Click on WORD or PDF below for full content
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. …