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David Warren asks can Israel survive?

… But I insist that Israel’s survival is tied to that of the West. She is our front line, an embodiment of unambiguously western values. The enemies we have are common enemies – left-fascist ideology (formerly expressed as Communism), and Islamofascist ideology (now called “Islamism,” to distinguish political from religious Islam, on the assumption that this can be done).

These are the two great contemporary Sirens, and each calls upon constituencies lodged deep in the West itself. The appeal of simplistic ideological movements spreads in the spiritual vacuum left by the recession of Christianity.

But whatever dark forces answer to the command of these two great Sirens, there is agreement between the left and the Islamists that Israel is the front line of the West, and that she is sufficiently isolated to be worth destroying first. There is moreover agreement between them that the ultimate target is “Amerika” and the whole “bourgeois, Judeo-Christian” order that has sustained our freedom and prosperity. …

In the Financial Times, Robert Kagan makes the case for a league of democracies.

With tensions between Russia and Georgia rising, Chinese nationalism growing in response to condemnation of Beijing’s crackdown on Tibet, the dictators of cyclone-ravaged Burma resisting international aid , the crisis in Darfur still raging, the Iranian nuclear programme still burgeoning and Robert Mugabe still clinging violently to rule in Zimbabwe – what do you suppose keeps some foreign policy columnists up at night? It is the idea of a new international organisation, a league or concert of democratic nations.

“Dangerous,” warns a columnist on this page, fretting about a new cold war. Nor is he alone. On both sides of the Atlantic the idea – set forth most prominently by Senator John McCain a year ago – has been treated as impractical and incendiary. Perhaps a few observations can still this rising chorus of alarm.

The idea of a concert of democracies originated not with Republicans but with US Democrats and liberal inter­nationalists. …

Karl Rove says the GOP has to stand for something.

Tuesday’s election results highlighted challenges for both Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans received a hard shot in Mississippi. Greg Davis (for whom I campaigned and who was a well-qualified candidate) narrowly lost a special congressional election in a district President George W. Bush carried four years ago with 62% of the vote. Democrats pulled off the win by smartly nominating a conservative, Travis Childers, from a rural swing part of the district who disavowed Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and hit Mr. Davis from the right.

This blow to the GOP came after two other special congressional election losses in recent months. Republicans lost former House Speaker Denny Hastert’s Illinois seat and Rep. Richard Baker’s Louisiana seat.

Both of those losses can be attributed to bad candidates. But that only shows the GOP can’t take “safe” seats for granted when Democrats run conservatives who distance themselves from their national party leaders. The string of defeats should cure Republicans of the habit of simply shouting “liberal! liberal! liberal!” in hopes of winning an election. They need to press a reform agenda full of sharp contrasts with the Democrats. …

American Spectator says Obama’s running for Carter’s second term.

You have to admit it takes guts. Audacity, even.

Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive nominee of the Democrats, has in essence just defeated the heiress of the Clinton era by campaigning as the heir-apparent of the Carter era.

The question for the rest of the year is this: Are there enough voting Americans who survived the disastrous odyssey through the late 1970s that was led by blessedly now ex-president Jimmy Carter? While Ronald Reagan is rated in poll after poll by Americans as a great president, (most recently he rated second only to Lincoln), are there enough people who recall that Reagan’s election came about because of Carter’s…ahhh…”performance” in the Oval Office? And will they be able to make the Obama-Carter connection for younger voters hearing terms like “windfall profits tax” for the first time? More to the point, can Senator John McCain do this?

The greatest charade of the year thus far is the idea that something “new” is being said in this campaign. By anybody. To be bluntly accurate, the only thing new is that one of the final two candidates is black. It seems to escape some that in a country even as young as America, 55 presidential elections (2008 is the 56th) covers just about all the ground there is to cover in debating any given next four years in the life of the United States. Consider.

Since the 1788 election that produced (unopposed) George Washington as the first president, the agenda for presidential elections has been narrowed to one underlying issue: the role of government. Understood in that fashion, the following 220 years of American history can be read as if with Superman’s X-ray vision. From slavery to abortion, the War of 1812 to the War in Iraq, from Lincoln’s support for “internal improvements” to John McCain’s disdain for congressional earmarks, the question at issue was the role of government. Whether dealing with the isolationism of Washington or Robert Taft or Ron Paul instead of the internationalism of Jefferson’s chase after the Barbary pirates, Wilson’s League of Nations or Ronald Reagan’s determination to win the Cold War, the underlying question every time was the role of government. …

Roy Spencer in National Review reacts to yesterday’s polar bear decision.

The decision on Wednesday by the U.S. Interior Department to declare the polar bear a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act is a major victory for environmentalists who have been looking for a back-door legal mechanism to limit carbon-dioxide emissions.

The decision was made after nine U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) studies looked into the possibility that the polar bear might be faced with extinction late in this century. Polar bears need a sea ice environment for most of the year to thrive. But summer sea extent has been receding for the last 30 years that we have been monitoring it with satellites, and as a result, two of the 13 subpopulations of polar bear have seen population declines. The other eleven subpopulations have been stable or growing. In all, the total polar-bear population is believed to be at or near a record high — 20,000 to 25,000.

So how is it that the eventual extinction of the polar bear has been forecast in the face of record-high numbers? Well, as in the case of global-warming projections, experts relied on computer models that predict continued global warming and continued melting of summer Arctic sea ice. …

Jeff Jacoby looks at Levy’s and Mellor’s book on the Supremes.

… In a lucid new book – “The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom” – legal scholars Robert Levy and William Mellor offer a mournful litany of high-court blunders in the modern era. The cases involve subjects as diverse as campaign finance, gun control, and the right to pursue an occupation; each, the authors write, had a “destructive effect on law and public policy” – either by enlarging government powers beyond their constitutional bounds or by undermining individual liberties that the Constitution protects. As often as not, the court failed not by being too activist, but by not being activist enough: by allowing the legislative and executive branches to do as they wished, instead of compelling them to stay within constitutional constraints.

The most notorious of the Dirty Dozen is Korematsu v. United States (1944), in which the court gave its sanction to the Roosevelt administration’s World War II internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, none of whom had been accused of disloyalty or sabotage.

In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the court upheld the government’s power to impose quotas for wheat even on a small farmer who used what he grew right on his farm and sold none of it across state lines. The court should have struck the law down as a blatant violation of the Commerce Clause, which limits Congress to the regulation of interstate commerce – something Farmer Filburn clearly wasn’t engaged in. Instead the court allowed it, throwing open the door to a vast expansion of federal control. …

Dilbert’s here. Along with Borowitz, Scrappleface and News Biscuit.

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Walter Williams hits one out of the park with Congressional Problem Creation.

Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place. Politicians and a large percentage of the public lose sight of the unavoidable fact that for every created benefit, there’s also a created cost or, as Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman put it, “There’s no free lunch.” While the person who receives the benefit might not pay or even be aware of the cost, but as sure as night follows day, there is a cost borne by someone. Let’s look at a couple of congressionally created problems.

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, whose provisions were strengthened during the Clinton and Bush administrations, is a federal law that mandates or intimidates lenders to offer credit throughout their entire market and discourages them from restricting their credit services to high-income markets, a practice known as redlining. The Community Reinvestment Act encouraged banks and thrifts to make so-called “no doc” and “liar” loans to customers who had no realistic ability to pay them back. A decade of monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve Bank, contributing to the housing bubble, encouraged lending institutions to take risks they otherwise would not have taken. Government actions created the subprime crisis and now government-proposed “solutions,” such as foreclosure holidays, bailouts and further regulation of financial institutions, to the problems they created will create more problems. …

For some time now, Pickerhead has thought the central problem for China’s military is how to sink an American carrier. Looks like Mark Helprin, one of our country’s most strategic thinkers, might agree.

Even as our hearts go out to the Chinese who have perished in the earthquake, we cannot lose sight of the fact that every day China is growing stronger. The rate and nature of its economic expansion, the character and patriotism of its youth, and its military and technical development present the United States with two essential challenges that we have failed to meet, even though they play to our traditional advantages.

The first of these challenges is economic, the second military. They are inextricably bound together, and if we do not attend to both we may eventually discover in a place above us a nation recently so impotent we cannot now convince ourselves to look at the blow it may strike. We may think we have troubles now, but imagine what they will be like were we to face an equal.

China has a vast internal market newly unified by modern transport and communications; a rapidly flowering technology; an irritable but highly capable workforce that as long as its standard of living improves is unlikely to push the country into paralyzing unrest; and a wider world, now freely accessible, that will buy anything it can make. China is threatened neither by Japan, Russia, India, nor the Western powers, as it was not that long ago. It has an immense talent for the utilization of capital, and in the free market is as agile as a cat. …

Meanwhile, Abe Greenwald reports 2,000 Chinese troops are pressed into emergency service repairing a dam near the earthquake site.

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us the problems in our country will not magically disappear when W is no longer president.

… Last week, I asked a fierce Bush critic what he thought were the current unemployment rate, the mortgage default rate, the latest economic growth figures, interest rates and the status of the stock market.

He blurted out the common campaign pessimism: “Recession! Worst since the Depression!”

Then he scoffed when I suggested that the answer was really a 5 percent joblessness rate in April that was lower than the March figure; 95 to 96 percent of mortgages not entering foreclosure in this year’s first quarter; .6 percent growth during the quarter (weak, but not recession level); historically low interest rates; and sky-high stock market prices.

There are serious problems — high fuel costs, rising food prices, staggering foreign debt, unfunded entitlements and annual deficits. Yet a president or vice president running for office (and covered incessantly by the media) would at least make the argument that there is a lot of good news, and that the bad that offsets it could be shared by a lot of culpable parties, from the Congress to the way we, the public, have been doing business for the last 20 years. …

Big GOP loss in Mississippi yesterday. John Fund has details.

Jack Tapper, of ABC News says it’s been fourteen times Obama has blamed his staff for errors. Thinks maybe he has a problem hiring competent people.

We started covering Sen. Barack Obama’s inability to hire good staffers in June 2007, when he blamed staffers for some opposition research trying to link Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, to outsourcing in India; for injecting some venom in the David Geffen/Hillary Clinton fight; and for missing an event with firefighters in New Hampshire.

In December, we noted again that Obama was blaming the answers on a 1996 questionnaire on a staffer; and was blaming his touring with “cured” ex-gay gospel singer Donnie McClurkin (which antagonized gays and lesbians) on bad vetting by his staff.

Those five buck-passing incidents were apparently not enough. …

Rich Lowry has figured out the Obama rules.

If Barack Obama gets his way, the Oxford English Dictionary will have updated its definition of “distraction” by the end of the campaign: “Diversion of the mind, attention, etc., from any object or course that tends to advance the political interests of Barack Obama.”

After his blowout win in North Carolina last week, Obama turned to framing the rules of the general election ahead, warning in his victory speech of “efforts to distract us.” The chief distracter happens to be the man standing between Obama and the White House, John McCain, who will “use the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election.”

Ah, yes, the famous distractions with which Republicans fool unwitting Americans. Ronald Reagan distracted them with the Iranian hostage crisis, high inflation and unemployment, gas lines and the loss of American prestige abroad. Then, the first George Bush distracted them with the notion of a third Reagan term, as well as the issues of taxes, crime and volunteerism. After a brief interlude of national focus during two Clinton terms, another Bush arrived wielding the dark art of distraction. …

John Stossel writes on the wisdom of the crowd.

Adam Smith blog makes an important point about Burma.

The cyclone in Burma reminds us of the misery inflicted by human disasters as much as natural ones. The (all too common) human disaster of totalitarian governments leaves people trapped under regimes which think that they know best. They know best how to plan and run the economy, they know best where people should live and what they should do, they know best how people should conduct their personal, cultural and spiritual lives, and they know best how to meet what nature throws at them. …

Honor among thieves? Boston Globe op-ed says so.

… The pirates who roamed the seas in the late 17th and early 18th centuries developed a floating civilization that, in terms of political philosophy, was well ahead of its time. The notion of checks and balances, in which each branch of government limits the other’s power, emerged in England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. But by the 1670s, and likely before, pirates were developing democratic charters, establishing balance of power on their ships, and developing a nascent form of worker’s compensation: A lost limb entitled one to payment from the booty, more or less depending on whether it was a right arm, a left arm, or a leg. …

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Anne Applebaum thinks Burma’s government needs to be removed.

They are “cruel, power-hungry and dangerously irrational,” in the words of one British journalist. They are ” violent and irrational,” according to a journalist in neighboring Thailand. Our own State Department leadership has condemned their “xenophobic, ever more irrational policies.”

On the evidence of the past few days alone, those are all accurate descriptions. But in one very narrow sense, the cruel, power-hungry, violent and xenophobic generals who run Burma are not irrational at all: Given their most urgent goal — to maintain power at all costs — their reluctance to accept international aid in the wake of a devastating cyclone makes perfect sense. It’s straightforward: The junta cares about its own survival, not the survival of its people. Thus the death toll is thought to have reached 100,000, a further 1.5 million Burmese are at risk of epidemics and starvation, parts of the country are still underwater, hundreds of thousands of people are camped in the open without food or clean water — and, yes, if foreigners come to distribute aid, the legitimacy of the regime might be threatened. …

National Review editors don’t think much of McCain’s environmental ideas.

Gov. Schwarzenegger likes to brag on California’s green credentials. Max Schultz in City Journal looks behind the facade.

… Republican state senator Tom McClintock underscored the real problem, which went well beyond Rancho Seco, in a speech to a Silicon Valley group in 2001. “From 1979 to 1999, generating capacity of over 45,000 megawatts was proposed to the [California Energy] Commission,” he said. “Only 4,500 megawatts was approved. Nuclear power plants were forbidden, and Rancho Seco and San Onofre Unit One,” another nuclear reactor, “were shut down prematurely. . . . For 27 years, this state has actively discouraged the construction of new power plants, and the day finally arrived when we ran out of power.” Indeed, California’s capability to generate electricity actually decreased slightly from 1990 through 1999.

Not even California’s flat per-capita energy consumption could save it from blackouts, since its population had been soaring. During the 20-year period that Senator McClintock noted, the number of California residents jumped from about 23 million people to 33 million. Today, the figure is closer to 38 million, and it could top 45 million by 2020. The cumulative demand proved too much for the aging system.

A dirty secret about California’s energy economy is that it imports lots of energy from neighboring states to make up for the shortfall caused by having too few power plants. Up to 20 percent of the state’s power comes from coal-burning plants in Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Montana, and another significant portion comes from large-scale hydropower in Oregon, Washington State, and the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. “California practices a sort of energy colonialism,” says James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington, D.C.–area investment group. “They rely on western states to supply them with power generation they are unwilling to build for themselves”—and leave those states to deal with the resulting pollution.

Another secret: California’s proud claim to have kept per-capita energy consumption flat while growing its economy is less impressive than it seems. The state has some of the highest energy prices in the country—nearly twice the national average, a 2002 Milken Institute study found—largely because of regulations and government mandates to use expensive renewable sources of power. As a result, heavy manufacturing and other energy-intensive industries have been fleeing the Golden State in droves for lower-cost locales. Twenty years ago or so, you could count eight automobile factories in California; today, there’s just one, and it’s the same story with other industries, from chemicals to aerospace. Yet Californians still enjoy the fruits of those manufacturing industries—driving cars built in the Midwest and the South, importing chemicals and resins and paints and plastics produced elsewhere, and flying on jumbo jets manufactured in places like Everett, Washington. California can pretend to have controlled energy consumption, but it has just displaced it. …

WSJ reports the Transportation Security Admin. has done something sensible.

The government is introducing segregation into airport security lines. And many travelers seem to like it.

In an effort to ease traveler anxiety and maybe even improve airport security, the Transportation Security Administration is rolling out a new setup where fliers are asked to self-segregate into different screening lanes depending on their security prowess. There are lanes for “Expert Travelers,” who know the drill cold; “Casual Travelers,” who run the airport gauntlet infrequently; and people with small children or special needs who move slowly through screening.

The idea, akin to how ski resorts divide skiers by ability, was suggested to TSA by focus groups of fliers. The agency didn’t think it would work, says TSA chief Kip Hawley, but a test showed travelers liked the idea, and it had some benefits for security screening. So TSA has now rolled it out in 12 airports, from Seattle to Boston, dubbing the program “Black Diamond,” the name it uses for expert lanes, borrowed from the ski-resort term for expert trails. More “Black Diamond” setups are coming.

“You have to see it to believe it,” Mr. Hawley said. “It has improved the flow and calm at the checkpoints.”

Not everyone is a believer. …

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Bill Kristol’s NY Times column is on Israel’s 60th. Hoffer again. Pickerhead wonders however he missed that.

… On Dec. 10, 1948, Winston Churchill, then leader of the opposition, took to the floor of the House of Commons to chastise the Labour government for its continuing refusal to recognize the state of Israel. In his remarks, Churchill commented:

“Whether the Right Honourable Gentleman likes it or not, and whether we like it or not, the coming into being of a Jewish state in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years. This is a standard of temporal values or time values which seems very much out of accord with the perpetual click-clack of our rapidly-changing moods and of the age in which we live.”

In 2008, the defense of the state of Israel, and everything it stands for, requires a kind of courage and determination very much out of accord with the perpetual click-clack of our politics, and with the combination of irresponsibility and wishfulness that characterizes the age in which we live.

Still, even though the security of Israel is very much at risk, the good news is that, unlike in the 1930s, the Jews are able to defend themselves, and the United States is willing to fight for freedom. Americans grasp that Israel’s very existence to some degree embodies the defeat and repudiation of the genocidal totalitarianism of the 20th century. They understand that its defense today is the front line of resistance to the jihadist terror, and the suicidal nihilism, that threaten to deform the 21st.

What Eric Hoffer wrote in 1968 seems even truer today: “I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel, so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.”

Israel from Christopher Hitchens too.

… It is a moral idiot who thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. The history of civilization demonstrates something rather different: Judaeophobia is an unfailing prognosis of barbarism and collapse, and the states and movements that promulgate it are doomed to suicide as well as homicide, as was demonstrated by Catholic Spain as well as Nazi Germany. Today’s Iranian “Islamic republic” is a nightmare for its own citizens as well as a pestilential nuisance and menace to its neighbors. And the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, where the Web site of Gaza’s ruling faction blazons an endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This obscenity is not to be explained away by glib terms like despair or occupation, as other religious fools like Jimmy Carter—who managed to meet the Hamas gangsters without mentioning their racist manifesto—would have you believe. (Is Muslim-on-Muslim massacre in Darfur or Iraq or Pakistan or Lebanon to be justified by conditions in Gaza?) Instead, this crux forces non-Zionists like me to ask whether, in spite of everything, Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West. This is a question to which Israelis themselves have not yet returned a completely convincing answer, and if they truly desire a 60th, let alone a 70th, birthday celebration, they had better lose no time in coming up with one.

James Kirchick notes the silence of South Africa to the disaster to the north.

The tendency to compare contemporary political events to the Third Reich is called reducto ad Hitlerum, so facile are the alleged similarities and so often is this tactic employed. With that caveat, when I saw a photograph Friday of smiling, garland-laden South African President Thabo Mbeki holding the hand of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, I couldn’t resist drawing a mental parallel: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 waving his copy of the Munich treaty before a crowd of thousands, boasting that he had achieved “peace for our time.”

That Mbeki, who last month insisted there was “no crisis” in Zimbabwe, continues to glad-hand Mugabe represents a complete abandonment of moral responsibility. As he provides diplomatic cover, Mugabe’s armed thugs roam Zimbabwe’s countryside threatening, torturing and killing people believed to have voted for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. …

Dick Morris on why Hillary won’t get out.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have always believed that they’re very different than the rest of us. Over their more than 30 years in politics together, they’ve learned one important and consistent lesson: that rules don’t matter. Rules don’t apply to them. Rules are for other people. Rules can be bent, changed, manipulated.

And that philosophy has worked very well for them.

So it’s particularly ironic that they are now turning to the Democratic Party Rules Committee to try and steal the presidential nomination that Hillary has already definitively lost to Barack Obama in the popular vote, the delegate count, and the total number of states.

Now she’ll try to get the Democratic bosses to rig it for her. If the rules don’t work, change them.

Under the guise of justice and fair play, Hillary Clinton is, in effect, asking the Rules Committee to rule that the party’s rules should be ignored — the same rules that the Rules Committee enacted and that Hillary and all of the other democrats supported without dissent. …

And, Ed Koch explains why he still backs Hill.

… Obama’s actions in not standing up to Rev. Jeremiah Wright and protest the minister’s attacks on white America, the United States government and the State of Israel, and his support of Minister Louis Farrakhan, are important matters. No one accuses Obama of adopting any of Rev. Wright’s positions as his own. Indeed, he has denounced them. But his denouncement comes 20 years too late and only after Rev. Wright denounced his heretofore devoted congregant as a hypocrite for conveying his disagreement with his minister, stating at the National Press Club on April 28th, “We both know that, if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected. Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever’s doing the polls. Preachers say what they say because they’re pastors.”

Yes, it is true that not many people would stand up in a church or synagogue and publicly argue with their minister, but surely, there are some who would argue privately – which was not done here – and even more who would leave a church or synagogue that was led by someone spouting hateful speech.

In any event, we expect more courage from a candidate for president of this great country. We are now engaged in a war against Islamic terrorism and are in need of someone who can be trusted to advocate on behalf of the United States. Senator Obama, regrettably, was silent for too long. …

Michael Crowley says Hillary’s behavior can, in part, be explained by impeachment.

… The Clintons find themselves victimized and under siege. The presidency is being stolen from them. The press is out to get them. They deride elites and champion the masses. They live in a constant state of emergency. But they will endure any humiliation, ride out any crisis, fight on even when fighting seems hopeless.

That might sound like a fair summary of how Bill and Hillary Clinton have viewed the past five months. But it also happens to describe what, until now, was the greatest ordeal of the Clintons’ almost comically turbulent political careers: impeachment. That baroque saga hardened the Clintonian worldview about politics and helps to explain their approach to this brutal campaign season. The Clintons have been here before, you see. They’re being impeached all over again. …

John Fund posts on McCain’s debate ideas.

WSJ writer says our students are being turned into Willie Lomans – i.e., traveling salespersons.

There comes a moment in the life of every parent when the startling proportions of one’s altered state are manifest. Only a few years ago, there you were, falling in love, getting married, and having a baby. Now suddenly you find yourself standing in your living room surrounded by boxes of scented candles or cookies or poinsettias that you somehow have to put into the hands of all the people who agreed to buy the stuff when you and your child went trolling for business months ago. Perhaps a line from the old Talking Heads song goes through your mind, “My God, how did I get here?”

In the past 30 years, school fund-raisers that involve children going door-to-door, and parents selling to friends, co-workers and such automatic soft touches as grandparents, have spread across the country like lice in a second-grade class. As a result, American children have transmogrified into a vast, seething sales team, forever being asked by schools to push products. According to the Association of Fund-Raising Distributors and Suppliers (AFRDS), America’s schoolchildren are now shaking down the populace for nearly $2 billion a year. …

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Looking at Israel, Mark Steyn, who never ceases to surprise, turns up a particularly poignant Eric Hoffer thought about the future of Israel.

.. Arabs will soon be demanding one democratic state – Jews and Muslims – from Jordan to the sea. And even those Western leaders who understand that this will mean the death of Israel will find themselves so confounded by the multicultural pieties of their own lands they’ll be unable to argue against it. Contemporary Europeans are not exactly known for their moral courage: The reports one hears of schools quietly dropping the Holocaust from their classrooms because it offends their growing numbers of Muslim students suggest that even the pretense of “evenhandedness” in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” will be long gone a decade hence.

The joke, of course, is that Israel, despite its demographic challenge, still enjoys a birth rate twice that of the European average. All the reasons for Israel’s doom apply to Europe with bells on. And, unlike much of the rest of the West, Israel has the advantage of living on the front line of the existential challenge. “I have a premonition that will not leave me,” wrote Eric Hoffer, America’s great longshoreman philosopher, after the 1967 war. “As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us.”

Indeed. So, happy 60th birthday. And here’s to many more.

Weekly Standard says the problems in Burma didn’t come out of nowhere and the UN is complicit.

IF THERE IS A DEFINING mood about the catastrophe that has engulfed Burma, it is the sense of denial. When a devastating cyclone ripped through the country over the weekend, the military regime reported that the storm had killed 351 people. While residents of Rangoon, the largest city, scrambled for food and shelter, state television broadcast an opera. At least a million people have been made homeless in the storm’s wake–and none of them will be going to the opera. As of this writing, the death toll is expected to reach as high as 100,000.

Yet the air of self-delusion which the Burmese regime breathes so freely is shared by others, particularly those in the cloistered confines of the United Nations. For years, as the military junta has brutalized and impoverished its population, U.N. officials either have ignored its atrocities or imagined they could be negotiated away.

Indeed, the same U.N. institutions that have accommodated and “engaged” the Burmese government are stupefied by how sluggishly the regime has responded to this disaster. …

A month and a half ago, Pickings suggested if Bill Gates wanted to do some good for Africa, he ought to form the ultimate NGO – an army to overthrow Mugabe. Contentions suggest the same for Burma.

Writing in the WSJ, Karl Rove says it’s Obama for the Dems, warts and all.

… The primary has created a deep fissure in Democratic ranks: blue collar, less affluent, less educated voters versus the white wine crowd of academics and upscale professionals (along with blacks and young people). Mr. Obama runs behind Mrs. Clinton’s numbers when matched against Mr. McCain in key industrial battleground states. Less than half of Mrs. Clinton’s backers in Indiana and North Carolina say they would support Mr. Obama if he were the nominee. In the most recent Fox News poll, two-and-a-half times as many Democrats break for Mr. McCain (15%) as Republicans defect to Mrs. Clinton (6%) and nearly twice as many Democrats support Mr. McCain (22%) as Republicans back Mr. Obama (13%). These “McCainocrat” defections could hurt badly.

State and local Democrats are realizing the toxicity of their probable national ticket. Democrats running in special congressional races recently in Louisiana and Mississippi positioned themselves as pro-life, pro-gun social conservatives and disavowed Mr. Obama. The Louisiana Democrat won his race on Saturday and said he “has not endorsed any national politician.” The Mississippi Democrat is facing a runoff on May 13 and specifically denied that Mr. Obama had endorsed his campaign. Not exactly profiles in unity. …

Don Campbell, a former reporter and present journalism prof wants to know why it took so long for Jeremiah Wright to get the coverage he deserved.

… In this election, alas, most of the bloodhounds have lost their sense of smell. For the most part, they’ve relinquished that space to bloggers and radio talkers who have an ideological agenda, not an obligation to root out the facts and present them fairly.

Thus, the coverage of Obama’s spiritual relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ is disturbing. True, Wright sounded so unhinged on his recent ego tour in Washington that it might generate sympathy for Obama. But the issue still hanging is how a man who played such an important role in Obama’s life for more than two decades drew so little scrutiny from reporters covering the Obama campaign. And since Obama himself has said the Wright controversy is a legitimate issue, I’ll take that as an invitation to weigh in.

First, it took much too long for major news media outlets to appreciate the importance of the Wright connection. (Not that they all do yet; the pummeling of ABC News by commentators for raising this and similar issues in the Pennsylvania debate further illustrated how out of touch some commentators are.) …

Andy McCarthy, in the Corner, says it’s nice to see McCain push back against Obama smears.

And an excellent, spirited response it is, from Mark Salter:

First, let us be clear about the nature of Senator Obama’s attack today: He used the words ‘losing his bearings’ intentionally, a not particularly clever way of raising John McCain’s age as an issue. This is typical of the Obama style of campaigning.

We have all become familiar with Senator Obama’s new brand of politics. First, you demand civility from your opponent, then you attack him, distort his record and send out surrogates to question his integrity. It is called hypocrisy, and it is the oldest kind of politics there is. …

Jim Taranto says Obama doesn’t handle criticism well.

Byron York has been listening to Michelle Obama.

Couple of shorts from John Fund.

David Warren writes on the “human rights commissions” in Canada.

… The basic strategy of the enemies of freedom in Canada has been to tie freedom’s defenders up in courts — kangaroo courts by preference. They may or may not have erred, tactically, in creating the headline cases I have mentioned above, which have helped rally many against them who are not among the usual friends of Messieurs Steyn and Levant. It is a high-risk enterprise for the HRCs, but the rewards if they succeed are substantial: for they will have eliminated the very possibility of dissent against the various fanatic leftist, feminist, gay activist, and Islamist agendas with which they openly ally themselves.

This is a battle that absolutely must be won, if Canada is to remain a free country. But it is only one battle in the long war that will be necessary to roll back the front line against the ideologues. Getting rid of Section 13 is a crucial short-term objective. But we must follow it up by finding ways to demolish the whole apparatus of the “human rights” industry, which has been infecting the Canadian legal system for decades.

It will be a task not of an hour, but of several generations, to reclaim our country

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Fouad Ajami says it’s time for Iran to pay a price for it’s foreign policies.

We tell the Iranians that the military option is “on the table.” But three decades of playing cat-and-mouse with American power have emboldened Iran’s rulers. We have played by their rules, and always came up second best.

Next door, in Iraq, Iranians played arsonists and firemen at the same time. They could fly under the radar, secure in the belief that the U.S., so deeply engaged there and in Afghanistan, would be reluctant to embark on another military engagement in the lands of Islam.

This is all part of a larger pattern. As Tehran has wreaked havoc on regional order and peace over the last three decades, the world has indulged it. To be sure, Saddam Hussein launched a brutal war in 1980 against his nemesis, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. That cruel conflict, which sought to quarantine the revolution, ended in a terrible stalemate; and it never posed an existential threat to the clerical state that Khomeini had built. Quite to the contrary, that war enabled the new rulers to consolidate their hold.

Over the course of its three decades in power, this revolutionary regime has made its way in the world with relative ease. No “White Army” gathered to restore the lost dominion of the Pahlavis; the privileged classes and the beneficiaries of the old order made their way to Los Angeles and Paris, and infidel armies never showed up. Even in the face of great violation – the holding of American hostages for more than 400 days – the indulgence of outside powers held.

Compare the path of the Iranian revolutionaries with the obstacles faced by earlier revolutions, and their luck is easy to see. Three years into their tumult, the tribunes of the French Revolution of 1789 were at war with the powers of Europe. The wars of the French Revolution would last for well over two decades. The Bolsheviks, too, had to fight their way into the world of states. The civil war between the White and Red Armies pulled the Allies into the struggle. A war raged in Russia and in Siberia. It was only in 1921 that Britain granted the Soviet regime de facto recognition.

In its first decade, the Iranian revolution was a beneficiary of the Cold War. …

Mark Steyn decided to listen to what Obama is saying. Yipes!

If you read a Barack Obama speech, you notice that, aside from the we-are-the-ones-we’ve-been-waiting-for narcissistic uplift and the Washington-needs-to-lift-people-up-not-tear-them-down bromides, almost everything he says is, well, nuts.

I don’t mean the moments when he gets carried away and announces that his administration would “stop the import of all toys from China.” As it happens, that’s a policy I’m not unsympathetic to. Almost 80 percent of American toys are made in the People’s Republic and, while that may well be appropriate given the whiff of totalitarian coerciveness that hangs around Barney the Dinosaur, I can’t say I’m entirely comfortable with contracting out U.S. innocence to the butchers of Tiananmen. For one thing, come the Sino-American War, Beijing will have the ultimate fifth column inside the West: The nation’s moppets, resentful at having their Elmos and SpongeBobs cut off for the duration, will be shinning down the drainpipe after dark in ski masks and blowing up power stations to hasten the day of liberation.

But forget that. Worse than the painting-by-numbers demagoguery are some of the accidental glimpses of the senator’s worldview. For example: “The drug companies, they’re not going to give up their profits easily when it comes to health care.”

Well, gee, how unreasonable of them. But demanding they give up their profits “easily” comes easy to him. Until he wrote his recent bestseller, the concept of “profits” was entirely theoretical to Obama’s life. As his wife put it, the Obamas “left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do. Don’t go into corporate America.” So Barack didn’t. Instead, he became a “community organizer,” whatever that is. It would make no difference to life in this great republic if every “community organizer” in the lower 48 were deposited on an atoll in the Antarctic. On the other hand, if America’s drug companies were no longer profitable, it might make rather a lot of difference. …

Interesting look at the Dem race from a NY liberal.

… But of course, I don’t know many of those fierce Clinton supporters, because most of my friends and acquaintances are writers and editors and cultural impresarios of one kind or another—members of “the media”—and there are precious few Clintonites among them. Because almost as much as geography is dispositive in spectator sports—if you live in New England, you’re bound to love the Red Sox and hate the Yankees—demography is dispositive in this year’s Democratic race. And the great majority of media people are members of the same (white) demographic cohort that has rejected Hillary and voted for Barack—educated, more-affluent-than-average residents of cities and suburbs. …

… When Bill Clinton was first elected, baby-boomers had just become an absolute majority of working journalists, and among some of them simmered an envy-cum-distrust of the first baby-boomer commander-in-chief. Somebody our age is president? Then, over the course of Bill Clinton’s (bungled, distasteful) presidency and Hillary Clinton’s (bungled, distasteful) campaign for the presidency, the couple have separately and together become incarnations of the most unattractive attributes of their generation’s elite—blind ambition cloaked in do-good self-righteousness, a sense of entitlement, high-handed snobbiness (“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies”), hedonism (Monica et al.), narcissism. As a poster couple for people of a certain age and demographic, they have become a bit of an embarrassment. …

… With the ten-point loss in Pennsylvania, the latest Reverend Wright eruption, and the shrinkage of Obama’s leads in the polls, the media are feeling lousy, and not just because their guy is taking a beating. If Obama is deemed to be an effete, out-of-touch yuppie, then the effete-yuppie media Establishment that’s embraced him must be equally oblivious and/or indifferent to the sentiments of the common folk.

Uh-oh. As the cratering of newspaper circulations accelerates (thousands a week are now abandoning the Times) and network-news audiences continue to shrink, for big-time mainstream journalists to seem even more out of touch makes some of them panic. …

Froma Harrop says Rev. Wright is no prophet, but Bill Cosby is.

Jeremiah, you’re no Jeremiah. Although Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright puts himself at the center of a prophetic tradition of the Afro-American church, he’s not much of a prophet. The prophet in the Biblical mode often tells his people what they don’t want to hear. Wright only mimics the prophet in his fiery condemnations of America. When it comes to the feelings of those who employ him, he’s strictly on tiptoe.

Around the time Wright was fluffing his feathers before the national media, a genuine prophet appeared in Newark, N.J., to deliver a tough look-in-the-mirror message to fellow African-Americans. The visionary was entertainer Bill Cosby, and his theme encapsulated in the title of a book he wrote with Harvard professor of psychiatry Alvin Poussaint: “Come on, People! On the Path From Victims to Victors.”

For his candor, Cosby has been tarred by black and white intellectuals as “blaming the victim.” He’s been accused of worse things, but that’s the lot of the prophet. “A prophet is despised in his own country, and in his own house, and among his own kin,” Jesus says in the Book of Mark. …

Bill Kristol looks at a McCain – Jindal ticket.

… the McCain campaign knows the environment for Republicans remains toxic. They noticed that on Saturday night Republicans lost their second House seat in a special election in two months — this one in a district they had held since 1974 and that Bush had carried by almost 20 points in 2004.

Another McCain staffer called my attention to this finding in the latest Fox News poll: McCain led Obama in the straight match-up, 46 to 43. Voters were then asked to choose between two tickets, McCain-Romney vs. Obama-Clinton. Obama-Clinton won 47 to 41.

That reversal of a three-point McCain lead to a six-point deficit for the McCain ticket suggests what might happen (a) when the Democrats unite, and (b) if McCain were to choose a conventional running mate, who, as it were, reinforced the Republican brand for the ticket. As the McCain aide put it, this is what will happen if we run a traditional campaign; our numbers will gradually regress toward the (losing) generic Republican number.

Maybe that’s why, in separate conversations last week, no fewer than four McCain staffers and advisers mentioned as a possible vice-presidential pick the 36-year-old Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal. They’re tempted by the idea of picking someone so young, with real accomplishments and a strong reformist streak. …

David Warren cautions against trusting the experts.

For at least the next decade, the most august scientific authorities are now saying, global average temperatures will not increase. My first instinct, had I any free money to blow, is to bet that they will rise: less from a betting impulse than from greed, for I’ve noticed that a lot of money has been made betting against the consensus of the authorities in my lifetime, and a lot lost on assuming it was sound.

I might hesitate, however, in this instance, for from the little I know about world climate — enough to dismiss global warming alarmists, but not enough to make my own confident predictions — a cooling trend is more likely than a warming one, in the near future, for two big reasons. First, Earth weather seems to track space weather, and the solar magnetic activity cycle seems to be entering relaxation mode.

Second, we have, as everybody agrees, regardless of their views on greenhouse warming, just passed through a decades-long phase of slightly rising global temperatures, which followed a few decades of slightly falling temperatures. The rise ended about 1998, a record warm year. We’re at the top of the roller coaster now. Experience should tell us: hang on for the plunge.

Another analogy might be to trends in breathing. It would not follow that my reader will never inhale again, from the fact that he is exhaling now. …

No one asked him, so P. J. O’Rourke treats us to the commencement address he would give. Here’s the outline.

1. Go out and make a bunch of money!

2. Don’t be an idealist!

3. Get politically uninvolved!

4. Forget about fairness!

5. Be a religious extremist!

6. Don’t listen to your elders!

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Israel has a birthday tomorrow. Melanie Phillips does the honors.

What would Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion have said if, on the day that he declared the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, he had known that six decades thence Israel would be encircled by its enemies, hopelessly outnumbered and fighting for its existence? He would surely have said: so what’s new?

Tomorrow, on 8 May, Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of that declaration. With every decade that it clocks up, people ask the same question: will Israel still be there for the next one? It is indeed astonishing that it has not only survived but is flourishing. Its situation as a permanently embattled nation is unique. On the day after Ben-Gurion declared its independence, six Arab armies invaded and tried to wipe it out. With the current exception of Egypt and Jordan, the Arab and Muslim world has been trying ever since.

Israel is the only country whose creation was approved by the UN; yet it is the only country whose legitimacy is called into question. It is the only country which the world requires to compromise with its Palestinian Arab attackers and accede to their demands, even while they are firing rockets at its schools and houses and blowing up its citizens. It is the only country which continues to provide electricity and basic services to those attackers and routinely treats thousands of Palestinians in its own hospitals, even those who have Israeli blood on their hands. And yet it is the only country which, in the court of public opinion, is condemned for behaving ‘disproportionately’ when it uses targeted military means to defend itself, and is accused of causing the very ‘Nazi’ or ‘apartheid’ atrocities of which it itself is the victim. …

Bret Stephens examines the enmity visited on Israel.

… For reasons both telling and mysterious, Israel has become unpopular among that segment of public opinion that calls itself progressive. This is the same progressive segment that believes in women’s rights, gay rights, the rights to a fair trial and to appeal, freedom of speech and conscience, judicial checks on parliamentary authority. These are rights that exist in Israel and nowhere else in the Middle East. So why is it that the country that is most sympathetic to progressive values gets the least of progressive sympathies?

The answer, it is said, is that as democratic as Israel may be in its domestic politics, it is nothing but bloody-minded as far as its foes are concerned. In May 2002, at the height of the so-called al-Aqsa Intifada, I reviewed Israeli and Palestinian casualty figures, sticking to Palestinian sources for Palestinian numbers and Israeli sources for Israeli ones. Much was then being made in the Western media of the fact that three times as many Palestinians as Israelis had been killed in the conflict – evidence, supposedly, that despite the suicide bombings, lynchings and roadside ambushes perpetrated daily against Israelis, Palestinians were the ones who really were getting it in the neck.

But drilling down into the data, something interesting turned up. At the time, 1,296 Palestinians had been killed by Israelis – of whom a grand total of 37, or 2.8%, were female. By contrast, of the 496 Israelis killed by Palestinians (including 138 soldiers and policemen), there were 126 female fatalities, or 25%.

To be female is a fairly reliable indicator of being a noncombatant. Females are also half the population. If Israel had been guilty of indiscriminate violence against Palestinians, the ratio of male-to-female fatalities would not have been 35-1.

These are not complicated facts. Yet the effort to think them through is rarely made. Is it laziness? I think not, because the image of demonic Israel, presented in copiously footnoted and ingeniously mendacious books like “The Israel Lobby,” is the product of a great deal of effort. …

Ever the combatant, Caroline Glick comments on two views of Israel at 60.

Israel’s 60th Independence Day is an excuse for the international media to weigh in on the state of the Jewish state. Given the anti-Israel bias of most of the international media, not surprisingly, most of the reports reveal less about Israel’s status at 60 than they reveal about how anti-Zionists perceive Israel at 60.

Two critiques – both cover stories of major magazines – stand out in this regard. In Canada, Maclean’s magazine’s May 5 cover pictures three Israeli soldiers struggling to raise the national flag. The headline reads, “Why Israel Can’t Survive.”

In the US, the cover of The Atlantic Magazine’s May edition sports a Star of David painted in Palestinian colors of red, black and green ensconced in a PLO flag. The headline asks, rhetorically, “Is Israel finished?”

The authors of the two articles – Michael Petrou in Maclean’s and Jeffery Goldberg in The Atlantic come to their subject from different angles. Petrou writes as an emotionally disengaged observer. Goldberg, who made aliya in the 1980s, writes as a disillusioned Zionist who abandoned Israel and moved back to America. Petrou writes of Israel’s certain demise with amoral detachment. Goldberg’s dispatch is a deeply emotional attempt to justify his decision to abandon Israel. …

Michael Oren, author of Power, Faith, and Fantasy: The United States in the Middle East, 1776 to 2006 reviews the relationship of Israel and the United States.

President George W. Bush will soon make his second visit to Israel in less than six months, this time to celebrate the country’s 60th anniversary. The candidates for the presidency, Republican and Democratic alike, have all traveled to Israel and affirmed their commitment to its security. So have hundreds of congressmen.

American engineers, meanwhile, are collaborating with their Israeli counterparts in developing advanced defense systems. American soldiers are learning antiterrorist techniques from the Israeli army.

Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where the American flag is rarely (if ever) burned in protest – indeed, some Israelis fly that flag on their own independence day. And avenues in major American cities are named for Yitzhak Rabin and Golda Meir. Arguably, there is no alliance in the world today more durable and multifaceted than that between the United States and Israel.

Yet the bonds between the two countries were not always so strong. For much of Israel’s history, America was a distant and not always friendly power. …

Thomas Sowell compares the preaching of Obama and his pastor.

… Like everyone else, I have also been hearing a lot lately about Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of the church that Barack Obama has belonged to for 20 years.

Both men, in their different ways, have for decades been promoting the far left vision of victimization and grievances– Wright from his pulpit and Obama in roles ranging from community organizer to the United States Senate, where he has had the farthest left voting record.

Later, when the ultimate political prize– the White House– loomed on the horizon, Obama did a complete makeover, now portraying himself as a healer of divisions.

The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is that they are addressing different audiences, using different styles adapted to those audiences.

It is a difference between upscale demagoguery and ghetto demagoguery, playing the audience for suckers in both cases. …

Walter Williams has fun with predictions from environmentalists.

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let’s look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” …

John Stossel says the left is wrong. He interviews Arianna Huffington.

… Like most liberals, she believes America needs more regulation. OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) should be strengthened to protect workers.

I tried to acquaint her with the facts. While it’s true that since OSHA started, deadly job accidents have dropped, the truth is, deaths were dropping before OSHA. Between the late 1930s and 1971, job fatalities fell from more than 40 to fewer than 20 per 100,000 workers. After OSHA was passed, fatalities continued to fall, but no faster than before. It’s misleading to credit regulation for the improvement. Government gets in front of a parade and pretends to lead it.

Huffington’s reply: “If you were the husband of one of the women who died recently because OSHA regulations were not sufficiently implemented, you would not be so cavalier about the speed at which things get better.”

As if the government could guarantee zero job deaths. …

ChiTrib editors on the real economy.

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Editors at the LA Times have figured out what Pickings readers have known for years – ethanol directives, from our idiot Congress, are a disaster.

To the annals of market manias and regulatory follies, a new chapter is being added: The Great Ethanol Bubble of 2008. It is possible that someday a fuel made from a cheap, abundant, renewable crop may replace oil. But it won’t be food-based ethanol. It’s time not only to stop subsidizing the stuff but to revamp the chaotic, politicized and wasteful system of subsidies for alternative energy.

It is now well established that inefficient corn ethanol actually pumps out more total life-cycle carbon emissions than gasoline, and total emissions from ethanol coming even from the most advanced refineries offer at most a 25% improvement over gasoline in terms of greenhouse gases — at a staggering environmental and financial cost. …

Michael Barone posts on the London mayoral election.

Abby and Stephen Thernstrom, authors of America in Black and White, ought to know what a Black church looks like. they say the church of Jeremiah Wright is out of the ordinary.

In his recent incendiary remarks, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. claimed that criticism of his views is nothing less “an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition.” Can it really be that millions of black Americans regularly choose to listen to viciously anti-white and anti-American rants on Sunday mornings?

Happily, Chicago’s Trinity Church is an outlier in that regard. Most black churchgoers belong to congregations that are overwhelmingly African-American and are affiliated with one of the historically black religious denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) or the National Baptist Convention. Rev. Wright’s Trinity Church, on the other hand, is a predominantly black branch of a white denomination that is not part of “the African-American religious tradition.” The United Church of Christ (known until 1957 as the Congregational Church) has a little over a million members; a mere 4 percent of them are black. Fewer than 50,000 blacks in the entire nation worship at a UCC church.

In contrast, 98 percent of the National Baptist Convention’s 4 million members are African Americans. Add in black Methodists and Pentecostals, as well as other black Baptists, and the total comes to more than 14 million members of an organized, predominantly African-American church. These churches include a substantial majority of all black adults today. In terms of sheer demographic weight, they clearly represent the “African-American religious tradition”-as Rev. Wright’s branch of a overwhelmingly white denomination does not. …

Heather Mac Donald in City Journal on the truly destructive ideas of Rev. Wright.

The list of Afrocentric “educators” whom the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has invoked in his media escapades since Sunday is a disturbing reminder that academia’s follies can enter the public world in harmful ways. Now the pressing question is whether they have entered Barack Obama’s worldview as well.

Some in Mr. Wright’s crew of charlatans have already had their moments in the spotlight; others are less well known. They form part of the tragic academic project of justifying self-defeating underclass behavior as “authentically black.” That their ideas have ended up in the pulpit of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ and in Detroit’s Cobo Hall, where Mr. Wright spoke at the NAACP’s Freedom Fund dinner on Sunday, reminds us that bad ideas must be fought at their origins — and at every moment thereafter.

At the NAACP meeting, Mr. Wright proudly propounded the racist contention that blacks have inherently different “learning styles,” correctly citing as authority for this view Janice Hale of Wayne State University. Pursuing a Ph.D. by logging long hours in the dusty stacks of a library, Mr. Wright announced, is “white.” Blacks, by contrast, cannot sit still in class or learn from quiet study, and they have difficulty learning from “objects” — books, for example — but instead learn from “subjects,” such as rap lyrics on the radio. These differences are neurological, according to Ms. Hale and Mr. Wright: Whites use what Mr. Wright referred to as the “left-wing, logical and analytical” side of their brains, whereas blacks use their “right brain,” which is “creative and intuitive.” When he was of school age in Philadelphia following the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision, Mr. Wright said, his white teachers “freaked out because the black children did not stay in their place, over there, behind the desk.” Instead, the students “climbed up all over [the teachers], because they learned from a ‘subject,’ not an ‘object.’ ” How one learns from a teacher as “subject” by climbing on her, as opposed to learning from her as “object” — by listening to her words — is a mystery.

One would hope that Mr. Wright’s audience was offended by the idea that acting out in class is authentically black — it was impossible to tell what the reaction in the hall was to the assertion. But one thing is clear: Embracing the notion that blacks shouldn’t be expected to listen attentively to instruction is guaranteed to perpetuate into eternity the huge learning gap between blacks on the one hand, and whites and Asians on the other. …

Jonah Goldberg sets the record straight on one of Wright’s wrongs – Tuskegee.

‘Based on this Tuskegee experiment … I believe our government is capable of doing anything.” So said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright when asked if he stood by his claim that “the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

The infamous Tuskegee experiment is the Medusa’s head of black left-wing paranoia. Whenever someone laments the fact that anywhere from 10 percent to 33 percent of African Americans believe the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill blacks, someone will say, “That’s not so crazy when you consider what happened at Tuskegee.”

But it is crazy. And it’s dishonest.

Wright says the U.S. government “purposely infected African-American men with syphilis.” This is a lie, and no knowledgeable historian says otherwise. And yet, this untruth pops up routinely. In March, CNN commentator Roland Martin defended Wright, saying, “That actually did, indeed, happen.” On Fox News, the allegation has gone unchallenged on Hannity & Colmes and The O’Reilly Factor. Obery Hendricks, a prominent author and visiting scholar at Princeton University, told O’Reilly “I do know that the government injected syphilis into black men at the Tuskegee Institute. Now we know that the government is capable of doing those things.”

To which O’Reilly responded: “All right. All governments have done bad things in every country.”

True enough. And what the U.S. did at Tuskegee was indeed bad, very bad. But it didn’t do what these people say it did. …

Christopher Hitchens has an idea how Rev. Wright got attached to Obama’s life.

… What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright’s pews, and at Wright’s mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama’s part for Wright’s views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to “Minister” Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, “Keep my wife out of it,” or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse’s influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner. …

Gerard Baker of the Times, UK asks where the “depression” has gone.

Whatever happened to the Great Depression? Not the real one from 70 years ago, the lost decade of unimagined misery and Steinbeckian angst, the worst period in the history of modern capitalism. I mean the replay we were promised this year. The one we were told was the inevitable counterpart to the greatest financial crisis since a couple of medieval Italians first sat down on a Florentine bench and invented the word “bank”.

I don’t know about you but I feel a bit cheated. There we all were, led to believe by so many commentators that the sub-prime crisis was going to force the United States into a new era of dust bowls and breadlines, a slump that would call into question the very functioning of the capitalist system in the world’s largest economy. Carried away on the surging wave of their own economically dubious verbosity, the pundits even speculated that this unavoidable calamity might presage some 1930s-style global political cataclysm to match.

Well, it’s early days, to be fair, but so far the Great Depression 2008 is shaping up to be a Great Disappointment. Not so much The Grapes of Wrath as Raisins of Mild Inconvenience. Last week the Commerce Department reported that the US economy – battered by the credit crunch, pummelled by a housing market collapse and generally devastated by the wild stampede of animal spirits – actually grew in the first three months of the year. …

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We open with good news. David Warren is back.

‘Write each column as if it were your last. And sooner or later it will be,” an editor once explained. I recall this sage advice, upon returning to my day job, after annual leave. And with my first deadline falling smack on my 55th birthday. (That is, yesterday. If you haven’t sent a card, it is already too late.) Five weeks of staying as far from the news as I could contrive to get. Some of this time spent fighting curiosity.

But most of it caring for ancient parents, now shifted to a nursing home from their need for constant medical supervision. This is a common experience among baby boomers, as my much younger, current editor explains: no call for “empathy” there. And my many contemporaries, whose parents are neither dead nor disowned, may well have learned that no empathy is appropriate. For the experience, though painful, is full of reward.

Indeed, this is among the forgotten truths of what I call, for shorthand, “post-modernity” – aka “the mall culture” or “the age of abortion” – that all human reward is founded in pain. That all true joy is founded in duty; and freedom in duty, too. That, in the words of my priest, “Principles are something you pay for, not something you collect on.”

And let me add, since we are dealing in old saws this morning, that one cannot begin to appreciate the glory and beauty and preciousness of a human life, until one has grasped how tenuous and transient it is. …

More good news. Global warming is not back. Chris Booker in the Telegraph, UK has the fun details.

Weekly Standard with the story of the latest scandal from UN “peacekeepers.” You’ll be pleased to learn, though, the Indians and Paks have been able to make common cause in this outrage.

IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE the United Nations’ reputation as an international peacekeeping organization could sink any lower, but it just has. The BBC’s flagship investigative news program, Panorama, revealed this week that the UN’s biggest peacekeeping mission, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has been blighted by yet another scandal. The 18-month BBC study into the conduct of the 17,000 strong, $1.1 billion a year operation (known as MONUC) found that UN troops have been involved in arming militia groups and smuggling gold and ivory. This revelation comes just three years after it emerged that UN peacekeepers had perpetrated the widespread abuse of refugees in the war-torn country.

The allegations are hugely embarrassing for the United Nations, and involve peacekeeping contingents from two of the UN’s biggest contributing nations. According to the BBC investigation, Indian peacekeepers (who make up a quarter of the MONUC mission) “had direct dealings with the militia responsible for the Rwandan genocide” in eastern Congo. The BBC states that “the Indians traded gold, bought drugs from the militias and flew a UN helicopter into the Virunga National park, where they exchanged ammunition for ivory.” The BBC also reports that Pakistani peacekeepers, the second largest group in MONUC, “were involved in the illegal trade in gold with the FNI militia, providing them with weapons to guard the perimeter of the mines” in the eastern town of Mongbwalu. …

Newsweek’s Evan Thomas notes the left’s growing regard for Reagan.

The outcome of this November’s election may hinge on a single question: which presidential candidate will prevail among the “Reagan Democrats”? Those traditionally Democratic voters made history—and a place in the political lexicon—in 1980 when they bolted their party’s disarrayed ranks to swing the polls in Ronald Reagan’s favor. Until recently, however, few liberal-leaning historians took a respectful look at the Reagan phenomenon. That’s finally changing, with the publication of Sean Wilentz’s new “The Age of Reagan,” even as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—and John McCain—seek the support of that crucial bloc. NEWSWEEK’s Evan Thomas moderated a conversation about the Gipper between Wilentz, a professed liberal, and NEWSWEEK’s George F. Will, a longtime Reagan admirer.

THOMAS: Sean, why have you taken a look at Reagan, and have other historians started to take another look at Reagan?
WILENTZ: It’s interesting. It’s no secret that intellectuals, generally being liberals, didn’t think much of Ronald Reagan at the time. Unlike Roosevelt, who got covered right away—as soon as he died there were books out about [him]—it took people a long time to catch up with Ronald Reagan. But I think that now they can no longer ignore him. His impact on the world and country, whether you like it or not, was so important that to ignore him is to ignore an entirety of American politics.

THOMAS: And why did it take so long?
WILENTZ: People had to overcome their own passions, their own dislikes. Some people had to grow up. Some people, it was a matter of all their ideas ripening. Ronald Reagan was difficult to read. His own official biographer couldn’t make head or tail out of Ronald Reagan, and he had more access than most. Look, he was a conservative in a conservative age. This is not, normally, what is the stuff of heroic history. It just doesn’t fit the mold in the way that Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln does. It’s just different. …

Shorts from National Review.

Larry Kudlow says when it comes to the economy, W knows.

President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country.

About a month ago he told reporters, “We’re not in a recession, we’re in a slowdown.” At a White House news conference a few weeks later, despite the fact that reporters pressed him to use the “R” word, Mr. Bush refused. And on Friday, after the most recent jobs report — which produced a much-smaller-than-expected decline in corporate payrolls, a huge 362,000 increase in the more entrepreneurial household survey (the best gain in five months), and a historically low 5 percent unemployment rate (4.95 percent, to be precise) — the president told reporters: “This economy is going to come on. I’m confident it will.”

We’re in the midst of the most widely predicted and heralded recession in history. Problem is, so far it’s a non-recession recession. Score one for President Bush. In an election year, it could be a big one.

First-quarter GDP growth came in at 0.6 percent. It wasn’t the widely predicted decline, and economists expect that number to be revised up. GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2007 was also up slightly, while the prior two quarters averaged over 4 percent growth.

My pal Jimmy Pethokoukis quotes Stanford professor Robert Hall, who heads the recession-dating committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research: “It seems unlikely that we would ever declare a peak-date when real GDP continued to rise.”

Interesting — isn’t it? — just how durable and resilient our low-tax, free-market, capitalist economy truly is. Hit by soaring food and energy prices, a bad housing downturn, and a Wall Street credit crunch, the economy continues to expand, albeit slowly. …

Bloomberg News says MIT prof has figured out why China has been able to grow so fast. Maybe.

Humor section starts with a post from the New Editor. Seems Bill Clinton was lying about his record. Bill lie? Who knew?

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Power Line warns us polar bears are the left’s new stalking horse.

That innocent-looking polar bear poses a huge threat to the American economy. It’s not his fault, of course. Liberals are always scheming to get control of the economy, and their latest dodge takes advantage of the myth that “global warming” threatens the bears’ habitat. The Left is now seeking to have the polar bear certified as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. Sounds harmless, you say? Hugh Hewitt–as far as I know, the only person so far to blow the whistle on the liberals’ scam–explains the legal consequences: …

Two of our favorites decided to revisit the “great” speech Obama gave six weeks ago. Mark Steyn is first.

Four score and seven years ago … No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR’s First Inaugural, or JFK’s religion speech, or (if, like Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, you find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860.

And, of course, the senator’s speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates’ Apology, etc.: It’s history. He said, apropos the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that “I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.” But last week Obama did disown him. So, great-speech-wise, it’s a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on.

It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be “required reading in classrooms,” said Bob Herbert in the New York Times; it was “extraordinary” and “rhetorical magic,” said Joe Klein in Time – which gets closer to the truth: As with most “magic,” it was merely a trick of redirection.

Obama appeared to have made Jeremiah Wright vanish into thin air, but it turned out he was just under the heavily draped table waiting to pop up again. The speech was designed to take a very specific problem – the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years – and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Sen. Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes? …

… “Do you personally feel that the reverend betrayed your husband?” asked Meredith Vieira on “The Today Show.”

“You know what I think, Meredith?” replied Michelle Obama. “We’ve got to move forward. You know, this conversation doesn’t help my kids.”

Hang on. “My” kids? You’re supposed to say “It’s about the future of all our children,” not “It’s about the future of my children” – whose parents happen to have a base salary of half a million bucks a year. But even this bungled cliché nicely captures the campaign’s self-absorption: Talking about Obama’s pastor is a distraction from talking about Obama’s kids.

By the way, the best response to Michelle’s “this conversation doesn’t help my kids” would be: “But entrusting their religious upbringing to Jeremiah Wright does?” Ah, but, happily, Meredith Vieira isn’t that kind of interviewer. …

Then Charles Krauthammer.

… Obama’s Philadelphia oration was an exercise in contextualization. In one particularly egregious play on white guilt, Obama had the audacity to suggest that whites should be ashamed that they were ever surprised by Wright’s remarks: “The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning.”

That was then. On Tuesday, Obama declared that he himself was surprised at Wright’s outrages. But hadn’t Obama told us that surprise about Wright is a result of white ignorance of black churches brought on by America’s history of segregated services? How then to explain Obama’s own presumed ignorance? Surely he too was not sitting in those segregated white churches on those fateful Sundays when he conveniently missed all of Wright’s racist rants.

Obama’s turning surprise about Wright into something to be counted against whites– one of the more clever devices in that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud in Philadelphia — now stands discredited by Obama’s own admission of surprise. But Obama’s liberal acolytes are not daunted. They were taken in by the first great statement on race: the Annunciation, the Chosen One comes to heal us in Philly. They now are taken in by the second: the Renunciation. …

… Obama’s newest attempt to save himself after Wright’s latest poisonous performance is now declared the new final word on the subject. Therefore, any future ads linking Obama and Wright are preemptively declared out of bounds, illegitimate, indeed “race-baiting” (a New York Times editorial, April 30).

On what grounds? This 20-year association with Wright calls into question everything about Obama: his truthfulness in his serially adjusted stories of what he knew and when he knew it; his judgment in choosing as his mentor, pastor and great friend a man he just now realizes is a purveyor of racial hatred; and the central premise of his campaign, that he is the bringer of a “new politics,” rising above the old Washington ways of expediency. It’s hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient than renouncing Wright when his show, once done from the press club instead of the pulpit, could no longer be “contextualized” as something whites could not understand and only Obama could explain in all its complexity.

Turns out the Wright show was not that complex after all. Everyone understands it now. Even Obama.

Then more of our favorites have Obama observations. First Victor Davis Hanson.

… Bottom line: unless Obama was caught on tape nodding as Wright screamed his obscenities at the United States, or an angry and spiteful Wright produces some letter, e-mail, etc. that reveals a kindred soul in Obama, or Michelle gives another speech “from the heart” about how hard she has struggled and how in return she has had no pride in this country, or there is another off-the-cuff, but recorded sneer at the white working class (50/50 chance on all four counts), I think he will weather the current storm and get the nomination. Obama evokes pure emotion and raw politics now, and logic, honesty, and accountability have little to do with his nomination bid.

Roger L. Simon.

Al Sharpton criticizing Barack Obama for urging non-violence in the Sean Bell verdict protest puts into dramatic relief the major racial conflict of our time – and it is inside the African-American community, not outside. Outdated racial profiteers like Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and now the formerly obscure Reverend Jeremiah Wright are clinging for dear life to their reactionary views that have impeded progress in their own community for years. …

Ed Morrissey.

Christopher Hitchens in his blog at the Daily Mirror.

If it had been held last Friday, it might well have gone the other way, or a different way. But something about the Obama magic seems somehow to have curdled, or congealed into what some analysts call “buyer’s remorse”. In a few short days, the world’s most charismatic candidate went straight from being able to do nothing wrong to being able to do very little right. ..

Norman Borlaug has in mind improved ways to feed Africa’s poor.

Rapidly increasing world food prices have already led to political upheaval in poor countries. The crisis threatens to tear apart fragile states and become a humanitarian calamity unless countries get their agricultural systems moving.

Now, with conference committee negotiations over the final shape of the Farm Bill at a critical stage, Congress needs to change the foreign food-aid program and help avert this calamity. The Bush administration has urged, rightly, that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) be allowed to buy food locally, particularly in Africa, instead of only American-grown food. …

Ilya Somin of Volokh reminds us of “Victims of Communism Day.”

Today is May Day, the primary holiday of communist parties and regimes. Last year, I put forward my proposal to transform May Day into Victims of Communism Day, in honor of the 100 million or more people murdered by communist regimes in the USSR, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere. …

Jim Taranto shows us a typical day slanting the news at AP, and Obama’s futile complaints to a Federal Election Commission that can’t act in part because he has put a hold on appointees.

On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, upheld Indiana’s requirement that voters present photo identification before casting ballots. Yesterday the Associated Press published a dispatch titled “Advocates: Voter ID Ruling May Disenfranchise US Voters.”

It ran 15 paragraphs, required two reporters (Deborah Hastings got the byline; David Lieb “contributed”), and was totally one-sided, offering not a single argument in favor of voter ID requirements. It’s possible that the AP did another dispatch titled “Advocates: Voter ID Ruling Helps Prevent Fraud,” or some such, but we couldn’t find it in a Factiva search. …

Business Week interviews Google’s CEO to learn about fostering innovation.

Tom Smith in Right Coast reviews Amazon’s Kindle electronic book.

I’m in love, and it’s with a gadget.  Contrary to what some of you may think, I do not frequently fall in love with gadgets or gear.  I am always looking for love there, true, but I rarely find it.  I like iPods, sure, but they didn’t change my life.  XM radio is a big improvement over FM, but it’s still hard to find anything you actually want to listen to.  My seven station weight machine in the garage was a bust. My smartwatch hooked up to some useless Microsoft network was like an ill considered fling with a crazy chick, not that I’ve ever done that.  And so on.  But this little beauty is different.

For those of you who still dial into AOL, a Kindle is Amazon’s new e-book reader gizmo, a “wireless reading device.”  With it you can download as many books as you could conceivably want to carry around with you from a library of 100,000 or so books in Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. …