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We’ll devote a lot of our time to Bill Buckley. National Review editors first.

… When Buckley started National Review — in 1955, at the age of 29 — it was not at all obvious that anti-Communists, traditionalists, constitutionalists, and enthusiasts for free markets would all be able to take shelter under the same tent. Nor was it obvious that all of these groups, even gathered together, would be able to prevail over what seemed at the time to be an inexorable collectivist tide. When Buckley wrote that the magazine would “stand athwart history yelling, ‘Stop!’” his point was to challenge the idea that history, with a capital H, pointed left. Mounting that challenge was the first step toward changing history’s direction. Which would come in due course. …

John Fund.

William F. Buckley Jr. struggled with the pain and inconvenience of emphysema for years, but it was only when he broke a bone in his right hand — the hand he wrote with — earlier this month that the physical decline of a man who very much lived by words quickly accelerated. He sent out a note to a few close friends essentially saying that he knew the end was near.

That end came at the desk in his study yesterday morning, perhaps as Buckley was struggling to put the finishing touches on his latest project — a book on the president he helped bring to office that he planned to call “The Reagan I Knew.” That project was far enough along that it will no doubt be published posthumously. …

WSJ with a bunch of good quotes.

John Podhoretz.

Mark Steyn Corner post.

Hugh Hewitt.

Let’s cover some other items with the Captain. First, he posts on the NY Times smear and how it might have backfired.

The New York Times marks another milestone on its journey to National Enquirer status. The Gray Lady’s smear piece on John McCain got 66% of Rasmussen respondents believing that the paper deliberately trying to kneecap the Republican frontrunner. Only 22% think that the paper had clean motives in publishing the unsubstantiated gossip: …

Then the Times has decided to raise another McCain issue. This time whether he can run for president.

The staff at the New York Times has burned the midnight oil trying to find ways to derail John McCain’s campaign. After endorsing him in the primary, the paper then ran an unsubstantiated smear against him as a philanderer. Now they ask whether he is eligible for the office, given his birth in the Panama Canal zone while his father served the country: …

The Captain has also discovered Obama tipped the Canadians to his NAFTA bashing saying he wasn’t serious. Wink, wink. “It’s just for the rubes.”

Barack Obama has joined Hillary Clinton in trashing one of her husband’s major economic and diplomatic achievements on the stump. He has told Americans that he rejects NAFTA, the program that created a free-trade zone out of North America, hoping to ride protectionist fever to the White House. However, the man who runs as a different kind of politician has a different kind of message to Canadians about NAFTA:

Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously, CTV News has learned. …

Tony Blankley on how Obama might be beaten.

Republicans owe Hillary our gratitude. She has road-tested several versions of attacks on Obama that don’t work. Obviously, and first, don’t come out against change and hope — the perennial themes of successful election campaigns. In 1984, even my old boss Ronald Reagan campaigned for re-election in response to the claim that America needed to change, on the words: “We ARE the change,” as well as on the hopeful theme of “morning in America.”

If a candidate is not for change, he is not for us. It has been almost two centuries since Prince von Metternich gained the first ministry of the Hapsburg’s Austrian empire by assuring the emperor that his administration consciously would avoid any “innovation.”

Nor will Americans ever vote for presidential candidates based on what the candidates have done for us already. In American politics, gratitude is always the lively expectation of benefits yet to come. The question is always, What will you do for us tomorrow? Americans will not give Sen. McCain the White House because we are grateful for his heroism 40 years ago at the Hanoi Hilton. We are grateful, and he was heroic. Americans might gladly vote for him to receive a medal, or even an opulent retirement home, but not the presidency.

Beyond these obvious points, Republicans should learn from Hillary’s campaign that Obama is remarkably adept at ridiculing the old style of campaigning. …

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The Corner of National Review Online William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008)

[Kathryn Jean Lopez]
I’m devastated to report that our dear friend, mentor, leader, and founder William F. Buckley Jr., died this morning in his study in Stamford, Connecticut.

He died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.

As you might expect, we’ll have much more to say here and in NR in the coming days and weeks and months. For now: Thank you, Bill. God bless you, now with your dear Pat. Our deepest condolences to Christopher and the rest of the Buckley family. And our fervent prayer that we continue to do WFB’s life’s work justice.

Daily Tech with an article on global cooling. Now we have some numbers to go along with anecdotal evidence.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down. …

Mark Steyn wonders why the NOW nags can’t focus on the real problems for women.

… Yet there is something not just boring but grotesque in Western feminists’ inability to prioritize. They seem implicitly to have accepted a two-tier sisterhood, in which white, upscale, liberal women twitter about NR columnists’ appalling misogyny in criticizing a female Bush-administration official, while simultaneously the women of the fastest-growing population group in the Western world are forced into clitoridectomies, forced into burqas, forced into marriage, forced into psychiatric wards, forced into hiding — and, if all else fails, forced off the apartment balcony by their brothers and fathers to fall to their deaths, as has happened to at least seven Muslim girls in Sweden recently. This is the real “war against women” being waged across the Western world, but, like so much of the Left, a pampered and privileged sisterhood would rather fight pseudo-battles over long-vanquished enemies.

Denver Post’s David Harsanyi points to McCain’s big hurdle.

Political observers have questioned whether Americans are “ready” to elect a woman or an African-American to the presidency. A more pertinent question, actually, is whether Americans are ready to elect a grouchy old white guy.

According to a Gallup poll, only 5 percent of Americans would never vote for an African-American, while 11 percent claim they would never vote for a woman. Believe it or not, comparatively, those are optimistic numbers — if you believe in polls that solidify your world view, like I do.

Republican candidate John McCain is hamstrung by a more worrisome factor. He will be 72 by the time the November election rolls around. …

Roger Simon on Obama and NAFTA.

VodkaPundit takes a look at the electoral college numbers.

General Patton would not understand. France is about to send troops to Afghanistan. The Captain has details. He also posts on McCain and Clinton tactics.

… The Clintons never got the message this cycle. They won in 1992 with James Carville fist-in-face tactics, but in sixteen years, people have tired of it. They want candidates who focus on themselves, not on their opponents. Both Barack Obama and John McCain managed to figure this much out, as did Mike Huckabee to a certain extent. They talked about their own narratives, while their opponents floundered by talking about others.

Hillary should have stuck with her own narrative. When she did that, she controlled the race. Only after she panicked after that disastrous November 2nd debate, in which she flip-flopped on drivers licenses for illegal aliens, did she come out hard against Obama. That’s when her campaign started discussing his kindergarten essays as evidence of his supposedly overweening ambition. …

Eugene Volokh points out the problems coming from yet another stupid law. Compact fluorescents this time.

John Stossel on gun laws.

It’s all too predictable. A day after a gunman killed six people and wounded 18 others at Northern Illinois University, The New York Times criticized the U.S. Interior Department for preparing to rethink its ban on guns in national parks.

The editorial board wants “the 51 senators who like the thought of guns in the parks — and everywhere else, it seems — to realize that the innocence of Americans is better protected by carefully controlling guns than it is by arming everyone to the teeth.”

As usual, the Times editors seem unaware of how silly their argument is. To them, the choice is between “carefully controlling guns” and “arming everyone to the teeth.” But no one favors “arming everyone to the teeth” (whatever that means). Instead, gun advocates favor freedom, choice and self-responsibility. If someone wishes to be prepared to defend himself, he should be free to do so. No one has the right to deprive others of the means of effective self-defense, like a handgun.

As for the first option, “carefully controlling guns,” how many shootings at schools or malls will it take before we understand that people who intend to kill are not deterred by gun laws? Last I checked, murder is against the law everywhere. No one intent on murder will be stopped by the prospect of committing a lesser crime like illegal possession of a firearm. The intellectuals and politicians who make pious declarations about controlling guns should explain how their gunless utopia is to be realized.

While they search for — excuse me — their magic bullet, innocent people are dying defenseless. …

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Thomas Sowell comments on the NY Times McCain hit.

The front page of the New York Times has increasingly become the home of editorials disguised as “news” stories. Too often it has become the home of hoaxes.

Going back some years, it was the Tawana Brawley hoax that she had been gang-raped by a bunch of white men. Just a couple of years ago, it was the Duke University “rape” hoax that they fell for.

In between there were the various hoaxes of New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, who was kept on and promoted until too many people found out what he had been doing and the paper had to let him go.

Last month the New York Times created its own hoax with a long front page article about how war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were killing people back in the United States because of the stress they had gone through in combat.

That hoax was shot down two days later by the New York Post, which showed that the murder rate among returning war veterans was only one-fifth the murder rate among civilians in the same age brackets.

Undaunted, the New York Times has come up with its latest front-page sensation, the claim that some anonymous people either suspected an affair between Senator John McCain and a female lobbyist or tried to forestall an affair.

But apparently no one actually claimed that they knew there was an affair. …

Michael Kinsley with hilarious NY Times satire.

… What I wrote was that some people had expressed concern that the Times article might have created the appearance of charging that McCain had had an affair. My critics have charged that I was charging the Times with charging McCain with having had an affair. Such a charge would be unfair to the New York Times, since the Times article, if you read it carefully (very carefully), does not make any charge against McCain except that people in a meeting eight years ago had suggested that other people eight years ago might reach a conclusion—about which the Times expressed no view whatsoever—that McCain was having an affair. …

David Brooks – The Real McCain.

… Over the course of his career, McCain has tried to do the impossible. He has challenged the winds of the money gale. He has sometimes failed and fallen short. And there have always been critics who cherry-pick his compromises, ignore his larger efforts and accuse him of being a hypocrite.

This is, of course, the gospel of the mediocre man: to ridicule somebody who tries something difficult on the grounds that the effort was not a total success. But any decent person who looks at the McCain record sees that while he has certainly faltered at times, he has also battled concentrated power more doggedly than any other legislator. If this is the record of a candidate with lobbyists on his campaign bus, then every candidate should have lobbyists on the bus.

And here’s the larger point: We’re going to have two extraordinary nominees for president this year. This could be one of the great general election campaigns in American history. The only thing that could ruin it is if the candidates become demagogues and hurl accusations at each other that are an insult to reality and common sense.

Maybe Obama can start this campaign over.

Debra Saunders on the latest Clinton tactics.

… I have to figure that Clintonia is rolling the dice. Her campaign is flailing. Being nice didn’t bump Clinton’s numbers. Along comes a photo that is just a photo of Obama visiting Africa and dressing like the locals, as both tourists and politicians are wont to do. And also a reminder that Obama might seem too exotic to some voters. It’s the wordless way of whispering: Is America ready for a black president?

The real question is: Does America want four years of a shameless victim in chief?

Jack Kelly thinks Obama’s work is cut out for him.

… Barack Obama, noted National Review’s David Frum, has the thinnest resume of any candidate for president since William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Then 36 (the youngest man ever nominated for president), Bryan had been a congressman for only six undistinguished years when he electrified the Democratic convention with his “Cross of Gold” speech.

Bryan got creamed in the general election, which suggests there is a limit to how high a populist with little on his resume besides a charismatic personality and a silver tongue can rise.

“Barack Obama is no Muhammad Ali,” said Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, who is supporting Sen. Hillary Clinton. “He took a walk every time there was a tough vote in the Illinois state senate. He took a walk more than 130 times. That’s what a shadow boxer does. All the right moves. All the right combinations. All the right footwork. But he never steps into the ring.”

“Don’t be deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history,” said Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee. Eloquent but empty calls for change seem to be working well enough for Sen. Obama in the battle for the Democratic nomination. But that may be due more to the weaknesses of Hillary Clinton than to his strengths. …

American.com writes on “one acre capitalism” in Kenya.

… Its work is easy to explain and difficult to implement. First, it groups farmers, mostly women, together and educates them on agricultural techniques. It then provides them with “inputs” like seeds and fertilizer. During the growing season, staff members monitor the crops’ progress; most of the farmers will grow staples like maize, which are more forgiving than passion fruit, though they are less lucrative. Once the harvest is in, One Acre acts as a bulk seller, enabling the crops to reach larger markets and command higher prices than they would if each farmer hauled his own crop to market. In return for this service, One Acre collects a small portion of the profits to help with costs, though it says the returns for farmers, after reimbursement, are still double what they were making before. “We’re adding value to these farmers’ lives and they’re paying for it,” Youn explains. One Acre reports that 97 percent of farmers have made their payments back to the fund.

More conventional microfinance involves lending money to people who then use it to cover the overhead costs of a small business. Because One Acre takes a risk on the farmers’ harvest, Matthew Forti, the organization’s board chair, who works in Boston, describes it as a “microequity organization.” This reflects the confidence that One Acre has in its farmers and its business model. Farmers will return because their previous yields would qualify as “crop failure” in the United States, Youn says. …

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Roger Simon has a good take on the NY Times flap.

… No matter what your politics, for too many years The New York Times has had far too much power over our national discourse for one outlet. No media source should have that much authority in a democracy. We need, pardon the expression, a thousand flowers to bloom. I know Bill Keller agrees with that, because I have heard him acknowledge it. He was clearly under considerable pressure from his reporters and editors to publish this unprofessional nonsense. …

Gerard Baker of the London Times wonders if the country is ready for the left-wing Obama.

For most ordinary Americans, those not encumbered with an expensive education or infected by prolonged exposure to cosmopolitan heterodoxy, patriotism is a consequence of birth.

Their chests swell with pride every time they hear the national anthem at sporting events. They fill up with understandable emotion whenever they see a report on television about the tragic heroics of some soldier or Marine who gave his life in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Foreigners don’t have to like America – and they’ve certainly exercised that freedom in the past few years. But most Americans can distinguish between the transience of policy failure and the permanence of the national ideal.

And surely even critics of the US could scarcely deny that there have been real causes for American pride in the past 25 years: the fall of the Berlin Wall; the victory in the first Gulf War in 1991; the nation’s unity in grief and resolve after September 11. Heck, I suspect most Americans got a small buzz of patriotic pride this week when they heard that one of their multimillion-dollar missiles had shot a dead but dangerous satellite traveling at 17,000 miles per hour out of the sky so that it fell harmlessly to Earth.

But not, apparently, Michelle Obama, wife of the man who is now the putative Democratic candidate for US president, and at this point favourite to succeed to that job. In what might be the most revealing statement made by any political figure so far in this campaign season, Mrs Obama caused a stir this week. She said that the success of her husband Barack’s campaign had marked the first time in her adult life that she had felt pride in her country.

This, even by the astonishingly self-absorbed standards of politicians and their families, is a remarkably narrow view of what makes a country great. And though she later half-heartedly tried to retract the remark it was a statement pregnant with meaning for the presidential election campaign. …

And Bill Kristol wonders if we are ready for another narcissist.

… Obama likes to say, “we are the change that we seek” and “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Obama’s rhetorical skill makes his candidacy appear almost collective rather than individual. That’s a democratic courtesy on his part, and one flattering to his followers. But the effectual truth of what Obama is saying is that he is the one we’ve been waiting for.

Barack Obama is an awfully talented politician. But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?

It’s fitting that the alternative to Obama will be John McCain. He makes no grand claim to fix our souls. He doesn’t think he’s the one everyone has been waiting for. He’s more proud of his country than of himself. And his patriotism has consisted of deeds more challenging than “speaking out on issues.”

Barack Obama went off the reservation on the subject of vouchers. New York Sun editors recount how he then paid obeisance to the teacher’s unions, the “nomenklatura” of the Dem party.

No sooner had we issued Elizabeth Green‘s dispatch under the headline “Obama Open to Private School Vouchers” than his campaign was scrambling to undo the potential damage with the Democratic primary electorate. On February 20, his campaign issued a statement headlined, “Response to Misleading Reports Concerning Senator Obama‘s Position on Vouchers” that said, “Senator Obama has always been a critic of vouchers.” The statement went on, “Throughout his career, he has voted against voucher proposals and voiced concern for siphoning off resources from our public schools.” It noted that Mr. Obama’s education agenda “does not include vouchers, in any shape or form.” …

WaPo has a list of the top Obama and Clinton flip-flops.

Couple of our favorites look forward to the VP pick. George Will first.

… McCain needs someone who will help him win and be a plausible president during the next four years. He has been in Washington more years than Clinton and Barack Obama combined, and today, as usual, but even more so, Washington is considered iniquitous, partly because McCain, our national scold, incessantly tells the country that its capital is awash in “corruption.” …

Will looked at many with a scatter gun. Byron York concentrates on Pawlenty and Sanford.

John McCain faces a dilemma when it comes to choosing a vice president. He needs a running mate who will be a contrast to him in a few key ways — younger, more knowledgeable about economic issues, and, especially, more conservative. But if McCain selects a running mate whose conservative credentials are beyond dispute, he’ll be choosing a candidate who likely disagrees with him on some issues of great importance to the Republican base.

On Sunday, I spoke with two leading contenders for the McCain ticket, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, both in Washington for the annual meeting of the National Governors’ Association. While each expressed strong support for McCain, neither would deny differences with the candidate on two of the issues that have caused McCain the greatest trouble with the conservative base: immigration and campaign-finance reform. …

John Fund says there will be a meeting in NY next week that attempts to add common sense to the global warming debate.

… Let’s hope Mr. Lomborg is wrong in his fear that the media are uninterested in showcasing a real debate on climate change. The proof may be found next week, when hundreds of scientists, economists and policy experts who dissent from the “consensus” that climate change requires radical measures will meet in New York to discuss the latest scientific, economic and political research on climate change. Five tracks of panels will address paleoclimatology, climatology, global warming impacts, the economics of global warming and political factors. It will be keynoted by Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who has argued that economic growth is most likely to create the innovations and know-how to combat any challenges climate change could present in the future. (Information on the conference is here1.)

The conference is being organized by the free-market Heartland Institute and 49 other co-sponsors, including a dozen from overseas. Heartland president Joseph Bast says its politically incorrect purpose is to “explain the often-neglected ‘other side’ of the climate change debate. This will be their chance to speak out. It will be hard for journalists and policy makers to ignore us.”

I wonder. …

Canada’s National Post on the coming global cooling.

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back. …

Don Surber reports on AP reporter who tells us the crook’s party affiliation only when GOP. Follow the link if you wish to read the full stories. But, you’ll get the picture.

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Want to ride on a vintage DC-3 in England? Hurry because Samizdata says the EU is about to shut them down.

… There are no exceptions for classic aircraft and thus after July 16th the soulless gray men will make the European world that much more like themselves. …

British blogger posts on the folks leaving his country.

… If things don’t change Britain will continue to lose far too many of its best and brightest.

Mark Steyn on the Clinton dénouement. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

On the day that Margaret Thatcher was toppled by her own party, I ran into an old friend, a hard-core leftist playwright, Marxist to the core, who wasn’t as happy as he should have been. He jabbed me in the chest. “You bastards on the right!” he fumed. “You wouldn’t even let us be the ones to drive the stake through her heart.”

I’m sure in America’s Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy there are similar mixed feelings. The Clintons have met their Waterloo but it’s not some doughty conservative warrior who gets to play Duke of Wellington, only some freshman pap peddler of liberal boilerplate whom no one had heard of the day before yesterday. …

Charles Krauthammer examines the Dem desire for defeat in Iraq.

… Despite all the progress, military and political, the Democrats remain unwavering in their commitment to withdrawal on an artificial timetable that inherently jeopardizes our “very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state.”

Why? Imagine the transformative effects in the region, and indeed in the entire Muslim world, of achieving a secure and stable Iraq, friendly to the United States and victorious over al-Qaeda. Are the Democrats so intent on denying George Bush retroactive vindication for a war they insist is his that they would deny their own country a now-achievable victory?

There’s been a lot of reaction to the NY Times McCain hit piece. We’ll start out with reaction from the left. Seattle Post-Intelligencer editor first.

I chose not to run the New York Times story on John McCain in Thursday’s P-I, even though it was available to us on the New York Times News Service. I thought I’d take a shot at explaining why.

To me, the story had serious flaws. It did not convincingly make the case that McCain either had an affair with a lobbyist, or was improperly influenced by her. It used a raft of unnamed sources to assert that members of McCain’s campaign staff — not this campaign but his campaign eight years ago — were concerned about the amount of time McCain was spending with the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman. They were worried about the appearance of a close bond between the two of them.

Then it went even further back, re-establishing the difficulties McCain had with his close association to savings-and-loan criminal Charles Keating. It didn’t get back to the thing that (of course) the rest of the media immediately pounced on — McCain, Iseman and the nature of their relationship — until very deep in the story. And when the story did get back there, it didn’t do so with anything approaching convincing material. …

LA Times blog posts on the pass taken by the Boston Globe.

… The Boston Globe, which is wholly owned by the New York Times, chose not to publish the article produced by its parent company’s reporters.

Instead, the Globe published a version of the same story written by the competing Washington Post staff. That version focused almost exclusively on the pervasive presence of lobbyists in McCain’s campaign and did not mention the sexual relationship that the Times article hinted at but did not describe or document and which the senator and lobbyist have denied.

On Thursday the Globe’s website, Boston.com, did provide a link to the Times story on the Times’ website. But such a stark editorial decision by a major newspaper raises suspicions that even the Globe’s editors, New York Times Co. employees all, had their own concerns about the content of their parent company’s story. …

Editors of SF Chronicle.

Sen. John McCain has a legitimate gripe. A New York Times story that highlighted his relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman was unfair. It implied more than it delivered.

The implication, if true, would be devastating to any politician – but especially to McCain, an Arizona Republican who has styled himself as a Mr. Clean reformer.

The fact that some of McCain’s advisers were “convinced the relationship had become romantic” in 2000 is not the same as them having evidence of infidelity. It is a suspicion, otherwise known as gossip. If these anonymous sources did have persuasive evidence of such misconduct, they either failed to provide it to the newspaper – or the newspaper declined to offer it to its readers. …

… Regrettably, the Times left itself and our profession open to … allegations of bias by publishing soft-focus evidence of what would be an outrageous breach of public trust.

Enough with the libs, now some of our favorites post on the Times. American Thinker first.

The decline and fall of the New York Times accelerates, with Thursday’s anonymously-sourced hit piece on John McCain. I will leave to others like Rick Moran and Ed Morrissey the debunking of the story itself. What concerns me is the manner in which the CEO of the organization has jettisoned standards that once would have ruled out publication of such material.

“A fish rots from the head” goes an old Chinese saying. If it is true, as reported, that the story was controversial within the Times, and only ran because the paper feared that The New Republic would publicize the office politics at the Times over publication of the story, the Sulzberger’s responsibility is all the greater. His inability to set clear guidelines, hire capable editors, and maintain newsroom harmony and discipline was about to be exposed to the public. To protect his hind quarters, he went with a disastrously bad story. …

Two posts from Power Line.

The New York Times’ story about John McCain’s alleged involvement with a female lobbyist brings to mind its infamous coverage of the alleged rape by members of the Duke lacrosse team. As Stuart Taylor recounted in his book on that sorry affair, Until Proven Innocent, the Times reporter who initially covered the story, Joe Drape, quickly learned facts that strongly tended to exonerate the accused players. The Times, however, refused to print his material and soon replaced him with Duff Wilson who took a pro-prosecution slant, thereby enabling the Times to peddle its preferred narrative of white privilege and racial oppression.

In McCain’s case, the Times received “exculpatory” material from his campaign which documented instances in which McCain did not take positions congenial to the female lobbyist in question. The Times refused to use or acknowledge that material, selecting only instances that enabled it to pursue its preferred narrative that McCain was unduly influenced by that lobbyist. …

Abe Greenwald from Contentions.

… The boomerang effect of this non-scandal and the way it has redistributed sympathies recalls another recent phenomenon that unfolded this primary season: the Clintons’ failed exploitation of identity Democrats. Hillary decided that winning the Democratic nomination was a crude matter of mathematics. Getting all of the white vote and most of the Hispanic vote would do the trick, and playing on those groups’ prejudices would secure their support. She and Bill intentionally isolated the white vote, pandering to a section of the electorate they thought would somehow fear Obama’s nomination. Not only did she begin to lose support amongst blacks (which presumably, she thought she could survive), but whites and Hispanics saw the effort for what it was and were repelled. In two months time, the Clintons gave Obama heaping chunks of every demographic group. …

And, of course, the Captain.

… So what do we have? We have salacious but completely unsubstantiated gossip, combined with a rehash of at least one old Times smear, placed on the front page of what used to be the premiere newspaper in America. And what exactly does that do for the Times’ credibility for the rest of this electoral cycle? They can’t run anything on McCain now without it being seen in the context of what the Times itself calls a “war” between the Times and McCain. Keller and company declared war on McCain yesterday, and it fired a bazooka of effluvium as its opening salvo. They’ve marginalized themselves for the next nine months.

American Spectator looks at smoking bans in “Serfdom by a Thousand Cuts.”

… smokers are not without hope. Less than a year after Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed the smoking ban, and gushed, “This law will save lives. The realities are that smoking kills people…My only regret is that this took so long,” the news out of Springfield is that the owners of taverns, casinos and strip clubs may soon be able to buy a “special license” that will allow their patrons to smoke inside.

So all of that talk about saving lives from second-hand smoke was all just a bunch of…second-hand smoke. Or was it just another Chicago-style scam so the state could sell expensive smoking licenses to bowling alley operators? The fact is officeholders thought the smoking ban was a terrific idea — or at least an efficient way to get those annoying single-issue pressure groupees out of their offices and off their backs — until they discovered that Illinois would have a budget shortfall of $750 million next year, and learned how much tax revenue the state made off its smokers, boozers, gamblers and stripshow devotees.

Illinois bar owners report that revenue is down in some cases by 50 percent. Casinos report that the ban has caused a 17 percent drop in gaming. I haven’t spoken to any strippers recently, but I bet they are feeling the pinch too. …

Neal Boortz on all the climate bureaucrats in San Francisco.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has decided that his city is not doing enough to combat climate change. So what is his solution? More government! Not only more government, but a new government bureaucrat will be added to the payroll in San Francisco. Looking for a job? San Francisco’s Director of Climate Protection Initiatives will make a generous $160,000 a year. Not bad for a government bureaucrat dedicated to hack science and a phony cause.

Wait .. there’s more. Newsom could, perhaps, get away with this new position … if he didn’t already have 25 employees on the city’s roster that are dedicated to “climate issues.” …

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Corner post with a link to video of the satellite shoot ‘em up.

David Warren notices witchcraft trials in one of the lands of “the religion of peace.”

… Shariah, as the learned (Anglican) Archbishop of Canterbury was instructing us recently, in the course of advocating the formal introduction of some form of it into Britain, is not a fixed system of law. There is no written code. It is something that is interpreted by Islamic scholars, in light of any one of five schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, alone. Yet all descend from the Koran, and from commonly accepted Hadiths, so there is a family resemblance between Shariah as practised in Saudi Arabia and in, say, Indonesia.

Still, there is no guessing what form may be introduced into a modern western country. Many Islamic scholars agree that Shariah should recognize the customs of the locality; others insist the whole point of Shariah is to change those customs until they are made to resemble those of desert Arabia in the 7th century AD.

Perhaps it will be another decade or two before we have witchcraft trials in Canada. And who knows whether they will be conducted under the supervision of wise Islamic scholars? For the concept of witchcraft is hardly unnatural to the mindset that has brought us “political correctness,” and for all we know the trials will be conducted by human rights commissioners.

For centuries, through the “dark” and “middle” ages, the Catholic Church struggled to eradicate the pagan belief in witches from pre-Christian Europe, only to have witchcraft proceedings explode again, at the time of the Reformation. We no longer appreciate what comes out on the table when free, rational thought is pushed under it.

Two days after Pickings remarked on the missing Mark Steyn, he showed up in Macleans. He answers critics who say he’s alarmist.

… Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you’d suggested such things on Sept. 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn’t seem such a big deal, and nor will the next concession, and the one after that. It’s hard to deliver a wake-up call for a civilization so determined to smother the alarm clock in the soft fluffy pillow of multiculturalism and sleep in for another 10 years. The folks who call my book “alarmist” accept that the Western world is growing more Muslim (Canada’s Muslim population has doubled in the last 10 years), but they deny that this population trend has any significant societal consequences. Sharia mortgages? Sure. Polygamy? Whatever. Honour killings? Well, okay, but only a few. The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith. More to the point, who are you relying on to “hold the line”? Influential figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury? The bureaucrats at Ontario Social Services? The Western world is not run by fellows noted for their line-holding: look at what they’re conceding now and then try to figure out what they’ll be conceding in five years’ time. …

Amir Taheri says elections in Arab countries are throwing out the Islamists.

Pakistan’s election has been portrayed by the Western media as a defeat for President Pervez Musharraf. The real losers were the Islamist parties.

The latest analysis of the results shows that the parties linked, or at least sympathetic, to the Taliban and al Qaeda saw their share of the votes slashed to about 3% from almost 11% in the last general election a few years ago. The largest coalition of the Islamist parties, the United Assembly for Action (MMA), lost control of the Northwest Frontier Province — the only one of Pakistan’s four provinces it governed. The winner in the province is the avowedly secularist National Awami Party.

Despite vast sums of money spent by the Islamic Republic in Tehran and wealthy Arabs from the Persian Gulf states, the MMA failed to achieve the “approaching victory” (fatah al-qarib) that Islamist candidates, both Shiite and Sunni, had boasted was coming.

The Islamist defeat in Pakistani confirms a trend that’s been under way for years. Conventional wisdom had it that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the lack of progress in the Israel-Palestine conflict, would provide radical Islamists with a springboard from which to seize power through elections.

Analysts in the West used that prospect to argue against the Bush Doctrine of spreading democracy in the Middle East. These analysts argued that Muslims were not ready for democracy, and that elections would only translate into victory for hard-line Islamists.

The facts tell a different story. So far, no Islamist party has managed to win a majority of the popular vote in any of the Muslim countries where reasonably clean elections are held. If anything, the Islamist share of the vote has been declining across the board. …

Karl Rove says a new twist in Obama’s speeches give McCain an opportunity.

… Perhaps in response to criticisms that have been building in recent days, Mr. Obama pivoted Tuesday from his usual incantations. He dropped the pretense of being a candidate of inspiring but undescribed “post-partisan” change. Until now, Mr. Obama has been making appeals to the center, saying, for example, that we are not red or blue states, but the United States. But in his Houston speech, he used the opportunity of 45 (long) minutes on national TV to advocate a distinctly non-centrist, even proudly left-wing, agenda. By doing so, he opened himself to new and damaging contrasts and lines of criticism.

Mr. McCain can now question Mr. Obama’s promise to change Washington by working across party lines. Mr. Obama hasn’t worked across party lines since coming to town. Was he a member of the “Gang of 14″ that tried to find common ground between the parties on judicial nominations? Was Mr. Obama part of the bipartisan leadership that tackled other thorny issues like energy, immigration or terrorist surveillance legislation? No. Mr. Obama has been one of the most dependably partisan votes in the Senate. …

Shorts from John Fund.

Michael Barone says there’s no chance anymore for Clinton.

In a recent post, I took a look at Hillary Clinton’s chances for a comeback in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Yesterday, the voters of Wisconsin made it plain they weren’t having any of it: They gave Barack Obama an impressive 58-41 percent victory over Clinton. So much for any Clinton best-case analysis. The Clinton campaign continues to look to the Ohio and Texas contests of March 4. But her numbers there seem to be eroding. CNN showed her lead in Texas disappearing, to a statistically insignificant 50-48 percent, while SurveyUSA put it at 50-45 percent, with all of the Clinton lead coming in south and west Texas. …

Jennifer Rubin in Contentions previews a strategy for Clinton in tonight’s debate.

VDH on ivy league populism.

The rhetoric of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton about the sad state of America is reminiscent of the suspect populism of John Edwards, the millionaire lawyer who recently dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.

Barack Obama may have gone to exclusive private schools. He and his wife may both be lawyers who between them have earned four expensive Ivy League degrees. They may make about a million dollars a year, live in an expensive home and send their kids to prep school. But they are still apparently first-hand witnesses to how the American dream has gone sour. Two other Ivy League lawyers, Hillary and Bill, are multimillionaires who have found America to be a land of riches beyond most people’s imaginations. But Hillary also talks of the tragic lost dream of America.

In these gloom-and-doom narratives by the well off, we less fortunate Americans are doing almost everything right, but still are not living as well as we deserve to be. And the common culprit is a government that is not doing enough good for us, and corporations that do too much bad to us. …

Samizdata posts a short review of P J O’Rourke’s book on Adam Smith.

… O’Rourke’s book – a New York Times best seller, according to the dust jacket – is a terrifically well-written, concise look at Smith, who wrote not just WoN but also on moral philosophy, jurisprudence and many other things. What O’Rourke does is tease out some of the contradictions as well as the great insights of Scotland’s most famous thinker apart from David Hume (the men were both great friends). What is particularly good is that although Smith was considered – not always accurately – to be the great-grandaddy of laissez-faire economics (he did not invent that term), he was much more than that. He was no ardent minimal statist although he would certainly have been horrified by the extent of state power in our own time. He supported state-backed funding of education for the poor, for example. …

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the Daily Mail piece Jonah linked to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Captain posts on Clinton’s prospects.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then a Corner post from VDH.

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

Jonathan Last from the Weekly Standard.

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

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

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

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

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

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Christopher Hitchens reminds us of Iran.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wiz Bang Blog with a good proposal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No resources are “natural.”

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

Christopher Hitchens thinks the US press is not serious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Australian notes his Neanderthal free trade ideas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Steyn comments on the Dem race.

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

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

Er, OK, if you say so. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Captain analyzes a Michelle Obama speech.

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

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

Jim Taranto’s take on superdelegates is interesting.

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

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

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

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

David Warren on globalony.

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

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

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

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

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

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