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One last Carter item. This from Haaretz.
Senior Israeli officials were not the first to try to get out of meeting Jimmy Carter. A number of members of Bill Clinton’s administration have already tried, including the former president and his wife the candidate; most members of Bush senior’s administration, including George H. W. himself; and it goes without saying the same applies to his son and his administration.
Carter has a strange characteristic: He finds it easier to make friends with dictators. If a person’s companions testify to his personality and character, then here is a partial list of people with whom Carter has gotten along well: Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat and Kim Il Jong. …
Tony Blankley takes the Bush administration to task for yesterday’s global warming speech.
The last months of a presidential administration are often dangerous. Presidents — looking to their legacies — go to desperate lengths to try to enhance their reputations for posterity. A pungent example of such practices by the Bush administration was reported above the fold on the front page of The Washington Times Monday: “Bush prepares global warming initiative.”
Oh, dear. Just as an increasing number of scientists are finding their courage to speak out against the global warming alarmists and just as a building body of evidence and theories challenge the key elements of the human-centric carbon-based global warming theories, George W. Bush takes this moment to say, in effect: “We are all global alarmists now.”
It reminds me of the moment back in 1971 when Richard Nixon proclaimed, “We are all Keynesians now” — eight years after Milton Friedman had published his book “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960″ and about an hour and a half before a consensus built that Friedman’s work consigned Keynes to the dustbin of economic history. …
Manchester Guardian columnist sees thru the green rhetoric.
… While antagonism to science merely impedes progress, antagonism to economics is regressive. American subsidies to ethanol fuel are not just causing “tortilla riots” but costing American taxpayers a staggering $5.5bn a year. Biofuel tankers are circling the globe, burning gasoline and chasing subsidies. They have joined carbon emissions certificates among the world’s greatest trading scams.
If I have changed my mind, I am not sure the same applies to many greens. I have rarely encountered so much fanaticism and blind faith. Did those demanding fuel subsidies not realise that palm oil would wipe out rainforests and that ethanol from corn would use as much carbon as it saved? Did those pleading for wind farms really think they could ever substitute for nuclear power; or those wanting eco-towns not realise they would just add to car emissions? Did they not understand that, once the tap of public money is turned on, lobbyists will ensure it is never turned off – however harmful?
If all these fancy subsidies and market manipulations were withdrawn tomorrow and government action confined to energy-saving regulation, I am convinced the world would be a cheaper and a safer place, and the poor would not be threatened with starvation.
Just now, for reasons not all of which are “green”, commodity prices are soaring. Leave them. Send food parcels to the starving, but let demand evoke supply and stop curbing trade. The marketplace is never perfect, but in this matter it could not be worse than government action. Playing these games has so far made a few people very rich at the cost of the taxpayer. Now the cost is in famine and starvation. This is no longer a game.
The Dem debate last night has received a lot of comment mostly centered around the toughness of the questions. David Brooks has some thoughts.
Three quick points on the Democratic debate tonight:
First, Democrats, and especially Obama supporters, are going to jump all over ABC for the choice of topics: too many gaffe questions, not enough policy questions.
I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.
We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues. …
John Fund next.
And Peter Canello from the Boston Globe.
Barack Obama last night staked his presidential campaign on the idea that the American people will look beyond the inevitable gaffes and errors and character attacks of a 24-hour campaign cycle to meet the challenges of a “defining moment” in American history.
Hillary Clinton staked her campaign on the idea that Americans won’t – and that her tougher, more strategic approach to countering Republican attacks is a better way for Democrats to reclaim the White House.
The first half of last night’s debate in the august National Constitution Center in Philadelphia was a tawdry affair, as ABC news questioners called on Obama and Clinton to address a year’s worth of dirty laundry, and each combatant eagerly grabbed at the chance to besmirch their rival a little more.
But while some in the audience groaned, the litany of nasty questions – about such matters as Obama’s comments on the working class and Clinton’s exaggerations about dangers she faced in Bosnia – helped to flesh out a long-simmering subtext to the Clinton-Obama battle: The Clinton campaign’s insinuation that Obama is more vulnerable to GOP-style attacks on his patriotism.
For Obama, the harsh questioning by Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News probably felt as though the media were trying to make up for a year’s worth of allegedly ginger treatment all in one night. But it clarified the sharply different postures of the two campaigns. …
Michael Goodwin from NY Daily News.
It seems like ancient history now, but not long ago Hillary Clinton argued that Barack Obama was getting a free pass from the media.
Those days are over, with moderators, a private citizen and Clinton herself peppering Obama on Wednesday night with a barrage of the kind of tough questions he escaped for more than a year.
He answered some better than others, and some not at all. But the mere fact that at least five damaging issues were thrown at him within 30 minutes was testament to how much the race has changed in the six weeks since anti-American remarks by Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeramiah Wright, became public.
That was the high-water mark of Obama’s campaign, and now the cracks are showing. My bet is that his ineffective answers on Wednesday night will mean more doubts among voters and more concern among Democratic superdelegates about whether Obama is electable in November.
The result is that Clinton, despite her own electability issues and an imperfect evening, scored a debate victory just a week before the Pennsylvania primary. A loss would knock her out. …
Ann Coulter has comments on Obama’s most excellent adventure in San Francisco where he explained the country to folks on billionaire’s row.
… Obama informed the San Francisco plutocrats that these crazy working-class people are so bitter, they actually believe in God! And not just the 12-step meeting, higher power, “as you conceive him or her to be” kind of G-d. The regular, old-fashioned, almighty sort of “God.”
As Obama put it: “(T)hey get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
The rich liberals must have nearly fainted at the revelation that the denizens of small towns in Pennsylvania have absolutely no concern for the rich’s ability to acquire servants from Mexico at a reasonable price.
We don’t know much about Obama’s audience, other than that four fundraisers were held on April 6 at the homes of San Francisco’s rich and mighty, such as Alex Mehran, an Iranian who went into daddy’s business and married an IBM heiress, and Gordon Getty, heir to the Getty Oil fortune.
It is not known whether any of Getty’s three illegitimate children attended the Obama fundraiser — which turned out to be more of a McCain fundraiser — but photos from the event indicate that there were a fair number of armed (and presumably bitter) policemen providing security for the billionaire’s soiree.
In 1967, Gordon sued his own father to get his hands on money from the family trust — and lost. So Gordon Getty knows from bitter. It’s a wonder he hasn’t turned to guns, or even to immigrant-bashing. God knows (whoever he is) there are enough of them working on his home.
These are the sort of well-adjusted individuals to whom Obama is offering psychological profiles of normal Americans, including their bizarre theories about how jobs being sent to foreign countries and illegal-alien labor undercutting American workers might have something to do with their own economic misfortunes. …