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WSJ Editors on how to make Russia pay.

Vladimir Putin proved last weekend that Russia’s army can push over Georgia’s army. In the past 48 hours, the West has begun to push back. If its leaders stay the course, they may yet turn Mr. Putin’s meager military success into a significant political defeat. …

Andrei Illarionov says Russia lost much in the exchange.

… Russia is now in nearly complete international isolation. Russia’s intervention in Georgia was backed only by Cuba. Neither Iran, nor Venezuela, nor Uzbekistan, nor even Belarus has said anything in support of Russia.

The political Group of Eight has de facto been transformed into a G7. The series of political defeats suffered by the Russian leadership, starting with the Rose Revolution in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and continuing through the NATO summit in Bucharest in April, has been extended by a new failure.

The main achievement of the Russian leadership — which the modern world could not (or did not want to) believe — is the resurrection of fear of the “Russian bear.” The world will long remember its fear and (albeit temporary) helplessness. …

Jonah Goldberg introduces us to an article in The Atlantic on the chaos in the Clinton campaign. The folks that burned through a quarter of a billion dollars.

… reporter Joshua Green picks through the internal e-mail viscera of the Clinton campaign and finds that the destructive nature of the Clintons is not always aimed at their enemies.

Indeed, shocking as this may be to people naive enough to believe that a woman with no executive experience, no security clearance, no significant successes under her belt, who was catapulted to presidential prominence solely because her husband treated her like a cautionary tale in a country-music song, was nonetheless a co-president for eight years: It turns out that the Bride of Clintonstein was an awful chief executive. Infected by her husband’s passive-aggressiveness, she stood paralyzed as the HMS Hillary took on more and more water, until even the string quartet on the deck was leaping for the flotation devices.

As Green pulls memo after memo from the great white’s carcass like so many Florida license plates, we discover that the Clintons knew long, long ago that they couldn’t beat Barack Obama to the nomination. But winning was secondary, carnage was king. You might even say of her decision to stay in the race: This was no polling accident. …

Craig Crawford comments on the article also.

… But giving so many campaign documents to the press? That suggests a certain hostility between candidate and underlings that should give pause to those who believed that Clinton was ready “on day one” to take command of the White House.

Beyond this mutiny, the behind-the-scenes paperwork shows how Clinton horribly mismanaged her own people. Postponing critical decisions until the roof caved in, and then forcing her staff to manage the damage control. Not a pretty picture for running the country.

Here is Part I from The Atlantic.

For all that has been written and said about Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the Democratic primaries, one issue still nags. Everybody knows what happened. But we still don’t have a clear picture of how it happened, or why.

The after-battle assessments in the major newspapers and newsweeklies generally agreed on the big picture: the campaign was not prepared for a lengthy fight; it had an insufficient delegate operation; it squandered vast sums of money; and the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia—one day a shots-’n’-beers brawler, the next a Hallmark Channel mom. Through it all, her staff feuded and bickered, while her husband distracted. But as a journalistic exercise, the “campaign obit” is inherently flawed, reflecting the viewpoints of those closest to the press rather than empirical truth.

How did things look on the inside, as they unraveled?

To find out, I approached a number of current and former Clinton staffers and outside consultants and asked them to share memos, e-mails, meeting minutes, diaries—anything that would offer a contemporaneous account. The result demonstrates that paranoid dysfunction breeds the impulse to hoard. Everything from major strategic plans to bitchy staff e-mail feuds was handed over. (See for yourself: much of it is posted online at www.theatlantic.com/clinton.)

Two things struck me right away. The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency. What follows is the inside account of how the campaign for the seemingly unstoppable Democratic nominee came into being, and then came apart.

Wondering what to make of Corsi’s Obama Nation? Peter Wehner has a cautionary note.

There has been a lot of attention given in the last few days to Jerome Corsi’s new book, The Obama Nation, which will debut at #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. It seems pretty clear, I think, that conservatives should not hitch their hopes to it.

Corsi himself, based on press accounts, is a leading advocate of the North American Union conspiracy. The NAU, for those who believe in it, is, according to a Boston Globe story, “a supranational organization that will soon fuse Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a single economic and political unit.” In an interview, Corsi said he believes in the existence of the NAU because, according to Corsi, President Bush was not securing the Southern border.

According to reports, Corsi has suggested that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lesbian, called John Kerry “anti-Christian, anti-American” and called Pope John Paul II “senile,” and said pedophilia “is OK with the Pope as long as it isn’t reported by the liberal press.”

As for the book: it seems to be riddled with factual errors–some relatively minor  … and some significant …

John Podhoretz watched Saddleback.

… Obama talked around most issues; perhaps most oddly, he said Clarence Thomas was the one Supreme Court justice he would not have selected because he hadn’t had enough experience (Thomas had been on the federal bench for a year and a half before he was nominated, which is about as long as Obama was in the Senate before he began seriously considering a run for the presidency). …

Roger Simon too.

And a Corner post from Mark Hemingway.

I don’t want to get to overheated about what occurred last night, but I do think McCain had a clear and decisive victory over Obama. It all comes down to something that Phil Bredesen, the Democratic governor of Tennessee recently said about Obama: “Instead of giving big speeches at big stadiums, he needs to give straight-up 10-word answers to people at Wal-Mart about how he would improve their lives.”

By that standard, McCain did extremely well and Obama did very poorly. McCain’s answers were direct, confident and, most importantly, serious. When asked about what leaders he would consult as president, he first suggested Gen. Petraeus, architect of the surge, who he correctly praised as one of America’s all-time great military leaders. By way of contrast, Obama suggested he would seek out the advice of a typical white person, er, his grandmother and his wife Michelle, who’s still trying to decide whether she’s proud of her country. …

Daily Mail piece says the Sahara was lush and green 5,000 years ago. Then the climate changed, without SUV’s.

Borowitz and Scrappleface have Olympic reports.

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Picli has stunning moon pic.

Victor Davis Hanson says it looks like a “Brave Old World.”

Russia invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at levels previously unimaginable. Gulf monarchies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing. Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch — all in a globalized world that tunes into the Olympics each night from Beijing.

“Citizens of the world” were supposed to share, in relative harmony, our new “Planet Earth,” which was to have followed from an interconnected system of free trade, instantaneous electronic communications, civilized diplomacy and shared consumer capitalism.

But was that ever quite true? …

David Warren looks at Russia.

Russia has long been a very pedagogical country. She likes to teach lessons to her neighbours. The smaller the neighbours, the more lessons they can expect to receive.

Through most of the 20th century, Russia was at her most expansive. Thanks to the Yalta settlements, and the miracle of nuclear weapons technology, the whole world became Russia’s “near abroad,” and various little countries of eastern and central Europe became her disciplined pupils. She taught us all lessons in dialectical materialism and scientific socialism, until she collapsed under the strain of it.

Vladimir Putin — the strongman of Russia, regardless of passing titles — is, in addition to being an old KGB officer thoroughly schooled in the ruthless barbarism of Communist power politics, also tsar from an older school of Russian imperialism. The notion that Russia — whose land area makes her by far the planet’s largest single state — could be threatened by a neighbour 1/245th her size, should not be confused with paranoia.

We need no more believe that, than believe that the large, fully-organized Russian military force that invaded Georgian sovereign territory over the weekend, while the world was watching the Olympics, was responding to a “provocation” by Georgia’s elected president, Mikheil Saakashvili. Unquestionably the latter has exercised poor practical judgment in dealing with the bear pawing at his little realm, but that is beside the point. …

Tony Blankley too.

Charles Krauthammer says we have ways of stopping Russia’s new Putintate.

… We are not without resources. There are a range of measures to be deployed if Russia does not live up to its cease-fire commitments:

1. Suspend the NATO-Russia Council established in 2002 to help bring Russia closer to the West. Make clear that dissolution will follow suspension. The council gives Russia a seat at the NATO table. Message: Invading neighboring democracies forfeits the seat.

2. Bar Russian entry to the World Trade Organization.

3. Dissolve the G-8. Putin’s dictatorship long made Russia’s presence in this group of industrial democracies a farce, but no one wanted to upset the bear by expelling it. No need to. The seven democracies simply withdraw. (And if Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, who has been sympathetic to Putin’s Georgia adventure, wants to stay, he can have an annual G-2 dinner with Putin.) Then immediately announce the reconstitution of the original G-7.

4. Announce a U.S.-European boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. To do otherwise would be obscene. Sochi is 15 miles from Abkhazia, the other Georgian province just invaded by Russia. The Games will become a riveting contest between the Russian, Belarusan and Jamaican bobsled teams.

All of these steps (except dissolution of the G-8, which should be irreversible) would be subject to reconsideration depending upon Russian action — most importantly and minimally, its withdrawal of troops from Georgia proper to South Ossetia and Abkhazia. …

Slate tells us why Georgia and Georgia have the same names.

The execrable Barbara Boxer goes after Tom Coburn, one of the few Senators who represent our interests. Debra Saunders has the story.

Karl Rove sees four key battleground states.

Presidential campaigns ultimately come down to who can win 270 Electoral College votes. With most states favoring one candidate or the other, this year’s contest could come down to a few battleground states.

Based on visits this past week with party leaders and old pros, it’s clear that Barack Obama will focus on Colorado and Virginia. Both have large concentrations of white, college-educated voters with whom Mr. Obama is popular. And both have seen Democrats surge recently. …

… If Mr. McCain lost Colorado and Virginia, he would likely have 264 electoral votes (assuming he carried the other states President Bush won in 2004). To win, he would have to pick up a state Democrats are counting on winning, such as Michigan. …

… Then there is Ohio. Ground zero in ’04, its 20 electoral votes will be hotly contested again this year. No Republican has won the White House without winning the Buckeye State. …

The Economist continues it’s series on bellwether states. This time North Carolina. Pickerhead thinks anyone who thinks Obama has a chance in NC must have scored some good dope.

THE past few years have been difficult for Mark Paylor, a pig, cattle and grain farmer. On a sunny summer morning in Greensboro he complains that rising petrol and feed prices have driven up his costs so far that it is impossible to compete with cheap imports. He is disgusted by trade agreements that let Mexico send America jalapeños riddled with salmonella, when American farmers have to play by stricter rules. Mr Paylor is a black and a Democrat, and he clearly wants change. He will not vote for John McCain. But he does not have much faith in Barack Obama, either: “He might put on a show to win, but he don’t understand.”

That comment suggests why Mr Obama faces an uphill climb in North Carolina. As swing states go, North Carolina is an unlikely prospect for the Democrats. It is a culturally conservative southern state that has voted for the Republican in every presidential election since 1976. In 2004 George Bush clobbered John Kerry here by a 12-point margin, even though Mr Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards, was North Carolina’s senator at the time. …

Walter Williams looks at what made some achieving black schools.

Most people know the tragic state of black education today. We know that billions of dollars are spent on federal government programs such as No Child Left Behind and the billions spent by state and local governments. If you were to ask an education “expert” to explain the tragedy, you’d get answers such as racial discrimination and underfunding.

My colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell has written volumes on black education and an article worth reading is one he wrote some years ago in The Public Interest (Spring 1976) and reprinted in his book “Education: Assumptions Versus History.”  …

Ever wonder why so many Olympic records are being broken? Slate has answers.

Can we please stop fussing over every new Olympic record?

A new record means that an athlete using today’s equipment outperformed an athlete using yesterday’s equipment. It’s not a fair fight.

In swimming alone, today’s advantages include:

1. LZR Racer suit. It reduces friction (compared with skin) and is structurally designed to compress and streamline the body for maximum speed. Estimated drag reduction: 5 percent to 10 percent. Estimated average improvement in top swimmers’ best times: 2 percent. Designed by NASA scientists and computers, among others. Cost: $500.

2. Pool depth. This is the deepest pool ever used in the Olympics. Depth disperses turbulence, reducing resistance. …

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Victor Davis Hanson says Russia’s move was six wins for them.

Lost amid all the controversies surrounding the Georgian tragedy is the sheer diabolic brilliance of the long-planned Russia invasion. Let us count the ways in which it is a win/win situation for Russia.

The Home Front
The long-suffering Russian people resent the loss of global influence and empire, but not necessarily the Soviet Union and its gulags that once ensured such stature. The invasion restores a sense of Russian nationalism and power to its populace without the stink of Stalinism, and is indeed cloaked as a sort of humanitarian intervention on behalf of beleaguered Ossetians.

There will be no Russian demonstrations about an “illegal war,” much less nonsense about “blood for oil,” but instead rejoicing at the payback of an uppity former province that felt its Western credentials somehow trumped Russian tanks. How ironic that the Western heartthrob, the old Marxist Mikhail Gorbachev, is now both lamenting Western encouragement of Georgian “aggression,” while simultaneously gloating over the return of Russian military daring. …

Can Hillary find a way to ruin Obama’s convention? “Yes she can,” says Maureen Dowd.

While Obama was spending three hours watching “The Dark Knight” five time zones away, and going to a fund-raiser featuring “Aloha attire” and Hawaiian pupus, Hillary was busy planning her convention.

You can almost hear her mind whirring: She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.

Now they’ve made Barry’s convention all about them — their dissatisfaction and revisionism and barely disguised desire to see him fail. Whatever insincere words of support the Clintons muster, their primal scream gets louder: He can’t win! He can’t close the deal! We told you so!

Hillary’s orchestrating a play within the play in Denver. Just as Hamlet used the device to show that his stepfather murdered his father, Hillary will try to show the Democrats they chose the wrong savior.

Her former aide Howard Wolfson fanned the divisive flames Monday on ABC News, arguing that Hillary would have beaten Obama in Iowa and become the nominee if John Edwards’s affair had come out last year — an assertion contradicted by a University of Iowa survey showing that far more Edwards supporters had Obama as their second choice.

Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama’s big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds of being the nominee in 2012. …

Contemplating the Clintons, Michael Goodwin says, “They’re baaaccckk!”

… Rested and ready, the Clinton crew is busy stirring the pot again.

Fresh from a nearly six-week layoff, Hillary and her team are picking up where they left off in June. Her pledges of unity and wholehearted acceptance of Barack Obama as the Democratic Party‘s nominee seem to be, well, halfhearted.

One day she’s on a YouTube video talking about the need for a “catharsis” at the Democratic convention, which sounds suspiciously like a demand to have her name put in nomination for a roll call. Then an interview surfaces of Bubba refusing to say Obama is ready to be President. And close aide Howard Wolfson rips the scab off the primary wounds by saying Hillary would have won if the media had exposed John Edwards‘ affair earlier.

This is definitely not the vacation Obama had in mind. From the headlines about Edwards’ sordid romps to the Russians’ brutal reminder of their Evil Empire days, his downtime before the convention begins Aug. 25 hasn’t been stress-free. …

Almost every disgusting thing our country has done with race has been the policy of Democrats. American Spectator on their record.

As Democrats prepare to nominate Senator Barack Obama to be the first black president, the Democratic National Committee and its chairman Howard Dean have whitewashed the party’s horrific and lengthy record of racism. The omission is in the section of the DNC website that describes the party’s history. The missing history raises the obvious question of whether the Democrats, unable or simply unwilling to put their party on record as taking direct responsibility for one of the worst racial crimes of the ages, will be able to run a campaign free of the racial animosities it has regularly brought both to American presidential campaigns and American political and social life in general.

What else to make of the official party history as presented by the DNC on its website? It is a history so sanitized of historical reality it makes Stalin look like historian David McCullough.

The DNC website section labeled “Party History,” linked here, is in fact scrubbed clean of the not-so-little dirty secret that fueled Democrats’ political successes for over a century and a half and made American life a hell on earth for black Americans. Literally, the DNC official history, which begins with the creation of the party in 1800, gets to the creation of the DNC itself in 1848 and then…poof!…the next sentence says: “As the 19th Century came to a close, the American electorate changed more and more rapidly.” It quickly heads into a riff on poor immigrants coming to America.

In a stroke, 52 years of Democrat history vanishes. Disappeared faster than the truth in the Clinton administration. Why would this be? Allow me to sketch in a few facts from those missing 52 years. For that matter, lets add in the facts from the party history before and after those 52 years, since they aren’t mentioned by the Democrats’ National Committee either.

So what’s missing? …

… * Last, but certainly not least, there is no reference to the fact that Birmingham, Alabama Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, who infamously unleashed dogs and fire hoses on civil rights protestors, was in fact — yes indeed — both a member of the Democratic National Committee and the Ku Klux Klan. …

Seattle Post -Intelligencer compares the offices of McCain and Obama. Obama fails the test. He is one of those sick people with a neat desk and office.

By their offices ye shall know them.

The personalities and personal histories of John McCain and Barack Obama are as evident in the artwork, books and mementoes in their Senate offices as in any words they may utter.

McCain’s office oozes comfy clutter and informality: random piles of books, a fortune-cookie message taped to the desk, an abundance of tchotchkes and bric-a-brac.

Obama’s office feels more like a gallery of modern art: precisely placed objects, sparsely adorned surfaces, clean lines, choreographed displays.

Both offices show their occupants’ sentimental streak: McCain has a picture of his favorite high school teacher, and a 1904 Navy register that lists his grandfather as a midshipman. Obama has a photo of the cliff in Hawaii where his mother’s ashes were scattered into the Pacific, and a tiger-beating stick from his grandmother’s village in Kenya.

A walking tour of the Senate offices of the two presidential candidates tells a tale of their occupants: …

Charles Murray says for most people, college is a waste of time. He proposes a series of certification exams.

… Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.

Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough — four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you’re a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school. …

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The Georgian mess allows John Podhoretz to continue his theme of the end of the vacation from history.

Quick show of hands: Who among us expected that, in the course of the convention acceptance speeches by John McCain and Barack Obama and throughout the three debates in which they face each other in the fall, the words “South Ossetia” might be mentioned again and again? Or that the nation of Georgia might loom larger over the November election than the state of Georgia?

This is the thing about presidential elections — they can turn on a dime. This one has already. The success of the surge is playing a complex role in the calculations of both camps, with the possibility of a clear victory in sight in Iraq before anyone actually casts a vote in November. For a time, it appeared the surge victory might, in an odd and unexpected way, help Barack Obama by taking Iraq off the table as a source of anxiety and allowing him to focus the election more specifically on the economy. But Obama’s own uncertainty about how to address the surge suggests otherwise. …

National Review editors on Russia’s invasion of Georgia.

… A massive Russian response, quite manifestly ready to go, was launched. Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia. Another pro-Russian force attacked Georgia in that part of the second breakaway province of Abkhazia that Tbilisi still controls. Georgia’s well-trained but modest army was forced to withdraw. Russian planes continued to bomb central Georgia, seeking to degrade both military and economic targets. When Saakashvili proposed a cease-fire, the Russians at first refused to talk to him, then started multiplying conditions for their acceptance; those conditions now include Saakashvili’s resignation.

Throughout this calculated aggression, the Russian media has played an inglorious but technically brilliant role. They have used the most modern techniques of journalism and marketing to broadcast the worst lies of the Kremlin. Those lies themselves have been cleverly designed to imitate the West’s own justifications for the Kosovo intervention: “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Doubtless the Georgian forces committed crimes in their incursion into South Ossetia. There are plausible reports that they shelled villages. But they were overwhelmed so quickly that they simply could not have committed crimes of the scale alleged by the Kremlin. Besides, Russia’s long patronage of South Ossetian attacks, its invasion across internationally recognized borders, and its relentless bombing of a country that has retreated and offered a cease-fire deprives it of any right to make such accusations. Russian policy is a war crime in itself.

None of this is or should be about Russia or the Russian people. All of it stinks of Soviet propaganda, Soviet brutality, Soviet morality, and Soviet nostalgia. It is the handiwork of the siloviki clique that currently monopolizes power in Russia through authoritarian politics, kleptocratic economics, and media manipulation. This clique must be shown that war crimes do not pay. The Russian people, too, need to learn that nostalgia for Soviet imperialism is a dead end for Russia. …

Corner posts on the subject.

… We are limited in how we can help our Georgian ally, but Putin’s brazen attack on Georgia should be a warning to the United States and our allies on Russia’s border and elsewhere in the area that they need to be prepared for more of this.

George Will is brilliant.

Asked in 1957 what would determine his government’s course, Harold Macmillan, Britain’s new prime minister, replied, “Events, dear boy, events.” Now, into America’s trivializing presidential campaign, a pesky event has intruded — a European war. Russian tanks, heavy artillery, strategic bombers, ballistic missiles and a naval blockade batter a European nation. We are not past such things after all. The end of history will be postponed, again. …

… What is it about August? The First World War began in August 1914. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact effectively announced the Second World War in August 1939. Iraq, a fragment of the collapse of empires precipitated by August 1914, invaded Kuwait in August 1990. (The August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev)

This year’s August upheaval coincides, probably not coincidentally, with the world’s preoccupation with that charade of international comity, the Olympics. For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi’s 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film “Triumph of the Will,” has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.

A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.

As for Iraq, Chris Hitchens wonders why it’s so hard for some people to accept and celebrate good news.

One day I will publish my entire collection of upside-down Iraq headlines, where the true purport of the story is the inverse of the intended one. (Top billing thus far would go to the greatest downer of them all: the tale of Iraq’s unemployed gravediggers, their always-insecure standard of living newly imperiled by the falling murder rate. You don’t believe me? Wait for the forthcoming anthology.) While you wait, you might consider last week’s astonishing report about the Iraqi budget surplus and the way in which the report was reported. …

… It is in no spirit of revenge that I remind you that, as little as a year ago, the whole of smart liberal opinion believed that the dissolution of Baathism and militarism had been a mistake, that Iraq itself was a bottomless pit of wasted dollars and pointless casualties, and that the only option was to withdraw as fast as possible and let the inevitable civil war burn itself out. To the left of that liberal consensus, people of the caliber and quality of Michael Moore were describing the nihilist “insurgents” as the moral equivalent of the Minutemen, and to the right of the same consensus, people like Pat Buchanan were hinting that we had been cheated into the whole enterprise by a certain minority whose collective name began with the letter J.

Had any of this sinister nonsense been heeded, it wouldn’t even be Saddam’s goons who were getting their hands on that fantastic wealth in such a strategic country. It would have been the gruesome militias who answer either to fanatical Wahhabism on one wing or to fanatical Shiism on another, and who are the instruments of tyrannical forces in neighboring countries. Hardly a prospect to be viewed with indifference. I still reel when I remember how many supposedly responsible people advocated surrendering Iraq without a fight. …

The Politico points out seven worrisome items for Barack.

A few weeks back, Time magazine was musing that John McCain was in danger of sliding from “a long shot” to a “no-shot.” Around the same time, a hard-nosed former Hillary Clinton insider declared the race “effectively over” thanks to the McCain campaign’s ineptitude, the tanking U.S. economy and Obama’s advantages in cash, charisma and hope. And Obama, up by three to six points nationally, was about to leverage a much-anticipated trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and Europe into a pre-convention poll surge.

Instead, his supporters are now suffering a pre-Denver panic attack, watching as John McCain draws incrementally closer in state and national polls – with Rasmussen’s most recent daily national tracker showing a statistical dead heat.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been privately enumerating her doubts about Obama to supporters, according to people who have spoken with her. Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn recently unveiled a PowerPoint presentation red-flagging Obama’s lukewarm leads among white female voters and Hispanics – while predicting a five-point swing could turn a presumed Obama win into a McCain landslide.

“It’s not that people think McCain will win – it’s that they are realizing that McCain could win,” says Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown, whose surveys show tight races in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. …

Thomas Sowell thinks there is little substance to Obama.

Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, Professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation.

Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But, instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures.

Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real substance.

Senator Barack Obama’s campaign this year reminds me very much of that course from Professor Galbraith. Many people were ecstatic during the early primaries, as each state’s voters heard his glittering generalities for the first time.

The media loved the novelty of a black candidate with a real chance to become president, and his left-wing vision of the world was largely their vision as well. There was a veritable media honeymoon for Obama. …

Debra Saunders has Edwards thoughts.

… The pretty-boy candidate always was the biggest phony at any Democratic debate. He was the $400-haircut poster boy for poverty. The 28,000-square-foot mansion owner, who preached about global warming. The candidate who demanded that other Democrats swear off accepting contributions from Fox News baron Rupert Murdoch, after he pocketed a $500,000 advance – with an extra $300,000 for expenses – from Murdoch’s Harper Collins. The man who ran as the doting husband of the cancer-battling Elizabeth Edwards while he was boffing an overpaid campaign aide.

If I were a Democrat, I would be spittin’ mad. If Edwards had won his party’s nomination for president, news of the affair most surely would have gotten out and the Democratic Party’s chances of winning the White House would have evaporated instantly, as would-be supporters would have realized they can’t believe a word the man says.

Edwards had asserted that National Enquirer reports of an affair with Rielle Hunter were “completely untrue.” In admitting to the affair – but not the lovechild, if you care to believe him – Edwards explained in a statement, that he relied on inaccuracies in the story to deny it, “But being 99 percent honest is no longer enough.”

99 percent honest? Even when he is coming clean, he’s a snake. …

David Harsanyi says, when it comes to politicians, low expectations would be our wisest course.

… Incredibly, despite our low opinion of elected officials and countless examples, this election season millions of otherwise reasonable Americans will once again dutifully plaster their cars with bumper stickers or plant yard signs bearing the name of some lifelong bureaucrat who has promised them the world.

Are these men and women running for office so special that they deserve near-religious adoration?

Is government so important in your life that you offer it?

Politicians exist to implement public policy. They lean left or they lean right.

Do they possess an extraordinary ability to magically “fix” the economy, or “create” jobs or change the world? Hardly.

Let’s keep expectations for politicians where they belong: Stay out of jail. Everything else is gravy.

What’s it like to challenge the globalony greens in England? The documentarian Martin Durkin has some answers.

… In the year that has passed since the film was broadcast, I have discovered what that “chilling effect” is. It is when a programme maker needs to risk his career in order to make a particular film. It is when a commissioning editor or a broadcaster is genuinely fearful of straying into certain areas.

The main Ofcom complainant noted: “This is Not an Attack on Free Speech”. So rather than try to shut me up, bully and vilify, why don’t they engage in an honest discussion about the science?

I’ll tell you why. Because the theory of global warming is crumbling round their ears. For the past decade now, world temperatures have been static or slightly declining – and that’s according to the IPCC. I don’t remember their silly models predicting that 10 years ago.

I no longer give a stuff whether left-liberal types agree with my views on global warming. However, I do expect every last one of them who claims to value the freedom to speak one’s mind, to defend my right to air them.

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George Friedman of Stratfor on Solzhenitsyn and the struggle for Russia’s soul.

… Solzhenitsyn served Western purposes when he undermined the Soviet state. But that was not his purpose. His purpose was to destroy the Soviet state so that his vision of Russia could re-emerge. When his interests and the West’s coincided, he won the Nobel Prize. When they diverged, he became a joke. But Solzhenitsyn never really cared what Americans or the French thought of him and his ideas. He wasn’t speaking to them and had no interest or hope of remaking them. Solzhenitsyn was totally alien to American culture. He was speaking to Russia and the vision he had was a resurrection of Mother Russia, if not with the czar, then certainly with the church and state. That did not mean liberalism; Mother Russia was dramatically oppressive. But it was neither a country of mass murder nor of vulgar materialism.

It must also be remembered that when Solzhenitsyn spoke of Russia, he meant imperial Russia at its height, and imperial Russia’s borders at its height looked more like the Soviet Union than they looked like Russia today. “August 1914” is a book that addresses geopolitics. Russian greatness did not have to express itself via empire, but logically it should — something to which Solzhenitsyn would not have objected.

Solzhenitsyn could not teach Americans, whose intellectual genes were incompatible with his. But it is hard to think of anyone who spoke to the Russian soul as deeply as he did. He first ripped Russia apart with his indictment. He was later ignored by a Russia out of control under former President Boris Yeltsin. But today’s Russia is very slowly moving in the direction that Solzhenitsyn wanted. And that could make Russia extraordinarily powerful. Imagine a Soviet Union not ruled by thugs and incompetents. Imagine Russia ruled by people resembling Solzhenitsyn’s vision of a decent man.

Solzhenitsyn was far more prophetic about the future of the Soviet Union than almost all of the Ph.D.s in Russian studies. Entertain the possibility that the rest of Solzhenitsyn’s vision will come to pass. It is an idea that ought to cause the world to be very thoughtful.

Peter Mansoor in WaPo writes on how the surge worked in Iraq.

Given the divisive debate over the Iraq war, perhaps it was inevitable that the accomplishments of the recently concluded “surge” would become shrouded in the fog of 30-second sound bites. Too often we hear that the dramatic security improvement in Iraq is due not to the surge but to other, unrelated factors and that the positive developments of the past 18 months have been merely a coincidence.

To realize how misleading these assertions are, one must understand that the “surge” was more than an infusion of reinforcements into Iraq. Of greater importance was the change in the way U.S. forces were employed starting in February 2007, when Gen. David Petraeus ordered them to position themselves with Iraqi forces out in neighborhoods. This repositioning was based on newly published counterinsurgency doctrine that emphasized the protection of the population and recognized that the only way to secure people is to live among them. …

The Economist on Obama fatigue.

… The junior senator from Illinois is strikingly self-obsessed even by the standards of politicians. He has already written two autobiographies. He seems to be happiest as a politician addressing huge crowds of adoring fans. His convention speech at Denver was always going to be an extraordinary moment, given that he will be delivering it on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. But Mr Obama decided to move it to a local sports stadium that has room for 75,000.

There are worrying signs, for the Democrats, that Obama fatigue is beginning to set in. A Pew poll this week showed that 76% of respondents named Mr Obama as the candidate they had heard most about compared with 11% who named Mr McCain. But close to half (48%) of Pew’s interviewees said that they had been hearing too much about Mr Obama—and 22% said that they have formed a less favourable opinion of him recently.

Mr Obama is undoubtedly an enormously talented public speaker. But his rhetorical tropes can begin to pall, particularly in a campaign that has already gone on for 18 months. How many more times can Americans hear the phrase “Yes we can” without wondering whether they really want to? …

George McGovern says his party should respect the union “secret” ballot.

… Voting is an immense privilege.

That is why I am concerned about a new development that could deny this freedom to many Americans. As a longtime friend of labor unions, I must raise my voice against pending legislation I see as a disturbing and undemocratic overreach not in the interest of either management or labor.

The legislation is called the Employee Free Choice Act, and I am sad to say it runs counter to ideals that were once at the core of the labor movement. Instead of providing a voice for the unheard, EFCA risks silencing those who would speak. …

Fascinating Michael Barone piece about the origins of voting habits.

To understand changes in the political map, we naturally tend to look for contemporary explanations. But American political alignments are not written on an empty slate. Beginnings matter, and the civic personalities of states tend to reflect the cultural folkways of their first settlers.

So I was not startled when I compared state poll results in this election with the results of the 2004 election and found patterns that reflect the surges of historic internal migration. For this year’s polls, I used the results from FiveThirtyEight.com, which discounts results based on its estimates of pollsters’ accuracy and the recentness of the polls. Thus, they don’t fully reflect the recent tightening of the national polls.

In two broad swaths of the country, John McCain is running about as well as George W. Bush did or better. One is the route of the westward surge of New England Yankees across upstate New York, northern Ohio, southern Michigan and into northern Illinois. McCain is running ahead of Bush in Massachusetts and just 1 percent behind in New York and (despite its economic problems) Michigan. Historically, this Yankee-settled region has been turned off by Southern accents, such as Bush’s Texas twang, and McCain evidently is less off-putting to its cultural liberals.

The other area in which McCain is running even with or better than Bush is the set of states settled by the Scotch-Irish stock, who thronged to the Appalachians in Colonial days and whose descendants followed the southwest path pioneered by their hero, Andrew Jackson. …

More on the Neanderthal murder mystery from The Independent, UK.

Neanderthals first appeared in Europe at least 300,000 years ago but they disappeared after the arrival of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, who first arrived in Europe 50,000 years ago. This has led to speculation about whether the Neanderthals interbred with the new arrivals to form a hybrid population that became submerged in the human gene pool, or were instead wiped out by them, either through competition for resources or by violence.

The latest evidence, an analysis of DNA recovered from a 38,000-year-old fossilised thigh bone, suggests the Neanderthals did not interbreed with modern humans but were eradicated by them.

DNA extracted from an adult Neanderthal man who lived near caves in what is now Croatia also revealed that the Neanderthals in Europe probably never numbered more than 10,000 individuals at any one time – a precariously small population size.

The new evidence about the demise of the Neanderthals comes from the complete sequence of DNA within tiny cellular structures known as mitochondria. This mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited and is easier to isolate from ancient bones than the conventional DNA found within the cell nucleus. …

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Last week Pickerhead kept hoping Robert Conquest would write something on Solzhenitsyn. It finally appeared Friday in the WSJ. Conquest includes an excerpt from a poem Solzhenitsyn asked him to translate. The poem mentions Studebakers, Dodges, and Chevrolets. These are references to some of the 400,000 trucks our country send to the Soviets during the war. The Studebaker was the third edition of the 2 1/2 ton 6 wheel drive GMC truck produced during the war. GM couldn’t build enough, so International had a version, and then Studebaker built the ones that were most common in the Soviet Union. Red Army soldiers loved the truck. When they wished to say a woman was well built, they would say, “she was built like a Studebaker.”

Those of us who had long been concerned to expose and resist Stalinism, in the West as in the USSR, learned much from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I met him in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1974, soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union — the result of his novel, “The Gulag Archipelago,” being published in Paris. He was personally pleasant; I have a photograph of the two of us, he holding a Russian edition of my book, “The Great Terror,” with evident approbation. He asked if I would translate a “little” poem of his. Of course I agreed.

The little poem, “Prussian Nights,” turned out to be 2,000 lines! …

Anne Applebaum on the war in Georgia.

For the best possible illustration of why Islamic terrorism may one day be considered the least of our problems, look no farther than the BBC’s split-screen coverage of yesterday’s Olympic opening ceremonies. On one side, fireworks sparkled, and thousands of exotically dressed Chinese dancers bent their bodies into the shape of doves, the cosmos and more. On the other side, gray Russian tanks were shown rolling into South Ossetia, a rebel province of Georgia. The effect was striking: Two of the world’s rising powers were strutting their stuff.

The difference, of course, is that one event has been rehearsed for years, while the other, if not a total surprise, was not actually scheduled to take place this week. That, too, is significant: The Chinese challenge to Western power has been a long time coming, and it is in a certain sense predictable. As a rule, the Chinese do not make sudden moves and do not try to provoke crises.

Russia, by contrast, is an unpredictable power, which makes responding to Moscow more difficult. …

WSJ Editors too.

… Western leaders should have seen this coming. Russia has baited the hot-tempered Georgian leader with trade and travel embargoes as well as saber-rattling. Georgia has had to tolerate a few thousand Russian troops on its soil — only Moscow recognizes the self-declared independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And in April, Russia downed a Georgian drone over Abkhaz — that is, Georgian — air space. Russia in recent years has also granted citizenship to the separatists. That looks like premeditation now: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledged yesterday to “protect the lives and dignity of Russian citizens, no matter where they are located.”

Perhaps Mr. Saakashvili finally snapped and acted first here, as the Kremlin insists. If so, it was a huge mistake, as he has picked a fight with a much larger opponent and damaged his country’s chances of joining NATO. The West may support Georgia’s territorial integrity, but no one wants war with Russia.

Now it’s up to NATO and especially the U.S. to persuade both sides to stand down. President Bush discussed the hostilities with Mr. Putin yesterday in Beijing, where they are attending the Olympics. The prime minister needs to hear that using Ossetia as a pretext for imperialism will have consequences for Russia’s relationship with the West.

George Will’s column on the last 100 years of race in our country has a welcome and appropriate note of optimism.

The Economist writes on another bellwether state. This time Colorado.

IN ONE episode of “South Park”, a potty-mouthed cartoon set in Colorado, a film festival comes to town. At first the locals are delighted. The visitors boost the economy and the films, which feature gay cowboys eating pudding, are better than expected. But the festival turns out to be a dastardly scheme, devised by Californians, to ruin pretty mountain towns and turn them into versions of Los Angeles. The natives must fight back.

This is pretty much how Coloradoans view their state. Not so long ago, the natives will tell you, it was a beautiful place filled with hardy individualists—“a leave-me-alone kind of state”, according to Jon Caldara of the conservative Independence Institute. It was also solidly Republican. Since the 1960s Colorado has voted for a Democratic president only once, in 1992, when Ross Perot and George Bush senior split the Republican vote. Then the Californians and other newcomers arrived, sprinkling their monstrous houses over the hills and upending the state’s politics.

These days Colorado’s Democrats are on a roll. Since 2004 they have taken control of the governor’s office, both chambers of the legislature and two congressional seats. John Hickenlooper, Denver’s Democratic mayor, is enormously popular across the state. In the caucuses on February 5th more people came out for Barack Obama, who carried the state, than for all the Republican candidates put together. …

Roger Simon picks the best political ad of the season, so far.

Kathryn Jean Lopez captures the essence of a Noonan column.

And Maureen Dowd captures the essence of John Edwards.

… The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.

So narcissist walks into a New York bar and meets a legendarily wacky former Gotham party girl — whose ’80s exploits were chronicled in a novel by her former boyfriend Jay McInerney because the behavior of her and her friends “intrigued and appalled me.” When you appall Jay McInerney, you know you’re in trouble.

The president manqué gives Rielle Hunter, formerly Lisa Druck, more than $114,000 to shoot vain little videos for his Web site (even though she’s a neophyte), one of which is scored with the song “True Reflections” about the Narcissus pool, which goes: “When you look into a mirror, do you like what’s looking at you? Now that you’ve seen your true reflections, what on earth are you gonna do?”

He has an affair with Hunter, while he’s honing his speech on the imperative to “live in a moral, honest, just America.” A married former aide says he’s the father when she gets pregnant, even though she’s telling people Edwards is the dad. And one of his campaign donors pays off Hunter to get her resettled with the baby out of North Carolina.

But the Breck Girl wants a gold star for the fact that he sent his marriage into remission when his wife was in remission. That’s special. …

Martin Peretz notes a new tactic by the fascist left.

Richmond Times-Dispatch on race in the race.

… Rightly or wrongly and largely unspoken, race is a deep-running factor in American culture — infusing much that it should not but does. Barack Obama is the first African-American with a genuine prospect of becoming president of an electorate that is 11 percent black and 77 percent white. Because of that percentage discrepancy, Obama’s chances of winning depend greatly on the extent to which — in commentator Juan Williams’ words — he can “assure undecided white voters that he shares their [conservative social] values and is worthy of their trust.”

SO HOW seemingly odd that Obama should inject race into the campaign. Possibly he did it to build a force field around himself to deflect every criticism of every kind.

During the primaries, he blasted Bill Clinton for allegedly making race an issue in the Carolinas — implying Clinton was doing it to gin up white turnout for Hillary. Obama also perceived subtle racial undertones in John McCain’s first general-election ad — i.e., its description of McCain as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”

In late June, Obama began mentioning his race (as he frequently had) in combination with dark implications that McCain would deploy race against Obama (as McCain never has): They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. “He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

Finally on July 31, in Springfield, Mo., Obama dealt down and dirty:

“Nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know — he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills. You know. He’s risky. That’s essentially the argument they’re making.” …

Drudge reports on Pelosi’s book’s flop.

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David Warren does the Solzhenitsyn honors today.

Prophetic writers are a holy nuisance to everyone, but especially to themselves. The gift of prophecy renders a man incapable of a quiet life, incapable of enjoying idle pleasures, incapable of looking the other way — when it is to no immediate personal advantage to be staring at the truth. But it cannot take away the normal human desire for such comforts.

Nobody could have wished to be Alexander Solzhenitsyn, poet of the Gulag, and of its “zeks” (hapless prisoners). Providence compelled him to experience at first hand everything he would immortalize, from the prison camps to the terminal wards to betrayals of every imaginable kind. And to these it added something more cruel: moments in which victories were achieved against improbable odds, each overturned in the next moment.

Yet providence also instilled the strength to resist illusion, and few men have endured what Solzhenitsyn repeatedly endured, more stoically. From the moment of his first arrest in 1945, he ceased to entertain the illusion that communism could reform itself; and later the illusion that after the final collapse of communism, the Russian people would emerge in any other condition than they did: scarred and debilitated by their experience of enslavement, and by their complicity in the machinations of evil. …

Paul Greenberg too.

Our final essay on Reagan by Mark Steyn is from the Daily Telegraph, UK.

‘We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.” Of all the marvelous Ronald Reagan lines retailed over the weekend, that’s my favourite. He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and it encapsulates his legacy at home and abroad.

I like it because too often we “small government” conservatives can sound small ourselves – pinched and crabbed and reductive. Reagan made small government a big idea. I always think of him in those broad-shouldered suits, arms outstretched, an inch of cuff: he was awfully expansive about shrinking government.

In the speech, he meant it domestically: it was an age when every government cure for inflation only doubled it. He slew that double-digit dragon so comprehensively that today the word “inflation” is all but obsolescent, at least as a political issue.

But, in the broader sense, Reagan’s line about nations that have governments is a good way to weigh up the world. Across central and eastern Europe, from Slovenia to Lithuania to Bulgaria, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments – serving at the people’s pleasure.

The intelligentsia persist in believing this had nothing to do with Reagan or Thatcher: they maintain that the Soviet empire would have collapsed anyway, their belated belief in the inevitable failure of communism being in no way inconsistent with their previous long-held belief in the inevitable triumph of communism. And anyway, they continue, if anyone was responsible, it was Mikhail Gorbachev. …

In his weekly campaign piece for WSJ, Karl Rove outlines McCain’s path to a win.

Notwithstanding the hype about Barack Obama, here is where the presidential race stands: John McCain was within an average of 1.9% of his Democratic opponent in last week’s daily Gallup tracking poll.

It shouldn’t be this close. Sen. Obama should be way ahead. It’s not that Sen. McCain has made up a lot of ground. Pollster.com1 shows that the Republican steadily declined from March through June as the Democratic contest dominated the news. Mr. McCain stabilized in July, and then ticked up slightly. But the most important political fact of July is that Mr. Obama has lost altitude. Gallup now projects that 23% of this year’s electorate will be swing voters, more than twice the share in 2004.

It seems that each candidate is underperforming with his base. Mr. Obama’s problem is that only 74% of Democrats in the latest Fox Poll support him, while Mr. McCain gets 86% of Republicans. But Mr. McCain’s support lacks the same intensity Mr. Obama receives. The latest Pew poll found that 24% of voters “strongly” support Mr. Obama, compared to 17% for Mr. McCain. …

Tony Blankley writes about this year’s anointed one.

It’s getting tricky to know how to refer to he who presumes to be the next president. It was made clear several months ago that mentioning his middle name is a forbidden act. (Pass out more eggshells.) Then, having nothing honorable to say, Obama warned his followers last week that Sen. McCain would try to scare voters by pointing to Obama’s “funny name” and the fact that “he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills.”

Now, putting aside for the moment the racial component of His warning, what are we to make of the “funny name” reference? Many people have “funny” names. Some people think my last name — being very close in spelling to the adverbial form for the absence of content — is funny.

Certainly, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s name is funny. Many on the left have had great fun with President Bush’s last name. But we all have found our names perfectly serviceable and would expect people to call us by the names by which we identify ourselves.

But He has made it clear that the mere use of His name would be freighted with coded innuendoes of something too horrible to say straightforwardly. One has to go back to Exodus 3:13-14 to find such strict instructions concerning the use of a name. Moses explained: “Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they say to me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?” And God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.” And He said, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” …

Karen Tumulty asks a rhetorical, “Have the Clintons Gotten Over It” and answers, “No.”

… Meanwhile, if Hillary Clinton’s feelings are still bruised, her husband’s are positively raw. The former President is particularly resentful of suggestions—which he believes were fueled by the Obama camp—that he attempted to play upon racial fears during the primaries. Not helping is the fact that Obama has yet to follow up on the tentative dinner plans he and Bill Clinton made at the end of the primary season. “It’s personal with him, in terms of his own legacy,” says a friend of Bill Clinton’s. “And the race stuff really left a bad taste in his mouth.”

Bill Clinton’s resentment came through in an interview with ABC News during his recent trip to Africa. Asked what regrets he might have about his role in his wife’s campaign, he bristled and then shot back, “I am not a racist. I never made a racist comment.” He struggled to render a positive comment about Obama’s qualifications for his old job. “You could argue that nobody is ever ready to be President,” Clinton said. “You could argue that even if you’ve been Vice President for eight years, that no one can ever be fully ready for the pressures of the office.” Pressed again, he responded with an endorsement that could hardly have been a weaker cup of tea: “I never said he wasn’t qualified. The Constitution sets qualification for the President. And then the people decide who they think would be the better President. I think we have two choices. I think he should win, and I think he will win.”  …

Politico writes on Jon Voight coming out of the closet. The Hollywood closet occupied by those who love freedom and think we are best served by market solutions.

Jon Voight intended to turn heads with the “very strong points” in his Washington Times op-ed last week. But he probably didn’t expect so many of them to reside in Hollywood.

In a sign of the growing interest in politics this election year, bloggers who normally focus on the entertainment industry are expanding their presence in one of the Internet’s other spheres of influence.

Voight’s piece slammed Democratic candidate Barack Obama, praised GOP contender John McCain and even repudiated his own Vietnam War protests as the naive flailings of a deluded youth. It was a stunning bit of self-revelatory memoir from the now-conservative “Coming Home” star.

The political blogsosphere, of course, went ballistic. …

Roger Simon has rough words for Random House.

Although it has for some time been a division of German media giant Bertelsmann, Random House has been one of the distinguished names in American publishing since the halcyon days of Bennett Cerf. So it is particularly repugnant to see the company knuckling under to  essentially the same reactionary, anti-democratic, anti-free speech forces that repressed the Danish cartoons.  As we learned in the Wall Street Journal today, the company has decided not to publish Sherry Jones’ historical novel “The Jewel of Medina” about Mohammed’s child bride Aisha.  The book was part of a $100,000 two-book contract with the author. …

Walter Williams says we’re becoming a nation of thieves.

… Much of the justification for the welfare state is to reduce income inequality by making income transfers to the poor. Browning provides some statistics that might help us to evaluate the sincerity and truthfulness of this claim. In 2005, total federal, state and local government expenditures on 85 welfare programs were $620 billion. That’s larger than national defense ($495 billion) or public education ($472 billion). The 2005 official poverty count was 37 million persons. That means welfare expenditures per poor person were $16,750, or $67,000 for a poor family of four.

Those figures understate poverty expenditures because poor people are recipients of non-welfare programs such as Social Security, Medicare, private charity and uncompensated medical care. The question that naturally arises is if we’re spending enough to lift everyone out of poverty, why is there still poverty? The obvious answer is poor people are not receiving all the money being spent in their name. Non-poor people are getting the bulk of it. …

We close today with a couple of items that prove God has a sense of humor. Bill Clinton, in his AIDS fighting role, has come out for monogamy. And Al Gore has a new 100 foot boat named Bio Solar One. That’s right, BS One.

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Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History, gives her Solzhenitsyn send-off.

… In the week of his death, though, what stands out is not who Solzhenitsyn was but what he wrote. It is very easy, in a world where news is instant and photographs travel as quickly as they are taken, to forget how powerful, still, are written words. And Solzhenitsyn was, in the end, a writer: A man who gathered facts, sorted through them, tested them against his own experience, composed them into paragraphs and chapters. It was not his personality but his language that forced people to think more deeply about their values, their assumptions, their societies. It was not his television appearances that affected history but his words.

His manuscripts were read and pondered in silence, and the thought he put into them provoked his readers to think, too. In the end, his books mattered not because he was famous or notorious but because millions of Soviet citizens recognized themselves in his work: They read his books because they already knew that they were true.

James Lileks says after reading Gulag;

…  I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.

Today’s Mark Steyn piece on Reagan came from July 2001 in The Spectator, UK .

… But, of course, it is not necessary for Friedman’s metaphor to make sense, as all the smart people who read The New York Times already agree with him. Missile defence has been a joke ever since it was cooked up a generation ago by President Reagan, the noted B-movie cowboy moron, and instantly dismissed as Star Wars, a comic-book fantasy. Then, as now, the smart set lined up to pour scorn on the presidential clod: according to JFK/LBJ national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, renowned Kremlinologist George F. Kennan, veteran arms control negotiator Gerald Smith, former defence secretary Robert S. McNamara, and a zillion others of one mind, Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative was an ‘act of folly’, a ‘dream’ that ‘cannot be achieved’. Worse, the whole scam was a ‘telling commentary on his presidential style’, according to Philip Geyelin in The Washington Post in 1984:

Reagan had no proposal worked out when he first floated the idea almost casually in a speech devoted to other, known quantities in his military program. He had only a fatuous, personal vision of a nuclear-free world.

Just as President Kennedy had no proposal worked out – only a fatuous personal vision of putting a man on the moon within the decade. …

John Fund adds his personal note to Bob Novak’s health news. John also writes on Pelosi’s interview with Stephanopoulos this past Sunday. A link to that interview is provided below. And, a great cartoon from Lisa Benson.

… On Sunday, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos became exasperated by Ms. Pelosi’s refusal to stray from her rote talking points. Several times he asked variations of the same question: “Why won’t you permit a straight up or down vote?”

“We have a debate every single day on this subject,” she coolly replied. “What you saw in the Congress this week was the war dance of the handmaidens of the oil companies.”

Mr. Stephanopoulos didn’t give up. “But why not allow votes on all that? When you came in as Speaker you promised in your commitment book ‘A New Direction for America’ — let me show our viewers — you said that ‘Bills should generally come to the floor under a procedure that allows open, full, fair debate consisting of full amendment process that grants the Minority the right to offer its alternatives.’ If they want to offer a drilling proposal, why can’t they have a vote?” …

The Economist starts a series on the bellwether states. First up – Ohio.

BARACK OBAMA is doing everything he can to make it look as if the election is a mere formality, and adoring media types are keen to play along. Yet the latest USA Today-Gallup poll puts John McCain four points ahead, while the RealClearPolitics average of polls gives Mr Obama a meagre two-and-a-half-point lead. Optimistic Republicans recall that Michael Dukakis was 17 points ahead of George Bush senior in the summer of 1988, and still lost. So there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this election, like the previous two, could boil down to a tight race settled by close results in a handful of “swing” states.

Ohio is the quintessential battleground state. Bill Clinton won it by some of the narrowest of his margins for any big state—just two points in 1992 and six in 1996. In 2004 George Bush won Ohio, with its precious 20 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to secure the presidency, by a mere 118,600 votes. Had 60,000 Ohioans gone the other way, John Kerry would have been president.

Ohio is also a bellwether. It has voted for the winning candidate in all 11 presidential elections since 1960. In doing so, it has deviated from the national vote shares by only a couple of points. In 2004 it matched the national average exactly. …

Power Line posts on Obama.

For some time I have been trying to make the case that Barack Obama doesn’t know much about anything except how to win friends and influence people, and that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. See, for example, the columns “The Kennedy-Khrushchev conference for dummies” and “Anti-terror oops.” In short, Obama is a BS artist. He is an extraordinary specimen, perhaps approaching the great American type of confidence man explored in literature by Herman Melville, Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison.

In “Emperor Obama’s new clothes,” James Lewis invokes Hans Christian Andersen to explore the same phenomenon. Lewis does a good job with “one little example.” He writes:

On May 19 Senator Obama proclaimed Iran to be just “a tiny country.” That’s a tiny country with seventy million people, half of it covered with mountains that you can tunnel under for your nuclear hidey holes. A half-million men in the army plus the fanatical martyrs of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, a domestic terror apparatus to keep the people down, a growing nuclear and missile program, enough oil to finance it all, a strategic position at the head and the tiny choke-point of the Persian Gulf, a long, long imperial tradition, and an Islamofascist suicide ideology, thanks to Jimmy Carter’s good friend Ayatollah Khomeini. The regime of this tiny country had a habit of sending hundreds of young boys to blow up mine fields with their bodies, wearing green plastic “Keys to Paradise” around their necks. It controls the “Shiite Crescent” from Lebanon to the Gulf using its powerful alliance with Syria and Hezb’allah, supplied by our good friends the Russians and Chinese. The regime has a habit of blowing up American soldiers in Iraq with state-of-the-art shaped-charge explosives. Iran has performed high-altitude missile tests that could only be used to set off a nuclear EMP explosion, designed to cripple any modern nation by zapping its electrical and communication grids. It’s just a “tiny threat,” said Obama — until his staff told him that wasn’t quite right, and he quickly changed his tune. …

Steve Malanga on the red ink in anti-business states.

… Of the approximately $48 billion in accumulated budget shortfalls that the 29 states with projected deficits are facing, $33 billion, or two-thirds of the gap, is concentrated in those five states considered by corporate executives to be the least friendly to business. Meanwhile, among the five states ranked as having the best business environment, Texas and North Carolina have no projected budget gaps, and Georgia, Tennessee and Florida are facing shortfalls amounting to about $4.1 billion, or less than one-tenth of the states’ total.

An idealist would assume that those stark numbers would jump out at legislators in the most anti-business states and prompt a bracing re-evaluation of their spending, tax and regulatory regimes, as Paterson advocates. But no such luck. Paterson’s former colleagues in the state legislature are lobbying for a new tax on millionaires, while across the country California’s legislators have called for boosting the state’s top tax rate from 9.3 percent to 11 percent. Since many firms, especially small ones, are organized corporately in such a way that they pay taxes on profits at their owners’ personal income tax rate, any increase in the top rate of income taxes will hit small firms hard, to say nothing of the impact on the personal taxes of executives at big firms. …

Thoughtful Robert Samuelson column on our affinity neighborhoods.

People prefer to be with people like themselves. For all the celebration of “diversity,” it’s sameness that dominates. Most people favor friendships with those who have similar backgrounds, interests and values. It makes for more shared experiences, easier conversations and more comfortable silences. Despite many exceptions, the urge is nearly universal. It’s human nature.

Perhaps America’s greatest glory is to rise above this self-absorption. People with many different heritages and beliefs have blended into a cohesive society. At some point, most people subordinate their own firmly held convictions and loyalties to the larger nation. This is more than patriotism; it’s the identity of “being an American.” But it is in constant tension with the differences that divide Americans.

The latest manifestation of this is what Bill Bishop calls “the Big Sort.” By that, he means that Americans have increasingly “clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and, in the end, politics.” Republican fundamentalists congregate with other Republican fundamentalists. Liberal Democrats herd with other liberal Democrats. Environmentalists decamp to Portland, Ore. Child-centered Republican families move to the exurbs of Dallas and Minneapolis. …

Op-Ed in The Australian says it’s been a tough year for the globalony folks.

IT has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world’s oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.

In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans’s article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can’t be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.

Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.

The reason is that precisely that they are believers, not scientists. No amount of empirical evidence will overturn what has become not a scientific theory but a form of religion. …

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Christopher Hitchens with his send off for Solzhenitsyn.

Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken. Should they manage to survive, such heroes have a good chance of outliving the state or the system that so grossly underestimated them. Examples are rather precious and relatively few, and they include Nelson Mandela refusing an offer to be released from jail (unless and until all other political detainees were also freed) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn having to be deported from his country of birth against his will, even though he had become—and had been before—a prisoner there.

Two words will always be indissolubly connected to the name of Alexander Isayevich: the acronym GULAG (for the initials of the Stalinist system of penitentiary camps that dotted the Soviet landscape like a pattern of hellish islands) and the terse, harsh word Zek, to describe the starved and overworked inhabitants of this archipelago of the new serfdom. …

Pickerhead has learned to pay attention to David Warren, even when he starts out in obtuse fashion. Turns out his essay on the “truths we know in our hearts” is timed perfectly for the passing of one of the 20th Century’s bravest truthtellers.

… A university professor has told me, “A certain amount of discretion is necessary. You must say things in a way sufficiently cumbersome, that those who can handle the truth will get it, and those who can’t, will not.” This was his prescription for academic survival, in the age of the “politically correct.”

Prudent advice, to be sure, but then one remembers the proverb of William Blake: “Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid, courted by Incapacity.”

We (royal) ought consistently to seek the obvious truth. That is the calling. Why do we hesitate?

Low motives easily suggest themselves. “I should like to keep my job. I should like to stay out of prison. I should like to avoid being hauled before a Human Rights Tribunal. I should like to have a quiet life, and continue paying my spousal support. Things may seem bad sometimes, but they could be worse.”

The cock crows thrice. There are saints, there are people who know that there are saints, and there are people who don’t know. One should aspire to rise at least to the middle condition. Not everyone is called to martyrdom, but everyone is called to witness.

Even journalists.

To witness what? To witness the news, or what appears to be news; to witness the unusual or significant; to describe or explain some aspect of current history.

Getting the facts straight — a far more difficult task than most readers or even journalists realize — is one of those ethical absolutes. It is a precondition for truth, though not the truth itself. For it is easy to lie with all your facts straight. …

Speaking of truth telling; in Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn asked himself what he would have been like had he been recruited into the NKVD organs rather than becoming an artillery officer.

“So I would (try) to imagine: if, by the time war broke out, I had already been wearing an NKVD officer’s insignia on my blue tabs, what would I have become? Nowadays, of course, I can console myself by saying that my heart wouldn’t have stood it, that I would have objected and at some point slammed the door. But later, lying on a prison bunk, I began to look back over my actual career as an officer and I was horrified.”

The June 2004 week when we celebrated Reagan’s life found five essays on the Gipper written by Mark Steyn. We had one yesterday. Today two more. One from the Sun-Times and one from National Review.

… Ronald Reagan is beyond the Clark Cliffords and Arthur Schlesingers now. When it comes to his reputation as a great president, the people are way ahead. In that respect, if the citizens of this great republic will forgive a monarchical comparison, let me return to the passing of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

She was 102, so it wasn’t exactly unexpected. The BBC and other broadcasters had long ago decided that most of the people who cared about the old girl were themselves long dead. So, come the day, they sloughed it off. Old woman, no big deal, all in the past. And then they spent the rest of the week trying to explain why they’d got it so wrong.

Outside the studios, over half a million people solemnly filed past her coffin as she lay in state at Westminster Hall, and a million lined the streets for her funeral, including some who’d flown in from Canada and other far-flung realms.

Something similar happened last week. Hundreds of thousands of Americans waited quietly in line in California and then in Washington to say goodbye to their president. Meanwhile, back on the air, the big networks struggled to find the tone. On the day itself, the assembled media grandees agreed that he was an amiable fellow with a big smile who told a good joke. If you’d tuned in 10 minutes late to ”Larry King Live,” you’d have assumed he was doing one of his special tributes to some half-forgotten comic or TV host from the ’50s that no one had very much to say about.

Back in the real world, the people waiting hours to get in to the Rotunda were there not just because Ronald Reagan was amiable but because they grasped that he was a significant figure in the life of this country and the world. Here too the events of two years ago are instructive: The Queen Mother was the last living representative of Britain’s wartime leadership. She didn’t win any battles, of course, but, advised to go to Canada, she instead stayed on in London, toured bombed-out streets in the East End, and took a direct hit at Buckingham Palace. To those on the streets of Westminster in 2002, she symbolized resolve and then victory in a great cause.

That’s what this week’s mourners understand about Reagan, too. He also symbolizes resolve and victory — in a slyer, slipperier war, but one which he won just as decisively. Some saw it then. More see it now. One day even the network anchors and Ivy League professors will get it.

Why is it Liberals think they’re so much smarter than those on the right? Peter Schweizer has some answers.

During the 2000 election, George W. Bush was often given the moniker “stupid.” A Boston television reporter tripped him up with a “pop quiz,” asking him the names of foreign leaders. At the same time, his opponent, Vice President Al Gore, was presented as the consummate intellectual. He went out of his way to drop phrases like “Cartesian revolution” and used complex metaphors like “the clockwork universe” in his speeches.

Indeed, Gore seemed obsessed with proving how smart he was — and the media was his willing accomplice. The media reported at least a dozen times that Gore was “the smartest kid in the class.” Bloomberg News observed that Gore had little patience for those “a few IQ points short of genius.” The New York Times asked (in all seriousness), “Is Gore too smart to be president?” His biggest challenge, the paper explained, was “to show that he is a regular guy despite a perceived surplus of gravitas, which at least some Americans seem to find intimidating.” This liberal assumption that a candidate can be just too darn smart to win a presidential election in this country goes back to Adlai Stevenson.

What proof was there of Gore’s alleged gravitas? How exactly did the media know that Gore was so smart and Bush so dumb? In fact, the record did not indicate any of this was true. It was often alleged, probably with reason, that Bush only got into Yale because his father had gone there and his grandfather had been a Connecticut senator. Yet Gore, with high school Bs and Cs (his only As were in art), got into Harvard in part because (like other politicians’ sons, including a raft of Kennedys) his father was a famous senator. At Harvard, Gore’s grades did not improve. In his sophomore year he earned a D, a C-minus, two Cs, two C-pluses and one B-minus. He was in the bottom fifth of his class his first two years in school. Later he flunked out of divinity school (failing five of his eight classes) and dropped out of Vanderbilt University Law School. Gore was once asked (after having served in the U.S. Senate for several years) to name his favourite president. “President Knox,” he replied. …

Emmett Tyrrell has interesting ideas for history reading this summer.

Slate reviews a new GPS/Traffic device.

Most of the time, you can get along fine without in-car GPS. Your daily commute is marked by well-worn drudgery: You drive to work, to the store, and back home, rote trips for which you don’t need help. And nowadays when you are lost, your phone can probably assist you. So it’s no surprise that GPS firms are suffering. This week, shares of Garmin, the once-high-flying market leader, plummeted after the company lowered its revenue expectations for the year and delayed the launch of its long-promised smartphone, a device investors hoped would unshackle Garmin’s fortunes from the apparently sinking GPS market.

But a few months ago, a Silicon Valley start-up called Dash Navigation put out a product that could well revive the sagging business. The Dash Express navigator packs a killer feature that other GPS systems lack: the Internet. Network connectivity powers Dash’s primary attraction: what the company calls “crowd-sourced traffic.” As you traverse your favored metropolis, the Dash Express anonymously transmits information about its location and speed to a central server. Every other Dash driver does the same. Using this data, Dash can paint a stunningly accurate picture of traffic patterns. Have you ever been stuck in a jam and wished there were some way to look two miles ahead to see whether things are still ugly? Dash essentially does that for you.

I’ve been testing the Dash Express for a week, and I’m floored. …

Humor section starts with the story about trash inspections in San Francisco. If you don’t recycle, do you get sent to the garbage gulag?

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Ilya Somin at Volokh has Solzhenitsyn thoughts.

John Podhoretz too.

And Victor Davis Hanson.

Which got Pickerhead thinking about Reagan, gone now for four years since that Saturday in June. And thinking about Steyn too, temporarily gone now for four weeks. How ’bout Steyn writing on Reagan? This is from Pickings’ Reagan Week four years ago, Mark Steyn in the Atlantic Monthly.

All Saturday across the networks, media grandees who’d voted for Carter and Mondale, just like all their friends did, tried to explain the appeal of Ronald Reagan. He was “The Great Communicator”, he had a wonderful sense of humour, he had a charming smile… self-deprecating… the tilt of his head…

All true, but not what matters. Even politics attracts its share of optimistic, likeable men, and most of them leave no trace – like Britain’s “Sunny Jim” Callaghan, a perfect example of the defeatism of western leadership in the 1970s. It was the era of “détente”, a word barely remembered now, which is just as well, as it reflects poorly on us: the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the free world had decided that the unfree world was not a prison ruled by a murderous ideology that had to be defeated but merely an alternative lifestyle that had to be accommodated. Under cover of “détente”, the Soviets gobbled up more and more real estate across the planet, from Ethiopia to Grenada. Nonetheless, it wasn’t just the usual suspects who subscribed to this grubby evasion – Helmut Schmidt, Pierre Trudeau, Francois Mitterand – but most of the so-called “conservatives”, too – Ted Heath, Giscard d’Estaing, Gerald Ford.

Unlike these men, unlike most other senior Republicans, Ronald Reagan saw Soviet Communism for what it was: a great evil. Millions of Europeans across half a continent from Poland to Bulgaria, Slovenia to Latvia live in freedom today because he acknowledged that simple truth when the rest of the political class was tying itself in knots trying to pretend otherwise. That’s what counts. He brought down the “evil empire”, and all the rest is fine print. …

Pelosi the Planet Protector cannot stand scrutiny from Charles Krauthammer.

… Places such as Nigeria, where chronic corruption, environmental neglect and the resulting unrest and instability lead to pipeline explosions, oil spills and illegal siphoning by the poverty-stricken population — which leads to more spills and explosions. Just this week, two Royal Dutch Shell pipelines had to be shut down because bombings by local militants were causing leaks into the ground.

Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.

The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling. Today, directional drilling — essentially drilling down, then sideways — allows access to oil that in 1970 would have required a surface footprint more than three times as large. Additionally, the United States has one of the most extensive and least corrupt regulatory systems on the planet.

Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?

The net environmental effect of Pelosi’s no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world — thereby increasing net planetary damage. …

Jim Lindgren in Volokh gives us some excerpts of a lengthy Weekly Standard piece on Obama and his time in the Illinois legislature.

Stanley Kurtz has a long profile on Barack Obama’s years in the Illinois State Senate: “Barack Obama’s Lost Years: The senator’s tenure as a state legislator reveals him to be an old-fashioned, big government, race-conscious liberal.”

Kurtz’s primary sources are the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender. Over the last few months, I have gone through a lot of the Chicago Defender stories myself. While I wouldn’t spin the facts as negatively as Kurtz does, there are a lot of facts in Kurtz’s story that people may not yet realize. …

Ed Morrissey notes how Rush Limbaugh tagged Obama with Carter’s “malaise” talk.

You know, Rush Limbaugh celebrates his 20th anniversary in syndication this week, an amazing accomplishment in any entertainment medium but especially so in radio.  Why has he succeeded so completely?  Perhaps because he can connect the dots, and the dottiness, as he does with Barack Obama’s energy policy as explained yesterday.  Take a listen to Rush’s deconstruction:

LIMBAUGH: This is Obama yesterday at a campaign event in Springfield, Missouri:

OBAMA: All the oil they’re talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups, you could actually save just as much.

LIMBAUGH: This is unbelievable! My friends, this is laughable of course, but it’s stupid! It is stupid! How many of you remember the seventies? When we had these shortages, all through the Jimmy Carter years and we have all these tips, all these tips on how to save gasoline? Avoid jackrabbit starts, keep your tires properly inflated, there’s a list of about ten or twelve these things. I said if I follow each one of these things I’ll have to stop the car every five miles, siphon some fuel out, for all the fuel I’m going to be saving.

This is ridiculous. This is a presidential candidate and he’s talking about keeping your tires inflated and getting regular tune-ups and that would save as much oil as drilling would produce. And this guy is the Democrat presidential nominee. Who has filled his head with this stuff? …

Slate covers the “nanny state” as it bans fast food restaurants in LA neighborhoods. Areas we can best describe as “The Hood.”

The war on fat has just crossed a major red line. The Los Angeles City Council has passed an ordinance prohibiting construction of new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area inhabited by 500,000 low-income people.

We’re not talking anymore about preaching diet and exercise, disclosing calorie counts, or restricting sodas in schools. We’re talking about banning the sale of food to adults. Treating French fries like cigarettes or liquor. I didn’t think this would happen in the United States anytime soon. I was wrong.

The mayor hasn’t yet signed the ordinance, but he probably will, since it passed unanimously. It doesn’t affect existing restaurants, and initially it will impose only a one-year moratorium. But that period is likely to be extended to two years or more, and the prohibition’s sponsor hopes to make it permanent. …

Christopher Buckley on the “age thing.”

… Senator Obama’s boosters pooh-pooh his Youth Thing problem, sometimes a bit grandiosely. Al Gore (44 when he became vice president) was moved to quote something President Kennedy (after Teddy Roosevelt, our youngest president) used on one of his detractors: “To exclude from positions of trust and command all those below the age of 44 would have kept Jefferson from writing the Declaration of Independence, Washington from commanding the Continental Army, Madison from fathering the Constitution, . . . and Christopher Columbus from discovering America.” He quoted this in the presence of a beaming Obama, and beam the senator might, having just been not so subtly compared to Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Columbus. If he lives up to those paradigms, we will be in excellent hands indeed.

Back to McCain: Experience is no guarantor of greatness, or even wisdom, as George Will recently reminded us wittily:

The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to being ranked as America’s worst president. Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow. …

US News covers the election of 1864, one of the most momentous in our nation’s history.

… On March 4, 1865—in his second inaugural address—Lincoln gave one of the most eloquent and stirring speeches in history. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” he said, “let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

The following month, five days after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate forces at Appomattox, Lincoln was shot by an assassin. He died the next morning, on April 15, 1865.

In the end, Lincoln’s profound legacy was created and propelled by two elections—the one in 1860, which triggered the war, and the election of 1864, which enabled Lincoln to win it. Historian Henry Adams once wrote that a president “resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.” Lincoln understood this to his core. Added historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: “The Constitution offers every president a helm, but the course and the port constitute the first requirement for presidential greatness. Great presidents possess, or are possessed by, a vision of an ideal America. Their passion is to make sure the ship of state sails on the right course.” Defining that vision and setting that course are what Lincoln’s presidency was all about.