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David Warren leads us off explaining the significance of tonight’s eclipse.

… A lunar eclipse presaged the defeat of Darius by Alexander the Great in the battle of Gaugamela, 331 B.C., and lunar eclipses foretold the deaths of Carneades (the ancient critic of astrology), of Herod, and of Augustus. It has been speculated (wildly) that the eclipse of April 3, 33 A.D., coincided with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. There was a lunar eclipse before the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. During his fourth voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus is said to have survived among the natives of St Anne’s Bay, Jamaica, thanks to the astronomical almanac with which he was able to predict the lunar eclipse of Feb. 29, 1504.

Yet for most of us today, an eclipse is just an eclipse. Among the inhabitants of the Earth’s sprawling conurbations, a person not forewarned will be likely to miss one. The night sky is awash with the big city glare, and even out in the countryside, lights in and around every cottage and farmhouse delete much of the celestial drama. One must wander off the roads, very far out of town, to see what the spectacle was to our pre-electrical ancestors.

For a moonless sky makes a very dark night in the state of nature. The fear of beasts and bandits was real and practical; and even unmolested travelers would easily lose their way. An eclipse of the full moon (it is always full for an eclipse) darkens the landscape appreciably, yet lets the stars shimmer with an intensity to enthrall one’s soul. …

Jonah Goldberg posts on “patient stacking.” The latest outrage from Britain’s NHS.

Here’s the Daily Mail piece Jonah linked to.

Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets.

Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour pledge.

The hold-ups mean ambulances are not available to answer fresh 999 calls. …

Howard Kurtz with a good view of what it’s like to be on the Clinton downward spiral. And this was before she got blown out in Wisconsin.

… The New York Daily News said “the once-mighty Clinton campaign is beginning to feel like the last days of Pompeii.” The New York Times quoted an unnamed superdelegate backing Clinton as saying that if she doesn’t win Ohio and Texas next month, “she’s out.” The Washington Post said “even many of her supporters worry” that the nomination “could soon begin slipping out of her reach.” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Dick Polman likened her campaign to the Titanic. A Slate headline put it starkly: “So, Is She Doomed?” …

… Fueling the sense that the former first lady is sinking is increasingly sharp criticism from liberal columnists who are embracing Obama, while few pundits are firmly in Clinton’s corner. The Nation, the country’s largest liberal magazine, has endorsed Obama. Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, the most prominent liberal blogger, voted for Obama in the California primary and has been ridiculing Clinton’s campaign.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that the Clinton machine is “ruthless” and the candidate “crippled by poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a synthetic product leeched of most human qualities.”

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen said Clinton has “an inability to admit fault or lousy judgment” and made an “ugly lurch to the political right” in backing a 2005 bill that would have made flag burning illegal (which, as he later noted, Obama also endorsed).

Arianna Huffington, one of the Net’s leading Clinton-bashers, has written of “Hillary’s hypocrisy running neck and neck with her cynicism.” New Republic Editor-in-Chief Marty Peretz posted an essay last week titled “The End of BillaryLand Is on Its Way. Rejoice!” …

The Captain posts on Clinton’s prospects.

… We are just about to the end of the Restoration. If Hillary winds up losing Ohio, she has almost no hope of winning Pennsylvania in April, even if she manages to win Texas. She has to pull a rabbit out of her hat in the next two weeks, starting with the debate tomorrow night, and hope Obama melts down in the meantime. Otherwise, the superdelegate firewall will become her Maginot Line. She will be left with two choices: quit or face the humiliation of seeing her superdelegates abandon her at the first possible moment of the convention.

Robert Samuelson looks at Obama and wonders. “Where’s the beef?”

It’s hard not to be dazzled by Barack Obama. At the 2004 Democratic convention, he visited with Newsweek reporters and editors, including me. I came away deeply impressed by his intelligence, his forceful language and his apparent willingness to take positions that seemed to rise above narrow partisanship. Obama has become the Democratic presidential front-runner precisely because countless millions have formed a similar opinion. It is, I now think, mistaken.

As a journalist, I harbor serious doubt about each of the most likely nominees. But with Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain, I feel that I’m dealing with known quantities. They’ve been in the public arena for years; their views, values and temperaments have received enormous scrutiny. By contrast, newcomer Obama is largely a stage presence defined mostly by his powerful rhetoric. The trouble, at least for me, is the huge and deceptive gap between his captivating oratory and his actual views.

The subtext of Obama’s campaign is that his own life narrative — to become the first African American president, a huge milestone in the nation’s journey from slavery — can serve as a metaphor for other political stalemates. Great impasses can be broken with sufficient goodwill, intelligence and energy. “It’s not about rich versus poor; young versus old; and it is not about black versus white,” he says. Along with millions of others, I find this a powerful appeal.

But on inspection, the metaphor is a mirage. Repudiating racism is not a magic cure-all for the nation’s ills. The task requires independent ideas, and Obama has few. If you examine his agenda, it is completely ordinary, highly partisan, not candid and mostly unresponsive to many pressing national problems. …

It’s time for Pickings to pick over Michelle Obama’s gaff. JoPod is first from Contentions with a couple of posts.

… It suggests, first, that the pseudo-messianic nature of the Obama candidacy is very much a part of the way the Obamas themselves are feeling about it these days. If they don’t get a hold of themselves, the family vanity is going to swell up to the size of Phileas Fogg’s hot-air balloon and send the two of them soaring to heights of self-congratulatory solipsism that we’ve never seen before.

Second, it suggests the Obama campaign really does have its roots in New Class leftism, according to which patriotism is not only the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the first refuge as well — that America is not fundamentally good but flawed, but rather fundamentally flawed and only occasionally good. There’s something for John McCain to work with here.

And third, that Michelle Obama — from the middle-class South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, Princeton 85, Harvard Law 88, associate at Sidley and Austin, and eventually a high-ranking official at the University of Chicago — may not be proud of her country, but her life, like her husband’s, gives me every reason to be even prouder of the United States. …

Then a Corner post from VDH.

… Some old cynical campaign veteran, cigar in mouth-a Tip O’Neill-type, with the more scars the better-should sit the two kids down, explain the no-holds-barred rules of the arena outside the university and liberal government agency, remind them that African Americans and elite white liberals probably make up about at most a fourth of the electorate, and emphasize to them that by the public’s own standard of living, the Obamas have been very privileged and done quite well-and that Michelle and Barack should start to say something uplifting other than the current mantra that the U.S. is a depressing and unfair place and has only one chance of ‘hope” and “change” and “redemption” by allowing Barack and Michelle to lead us out of our collective ignorance.

Jonathan Last from the Weekly Standard.

… Instead of seeing America as a place which afforded her the opportunity to create a blessed life, Mrs. Obama seems to view it as a place where some “people” are always trying to hold her back. Whoever these “people” are, we should be glad they haven’t been successful. Michelle Obama’s progress is–despite her telling of it–an inspirational story that should make us proud of America, not frustrated by, and scornful of, it. It says something about her view of this nation, and of her husband and herself, that she seems to find it so difficult–their own experience notwithstanding–to feel gratitude for and pride in her country.

David Harsanyi thinks there’s a good chance we will soon have more freedom to own guns.

It’s election season, meaning candidates across the political spectrum will rediscover their love of shotguns and regale us with tender tales of hunting varmints.

What this pandering actually tells us is that the acrimonious issue of gun ownership is settling in on the side of the Constitution. Though citizens hold varied opinions on how to govern possession, a majority believe that gun ownership is an individual right.

Gallup pollsters asked Americans last year, “Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?” Sixty percent said “should not.” In 2007, a Pew poll asked Americans if they would “favor or oppose a law that banned the sale of handguns.” Fifty-five percent said they would oppose. …

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Christopher Hitchens reminds us of Iran.

Dear Mr. President: A few months ago, it became possible to hear members and supporters of your administration going around Washington and saying that the question of a nuclear-armed Iran “would not be left to the next administration.” As a line of the day, this had the advantage of sounding both determined and slightly mysterious, as if to commit both to everything and to nothing in particular.

That slight advantage has now, if you will permit me to say so, fallen victim to diminishing returns. The absurdly politicized finding of the National Intelligence Estimate — to the effect that Iran has actually halted rather than merely paused its weapons-acquisition program — has put the United States in a position where it is difficult even to continue pressing for sanctions, let alone to consider disabling the centrifuge and heavy-water sites at Natanz, Arak and elsewhere. …

Tyler Cowen, economist at George Mason, with a great NY Times op-ed. Says if you’re worried sick about the election, you might want to chill a bit.

IT has become common wisdom that the battle for the presidency is all about the economy. Voters are being told that the country’s economic health depends on pulling the right lever in the polling booth.

This election is certainly important. But based on the historical record, it isn’t likely to result in a major swing in economic policy. Fundamentally, democracy is not a finely tuned mechanism that can be used to direct economic policy as a lever might lift a pulley. The connection between what voters want, or think they want, and what ultimately happens in the economy, is far less direct.

Voters may be concerned about the economy, but there is little evidence that the electorate, as a whole, really wants to engage in close consideration of economics. The current campaign season is a case in point. …

… THAT might sound pessimistic, but it’s not. Many Americans will be living longer, finding new sources of learning and recreation, creating more rewarding jobs, striking up new loves and friendships, and, yes, earning more money. Just don’t expect most of these gains to come out of the voting booth or, for that matter, Washington.

And if you’re still worrying about how to vote, I have two pieces of advice. First, spend your time studying foreign policy, where the president has more direct power, and the choice of a candidate makes a much bigger difference. Second, stop worrying and get back to work.

Slate gives Karl Rove’s Fox News appearances a good review.

… Since materializing on-air on Super Tuesday, Rove has merely offered clarity, concision, humility, good humor, good posture, and dispassionate analysis. To be sure, there are lefties distraught that he does not eat babies on-air. Maybe some conservatives, too. But the only thing more impressive than hearing the man drop political science—what other cable-news analyst has lately name-checked Henry Cabot Lodge?—is seeing that one of our culture’s most controversial figures is one of its most mild-mannered. Given the jaunty clattering of MSNBC’s 24/7 locker room, the rapid-fire banter of CNN’s endless phalanxes of conventional wiseguys, and the screeching maelstrom summoned nightly by Rove’s Fox colleagues, the guy plays like a human comma, a very welcome thoughtful pause. …

Mark Steyn must be working on a new book. It’s hard to find him beyond the weekly Orange County gig. Here’s a run of his recent Corner posts.

Bill Kristol thinks the Dems can’t govern because they’ve been so long without real responsibility.

… Having controlled the executive branch for 28 of the last 40 years, Republicans tend to think of themselves as the governing party — with some of the arrogance and narrowness that implies, but also with a sense of real-world responsibility. Many Democrats, on the other hand, no longer even try to imagine what action and responsibility are like. They do, however, enjoy the support of many refined people who snigger at the sometimes inept and ungraceful ways of the Republicans. (And, if I may say so, the quality of thought of the Democrats’ academic and media supporters — a permanent and, as it were, pensioned opposition — seems to me to have deteriorated as Orwell would have predicted.)

The Democrats won control of Congress in November 2006, thanks in large part to President Bush’s failures in Iraq. Then they spent the next year seeking to ensure that he couldn’t turn those failures around. Democrats were “against” the war and the surge. That was the sum and substance of their policy. They refused to acknowledge changing facts on the ground, or to debate the real consequences of withdrawal and defeat. It was, they apparently thought, the Bush administration, not America, that would lose. The 2007 Congressional Democrats showed what it means to be an opposition party that takes no responsibility for the consequences of the choices involved in governing. …

Kristol’s piece serves as a segue to a series of great posts from the Captain.

Wiz Bang Blog with a good proposal.

With yet another mass shooting in a “gun-free zone,” I find myself thinking a great deal about that concept.

The first idea is one that is bouncing around the blogosphere — the notion that the powers that be that designate such places ought to be held legally liable for the carnage that erupts in them. …

WSJ has the story of Jews saved by the Dominican’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo. A reminder of how much was known, and how little done.

On July 6, 1938, at Evian-les-Bains, a lovely French tourist resort on Lake Geneva, representatives of 32 countries met for a conference to discuss the growing Jewish refugee problem in Europe triggered by the rise of Nazi Germany. One by one, the representatives from each country (including the U.S.) explained why they would not be able to take in the displaced Jews. The German newspaper Völkischer Beobachter encapsulated what Evian meant for the Jews: “Nobody wants them.” The conference was later deemed by various historians to have given Hitler the implicit go-ahead for his Final Solution.

Out of all the conference attendees, only one unlikely nation volunteered to take in refugees. The Dominican Republic, led by dictator Rafael Trujillo, made an offer to receive as many as 100,000 people. ..

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Don Boudreaux, from Cafe Hayek devotes his Tribune-Review column to the late Julian Simon. He recounts the famous Simon wager with doomster Paul Ehrlich.

Last Friday, Feb. 8, marked the 10th anniversary of the death of the great economist Julian Simon. Although he never received the professional or popular acclaim of economists such as Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson or F.A. Hayek, Simon’s insights and work rank with those of history’s greatest social scientists.

Simon’s most important contribution was to crystallize and explain an insight that even the best economists before him only glimpsed — namely, that human beings in free societies are “the ultimate resource.” Nothing — not oil, not land, not gold, not microchips, nothing — is as valuable to the material well-being of people as is human creativity and effort.

Indeed, there are no resources without human creativity to figure out how to use them and human effort actually to do so. Recognizing the truth of this insight renders silly the familiar term “natural resources.”

No resources are “natural.”

Take petroleum. What makes it a “resource”? It’s certainly not a resource naturally. If it were, American Indians would long ago have put it to good use. But they didn’t. I suspect that for Pennsylvania’s native population in, say, the year 1300, the dark, thick, smelly stuff that bubbled up in watering holes was regarded as a nuisance. …

Christopher Hitchens thinks the US press is not serious.

… Take, just for an example, the obituaries for Earl Butz, a once-important Republican politician who served Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford as secretary for agriculture until compelled to resign after making a loutish and humorless observation in the hearing of the Watergate whistle-blower John Dean. In the words of his New York Times obituarist, Butz (who “died in his sleep while visiting his son William,” which, I must say, makes the male offspring sound exceptionally soporific) had “described blacks as ‘coloreds’ who wanted only three things—satisfying sex, loose shoes and a warm bathroom.” There isn’t a grown-up person with a memory of 1976 who doesn’t recall that Butz said that Americans of African descent required only “a tight p—y, loose shoes, and a warm place to s–t.” Had this witless bigotry not been reported accurately, he might have held onto his job. But any reader of the paper who was less than 50 years old could have read right past the relevant sentence without having the least idea of what the original controversy had been “about.” …

While much of that press in the US is in full Obama swoon, some foreigners are listening to his foolishness. David Warren is first.

… It is in this sense that a vote for Obama is a vote for Osama.

This has nothing to do with Barack Obama’s race, creed, or ideology. I do not doubt for a moment that Mr. Obama is a sincere Christian and patriotic American, and that he truly believes himself the New Man for the New Age.

I fear him rather on two accounts. The first is that he has no policies. He offers vague “feel good” on every domestic issue, and magic in foreign policy. Simply by his being Obama, and not Bush, the conflicts will go away. He will withdraw from Iraq. He will ignore Iran. And he will invade Pakistan (to get at Osama). People who say things like this, whether or not in a dream-like trance, are not eligible to be commander-in-chief. Or rather, should not be.

For the second problem with Mr. Obama is that he is eminently electable. Republicans do not seem to realize just how electable. For while Barack Hussein Obama does not entirely resemble the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau (who had his policy wonk side, and more native malice), he has that mystical androgynous quality that comes across hypnotically on TV.

It was the women who put Trudeau in power, and kept him there: the women’s vote in English Canada, plus the Liberal fiefdom in Quebec. It is the ditzier range of women in the borderline Red States that could elect President Obama: lonely women, and to some extent, their weak, “sensitive” men. …

The Australian notes his Neanderthal free trade ideas.

The Economist wants to climb on, but deep down there’s some vestigial common sense.

… But what policies exactly? Mr Obama’s voting record in the Senate is one of the most left-wing of any Democrat. Even if he never voted for the Iraq war, his policy for dealing with that country now seems to amount to little more than pulling out quickly, convening a peace conference, inviting the Iranians and the Syrians along and hoping for the best. On the economy, his plans are more thought out, but he often tells people only that they deserve more money and more opportunities. If one lesson from the wasted Bush years is that needless division is bad, another is that incompetence is perhaps even worse. A man who has never run any public body of any note is a risk, even if his campaign has been a model of discipline.

And the Obama phenomenon would not always be helpful, because it would raise expectations to undue heights. Budgets do not magically cut themselves, even if both parties are in awe of the president; the Middle East will not heal, just because a president’s second name is Hussein. …

A blog at The Nation reports on Obama’s plagiarism. The source was the Clinton campaign.

When The New York Times revealed this morning that Barack Obama had borrowed extensively from a speech by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick to develop the soaring rhetoric of his recent addresses defending the politics of hope, the story was sourced only to “a rival campaign.”

But now Congressman Jim McGovern, a Clinton backer from Massachusetts, and the Clinton campaign’s communications director, Howard Wolfson, are out peddling the comparison in conference calls and interviews. …

American Thinker posts on our three worst presidents. All Dems; Carter, Buchanan, and LBJ. In the interest of brevity the middle was deleted. Follow the link if you’re curious.

…The actual consequences of Johnson’s Great Society were disastrous for blacks, discouraging initiative, encouraging a sense of entitlement and victimhood, and creating a permanent dependency class. Until 1965, 82% of black households had both a mother and a father in the home — a statistic on par with or even slightly higher than white families. After 1965 (the year the Democrats and President Johnson decided it was time to stop oppressing blacks and start “helping” them), the presence of black fathers in the home began a precipitous decline; today, the American black out-of-wedlock birthrate is at 69% …

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WSJ Editors on the move by some, including Obama, to give the protection of our courts to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned 9/11.

On Monday, some six years after 9/11, military prosecutors filed charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda’s foreign-operations chief, along with five of his conspirators. They will stand before a military tribunal, and if convicted they could face execution. And as if to prove that the U.S. has lost its seriousness and every sense of proportion, now we are told not that KSM is a killer, but a victim.

The victim, supposedly, of President Bush. Opponents of military commissions (including Barack Obama) want KSM & Co. turned over to the regular civilian courts, or at least to military courts-martial; anything else is said to abridge American freedoms. This attitude is either disingenuous or naïve, or both, because it is tenable only by discounting the nature of the attacks and the enemies who carried them out.

KSM himself has made plain the extent and ambition of his world war. “I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he admitted during a hearing in March last year. He planned the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the 2002 bombings of the Bali nightclubs and the Kenya hotel, among 31 actual attacks. KSM was an architect of the Bojinka plot in 1995; by his own confession he drew up plans for strikes in South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Panama, Israel, Brussels and London, plus a “new wave” of post-9/11 attacks on L.A., Seattle, Chicago and New York. …

Mark Steyn comments on the Dem race.

These days, Obama worshippers file two kinds of columns. The first school is well-represented by Ezra Klein, the elderly bobby-soxer of The American Prospect:

“Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.”

Er, OK, if you say so. …

… Poor mean, vengeful Hillary, heading for a one-way ticket on the Oblivion Express, has a point. Barack Obama is an elevator Muzak dinner-theater reduction of all the glibbest hand-me-down myths in liberal iconography – which is probably why he’s a shoo-in. The problems facing America – unsustainable entitlements, broken borders, nuclearizing enemies – require tough solutions, not gaseous Sesame Street platitudes. But, unlike the whose-turn-is-it? GOP, Mrs. Clinton’s crowd generally picks the new kid on the block: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. I wonder if Hillary Rodham, Goldwater Girl of 1964, ever wishes she’d stuck with her original party.

London Times’ Gerard Baker shows how hubris worked havoc for Hillary and Barack.

… The truth is that until now she has run a campaign that will become a model of how not to win elections.

It began a year ago with the insistence on her invincibility, as though she did not need to earn the nomination but was owed it by a grateful party.

It continued with her emphasis on her experience and familiarity with the ways of Washington in a year in which it was clear to all that voters wanted change.

Then when she ran into trouble after the first few contests, she made the catastrophic mistake of letting her husband run riot for a few crucial days and remind voters of all that they feared about a Clinton restoration.

Her one remaining asset after all this is that her core voters are still the Democratic party’s base: working-class types struggling to make ends meet in a weakening economy.

But even they may be starting to waver in the direction of Mr Obama’s inspiring rhetoric. She has two weeks to persuade them that she has a real plan to help them.

Peggy Noonan has advice for Clinton. We hope it is ignored.

… Her whole life right now is a reverse Sally Field. She’s looking out at an audience of colleagues and saying, “You don’t like me, you really don’t like me!”

Although of course she’s not saying it. Her response to what from the outside looks like catastrophe? A glassy-eyed insistence that all is well. “I’m tested, I’m ready, let’s make it happen!” she yelled into a mic on a stage in Texas on the night of her latest defeat. This is meant to look like confidence. Whether or not you wish her well probably determines whether you see it as game face, stubbornness or evidence of mild derangement.

In Virginia last Sunday, two days before the Little Tuesday voting, she suggested her problem is that she’s not a big phony. “People say to me all the time, ‘You’re so specific. . . . Why don’t you just come and, you know, really just give us one of those great rhetorical flourishes and then, you know, get everybody all whooped up.’ “

When she said it, I thought it might be a sign that Mrs. Clinton was beginning to accept the idea that she might lose. …

The Captain analyzes a Michelle Obama speech.

… It’s hard to know where to start in with this speech. First, what evidence does Mrs. Obama have that the largest part of credit card debt goes to health care? Second, if she has seen the standard of living get progressively worse during her lifetime, she needs new glasses. The living standard of even those classified as poor now have per-person expenditures of the American middle-class of the early 1970s, according to the Census Bureau. Eighty percent of the poor live in air-conditioned housing, 43% of them own their own homes, and the average poor American has as much living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, and Athens. Only 3% don’t own a color TV.

But it’s the notion that only Barack Obama can save our souls that is the most offensive part of the speech, by far. Government doesn’t exist to save souls; it exists to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. …

Jim Taranto’s take on superdelegates is interesting.

… Politico reports that some Democrats are complaining the superdelegates aren’t diverse enough:

According to a Politico analysis, close to half of the 700-plus Democratic superdelegates who could end up determining the party nominee are white men.

One Obama superdelegate, a House member, had sharp criticism for the superdelegate racial and gender makeup, a reaction that reflects the sensitivities surrounding the issue.

“It’s still the old guard, the white men. They always want to control the outcome,” the superdelegate said. “But this time, they won’t be able to do it.” . . .

David Warren on globalony.

… the global warming hysteria is one area of public policy entirely in the hands of experts. Only fully-qualified eco-scientists, and then, only those in the employ of the United Nations and the various national environmental bureaucracies, are consulted on the issue. (“The science is settled.”) These are the sages of today, and fools of tomorrow.

There is a vast and growing literature of extremely well-qualified skeptics, who doubt the very premise behind the international hysteria — that fluctuations in human-caused CO2 emissions have anything much to do with either global or regional temperature trends. Most have noticed that the trends coincide much better with solar cycles, beyond human control. But, by definition, these skeptics are not in the pay of the environmental bureaucracies, or at least, do not remain in their pay for long. …

So, what’s it like to live in South Africa? American.com looks at power shortages there.

… The power crisis is not only a source of national embarrassment—Eskom says it won’t be able to guarantee full service until 2012—it exposes some of South Africa’s serious public policy problems. There has been little effort by the African National Congress (ANC), the governing party, or by Eskom to hold anyone accountable for the electricity shortage and its colossal costs. The fact that the ANC holds more than 70 percent of the seats in parliament means that it can disrespect the institution with impunity and advance its own agenda without regard for the smaller parties. It also maintains a tight grip on the state-owned media, which has been spinning the energy crisis and deflecting blame from the government.

In all likelihood, it was the ANC’s obsession with changing the racial makeup of companies, both state-owned and private, that led to the current problems. In practice, this meant firing white workers and hiring black ones. Transforming Eskom so that it better reflects the country’s demography is one thing, but doing so in a way that alienates the current employees and robs the organization of years of expertise was shortsighted. As we now see, it has been enormously costly to all South Africans, regardless of their skin color.

President Thabo Mbeki’s government is constantly accused by the hard-left trade unions and the South African Communist Party of being too pro-market and economically liberal. If only these charges were true. …

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Power Line has chosen as their Book of the Year Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV; The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Gabriel Schoenfeld referred to the award dinner in out first Picking yesterday.

… Last night I listened to Henry Kissinger speak at a dinner (honoring Norman Podhoretz for his new book) that was put on by the amazing trio running Power Line. He made one point that struck me with special force: American withdrawal from Iraq will be an unmistakable American defeat, and the consequences will not be long-term, they will be immediate and grave.

No one can predict the future, but Kissinger’s analysis and warning seems irrefutable. Is that what America wants? This election is shaping up to be even more critical than the Carter-Reagan choice of 1980. Am I correct in thinking that, of the post-war elections, only the Nixon-McGovern race in 1972 had more riding on it?

In addition to the book, Mr. Podhoretz has written, for Commentary, the case for a strike against Iran’s nuclear program. It is 7,000 words and almost fills us up tonight. Here is how he closes.

… The upshot is that if Iran is to be prevented from becoming a nuclear power, it is the United States that will have to do the preventing, to do it by means of a bombing campaign, and (because “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long”) to do it soon.

When I first predicted a year or so ago that Bush would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities once he had played out the futile diplomatic string, the obstacles that stood in his way were great but they did not strike me as insurmountable. Now, thanks in large part to the new NIE, they have grown so formidable that I can only stick by my prediction with what the NIE itself would describe as “low-to-moderate confidence.” For Bush is right about the resemblance between 2008 and 1938. In 1938, as Winston Churchill later said, Hitler could still have been stopped at a relatively low price and many millions of lives could have been saved if England and France had not deceived themselves about the realities of their situation. Mutatis mutandis, it is the same in 2008, when Iran can still be stopped from getting the bomb and even more millions of lives can be saved—but only provided that we summon up the courage to see what is staring us in the face and then act on what we see.

Unless we do, the forces that are blindly working to ensure that Iran will get the bomb are likely to prevail even against the clear-sighted determination of George W. Bush, just as the forces of appeasement did against Churchill in 1938. In which case, we had all better pray that there will be enough time for the next President to discharge the responsibility that Bush will have been forced to pass on, and that this successor will also have the clarity and the courage to discharge it. If not—God help us all—the stage will have been set for the outbreak of a nuclear war that will become as inescapable then as it is avoidable now.

A “Sex Show” has been touring campuses in the East and Duke University had them over for a visit. It was Duke’s bad luck Stuart Taylor noticed.

… So, some might be surprised to learn that on this year’s Super Bowl Sunday, Duke University played host to a group of strippers, prostitutes, phone-sex operators, and others in a “Sex Workers Art Show” to display their “creativity and genius.” The university spent $3,500 from student fees and various programs to pay the performers and cover expenses.

One account of the February 3 show in the on-campus Reynolds Theater — from which I have redacted the more repulsive particulars — was posted on the Internet by Jay Schalin, of the conservative-leaning John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. …

… While the show portrayed “sex workers” as both artistic “geniuses” and victims of society, males who pay strippers to perform had better have politically correct motives. The Sex Workers Art Show passed the political correctness test because, in the words of its website, it not only “entertains, arouses, and amazes” but also offers “scathing and insightful commentary on notions of class, race, gender, labor, and sexuality.”

As if the nation’s campuses were not sufficiently steeped in such stuff already. …

… Brodhead and the board understand how the p.c. game is played. If only the lacrosse players had understood that, they could have lined up university funding to hire a better class of strippers: college-educated white people spouting vacuous political bromides and sporting dollar bills and sparklers in the right places.

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Gabriel Schoenfeld parses the Dem Iraq rhetoric.

… Last night I listened to Henry Kissinger speak at a dinner (honoring Norman Podhoretz for his new book) that was put on by the amazing trio running Power Line. He made one point that struck me with special force: American withdrawal from Iraq will be an unmistakable American defeat, and the consequences will not be long-term, they will be immediate and grave.

No one can predict the future, but Kissinger’s analysis and warning seems irrefutable. Is that what America wants? This election is shaping up to be even more critical than the Carter-Reagan choice of 1980. Am I correct in thinking that, of the post-war elections, only the Nixon-McGovern race in 1972 had more riding on it?

Mark Steyn reminds us that lost in the Canterbury flap were some of the outrageous inroads the fundamentalist Moslems have made in British culture.

The other day I got an e-mail from a British reader passing on a low-key press release. It announced that the Department for Work and Pensions had ruled that polygamous men were entitled to receive spousal welfare benefits for each of their wives. My correspondent then wondered whether I’d planted someone deep within Her Majesty’s Government “who comes out with this stuff just to boost sales of your book?”

Well, no, that would be pretty expensive. Still, to reprise the line of Canadian cynics apropos James Jesus Angleton’s belief that Pierre Trudeau was on the Soviet payroll: Why bother paying someone when he’s prepared to do it for free? Every day around the developed world, minor government bureaucrats get advice from minor government lawyers and make small incremental adjustments to Western civilization. “Where there is a valid polygamous marriage the claimant and one spouse will be paid the couple rate,” read the new British guidelines. “The amount payable for each additional spouse is presently £33.65.”

You can’t (for the moment) marry multiple wives within the United Kingdom, but if you contract a polygamous marriage in a jurisdiction where polygamy is legal, such as certain, ahem, Muslim countries, your better halves (or better eighths?) are now recognized as eligible for British welfare payments. Thus the concept of “each additional spouse” has been accepted both de facto and de jure. …

A post from the Captain reminds us of more Clinton slime.

Interesting campaign analysis from Charlie Cook of National Journal.

One of the fascinating byproducts of this remarkable presidential campaign is that so many people, not just political junkies, are watching with rapt attention.

My 18-year-old, fairly apolitical son was recently grilling me about the race, and I found myself saying that there had not been such a weird and turbulent presidential campaign in my lifetime.

In fact, I told him I doubted I would ever see one like it again. …

WSJ Editors note more studies showing the foolishness of ethanol.

The ink is still moist on Capitol Hill’s latest energy bill and, as if on cue, a scientific avalanche is demolishing its assumptions. To wit, trendy climate-change policies like ethanol and other biofuels are actually worse for the environment than fossil fuels. Then again, Washington’s energy neuroses are more political than practical, so it’s easy for the Solons and greens to ignore what would usually be called evidence. …

John Stossel thinks the stimulus is nonsense.

… The federal government is in the red. Bush’s new budget has a $400 billion deficit. There’s no lockbox with $100 billion in it. So to give everyone a tax rebate, the government will have to borrow more money. But that only moves the cash from one part of the economy to another. As (George Mason University economist) Roberts says, “It’s like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end.” …

 

… Economists call this the “broken window fallacy.” In the 19th century, French economist Frederic Bastiat illustrated it with the story of a boy who breaks a shop window. At first the townspeople lament the loss, but then someone points out that the shopkeeper will have to spend money to replace the window. What the window maker earns, he will soon spend elsewhere. As that money circulates through town, new prosperity will bloom.

The fallacy, of course, is that if the window had not been broken, the shopkeeper would have “replaced his worn-out shoes … or added another book to his library.” The town gains nothing from the broken window.

This logic is lost on the stimulus promoters. I’m surprised they don’t suggest that we prevent recessions by breaking lots of windows. …

ECO – World gives us the latest case against globalony.

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. …

John Tierney on NASCAR physics.

When Junior Johnson entered the Daytona 500 in 1960, he’d already achieved fame in two careers — first as a moonshiner who kept outrunning federal agents, then by applying those skills to win stock-car races.

Now he was ready for a new career as an “intuitive physicist,” a term borrowed from Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, who teaches nonintuitive physics at the University of Nebraska.

Johnson was stuck driving an old Chevrolet that was slower than the Pontiacs at Daytona that year. But in practice he discovered that he could keep up with a Pontiac if he stayed close to its rear bumper. He suspected, as he put it, that “the air was creating a situation, a slipstream type of thing.” …

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Peter Wehner says Pelosi has morphed into Baghdad Bob.

… Nancy Pelosi, leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, has become our Baghdad Bob. And what a spectacle it is. Jihadists in Iraq are testifying to their own failures. At the same time, the Speaker of the House seems to have a deep ideological investment in ours.

Christopher Hitchens is not as polite to the Archbishop as Mr. Warren was yesterday

… And just look at how casually this sheep-faced English cleric throws away the work of centuries of civilization:

[A]n approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts”—I think that’s a bit of a danger.

In the midst of this dismal verbiage and euphemism, the plain statement—”There’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said”—still stands out like a diamond in a dunghill. It stands out precisely because it is said simply, and because its essential grandeur is intelligible to everybody. Its principles ought to be just as intelligible and accessible to those who don’t yet speak English, in just the same way as the great Lord Mansfield once ruled that, wherever someone might have been born, and whatever he had been through, he could not be subject to slavery once he had set foot on English soil. Simple enough? For the women who are the principal prey of the sharia system, it is often only when they are shipped or flown to Britain that their true miseries begin. This modern disgrace is deepened and extended by a fatuous cleric who, presiding over an increasingly emaciated and schismatic and irrelevant church, nonetheless maintains that any faith is better than none at all.

John O’Sullivan has a defense (sort of) of the Canterbury Fool.

… At about the time Rowan Williams was named for the ancient See of Canterbury, a friend who’d known and admired the new archbishop well at Oxford told me he was alarmed by the news. “He is a fine teacher, a very scrupulous theologian and a pious man,” said my friend. “But he lacks political skills and everyday common sense – which today are essential qualities in a successful archbishop.”

He went on to predict that Anglicanism would be convulsed in rows that would deeply distress his old friend.

That was a safe bet: The worldwide Anglican Communion was already embroiled in painful disputes between progressives and traditionalists over women priests, gay marriage and the authority of the biblical tradition.

Alas, in the course of persuading both sides not to push their disputes to the point of breaking up Anglicanism, Rowan Williams as primate (first bishop among equals), has repeatedly turned the other cheek – and repeatedly got slapped by both sides. More, he has shown a genius for putting his foot in it with ill-judged public statements – for instance, that terrorists “can have serious moral goals” or that Western market transactions might be “acts of aggression” against the world’s poor – that then require several rounds of further explanation. …

Debra Saunders has Canterbury comments.

… It’s not only Our Betters in Europe who, in the name of political correctness, become apologists for polygamists. In 2005, then-Canada Prime Minister Paul Martin commissioned a $150,000 study to debunk the notion that same-sex marriages could lead to legalized polygamy — only to watch the three law professors on the panel recommend that Canada repeal its anti-polygamy law. Because: “The parties most likely to suffer from this rule are the left-behind wives.”

If secular Western nations had bedrock values, maybe there would be no need to worry about Values Creep. But when, as the honor-violence report noted, even women’s activists defend female genital mutilation, it’s clear that the only absolute in liberal societies is doubt.

Up against fanatics with barbaric ideologies, we are outgunned. We don’t even care if they want to hurt us.

“If you had a map of the U.K. showing the location of Islamist groups — or terrorist cells — and you had another map showing the incidence of honor-based violence and you overlaid them, you would find that they were a mirror,” noted Nazir Afzal, the Crown prosecutor on honor-based violence.

It makes you wonder if Western nations have a death wish.

Mark Helprin, who’s been very quiet lately, stirs from his lair in Charlottesville to slay some talk-show dragons.

What a kerfuffle! Half a dozen talk-radio hosts whose major talent is that, like hairdressers, they can talk all day long to one client after another as they snip, have decided that the presumptive Republican nominee does not hew sufficiently close to their gospel.

As anyone who has listened to them knows, the depth of their thought is truly Oprah-like. And if a great institution of the left can weigh-in as it does in the choice of a nominee, why not its fraternal twins on the right? It doesn’t matter that Mitt Romney, suddenly their Reagan, became a conservative in a flash of light sometime last year, or that their other champion, a populist theocrat, is in many ways as conservative as Vladimir Lenin. The task is to stop the devil McCain.

As a mere print person whose words are not electrified and shot through walls, automobiles, pine trees, and brains, I realize that what I write in the bloody ink of a dying industry may be irrelevant. But from my antiquated perspective, something is very wrong.

Ostracism following tests of “right thinking” is a specialty of the left. …

We’ll do a little nuance here as Thomas Sowell defends journalists, and entertaining talk-show hosts, who have not yet climbed on the McCain bandwagon. His example is not to the point, but an interesting history lesson nonetheless.

… The carnage of the First World War was a shock from which a whole generation never recovered. Millions of soldiers on both sides were killed. A whole continent was devastated and millions of civilians were starving amid the ruins. Surely it was a humane and noble desire to want to avoid a repetition of that.

So when Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times of London, decided to filter the news, in the interest of peace, that was understandable.

Rather than print news that could rekindle animosities among nations that had fought in the First World War, Dawson filtered dispatches from his own foreign correspondents in Germany to remove negative reports of what the Nazis were doing.

Some of The Times’ correspondents complained at the deletions and rewriting of what they had written, and some resigned in protest. They apparently understood that their role was to report the facts as they saw them, not cater to some hope or agenda.

We now know in retrospect that The Times’ use of its great influence to promote the interests of peace had the opposite effect.

It downplayed the dangers of Hitler, thus contributing to Britain’s belated awakening to those dangers, and its vacillating responses — factors which emboldened Hitler to launch the Second World War.

It was not just that Dawson guessed wrong. More fundamentally, he misunderstood a journalist’s role and the betrayal involved when he went beyond that role, even for a noble cause.

David Brooks says neither of the Dems is going to govern as they campaign. Should we be surprised?

There’s a big difference between the Republican and Democratic campaigns: The Republicans have split on policy grounds; the Democrats haven’t. There’s been a Republican divide between center and right, yet no Democratic divide between center and left.

But when you think about it, the Democratic policy unity is a mirage. If the Democrats actually win the White House, the tensions would resurface with a vengeance.

The first big rift would involve Iraq. Both Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have seductively hinted that they would withdraw almost all U.S. troops within 12 to 16 months. But if either of them actually did that, he or she would instantly make Iraq the consuming partisan fight of their presidency.

There would be private but powerful opposition from Arab leaders, who would fear a return to 2006 chaos. There would be irate opposition from important sections of the military, who would feel that the U.S. was squandering the gains of the previous year. A Democratic president with few military credentials would confront outraged and highly photogenic colonels screaming betrayal. …

Dick Morris show us how to follow the Clinton money.

… Foreigners are not allowed to contribute to presidential campaigns. But Bill’s 1996 campaign was accused of taking funds from the Chinese government passed through James Riady and through Al Gore’s visit to a Buddhist temple.

The Emir of Dubai must be smarting from the rejection of his efforts to take over security for key American ports and one can easily imagine that a desire for political acceptance by the next president may have been behind his generosity to Bill Clinton over this decade. Dubai has been gobbling up U.S. businesses. It recently bought a 20 percent stake in Nasdaq, Barney’s, Loehmann’s, it bought the Essex House Hotel, a 4 percent stake in Chrysler, a $5 million stake in MGM Mirage. In other words, Dubai is here to stay and may need help and permission for further investments from the federal government. Is it too much of a leap to speculate that the Emir might want to protect his investment by buying out Bill so that he can lend much needed cash to Hillary at a crucial moment in her campaign?

Especially at a time when Dubai and other foreign sovereign wealth funds are seeking to buy significant shares of cash-poor American banks, the major infusion of money into the Clinton campaign from the Middle East could become an important campaign issue.

Hillary and Bill could clear all this up by simply releasing the details of their personal finances as it was once customary for candidates to do. …

Post from Breakthrough Blog on the opposition to the $2,500 car.

Car A gets a fuel efficiency of 46 miles per gallon. Car B gets about 50 miles per gallon. Car A is called the Toyota Prius and is hailed by environmentalists as a step towards solving global warming. Car B, a new car called the Tata Nano unveiled by an Indian company, is reviled by environmentalists as disastrous for global warming. The New York Times devotes an entire editorial condemning the Tata Nano. Columnist and author Tom Friedman calls for the Tata Nano to be “taxed like crazy.” The reason for this extreme criticism? The Tata Nano is cheap – very cheap. It is a revolutionary new car design that will cost only about $2,500 and will bring car ownership within reach of millions of new people in the developing world.

The environmentalists’ hypocrisy is breathtaking. How can anything be criticized simply for being affordable? Tomorrow, if college education is made more accessible and affordable in India, will the New York Times denounce it on the grounds that college graduates tend to earn more and buy more consumer goods and hence enlarge their environmental “footprint”? The attitude of many environmentalists today is not unlike that of the Duke of Wellington at the dawn of the railroad era, who criticized the railways on the grounds that they would “only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” …

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David Warren, Canadian, looks at Britain and sees Canada’s future.

… In various other ways, Shariah is being recognized, semi-formally. For instance, although bigamy remains nominally a crime in Britain, the Labour government has approved new social provisions by which extra welfare payments, council housing privileges, and tax benefits may be claimed by polygamous households, and the cash benefits to which the extra wives are now entitled may be paid directly into the account of their husband.

At a higher level, the (Anglican) Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, publicly called this week for the recognition of “some form of” Shariah law for Muslims in Britain, and said it should be given equal status with parliamentary law. While Archbishop Williams has a long history of muddled pronouncements, and is widely observed to be emotionally unstable, the strength of his office is now engaged on the Islamist side. …

John Fund charts the ways McCain can win in Nov.

… He is the only potential GOP candidate who is clearly positioned to keep the basic red-blue template of how each state voted in 2004 intact and then be able to move into blue territory.

Let’s assume that Ohio goes to either Mr. Obama or Ms. Clinton. It’s at least as likely that Mr. McCain could carry New Hampshire. The Granite State went only narrowly to Mr. Kerry, a senator from a neighboring state, and Mr. McCain has unique advantages there. New Hampshire elections are determined by how that state’s fiercely independent voters go, and Mr. McCain has won over many of them in both the 2000 and 2008 GOP primaries. He spent 47 days in New Hampshire before this year’s primary and is well-known in the state. If Mr. McCain lost Ohio but carried New Hampshire and all the other states Mr. Bush took in 2004, he would win, 270-268.

It’s true that Democrats will make a play for states other than Ohio that Mr. Bush won. Iowa is a perennially competitive state that could go either way this fall. Arkansas polls show that Hillary Clinton might well be able to carry the state where she served as First Lady for over a decade.

But Mr. McCain’s roots in the Rocky Mountain West complicate Democratic efforts to take states in that region. His fierce individualism and support for property rights play well in Nevada and Colorado, which were close in 2004. New Mexico, next door to Mr. McCain’s Arizona, gave Mr. Bush a very narrow 49.6% to 49% victory in 2004. But Mr. McCain’s nuanced position on immigration marks him as the GOP candidate who is most likely to hold the Hispanic voters who are the key to carrying New Mexico. ….

Jeff Jacoby celebrates Obama’s victories among white Americans.

ON THE SUBJECT of Black History Month, I’m with Morgan Freeman, who described it a few years ago as “ridiculous” – for the excellent reason that “black history is American history,” not some segregated addendum to it. The only way to get beyond racial divisions, he told Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes,” is to “stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man, and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.”

Amen to that. The sooner we resolve to abandon the labels “black” and “white,” the sooner we will be a society in which such racial labels are irrelevant. And what better moment to make such a resolution than this one, when white Americans by the millions are proving that the color of a person’s skin is no longer a bar to anything in this country – not even the presidency.

Whether or not Barack Obama’s bid for the White House ultimately succeeds, it has already demolished the canard that America will not elect a black president. His impressive win over Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses could perhaps be dismissed as a fluke, but after Super Tuesday there is not much left to argue about. Obama carried 13 states last week, and the whiter the state, the more imposing his victory.

He took Utah with 57 percent of the vote; North Dakota with 61 percent; Kansas with 74 percent; Alaska with 75 percent. Idaho chose Obama over Clinton by 80 to 17 percent. …

Bob Novak says, “Not so fast.”

Which Democrat really won Super Tuesday? Thanks to the Democratic Party’s proportional representation, it is not easy to say a week later. Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama ran a virtual dead heat for delegates that day in 22 states clearly stacked in Obama’s favor. But the way Obama lost California raises the specter of the dreaded Bradley Effect.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American Democrat, in 1982 unexpectedly lost his bid for governor of California. His defeat followed voters telling pollsters they prefer a black candidate and then voting the other way. In California’s primary last Tuesday, Obama lost by 10 percentage points after one late survey showed him ahead by 13 points and two others gave him a smaller lead.

Was this presumed 20-point reversal caused by the Bradley Effect, which has worried Democratic leaders about Obama since he became an obstacle to Clinton’s majestic procession to the Oval Office? It is much too early for that conclusion, but the subject is in the minds and private comments of Democratic politicians pondering the stalemate for the party’s presidential nomination. …

Changing subjects, George Will writes on the foolishness that is ethanol.

Iowa’s caucuses, a source of so much turbulence, might even have helped cause the recent demonstration by 10,000 Indonesians in Jakarta. Savor the multiplying irrationalities of the government-driven mania for ethanol and other biofuels, and energy policy generally.

Indonesians, like most Asians, love soybeans, the world price of which has risen 50 percent in a month and 125 percent in a year, partly because of increasing world population and incomes, but also because many farmers have switched land from soybeans to crops that can be turned into biofuels. In 2005, America used 15 percent of its corn crop to supplant less than 2 percent of its gasoline use. In 2007, the government-contrived U.S. demand for ethanol was more than half the global increase in demand. The political importance of corn-growing, ethanol-making Iowa is one reason that biofuel mandates flow from Washington the way oil would flow from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if it had nominating caucuses.

ANWR’s 10.4 billion barrels of oil have become hostage to the planet’s saviors (e.g., John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama), who block drilling in even a tiny patch of ANWR. You could fit Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Delaware into ANWR’s frozen desolation; the “footprint” of the drilling operation would be one sixth the size of Washington’s Dulles airport. …

Robert Samuelson says, “No stupid! It’s not the economy.”

… We have a $14 trillion economy. The idea that presidents can control it lies between an exaggeration and an illusion. Our presidential preferences ought to reflect judgments about candidates’ character, values, competence and their views on issues where what they think counts: foreign policy; long-term economic and social policy — how they would tax and spend; health care; immigration. Forget the business cycle.

True, presidents try to manipulate it. In 1971, President Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls in part to prevent inflation from jeopardizing his reelection. The economy boomed in 1972. But the controls were a time-delayed disaster. When they were removed, inflation exploded to 12 percent in 1974. In 1980, the Carter administration adopted credit controls to squelch raging inflation. The result was a short recession — a complete surprise — that probably sealed Jimmy Carter‘s defeat in November.

History’s long view teaches the same lesson. No president tried harder, with good reason, to influence the business cycle than Franklin Roosevelt. When he took office in 1933, unemployment was roughly 25 percent. By executive order and congressional legislation, FDR effectively abandoned the gold standard, adopted deposit insurance, tried to prop up falling farm and factory prices, rescued many defaulting homeowners, regulated the stock market, and embarked on massive public works.

With what result? Well, leaving the gold standard aided recovery. But some economic research suggests that other New Deal measures may have frustrated revival. In any case, all of them together didn’t end the Great Depression. World War II did that. In 1939 unemployment was still 17 percent. …

How’s this for some good news? Steve Chapman thinks nuclear terrorism is unlikely.

… Assuming the jihadists vault over those Himalayas, they would have to deliver the weapon onto American soil. Sure, drug smugglers bring in contraband all the time — but seeking their help would confront the plotters with possible exposure or extortion. This, like every other step in the entire process, means expanding the circle of people who know what’s going on, multiplying the chance someone will blab, back out or screw up.

Mueller recalls that after the Irish Republican Army failed in an attempt to blow up British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, it said, “We only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” Al-Qaida, he says, faces a very different challenge: For it to carry out a nuclear attack, everything has to go right. For us to escape, only one thing has to go wrong.

That has heartening implications. If Osama bin Laden embarks on the project, he has only a minuscule chance of seeing it bear fruit. Given the formidable odds, he probably won’t bother.

None of this means we should stop trying to minimize the risk by securing nuclear stockpiles, monitoring terrorist communications and improving port screening. But it offers good reason to think that in this war, it appears, the worst eventuality is one that will never happen.

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Mark Steyn’s weekly OC Register column reviews the campaign to date.

… it should be noted that the defining McCain moment came back in the fall when he responded to Hillary Clinton’s support for public funding for a Woodstock museum. If you’re under 70 and have no idea what “Woodstock” is or why it would require its own museum, ask your grandpa. But McCain began by saying he was sure Mrs. Clinton was right and that it was a major “cultural and pharmaceutical event.” Which is a cute line. And McCain wasn’t done yet: “I wasn’t there,” he said of the 1969 music festival. “I was tied up at the time.”

And the crowd roared its approval. It’s not just a joke, though it’s a pretty good one. It’s not merely a way of reminding folks you’ve stood up to torture and you can shrug it off with almost 007-cool insouciance. But it also tells Republican voters that, when Sen. Clinton offers up some cobwebbed boomer piety, you know a piñata when you see one, and you’re gonna clobber it. …

If you want Mark with a little more bite, we have a Townhall link to his CPAC speech. Twenty-eight minutes of fun.

So how did McCain do at CPAC?

John Fund liked McCain’s appearance.

Democrats, and even a few Republicans, have suggested that John McCain may not wear well as a candidate, with many making comparisons to Bob Dole, the former war hero and longtime senator who was the uninspired GOP nominee in 1996 against Bill Clinton.

But Mr. McCain put many of those doubts to rest yesterday with a thundering speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. …

John Podhoretz did too.

What John McCain delivered at the Conservative Political Action Conference was a nearly perfect political speech in a nearly perfect setting. The rhetorical dynamic was to present McCain as an “imperfect servant” — first of his party and then of his country. This had the effect, first, of creating a mood of rueful modesty, which are the necessary critical grace notes for any speaker trying to make a case before a partly hostile audience. Any hostility shown him by the audience — and there was some — seemed unreasonable and ugly-spirited given the outstretched hand of the speaker.

The purpose of the speech was for McCain to make the case that he is a conservative, and indeed, it was a speech rooted in conservative philosophy, featuring two (count-’em) quotes from Burke on the nature of liberty and the threats to it. But he did far more. …

Jennifer Rubin, also in Contentions.

McCain did himself a lot of good in his CPAC speech. The crowd gave him a very friendly welcome. The only boos I could discern came during his discussion of immigration reform. Throughout the speech he was interrupted several times by healthy applause. Specifically, he did six smart things:

First, he did not deny there are real differences between him and the assembled. …

The Captain’s first post today is on the McCain speech.

… McCain focused the latter part of his speech on the big issues that he says will define the election — the war, the Democratic insistence on statist policies, and entitlement reform. He concluded that part of the argument with this (emphasis mine):

These are but a few of the differences that will define this election. They are very significant differences, and I promise you, I intend to contest these issues on conservative grounds and fight as hard as I can to defend the principles and positions we share, and to keep this country safe, proud, prosperous and free.

We have had a few disagreements, and none of us will pretend that we won’t continue to have a few. But even in disagreement, especially in disagreement, I will seek the counsel of my fellow conservatives. If I am convinced my judgment is in error, I will correct it. And if I stand by my position, even after benefit of your counsel, I hope you will not lose sight of the far more numerous occasions when we are in complete accord.

If conservatives hear that carefully, that is an invitation to the table. They should accept that invitation and start seeking to fill the seats. …

He also posts on MSNBC going in the tank for Obama.

… What? MS-NBC biased? Oh heavens, could that possibly be? Before the Left gets particularly outraged by that particular idea, let’s recall that this is the network that airs Keith Olbermann, who saw Peter Finch’s performance in Network and didn’t realize it was satire. Their supposed news anchor spends every night ranting about conservatives and Republicans, daily issuing them the title of “The Worst Person In The World”, which ignores people like Richard Ramirez, Ali Khameini, Osama bin Laden, the Castro brothers, and so on.

And yet, Republican presidential candidates have regularly appeared on MS-NBC, despite the almost relentless bias against them on the cable channel. They haven’t even demanded Mr.Meltdown recuse himself from the proceedings. Apparently, they don’t feel as though the pettiness and rancid commentary at MS-NBC can knock them off their stride. Hillary feels differently — shouldn’t that say something about her candidacy? …

And he speculates on the source of Clinton’s $5 million dollar loan.

Neal Boortz comments on McCain.

… But .. McCain is the guy. He’s going to be the nominee unless something really bizarre happens. If you don’t support his candidacy .. if you sit out the election .. just how much influence do you think you are going to have during his presidency? That is …if your actions don’t put Hideous Hillary in office.

Charles Krauthammer tells us how we got to McCain.

… The story of this campaign is how many Republicans felt that national security trumps social heresy. The problem for Giuliani and McCain, however, was that they were splitting that constituency. Then came Giuliani’s humiliation in Florida. After he withdrew from the race, he threw his support to McCain — and took his followers with him.

Look at the numbers. Before Florida, the national polls had McCain hovering around 30 and Giuliani in the mid-teens. After Florida, McCain’s numbers jumped to the mid-40s, swallowing the Giuliani constituency whole. …

… Bush muddied the ideological waters of conservatism. It was Bush who teamed with Teddy Kennedy to pass No Child Left Behind, a federal venture into education that would have been anathema to (the early) Reagan. It was Bush who signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. It was Bush who strongly supported the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill. It was Bush who on his own created a vast new entitlement program, the Medicare drug benefit. And it was Bush who conducted a foreign policy so expansive and, at times, redemptive as to send paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan and traditional conservatives such as George F. Will into apoplexy and despair (respectively).

Who in the end prepared the ground for the McCain ascendancy? Not Feingold. Not Kennedy. Not even Giuliani. It was George W. Bush. Bush begat McCain. …

VDH has a call to arms.

… The alternative is a Republican loss, and likely increased Democratic control of the Congress and soon a trifecta with the Supreme Court.

We would witness a new generation of European-like tax increases, unnecessary new programs, negotiated or unilateral surrender in Iraq, loss of what has been achieved in preventing another 9/11 (a return to the Sandy Berger/Albright response to terrorists in the late 1990s when our embassies were leveled and Pakistan got the bomb), 2-3 far Left Supreme Court justices, and the race/class/gender industry given official sanction.

The idea that feuding conservatives would each not make some sort of concessions to prevent all that is lunatic.

Gerard Baker of the London Times says the Dem race is Dunkin’ Donuts against Starbucks.

I’m not sure when the term latte liberal replaced the old champagne socialist as the favoured term of derision for the well-heeled leftie but it looks an increasingly useful metaphor for understanding how the deadlock in the Democratic presidential primary election might be broken.

The two candidates have fought themselves to a standstill. In the closest race in any US presidential primary campaign in decades, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are more or less tied in total votes received and in delegates elected for the party’s nominating convention.

Super Tuesday, when almost half the country voted in the nearest thing ever to a nationwide primary, was supposed to break the logjam but has merely tightened it.

The reason the race is so close has nothing to do with policy differences. I’d wager that not one voter in a hundred could name with any confidence a single difference between the two candidates’ stances on the war in Iraq, healthcare, taxes, public spending, abortion or anything else. That’s because there isn’t one. …

IBD Editors say it’s time to prepare for global cooling.

According to Popular Mechanics, a truck was the Auto Show big hit in Chicago. Navistar introduced its new big rig.

At what was by far the most jam-packed unveiling of the entire show here so far, Navistar International today took the wraps off its new flagship truck, the LoneStar. This monster is the big-rig equivalent of a Harley-Davidson dresser, with a huge chrome grille and lights galore. But there’s some green poking through that smoke: As part of Navistar’s Advanced Classics line of Class 8 trucks designed with advanced aerodynamics, the LoneStar is projected to be 5 to 15-percent more fuel efficient than traditional trucks. …

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Samizdata with a quote of the day we can all understand.

Accuracy in Media finds out just what H. Clinton was doing during the Watergate hearings. Her supervisor in the House Impeachment staff says;

… During that period I kept a private diary of the behind the scenes congressional activities. My original tape recordings of the diary and other materials related to the Nixon impeachment provided the basis for my prior book Without Honor and are now available for inspection in the George Washington University Library.

After President Nixon’s resignation a young lawyer, who shared an office with Hillary, confided in me that he was dismayed by her erroneous legal opinions and efforts to deny Nixon representation by counsel-as well as an unwillingness to investigate Nixon. In my diary of August 12, 1974 I noted the following:

John Labovitz apologized to me for the fact that months ago he and Hillary had lied to me [to conceal rules changes and dilatory tactics.] Labovitz said, “That came from Yale.” I said, “You mean Burke Marshall [Senator Ted Kennedy's chief political strategist, with whom Hillary regularly consulted in violation of House rules.] Labovitz said, “Yes.” His apology was significant to me, not because it was a revelation but because of his contrition.

At that time Hillary Rodham was 27 years old. She had obtained a position on our committee staff through the political patronage of her former Yale law school professor Burke Marshall and Senator Ted Kennedy. Eventually, because of a number of her unethical practices I decided that I could not recommend her for any subsequent position of public or private trust. …

Another Clinton controversy over foreign money.

Apparently, Hillary is considering using some of her own money to finance her campaign.

 

If she does, I can guarantee there’ll be questions about the millions in foreign money Bill Clinton has racked up in speaking fees that’s likely stashed in their joint checking account. …

Kansas City Star reports Obama’s claim GOP will have Hillary dirt.

Sen. Barack Obama predicted Wednesday that Republicans will have a dump truck full of dirt to unload on Hillary Rodham Clinton if the former first lady wins the Democratic presidential nomination. Obama said he offers the party its best hope of winning the White House, a claim Clinton also made.

At a news conference the morning after Super Tuesday, Obama offered some pointed advice to members of Congress and other party leaders who will attend the national convention this summer as delegates not chosen in primaries or caucuses.

He said if he winds up winning the most delegates in voting, they “would have to think long and hard about how they approach the nomination when the people they claim to represent have said, ‘Obama’s our guy.’” …

Gabor Steingart in Der Spiegel with another perceptive report on the race.

The duel between Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama may be fascinating for the party’s supporters, but it’s jeopardizing a Democratic election victory in November. When two people quarrel, the third often wins — which is why John McCain could end up as president. …

VDH says; Weird times and weird election.

In this weird presidential campaign, almost everything has turned out opposite from what pollsters and pundits predicted. Even Super Tuesday proved not-so-super, and things are still not quite settled in either party race.

The election was supposed to be about a shaky Iraq. But after the successful surge and the recent economic downturn in the U.S., candidates now talk more about mortgages and illegal immigration than chaos in Baghdad.

John McCain was said to be finished by July. Then he was back again as a contender by January and is a supposed sure thing in February.

Barack Obama was at first just to be a runner-up; front-runner Hillary Clinton once worried more about the fall Republican nominee. Then, after the unexpected Obama victory in Iowa, his surging poll numbers assured us that Hillary was toast in New Hampshire. But she suddenly came back there, and also won in Michigan and Nevada — but that was all before Obama resurged in February. …

The Captain has CPAC advice for McCain.

Dan Henninger says it’s McCain or the wilderness.

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham aren’t the only conservatives in agony over John McCain. The base is bummed. At the Portofino Hotel in Orlando, Fla., where Rudy Giuliani went down with a graceful valedictory concession, an energetic Rudy guy in dark glasses and slicked black hair — hours before ebulliently cheering up anyone who would talk to him — ran up to a reporter waiting for a car. “My wife just heard. Rudy’s gonna endorse McCain! S—!!!!”

Conservatives can’t catch a break. Taxes, judges, the culture — somewhere a conservative is always getting shafted. The party broke up on the rocks of the 2006 election. Its 2008 presidential nomination has been contested by men claiming the mantle of Ronald Reagan but who in fact are: John McMaverick, a New York City mayor on his third marriage, the moderate governor of liberal Massachusetts, and the funniest governor ever from Hope, Ark.

There are murmurs of heading into the political wilderness. Sit this one out. Rather than sell the party’s soul to John McCain, let Hillary have it, or Barack. Go into opposition for four years while the party gets its head together and comes up with an authentic conservative candidate. If this sourness takes hold at the margin, say among GOP anti-immigrant voters, it might happen. …

George Will comments on Tuesday results.

… On Tuesday, the Democratic Party paid a price for early voting, especially in California, where more than 2 million votes were cast in the 29 days prior to what is anachronistically called Election Day. The price was paid by the party’s most potentially potent nominee, Obama, whose surge became apparent after many impatient voters had already rushed to judgment.

Although Obama lost California to Clinton by 380,000 votes, he surely ran much closer in the votes cast on Tuesday, after her double-digit lead in polls had evaporated. Had he won the third of the three C’s — he won Connecticut, where a large portion of voters are in her New York City media market, and in Colorado, a red Western state rapidly turning purple — he might now be unstoppable.

Evangelical Christians, who in 2006 gave Republicans more votes than Democrats received from African-Americans and union members combined, wanted to determine the GOP’s nominee — and perhaps they have done so. By giving so much support to an essentially regional candidate, Mike Huckabee, rather than to Mitt Romney, they have opened McCain’s path to capturing the conservative party without capturing conservatives. McCain’s Tuesday triumph was based in states (New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California) he will not carry in November. …