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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. …