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Chicago Tribune editors introduce us to Tzipi Livni. She’s about to become a prime minister. No, not Finland. Israel.

Iran is rushing ahead with its nuclear program, overcoming technical challenges and daring the world to stop it. The terrorists of Hamas are tightening their grip on Gaza and eyeing the West Bank. Hezbollah radicals are ascendant in Lebanon. And peace talks with the Palestinians are lurching along, yet to yield any major results.

Enter Tzipi Livni, the woman who likely will be Israel’s next prime minster.

If that name’s not familiar to you, it will be. Livni won election Wednesday as the new leader of the Kadima party, which was founded by her political mentor, the former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. She now will try to form a coalition government that would replace disgraced Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. He is stepping down after a series of damaging corruption investigations. …

Jim Kramer provides concise cogent background for Wall Street’s troubles.

Frank Capra would have loved the ongoing demise of Wall Street as we know it. How could he not? He correctly presaged it 62 years ago in It’s a Wonderful Life. Except in the 2008 sequel, not only does the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan survive, but it vanquishes Potter’s sorry, bloated operation, and the evil banker’s empire gets dismantled and sent to the eponymous field! This time around, George Bailey gets played not by Jimmy Stewart but by another quiet, unassuming individual, Ron Hermance. He’s the CEO of the homegrown Hudson City Bancorp, a modern-day replica of the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan. Never heard of Hermance or Hudson City? Under the avuncular and down-to-earth Hermance, this once-tiny Paramus, New Jersey, savings bank is now the largest savings and loan in the country. Who gets cast as the vicious, scheming Mr. Potter? We’ve got tons of candidates vying for that role these days, but only Richard Fuld, of the bankrupt Lehman Brothers, can truly fill Lionel Barrymore’s wingtips, given his arrogance and greed. How fitting is it that the day Lehman Brothers ceased to trade, because of Fuld’s inability to grasp how truly rotten Lehman had become, Hudson City hit its 52-week high? The cause of Lehman’s death? A mortgage portfolio of deadbeat loans that may prove to be worth even less than Fuld and his minions eventually acknowledged.

Hudson City’s secret is that, just like good old George Bailey in the movie, Hermance never saw the world outside his hometown, never went to exotic places like Santa Barbara, South Beach, or Europe. So unlike Fuld, or the executives at the defunct Bear Stearns, the merged Merrill Lynch, and even the now-seized American International Group, Hermance never lent money, gave mortgages, or promised to pay off on guarantees to anyone outside of his bailiwick. In other words, unlike those other guys, Hermance actually knew his borrowers and has been paid back on virtually every loan he has ever made. Hudson City’s default rate is virtually nonexistent compared with that of every one of these fallen behemoths. That’s how good the firm’s lending standards are. His model couldn’t have been more the opposite of the Potter-like plan, which, at its core, meant crafting mortgage-backed securities together from billions of dollars in residential loans of dubious quality that vastly overstated the value of the property underneath them and had no hope of ever being repaid unless housing continued to appreciate. No wonder Hudson City’s thriving while Potter’s field is filled with the graves of those who worked at Bear, Lehman, and Merrill.

The ascendancy of Hudson City, and the destruction or succumbing of so many of the once seemingly invincible investment banks or insurers, is no coincidence. There’s a fundamental change going on, and Hudson City’s riding it while almost everyone on Wall Street is being swamped by it. The change involves risk and the need to avoid taking it; it involves funding and the need to have a steady source, through sticky deposits, not hot slimy hedge funds; and it involves simplicity, not complexity. A mortal can actually understand how Hudson City makes its money; nobody can possibly even fathom all of the ways that Lehman or Bear or Merrill or AIG found to lose money. …

Spengler’s cynicism may not be the tonic for now, but he has a point.

Why should American taxpayers give US Treasury Secretary “Hank” Paulson a blank check to bail out the shareholders of busted banks? Why should the Treasury turn itself into a toxic waste dump for their bad loans? Why not let other banks join the unlamented Brothers Lehman in bankruptcy court, and start a new bank with taxpayers’ money? Or have the Treasury pay interest on delinquent mortgages, and make them whole? Even better, why not let the Chinese, or the Saudis or other foreign investors take control of failed American banks? They’ve got the money, and they gladly would pay a premium for an inside seat at the American table.

None of the above will occur. America will give between US$700-$800 billion to the Treasury to buy any bank assets it wants, on any terms, with no possible legal recourse. It is an invitation to abuse of power unparalleled in American history, in which ill-paid civil servants will set prices on the portfolios of the banking system with no oversight and no threat of legal penalty.

Why are the voices raised in protest so shrill and few? Why will Americans fall on their fountain-pens for their bankers? If America is to adopt socialism, why not have socialism for the poor, rather than for the rich? Why should American households that earn $50,000 a year subsidize Goldman Sachs partners who earn $5 million a year?

Believe it or not, there is a rational explanation, and quite in keeping with America’s national motto, E pluribus hokum. Part of the problem is that Wall Street, like the ethnic godfather in the old joke, has made America an offer it can’t understand. The collapsing the mortgage-backed securities market embodies a degree of complexity that mystifies the average policy wonk. But that is a lesser, superficial side of the story. …

WaPo story on Hillary fan who now supports McCain because of the Palin pick.

Lynette Long’s friends can barely sputter their objections. “How could you?” they say. “What about the environment? What about gay rights? What about Roe v. Wade?”

Long’s son calls, flabbergasted. And her patients in affluent, liberal Bethesda? They can hardly fathom it.

Lynette Long — psychologist, feminist, Democrat, Dupont Circle dweller, Whole Foods shopper, George Bush hater, Hillary Clinton supporter (to the max) — is not just voting for John McCain and Sarah Palin, she even took the stage at their rally in Fairfax to trumpet her decision to the world.

Long got the call from the McCain campaign at 10 the night before the rally this month. With a twinkle in her eye, the struggle for women in her heart and a bit of mischief in her mind, she agreed to be a warm-up speaker for the Republican ticket.

She had never been to a candidate’s rally before. She had voted for the Democrat for president in every election except for the elder George Bush’s first time, against Michael Dukakis in 1988. Sure, she had demonstrated against the Vietnam War, but she basically wasn’t the political type. That is, until Hillary Clinton came along.

All of a sudden, Long saw hope. As she told her son: “How would you feel if every day all the people you saw in authority were men, all the statues in Washington are all men, the money in your pocket, all pictures of men — and then finally, a woman comes along and she could be president? How would you feel? I would vote for her.” …

Ralph Peters on the charms of Sarah Palin.

… Speaking of Reagan (Eureka College, Illinois), every chief executive we’ve had since the Gipper snapped his final salute as president has had the imprimatur of an Ivy League university. And we’ve gone from bad to worse:

* George Herbert Walker Bush: Yale.

* William Jefferson Clinton: Georgetown, Oxford, Yale Law.

* George W. Bush: Yale and Harvard Business School.

The first lacked the sense to finish the job in Desert Storm; the second lacked the guts to go after al Qaeda when it was just a startup – and the third, well, let’s just say he disappointed our low expectations.

Now we have the Ivy League elite’s “he’s not only like us but he’s a minority and we’re so wonderful to support him” candidate, Sen. Barack Obama (Columbia and Harvard Law).

Our country can’t afford another one of these clowns. Harvard isn’t the answer – Harvard’s the problem.

So here’s the message Palin is sending on behalf of the rest of us (the down-market masses Dems love at election time and ignore once the voting’s done): The rule of the snobs is over. It’s time to give one of us a chance to lead.

Sen. John McCain‘s one of us, too. He raised hell at Annapolis (quadruple ugh: military!), and he’ll raise the right kind of hell in Washington.

McCain’s so dumb he really loves his country.

Jeff Jacoby on the drilling bill that’s against drilling.

Q: Says here the House of Representatives approved a bill to allow offshore oil drilling, but nearly all the Republicans voted against it. Weren’t Republicans the ones chanting “Drill, baby, drill!” at their convention last month?

A: Yep. That’s why they voted against this bill. It isn’t a drilling bill, it’s an anti-drilling bill. If it becomes law, nearly all the oil and gas in the Outer Continental Shelf would be off-limits forever.

Q: Huh? This story says the bill “would allow offshore drilling as close as 50 miles from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.” It quotes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “It’s time for an oil change in America, and this bill represents that.” That’s anti-drilling?

A: C’mon: A few weeks ago, Pelosi was implacably opposed to letting the House vote on lifting the offshore drilling moratorium. “I’m trying to save the planet!” she told Politico. “I’m trying to save the planet!” You really think someone so sanctimoniously hostile to drilling just six weeks ago is all for it now?

Q: But this bill -

A: This bill permanently bans all drilling within 50 miles of the US coast, which just happens to be where most of the recoverable oil and gas reserves are. …

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Robert Samuelson on Paulson’s “confidence” game.

It’s doubtful that Princeton University economist Ben Bernanke and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson imagined what awaited them when they took charge of the Fed and the Treasury, respectively, in 2006. Since then, they have put their agencies on a wartime footing, trying to avert the financial equivalent of an army’s collapse. As in war, there have been repeated surprises. As in war, the responses have involved much improvisation — for instance, the $85 billion rescue of American International Group. But last week their hastily built defenses seemed to be crumbling, so Paulson proposed a radical solution of having the government buy vast amounts of distressed debt to shore up the financial system.

It’s all about confidence, stupid. Every financial system depends on trust. People have to believe that the institutions they deal with will perform as expected. We are in a crisis because financial managers — the people who run banks, investment banks, hedge funds — have lost that trust. Banks recoil from lending to each other; investors retreat. The ultimate horror is when everyone wants to sell and no one wants to buy. Paulson’s plan aims to avoid that calamity. …

David Harsanyi reacts to Biden’s claim it’s patriotic to pay taxes.

The Boston Tea Party be damned. This week, Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden unleashed the most absurd remark of his illustrious career, claiming that taxes were “patriotic.”

Biden claims that wealthier Americans should pay more in taxes because, “It’s time to be patriotic . . . time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut.”

Oh, the injustice of American society!

When exactly did taxation transform into a form of charity? Biden, it seems, has a difficult time differentiating between coercion and generosity. The distinction is simple: When one fails at altruism, he is a louse; when one fails to pay taxes, he ends up in the slammer.

But anyone can “jump in” at any time. Biden and his wife, who would be considered wealthy under an Obama/Biden tax plan, for instance, gave an average of $369 a year to charity during the past decade. So you can see that by “help,” Biden means assistance with your money. …

Columnist for Toronto Globe and Mail writes on the incredible shrinking Obama.

How’s Barack Obama’s narrative going?

Journalists used to tell stories, now they plumb narratives. Narrative is a pretentious borrowing from the abstraction-clotted world of academic criticism, where texts are interrogated, authors are dead and high-toned fatuousness is king. I’ll see your postmodern and raise you a meta.

Mr. Obama’s campaign, however, has renewed narrative’s trendy fizz. It is the very Perrier water (or is it San Pellegrino now?) of the better campaign reportage. Take no hike up Pundit Mountain without it. From the moment, the Obama surge took forceful shape, everyone – reporters, the scholars of blogland, the partisan howler monkeys of cable-news cage matches – has chattered on about Mr. Obama’s narrative.

Trouble is, most of the story of the campaign isn’t so much coming from the candidate himself as it is created by all those who, most in worshipful terms, have talked, written and reported on or about him. The Obama campaign is one great text generator, the grand fable of his fans.

In one sense, this is not surprising. He has a quicksilver quality. Even after two autobiographies, Mr. Obama remains something of a floating, uncrowded presence. His story (and he is so impressively self-aware as to have made the most acute comment on it) is temptingly open-ended, very much a page to be written on. He himself has written, most memorably: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” …

Noemie Emery has a lot of fun calculating the Palin effect.

Now that the dust is beginning to settle from the whirlwind descent of Hurricane Sarah, it may be time to stand back a little and assess in perspective what the moose-hunting beauty from Wasilla, Alaska, has wrought. Things will change between now and November, but she has already had a sizeable impact, and four major themes do stand out:

1. Call off the funeral. Three weeks ago, the wisdom was that the conservative movement was over and done with. It had burned itself out, taking the Republican party down with it, and setting the stage for the biggest explosion of liberal governance since perhaps the New Deal. Ever since November 2006, when the roof quite deservedly fell in on the Republican Congress, liberals have declared that the Reagan Era–first pronounced dead in 1982, then in 1986, then in 1988, then in 1992, then again in 1998-2000, and of course dead for good in 2006–was at long last finally going to receive the burial it deserved. …

Yesterday we had Larry Sabato on the state of the race. Today Jay Cost from Real Clear Politics takes a turn.

There’s been a lot of talk about this dynamic race – “game changers” and “moments” and things of that nature. Regular readers of mine know that I don’t subscribe to the view of politics inherent to that kind of analysis.

As an alternative to discussing Fannie, Freddie, lipstick on pigs, hacked emails, and patriotic 1040 filers – I thought I would put some simple numbers on the board to give us a sense of exactly what has changed since June 3rd.

I’ve broken the national polling into two sorting categories. First, we sort by pollster. We group the Gallup polls together, then the Rasmussen polls, then the remaining polls.

Second, we sort by date. We group the polls for June, then for July, then for August prior to the conventions, then for today. …

John Fund points out one of the reasons we’ll have to hold our noses.

Peter Robinson looks for Barack’s sense of humor.

Work your way down a checklist of the attributes a presidential candidate needs and you’ll see that Barack Obama possesses all but one.

Is he intelligent? Obviously. A quick study, capable of ingesting and then disgorging immense quantities of boring information about public policy? That’s how he got elected president of the Harvard Law Review. Good with words? Very. Just read his first book. (His second, a campaign book, was written not to be read but to be placed on coffee tables.) Determined? Resilient? He prevailed in a contest with Hillary Clinton that proved more grueling than the 12 labors of Hercules.

What Barack Obama lacks is simple–and a lot more important than it might seem: a sense of humor. …

James Taranto posts on the media’s cavalier attitude towards the hackers who broke into Sarah Palin’s computer.

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Charles Krauthammer writes on Bush and the historical perspective to come.

For the past 150 years, most American war presidents — most notably Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt — have entered (or reentered) office knowing war was looming. Not so George W. Bush. Not so the war on terror. The 9/11 attacks literally came out of the blue.

Indeed, the three presidential campaigns between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Sept. 11, 2001, were the most devoid of foreign policy debate of any in the 20th century. The commander-in-chief question that dominates our campaigns today was almost nowhere in evidence during our ’90s holiday from history.

When I asked President Bush during an interview Monday to reflect on this oddity, he cast himself back to early 2001, recalling what he expected his presidency would be about: education reform, tax cuts and military transformation from a Cold War structure to a more mobile force adapted to smaller-scale 21st-century conflict.

But a wartime president he became. And that is how history will both remember and judge him. …

David Warren has thoughts on the strengths of our culture when dealing with difficulties.

… Not Canada alone, but the English-speaking peoples flourished through the course of the last few centuries from a cultural inability to be carried away.

We recall the wartime accounts of the British under aerial attack, getting up each morning to go calmly about the business of clearing the latest mess. We recall the way in which our own parents and grandparents stolidly proceeded through the Great Depression. And we may wonder, practically, if the same qualities are still in us — or if, rather, we have lost our sang-froid.

Politicians cannot help us when times get very rough. The people themselves must be equal to the challenge. We must be ready to do our part, without whining; without indulging in self-pity, or engaging in the excitable sport of choosing scapegoats. The attitude must be that of my admired banker friend: “This has happened. We must deal with it.”

And deal with it in the knowledge that there are no more “quick fixes” now, than there ever were. It is the belief in quick fixes that created the problems. The world, to those who have any wisdom, is a place that repays diligent labour, when it gives any repayment at all; and routinely punishes those who shirk — together with everyone around them. …

David Leonhardt in the NY Times with his ideas on the origins.

… How did this happen? For one thing, the population of the United States (and most of the industrialized world) was aging and had built up savings. This created greater need for financial services. In addition, the economic rise of Asia — and, in recent years, the increase in oil prices — gave overseas governments more money to invest. Many turned to Wall Street.

Nonetheless, a significant portion of the finance boom also seems to have been unrelated to economic performance and thus unsustainable. Benjamin M. Friedman, author of “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” recalled that when he worked at Morgan Stanley in the early 1970s, the firm’s annual reports were filled with photographs of factories and other tangible businesses. More recently, Wall Street’s annual reports tend to highlight not the businesses that firms were advising so much as finance for the sake of finance, showing upward-sloping graphs and photographs of traders.

“I have the sense that in many of these firms,” Mr. Friedman said, “the activity has become further and further divorced from actual economic activity.”

Which might serve as a summary of how the current crisis came to pass. Wall Street traders began to believe that the values they had assigned to all sorts of assets were rational because, well, they had assigned them. …

Larry Sabato from UVA gives his take on the electoral college as it stands today.

In early summer, the Crystal Ball took its first look at the likely November 4th Electoral College map. Our assessment was that, in the College at least, the contest appeared close. John McCain had 174 solid or likely electoral votes to Barack Obama’s 200 solid or likely. The lead switched once we added in states that were “leaning” to one or the other: McCain had 227 votes to Obama’s 212, with 270 needed for election. Fully 99 electoral votes in eight other states (CO, MI, NH, NV, OH, PA, VA, and WI) remained in the toss-up category.

We based our map not just on current polling but also the recent historical record in presidential elections. To some degree, this explained the differences between our map and those of some other analysts. As we revise it in this essay, we will once again add a dose of history to current trends, and at least tentatively, we will attempt to narrow the number of toss-ups.

Just think about all that has happened since early July. Obama took his European trip, hailed in some quarters and condemned in others. The McCain campaign came alive for the first time in months, attacking Obama as “the biggest celebrity in the world” after his travels–a hint of the strategy that was to come. Polls narrowed between Obama and McCain, as Obama lost some of his earlier luster. The Democratic Convention in Denver temporarily revived Obama’s survey numbers, producing a small convention bounce, mainly on the strength of Obama’s closing night speech. Much of the rest of the week had been consumed by intrigue about what the Clintons would or would not do, and Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as Veep-nominee was met with general approval but no special enthusiasm. It avoided any controversy but was not, in the overused term of 2008, a “game changer.”

Then the presidential contest got its real shake-up. …

Rush Limbaugh calls Obama on his racist ads in the Hispanic community.

I understand the rough and tumble of politics. But Barack Obama — the supposedly postpartisan, postracial candidate of hope and change — has gone where few modern candidates have gone before.

Mr. Obama’s campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making. And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering. …

John Fund with more on that ad.

Corner post on the subject also.

… The other thing to note about this episode is the force and speed with which Limbaugh responded. The moment the television ad was up, Rush began an effort to correct the record through his radio program, comments to reporters, and now his Journal editorial. It has succeeded, and an ad that was supposed to help Obama may well turn out to hurt him. As Limbaugh wrote, Barack Obama, in appealing to racial divisions, is playing with political dynamite. It is a very unfortunate turn for the candidate who once promised to be a unifying figure and source of civic and racial comity.

Barack Obama has tangled with the wrong fellow. There’s a reason Rush has been on top for two decades. This latest episode helps demonstrate why.

Steve Hayward says Sarah is a natural.

Lurking just below the surface of the second-guessing about Sarah Palin’s fitness to be president is the serious question of whether we still believe in the American people’s capacity for self-government, what we mean when we affirm that all American citizens are equal, and whether we tacitly believe there are distinct classes of citizens and that American government at the highest levels is an elite occupation.

It is incomplete to view the controversy over Palin’s suitability for high office just in ideological or cultural terms, as most of the commentary has done. Doubts about Palin have come not just from the left but from across the political spectrum, some of them from conservatives like David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will. Nor is this a new question. To the contrary, Palin’s ascent revives issues and arguments about self-government that raged at the time of the American founding and before. Indeed, the basic problems of the few and the many, and the sources of wisdom and virtue in politics, stretch back to antiquity.

American political thought since its earliest days has been ambiguous or conflicted about the existence and character of a “natural aristocracy” of governing talent. If the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are watching the storm over Palin, they must surely be revisiting their famous dialogue about America’s governing class. Adams’s widely misunderstood argument that there should perhaps be an explicit recognition and provision for an aristocratic class finds its reprise in the snobbery that greeted Palin’s arrival on the scene. It’s not just that she didn’t go to Harvard; she’s never been on Meet the Press; she hasn’t participated in Aspen Institute seminars or attended the World Economic Forum. She hasn’t been brought into the slipstream of the establishment by which we unofficially certify our highest leaders.

The issue is not whether the establishment would let such a person as Palin cross the bar into the certified political class, but whether regular citizens of this republic have the skill and ability to control the levers of government without having first joined the certified political class. But this begs an even more troublesome question: If we implicitly think uncertified citizens are unfit for the highest offices, why do we trust those same citizens to select our highest officers through free elections? …

Susan Estrich takes a look at Alaska’s “first dude.”

… There may be only one truly regular guy, a guy regular enough that he doesn’t begin to have the arrogance to believe he speaks for anyone other than himself, in this race. And therefore, of course, he does.

He is not fancy. He is not elite. He is not a single one of the things that Barack Obama has been criticized for. He is from a town even smaller than the one he grew up in. He was secure enough to marry a smart and ambitious girl, a girl he has always thought had great things in her.

A Beverly Hills dinner with 300 best friends at $28,500 apiece is not where you would ever place him, much less ever imagine him to be. The Democrat is the guy in Beverly Hills, as comfortable as he could be, even if he didn’t grow up there. He has the pedigrees. So does his wife. So does his opponent, and his opponent’s wife. So ultimately does a 36-year member of the Senate wherever he is from. It is the Republican guy who is real not rich, hard-working not fancy, so All Alaskan that he is in fact much more in touch with what he is, which is a whole lot easier for a very lot of he voters who are likely to decide this election. …

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Abe Greenwald looks at a cast of international characters and wonders if Obama is up to dealing with them.

… But what common purpose can we find with the above-mentioned leaders. While there are natural resource dimensions to some of our problems, the heads of Russia, Iran, North Korea, and al Qaeda are driven, above all else, by messianic totalitarianism. (As Peters points out, even Putin’s sense of Russian destiny is informed by a delusional mysticism). Obama went to Berlin and told hundreds of thousands of Germans that “Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity.” It’s a nice thought, but humanity, as such, is far less common than Obama realizes.

Good WSJ OpEd on the accounting rules that rile markets.

… The current meltdown isn’t the result of too much regulation or too little. The root cause is bad regulation.

Call it the revenge of Enron. The collapse of Enron in 2002 triggered a wave of regulations, most notably Sarbanes-Oxley. Less noticed but ultimately more consequential for today were accounting rules that forced financial service companies to change the way they report the value of their assets (or liabilities). Enron valued future contracts in such a way as to vastly inflate its reported profits. In response, accounting standards were shifted by the Financial Accounting Standards Board and validated by the SEC. The new standards force companies to value or “mark” their assets according to a different set of standards and levels.

The rules are complicated and arcane; the result isn’t. Beginning last year, financial companies exposed to the mortgage market began to mark down their assets, quickly and steeply. That created a chain reaction, as losses that were reported on balance sheets led to declining stock prices and lower credit ratings, forcing these companies to put aside ever larger reserves (also dictated by banking regulations) to cover those losses. …

Ed Morrissey posts on McCain’s 2006 attempt to dig into the Fannie/Freddie mess.

With the financial sector in turmoil today, the media and the politicians have started throwing around blame with the same recklessness as lenders threw around credit to create the problem.  Politically, the pertinent question is this: Which candidate foresaw the credit crisis and tried to do something about it?  As it turns out, John McCain did — and partnered with three other Senate Republicans to reform the government’s involvement in lending three years ago, after an attempt by the Bush administration died in Congress two years earlier.  McCain spoke forcefully on May 25, 2006, on behalf of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 (via Beltway Snark): …

WaPo Op-Ed says exports saved us from recession in the past year and are should do the same this year.

From the way the presidential candidates have been talking, you might think that American factories and workers are unable to compete in the global economy. John McCain has promised to open new markets for American goods and provide help for workers who lose their jobs. Barack Obama has expressed doubts about past trade agreements and has proposed changes in tax laws that he says now encourage companies to ship jobs overseas.

The candidates deserve credit for recognizing the challenges posed by trade and foreign investment. But their tone obscures a major success story: the dramatic improvement in our balance of international trade. This export boom has saved us from recession over the past year and, despite the recent financial turmoil, is likely to continue doing so. It is generating at least 2 million new and high-paying jobs, about half of them from increased foreign sales by the beleaguered manufacturing sector.

Fresh evidence of the trend came last month, when the second-quarter growth rate for the U.S. economy was revised upward, to 3.3 percent. A record surge in net exports accounted for almost all of that expansion. Since the housing and financial crises erupted in mid-2007, there has been a decline in final domestic demand. We would have been in recession throughout this period had we relied wholly on internal economic forces.

International trade has saved the day. Our external balance has improved by more than $200 billion as calculated for gross domestic product (GDP) purposes, cutting the previous deficit by more than one-third. This dramatic progress has kept the overall economy growing by modest amounts. The prophets of recession ignored the international engagement of the U.S. economy. …

Karl Rove says Obama should sell himself and pass on the McCain attacks.

… It is a mistake for Mr. Obama to spend a lot of time attacking Mr. McCain. In the past week, he, his surrogates or his ads have mocked Mr. McCain’s inability to use a keyboard (an activity, like combing his hair or tying his tie, that Mr. McCain has difficulty with because of war wounds), claimed his administration would be riddled with lobbyists, tried to make an issue of his age and successful cancer treatment, missed no chance to suggest he’d be President George W. Bush’s third term, and called him “dishonorable.” This last charge is particularly foolish. It’s one of the last things voters will believe about John McCain.

The people who can be won over by shouting “McCain is Bush” long ago sided with Mr. Obama. That message does not resonate with undecided voters. The Democrat should instead spend every moment spelling out what he would do to address the country’s challenges.

This election is not fundamentally about Mr. McCain. It is much more about people’s persistent doubts concerning Mr. Obama. The only way to reassure them is to provide a compelling, forward-looking agenda. That sounds obvious, but the Obama campaign seems to be betting on making Mr. McCain an unacceptable choice by striking at his character. Mr. McCain has absorbed many harder blows than anything the Obama campaign can throw his way. …

Laura Ingraham defends Sarah Palin against nay-sayers on the right.

In today’s New York Times, David Brooks launches a critique of Sarah Palin, essentially concluding that her populist appeal is dangerous and ill-conceived. He yearns for the day when “conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement,” one that stressed “classical education, hard-earned knowledged, experience, and prudence.” Brooks, like a handful of other conservative intellectuals, believes Palin “compensates for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.”

Well, at the risk of appearing brash, let me say that I am glad to see my old friend finally pushed to the point where he has to make an overt defense of elitism, after years of demonstrating covert support for elitism. We conservatives who believe Governor Palin represents a solid vice-presidential pick should be extremely comfortable engaging this issue.

Brooks’s main argument against Palin is that she lacks the type of experience and historical understanding that led President Bush to a 26 percent approval rating in his final months in office. Yet the notion that the Bush Administration got into trouble because it didn’t have enough “experience” is absurd. George W. Bush was governor of Texas for six years. His father was president. His primary advisors on matters of foreign policy were Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell. …

Lets have a look at the David Brooks column.

… Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.

Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.

And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice. …

Jake Tapper of ABC’s Political Punch reports on Obama’s dishonest Spanish language ads.

… The greater implication the ad makes, however, is that McCain is no friend to Latinos at all, beyond issues of funding the DREAM act or how NCLB money is distributed. By linking McCain to Limbaugh’s quotes, twisting Limbaugh’s quotes, and tying McCain to more extremist anti-immigration voices, the Obama campaign has crossed a line into misleading the viewers of its new TV ad. In Spanish, the word is erróneo.

LA Times story on the guilt of the Rosenbergs.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed 55 years ago, on June 19, 1953. But last week, they were back in the headlines when Morton Sobell, the co-defendant in their famous espionage trial, finally admitted that he and his friend, Julius, had both been Soviet agents.

It was a stunning admission; Sobell, now 91 years old, had adamantly maintained his innocence for more than half a century. After his comments were published, even the Rosenbergs’ children, Robert and Michael Meeropol, were left with little hope to hang on to — and this week, in comments unlike any they’ve made previously, the brothers acknowledged having reached the difficult conclusion that their father was, indeed, a spy. “I don’t have any reason to doubt Morty,” Michael Meeropol told Sam Roberts of the New York Times.

With these latest events, the end has arrived for the legions of the American left wing that have argued relentlessly for more than half a century that the Rosenbergs were victims, framed by a hostile, fear-mongering U.S. government. Since the couple’s trial, the left has portrayed them as martyrs for civil liberties, righteous dissenters whose chief crime was to express their constitutionally protected political beliefs. In the end, the left has argued, the two communists were put to death not for spying but for their unpopular opinions, at a time when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were seeking to stem opposition to their anti-Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War.

To this day, this received wisdom permeates our educational system. …

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David Warren comments on Wall Street’s problems.

… Lehman Brothers went down over the weekend; A.I.G. is falling as I write. Their assets get dumped, the value of other companies’ similar assets is reduced accordingly, and this in turn erodes the capital base under the entire banking system. The collapse of Lehman has, moreover, just kicked away the argument that some firms are, by nature, too tall to fall. And all because of a few million dicey consumer loans, that no one thought twice about at the time.

The problem must be solved, or so everyone says, by increasing government regulation. Am I perhaps alone in observing that this regulation is already as dense and complex as the industry, and that it might well make more sense to make the regulations not denser and more complex, but rather, simpler, more transparent and effective. For to my mind, we ought to have learned by now that the more complex a system grows, and the farther removed from the hard facts of nature, the more susceptible it becomes to catastrophic failure.

Over several generations we have rebuilt an economy that once rested on goods, services, and tangible assets. It now depends also on kiting, with wonderfully sophisticated credit instruments — like a postmodern building, supported as much from above as below. In the longer view, it is well that gravity asserts itself the sooner, and we reacquire the benefit of a solid foundation.

In the meanwhile, consider Matthew 5:45. The sun rises alike on the evil and the good, and the rain falls on the just and the unjust. To which we might add, that it is usually the unjust who are whining.

Robert Samuelson columns on Wall Street’s unraveling.

… How Wall Street restructures itself is as yet unclear. Companies need more capital. Merrill went to Bank of America because commercial banks have lower leverage (about 10 to 1). It seems likely that many thinly capitalized hedge funds will be forced to reduce leverage. Ditto for “private equity” firms. In time, all this may prove beneficial. Financial firms may take fewer stupid and wasteful risks — at least for a while. Talented and ambitious people may move from finance, where they were attracted by exorbitant pay, into more productive industries.

But the immediate effect may be to damage the rest of the economy. People have already lost their jobs. States and localities, particularly New York City and New Jersey, that depend on Wall Street’s profits and payrolls will face further spending cuts. Banks and investment banks may tighten lending standards again and impede any economic recovery. The stock market’s swoon may deepen consumers’ pessimism, fear and reluctance to spend. There may be more failures of financial firms. It’s hard to know, because financial crises resemble wars in one crucial respect: They result from miscalculation.

John Stossel writes on racism and privilege.

Complaints about racism still dominate media discussion of the disparity between black and white success. Comedian Chris Rock tells white audiences, “None of ya would change places with me! And I’m rich! That’s how good it is to be white!”

I assumed that the success of Barack Obama, as well as thousands of other black Americans and dark-skinned immigrants — many of whom thrive despite language problems — demonstrates that America today is largely a colorblind meritocracy. But a white campus lecturer, Tim Wise, gets tremendous applause from students by saying things like, “[W]hite supremacy and privilege continue to skew opportunities hundreds of years after they were set in place” and in America, “meritocracy is as close to a lie as you can come.” His message is in demand — he is invited to more than 80 speaking engagements a year.

But black writer Shelby Steele argues that whites do blacks no favors wringing their hands about white privilege.

“I grew up in segregation,” Steele told me. “So I really know what racism is. I went to segregated school. I bow to no one in my knowledge of racism, which is one of the reasons why I say white privilege is not a problem.”

Steele claims, “the real problem is black irresponsibility. … Racism is about 18th on a list of problems that black America faces.” …

von Mises Institute asks if hurricanes cause shortages.

The Huntsville Times reported on September 12 that, in response to the looming threat from Hurricane Ike, Alabama Governor Bob Riley declared a formal state of emergency. The governor’s declaration of emergency activated the state’s price-gouging law, which makes “unconscionable pricing” illegal during times of emergency. The Times quoted Riley as saying that he thinks “a threat to public health is a strong possibility due to the shortage of fuels.”

Hurricanes don’t cause shortages, however.

Price controls do. …

WSJ editors destroy other economic nonsense.

It was said to be the year of speculators gone wild. Seemingly everyone in Washington, including Barack Obama and John McCain, decided that oil prices were soaring because profiteers and middlemen were manipulating the futures markets. “Speculators” were spotted everywhere this side of the grassy knoll.

The only problem is that there’s no evidence to support the conspiracy theories — and sure enough, federal regulators dismantled this Beltway consensus late last week. In one of the broadest and most authoritative studies to date, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has offered hard statistical data that financial trading hasn’t been driving price moves. The CFTC conducted an unprecedented Wall Street data sweep and scrutinized millions of transactions worth billions of dollars between January and June of this year. …

The American reports on trends in micro-finance.

Over the past two decades, “microfinance”—the extension of small loans and other financial services to individuals in poor countries—has become a darling of the international development community. The movement’s founding father, Muhammad Yunus, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006; the United Nations says that microfinance can help countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Given the newness of the industry and the informal nature of many microfinance institutions (MFIs), relatively little is known about the size and quantity of the lenders, the kinds of loans that are disbursed, or the conditions under which clients are served—but the available data tell an impressive story. According to the most recent figures from the nonprofit Microfinance Information Exchange, more than 2,200 MFIs are currently lending to around 77 million borrowers worldwide. The Microcredit Summit Campaign reckons that the numbers are even higher: it counts more than 3,300 MFIs serving 133 million clients, including 92.9 million of the world’s poorest people (representing an increase of over 700 percent from 1992). In 2006, capital investment in MFIs eclipsed $4 billion, more than triple the level in 2004. The global MFI industry has also attracted hefty amounts of U.S. aid, including $245 million in 2008. …

LA Times editors think the sun should shine on CA bar results.

Americans have been debating the fairness and efficacy of racial preferences in college and graduate school admissions for more than 30 years. Now a UCLA professor is seeking to test his hypothesis that affirmative action programs actually hurt the career prospects of minority law school graduates. But he has been hampered in his research by the indefensible failure of the State Bar of California to provide the statistics he needs. …

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Spengler has a look at the US financial crisis.

Lehman Brothers survived the American Civil War, two world wars and the Great Depression, but today, Monday, the firm that set the standard in fixed income markets will be liquidated. Potential losses are so toxic that none of the major financial institutions was willing to acquire it.

Lehman’s demise follows the failure last week of the two American mortgage guarantee agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It is remarkable that the US authorities, exhausted from their efforts to bail out the mortgage guarantors and other firms, have left Lehman to its fate.

An enormous hoax has been perpetrated on global financial markets during the past 10 years. An American economy based on opening containers from China and selling the contents at Wal-Mart, or trading houses back and forth, provides scant profitability. Where the underlying profitability of the American economy was  poor, financial engineering managed to transform thin profits into apparently fat ones through the magic of leverage.

The income of American consumers might have stagnated, but the price of their houses doubled during 1998-2007 thanks to the application of leverage to mortgage finance. The profitability of American corporations might have slowed, but the application of leverage in the form of mergers and acquisitions financed with junk bonds multiplied the thin band of profitability. …

Editors at IBD discuss the background to the credit meltdown.

Obama in a statement yesterday blamed the shocking new round of subprime-related bankruptcies on the free-market system, and specifically the “trickle-down” economics of the Bush administration, which he tried to gig opponent John McCain for wanting to extend.

But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions. …

A month and a half ago, Village Voice published a long piece on the origins of the problems at Fannie and Freddie. That’s right, Village Voice. And they most of their finger pointing was in the direction of Andrew Cuomo. Of course, that would confirm Pickerhead’s world view that almost all problems in our society are caused by big government liberal Dems and their crazy schemes. It seems to be a good time to include this in Pickings.

There are as many starting points for the mortgage meltdown as there are fears about how far it has yet to go, but one decisive point of departure is the final years of the Clinton administration, when a kid from Queens without any real banking or real-estate experience was the only man in Washington with the power to regulate the giants of home finance, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), better known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded “kickbacks” to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.

What he did is important—not just because of what it tells us about how we got in this hole, but because of what it says about New York’s attorney general, who has been trying for months to don a white hat in the subprime scandal, pursuing cases against banks, appraisers, brokers, rating agencies, and multitrillion-dollar, quasi-public Fannie and Freddie.

It all starts, as the headlines of recent weeks do, with these two giant banks. But in the hubbub about their bailout, few have noticed that the only federal agency with the power to regulate what Cuomo has called “the gods of Washington” was HUD. Congress granted that power in 1992, so there were only four pre-crisis secretaries at the notoriously political agency that had the ability to rein in Fannie and Freddie: ex–Texas mayor Henry Cisneros and Bush confidante Alfonso Jackson, who were driven from office by criminal investigations; Mel Martinez, who left to chase a U.S. Senate seat in Florida; and Cuomo, who used the agency as a launching pad for his disastrous 2002 gubernatorial candidacy.

With that many pols at the helm, it’s no wonder that most analysts have portrayed Fannie and Freddie as if they were unregulated renegades, and rarely mentioned HUD in the ongoing finger-pointing exercise that has ranged, appropriately enough, from Wall Street to Alan Greenspan. But the near-collapse of these dual pillars in recent weeks is rooted in the HUD junkyard, where every Cuomo decision discussed here was later ratified by his Bush successors. …

Division of Labour posts on the media’s economic analysis.

On campus this afternoon I overheard the following remark by a non-economist, trying to explain to another non-economist the Lehman failure and today’s stock market decline: “It’s a combination of deregulation and greed. Boy, if you deregulate enough, the greed will follow.”

If I had butted in, I would have made two points. (1) If an unusually large number of airplanes crash during a given week, do you blame gravity? No. Greed, like gravity, is a constant. It can’t explain why the number of crashes is higher than usual. (2) What deregulation have we had in the last decade? Please tell me. On the contrary, …

David Harsanyi plays “whose a liar.”

There are many brands of truth. Some are poetic truths, others are political truths and some are staggering exaggerations — or what politicians frequently refer to as “talking.”

These days, there is an outbreak of artificial indignation over the “lies” of Republicans. John McCain, claims Barack Obama’s national press secretary Bill Burton, has run the “sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history.”

Ouch. We can attribute one of the following to this claim: 1) Burton has just landed on the planet Earth; 2) Burton is attempting to manipulate the media; 3) Burton is “lying.”

I pick 2. After all, we’ve all heard the self-serving myth that pits helpless, meek, high-minded, issue-oriented Democrats against mendacious and mean Republicans, who not only detest America — especially children and small vulnerable creatures — but will lie and cheat to keep all oppressed.

The facts betray a more equitable story. …

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WSJ Editors take an important lesson form Woodward’s new book.

… The success of the surge in pacifying Iraq has been so swift and decisive that it’s easy to forget how difficult it was to find the right general, choose the right strategy, and muster the political will to implement it. It is also easy to forget how many obstacles the State and Pentagon bureaucracies threw in Mr. Bush’s way, and how much of their bad advice he had to ignore, especially now that their reputations are also benefiting from Iraq’s dramatic turn for the better.

Then again, American history offers plenty of examples of wartime Presidents who faced similar challenges: Ulysses Grant became Lincoln’s general-in-chief in 1864, barely a year before the surrender at Appomattox. What matters most is that the President had the fortitude to insist on winning. That’s a test President Bush passed — something history, if not Bob Woodward, will recognize.

Pickerhead’s favorite media line on Sarah Palin was from the incredulous Roger Ebert, “And how can a politician her age have never have gone to Europe?” Speaking of Europe, Bret Stephens reports on Obama’s popularity there.

Told he had the support of “every thinking person” for his second presidential bid in 1956, Democrat Adlai Stevenson famously replied: “That’s not enough, madam. We need a majority!” It’s a line that springs to mind in this presidential season, amid polls and reports that the current Democratic contender from Illinois has the support of just about every non-American interested in our politics.

The latest data come courtesy of the BBC, which commissioned a survey of 23,531 people in 22 countries for their views about the U.S. election. The not-so-astounding result: Barack Obama is the favorite in all 22 countries. The Illinois Democrat’s numbers are especially striking in Britain (where he leads Republican John McCain by a 59% to 9% margin, with the rest not expressing a preference) and Canada (66% to 14%). They also hold up in China (35% to 15%), Egypt (26% to 13%), Brazil (51% to 8%) and, of course, France (69% to 6%). Broad majorities in most countries also believe an Obama administration would do more than a McCain one to heal America’s relations with the wider world.

But here’s a question: Should we — that is, voting-age Americans — care? …

… More recently, the British columnist Jonathan Freedland has written in the Guardian that “if Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger.” … Works for Pickerhead

Free speech is important because it makes it easier to spot the idiots. Canada has one. David Warren has the story.

… Typical “conservatives,” my outraged correspondents were, to a man (and woman), careful to say they don’t want Ms. Mallick censored or prosecuted for writing such things, that she has “a right” to say what she pleases. They only contest her right to be paid by the Canadian taxpayer, through her gig at the CBC. Now, if I were the Generalissimo of Canada, the CBC would be the first billion dollars I’d save, but until that happy hour arrives, I only wish they’d publish Ms. Mallick’s scribblings more prominently.

Several reasons for this. The first, of course, is that by doing so, they will bring the day nearer when the CBC will be, ahem, “privatized.”

But my second reason is more generous. I think Ms. Mallick expresses openly what many, quite possibly most, of her MSM colleagues are actually thinking, and in my experience, actually saying in social gatherings and while working away from the microphones — though seldom with such ebullience. Ms. Mallick is rare in being so refreshingly candid, on the record.

Where such prejudices as hers exist, it is an advantage to everyone to have them expressed openly, discussed openly, demolished openly. Far worse is the poison in people who think like Ms. Mallick, but contain themselves within the shallow literary conventions of “journalistic objectivity.” …

Charles on Charles; Krauthammer on Gibson, that is.

… There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”

Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”

Wrong.

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. …

Dick Morris on the reasons Sarah scares the Dems.

… Why do Democrats feel so threatened? They’ve even stopped attacking McCain and President Bush to launch a vicious and sexist barrage at her that would normally make a feminist angry and a Democrat blush.

Basically, it’s this: John McCain only endangers Democratic chances of victory this November, but Sarah Palin is an existential threat to the Democratic Party.

She threatens a core element of the party’s base – women

When an African-American like Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell or Condi Rice rises to prominence as a Republican, he or she endangers the Democratic coalition. So would a Republican labor leader.

And so, above all, does the woman Republican running for vice president.

Democrats can’t stomach seeing the feminist movement’s impetus for greater female political participation and empowerment “hijacked” by a pro-life woman who espouses traditional values. They must obliterate her, lest her popularity eat away at their party’s core. …

Peter Wehner on the sudden interest of the press in accuracy in the campaign.

… My own view is that the debate about “lipstick on a pig” was silly and will soon be forgotten. Yet it’s not as if it broke any barriers in that regard. To take just one arguably more serious example: Recall that in February, Barack Obama said, “We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years.”

It’s a charge Obama repeated, even though he knew it was untrue. (The Annenberg Political Fact Check said, “It’s a rank falsehood for the DNC to accuse McCain of wanting to wage ‘endless war’ based on his support for a presence in Iraq something like the U.S. role in South Korea.”) The fact that the accusation was false didn’t seem to matter; one Obama aide told the Politico, “It’s seldom you get such a clear shot.” But for some reason, the press didn’t go into a tizzy on this matter. Puzzling. …

Melanie Phillips blogs on the “Stasi” tactics of Obama’s fans.

… Apparently Camp Obama has parachuted dozens of operatives into Alaska to find the skeletons in the Palin closet that it just knows must exist. Unable to process the fact that the left might not come into its rightful inheritance of power, which as we all know is the natural order of the universe, it is behaving like an American Stasi.

And the more it behaves in this grotesque manner, the more counter-productive it all is. Palin is a kind of barium meal for the US body politic: as she is ingested deeper into the system, the nastiness and sheer malevolence of the Democratic party and its bullying cheerleaders in the media are being sickeningly illuminated all around her. As a result, the media and the Democrats are merely doing untold damage to themselves, particularly since the blogosphere is shredding the smears being hurled at Palin as fast as they are being produced. …

Another view of the media firestorm from Tod Lindberg of the Weekly Standard.

… Now, you might think it hypocritical to criticize the inexperience of a vice presidential nominee who has similar experience to your presidential nominee, but that’s just a failure of the imagination. Indeed, hypocrisy was the strange charge Democrats decided to make against McCain and Palin: Having run against Obama all summer for his lack of experience and accomplishment, how dare John McCain pick as his running mate someone with (ahem) experience comparable to that of the Democratic candidate for president McCain had been criticizing?

Well, maybe because it is not a sign of the strength of a candidate at the top of a ticket to need the experience of Joe Biden (or Dick Cheney) in order to allay concerns that he’s not quite up to some aspects of the job. And, contrariwise, it is a sign of strength at the top when the nominee can look to the future and make a priority of party-building. Does anybody think that if Obama loses, he will have left his party in a stronger position by advancing the prospects of Joe Biden? Fortunately for Democrats, at least they’ve got Hillary in the wings.

But these weren’t the only hypocrisies in the air. Remember reading the discussions of Vice President Al Gore’s parenting skills in all the papers the day after his teenage son got busted for dope at high school? No? That would be because Gore called around to all the papers (including the Washington Times, where I was editorial page editor at the time) and asked us not to publish it, kids being kids and being owed some privacy. The newspapers didn’t. That was then: Given a preposterous Internet rumor that Sarah Palin was never pregnant with her four-month-old baby but faked it to cover up for her daughter, Bristol was fair game. This was a judgment shared among Democrats and, coincidentally, the media (the same ones who were also all over the John Edwards love-child story, remember?). …

NY Post has the story of photographer who blindsided McCain for creepy shots.

Controversial celebrity photographer Jill Greenberg, a self-professed “hard-core Dem,” deliberately took a series of unflattering shots of Republican nominee John McCain for the current cover of The Atlantic – and then bragged about it on a blog.

Greenberg, known for her heavily retouched pics of apes and babies, boasted to Photo District News that she submitted photos of the Arizona senator to the mag while barely airbrushing them.

“I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she boasted. …

On one level this Economist story on traffic research would seem to say it’s hopeless. But it also shows the sophistication of the effort. In itself, that shows promise.

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Amir Taheri writes on the conflicting lessons of 9/11.

… McCain believes that America is at war; Obama doesn’t. McCain believes the United States can win on the battlefield; Obama doesn’t.

For Obama, the problem is one of effective law enforcement. His model is the way Clinton handled the first attack on World Trade Center in 1993. Obama says: “We are able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial.” This means the United States reacting after being attacked.

McCain, however, doesn’t fear the politically incorrect term “pre-emption” – hitting the enemy before he hits you.

WHEN all is said and done, this election may well have only one big issue: the existential threat that Islamist terrorism poses to America’s safety. Since McCain and Obama offer radically different policies for facing that threat, American voters do have a real choice.

Gerard Baker tries to explain to Obama-worshipping Euros how it is The One might lose.

… Travelling in Britain this week, I’ve been asked repeatedly by close followers of US politics if it can really be true that Barack Obama might not win. Thoughtful people cannot get their head around the idea that Mr Obama, exciting new pilot of change, supported by Joseph Biden, experienced navigator of the swamplands of Washington politics, could possibly be defeated.

They look upon John McCain and Sarah Palin and see something out of hag-ridden history: the wizened old warrior, obsessed with finding enemies in every corner of the globe, marching in lockstep with the crackpot, mooseburger-chomping mother from the wilds of Alaska, rifle in one hand, Bible in the other, smiting caribou and conventional science as she goes.

Two patronising explanations are adduced to explain why Americans are going wrong. The first is racism. I’ve dealt with this before and it has acquired no more merit. White supremacists haven’t been big on Democratic candidates, whatever their colour, for a long time, and Mr Obama’s race is as likely to generate enthusiasm among blacks and young voters as it is hostility among racists.

In a similarly condescending account, those foolish saps are being conned into voting for Mr McCain because they like his running-mate. Her hockey-mom charm and storybook career appeals to their worst instincts. The race is boiling down to a beauty contest in which a former beauty queen is stealing the show. Believe this if it helps you come to terms with the possibility of a Democratic defeat. But there really are better explanations. …

And Charles Krauthammer recounts the Obama trajectory as it seems to be crashing to earth.

…Palin is not just a problem for Obama. She is also a symptom of what ails him. Before Palin, Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great. Which is why McCain‘s Paris Hilton ads struck such a nerve. Obama’s meteoric rise was based not on issues — there was not a dime’s worth of difference between him and Hillary on issues — but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.

The unease at the Denver convention, the feeling of buyer’s remorse, was the Democrats’ realization that the arc of Obama’s celebrity had peaked — and had now entered a period of its steepest decline. That Palin could so instantly steal the celebrity spotlight is a reflection of that decline.

It was inevitable. Obama had managed to stay aloft for four full years. But no one can levitate forever. …

James Pethokoukis who writes on money and politics for US News is uniquely situated to comment on the bubble that was Barack.

… Has the “revolutionary optimism” of Obamamania faded? Let’s turn to a second event. I was recently chatting with a top Obama adviser who was explaining in detail the campaign’s ambitious 50-state strategy, how legions of Obamamaniacs were turning up in the reddest counties of the red states. If that was all true, I asked him, how come the polls were so close? If Obama was surging in places where John Kerry and Al Gore got clobbered, shouldn’t the Democratic nominee be ahead by a country mile? The only answer I got was something about how the structure of the American electorate is historically biased against Democrats.

Huh? I felt like a Wall Street analyst during the tech boom sitting through a glitzy PowerPoint presentation—filled with buzzwords like “stickiness” and “eyeballs” and, of course, “sticky eyeballs”—who finally had the temerity to ask: “So if things are so great, why aren’t you making any money?” It’s like the old joke, “Sure, we lose money on each sale, but we make up for it on volume!” (The adviser finally admitted that Obama hadn’t closed the deal on national security.)

Is Obama doomed to go from hero to zero, bubble to complete bust? I don’t think so. Politicians, unlike stocks, don’t go to zero—though Howard Dean did come awfully close in the 2004 Democratic primaries. …

Byron York tries to understand why Obama supporters go crazy contemplating Sarah.

What is it about Sarah Palin that seems to have driven so many smart, thoughtful Obama supporters around the bend?

Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, wrote that Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman” and denounced “the Republican Party’s cynical calculation that because [Palin] has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies … she speaks for the women of America.”

Carol Fowler, the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, said that Palin’s “primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”

Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan, wrote that Palin’s values “more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers” and asked: “What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.” …

Perhaps the strangest episode in the Charlie Gibson interview of Sarah Palin was his willingness to believe the bogus AP reports of her supposed claim our Iraq efforts were a “mission from God” in Blues Bros speak. Jim Lindgren of Volokh has the story.

One thing I learned tonight is that neither Charlie Gibson nor anyone on his staff reads the Volokh Conspiracy (or Hot Air for that matter).

Outrageously, in his interview Gibson claimed that Sarah Palin had called the Iraq War “a task . . . from God.”

No she didn’t. She prayed that it was a task from God. As I said a few days ago:

I find it hard to believe that Anderson Cooper [and now, Charlie Gibson] does not understand the difference between praying for something you hope is true and stating that it is true.

Is praying for peace throughout the world the same as saying that there is peace throughout the world?

If I had prayed for the press to be fair to Sarah Palin that would not be the same as stating that the press is being fair to Sarah Palin.

Here was the exchange between Palin and Gibson tonight:: …

More on this from Hot Air.

Jay Nordlinger posts on Gibson attitudes at the Corner.

ABC News is so stupid they are flagging the “holy war” parts of the interview for promotional purposes. Dartblog with the story

We have snippets of CBS News interview with Hillary’s Mark Penn.

… CBSNews.com: So you think the media is being uniquely tough on Palin now?

Mark Penn: Well, I think that the media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they’re not doing on the other candidates. And that’s going to subject them to people concluding that they’re giving her a tougher time. Now, the media defense would be, “Yeah, we looked at these other candidates who have been in public life at an earlier time.”

What happened here very clearly is that the controversy over Palin led to 37 million Americans tuning into a vice-presidential speech, something that is unprecedented, because they wanted to see for themselves. This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility with them. …

Wisconsin is this week’s bellwether state in The Economist.

… Wisconsin is best known for its dairy products and its love of American football. The Packers, a team from the small city of Green Bay, claim some of the sport’s most obsessive fans, known as “cheeseheads”, a term also used to denote Wisconsans generally. But among politicos, Wisconsin is the swing state that has failed to swing.

Earlier in the last century, the state was at the heart of America’s Progressive movement, enacting liberal social reforms such as compensation for injured workers before the rest of the country did. But Wisconsin pioneered conservative welfare reform in the 1990s, and its voters now plainly prefer divided government on the state level: Wisconsin currently has a Democratic governor, Jim Doyle, and a Republican-controlled state Assembly. And they have split almost exactly evenly when it comes to the presidency. Al Gore took the state by only 5,700 votes in 2000, and John Kerry won it by 11,400 in 2004—0.2% and 0.4% of the vote, respectively. The margins were a lot closer than those in nearby Michigan, which gets a lot more attention. …

Adam Smith blog post on the disruptions of bio-fuel.

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David Warren marks the anniversary looking at Canada’s contributions to the war on terror.

… Canada took a pass on helping the American enterprise in Iraq — the justification for which we did not so much dispute as ignore. We left the British and Australians, the Poles, Georgians, and others, to do our share of the lifting there. The wisdom of the Chrétien government was to focus our embarrassingly limited resources on the task of clearing the Taliban out of Afghanistan.

In this, we have played a modest but distinguished role. Even if our government has not, our soldiers in that theatre of war have recalled Canada’s finest martial traditions, in some wonderfully aggressive campaigns. Our scandalously under-equipped and under-manned units have taken casualties proportionally higher than our allies — but more to the point, they have inflicted casualties far out of proportion to what they have sustained.

It has been a mostly thankless task Their accomplishments have been almost entirely ignored in Canadian media back home, while their losses have been prominently reported. In the last fortnight, for instance, I was aghast to be unable to find, anywhere in the mainstream Canadian media, mention of our soldiers’ part in one major, obviously heroic operation.

Their instruction was to escort a 200-tonne hydroelectric turbine — too large for any helicopter to lift — on a five-day journey across Taliban-infested territory to the Kajaki reservoir in Helmand province. The expedition, led by the British, and including Australian, New Zealand, and American troops, as well as Canadian and Afghan, was under attack throughout the journey. The turbine was successfully delivered, intact. …

Fouad Ajami looks at the foreign policy differences between the candidates.

… When we elect a president, we elect a commander in chief. This remains an imperial republic with military obligations and a military calling. That is why Eisenhower overwhelmed Stevenson, Reagan’s swagger swept Carter out of office, Bush senior defeated Dukakis, etc.

The exception was Bill Clinton, with his twin victories over two veterans of World War II. We had taken a holiday from history — but 9/11 awakened us to history’s complications. Is it any wonder that Hillary Clinton feigned the posture of a muscular American warrior, and carried the working class with her?

The warrior’s garb sits uneasily on Barack Obama’s shoulders: Mr. Obama seeks to reassure Americans that he and his supporters are heirs of Roosevelt and Kennedy; that he, too, could order soldiers to war, stand up to autocracies and rogue regimes. But the widespread skepticism about his ability to do so is warranted. …

American Spectator suggests Sarah fans might want to cool their jets a little.

In the less than two weeks since she was introduced as John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin has become a political sensation.

She has united the Republican base behind McCain’s candidacy in a way that few could have predicted. She has energized conservatives. She’s attracted more than 15,000 to rallies. And her speech to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul last week has prompted comparisons to Ronald Reagan.

With all due respect to the governor of Alaska, are conservatives getting ahead of themselves?

For months, conservatives have mocked the celebrity appeal of Barack Obama, but now they are flocking to Palin in a similar manner. …

Ann Coulter’s great column on 9/11 and seven years of no attacks here at our home.

Morose that there hasn’t been another terrorist attack on American soil for seven long years, liberals were ecstatic when Hurricane Gustav was headed toward New Orleans during the Republican National Convention last week. The networks gave the hurricane plenty of breaking-news coverage — but unfortunately it was Hurricane Katrina from 2005 they were covering.

On Keith Olbermann’s Aug. 29 show on MSNBC, Michael Moore said the possibility of a Category 3 hurricane hitting the United States “is proof that there is a God in heaven.” Olbermann responded: “A supremely good point.”

Actually, Olbermann said that a few minutes later to some other idiotic point Moore had made, but that’s how Moore would have edited the interview for one of his “documentaries,” so I will, too. I would only add that Michael Moore’s morbid obesity is proof that there is a Buddha.

Hurricane Gustav came and went without a hitch. What a difference a Republican governor makes! …

Karl Rove says Barack needs to stop running against Sarah.

Of all the advantages Gov. Sarah Palin has brought to the GOP ticket, the most important may be that she has gotten into Barack Obama’s head. How else to explain Sen. Obama’s decision to go one-on-one against “Sarah Barracuda,” captain of the Wasilla High state basketball champs?

It’s a matchup he’ll lose. If Mr. Obama wants to win, he needs to remember he’s running against John McCain for president, not Mrs. Palin for vice president.

Michael Dukakis spent the last months of the 1988 campaign calling his opponent’s running mate, Dan Quayle, a risky choice and even ran a TV ad blasting Mr. Quayle. The Bush/Quayle ticket carried 40 states.

Adlai Stevenson spent the fall of 1952 bashing Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate, Richard Nixon, calling him “the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, and then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.” The Republican ticket carried 39 of 48 states.

If Mr. Obama keeps attacking Mrs. Palin, he could suffer the fate of his Democratic predecessors. These assaults highlight his own tissue-thin résumé, waste precious time better spent reassuring voters he is up for the job, and diminish him — not her.

Sarah Palin returned today to Alaska. Perfunction.com has the story.

Good Corner post on the enthusiasm at McCain/Palin rally in NOVA.

… One good indication of the enthusiasm were the number of creative signs and campaign paraphenalia by those present. I saw two high-school girls together — one had a custom T-Shirt that said “The Future Mrs. Track Palin,” and her friend’s shirt said “Piper Can Do My Hair” (my memory may not be exact). There were also lots of special needs children and mothers present. One mother had a rather lovely and affecting sign with a picture of her son with Down syndrome that read “47 Chromosomes from Heaven.” Geraghty and I saw another woman with a sign that said “McCain Hero with a Heart and a Veep Just Like Me.” Just like me? Women really seem to identify with Palin. …

Jonah Goldberg on how lucky we are the crazy Dem left nominates their candidate.

… Psephologist and columnist Michael Barone noticed during the primaries that, with the exception of the black vote, Obama’s support within the Democratic party is comprised almost entirely of cultural liberals. He dubbed this intra-Democratic split a divide between “academics and Jacksonians.” The Jacksonians are working-class, culturally conservative whites. The academics are the same people who formed the base for Howard Dean, Bill Bradley, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart, George McGovern, and other successful presidents in the anti-matter universe where Spock has a goatee. …

VDH on Biden.

… He seems to have established a new Biden’s Law: if one makes enough gaffes, they soon reach a point that none of them matter. And even stranger is Biden’s Second Law of Politics: the more you sound obnoxious and offend, you soon reach a point where the shocked listener turns from anger to indifference and finally no less to empathy! …

This week The Economist bellwether state is Missouri.

AT A park in downtown St Louis, three women are drinking Bud Light and watching a demonstration of Scottish tossing-the-caber. It is a peaceful scene at the Festival of Nations, but worries simmer beneath the surface. The women supported Hillary Clinton, and are now undecided. Barack Obama is “a wonderful young man”, but inexperienced in foreign policy. John McCain is “honourable”, but perhaps not up to the task.

These are typical concerns from an average undecided voter in this state. Missouri has 5.8m people and 11 electoral votes. Its moderate size belies its traditional role in presidential elections. There are ways to win the White House without winning Missouri, but few candidates have managed it. The state has voted for the victor in 25 of the last 26 elections. The exception was in 1956, when America went for Dwight Eisenhower, a popular Republican war hero, in a landslide. Missourians gave it to Adlai Stevenson, a cerebral Democrat from neighbouring Illinois. …

Remember the hilarious movie Thank You For Smoking? Christopher Buckley, who wrote the book has written another. This time on the Supreme Court.

Think George W. Bush is unpopular? Pity Donald P. Vanderdamp, the blandly honest bowling enthusiast occupying the White House in “Supreme Courtship.” Congress, which has tagged him “Don Veto” for rejecting every spending bill that lands on his desk, hates him so much it’s trying to amend the Constitution to limit presidents to one term — beginning with him. And now a fresh collision awaits. President Vanderdamp has a Supreme Court seat to fill, and in a stroke of genius, he has nominated America’s most popular TV judge: Pepper Cartwright, star of “Courtroom Six.”

Beautiful and headstrong, Cartwright spews folksy Texas wisdom when not quoting Shakespeare, packs a LadySmith revolver and delivers judicial decisions from the hip. She was once a real judge — a good one — on the Los Angeles Superior Court before her husband-cum-producer, Buddy Bixby, plucked her from the bench and turned her into a star. “I doubt I’m qualified to be a clerk at the Supreme Court,” she admits in a news conference, though she’s better at the media rodeo than her adversaries on the Hill. They include Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dexter Mitchell, a shiny, botoxed Amtrak supporter from Connecticut who bears a passing resemblance to Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. (“Mitchell loved — lived — to talk”) and who is determined to quash Cartwright’s appointment, not least because he lusts after a seat on the court himself. …

Slate’s Explainer tells us who first put lipstick on a pig.

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Last week’s Asia Times column by Spengler predicting Obama would lose, referred to a column he wrote in late February – Obama’s women reveal his secret. It is here today.

“Cherchez la femme,” advised Alexander Dumas in: “When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman.” In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama’s women reveal his secret: he hates America.

We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man – least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father – can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.

America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its creative success is so enormous that its global influence hastens the decline of other cultures. For those on the destruction side of the trade, America is a monster. Between half and nine-tenths of the world’s 6,700 spoken languages will become extinct in the next century, and the anguish of dying peoples rises up in a global cry of despair. Some of those who listen to this cry become anthropologists, the curators of soon-to-be extinct cultures; anthropologists who really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama’s mother, the University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice.

Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother’s revenge against the America she despised. …

… Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama’s campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator. “I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon. He’s an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there’s the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive,” she told a fundraiser in February 2007.

“For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, “She added that the TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she’d like to meet him sometime.” Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.

“Frustration” and “disappointment” have dogged Michelle Obama these past 20 years, despite her US$300,000 a year salary and corporate board memberships. It is hard for the descendants of slaves not to resent America. They were not voluntary immigrants but kidnap victims, subjected to a century of second-class citizenship even after the Civil War ended slavery. Blackness is not the issue; General Colin Powell, whose parents chose to immigrate to America from the West Indies, saw America just as other immigrants do, as a land of opportunity. Obama’s choice of wife is a failsafe indicator of his own sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his mother’s milk. …

Corner post on Obama’s sacrifices.

Another post on the late-night Obama/Biden jokes.

And a post on Obama’s Monday.

James Taranto catches AP trying to help Obama, and making him look ridiculous in the process.

We follow Jennifer Rubin through a number of posts in Contentions.

While Obama supporters flail about and bemoan the state of the race, here’s something to consider: the fix which Barack Obama is now in is entirely of his own making. The obvious blunder was in bypassing Hillary Clinton as VP. With Clinton, the frenzy of excitement would have been for the Democrats and Sarah Palin would be back in Alaska. But that is not Obama’s only flub, not by a long shot. Consider:

– Reneging on his public financing promise: Had he not done that, he might have saved his New Politics reputation and avoided his current money woes.

– Going on the Magical Mystery Tour: Had he not done that, we likely wouldn’t have had the “I still don’t think the surge was worth it” interview, there wouldn’t have been the priceless Berlin rally footage and he might have spent the summer at home talking about energy policy.

– Nixing the townhalls: Had he not done that, he — again — might have sustained the New Politics moniker and could have kept the focus on domestic issues and McCain’s association with George Bush.

– Losing the opportunity of a lifetime: Had he not done the angry liberal routine in Denver he might not be trailing among independents by an unbelievable margin of 52-37%.

There are a host of other, smaller errors (e.g. the atrocious Rick Warren forum, hiding from the press in Hawaii during the invasion of Georgia), but the conclusion is inescapable: if Barack Obama does lose this, there won’t be anyone to blame but himself.

Pickerhead’s been patiently waiting for Sarah Palin in the eyes of Camille Paglia. It’s here today.

… As I said in my last column, I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama’s efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development and which are painfully wrong for the target audience of rural working-class whites that he has been trying to reach. Obama on the road and even in major interviews has been droppin’ his g’s like there’s no tomorrow. It’s analogous to the way stodgy, portly Al Gore (evidently misadvised by the women in his family and their feminist pals) tried to zap himself up on the campaign trail into the happening buff dude that he was not. Both Gore and Obama would have been better advised to pursue a calm, steady, authoritative persona. Forget the jokes — be boring! That, alas, is what reads as masculine in the U.S.

The over-the-top publicity stunt of a mega-stadium for Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention two weeks ago was a huge risk that worried me sick — there were too many things that could go wrong, from bad weather to crowd control to technical glitches on the overblown set. But everything went swimmingly. Obama delivered the speech nearly flawlessly — though I was shocked and disappointed by how little there was about foreign policy, a major area where wavering voters have grave doubts about him. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary event with an overlong but strangely contemplative and spiritually uplifting finale. The music, amid the needlessly extravagant fireworks, morphed into “Star Wars” — a New Age hymn to cosmic reconciliation and peace.

After that extravaganza, marking the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s epochal civil rights speech on the Washington Mall, I felt calmly confident that the Obama campaign was going to roll like a gorgeous juggernaut right over the puny, fossilized McCain. The next morning, it was as if the election were already over. No need to fret about American politics anymore this year. I had already turned with relief to other matters.

Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy — one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama’s triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football — or one of the great light-saber duels in “Star Wars.” (Here are the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, going at it with Darth Maul in “The Phantom Menace.”) This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment. …

John Stossel looks at Obama’s “green jobs.”

Amazing story from the London Times on EU farming rules.

… European Union rules ban farmers from using combine harvesters on wet land to protect soil quality. Those who flout the ban can be prosecuted. …