior to those in politics today, much like Carter did thirty years ago. Obama, like Carter, invites Americans to trust him with the most beguiling claims of spiritual elevation. Obama, like Carter was an utter and complete Democrat partisan, although he promised to be just the opposite.

Jimmy Carter never tried to “govern from the center” or “seek bipartisanship.” He could easily have passed tax cuts or defense spending increases. He did not want to. Barack Obama has never sought bipartisanship. He embraces Leftism completely. They are the same: Barack Obama is our next Jimmy Carter.

Robert Samuelson reports how this financial crisis is different.

… Previous financial crises so weakened the banks and savings and loans that they lost their primacy. As recently as 1980, they supplied almost half of all lending — to companies, consumers and home buyers. Now their share is less than 30 percent. The gap has been filled by “securitization”: the bundling of mortgages, credit card debt and other loans into bond-like instruments that are sold to all manner of investors (banks themselves, pension funds, hedge funds, insurance companies).

As a result, the nature of financial crises changed. With a traditional “bank run,” the object was to reassure the public. The central bank — the Federal Reserve in the United States — lent cash to solvent banks so that they could repay worried depositors and preempt a panic that would spread to more and more banks and would ultimately deprive the economy of credit. But now the fear and uncertainty center on the value of highly complex, opaque securities and the myriad financial institutions that hold them. …

John Stossel with more on the unintended consequences of sex-offender laws.

… Too often, American criminal law is a blunt instrument designed to make it look as if politicians are protecting us. I think the politicians usually protect themselves, at our expense.

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On the fifth anniversary Slate asked proponents of the Iraq War what they got wrong. Chris Hitchens says – nothing.

An “anniversary” of a “war” is in many ways the least useful occasion on which to take stock of something like the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, if only because any such formal observance involves the assumption that a) this is, in fact, a war and b) it is by that definition an exception from the rest of our engagement with that country and that region. I am one of those who, for example, believes that the global conflict that began in August 1914 did not conclusively end, despite a series of “fragile truces,” until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is not at all to redefine warfare and still less to contextualize it out of existence. But when I wrote the essays that go to make up A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, I was expressing an impatience with those who thought that hostilities had not really “begun” until George W. Bush gave a certain order in the spring of 2003.

Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy U.S. involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein’s wing of the Baath Party to power. …

John Burns on our five years in Iraq.

… American hopes are that Iraqis, with enough American troops still present to stiffen the new Iraqi forces and prevent a slide backward toward all-out civil war, will ultimately tire of the violence in the way of other peoples who have been plunged into communal violence, as many Lebanese did during their 15-year civil war. Those hopes have been buoyed by a reduction in violence in the last year that can been traced to the American troop increase and to the cooperation or quiescence of some previously militant groups, both Sunni and Shiite.

They are hopes shared by many ordinary Iraqis. Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the American command, have long suggested that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam Hussein’s years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

That sentiment is not one that many critics of the war in the United States seem willing to accept, but neither does it offer the glimmer of cheer that it might seem to offer to many supporters of the war. For it would be passing strange, after the years of unrelenting bloodshed, if Iraqis demanded anything else. It is small credit to the invasion, after all it has cost, that Iraqis should arrive at a point when all they want from America is a return to something, stability, that they had under Saddam. For America, too, it is a deeply dispiriting prospect, promising no early end to the bleeding in Iraq.

David Brooks asks and answers seven questions about the financial crisis.

What’s the most underdiscussed issue of this presidential campaign?

Housing. Housing prices are off about 10 percent from their peak, and experts expect them to drop another 20 percent or so. Without policy changes, several million households will default on their mortgages over the next few years. Roughly 14 million homeowners will owe more than their houses are worth. Uncertainty about mortgage-backed securities will continue to whack at the foundations of the banking system.

Who’s to blame?

Who’s not to blame? The mortgage brokers were out of control. Regulators were asleep. Home buyers thought they were entitled to Corian counters and a two-story great room. Everybody from Norwegian town elders to financial geniuses decided that house prices would always go up. This was an episode of mass idiocy.

Victor Davis Hanson thinks Wright is a strange biblical scholar.

… Any middle-of-the-road Democratic voter who sampled five or six of Wright’s sermons, juxtaposed them with Obama’s references to him as not particularly controversial, an uncle, a scholar, etc., wouldn’t vote for Obama in a million years.

VDH also thinks Obama’s morphing into Nixon.

Wrightgate is more and more becoming Nixonian.

Now we hear that Rev. Wright considers Israel a “dirty word”. I don’t want to sound like a broken-record, but we are back to 1973-4 when almost every day a new disclosure helped doom the stonewalling Nixon.

The gamut of Wright’s hatred is amazingly extensive—Israel, whites, rich people, the United States, the American conduct of World War II, moderate blacks, middleclassness, Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice—to such a degree that he seems consumed with hatred and simply fills in the target spontaneously at any given moment. …

Bill Kristol thinks maybe it’s not time for Obama. He doesn’t say it, but Pickerhead wonders if Obama’s time will ever come – what with the Wright Reverend and the increasingly tiresome wife.

… Obama seems to have seen, early in his career, the utility of joining a prominent church that would help him establish political roots in the community in which he lives. Now he sees the utility of distancing himself from that church. Obama’s behavior in dealing with Wright is consistent with that of a politician who often voted “present” in the Illinois State Legislature for the sake of his future political viability.

The more you learn about him, the more Obama seems to be a conventionally opportunistic politician, impressively smart and disciplined, who has put together a good political career and a terrific presidential campaign. But there’s not much audacity of hope there. There’s the calculation of ambition, and the construction of artifice, mixed in with a dash of deceit — all covered over with the great conceit that this campaign, and this candidate, are different. …

Roger Simon thinks Obama’s turning into an ordinary narcissistic political creep. And, McCain is attracting attention.

John Derbyshire says Obama is …

… toast. He may yet get the Democratic nomination, but tens of millions of Americans who are neither (a) black nor (b) guilty white liberals are simply appalled that Obama would revere a guy like Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, whatever the particularities of which services he did and didn’t attend. It defies belief that Obama knew this man for all that time, intimately enough to have him supervise at the Obama wedding and the children’s baptisms, yet did not know that Wright is a white-hating, America-hating crank. Who on earth believes this?

The MSM can’t smother this, not in the age of the web, though they are trying mightily.

Jennifer Rubin posts on Wright.

Juan Williams hit the nail on the head during his appearance on Fox News Sunday. He explained the importance of the Reverend Wright issue . (It is worth watching just for the reaction shots of the other Fox commentators, who can only observe in awe and stifle the urge to interrupt while Williams is on his roll). This goes to “character and judgment,” Williams explains, because we now can see that Obama was playing games on the race question. He exploited, in other words, his connection to Reverend Wright when it was to his advantage in the past, but is now playing to the public’s yearning for racial unity, since it better serves his presidential ambitions. For bonus points, Williams explains how the brand of noxious black nationalism and paranoia exemplified in Wright’s sermons leads to statements like Michelle Obama’s. …

Does Owl Gore know England will have a white Easter?

… Conditions will be worst in Scotland and northern England but below-freezing temperatures and a sprinkling of snow are possible even in the South East – alongside strong winds and driving rain. Western regions, especially the South West, should have clearer skies but freezing conditions at night. …

Or that Montreal is about to set a snow record?

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David Warren writes on who will pay the price for our ethanol foolishness.

A few weeks ago I wrote in this space – facetiously – that an effective response to global warming and/or the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide would be to cut the world’s food consumption by half. This could be achieved if we would all agree to eat only on odd-numbered days.

Among the advantages of having our environmental commissars enforce this scheme, I mentioned the halving of the factory and transport infrastructure that delivers the planet’s food. But beyond this, the food industry’s billion or so poorest customers, who barely get enough to eat now, would be removed from the carbon account entirely. Think of it on the analogy of a corporate buy-out, I suggested:

“At first, there is a net increase in CO2 ‘costs’ as people die and their corpses decay. But later, after they have finished decaying, there are substantial and permanent net savings.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t joke. A scheme to kill off the world’s poor, through starvation, has already been launched on the advice of environmental “experts,” and is showing promising results. The tactics are cleverer than mine, by half.

“Biofuel” is the means. By turning much of the planet’s limited arable land, including especially the lower-cost breadbaskets of the Third World, into grain generators for biofuel, the environmental revolution is creating the conditions for famine on a colossal scale. …

… Biofuel has joined the list of environmental catastrophes caused by environmental scares. That list began with the DDT scare in the early 1960s. Tens of millions have died from malaria and other diseases that could have been eradicated by spraying with this pesticide.

The triumph of “environmentalism” is symptomatic of the madness that has gripped our power elites, under the thrall of “political correctness” – for there is real insanity in creating an actual and predictable disaster, to avert an imaginary one.

Noting food riots already in Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Mexico, and food rationing in Pakistan and China, the Indian development economist Deepak Lal writes: “For the Western ‘good and the great,’ their academic acolytes and the pop stars grandstanding to save Africa and to end poverty, this latest Western assault on the world’s poor by their promotion of biofuels to replace food on the limited land in the world, can only evince contempt.”

The American thinks we should listen to the French – sometimes.

Counterterrorism, like espionage and covert action, isn’t a spectator sport. The more a country practices, the better it gets. France has become the most accomplished counterterrorist practitioner in Europe. Whereas September 11, 2001, was a shock to the American counterterrorist establishment, it wasn’t a révolution des mentalités in Paris. Two waves of terrorist attacks, the first in the mid-1980s and the second in the mid-1990s, have made France acutely aware of both state-supported Middle Eastern terrorism and freelancing but organized Islamic extremists.

In comparison, the security services in Great Britain and Germany were slow to awaken to the threat from homegrown radical Muslims. Britain’s gamble was that its multicultural approach to immigrants was superior to France’s forced-assimilation model. But with the discovery of one terrorist plot after another being planned by British Muslims, as well as the deadly transportation bombings that took place in London on July 7, 2005, the British have begun to question the wisdom of their “Londonistan” approach to Muslim immigration. Similarly, until recently, the belief in Berlin was that Germany was safe from homegrown Muslim terrorism; but two major bomb plots over the past year and a half—one aimed at German trains, the second at American installations and interests in Germany—have raised serious doubts in the minds of many German security officials about that previous assumption.

And French scholars and journalists have been way ahead of their European and American counterparts in dissecting Islamic extremism and in analyzing the phenomenon of European-raised Muslim militants. French officials who work in counterterrorism are well apprised of this intellectual spadework, often maintaining friendly relationships with scholars and journalists working in the field. …

John Fund, who has written often on voter fraud, says it would be a mistake to use postal primaries in FL and MI.

“There’s talk in some Democratic circles of letting the states of Michigan and Florida revote. . . . They’re talking about a revote primary where people would mail in their ballots. That’s a great idea, combine the reliability of the people in Florida who count the ballots with the efficiency of the Post Office. What could go wrong there?”–Jay Leno

It’s unclear if either Florida or Michigan, whose delegations are barred from voting at the Democratic National Convention because they held early primaries in violation of party rules, will figure out a way to hold a revote between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

What is clear is that the Democratic Party in both states is likely to reject using privately funded mail-in elections as the solution. A mail-in vote is less secure than a ballot cast in person, and both Michigan and Florida have long histories of both voter fraud and election official incompetence.

For too long, both parties have encouraged the growth of mail-in ballots (also known as absentee voting), to the point that some 3 out of 10 votes in national elections are now cast before Election Day. Little thought has been given to the security problems attendant to absentee voting.

Carl Hiaasen, who has written often on Florida fraud, writes on another FL primary.

…

8. After what happened here in 2000, why would the Democratic leadership jeopardize its chances to win back the White House by putting Florida in such a pivotal position?

That would be a good question for Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party. Another good question for Dean is: When are you going to stop acting like an addled hamster and do something smart?

9. If another primary were approved, is it true that the Democratic candidates would be allowed to campaign and advertise throughout Florida?

Tragically, yes. After months of peace and quiet, the Sunshine State finally would be invaded full-bore by the Obama and Clinton forces.

Remember back when Rudy Giuliani was the only one hanging around? Heck, we hardly knew he was here.

Those were the days . . .

Jennifer Rubin likes McCain’s earmark record compared to Obama and Clinton.

The Economist tells us how we will soon get real time traffic and road info on our car’s GPS gear.

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We open with a great piece by Abigail Thernstrom. Abby is a friend and one of Pickings most faithful readers. Today’s article celebrates the success of Barack Obama’s appeal across racial lines. Abby shows why this is not typical of African-American politicians in the U. S. today. Yet again, we see the un-intended consequence of well meaning but foolish laws. She is an optimist so ends on that note – probably misplaced.

… Most black politicians do not have the personal history that has allowed Mr. Obama to “find common political ground.” They have also been groomed in majority-black districts where they have seldom needed to appeal across racial lines.

“The Voting Rights Act perplexingly integrates the Congress by separating people into different congressional districts on the basis of race,” political scientist David Lublin has noted. The statute has conferred on minority candidates a unique privilege: protection from white competition. In theory, there are no group rights to representation in America. In fact, the 1965 statute has created a system of reserved seats for blacks and Hispanics.

Almost all members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been elected to fill a reserved seat. They run in what Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has called “segregated” districts. These are districts devoid of the normal political pressures that encourage candidates to move to the political center. Candidates win — as Bobby Rush did — by emphasizing their racial bona fides, their commitment to representing black interests, and their far-left convictions — matching those of most black voters. It is not a recipe for winning in statewide and other majority-white settings. …

… Perhaps the candidacy of Barack Obama can convince the black leadership, as well as the Justice Department attorneys and judges who enforce and interpret the Voting Rights Act, that it is time to move on. Barack Obama, in turning his back on the world of segregated politics, has shown the way forward.

Ilya Somin notes one bright spot in the Spitzer mess.

Until his recent downfall, Eliot Spitzer was one of America’s most prominent Jewish politicians. Yet his Jewishness has been almost completely absent from the public debate occasioned by his disgrace and resignation. …

… The lack of focus on Spitzer’s Jewishness is all to the good. It shows that both the political elite and the general public broadly accept the role of Jews in public life and that anti-Semitism has largely been marginalized in mainstream political discourse. …

Abe Greenwald posts for Contentions on the Dem’s Iraq dilemma.

… Enter John McCain. He recognized the failings of the Rumsfeld plan and, determined not to quit, pushed for new ideas. Having backed the Petraeus plan that’s responsible for the shift in Iraq, he doesn’t need to dance around the pro-victory majority—let alone convince them to throw in the towel. Seeing these new figures, the Democrats will at some point try to back off on the defeatist rhetoric, but there’s only so far they can go and not seem preposterous. A 180-degree turn on Iraq would create too much fallout about flip-flopping, experience, and character. It’s not clear how the Democrats are going to wriggle out of this one. But the man who changed when it most mattered can stay in one place for a while.

John Fund says NY Gov. David Patterson supports vouchers.

… He is passionately in favor of school choice and has even spoken at two conferences held by the Alliance for School Choice. At one, he pulled off the rare feat of quoting both Martin Luther King Jr. and individualistic philosopher Ayn Rand approvingly in the same speech. …

John then flips to Obama’s pastor. Many of our favorites have thoughts on this too and we devote much of today to Rev. Wright. This might be the lever that allows Hillary to push Barack out of the way. A New Yorker profile March 10th had this about Michelle Obama’s address to a South Carolina church during the primary campaign there.

… Earlier on the day that (Michelle) Obama visited the nursery school, she addressed a congregation at the Pee Dee Union Baptist Church, in Cheraw, a hamlet of about six thousand known as “The Prettiest Town in Dixie.” The church’s makeshift gravel parking lot, next to the Pee Dee Ice and Fuel Company and bounded by train tracks, was full. After an invocation by the Reverend Jerry Corbett and an introduction by the mayor of Cheraw, Obama came to the pulpit. “You all got up bright and early just for me?” she asked the mostly elderly, almost all-black crowd. “Yes!” they roared. Obama continued, “On behalf of my church home and my pastor, Reverend Wright, I bring greetings.” …

Power Line is first.

… Obama has also said that Wright is “like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with.” But who takes spiritual guidance from hate-spewing old uncles?

Wright isn’t just someone with whom Obama is friendly. To criticize Obama for having friends with controversial, or even abhorrent, views would constitute guilt by association. But Wright is Obama’s spiritual leader. To be sure, no thinking person always agrees with his minister, priest, or rabbi on political and social issues. But it’s unusual for a thinking person to retain an affiliation with a church whose leader attacks his country unless, at a minimum, that person considers those attacks not “particularly controversial.”

Obama should explain why he retained his apparently close affiliation with Wright and his church in more persuasive terms than he has to date. Otherwise, I think it’s reasonable to draw adverse inferences based on that affiliation, including the inference that Obama doesn’t quite measure up as a “post-racial” figure. …

Victor Davis Hanson with four Corner posts.

… 1) The Obamas were not merely endorsed by, or attended the church of, Rev. Wright, but subsidized his hatred with generous donations, were married by him, and had their children baptized by this venomous preacher; there is nothing quite comparable in the case of Sens. Clinton and McCain.

2) Rev. Wright’s invective is not insensitive or hyperbolic alone, but in the end disgusting. And when listened to rather than read, the level of emotion and fury only compound the racism and hatred, whether in its attack on the Clintons, or profanity-laced slander of the United States and its history, or in gratuitous references to other races. Its reactionary Afrocentrism, conspiracy-theory, and illiberal racial separatism take us back to the 1970s, and compare with the worst of the fossilized Farrakhan—and have no remote parallel in the present campaign.

3) Sen. Obama has proclaimed a new politics of hope and change that were supposedly to transcend such venom and character assassination of the past. Thus besides being politically dense, he suffers—unless he preempts and explains in detail his Byzantine relationship with the Reverend—the additional charge of hypocrisy in courting such a merchant of hate. And then he compounds the disaster by the old-fashion politics of contortion and excuse by suggesting the Rev. Wright is not that controversial, or is analogous to the occasional embarrassing outburst of an uncle—some uncle. …

Ed Morrissey (The Captain)

Before the press began looking into the inflammatory rhetoric of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, they fawned over his association with Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey. In a Chicago Tribune profile that appeared just as Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency in January 2007, the Senator confirmed the close relationship with the firebrand preacher at Trinity United Church. …

Abe Greenwald in Contentions.

… So why doesn’t Obama repudiate Wright? If it’s true, as Obama’s campaign asserts, that Jeremiah Wright is “one of the country’s ten most influential black pastors,” then hate speech like Wright’s isn’t a big deal to a giant swath of American blacks. Moreover, that vote must be courted. Funny, how Democrats have spent decades stoking fears about the dangerous and discriminatory political influence of the religious Right, and now a demonstrably vile Reverend like Jeremiah Wright has the ear of a man who could become the Democratic nominee for president.

Roger Simon.

KJ Lopez.

… Hillary Clinton will be thanking God this Easter for the gift of Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

We’ll end this with Mark Steyn.

… I’m not a believer in guilt by association, or the campaign vaudeville of rival politicians insisting this or that candidate dissociate himself from remarks by some fellow he had a 30-second grip’n'greet with a decade ago. But Jeremiah Wright is not exactly peripheral to Barack Obama’s life. He married the Obamas and baptized their children. Those of us who made the mistake of buying the senator’s latest book, “The Audacity Of Hope,” and assumed the title was an ingeniously parodic distillation of the great sonorous banality of an entire genre of blandly uplifting political writing discovered circa page 127 that in fact the phrase comes from one of the Rev. Wright’s sermons. Jeremiah Wright has been Barack Obama’s pastor for 20 years – in other words, pretty much the senator’s entire adult life. Did Obama consider “God Damn America” as a title for his book but it didn’t focus-group so well? …

 

… What is Barack Obama for? It’s not his “policies,” such as they are. Rather, Sen. Obama embodies an idea: He’s a symbol of redemption and renewal, and a lot of other airy-fairy abstractions that don’t boil down to much except making upscale white liberals feel good about themselves and get even more of a frisson out of white liberal guilt than they usually do. I assume that’s what Geraldine Ferraro was getting at when she said Obama wouldn’t be where he was today (i.e., leading the race for the Democratic nomination) if he was white. For her infelicity, the first woman on a presidential ticket got bounced from the Clinton campaign and denounced by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann for her “insidious racism” indistinguishable from “the vocabulary of David Duke.”

Oh, for cryin’ out loud. Enjoyable as it is to watch previously expert tossers of identity-politics hand grenades blow their own fingers off, if Geraldine Ferraro’s an “insidious racist”, who isn’t? …

… his whiny wife, Michelle, says that her husband’s election as president would be the first reason to have “pride” in America, and complains that this country is “downright mean” and that she’s having difficulty finding money for their daughters’ piano lessons and summer camp. Between them, Mr. and Mrs. Obama earn $480,000 a year (not including book royalties from “The Audacity Of Hype,” but they’re whining about how tough they have it to couples who earn 48 grand – or less. Yes, we can. But not on a lousy half-million bucks a year.

God has blessed America, and blessed the Obamas in America, and even blessed the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose bashing of his own country would be far less lucrative anywhere else on the planet. The “racist” here is not Geraldine Ferraro but the Rev. Wright, whose appeals to racial bitterness are supposed to be everything President Obama will transcend. Right now, it sounds more like the same-old same-old. …

Reason says oil prices are in a bubble.

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Pew Research finds the majority of us expect success in Iraq. Ed Morrissey posts on the likely beneficiary.

… The big question will be how this affects the presidential race. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have campaigned on their commitment to withdrawal, especially Obama, who has tried to position himself to Hillary’s left. That made sense in the beginning of the primary campaign, when the surge had yet to begin and the violence appeared to overwhelm the American mission in Iraq. Now, however, it looks more like a senseless surrender with success in reach.

It’s not just Republicans, either. Half of all independents now believe that the US needs to remain in place until the gains in Iraq have been secured. The one presidential candidate arguing that policy also happens to be the Senator who spent the last three years arguing for a better counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. John McCain already had significant appeal for centrists and independents, and this makes his case even stronger.

And then finds a Rasmussen poll as possible illustration

So far, the burden of the early clincher hasn’t done much to damage John McCain. In a sign that the increasingly bitter Democratic primary campaign may provide some assistance to the Republican nominee, Rasmussen shows McCain ahead of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the normally blue state of Michigan. And in worse news, McCain has pulled even in Pennsylvania as well:

John Fund sets the tone for a lot of today’s picks.

As the political career of Eliot Spitzer melts down, many will lament that what the governor on Monday called his “progressive politics” fell victim to his personal foibles. If only he hadn’t made mistakes in his private life, they will moan, New York could have been redeemed from its squalid, special-interest dominated stagnation.

That’s nonsense. More is at issue here than a mere private mistake. The governor’s frequent use of a prostitution ring was of public concern — because, notes Henry Stern, head of the watchdog group New York Civic, “people could easily have blackmailed him, you can’t have that if you’re governor.”

True enough, New York’s dysfunctional and secretive state government desperately needs fumigation, with both political parties sharing in the blame. But Mr. Spitzer’s head-butting approach to redemption — involving the arbitrary use of power and bully-boy tactics — was no improvement. As for reform, his first budget grew state spending at three times the rate of inflation, and is a major reason the state now faces a $4.5 billion deficit. When the governor tried to reform the state’s bloated Medicaid program, the health-care workers’ union ran a TV campaign against him, and he quickly caved.

Mr. Spitzer seemed to excel only in the zeal with which he would go after perceived adversaries. …

Fred Dicker owns the Albany beat. Here’s his take.

ALBANY – I saw many signs early on that Eliot Spitzer was to politics what Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry was to religion – a consummate hypocrite – but few, if any, of his governmental colleagues (and even fewer members of the largely fawning press corps) appeared able to see it as well.

To many of them, Spitzer could do no wrong.

They thought he was “right” on the issues that supposedly counted – government involvement in the private economy, hostility to Wall Street, gay marriage, even more campaign-finance restrictions (that favor the wealthy like Spitzer) and tighter gun laws.

So what did it matter if he turned into a boorish Richard Nixon when he unleashed the State Police on his leading Republican nemesis, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, or repeatedly violated his self-proclaimed principles of government openness, public accountability and an end to influence of special interests? …

Charles Gasparino is next.

IN the fall of 2006, with Eliot Spitzer plainly on his way to a landslide win in the governor’s race, I commiserated with one of Attorney General Spitzer’s chief targets, former New York Stock Exchange chief Dick Grasso.

“He’s going to be governor,” Grasso told me, sounding wounded and enraged, “and nothing will stop him.”

Yes, I replied – but he’ll ultimately blow himself up.

I can’t repeat the phrase I actually used in a family newspaper; let’s just say I predicted Spitzer would someday step on a most sensitive part of his own anatomy.

As a reporter covering him – and then becoming the target of one his office’s no-holds-barred intimidation games – I saw Spitzer’s shortcomings first hand: his zealotry, his wild temperament and his penchant for sleazy tactics.

But I never thought I’d be proven right in the most literal sense …

Ever the one to look beyond the fray, Michael Barone notes a troubling aspect of the Spitzer mess.

… When society has effectively legalized something that is still theoretically illegal, there is always the possibility of selective prosecution—targeting individuals who are in disfavor with someone in government. Selective prosecution is tyranny, and the possibility of selective prosecution is a powerful argument for legalization of the behavior that the society has chosen to condone. …

Power Line has the picture.

John Podhoretz has a good take.

John Kass of Chi Trib reacts to wife as stage prop.

Did New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer have to drag his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, up there, in her pearls and powder blue Chanel jacket like some prop to be shamed?

Did he have to parade her before the cameras, so lovely and tired, disgraced and betrayed, for all to see?

No. And he’s a coward for doing so, and for betraying his wife again in public, for compromising all of us who watched the two of them on TV the other day at that terrible news conference.

He was cool, seemingly forceful, making one of those weasel statements that befits lawyers, a vague apology but nothing in his words admitting he broke the law. So he had things together, he was under control, drawing it all out, teasing federal prosecutors into offering him a deal: Spitzer resigns, they don’t press charges on his money transfers to the high priced online whorehouse.

The former prosecutor who attacked, among other things, prostitution rings, has been hoisted on some whore’s petard.

And Silda stood beside him mute, like one of those people who crawl out of burning cars, make it to the side of the road and stare at what brought them there. …

Kimberley Strassel thinks the media have a lot of blame for Spitzer’s tactics.

The fall of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer holds many lessons, and the press will surely be examining them in coming months. But don’t expect the press corps to delve into the biggest lesson of all — its own role as his enabler.

Journalists have spent the past two days asking how a man of Mr. Spitzer’s stature would allow himself to get involved in a prostitution ring. The answer, in my mind, is clear. The former New York attorney general never believed normal rules applied to him, and his view was validated time and again by an adoring press. “You play hard, you play rough, and hopefully you don’t get caught,” said Mr. Spitzer two years ago. He never did get caught, because most reporters were his accomplices.

Journalism has many functions, but perhaps the most important is keeping tabs on public officials. That duty is even more vital concerning government positions that are subject to few other checks and balances. Chief among those is the prosecutor, who can use his awesome state power to punish, even destroy, private citizens.

Yet from the start, the press corps acted as an adjunct of Spitzer power, rather than a skeptic of it. Many journalists get into this business because they want to see wrongs righted. Mr. Spitzer portrayed himself as the moral avenger. He was the slayer of the big guy, the fat cat, the Wall Street titan — all allegedly on behalf of the little guy. The press ate it up, and came back for more. …

More on that line from That Gay Conservative.

Vaclav Klaus wrote a piece for the Australian on globalony.

A WEEK ago, I gave a speech at an official gathering at Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech, quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning, went as follows: Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will nevertheless be identical: the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality. What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its present strongest version, climate alarmism. …

 

… The climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong. They believe in their own ability to assemble all relevant data into their Central Climate Change Regulatory Office equipped with huge supercomputers, in the possibility of giving adequate instructions to hundreds of millions of individuals and institutions.

We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. We need to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.

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We open with a Power Line post on the recently published A Crime So Monstrous. The author is E. Benjamin Skinner.

Benjamin Skinner is the precocious author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face With Modern-Day Slavery. He spent four years working on the book and investigating the phenomenon of modern slavery up close and personal. Today is the book’s publication date. The author has kindly responded to our invitation to bring the book to the attention of our readers with a message describing what he is up to in it:

There are more slaves in the world today than at any point in human history, and A Crime So Monstrous is their story, in full color. For four years, I traveled in over a dozen countries, talking to slaves, traffickers and liberators, going undercover when necessary in order to infiltrate slave trading networks. …

Perceptive Corner post From VDH.

… McCain may become a proper antidote for all this. Unlike the verbose Michelle Obama, he really has suffered in his life; unlike Barack Obama he really has reached across the aisle and paid a price for it; and unlike Obama’s promises of transparency, he really does talk in specifics and bluntly rather than in mellifluous platitudes. And as for an against-the-odds candidacy, in postmodern America a 71-year-old survivor of communist torture and malignant melanoma seems to match the narrative of a young Ivy-League graduate of mixed ancestry.

Neal Boortz with the truth about polar bears.

So-called “environmentalists” insist on making polar bears the centerpiece for their fight against capitalism. They insist that polar bears are nearing extinction because of man-made global warming. It’s not theory to them .. it’s etched-in-stone fact. Right now the Bush administration is being sued by environmental groups claiming the Fish and Wildlife Service is in breach of its own mandate – its failure to protect the polar bear as an endangered species.

Well, yes … there actually has been a delay to determine whether or not polar bears are actually endangered species. The fact of the matter is that they are not … there are more polar bears today than there were in the 1970s. A lot more. But environmentalists can’t seem to understand that simple concept, or they just don’t want to admit it. They believe that Bush is delaying the decision so his administration can sell oil and gas leases in Alaska, where, by the way, you find most polar bears. …

John Stossel says beware of politicians who will fix all our ills.

Watching presidential candidates promise to “fix” America fills me with dread.

A reason I have this reaction is that I’ve been doing reports for “20/20″ on previous politicians’ campaigns to “fix” child sex abuse.

Sexual abuse was always a problem, but in the early 1990s, something changed. Several pretty white girls were victimized at a time when the 24-hour cable-news cycle was hungry for new drama. Heinous child molestation became the big story. So publicity-seeking politicians clamored for new laws.

One result of their campaign was Megan’s Law, which requires police to notify neighbors when a sex offender lives nearby. States were also ordered to establish registries so that when sex offenders are released from prison or put on probation, everyone can keep track of them.

It does seem important to know when a dangerous person lives nearby, but these laws have freedom-killing effects that go well beyond their proponents’ good intentions.

For last week’s “20/20″ (http://tinyurl.com/23wywh), I interviewed sex offender Frank Rodriquez. Because he admits he repeatedly had sex with a child, he will forever be listed on the Texas sex-offender registry. His name and picture are posted next to those of murderers of children and a man who molested 200 kids.

But Frank’s “crime” was different. He had sex with his high-school girlfriend. She says it was her idea. …

Thomas Sowell writes on the real costs of crime.

For more than two centuries, the political left has been preoccupied with the fate of criminals, often while ignoring or downplaying the fate of the victims of those criminals.

So it is hardly surprising that a recent New York Times editorial has returned to a familiar theme among those on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic, with its lament that “incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen.”

Back in 1997, New York Times writer Fox Butterfield expressed the same lament under the headline, “Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling.” Then, as now, liberals seemed to find it puzzling that crime rates go down when more criminals are put behind bars.

Nor is it surprising that the left uses an old and irrelevant comparison — between the cost of keeping a criminal behind bars versus the cost of higher education. According to the Times, “Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, and Oregon devote as much or more to corrections as they do to higher education.”

The relevant comparison would be between the cost of keeping a criminal behind bars and the cost of letting him loose in society. But neither the New York Times nor others on the left show any interest in that comparison.

In Britain, the total cost of the prison system per year was found to be £1.9 billion, while the financial cost alone of the crimes committed per year by criminals was estimated at £60 billion.

The big difference between the two kinds of costs is not just in their amounts. The cost of locking up criminals has to be paid out of government budgets that politicians would prefer to spend on giveaway programs that are more likely to get them re-elected. But the far higher costs of letting criminals loose is paid by the general public in both money and in being subjected to violence. …

American.com with a look at Americans and their giving.

Q. How much do Americans give? Is the amount we give going up?
A. In 2006, Americans gave about $295 billion to charity. This was up 4.2 percent over 2005 levels, and charitable giving has generally risen faster than the growth of the American economy for more than half a century. Correcting for inflation and population changes, GDP per person in America has risen over the past 50 years by about 150 percent, while charitable giving per person has risen by about 190 percent. That is, the average American family has gotten much richer in real terms over the past half century, and charitable giving has more than kept pace with this trend. …

Walter Williams on “Big Corn and the Ethanol Hoax.”

… It’s easy to understand how the public, looking for cheaper gasoline, can be taken in by the call for increased ethanol usage. But politicians, corn farmers and ethanol producers know they are running a cruel hoax on the American consumer. They are in it for the money. The top leader in the ethanol hoax is Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the country’s largest producer of ethanol. Ethanol producers and the farm lobby have pressured farm state congressmen into believing that it would be political suicide if they didn’t support subsidized ethanol production. That’s the stick. Campaign contributions play the role of the carrot.

The ethanol hoax is a good example of a problem economists refer to as narrow, well-defined benefits versus widely dispersed costs. It pays the ethanol lobby to organize and collect money to grease the palms of politicians willing to do their bidding because there’s a large benefit for them — higher wages and profits. The millions of gasoline consumers, who fund the benefits through higher fuel and food prices, as well as taxes, are relatively uninformed and have little clout. After all, who do you think a politician will invite into his congressional or White House office to have a heart-to-heart — you or an Archer Daniels Midlands executive?

American Digest says there’s a new way to look at our divided country – Starbucks vs. Wal-Mart.

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Volokh post points out Spitzer irony.

… So Elliot Spitzer, aggressive former white collar crime prosecutor, was brought down because he couldn’t outsmart banks looking for evidence of white collar crimes.

Spitzer posts from a lot of our favorites.

Bad news for the GOP in Illinois. John Fund has the details.

Karen Hanretty, the spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, had a terse response to the startling loss of former Speaker Dennis Hastert’s seat in a special election in Illinois on Saturday.

“The one thing 2008 has shown is that one election in one state does not prove a trend,” she noted. Fair enough. Indeed in June, 2006, Republicans retained a California seat in a high-profile special election, but that had no predictive value given that Democrats stomped their way to control of Congress a few months later.

But special elections in highly visible seats do have a psychological effect on parties. Not only can they boost or depress morale, but they can affect how political contributions flow in the months leading up to the general election.

That should worry Republicans because history does show that some special elections have captured a growing mood against the party that controls the White House. …

Mark Steyn Corner post.

Todd Spivak, Houston Press reporter reports his coverage of Obama back in the day. This is long, but will provide a good flavor for Obama and Chicago politics.

It’s not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.

Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn’t yet hit local newsstands.

It’s the first time I ever heard him yell, and I’m trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

This is before Obama Girl, before the secret service detail, before he becomes a best-selling author. His book Dreams From My Father has been out of print for years.

I often see Obama smoking cigarettes on brisk Chicago mornings in front of his condominium high-rise along Lake Michigan, or getting his hair buzzed at the corner barbershop on 53rd and Harper in his Hyde Park neighborhood.

This is before he becomes a U.S. senator, before Oprah starts stumping for him, before he positions himself to become the country’s first black president.

He is just a rank-and-file state senator in Illinois and I work for a string of small, scrappy newspapers there.

The other day, while stuck in traffic on Houston’s Southwest Freeway, I was flipping through right-wing rants on AM radio. Dennis Praeger was railing against Michelle Obama for her clumsy comment on being proud of her country for the first time.

Praeger went on to call her husband a blank slate. There’s no record to look at, he complained, unless you lived in Barack Obama’s old state Senate district.

Well, I lived and worked in that district for three years — nearly half Obama’s tenure in the Illinois Legislature. D-13, the district was called, and it spanned a large swath of the city’s poor, black, crime-­ridden South Side.

It was 2000 and I was a young, hungry reporter at the Hyde Park Herald and Lakefront Outlook community newspapers earning $19,000 a year covering politics and crime.

I talked with Obama on a regular basis — a couple times a month, at least. I’d ask him about his campaign-finance reports, legislation he was sponsoring and various local issues. He wrote an occasional column published in our papers. It ran with a headshot that made him look about 14 years old. …

Canada’s National Post has a great op-ed on globalony.

Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism — and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy — can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.

The NIPCC is a counter to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The group was unveiled this week in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, along with its scientific report claiming that natural factors — the sun, El Ninos and La Ninas, volcanoes, etc, — not human sources are behind global warming.

The Washington Post’s first instincts (not just on its opinion pages, but in its news coverage, too) were cleverly to sew doubt of the group’s credibility by pointing out to readers that many of the participants had ties to conservative politicians, such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and that the conference sponsor — the Heartland Institute — received money from oil companies and health care corporations.

That’s standard fare, and partly fair, so that’s not what I am talking about.

The insidiousness I am referring to is the unfavourable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC’s famous report of last year.

After reminding readers that the IPCC and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change, the paper then, sneeringly, added: “While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists.”

First of all, the IPCC and Mr. Gore won the Peace Prize, not a science prize, which only proves they are good at politics. They didn’t win the Physics Prize, for instance. …

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Martin Peretz says there is a Mid-East peace process and there is a NY Times. And they’re both foolish.

As Mugabe in Zimbabwe continues his descent, Next door South Africa sees nothing.

Ed Morrissey posts on Zimbabwe too.

Power Line posts on the Times continuing campaign against McCain.

Charles Krauthammer leads us off with one of his better efforts. Now, that is saying something.

… The Obama campaign has sent journalists eight pages of examples of his reaching across the aisle in the Senate. I am not the only one to note, however, that these are small-bore items of almost no controversy — more help for war veterans, reducing loose nukes in the former Soviet Union, fighting avian flu and the like. Bipartisan support for apple pie is hardly a profile in courage.

On the difficult compromises that required the political courage to challenge one’s own political constituency, Obama flinched: the “Gang of 14″ compromise on judicial appointments, the immigration compromise to which Obama tried to append union-backed killer amendments and, just last month, the compromise on warrant eavesdropping that garnered 68 votes in the Senate. But not Obama’s.

Who, in fact, supported all of these bipartisan deals, was a central player in two of them and brokered the even more notorious McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform? John McCain, of course.

Yes, John McCain — intemperate and rough-edged, of sharp elbows and even sharper tongue. Turns out that uniting is not a matter of rhetoric or manner, but of character and courage.

Victor Davis Hanson tells us what Obama has in common with pet rocks.

In fall 1975 I remember sitting in the Stanford student lounge watching two apparently educated and bright students compare their pet rocks, as the craze spread all over Silicon Valley and then went national. By summer few would admit they had purchased one. Never underestimate the ability of mass wired consumer society to go hysterical.

Something like that happened with the Obama campaign in mid-February, as he became the new generation’s pet rock. No one knew what he had done; no one knew what he would do; no one cared whether they knew; all only wanted to be a part of it. It was a sort of self-described “movement” to “change the world,” that offered absolution for all sorts of sins, real and imagined, of commission and omission, an atonement for past and present, here and abroad. …

Been wondering what Andrew Sullivan has been doing? Here’s a Hillary rant.

It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . .

Put your own movie analogy in here. Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction – whoosh! she’s back at your throat! – has often occurred to me when covering the Clintons these many years. The Oscars host Jon Stewart compares them to a Terminator: the kind that is splattered into a million tiny droplets of vaporized metal . . . only to pool together spontaneously and charge back at you unfazed.

The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: inviolable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy. You can’t escape; you can’t hide; and you can’t win. And these days, in the kinetic pace of the You campaign, they are like the new 28 Days Later zombies. They come at you really quickly, like bats out of hell. Or Ohio, anyway. …

Wish another Hillary? Dick Morris is next.

The real message of Tuesday’s primaries is not that Hillary won. It’s that she didn’t win by enough.

The race is over.

The results are already clear. Obama will go to the Democratic Convention with a lead of between 100 and 200 elected delegates. The remaining question is: What will the super do then? But is that really a question? Will the leaders of the Democratic Party be complicit in its destruction? Will they really kindle a civil war by denying the nomination to the man who won the most elected delegates? No way. They well understand that to do so would be to throw away the party’s chances of victory and to stigmatize it among African-Americans and young people for the rest of their lives. The Democratic Party took 20 years to recover from the traumas of 1968 and it is not about to trigger a similar bloodletting this year. …

George McGovern is slapping around the government for excessive regulatory fever. That’s right, George McGovern! Yup, the old Dem candidate.

… With liberalized credit rules, many people with limited income could access a mortgage and choose, for the first time, if they wanted to own a home. And most of those who chose to do so are hanging on to their mortgages. According to the national delinquency survey released yesterday, the vast majority of subprime, adjustable-rate mortgages are in good condition,their holders neither delinquent nor in default.

There’s no question, however, that delinquency and default rates are far too high. But some of this is due to bad investment decisions by real-estate speculators. These losses are not unlike the risks taken every day in the stock market.

The real question for policy makers is how to protect those worthy borrowers who are struggling, without throwing out a system that works fine for the majority of its users (all of whom have freely chosen to use it). If the tub is more baby than bathwater, we should think twice about dumping everything out.

Health-care paternalism creates another problem that’s rarely mentioned: Many people can’t afford the gold-plated health plans that are the only options available in their states.

Buying health insurance on the Internet and across state lines, where less expensive plans may be available, is prohibited by many state insurance commissions. Despite being able to buy car or home insurance with a mouse click, some state governments require their approved plans for purchase or none at all. It’s as if states dictated that you had to buy a Mercedes or no car at all. …

Speaking of government, Jeff Jacoby explains why it always makes things worse.

… The subprime mortgage collapse is another tale of unintended consequences.

The crisis has its roots in the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, a Carter-era law that purported to prevent “redlining” – denying mortgages to black borrowers – by pressuring banks to make home loans in “low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.” Under the act, banks were to be graded on their attentiveness to the “credit needs” of “predominantly minority neighborhoods.” The higher a bank’s rating, the more likely that regulators would say yes when the bank sought to open a new branch or undertake a merger or acquisition.

But to earn high ratings, banks were forced to make increasingly risky loans to borrowers who wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage under normal standards of creditworthiness. The Community Reinvestment Act, made even more stringent during the Clinton administration, trapped lenders in a Catch-22.

“If they comply,” wrote Loyola College economist Thomas DiLorenzo, “they know they will have to suffer from more loan defaults. If they don’t comply, they face financial penalties . . . which can cost a large corporation like Bank of America billions of dollars.”

Banks nationwide thus ended up making more and more subprime loans and agreeing to dangerously lax underwriting standards – no down payment, no verification of income, interest-only payment plans, weak credit history. If they tried to compensate for the higher risks they were taking by charging higher interest rates, they were accused of unfairly steering borrowers into “predatory” loans they couldn’t afford.

Trapped in a no-win situation entirely of the government’s making, lenders could only hope that home prices would continue to rise, staving off the inevitable collapse. But once the housing bubble burst, there was no escape. …

Daily Telegraph, UK on continued climate skepticism.

Last week, virtually unreported in Britain, the extraordinary winter weather of 2008 elsewhere in the world continued. In the USA, there were blizzards as far south as Texas and Arkansas, while in northern states and Canada what they are calling “the winter from hell” has continued to break records going back in some cases to 1873. Meanwhile in Asia more details emerged of the catastrophe caused by the northern hemisphere’s greatest snow cover since 1966.

 

In Afghanistan, where they have lost 300,000 cattle, the human death toll has risen above 1,500. In China, the havoc created by what its media call “the Winter Snow Disaster” has continued, not least in Tibet, where six months of snow and record low temperatures have killed 500,000 animals, leaving 3 million people on the edge of starvation.

It might have seemed timely that in New York an array of leading climatologists and other experts should have gathered for the most high-powered international conference yet to question the “consensus” on global warming. After three days of what the chairman called “the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp”, the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would “markedly diminish further prosperity” while having “no appreciable impact” on the Earth’s warming. …

Want to be healthy? Get out in the sun. Shows what the experts knew. Toronto Globe and Mail bemoans Canada’s location.

In the summer of 1974, brothers Frank and Cedric Garland had a heretical brainwave.

The young epidemiologists were watching a presentation on death rates from cancer county by county across the United States. As they sat in a lecture hall at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore looking at the color-coded cancer maps, they noticed a striking pattern, with the map for colon cancer the most pronounced.

Counties with high death rates were red; those with low rates were blue. Oddly, the nation was almost neatly divided in half, red in the north and blue in the south. Why, they wondered, was the risk of dying from cancer greater in bucolic Maine than in highly polluted Southern California?

The two had arrived at Johns Hopkins a few days earlier, having driven their Mustang from their hometown of San Diego. Frank was about to begin graduate studies and Cedric his first job as a professor. It was July, and the trip through the sunny South gave them an idea as they studied the cancer maps: Exposure to sunshine varies dramatically depending on the latitude. What if that’s what was behind the varying cancer rates?

Their hypothesis, painstakingly developed and published six years later in the International Journal of Epidemiology, was that sunlight has a powerful anti-cancer effect through its role in producing vitamin D in bare skin. Those living at northern latitudes, they theorized, receive less sunlight and make less of the vitamin, which in turn increases their risk of dying from cancer.

Today, with vitamin D so much in the news, it’s hard to believe that it took decades for the Garlands’ hypothesis to gain traction in the mainstream medical community. …

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Rich Lowry writes on the Columbia, Venezuela, and Ecuador excitement.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez reached for what he considered the ultimate insult when he called Colombia “the new Israel.” If by that he means a country better governed than its immediate neighbors, that dares to protect itself against terrorists across its border despite getting bludgeoned for it by the international left — he had a point. …

The Economist has a good analysis of the battle for the Dem nomination.

JOHN EDWARDS has been saying since 2004 that there are two Americas—the America of the rich and privileged and the America of the poor and put-upon. The results of March 4th proved that there are also two Democratic Parties.

A famous political distinction exists between “wine-track” and “beer-track” Democrats. Wine-track Democrats have traditionally supported reform-minded liberals such as Gary Hart and Paul Tsongas. Beer-track Democrats have preferred more practical-minded pols. Walter Mondale famously hammered the nail into Gary Hart’s coffin when he stole a line from a hamburger advertisement and asked “Where’s the beef?”

Part of Bill Clinton’s genius was to bring the wine-drinkers and beer-drinkers together. This was, after all, a man who went to Yale and Oxford but who grew up the child of a widow in the backwoods of Arkansas. Yet this year’s Democratic primaries have burst the party asunder once again.

Obamaworld is a universe of liberal professionals and young people—plus blacks from all economic segments. Hillaryland, by contrast, is a place of working-class voters, particularly working-class women, and the old. These are people who occupy not just different economies but also different cultures. How many white Obama voters eat in Cracker Barrel or Bob Evans? And how many Clinton voters have a taste for sushi? …

… The great challenge for the Democratic Party in November will be to put this coalition back together. But the bitter fight in the months to come will widen the already gaping divide. John McCain could not be better positioned to pick up the pieces.

Then Peggy Noonan. Who is awesome.

From the first voting in Iowa on Jan. 3 she had to prove that Clintons Are Magic. She wound up losing 11 in a row. Meaning Clintons aren’t magic. He had to take her out in New Hampshire, on Super Tuesday or Junior Tuesday. He didn’t. Meaning Obama isn’t magic.

Two nonmagical beings are left.

What the Democrats lost this week was the chance to paint the ’08 campaign as a brilliant Napoleonic twinning of strategy and tactics that left history awed. What they have instead is a ticket to Verdun. Trench warfare, and the daily, wearying life of the soldier under siege. The mud, the cold, the dank water rotting the boots, all of it punctuated by mad cries of “Over the top,” bayonets fixed.

Do I understate? Not according to the bitter officers debating doomed strategy back in HQ. More on that in a minute.

This is slightly good for John McCain. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hemorrhage money, exhaust themselves, bloody each other. He holds barbecues for the press and gets rid of a White House appearance in which the incumbent offers his dread embrace. …

… I end with a deadly, deadpan prediction from Christopher Hitchens. Hillary is the next president, he told radio’s Hugh Hewitt, because, “there’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power . . . people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.”

It was like Claude Rains summing up the meaning of everything in the film “Lawrence of Arabia”: “One of them’s mad and the other is wholly unscrupulous.” It’s the moment when you realize you just heard the truth, the meaning underlying all the drama. “They win in the end.” Gave me a shudder.

Good VDH Corner post on the same subject.

And then, Mark Steyn.

Well, we will have Hillary Clinton to kick around some more, at least for another few weeks. The Mummy (as my radio pal Hugh Hewitt calls her) kicked open the sarcophagus door and, despite the rotting bandages dating back to Iowa, began staggering around, terrorizing folks all over again.

“She is a monster,” Barack Obama adviser Samantha Power told a reporter from The Scotsman – and not a monster in a cute Loch Ness blurry, long-distance kind of way. “You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh,’” continued Ms. Power, who subsequently resigned from the campaign.

The New York Times took a different line. The monster is you – yes, you, the American people. Surveying the Hillary-Barack death match, Maureen Dowd wrote: “People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?”

Do even Democrats really talk like this? Apparently so. As Ali Gallagher, a white female (sorry, this identity-politics labeling is contagious) from Texas, told the Washington Post: “A friend of mine, a black man, said to me, ‘My ancestors came to this country in chains; I’m voting for Barack.’ I told him, ‘Well, my sisters came here in chains and on their periods; I’m voting for Hillary.’”

When everybody’s a victim, nobody’s a victim. …

David Brooks thinks Obama has taken a wrong turn with his campaign.

… Clinton can’t compete on personality, but a knife fight is her only real hope of victory. She has nothing to lose because she never promised to purify America. Her campaign doesn’t depend on the enthusiasm of upper-middle-class goo-goos. On Thursday, a Clinton aide likened Obama to Ken Starr just to badger them on.

As the trench warfare stretches on through the spring, the excitement of Obama-mania will seem like a distant, childish mirage. People will wonder if Obama ever believed any of that stuff himself. And even if he goes on to win the nomination, he won’t represent anything new. He’ll just be a one-term senator running for president.

In short, a candidate should never betray the core theory of his campaign, or head down a road that leads to that betrayal. Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him.

Besides, the real softness of the campaign is not that Obama is a wimp. It’s that he has never explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona.

If he can’t explain that, he’s going to lose at some point anyway.

After a March weekend when it snowed for 24 hours straight in Mississippi, it is fitting we have an WSJ Interview with Vaclav Klaus one of the world’s prominent global warming skeptics.

… Mr. Klaus has become a globally prominent voice of skepticism about what he calls global-warming “alarmism.” This week, while in New York to address a gathering of fellow “non-alarmists” at a conference in Times Square, he took some time to sit down with members of the Journal’s editorial board to offer his dissenting views on Russia, Kosovo, America and of course, climate change.

“I am not a climatologist,” Mr. Klaus cheerfully admits. “I am not disputing the measurement of the temperature.” Even so, Mr. Klaus believes that his many years of experience in the fields of economics and econometrics give him some insight into the nature of the problems faced by climatologists and policy makers. In climatology as in economics, he says, “there are no controlled experiments. . . . You can’t repeat the time series.” So, just as you can’t run a controlled experiment to determine the effect of, say, deficits on interest rates, we can’t directly determine the effect of CO2 on climate. All we have are observations and inferences.

Mr. Klaus is also interested in the politics of global warming. He has written a book, tentatively titled “Blue, Not Green Planet,” published in Czech last year and due out in English translation in the U.S. this May. The main question of the book is in its subtitle: “What is in danger: climate or freedom?”

He likens global-warming alarmism to communism, which he experienced first-hand in Cold War Czechoslovakia, then a Soviet satellite. While the communists argued that we must all sacrifice some freedom in pursuit of “equality,” the “warmists,” as Mr. Klaus calls them, want us to sacrifice liberty — especially economic liberty — to prevent a change in climate. In both cases, in Mr. Klaus’s view, the costs of achieving the goal, and the impossibility of truly doing so, argue strongly against paying a price of freedom. …

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Mark Steyn’s Buckley send-off.

If you were running one of those Frank Luntz machine-wired focus groups to produce the ideal conservative leader for America, I doubt you’d come up with an urbane patrician harpsichordist who lived part time in Switzerland and was partial to words like “eremitical” and “periphrastic.” “It’s the epigoni, stupid” is not a useful campaign slogan – although, in fact, a distressingly large number of political candidates are certainly epigoni (“a second-rate imitator”).

But William F. Buckley Jr. was a first-rate original, who founded the modern conservative movement half a century ago and saw it through to victory in the 1980 presidential election and then to vindication in the collapse of communism a decade later. He would demur when credited with “creating” the entire show but he was certainly its impresario, and at a time when there wasn’t exactly a lot of talent stampeding to audition.

The 1950s are assumed, at least by children of the Sixties, to be a “conservative” era. But at home New Deal liberalism controlled all the levers of society, and abroad the communists had gobbled up half of Europe, neutered most of the rest, swiped China, were eyeing up other valuable real estate across the planet, and Washington’s foreign policy establishment was inclined to accept this as a permanent feature of life to be “managed” rather than defeated.

The Republican minority in Congress were isolationists or country-club liberals, and their presidential nominees were “moderates” like Dewey or nonpartisans like Ike. There was virtually no serious intellectual energy in American conservatism. The notion that in the early 21st century more Americans would identify themselves as “conservatives” than as “liberals” would have struck the elites of 50 years ago as preposterous: a scenario unimaginable outside the more-fanciful dystopian science fiction. …

Thomas Sowell too.

Writing in 1954, Lionel Trilling said that most conservatives do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

One of the perks of being a liberal is disdaining people who are not liberals. However, as of 1954, Trilling’s dismissive attitude toward conservatives’ intellectual landscape was painfully close to the truth.

Trilling wrote ten years after Friedrich Hayek’s landmark counterattack against the left in his book “The Road to Serfdom.” But that was a book with great impact on a relatively small number of people at the time, though its influence spread around the world over the years.

Trilling also wrote eight years before Milton Friedman’s first book aimed at a popular audience — “Capitalism and Freedom” — and a quarter of a century before Rush Limbaugh pioneered conservative talk radio.

They say it is always darkest before the dawn. One year after Lionel Trilling’s dismissal of conservative intellectual thought, William F. Buckley founded National Review, the first in a series of conservative journals of opinion that would build on its success.

In short, Bill Buckley revitalized conservatism, with his wit, his intellect, and his inimitable mannerisms that made him a TV icon as a guest on many programs, even before he created his own long-running program, “Firing Line.” …

Peter Wehner points out there is more working well in the Middle East besides the military surge.

… In November 2007 Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (“Dr Fadl”) published his book, Rationalizations on Jihad in Egypt and the World, in serialised form. Mr Sharif, who is Egyptian, argues that the use of violence to overthrow Islamic governments is religiously unlawful and practically harmful. He also recommends the formation of a special Islamic court to try Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two and its ideological leader, and calls the attacks on September 11 2001 a “catastrophe for all Muslims”.

Mr Sharif’s words are significant because he was once a mentor to Mr Zawahiri. Mr Sharif, who wrote the book in a Cairo prison, is “a living legend within the global jihadist movement”, according to Jarret Brachman, a terrorism expert.

Another important event occurred in October 2007, when Sheikh Abd Al-‘Aziz bin Abdallah Aal Al-Sheikh, the highest religious authority in Saudi Arabia, issued a fatwa prohibiting Saudi youth from engaging in jihad abroad. It states: “I urge my brothers the ulama [the top class of Muslim clergy] to clarify the truth to the public . . . to warn [youth] of the consequences of being drawn to arbitrary opinions and [religious] zeal that is not based on religious knowledge.” The target of the fatwa is obvious: Mr bin Laden.

A month earlier Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, an influential Saudi cleric whom Mr bin Laden once lionised, wrote an “open letter” condemning Mr bin Laden. “Brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocents among children, elderly, the weak, and women have been killed and made homeless in the name of al-Qaeda?” …

Karl Rove reviews the campaign.

Tuesday’s exciting presidential primaries were about momentum, delegates and second looks.

In the Republican contest, these factors gave victory to the Lazarus candidate. John McCain’s campaign nearly collapsed eight months ago in a mass of debt and missteps. Tuesday, Mr. McCain became the GOP’s standard-bearer by passing the 1,191-delegate threshold needed for nomination. It was a remarkable comeback and personal triumph of character, grit and persistence.

The Democrats saw Hillary Clinton come back from the abyss for the third time this year. What is it about the Clintons living life on the political edge? Mrs. Clinton was on the edge after Iowa but recovered in New Hampshire. She was falling after losing South Carolina but recovered on Super Tuesday. She then endured 11 straight defeats that threatened to end her candidacy but won three of Tuesday’s four contests. However, as of Wednesday night, her victories only closed Mr. Obama’s delegate lead by nine, from 110 to 101.

As exciting as Tuesday night was, the Democratic contest has not shifted to advantage Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Obama still has a healthy advantage. There are 611 delegates to be elected in 12 future contests, 349 superdelegates have yet to commit, and 12 delegate spots from Tuesday’s primaries are still not allocated. To win, Mrs. Clinton must take 58% of these outstanding delegates. That’s a tall order.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it doesn’t necessarily all depend on Pennsylvania and its 158 delegates. …

Roger Simon posts on the Dem dust-up.

Much of today’s Pickings is devoted to a Reason Magazine interview with one of Pickerhead’s good friends, Chip Mellor, President and co-founder of the libertarian public interest law firm The Institute for Justice. IJ has figured in these pages many times. This particular interview provides readers with an in-depth introduction to the thoughts one of the most consequential lawyers in the country.

Chip and Bob Levy (also with the Institute) have written The Dirty Dozen; How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom. This 300 page book will be published in May. The Foreword, by Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago, is itself worth the price of admission. When out to dinner a few weeks ago, Chip and Bob gave me one of the proofs. Here, from the introduction, is the purpose of the book.

Whether it is political speech, economic liberties,property rights, welfare, racial preferences, gun owners’ rights, or imprisonment without charge, the U. S. Supreme Court has behaved in a manner that would have stunned, mystified, and outraged our founding fathers.

Here’s Chip describing IJ’s first case.

…

reason:

What was the first case that IJ took on?

Mellor: The first case was in 1991 and involved a wonderful entrepreneur here in Washington, D.C., named Taalib-Din Uqdah and his wife, Pamela Farrell. They were entrepreneurs seeking to braid hair but had the misfortune of doing so without a license to practice cosmetology.

Hair braiding is a means of both artistic and cultural expression as well as personal preference for the way that hair is styled, particularly in African-American and Caribbean communities. It is widely practiced and very popular. It’s often practiced in the home and passed on from mother to daughter in sort of an informal apprenticeship, because it is a very elaborate means of styling hair. But Taalib-Din had opened a salon. It was in a home, but one where they’d converted the first floor to a salon. He employed about a dozen people.

He actually received a knock on the door from the D.C. cosmetology police informing him that he was practicing cosmetology without a license, and he had to cease and desist immediately or face a fine—I believe it was $1,000 a day—and possibly even imprisonment for the crime of braiding hair and employing people. And when he went down to get a license, of course, he found that it was much harder than one would expect because it required that you actually attend cosmetology school for a couple of years, that you have thousands of hours of training learning skills that have nothing to do with African hair braiding. Adding insult to injury, it required you to demonstrate your proficiency by showing that you could, on a practical exam, style women’s hair in finger waves and pin curls, which were the hair styles popular with white women in 1938, when the law was passed.

reason: What happened in the case?

Mellor: We lost at the U.S. District Court and were moving it up through the appeal process when we were successful through both media and other efforts in getting it deregulated in the D.C. City Council.

reason: How did the media respond?

Mellor: All of our cases are deliberately designed as platforms to educate the general public about the importance of what may seem to be unique or even arcane issues and why those issues affect many, many people beyond the particular case, both in terms of the situation and also in terms of the constitutional principle involved. Here we had a wonderful media response from everybody. They picked up on several things: 1) the inherent injustice involved; 2) the compelling story that the clients had to tell; and 3) the way in which the law was really rigged against what could otherwise be a totally legitimate and productive activity.

The principle of law there is applicable whether it’s hair braiding or cab driving or casket retailing or flower selling or any number of entry-level occupations that are subject to arbitrary regulations. …

The Economist spent a lot of the last issue on potatoes. Even though we are already full, three articles were noteworthy and are included. It’s the weekend, so we can be a little longer. There’s actually a book you can read. The review is here too.

IT IS the world’s fourth-most-important food crop, after maize, wheat and rice. It provides more calories, more quickly, using less land and in a wider range of climates than any other plant. It is, of course, the potato.

The United Nations has declared 2008 the International Year of the Potato. It hopes that greater awareness of the merits of potatoes will contribute to the achievement of its Millennium Development Goals, by helping to alleviate poverty, improve food security and promote economic development. It is always the international year of this or month of that. But the potato’s unusual history means it is well worth celebrating by readers of The Economist—because the potato is intertwined with economic development, trade liberalisation and globalisation. …