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Michael Crowley in WaPo with a send off for Ted Stevens, one of the most corrupt Republicans holding office.

If the charges announced yesterday are true, the powerful Alaska Republican Ted Stevens will end his four-decade Senate career in a sleazy flameout; the conservative committee baron is accused of concealing more than $250,000 in payments from the oil firm of an Alaska businessman who was allegedly seeking legislative rewards. Stevens says he is innocent, but if he’s convicted, few tears will be shed in Washington. Stevens cultivated a tyrannical image and personalized politics to an extreme degree, dividing the world into friends and enemies and showing no mercy. This outlook carried him to great heights. But, nourished by the culture of a Republican-dominated Congress, it eventually became toxic.

Stevens succeeded in Washington by understanding that fear can be a formidable weapon. “I’m a mean, miserable SOB,” he once boasted. Congressional staffers frequently cite him as one of the meanest and most temperamental members of Congress. When girding for battle on the Senate floor, the cantankerous 84-year-old Stevens would often don his signature Incredible Hulk necktie. He has branded certain critics of his record “psychopaths” and once cracked during a clash with House Republicans, “I’m just sorry they repealed the law on dueling. I’d have shot a couple of the sons of [expletive].” …

A writer for Real Clear Politics says McCain should run against Stevens.

Senator Ted Stevens’ seven-count indictment looks like it couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Republican Party, which is already in mid-soul search.

But in every crisis there is opportunity – and for John McCain this latest congressional Republican scandal offers an opportunity to revive his reputation as an independent reformer. It has the added advantage of being brand consistent.

John McCain has been a constant critic of the unprecedented levels of pork barrel spending that took hold of the Republican Congress during the Bush Administration. And there is no better symbol of that excess then Senator Ted Stevens’ infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” the $398 million dollar boondoggle to an island in Alaska where less than 10,000 people lived.

McCain also took early aim at the culture corruption that emerged from all the overspending and lobbying by GOP-leaning special interests – holding early hearings into the Jack Abramoff scandals that ultimately engulfed House Majority Leader Tom Delay, Congressman Bob Ney and others. It didn’t make him popular with RNC apparatchiks, but it did make him right.

The Republicans’ rejection by the voters in 2006 was swift and vicious. But the war in Iraq was not – counter to conventional wisdom – the primary reason for the loss of their 12-year Congressional majority. Exit polls showed that voters were more disgusted by the corruption and ethics allegations – the steady stream of scandals from Duke Cunningham to Mark Foley. …

David Ignatius thinks McCain is hiding the best parts.

In the dog days of summer, John McCain‘s political personality has become so fuzzy that even some Republicans are worrying about his viability. But if you want a reminder of why McCain should be a formidable candidate, take another look at his remarkable 1999 autobiography, “Faith of My Fathers.”

McCain’s account is as revealing as Barack Obama‘s memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” Both candidates have written powerful accounts of their formative experiences. Each tale is woven around the universal theme of fathers and sons. Given the psychological torments that often drive politicians, it’s a blessing to have two candidates who have examined their lives carefully and appear to understand their inner demons.

But these two memoirists couldn’t have more different stories to tell, and that’s what should make the 2008 campaign so interesting. Where Obama describes a quest for an absent father and an African American identity, McCain’s early story is about learning to accept the legacy of a famous family where both his father and grandfather were four-star admirals.

McCain was a wild man in his youth, drinking and chasing women like a renegade prince of Navy royalty. He is brutally frank in his description of this protracted adolescence, describing his years at the Naval Academy as “a four-year course of insubordination and rebellion.”

McCain’s burden, and ultimately his salvation, was the military code of honor that his forefathers embodied. He was from a family of professional warriors, as far back as he could trace his ancestors, and he says this gave him a “reckless confidence” and a sense of fatalism. But it also produced an unshakable bond with his fellow officers and enlisted men — and to the nation they had pledged to serve. Leadership, the art of guiding men courageously in war, was the family business. …

According to Karl Rove, Iraq creates problems for both candidates.

In a race supposedly dominated by the economy, both Barack Obama and John McCain have spent a lot of time talking about Iraq. Why? Because both men have Iraq problems that are causing difficulties for their campaigns.

How each candidate resolves his Iraq problems may determine who voters come to see as best qualified to set American foreign policy.

If Mr. McCain wins the argument on Iraq, he will add to his greatest strength — a perceived fitness to be commander in chief and lead the global war on terror. As the underdog, Mr. McCain needs to convince voters that he is overwhelmingly the better choice on the issue.

Mr. Obama needs to win the argument because his greatest weakness is inexperience and a perceived unreadiness to be president. That’s dangerous. Voters believe keeping America safe and strong is a president’s most important responsibility. …

Tony Blankley will lead off today’s consideration of Obama’s ego.

… But man persists in liking to have things and organizing around groups smaller than humanity. Specifically, modern Western civilization — and the United States, in particular — has done rather well organizing into nations and permitting its people to be free to produce and keep most of the fruits of our labor.

Reading Obama’s Berlin speech, I see dangerous suggestions that he doesn’t share that happy view of American prosperity. As he said, while he came to Berlin as “a proud citizen of the United States,” he also came to Berlin as “a fellow citizen of the world.” Putting aside the thought that a rally in Berlin in front of a quarter-million glistening-eyed, bosom-clenching, swooning Germans is a historically awkward spot for a leader to proclaim his worldwide goals for tomorrow, his actual words are disconcerting enough — even if they had been delivered in peaceful Switzerland.

He said: “The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between natives and immigrants cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down. We know that these walls have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a union of promise and prosperity.”

That last sentence would suggest that Obama is not terribly keen about nation-states. It suggests that he believes that nation-states have outgrown their practical and moral utility. That is why, presumably, he says that we must tear down the walls between the countries “with the most” — that would be the United States — and those with the least. That is why he calls for tearing down walls between “natives and (illegal?) immigrants.” That is why he is for strict reductions in carbon emissions for the United States, even if it reduces our prosperity more than it does poorer countries. …

Corner posts on Barack’s ego.

Now we know why Obama took the American flag off his lapel. On July 24, in Berlin, he told us. The American flag is too small to contain him. He is not comfortable being an American citizen, only fully comfortable as a citizen of the world.

But “citizen of the world” is a utopian, unreal, angelic, inhuman term, an abstraction of the sort that leads to immense bloodshed as human irregularities are hacked off and angularity is loudly planed away. I agree with Pete Wehner’s observation on Commentary’s website that one can be a citizen of the United States, but not — in anything like the same sense — of the world.  One can enjoy the natural rights protected by the U.S. Constitution, but will not find such rights protected globally, not even in France, as Byron York pointed out last month and again on Friday.

The Berlin speech also explains why Obama is more likely to praise an “ideal” America than the real America. He is bewitched by abstractions and lofty ideals. That is how he touches the secret chords of the heart of so many millions, the teenage romanticism of a world without different real interests, without the clashes of culture, the force of political arguments about who gets what, when, and how. …

And another Corner post on Obama’s insinuations of racism.

NY Times notes the upcoming 100th anniversary of the first airplane fatality. A reminder of how safe air travel has become.

For the 100th anniversary of powered flight, President Bush in 2004 went to Kitty Hawk, N.C., for a re-enactment of the Wright Brothers’ feat. September will mark another major centennial in aviation history, though no ceremony has been announced: the first death of an airplane passenger.

It was Sept. 17, 1908. Orville Wright was showing off a new “aeroplane” at Fort Myer, Va., for about 2,000 people, including Army brass. He took up a 26-year-old lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps, Thomas E. Selfridge, “an aeroplanist himself,” according to the report in this newspaper. Contemporary accounts vary, but the pair apparently made three and a half successful circuits at an altitude of about 75 feet, before a propeller split and hit other parts of the plane, causing it to crash. Orville was badly hurt.

Still, the Army was impressed, so much so that the War Department eventually bought the Wrights’ invention. Aviation endured, punctuated by occasional catastrophic crashes that have, in the end, made flying much safer, especially in the United States, where the airlines carry some two million people a day on tens of thousands of flights. …

The Onion reports Gore places infant son in spaceship to escape dying earth.

Young Gore sets out for his new home, where the sky is clear,the water is clean, and there are no Republicans.

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Blog post in Canada’s National Post tries to explain male Muslim anger.

Before resting its recent case against Mohammed Momin Khawaja under Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act, the prosecution presented Momin’s former fiancée, Zeba Khan, as the final witness via a video link from Dubai. Ms. Khan reportedly stated in her testimony: “You will not meet a young Muslim man in the world who is not angry about something. Anyone who watches the news, if he wasn’t mad then, a) there’s something wrong with him, or b) he’s ignorant.”

Obviously, not all angry young Muslim men are engaging in violence — nor, of course, are all Muslims terrorists. But many terrorists are found to be Muslims. Ms. Khan’s remark purports to explain the linkage. …

John Fund notes the Ted Stevens indictment.

Now the libs are starting to make fun of Obama. Here’s WaPo’s Dana Milbank.

Barack Obama has long been his party’s presumptive nominee. Now he’s becoming its presumptuous nominee.

Fresh from his presidential-style world tour, during which foreign leaders and American generals lined up to show him affection, Obama settled down to some presidential-style business in Washington yesterday. He ordered up a teleconference with the (current president’s) Treasury secretary, granted an audience to the Pakistani prime minister and had his staff arrange for the chairman of the Federal Reserve to give him a briefing. Then, he went up to Capitol Hill to be adored by House Democrats in a presidential-style pep rally.

Along the way, he traveled in a bubble more insulating than the actual president’s. Traffic was shut down for him as he zoomed about town in a long, presidential-style motorcade, while the public and most of the press were kept in the dark about his activities, which included a fundraiser at the Mayflower where donors paid $10,000 or more to have photos taken with him. His schedule for the day, announced Monday night, would have made Dick Cheney envious: …

John Tierney helps you remove 10 things from your worry list this summer.

For most of the year, it is the duty of the press to scour the known universe looking for ways to ruin your day. The more fear, guilt or angst a news story induces, the better. But with August upon us, perhaps you’re in the mood for a break, so I’ve rounded up a list of 10 things not to worry about on your vacation.

Now, I can’t guarantee you that any of these worries is groundless, because I can’t guarantee you that anything is absolutely safe, including the act of reading a newspaper. With enough money, an enterprising researcher could surely identify a chemical in newsprint or keyboards that is dangerously carcinogenic for any rat that reads a trillion science columns every day.

What I can guarantee is that I wouldn’t spend a nanosecond of my vacation worrying about any of these 10 things. (You can make your own nominations in the TierneyLab blog.)

1. Killer hot dogs. What is it about frankfurters? There was the nitrite scare. Then the grilling-creates-carcinogens alarm. And then, when those menaces ebbed, the weenie warriors fell back on that old reliable villain: saturated fat.

But now even saturated fat isn’t looking so bad, thanks to a rigorous experiment in Israel reported this month. The people on a low-carb, unrestricted-calorie diet consumed more saturated fat than another group forced to cut back on both fat and calories, but those fatophiles lost more weight and ended up with a better cholesterol profile. And this was just the latest in a series of studies contradicting the medical establishment’s predictions about saturated fat.

If you must worry, focus on the carbs in the bun. But when it comes to the fatty frank — or the fatty anything else on vacation — I’d relax.

2. Your car’s planet-destroying A/C. No matter how guilty you feel about your carbon footprint, you don’t have to swelter on the highway to the beach. After doing tests at 65 miles per hour, the mileage experts at edmunds.com report that the aerodynamic drag from opening the windows cancels out any fuel savings from turning off the air-conditioner. …

WSJ’s Kim Strassel interviews the heretical environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg.

… Bjorn Lomborg busted — and that is the only word for it — onto the world scene in 2001 with the publication of his book “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” A one-time Greenpeace enthusiast, he’d originally planned to disprove those who said the environment was getting better. He failed. And to his credit, his book said so, supplying a damning critique of today’s environmental pessimism. Carefully researched, it offered endless statistics — from official sources such as the U.N. — showing that from biodiversity to global warming, there simply were no apocalypses in the offing. “Our history shows that we solve more problems than we create,” he tells me. For his efforts, Mr. Lomborg was labeled a heretic by environmental groups — whose fundraising depends on scaring the jeepers out of the public — and became more hated by these alarmists than even (if possible) President Bush.

Yet the experience left Mr. Lomborg with a taste for challenging conventional wisdom. In 2004, he invited eight of the world’s top economists — including four Nobel Laureates — to Copenhagen, where they were asked to evaluate the world’s problems, think of the costs and efficiencies attached to solving each, and then produce a prioritized list of those most deserving of money. The well-publicized results (and let it be said here that Mr. Lomborg is no slouch when it comes to promoting himself and his work) were stunning. While the economists were from varying political stripes, they largely agreed. The numbers were just so compelling: $1 spent preventing HIV/AIDS would result in about $40 of social benefits, so the economists put it at the top of the list (followed by malnutrition, free trade and malaria). In contrast, $1 spent to abate global warming would result in only about two cents to 25 cents worth of good; so that project dropped to the bottom.

“Most people, average people, when faced with these clear choices, would pick the $40-of-good project over others — that’s rational,” says Mr. Lomborg. “The problem is that most people are simply presented with a menu of projects, with no prices and no quantities. What the Copenhagen Consensus was trying to do was put the slices and prices on a menu. And then require people to make choices.” …

Walter Williams on the strangle hold greens have on Congress.

Let’s face it. The average individual American has little or no clout with Congress and can be safely ignored. But it’s a different story with groups such as Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy. When they speak, Congress listens. Unlike the average American, they are well organized, loaded with cash and well positioned to be a disobedient congressman’s worse nightmare. Their political and economic success has been a near disaster for our nation.

For several decades, environmentalists have managed to get Congress to keep most of our oil resources off-limits to exploration and drilling. They’ve managed to have the Congress enact onerous regulations that have made refinery construction impossible. Similarly, they’ve used the courts and Congress to completely stymie the construction of nuclear power plants. As a result, energy prices are at historical highs and threaten our economy and national security.

What’s the political response to our energy problems? It’s more congressional and White House kowtowing to environmentalists, farmers and multi-billion dollar corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland. Their “solution,” rather than to solve our oil supply problem by permitting drilling for the billions upon billions of barrels of oil beneath the surface of our country, is to enact the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that mandates that oil companies increase the amount of ethanol mixed with gasoline. Anyone with an ounce of brains would have realized that diverting crops from food to fuel use would raise the prices of corn-fed livestock, such as pork, beef, chicken and dairy products, and products made from corn, such as cereals. Ethanol production has led to increases in other grain prices, such as soybean and wheat. Since the U.S. is the world’s largest grain producer and exporter, higher grain prices have had a huge impact on food prices worldwide. …

American.com tells us what happened to the climate nonsense of Great Britain’s Tories.

With less than two years remaining until the next general election, Britain’s Conservative Party has surged to an historic 22-point opinion-poll lead over the incumbent Labour Party. This turnabout has followed an energetic campaign by the Tory leader, David Cameron, to wrench the party out of its ideological comfort zone and overhaul its public image. Cameron has indeed handled many issues deftly. However, his initial attempt to spark a bidding war over climate alarmism backfired enormously, and it should serve as a warning to other Western political parties that are trying to burnish their green credentials.

From the moment he was elected Conservative leader in 2005, Cameron was eager to woo the upper-class voters who had shunned the party in the post-Thatcher era. He chose to make environmental policy the focus of his stylistic revolution, and he commissioned Zac Goldsmith (a fellow Eton graduate and director of The Ecologist magazine) to chair a “Quality of Life” policy group. Goldsmith, an heir to a billion-dollar fortune and well-known green activist, claimed “an invitation to be radical.” …

Does it feel like gas prices go up faster than they go down? Slate’s Explainer says you’re right.

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Bill Kristol says running against Congress will be a winning strategy.

… Given the unpopularity of the current Democratic Congress, given Americans’ tendency to prefer divided government, given the voters’ repudiations of the Republicans in 2006 and of the Democrats in 1994 — isn’t the prospect of across-the-board, one-party Democratic governance more likely to move votes to McCain than to Obama?

So I cheered up once again. For it will become increasingly obvious, as we approach November, that the Democrats will continue to control Congress for the next couple of years. But if the voters elect Obama as president, they’ll be putting Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in untrammeled control of our future.

In 1948, a Republican Congress, which had taken power two years before with great expectations after a decade and a half of Democratic control, had become unpopular. Harry Truman lambasted it as a no-good, do-nothing Congress — and he rode that assault to the White House. We’ll soon start hearing more from McCain about the deficiencies of today’s surge-opposing, drilling-blocking, earmark-loving Congress.

And McCain will then assert that if you don’t like the Congress in which Senator Obama serves in the majority right now, you really should be alarmed about a President Obama rubber-stamping the deeds of a Democratic Congress next year. A President McCain, on the other hand, could check Congressional appetites — as well as work across the aisle with a Democratic Congress in a bipartisan spirit where appropriate. …

Byron York says, “What do you mean Obama’s not funny?”

… Last week, Jon Stewart on The Daily Show got an enthusiastic reception from his audience with a routine about Obama’s media entourage. Stewart tossed to the team of reporters who were said to be traveling with the Obama campaign, some of whom had abandoned John McCain to cover the more exciting Democrat.  They were positively giddy about Obama.

“The commander-in-chief,” said one.

“Did you see when the president hit that three-pointer?” asked another.

“Nothing but net,” said a third.

Stewart interrupted. “He’s not the president.” Pause.“Barack Obama’s not the president.”

A confused silence. “Are you sure?” the reporters asked.

Stewart wondered whether the reporters were “nervous that this maybe plays into the idea of the press being a little Obama-centric, a little sycophantic.” Not at all, they said, exchanging stories of this or that treasured contact with the Great One. A moment later, Stewart asked what they learned during the trip.

“I’ll tell you something, Jon,” said one. “Barack Obama kinda gives me a boner.”

Stewart dutifully faked embarrassment and exasperation. “Anything else?” he asked. All the others raised their hands. They, too, were, well, thrilled to be in Obama’s presence.

“I’m not talking about boners,” Stewart said.

“Seriously,” said one last reporter. “They should call this guy Barack O-Boner.” …

Ever wonder why Europeans like Obama? VDH has answers.

Let us count the ways:

1) Obama’s tax code, support of big government programs and redistribution of income, and subservience to UN directives delight the European masses—especially at a time when their own governments are trying to cut taxes, government, seek closer relations with the US, and ask a petulant, pampered public to grow up. …

David Harsanyi says media bias won’t win the election.

Once again the ugly shadow of “media bias” is darkening the otherwise wholesome world of partisan politics.

Actually, media bias is so terrible, so unjust, so despicable, just about everyone wants to be offended by it.

Take, for instance, the recent flap over the New York Times editorial page decision to reject a John McCain op-ed regarding Iraq only a week after running a Barack Obama column on the very same topic.

As the adults among us probably already know, “fairness” is only a fairy tale. So The Times had no obligation to publish an opinion it found objectionable.

Yet, for McCain, the snub worked miracles. Rather than being handed another mind-numbing essay on Iraq policy, Republicans were allowed to come together and protest the liberal media’s refusal to publish an op-ed none of them would have taken the time to read in the first place. …

Speaking of media bias, this is a good place to put the second part of the Columbia Journalism Review piece on the NY Times.

Random thoughts from Thomas Sowell.

… When New York Times writer Linda Greenhouse recently declared the 1987 confirmation hearings for Judge Robert Bork “both fair and profound,” it was as close to a declaration of moral bankruptcy as possible. Those hearings were a triumph of character assassination by politicians with no character of their own. The country is still paying the price, as potential judicial nominees decline to be nominated and then smeared on nationwide television.

Some of the most emotionally powerful words are undefined, such as “social justice,” “a living wage,” “price gouging” or a “fragile” environment, for example. Such terms are especially valuable to politicians during an election year, for these terms can attract the votes of people who mean very different‘ and even mutually contradictory‘ things when they use these words. …

John Fund spots a new book ranking presidents.

In November, we will definitively rank our two presidential candidates, but whoever wins the election will eventually be subject to yet another ranking effort — that of historians who, every decade or so, compare all the U.S. presidents from the Founding to the current day. Inevitably, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington end up at the top of such lists, and Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan — both notoriously ineffectual, among other things — at the bottom. But the judgments of historians can often seem arbitrary or recondite, not to mention politically weighted, making the whole effort seem like a mysterious parlor game.

Alvin Felzenberg is not an academic historian, although he holds a doctorate in politics from Princeton. He has also held senior staff positions in Congress and most recently served as the spokesman for the 9/11 Commission. He thinks presidential ratings should be demystified and opened up to laymen with an interest in American history. He wants to restart the conversation about what we want in a leader. It is a good time to ponder such things.

In “The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn’t),” Mr. Felzenberg draws up a report card for each U.S. chief executive, assigning numerical scores to six categories. …

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Last week, fresh off running an op-ed by Obama, the NY Times refused to run one by McCain. Power Line posts on the subject. That refusal and McCain’s complaining last week about the biased media coverage of Obama was almost too rich for words. McCain sucked up to the press for years. It’s nice to see him getting the short end of that stick.

Along those lines, Ann Coulter had some thoughts.

ck before the Republican Party was saddled with John McCain as its nominee, The New York Times called him “the only Republican who promises to end the George Bush style of governing from and on behalf of a small, angry fringe.” The paper praised him for “working across the aisle to develop sound bipartisan legislation” and predicted that he would appeal to “a broader range of Americans than the rest of the Republican field.”

At the same time, the Times denounced “the real” Rudy Giuliani as “a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man” and Mitt Romney as “shape-shifting,” claiming it’s “hard to find an issue on which he has not repositioned himself to the right since he was governor of Massachusetts.”

Here are a few issues I found that Romney hadn’t switched positions on, and it wasn’t “hard”: tax cuts, health care, same-sex marriage, illegal immigration and the surge in Iraq. The only issue on which Romney had changed his position was abortion, irritating people who would prefer for Republicans to refuse to run in places like Massachusetts and New York City in order to preserve their perfect pro-life credentials.

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof echoed the editorial page in early February with a column titled: “Who Is More Electable?” In the very first sentence, Kristof concluded that McCain is “the Republican most likely to win the November election.” Kristof touted McCain’s “unusual appeal among swing voters” and cited polls that showed McCain would do “stunningly well” in a general election.

Also in February, CNN produced polls showing McCain doing better than “generic Republican” in a general election, which Jeffrey Toobin said was a tribute to how “well respected” McCain is. Hey, is it too late for us to nominate “generic Republican”?

And on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” from the way Chris Matthews carried on about McCain, you’d think he had caught a glimpse of Obama’s ankle. Matthews said that McCain was “the real straight talker … a profile in courage … more seasoned than the current president, a patriot, of course … honest and respected in the media. He has all the pluses in the world of a sort of a, you know, an Audie Murphy, if you will, a real war hero.”

I guess the party’s over. …

Now is an opportunity to include part one of an item from the Columbia Journalism Review on the present condition of the NY Times. Pickerhead has been holding this for a week or so. It is 6,000 words so part two will be in Pickings tomorrow. This comprehensive review of Pinch Sulzberger’s tenure is more balanced than some of the items that merely celebrate the continuing collapse of the paper. There is not much doubt Pinch has been a disaster, and there’s not much doubt the paper has a more pronounced left-wing bias.

Corporate annual meetings are generally drowsy affairs—a pep talk by management, some PowerPoint graphics, a little predetermined voting, all topped off by a parade of cranks to the microphones to excoriate management about their pet causes. April’s annual gathering of shareholders in The New York Times Company certainly featured all of those ingredients, down to the codger who shuffled in late, grabbed the seat next to mine, and promptly dozed off.

But beneath the surface routine there was an undercurrent of tension. Shareholders in the Times Company have been taking it on the chin recently, to say the least. In the five years between 2003 and the end of 2007, the Times’s stock lost about two-thirds of its value before rebounding slightly this year. As with most newspapers, daily circulation has been steadily eroding for years, dropping about 4 percent in the six months before the meeting. Sunday circulation has done even worse, declining almost 10 percent in those same six months.

The company’s “challenging” (to use CEO Janet Robinson’s word) first quarter of 2008 pointed to an even bumpier road ahead as the economy softens. Some bright spots poke through the gloom, but company-wide revenue was down about 9 percent year-over-year, with newspaper classifieds free-falling almost 23 percent compared to the first quarter of 2007. Despite the steep decline in the Times’s stock, an April report by media analyst Paul Ginocchio at Deutsche Bank concluded it was still overpriced: “We believe NYT’s valuation has been inflated well above fundamental levels, and continue to see a near-term selling opportunity,” his report said. …

… The company’s financial problems are hardly unique in the print world; no one has yet solved the challenge to newspapers posed by the digital revolution. Still, the pall hanging over the annual meeting seemed especially striking given the setting, the sleek new TimesCenter, a 378-seat auditorium appended to the company’s new fifty-two-story Renzo Piano-designed headquarters, a building that cost the company about $600 million. The Times Building is just one of several big outlays the company undertook in recent years, even as its financial fortunes worsened. From 2003 through 2006, the company spent hundreds of millions buying back its own stock only to see its value steeply depreciate. Last year, it chose to substantially raise its cash dividend to shareholders, a principal source of income for members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family that controls the company.

Despite pressure from large shareholders, Times management has also been reluctant to shed some of its under-performing assets, such as The Boston Globe, which the company acquired in 1993 for $1.1 billion, a price that many critics called absurdly high even at the time. That judgment was vindicated last year when the company had to absorb a painful $814 million write-down on the Globe deal and a later acquisition of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. …

Roger Simon comments on the troubles of John Edwards.

… But now that the cat is out the bag, I will say what I wanted to say then. John Edwards–he of constructing a 28,000 square foot home while preaching about the two Americas and remonstrating about the environment–is one of the most reprehensible schmucks to appear on the American political scene in some time. And that’s saying something. That he played this game while his wife had cancer makes it contemptible beyond words. Now we know why he was always primping in the mirror. It is narcissism unbounded. …

Slate wonders why the media is ignoring the current John Edwards story.

Everybody had a good laugh last August when Roll Call broke the story about Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, getting arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for playing footsies in a toilet stall. The late-night talk show hosts mined the material for days; Slate produced a re-enactment of the bathroom ballet; and newspapers, magazines, and cable channels shredded Craig.

The angle taken by most reporters and commentators wasn’t that Craig’s restroom conduct was particularly shameful. The press doesn’t object to same-sex sex at all, nor should it. Craig’s true offense, said the press and the clowns, was hypocrisy, which they consider an inexcusable crime. Craig had supported both federal and Idaho bans on same-sex marriage, had opposed hate crime legislation that would extend protections to gays, and had earned a perfect 0 rating (PDF) from the Human Rights Campaign, a gay lobby. And he had denied and denied any and all gayness while trying to recruit some action in a bathroom!

Although the Craig story and the John Edwards story, currently unfolding thanks to the National Enquirer, aren’t directly analogous, they have a bit in common. Edwards, too, may be a sex hypocrite. The tabloid called Edwards a cheater last October and the father of a love child in December, and last night the Enquirer posted a story about Edwards’ visit to his alleged mistress and child at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night. …

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Before we get into the normal news of the day, (beginning with a hilarious column by Gerard Baker) a WSJ Op-ed contains an important germ of thought about the overall robust condition of the world’s economy. The author argues for better metaphors that acknowledge that strength.

… There’s an old saying that if your neighbors are losing their jobs it’s a recession; if you are losing yours it’s a depression. It’s therefore unfortunate that such a large fraction of prominent forecasters hails from the financial community. Their views are colored by the turmoil suffered in their industry. In an earlier generation, many of the best-known forecasters ran economics departments in nonfinancial companies. Today these are a dying breed, thanks to the past decades of corporate cost-cutting.

We are not a nation of whiners, but we do have a lot of alarmists. It is becoming politically incorrect to suggest that the economy is basically sound.

We shouldn’t expect forecasters to shrug off the depressing effects of what’s happening in their own back yards. This is human nature. We just need to keep things in perspective when we listen to them. A more objective diagnosis is especially needed during an election year, in which many unfounded fears are broadcast and amplified by the media.

A natural system has built-in redundancy. It manages and heals itself. The economic system is no exception. On this page about 10 years ago, Penny Russell and I argued against the idea that the economy is a “house of cards,” susceptible to collapse as soon as a few cards are dislodged. We suggested that it’s more like a beehive. The future of the hive does not depend on full employment for all the worker bees. In fact, an accident can put many bees out of action without compromising the hive as a whole.

Metaphors are important. If they are off the mark, they can deceive. But good metaphors can help maintain perspective amid chaos. …

Gerard Baker has fun with The Tour.

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.

And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth – for the first time – to bring the light unto all the world. …

David Brooks too. He’s been absent from these pages lately, having drunk the Obama Kool-Aid and all. But, now he’s come back to earth.

… Obama’s tone was serious. But he pulled out his “this is our moment” rhetoric and offered visions of a world transformed. Obama speeches almost always have the same narrative arc. Some problem threatens. The odds are against the forces of righteousness. But then people of good faith unite and walls come tumbling down. Obama used the word “walls” 16 times in the Berlin speech, and in 11 of those cases, he was talking about walls coming down.

The Berlin blockade was thwarted because people came together. Apartheid ended because people came together and walls tumbled. Winning the cold war was the same: “People of the world,” Obama declared, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa, I have to confess my American soul was stirred. It seemed like the overture for a new yet quintessentially American campaign.

But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more.

When John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, their rhetoric soared, but their optimism was grounded in the reality of politics, conflict and hard choices. Kennedy didn’t dream of the universal brotherhood of man. He drew lines that reflected hard realities: “There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin.” Reagan didn’t call for a kumbaya moment. He cited tough policies that sparked harsh political disagreements — the deployment of U.S. missiles in response to the Soviet SS-20s — but still worked. …

Debra Saunders comments on the tour.

Should Americans become more like Our Betters in Europe?

Clearly the 200,000 Germans who gathered to watch Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama at Berlin’s Tiergarten on Thursday thought so. And in that Obama liberally challenged U.S. policies on the war in Iraq, global warming and U.S. interrogation measures, he gave the German audience the affirmation it craved.

A Pew Research Center poll showed 82 percent of Germans had confidence that Obama would do the right thing on world affairs. No wonder.

In Germany, it was all wunderbar. Addressing the throng as a “proud citizen of the United States,” but also “a fellow citizen of the world,” Obama seemed to be giving Europeans a role and a voice in an election in which they have no vote.

Not that Europeans haven’t tried to play a role in U.S. electoral politics before. Who can forget Operation Clark County? That was the campaign waged by British paper the Guardian that encouraged Brits to write to voters in a swing county in the swing state of Ohio to urge them to vote for 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry — because “the result of the U.S. election will affect the lives of millions around the world, but those of us outside the 50 states have had no say in it.”

Well, they had their say, and Clark was the only county in Ohio to switch from supporting Gore in 2000 to Bush GOP in 2004. George W. Bush garnered some 25 percent more votes than in 2000. …

More of our favorites – David Warren.

‘People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time.”

That is what Barack Obama said, to a crowd of a couple hundred thousand, on Thursday, after stepping out of his spaceship in Germany. From where? From Amerika, we understand.

The very next sentence: “I know my country has not perfected itself.”

But Obama’s transition team is only beginning its work. America might be fixed during his first week in office. And then, Europe can be fixed. …

For a change of subject, Sam Thernstrom says it’s good to have a climate debate just leave Al The Poseur out of it.

Al Gore continues to build a remarkably mixed legacy as the leader of the movement to combat global climate change. For many years, the climate debate focused primarily on the scientific questions; today, that controversy continues but it is increasingly marginal in political circles, where attention has turned to the far more difficult task of developing an effective policy response to warming.

Mr. Gore’s activism on the science of climate change has earned him the attention of the world; when he speaks, everyone listens. But what they hear from him on climate policy is sheer nonsense. Worse, it is dangerous nonsense; Gore deliberately obscures the critical questions that need to be carefully considered when crafting climate policy. Gore’s proposal to produce 100 percent of American electricity from renewable sources within a decade should be rejected–indeed, ridiculed–even by those who share Gore’s goal of combating climate change.

Almost no one believes Gore’s proposal is even technically feasible, much less economically realistic. This is the sort of goal that a politician plucks out of thin air just because it sounds bold; it has no bearing on reality whatsoever. Renewables produce roughly 2.3 percent of our power today; it may be possible to increase that number significantly, but the idea of generating all of America’s electricity with renewables within a decade is simply laughable. Underscoring the absurdity of this agenda is Gore’s silence on the one source of energy that realistically could quickly produce significant amounts of reliable, affordable, zero-emissions energy: nuclear. …

And Michael Barone says the enviro-lunatics may be on their way out.

Sometimes public opinion doesn’t flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn’t change anybody’s mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. Evidently, the experience of paying more than $50 for a tankful gets people thinking we should stop worrying so much about global warming and the environmental dangers of oil wells on the outer continental shelf and in Alaska. Drill now! Nuke the caribou!

Our system of divided government and litigation-friendly regulation makes it hard for our society to do things and easy for adroit lobbyists and lawyers to stop them. Nations with more centralized power and less democratic accountability find it easier: France and Japan generate most of their electricity by nuclear power and Chicago, where authority is more centralized and accountability less robust than in most of the country, depends more on nuclear power than almost all the rest of the nation.

In contrast, lobbyists and litigators for environmental restriction groups have produced energy policies that I suspect future generations will regard as lunatic. We haven’t built a new nuclear plant for some 30 years, since a Jane Fonda movie exaggerated their dangers. We have allowed states to ban oil drilling on the outer continental shelf, prompted by the failure of 40- or 50-year-old technology in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969, though current technology is much better, as shown by the lack of oil spills in the waters off Louisiana and Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina.

We have banned oil drilling on a very small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that is godforsaken tundra (I have been to the North Slope oil fields, similar terrain — I know) for fear of disturbing a herd of caribou — a species of hoofed animals that is in no way endangered or scarce. …

English speaking peoples have much to be proud of; nothing more so than the abolitionist movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries which was led by William Wilberforce. WSJ’s Bookshelf reviews a new biography.

… Full success would come only two decades later, as a result of a persistent campaign to shift public opinion, principally by showing the horrors of the slave trade while arguing that its abolition would not wreck the economy or merely benefit foreigners who would step into the market. Wilberforce guided a coalition to make the case for abolition. Mr. Hague’s insider knowledge of politics — he is himself a member of Parliament and a former leader of Britain’s Conservative Party — sharpens his analysis of Wilberforce’s own campaign and deepens his admiration for its success. Winning over both public opinion and key politicians eventually allowed Wilberforce to push abolition through. Lord Grenville, as prime minister, introduced a motion in the House of Lords in 1807 that made its passage in the House of Commons a foregone conclusion.

As the debate in the Commons reached a climax, Samuel Romilly rose to give a speech that poignantly contrasted Wilberforce’s victory with Napoleon Bonaparte’s career. When Bonaparte seemed to have reached the summit of his ambition, he could not escape “recollection of the blood he had spilled and the oppressions he had committed.” Wilberforce, by contrast, could enjoy the consciousness of having saved “so many millions of his fellow creatures.” When Romilly concluded his tribute, the House of Commons rose to its feet and cheered. …

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Last week’s prisoner/cadaver exchange between Lebanon and Israel has attracted a lot of comment for which we provide a round-up today. David Warren is first.

… It is right to recover the bodies. But at what cost?

This is something the postmodern mind, which I find increasingly unhinged, is incapable of processing. There are costs involved in obtaining any benefit: the world is constructed in that way. These costs are not always denominated in money; and even when they are, we forget that money stands as a counter for the labour and sacrifice expended to obtain it.

Whether we are dealing with indifferent small purchases — when, as the Yorkshireman says, “You can’t have (both) the penny and the bun” — or with huge political transactions touching everyone — the cost of what we propose must be calculated. And the bigger the measure, the more prudence (i.e. sanity) requires that we consider all the foreseeable costs — including, of course, the costs of not taking action. …

David Bernstein in Volokh wonders if Israel should have a death penalty for terrorists.

The farce plays itself out over and over. Israel captures terrorists, some of whom are guilty of horrific mass murders. Capturing the terrorists often requires the sacrifice of great human, financial, and intelligence resources. The terrorists’ allies respond by planning various operations to obtain human “bargaining chips,” dead or alive, to use in exchange for their captured allies. Israel then agrees to release anywhere from a handful to hundreds of terrorists in exchange for dead bodies or one or a handful of live captives. The released terrorists become heroes, and some go on to commit new murders.

The prisoner exchange taking place today is hardly the worst of them, but it illustrates the point. Israel is releasing Samir Kuntar, guilty of the horrific, cold-blooded murder of a child (and who is shamefully apparently a national hero in Lebanon) and two adults, in exchange for the bodies of two dead soldiers. The soldiers themselves were abducted in an attempt to gain Kuntar’s release, an incident that provoked the 2006 Lebanon Hezbollah war, and led to the death of dozens of more Israelis.

I simply don’t understand why Israel doesn’t put an end to this madness and institute the death penalty for murder caused by terrorism. I have mixed emotions about the death penalty in general, but this is one circumstance in which I think the arguments in favor are overwhelming. …

Mona Charen writes on the culture that celebrates a child killer.

… This week, Kuntar, dressed in fatigues and sporting a Hitlerian mustache and haircut, walked down a red carpet arrayed for him in Beirut. The government closed all offices and declared a national day of celebration. Tens of thousands of Lebanese cheered, waved flags, threw confetti, and set off fireworks as Hezbollah staged a rally to celebrate their “victory” over Israel. Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” leader of the Palestinian Authority, sent “blessings to Samir Kuntar’s family.” PA spokesman Ahmad Abdul Rahman sent “warm blessings to Hezbollah on the return of the heroes of freedom headed by the great Samir Kuntar.” …

Mitch Albom too.

… “Samir! Samir!” the crowd reportedly yelled. This for a man convicted of smashing a child’s head into pieces.

You can take whatever side you like in the Israeli-Palestinian debate. You can argue who is entitled to land and statehood and borders.

But you cannot defend the frenzied lovefest that took place for Kuntar in Lebanon, as if he were some long-lost statesmen, instead of a common murderer who did the worst thing you can do: take the life of a child. What religion condones that? What holy book says that is a good thing? A banner in Beirut, according to the New York Times, read “God’s Achievement Through Our Hands.”

What God would have a child’s murder on anyone’s hands? How do people celebrate such a killer? …

Contentions says prisoner prices will go up.

The logic of prisoner swaps dictates that, over time, successive swaps between states and terrorist organizations become more expensive to states.  This is because terrorist organizations typically exchange prisoners only when they can declare victory – and victory can hardly be declared if a given deal looks paltry compared to one that preceded it.  (On the other hand, when terrorist organizations lose, their captives are, ideally, liberated in the process of their defeat.)  For this reason, states engaging in prisoner swap negotiations with terrorist organizations need to keep the possibility of future prisoner negotiations firmly in mind: giving away too much might make future – and possibly more important – prisoner exchanges cost-prohibitive. …

Do you ever wonder how the Arab world got to the point of worshipping brutality? Anne Applebaum looks at textbooks in Saudi schools.

Because they are so clearly designed for the convenience of large testing companies, I had always assumed that multiple-choice tests, the bane of any fourth grader’s existence, were a quintessentially American phenomenon. But apparently I was wrong. According to a report put out by the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom last week, it seems that Saudi Arabians find them useful, too. Here, for example, is a multiple-choice question that appears in a recent edition of a Saudi fourth-grade textbook, Monotheism and Jurisprudence, in a section that attempts to teach children to distinguish “true” from “false” belief in god:

Q. Is belief true in the following instances:
a) A man prays but hates those who are virtuous.
b) A man professes that there is no deity other than God but loves the unbelievers.
c) A man worships God alone, loves the believers, and hates the unbelievers.

The correct answer, of course, is c). According to the Wahhabi imams who wrote this textbook, it isn’t enough just to worship god or just to love other believers—it is important to hate unbelievers as well. By the same token, b) is also wrong. Even a man who worships god cannot be said to have “true belief” if he loves unbelievers.

“Unbelievers,” in this context, are Christians and Jews. In fact, any child who sticks around in Saudi schools until ninth grade will eventually be taught that “Jews and Christians are enemies of believers.” They will also be taught that Jews conspire to “gain sole control of the world,” that the Christian crusades never ended, and that on Judgment Day “the rocks or the trees” will call out to Muslims to kill Jews. …

Karl Rove says both candidates have flip-flopped.

… Sen. McCain has changed his position on drilling for oil on the outer continental shelf. But because he explained this change by saying that $4-a-gallon gasoline caused him to re-evaluate his position, voters are likely to accept it. Of course, Mr. McCain doesn’t explain why prices at the pump haven’t also forced him to re-evaluate his opposition to drilling on 2000 acres in the 19.2-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But, then, what politician is always consistent?

Mr. McCain flip-flopped on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. He’d voted against them at the time, saying in 2001 that he’d “like to see more of this tax cut shared by working Americans.” Now he supports their continuation because, he says, letting them expire would increase taxes and he opposes tax hikes. Besides, he recognizes that the tax cuts have helped the economy.

At least Mr. McCain fesses up to and explains his changes. Sen. Obama has shifted recently on public financing, free trade, Nafta, welfare reform, the D.C. gun ban, whether the Iranian Quds Force is a terrorist group, immunity for telecom companies participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the status of Jerusalem, flag lapel pins, and disavowing Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And not only does he refuse to explain these flip-flops, he acts as if they never occurred.

Then there is Iraq. …

Thomas Sowell continues the column from two days ago.

We don’t look to arsonists to help put out fires but we do look to politicians to help solve financial crises that they played a major role in creating.

How did the government help create the current financial mess? Let me count the ways.

In addition to federal laws that pressure lenders to lend to people they would not otherwise lend to, and in places where they would otherwise not invest, state and local governments have in various parts of the country so severely restricted building as to lead to skyrocketing housing prices, which in turn have led many people to resort to “creative financing” in order to buy these artificially more expensive homes.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve System brought interest rates down to such low levels that “creative financing” with interest-only mortgage loans enabled people to buy houses that they could not otherwise afford.

But there is no free lunch. Interest-only loans do not continue indefinitely. After a few years, such mortgage loans typically require the borrower to begin paying back some of the principal, which means that the monthly mortgage payments will begin to rise.

Since everyone knew that the Federal Reserve System’s extremely low interest rates were not going to last forever, much “creative financing” also involved adjustable-rate mortgages, where the interest charged by the lender would rise when interest rates in the economy as a whole rose. …

Paul Gigot has details on some of the ways the government helped create this crisis.

Angelo Mozilo was in one of his Napoleonic moods. It was October 2003, and the CEO of Countrywide Financial was berating me for The Wall Street Journal’s editorials raising doubts about the accounting of Fannie Mae. I had just been introduced to him by Franklin Raines, then the CEO of Fannie, whom I had run into by chance at a reception hosted by the Business Council, the CEO group that had invited me to moderate a couple of panels.

Mr. Mozilo loudly declared that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I didn’t understand accounting or the mortgage markets, and that I was in the pocket of Fannie’s competitors, among other insults. Mr. Raines, always smoother than Mr. Mozilo, politely intervened to avoid an extended argument, and Countrywide’s bantam rooster strutted off.

I’ve thought about that episode more than once recently amid the meltdown and government rescue of Fannie and its sibling, Freddie Mac. Trying to defend the mortgage giants, Paul Krugman of the New York Times recently wrote, “What you need to know here is that the right — the WSJ editorial page, Heritage, etc. — hates, hates, hates Fannie and Freddie. Why? Because they don’t want quasi-public entities competing with Angelo Mozilo.”

That’s a howler even by Mr. Krugman’s standards. Fannie Mae and Mr. Mozilo weren’t competitors; they were partners. Fannie helped to make Countrywide as profitable as it once was by buying its mortgages in bulk. Mr. Raines — following predecessor Jim Johnson — and Mr. Mozilo made each other rich. Which explains why Mr. Johnson could feel so comfortable asking Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) to discuss a sweetheart mortgage with Mr. Mozilo, and also explains the Mozilo-Raines tag team in 2003. …

Times, UK thinks oil prices might be at their tipping point.

The Economist reports on East Africa’s pirates.

ON A dazzling morning in April, the Playa de Bakio, a Spanish fishing boat, limped into paradisal Port Victoria in the Seychelles, damaged by grenades. Its crew of 26 was shaken. A Spanish military aircraft flew them to momentary fame in Spain. The fishermen had been held by Somali pirates for a week and freed after a ransom of $1.2m—so it was rumoured—was paid, in contravention of Spanish law.

The boat, a big industrial vessel known as a purse seiner, was easy prey. The pirates attacked on a speedboat launched from a mother ship, a captured Asian fishing ship known as a longliner. Once on board, they regaled the crew with tales of famine in their villages. Some of the Spaniards felt sorry for them. When one of the pirates stripped his shirt off, “he was all bones, no meat at all,” said a Basque crewman. The Spaniards were less enamoured of the pirates when they threatened them with machineguns and knives. “They valued life less than cockroaches,” said the skipper. …

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Peter Wehner of Contentions was surprised by Obama’s continued refusal to acknowledge the value of the surge.

In an interview yesterday with Senator Obama, ABC’s Terry Moran listed just a few of the by now seemingly endless data points demonstrating that the so-called surge, which Obama opposed at the time it was announced, is a success. Moran then asked this (excellent) question: Knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?”

Obama’s answer was, “No.”

This must surely rank as among the most misinformed, ideological, and reckless statements by a presidential candidate in modern times. The McCain campaign should do everything they can to make Obama pay a high price for it. That one word answer, “No,” should be advertised in bright neon lights. It should become Exhibit A that Obama not only doesn’t have the “judgment to lead;” he has now supplied us with evidence that few people possess judgment as flawed as his. …

Jennifer Rubin agrees. Are they preaching to the choir?

… How will all this play? It depends if the American people, after learning of the surge’s great success and the brilliance of our commander there, find it troubling that the candidate with no national security experience would throw it all away and disregard knowledgeable advice. It is peculiar in the extreme to have a nominee who when presented with potential victory says ” I wouldn’t have tried to win.” One can imagine that a victory he would not himself have pursued himself (and is apparently sorry we did) is one he has little interest in securing. Hence, his light regard for the advice of Petraeus.

The McCain camp must be celebrating. They have finally gotten lucky.

Jonah Goldberg thinks the surge is yesterday’s news. That elections are about the future.

… Politically, the surge is a bit like the Supreme Court’s recent decision affirming the constitutional right to own a gun. Obama’s position on gun rights, a miasma of murky equivocation, would hurt him if gun control were a big issue this year. It isn’t, thanks to the high court’s ruling. That’s a huge boon.

The surge has done likewise with the war. If it were going worse, McCain’s Churchillian rhetoric would match reality better. But with sectarian violence nearly gone, al Qaeda in Iraq almost totally routed and even Sadrist militias seemingly neutralized, the stakes of withdrawal seem low enough for Americans to feel comfortable voting for Obama. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s support for an American troop drawdown pushes the perceived stakes even lower.

Recall that Bill Clinton, with his dovish record and roster of “character issues,” would never have been elected if the Soviet Union hadn’t collapsed in 1991. With the Cold War over, the successful Reagan surge (and Bush pere’s cleanup efforts) made rolling the dice on Clinton tolerable. The McCain surge (and Bush fils’ success at averting another 9/11) produces the same effect for Obama.

A silver lining for McCain is that Obama’s arrogance and sense of indebtedness to his party’s antiwar base have elicited a series of credibility-damaging zigzags on Iraq. Obama would do better to promise peace with honor as soon as possible, then quickly move on to economy talk. The subsequent bleating from the bug-out lefties would be useful testament to Obama’s rumored centrism. …

David Warren comments on the tour.

Seriousness is a perception, and I am struck by the tone of American media, even from the conservative side, as they review the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. (John McCain is also running, but they’re not covering that.) The welter of his empty rhetorical gestures and contradictions are analyzed with a gravity to suggest deep thought had gone into his “evolving” electoral manifesto.

Running for the Democrat nomination, Obama posed as the reliable progressive, free of all Clintonian baggage — as a kind of “Hillary Clinton you can believe in.” He would get out of Iraq, cut a deal with Iran, bomb Pakistan, trash America’s free trade agreements, deliver socialist medicine, cool global warming, and “heal” everything that ails you. Shades of John F. Kennedy: at least in his supporters’ imagination.

Running now against a Republican, and with the progressive vote safely in the bag, he will stay the course in Iraq, confront Iran, show diplomacy in Pakistan, defend free trade, spend cautiously, ignore global warming, and “heal” everything that ails you. Shades of Ronald Reagan.

The most laughable part of the campaign is the new, first-ever, “I am the world” tour, currently in progress. Obama, realizing he has no credentials in this field, but is even more a rock star abroad than at home, seeks photo ops looking presidential in front of backdrops such as the Brandenburg Gate. Of course, he cannot get all the backdrops he wants, since his demand for them as a mere candidate for office is unprecedented, and leaves foreign leaders embarrassed that he asked. …

David Harsanyi too. He thinks Barack could learn a lot there.

The Barack Obama “Change Is Coming” World Tour touches down in Europe this week after a triumphant jaunt through the Middle East.

The trip is significant in more than one respect. After all, there is genuine (if incremental) “change” budding in European politics — most of it an attempt to turn back the kinds of stifling economic controls and regulations that the presumptive Democratic nominee seems to support here at home.

Obama will visit Germany, France and England this week. It just happens that those Western European nations have turned to right-of-center coalitions to remedy corrosive welfare systems, never-ending entitlements, unchecked union power and overregulation of industry.

In England mere months ago, the left-of-center Labor Party lost more than 400 seats in local elections, including finishing off the reign of London Mayor Ken “The Red” Livingstone.

In France, Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy swept into power in 2007, promising to cut back welfare rolls and revitalize the floundering French economy. In Germany, Angela Merkel vowed free-market reforms to undo theoretical social “safety nets” that have led to “terrifyingly high unemployment.”

Then, Silvio Berlusconi unexpectedly won Italy’s election this year, in part on the pledge to unknot the tangle of economic regulations hampering that nation.

Those are the top four economic powers in Europe. That’s officially a trend. …

Popular Mechanics has a great article on MIT engineers with simple ideas to improve living conditions in underdeveloped parts of our world.

The Peruvian village of Compone lies 11,000 ft. above sea level in El Valle Sagrado de los Incas, the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Flat but ringed by mountains, the tallest capped year-round in snow and ice, the valley is graced with a mild climate and mineral-rich soil that for centuries has produced what the Incas called sara—corn.

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EU regulations prohibit continued use of vintage DC – 3′s. Samizdata proposes a salute to the rule makers in Brussels.

In case you like the idea of Condi Rice as VP, read Noah Pollak’s post on how she’s gone native at State.

David Aaronovich in the London Times says if its Obama, Europeans will come to hate him too.

… George W.Bush, of course, represents a particular kind of offence to European sensibilities. He blew out Kyoto, instead of pretending to care about it and then not implementing it, which is what our hypocrisies require. He took no exquisite pains to make us feel consulted. He invaded Iraq in the name of freedom and then somehow allowed torturers to photograph each other in the fallen dictator’s house of tortures. He is not going to run Franklin Roosevelt a close race for nomination as the second greatest president of the US.

But even if he had been a half-Chinese ballet-loving Francophone, he would have been hated by some who should have loved him, for there isn’t an American president since Eisenhower who hasn’t ended up, at some point or other, being depicted by the world’s cartoonists as a cowboy astride a phallic missile. It happened to Bill Clinton when he bombed Iraq; it will happen to Mr Obama when his reinforced forces in Afghanistan or Pakistan mistake a meeting of tribal elders for an unwise gathering of Taleban and al-Qaeda. Then the new president (or, if McCain, the old president) will be the target of that mandarin Anglo-French conceit that our superior colonialism somehow gives us the standing to critique the Yank’s naive and inferior imperialism. …

Writing for Vanity Fair, Dee Dee Myers asks if the media are trying to elect Barack.

Tomorrow, CBS’s Katie Couric will interview Barack Obama from Jordan. On Wednesday, ABC’s Charlie Gibson will chat with him from Israel. And on Thursday, NBC’s Brian Williams will do the honors from Germany. Call it the presidential campaign equivalent of Shooting the Moon.

And to think, a few short months ago the Washington establishment was buzzing about the press’s pending dilemma: With Obama and John McCain looking like the all-but-certain nominees of their respective parties, how would the media choose between its new crush, Obama, and its long-time paramour, McCain? The Illinois senator has been a media darling since he burst onto the scene at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2004, and during the Democratic primary season, he bested Hillary Clinton in both quantity of coverage (he got more) and tenor (his was way more positive). But McCain has gotten so much favorable media attention over the years that he often joked that the press was his political base. In a head-to-head competition, who would win?

So far, the answer is clear: Obama is The One. In the first quarter of the general election, he has simply gotten more and better coverage than McCain. For those who need more evidence than the enormous press entourage that is treating Obama’s current trip not like the campaign swing of a presidential candidate, but like the international debut of the New American President, there are several new studies which help quantify the disparity. …

David Harsanyi interviews Douglas Feith.

John Fund shines a light on the edifice complex gripping the country’s criminal class.

Charles Rangel, chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, is intent on raising $30 million for a new academic center in his New York district — a center with his name on it. After securing an earmark and two other federal grants totaling some $2.6 million for the project, the Democratic congressman wrote letters on his congressional stationery to businesses with interests before his committee. They sought meetings to help him fulfill his “personal dream” of seeing the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service completed.

The House Ethics Committee will examine the legality of Mr. Rangel’s requests, but the bigger question is why Congress hands out money to name buildings, bridges — everything under the sun — after its own living members. Until roughly the 1960s, people had to die before a grateful nation memorialized them in granite. The Lincoln Memorial wasn’t dedicated until a full half century after the Great Emancipator’s death. Ditto for Franklin Roosevelt. George Washington had to wait 89 years for his memorial.

Now it seems almost every committee chairman gets some “Monument to Me” named after himself with the tab going to the taxpayer. There’s a navigation lock in Pennsylvania named after Rep. C.W. “Bill” Young, the former GOP chair of the House Appropriations Committee. He represents St. Petersburg, Fla. — his only connection to Pennsylvania is that he happened to be born there. Nor is that Mr. Young’s only monument. The C.W. Young Center for Bio-Defense and Emerging Infectious Disease was dedicated at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., last year. …

Thomas Sowell wishes to understand how the lenders with serious loan problems were “exploiting” the poor.

Blaming the lenders is the party line of Congressional Democrats as well. What we need is more government regulation of lenders, they say, to protect the innocent borrowers from “predatory” lending practices.

Before going further down that road, it may be useful to look back at what got us into this mess in the first place.

It was not that many years ago when there was moral outrage ringing throughout the media because lenders were reluctant to lend in certain neighborhoods and because banks did not approve mortgage loan applications from blacks as often as they approved mortgage loan applications from whites.

All this was an opening salvo in a campaign to get Congress to pass laws forcing lenders to lend to people they would not otherwise lend to and in places where they would not otherwise put their money.

The practice of not lending in some neighborhoods was demonized as “redlining” and the fact that minority applicants were approved for mortgages only 72 percent of the time, while whites were approved 89 percent, was called “overwhelming” evidence of discrimination by the Washington Post. …

It was government intervention in the financial markets, which is now supposed to save the situation, that created the problem in the first place.

Laws and regulations pressured lending institutions to lend to people that they were not lending to, given the economic realities. The Community Reinvestment Act forced them to lend in places where they did not want to send their money, and where neither they nor the politicians wanted to walk.

Now that this whole situation has blown up in everybody’s face, the government intervention that brought on this disaster in is supposed to save the day.

Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others– regardless of what the facts may be. Politicians get away with this to the extent that we gullibly accept their words and look to them as political messiahs.

Paul Greenberg compares the tolerance he experienced in part of the academy 50 years ago, to the conformity of today.

… At the time — the 1950s — conservatives were widely assumed to have no ideas at all. But only “irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas,” as the literary critic Lionel Trilling put it. All too accurately. For back then the right was as devoid of ideas as the left is now.

My staunchly Jeffersonian teacher — James L. Bugg — questioned me closely about the Federalist positions I defended. Nevertheless, he didn’t just tolerate but encouraged other opinions. He even took me on as a graduate assistant. I wonder if such a thing would be possible now, in our ideologically driven day.

Now I realize how blessed I was to have encountered such teachers. At the time I took it as a matter of course. Talk about spoiled; I thought all graduate schools were like that.

I found out they weren’t when I went on to an Ivy League school. Columbia University in the early 1960s was quite a step from the University of Missouri in the late 1950s. Quite a step down. At Columbia, ideology was already all. Even then education was rapidly giving way to indoctrination. Fail to toe the party line and you’d pay the price. …

Division of Labour likes one of Gore’s arguments against drilling.

… Gore is suggesting that it isn’t worth undertaking any cost today for a benefit that won’t arrive for ten years. Isn’t this the same Al Gore who says we need to start taking costly steps today to slow global warming, in order to save us from rising sea levels, etc., that will otherwise arrive in thirty to fifty years?

Trans Central Station interviews immigrant who started Pay Pal.

… I think the United States is the greatest country that’s ever existed on earth. And I think that it is difficult to argue on objective grounds that it is not. I think the facts really point in that direction. It’s the greatest force for good of any country that’s ever been. I think it would be a mistake to say the United States is perfect; it certainly is not. But when historians look at these things on balance and measure the good with the bad — and I think if you do that on a rational basis and make a fair assessment — I think it’s hard to say that there is anything better. I wasn’t born in America – but I got here as fast as I could.

Obama tours the world for five days. Andy Borowitz says McCain will visit the internet for five days.

And Scrappleface notes Obama’s submission was rejected by Reader’s Digest.

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Contentions on Beijing bigots.

Sarah Baxter of the London Times with yet another perceptive view of American politics. She comments on his world tour.

… Yet the global coming of the Obamessiah is manna for critics who claim the Illinois senator has embarked on a humourless cult of personality. Exhibit A last week was his po-faced reaction to a satirical cartoon on the cover of The New Yorker showing Obama as a turban-wearing Muslim and his wife Michelle with a black-power Afro, wearing military fatigues.

It was “an insult against Muslim Americans”, he claimed, tweaking a nerve aroused by the riots over a Danish newspaper’s cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

Although Obama has continued to raise money at a breathtaking pace, hauling in $52m in June, he leads McCain by only 46% to 42%, according to RealClearPolitics’ poll of polls, at a time when approval ratings for President George W Bush and the Republicans are in the mire.

Lanny Davis, a prominent supporter of Hillary Clinton during the primary campaign, said: “Why is he basically in a dead heat? If you are a Democrat ahead of a Republican by five or six points; and if you are polling under 50% and that stays the same through October, the Republican wins.”

Democrats are torn between the conviction that 2008 is their year and a rising sense of terror that they could blow yet another election.

The ever-ambitious Clinton has already sensed an opening. It emerged last week that she is sending hand-written letters to campaign donors asking them to roll over their contributions to her Senate re-election fund – with “any amount in excess” of the maximum $2,300 contribution going to the 2012 presidential election. …

Ed Morrissey notes the second Berlin location is a bust for Obama too.

After receiving a hailstorm of criticism for considering Brandenburg Gate for a public speech, as well as official German dissuasion, Barack Obama moved the venue to the Siegessäule monument.  Obama will speak about “historic” US-German relations, but once again, Obama’s own grasp of history has been proven deficient.  Not only does the site contain a monument to Prussian victories over other American allies in Europe, its placement was decided by Adolf Hitler — in order to impress crowds in his idealized version of Berlin called Germania: …

… Obama could be excused for his gaffe, except for two reasons.  His team certainly understood the historical weight that the Brandenburg Gate would have lent his event, so why didn’t they bother to ask the Germans about the Siegessäule?  Quite obviously, the Germans understand the meaning and subtext of the monument, and most of them wonder why Obama does not.  Maybe this is a better example of clueless Americans traveling abroad than those who can only say Merci, beaucoup.

The more basic question is why Obama feels the need to conduct a campaign event among Germans.  Meeting with foreign leaders makes sense for a man with no foreign policy experience whatsoever, but that doesn’t require massive rallies among people who aren’t voting in this election.  In his rush to look impressive for no one’s purposes but his own, Obama has made himself look ignorant and arrogant all over again.

Peter Robinson Corner post shows what spendthrifts Bush and the GOP have been.

Last Friday, I posted a chart on what can only be termed, alas, Republican overspending—that is, the enormous increase in domestic spending during this administration, most of which, of course, took place while the GOP held not only the White House but both chambers of Congress—from an article by Glenn Hubbard, the dean of the Columbia business school, and John Cogan, a colleague of mine here at the Hoover Institution.  (You’ll find the article, “The Coming Tax Hike,” in the most recent issue of the Hoover Digest.)  Readers instantly began peppering me with questions about the chart, and over the weekend I swapped emails with John Cogan.  Below, the chart once again—and below that, answers to most frequently asked questions. …

Kimberley Strassel says it’s going to be tough to purge the GOP of the porkers.

The 11th commandment of politics is that elected officials shall not take sides in their party primaries. Then again, Missouri Republicans are burdened with so many sins, what’s one more?

For an insight as to why the GOP is down and out in Washington, take a look at Jefferson City. That’s where Sarah Steelman, the state treasurer, is running in an Aug. 5 primary for the Missouri governorship. And it’s where her reform campaign against earmarks and self-dealing is threatening the entrenched status quo, causing her own party to rise against her.

So bitter are House Minority Whip Roy Blunt and Sen. Kit Bond at Ms. Steelman’s attack on their cherished spending beliefs that last month they rallied the entire Missouri congressional delegation to put out a public statement openly criticizing her campaign against six-term U.S. Rep. Kenny Hulshof. Joining them in their support of Mr. Hulshof has been the vast majority of the state Republican machine. Ms. Steelman is clearly doing something right. …

John Fund points out it can be done.

Last July, Paul Broun shocked Georgia pundits when the poorly funded physician narrowly defeated a longtime legislative leader in a GOP primary for a special election in an overwhelmingly Republican U.S. House seat. Party grandees were convinced Dr. Broun’s victory was a fluke and this year backed a challenge from state Rep. Barry Fleming, who hails from the district’s population center of Augusta. Mr. Fleming promptly raised nearly $1 million and proceeded to throw the kitchen sink at Dr. Broun, including mailers claiming he was soft on Internet perverts and chiding him for failing to bring home earmarks for the district.

Well, Dr. Broun will be going back to Washington next year …

Posts on the Grand Old Party should be followed by a review of the Grand New Party.

… The timely thesis of Grand New Party is that the party that captures “the non-college-educated voters who make up roughly half of the electorate” will dominate politics for the foreseeable future, as has been the case ever since the New Deal. The book’s thesis, which was in effect the rationale for both the Huckabee campaign and the latter stages of the Hillary Clinton campaign, is likely to be given another test in the general election — in which middle-class swing voters, who’ve deserted the GOP but have doubts about Barack Obama, hold the winning cards.

Authors Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, who both work for The Atlantic, are among the brightest lights in the younger generation of political thinkers. …

The Australian publishes a piece by a man who ran the computer models for his country’s “Green” office.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” …

We can’t drill fast enough says David Harsanyi.

One day Americans are moaning about the harmful impact of cheap oil and the next they’re grousing about the harmful impact of expensive oil.

Which one is it?

As a disreputable sort, I freely confess to having a fondness for oil. Actually, I have a mild crush on all carbon-emitting fuels that feed our prosperity. But I’m especially fond of cheap oil. For many years, those who spread apocalyptic global-warming scenarios have warned me that a collective national sacrifice was needed to save the world.

One option, we were told, was to make gas artificially expensive, forcing our ignorant, energy-gobbling neighbors to alter their destructive habits.

Well, here we are. At $4 a gallon for gas, we already have a flailing economy. Isn’t it glorious? And isn’t it exactly what many environmentalists desired?

The problem is that there is no feasible “alternative” fuel that can haul food from farms to cities, produce affordable electricity for your plasma TV and drive your kids to school. Not yet. It can happen, of course, but only (to pinch a word from enlightened grocery shoppers) organically.

The problem is that when “green” fantasies crash onto the shores of economic reality (as they did with corn-based ethanol), we all suffer.

Don’t worry, though, congressional Democrats have a bold plan. Hold on for 10 or 15 years and they’ll have a bounty of energy options. They promise. But no oil shale. No clean coal. No nuclear power. And definitely no more oil. …

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Ralph Peters on the disaster for al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the world.

IF you think the US markets have problems, look at the value of al Qaeda shares throughout the Muslim world: A high-flying political equity just a few years ago, its stock has tanked. It made the wrong strategic investments and squandered its moral capital.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Osama bin Laden was the darling of the Arab street, seen as the most successful Muslim in centuries. The Saudi royal family paid him protection money, while individual princes handed over cash willingly: Al Qaeda seemed like the greatest thing since the right to abuse multiple wives.

Osama appeared on T-shirts and his taped utterances were awaited with fervent excitement. Recruits flocked to al Qaeda not because of “American aggression,” but because, after countless failures, it looked like the Arabs had finally produced a winner.

What a difference a war makes.

Yes, al Qaeda had little or no connection to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – but the terrorists chose to declare that country the main front in their struggle with the Great Satan. Bad investment: Their behavior there was so breathtakingly brutal that they alienated their fellow Muslims in record time. …

Charles Krauthammer says;

… Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself. There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history — “generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment” — when, among other wonders, “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” As Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, “Moses made the waters recede, but he had help.” Obama apparently works alone.

Obama may think he’s King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty. …

Michael Barone is surprised by Obama’s shallow knowledge of history.

Mr. Barone will dazzle you with his knowledge of history; particularly his knowledge of how close Gerald Ford was to beating the village idiot from Plains.

… Ford’s political situation then was far more parlous than McCain’s today. An early summer Gallup poll showed him trailing Carter by 62 percent to 29 percent. He had barely limped through the primary contests against Ronald Reagan, who continued his campaign up through the mid-August national convention. His political ads had been disastrous, and on Aug. 1 he did not have a general election media team in place.

Yet by November, the race was about even. Ford ended up losing by just 50 percent to 48 percent. A switch of 5,559 votes in Ohio and 3,687 in Hawaii — 9,247 votes out of 81 million — would have made Ford president for four more years.

How this came about is an interesting story, and one of obvious relevance to the McCain campaign this year. Much of it is told in a book two copies of which are currently available new and used on amazon.com, “We Almost Made It,” by Malcolm MacDougall — a professional advertising man, still active, who had played no significant role in presidential campaigns before 1976 and has not done so since. …

A true believer has come back to earth. Nat Hentoff has become disillusioned.

During my more than 60 years of covering national politics, I have never seen a candidate’s principles and character so effectively tarnished — after so extraordinarily inspiring a start — as Barack Obama’s. He has come to resemble another mellifluous orator I came to know in Boston during my first time reporting on a campaign — James Michael Curley, the skilful prestidigitator whom Spencer Tracy masterfully played in the movie “The Last Hurrah.” Obama’s deflation has not been due to ruthless opposition research by John McCain’s team but by the “change” candidate himself. Like millions of Americans, I, for a time, was buoyed by not only the real-time prospect of our first black president but much more by the likelihood that Obama would pierce the dense hypocrisy and insatiable power-grabbing of current American politics. …

Ed Morrissey on the “in the Obama tank” media.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign complained loudly that the media treated Barack Obama like a rock star instead of a presidential candidate.  Saturday Night Live made itself relevant for the first time in a generation by skewering the love affair that the mainstream media had with Obama, finally embarrassing them into asking a few tough questions of Obama — after more than a year.  Now, with Obama embarking on his world tour, all three broadcast networks will have their anchors trailing him, apparently hoping to record every bon mot that escapes from his lips: …

We get David Harsanyi’s take on the New Yorker cover.

WSJ editors warn us about the lawnmower men.

Al Gore blew into Washington on Thursday, warning that “our very way of life” is imperiled if the U.S. doesn’t end “the carbon age” within 10 years. No one seriously believes such a goal is even remotely plausible. But if you want to know what he and his acolytes think this means in practice, the Environmental Protection Agency has just published the instruction manual. Get ready for the lawnmower inspector near you.

In a huge document released last Friday, the EPA lays out the thousands of carbon controls with which they’d like to shackle the whole economy. Central planning is too artful a term for the EPA’s nanomanagement. Thankfully none of it has the force of law — yet. However, the Bush Administration has done a public service by opening this window on new-wave green thinking like Mr. Gore’s, and previewing what Democrats have in mind for next year. …

We probably should ignore Al Gore, but John Tierney had three questions for him.

Jennifer Rubin compares Ed Begley, a committed green to a trend surfer like Gore.

Economist reports on food for thought.

CHILDREN have a lot to contend with these days, not least a tendency for their pushy parents to force-feed them omega-3 oils at every opportunity. These are supposed to make children brainier, so they are being added to everything from bread, milk and pasta to baby formula and vitamin tablets. But omega-3 is just the tip of the nutritional iceberg; many nutrients have proven cognitive effects, and do so throughout a person’s life, not merely when he is a child.

Fernando Gómez-Pinilla, a fish-loving professor of neurosurgery and physiological science at the University of California, Los Angeles, believes that appropriate changes to a person’s diet can enhance his cognitive abilities, protect his brain from damage and counteract the effects of ageing. Dr Gómez-Pinilla has been studying the effects of food on the brain for years, and has now completed a review, just published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, that has analysed more than 160 studies of food’s effect on the brain. Some foods, he concludes, are like pharmaceutical compounds; their effects are so profound that the mental health of entire countries may be linked to them. …