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Slate had a number of cool pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge. Here’s two.
Charles Krauthammer has lots of fun with Obama’s mistake that has “metastasized.”
When the House of Representatives takes up arms against $4 gas by voting 324-84 to sue OPEC, you know that election-year discourse has entered the realm of the surreal. Another unmistakable sign is when a presidential candidate makes a gaffe, then, realizing it is too egregious to take back without suffering humiliation, decides to make it a centerpiece of his foreign policy.
Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure — then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration’s refusal to do so not just “ridiculous” but “a disgrace.”
After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity. …
Eight months back Israeli jets destroyed an installation of some type in north-eastern Syria. At the time, there was speculation it was a nuclear reactor. In a perfect illustration of how the New Yorker’s readers become ignorant, Seymour Hirsh found an expert to say that was not possible. We now know the expert was wrong. Said expert is now one of Obama’s advisors. Gabriel Schoenfeld considers the implications for the LA Times.
ONE OF THE least noticed and most peculiar campaign promises made by Barack Obama is his pledge, if elected president, to “secure all loose nuclear materials in the world within four years.” Without doubt that is a laudable goal, but one is left wondering how exactly he expects to accomplish it in four years, or even, for that matter, in 40.
One of many obstacles is that our intelligence agencies seldom know where loose nuclear materials are, especially when they are hidden on the territory of hostile states. An even bigger problem is that when we they do locate them, there always will be some expert or another telling us that, despite all the evidence, they are not really there. Obama, of all people, should know this.
He has one such expert advising his campaign. …
Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics says Hillary’s biggest mistake was not finding Rev. Wright before Iowa when it could have done her some good. Now it only helps McCain. This from the “world’s smartest woman?”
Coming off her landslide win in West Virginia on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton plods on to the end of the primary season on June 3. But her campaign has already been declared dead by many pundits, and the postmortems on why her campaign failed have already begun.
Most prominent among them, at least thus far, is Karen Tumulty of Time magazine, who in last week’s issue recounted Mrs. Clinton’s “five big mistakes, each of which compounded the others.”
According to Ms. Tumulty, those mistakes, in order, were: 1. She misjudged the mood, 2. She didn’t master the rules, 3. She underestimated the caucus states, 4. She relied on old money, and 5. She never counted on a long haul.
All of these points are no doubt true, but they miss the mark. Mrs. Clinton’s first and biggest mistake, which eventually led to her undoing, can be summed up in a single question: How and why did her campaign miss Mr. Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?
Put simply, had Mr. Wright been introduced to voters a few days before the Iowa caucuses, odds are Barack Obama would not be a hair’s breadth away from clinching the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. …
And for Hillary’s latest mistake, Maureen Dowd columns.
… Obama now has the perfect excuse not to pick Hillary as his running mate. She has been too unseemly in her desire to be on the scene if he trips, or gets hit with a devastating story. She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.
That’s where the runners-up can be found, prettily lurking, in case it turns out the girl with the crown has some naked pictures in her past.
Mark Steyn was watching the congressional oil hearings.
I was watching the Big Oil execs testifying before Congress. That was my first mistake. If memory serves, there was lesbian mud wrestling over on Channel 137, and on the whole that’s less rigged. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz knew the routine: “I can’t say that there is evidence that you are manipulating the price, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not.”
Had I been in the hapless oil man’s expensive shoes, I’d have answered, “Hey, you first. I can’t say that there is evidence that you’re sleeping with barnyard animals, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not. Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence and prima facie evidence, lady? Do I have to file a U.N. complaint in Geneva that the House of Representatives is in breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?”
But that’s why I don’t get asked to testify before Congress. So instead the Big Oil guy oozed as oleaginous as his product before the grand panjandrums of the House Subcommittee on Televised Posturing, and then they went off and passed 324-82 the so-called NOPEC bill. The NOPEC bill is, in effect, a suit against OPEC, which, if I recall correctly, stands for the Oil Price-Exploiting Club. “No War For Oil!,” as the bumper stickers say. But a massive suit for oil – now that’s the American way. …
David Harsanyi of Dever Post says if the Senate is looking for villians, they should look in the mirror.
… This week’s sham of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing saw Big Oil executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron and three other companies take the stand. With quivering voices, they explained basic economic principles to Senate demagogues who, incidentally, bear far more responsibility for high prices than the execs themselves.
The lead demagogue, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, leveled numerous preposterous charges. He claimed that there was a “disconnect” between supply and demand and the gasoline prices that consumers are wrestling with at the pump.
Leahy, one hopes, knows that oil companies have little to do with the price of oil per barrel. He knows full well that they can’t control OPEC production or Hugo Chavez or the dramatic increase in oil demand by China, India and other developing nations. So in this case, the only “disconnect” is between facts and Sen. Leahy. …
Amazing story from George Will.
CHARLES TOWN, W.Va. — Numbers come precisely from the agile mind and nimble tongue of Frank Buckles, who seems bemused to say that 4,734,991 Americans served in the military during America’s involvement in the First World War and that 4,734,990 are gone. He is feeling fine, thank you for asking. …
It’s really kinda funny to read a defense of free trade in The New Yorker. James Surowieki tries to make it simple so the ignorati will catch on, in “The Free Trade Paradox.”
… The reason for this is simple: free trade with poorer countries has a huge positive impact on the buying power of middle- and lower-income consumers—a much bigger impact than it does on the buying power of wealthier consumers. The less you make, the bigger the percentage of your spending that goes to manufactured goods—clothes, shoes, and the like—whose prices are often directly affected by free trade. The wealthier you are, the more you tend to spend on services—education, leisure, and so on—that are less subject to competition from abroad. In a recent paper on the effect of trade with China, the University of Chicago economists Christian Broda and John Romalis estimate that poor Americans devote around forty per cent more of their spending to “non-durable goods” than rich Americans do. That means that lower-income Americans get a much bigger benefit from the lower prices that trade with China has brought. …
WSJ Op-Ed on the joys of the “Staycation” – vacationing at home.