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Spengler has a look at the US financial crisis.

Lehman Brothers survived the American Civil War, two world wars and the Great Depression, but today, Monday, the firm that set the standard in fixed income markets will be liquidated. Potential losses are so toxic that none of the major financial institutions was willing to acquire it.

Lehman’s demise follows the failure last week of the two American mortgage guarantee agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It is remarkable that the US authorities, exhausted from their efforts to bail out the mortgage guarantors and other firms, have left Lehman to its fate.

An enormous hoax has been perpetrated on global financial markets during the past 10 years. An American economy based on opening containers from China and selling the contents at Wal-Mart, or trading houses back and forth, provides scant profitability. Where the underlying profitability of the American economy was  poor, financial engineering managed to transform thin profits into apparently fat ones through the magic of leverage.

The income of American consumers might have stagnated, but the price of their houses doubled during 1998-2007 thanks to the application of leverage to mortgage finance. The profitability of American corporations might have slowed, but the application of leverage in the form of mergers and acquisitions financed with junk bonds multiplied the thin band of profitability. …

Editors at IBD discuss the background to the credit meltdown.

Obama in a statement yesterday blamed the shocking new round of subprime-related bankruptcies on the free-market system, and specifically the “trickle-down” economics of the Bush administration, which he tried to gig opponent John McCain for wanting to extend.

But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions. …

A month and a half ago, Village Voice published a long piece on the origins of the problems at Fannie and Freddie. That’s right, Village Voice. And they most of their finger pointing was in the direction of Andrew Cuomo. Of course, that would confirm Pickerhead’s world view that almost all problems in our society are caused by big government liberal Dems and their crazy schemes. It seems to be a good time to include this in Pickings.

There are as many starting points for the mortgage meltdown as there are fears about how far it has yet to go, but one decisive point of departure is the final years of the Clinton administration, when a kid from Queens without any real banking or real-estate experience was the only man in Washington with the power to regulate the giants of home finance, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), better known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded “kickbacks” to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.

What he did is important—not just because of what it tells us about how we got in this hole, but because of what it says about New York’s attorney general, who has been trying for months to don a white hat in the subprime scandal, pursuing cases against banks, appraisers, brokers, rating agencies, and multitrillion-dollar, quasi-public Fannie and Freddie.

It all starts, as the headlines of recent weeks do, with these two giant banks. But in the hubbub about their bailout, few have noticed that the only federal agency with the power to regulate what Cuomo has called “the gods of Washington” was HUD. Congress granted that power in 1992, so there were only four pre-crisis secretaries at the notoriously political agency that had the ability to rein in Fannie and Freddie: ex–Texas mayor Henry Cisneros and Bush confidante Alfonso Jackson, who were driven from office by criminal investigations; Mel Martinez, who left to chase a U.S. Senate seat in Florida; and Cuomo, who used the agency as a launching pad for his disastrous 2002 gubernatorial candidacy.

With that many pols at the helm, it’s no wonder that most analysts have portrayed Fannie and Freddie as if they were unregulated renegades, and rarely mentioned HUD in the ongoing finger-pointing exercise that has ranged, appropriately enough, from Wall Street to Alan Greenspan. But the near-collapse of these dual pillars in recent weeks is rooted in the HUD junkyard, where every Cuomo decision discussed here was later ratified by his Bush successors. …

Division of Labour posts on the media’s economic analysis.

On campus this afternoon I overheard the following remark by a non-economist, trying to explain to another non-economist the Lehman failure and today’s stock market decline: “It’s a combination of deregulation and greed. Boy, if you deregulate enough, the greed will follow.”

If I had butted in, I would have made two points. (1) If an unusually large number of airplanes crash during a given week, do you blame gravity? No. Greed, like gravity, is a constant. It can’t explain why the number of crashes is higher than usual. (2) What deregulation have we had in the last decade? Please tell me. On the contrary, …

David Harsanyi plays “whose a liar.”

There are many brands of truth. Some are poetic truths, others are political truths and some are staggering exaggerations — or what politicians frequently refer to as “talking.”

These days, there is an outbreak of artificial indignation over the “lies” of Republicans. John McCain, claims Barack Obama’s national press secretary Bill Burton, has run the “sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history.”

Ouch. We can attribute one of the following to this claim: 1) Burton has just landed on the planet Earth; 2) Burton is attempting to manipulate the media; 3) Burton is “lying.”

I pick 2. After all, we’ve all heard the self-serving myth that pits helpless, meek, high-minded, issue-oriented Democrats against mendacious and mean Republicans, who not only detest America — especially children and small vulnerable creatures — but will lie and cheat to keep all oppressed.

The facts betray a more equitable story. …

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WSJ Editors take an important lesson form Woodward’s new book.

… The success of the surge in pacifying Iraq has been so swift and decisive that it’s easy to forget how difficult it was to find the right general, choose the right strategy, and muster the political will to implement it. It is also easy to forget how many obstacles the State and Pentagon bureaucracies threw in Mr. Bush’s way, and how much of their bad advice he had to ignore, especially now that their reputations are also benefiting from Iraq’s dramatic turn for the better.

Then again, American history offers plenty of examples of wartime Presidents who faced similar challenges: Ulysses Grant became Lincoln’s general-in-chief in 1864, barely a year before the surrender at Appomattox. What matters most is that the President had the fortitude to insist on winning. That’s a test President Bush passed — something history, if not Bob Woodward, will recognize.

Pickerhead’s favorite media line on Sarah Palin was from the incredulous Roger Ebert, “And how can a politician her age have never have gone to Europe?” Speaking of Europe, Bret Stephens reports on Obama’s popularity there.

Told he had the support of “every thinking person” for his second presidential bid in 1956, Democrat Adlai Stevenson famously replied: “That’s not enough, madam. We need a majority!” It’s a line that springs to mind in this presidential season, amid polls and reports that the current Democratic contender from Illinois has the support of just about every non-American interested in our politics.

The latest data come courtesy of the BBC, which commissioned a survey of 23,531 people in 22 countries for their views about the U.S. election. The not-so-astounding result: Barack Obama is the favorite in all 22 countries. The Illinois Democrat’s numbers are especially striking in Britain (where he leads Republican John McCain by a 59% to 9% margin, with the rest not expressing a preference) and Canada (66% to 14%). They also hold up in China (35% to 15%), Egypt (26% to 13%), Brazil (51% to 8%) and, of course, France (69% to 6%). Broad majorities in most countries also believe an Obama administration would do more than a McCain one to heal America’s relations with the wider world.

But here’s a question: Should we — that is, voting-age Americans — care? …

… More recently, the British columnist Jonathan Freedland has written in the Guardian that “if Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger.” … Works for Pickerhead

Free speech is important because it makes it easier to spot the idiots. Canada has one. David Warren has the story.

… Typical “conservatives,” my outraged correspondents were, to a man (and woman), careful to say they don’t want Ms. Mallick censored or prosecuted for writing such things, that she has “a right” to say what she pleases. They only contest her right to be paid by the Canadian taxpayer, through her gig at the CBC. Now, if I were the Generalissimo of Canada, the CBC would be the first billion dollars I’d save, but until that happy hour arrives, I only wish they’d publish Ms. Mallick’s scribblings more prominently.

Several reasons for this. The first, of course, is that by doing so, they will bring the day nearer when the CBC will be, ahem, “privatized.”

But my second reason is more generous. I think Ms. Mallick expresses openly what many, quite possibly most, of her MSM colleagues are actually thinking, and in my experience, actually saying in social gatherings and while working away from the microphones — though seldom with such ebullience. Ms. Mallick is rare in being so refreshingly candid, on the record.

Where such prejudices as hers exist, it is an advantage to everyone to have them expressed openly, discussed openly, demolished openly. Far worse is the poison in people who think like Ms. Mallick, but contain themselves within the shallow literary conventions of “journalistic objectivity.” …

Charles on Charles; Krauthammer on Gibson, that is.

… There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”

Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”

Wrong.

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. …

Dick Morris on the reasons Sarah scares the Dems.

… Why do Democrats feel so threatened? They’ve even stopped attacking McCain and President Bush to launch a vicious and sexist barrage at her that would normally make a feminist angry and a Democrat blush.

Basically, it’s this: John McCain only endangers Democratic chances of victory this November, but Sarah Palin is an existential threat to the Democratic Party.

She threatens a core element of the party’s base – women

When an African-American like Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell or Condi Rice rises to prominence as a Republican, he or she endangers the Democratic coalition. So would a Republican labor leader.

And so, above all, does the woman Republican running for vice president.

Democrats can’t stomach seeing the feminist movement’s impetus for greater female political participation and empowerment “hijacked” by a pro-life woman who espouses traditional values. They must obliterate her, lest her popularity eat away at their party’s core. …

Peter Wehner on the sudden interest of the press in accuracy in the campaign.

… My own view is that the debate about “lipstick on a pig” was silly and will soon be forgotten. Yet it’s not as if it broke any barriers in that regard. To take just one arguably more serious example: Recall that in February, Barack Obama said, “We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years.”

It’s a charge Obama repeated, even though he knew it was untrue. (The Annenberg Political Fact Check said, “It’s a rank falsehood for the DNC to accuse McCain of wanting to wage ‘endless war’ based on his support for a presence in Iraq something like the U.S. role in South Korea.”) The fact that the accusation was false didn’t seem to matter; one Obama aide told the Politico, “It’s seldom you get such a clear shot.” But for some reason, the press didn’t go into a tizzy on this matter. Puzzling. …

Melanie Phillips blogs on the “Stasi” tactics of Obama’s fans.

… Apparently Camp Obama has parachuted dozens of operatives into Alaska to find the skeletons in the Palin closet that it just knows must exist. Unable to process the fact that the left might not come into its rightful inheritance of power, which as we all know is the natural order of the universe, it is behaving like an American Stasi.

And the more it behaves in this grotesque manner, the more counter-productive it all is. Palin is a kind of barium meal for the US body politic: as she is ingested deeper into the system, the nastiness and sheer malevolence of the Democratic party and its bullying cheerleaders in the media are being sickeningly illuminated all around her. As a result, the media and the Democrats are merely doing untold damage to themselves, particularly since the blogosphere is shredding the smears being hurled at Palin as fast as they are being produced. …

Another view of the media firestorm from Tod Lindberg of the Weekly Standard.

… Now, you might think it hypocritical to criticize the inexperience of a vice presidential nominee who has similar experience to your presidential nominee, but that’s just a failure of the imagination. Indeed, hypocrisy was the strange charge Democrats decided to make against McCain and Palin: Having run against Obama all summer for his lack of experience and accomplishment, how dare John McCain pick as his running mate someone with (ahem) experience comparable to that of the Democratic candidate for president McCain had been criticizing?

Well, maybe because it is not a sign of the strength of a candidate at the top of a ticket to need the experience of Joe Biden (or Dick Cheney) in order to allay concerns that he’s not quite up to some aspects of the job. And, contrariwise, it is a sign of strength at the top when the nominee can look to the future and make a priority of party-building. Does anybody think that if Obama loses, he will have left his party in a stronger position by advancing the prospects of Joe Biden? Fortunately for Democrats, at least they’ve got Hillary in the wings.

But these weren’t the only hypocrisies in the air. Remember reading the discussions of Vice President Al Gore’s parenting skills in all the papers the day after his teenage son got busted for dope at high school? No? That would be because Gore called around to all the papers (including the Washington Times, where I was editorial page editor at the time) and asked us not to publish it, kids being kids and being owed some privacy. The newspapers didn’t. That was then: Given a preposterous Internet rumor that Sarah Palin was never pregnant with her four-month-old baby but faked it to cover up for her daughter, Bristol was fair game. This was a judgment shared among Democrats and, coincidentally, the media (the same ones who were also all over the John Edwards love-child story, remember?). …

NY Post has the story of photographer who blindsided McCain for creepy shots.

Controversial celebrity photographer Jill Greenberg, a self-professed “hard-core Dem,” deliberately took a series of unflattering shots of Republican nominee John McCain for the current cover of The Atlantic – and then bragged about it on a blog.

Greenberg, known for her heavily retouched pics of apes and babies, boasted to Photo District News that she submitted photos of the Arizona senator to the mag while barely airbrushing them.

“I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she boasted. …

On one level this Economist story on traffic research would seem to say it’s hopeless. But it also shows the sophistication of the effort. In itself, that shows promise.

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Amir Taheri writes on the conflicting lessons of 9/11.

… McCain believes that America is at war; Obama doesn’t. McCain believes the United States can win on the battlefield; Obama doesn’t.

For Obama, the problem is one of effective law enforcement. His model is the way Clinton handled the first attack on World Trade Center in 1993. Obama says: “We are able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial.” This means the United States reacting after being attacked.

McCain, however, doesn’t fear the politically incorrect term “pre-emption” – hitting the enemy before he hits you.

WHEN all is said and done, this election may well have only one big issue: the existential threat that Islamist terrorism poses to America’s safety. Since McCain and Obama offer radically different policies for facing that threat, American voters do have a real choice.

Gerard Baker tries to explain to Obama-worshipping Euros how it is The One might lose.

… Travelling in Britain this week, I’ve been asked repeatedly by close followers of US politics if it can really be true that Barack Obama might not win. Thoughtful people cannot get their head around the idea that Mr Obama, exciting new pilot of change, supported by Joseph Biden, experienced navigator of the swamplands of Washington politics, could possibly be defeated.

They look upon John McCain and Sarah Palin and see something out of hag-ridden history: the wizened old warrior, obsessed with finding enemies in every corner of the globe, marching in lockstep with the crackpot, mooseburger-chomping mother from the wilds of Alaska, rifle in one hand, Bible in the other, smiting caribou and conventional science as she goes.

Two patronising explanations are adduced to explain why Americans are going wrong. The first is racism. I’ve dealt with this before and it has acquired no more merit. White supremacists haven’t been big on Democratic candidates, whatever their colour, for a long time, and Mr Obama’s race is as likely to generate enthusiasm among blacks and young voters as it is hostility among racists.

In a similarly condescending account, those foolish saps are being conned into voting for Mr McCain because they like his running-mate. Her hockey-mom charm and storybook career appeals to their worst instincts. The race is boiling down to a beauty contest in which a former beauty queen is stealing the show. Believe this if it helps you come to terms with the possibility of a Democratic defeat. But there really are better explanations. …

And Charles Krauthammer recounts the Obama trajectory as it seems to be crashing to earth.

…Palin is not just a problem for Obama. She is also a symptom of what ails him. Before Palin, Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great. Which is why McCain‘s Paris Hilton ads struck such a nerve. Obama’s meteoric rise was based not on issues — there was not a dime’s worth of difference between him and Hillary on issues — but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.

The unease at the Denver convention, the feeling of buyer’s remorse, was the Democrats’ realization that the arc of Obama’s celebrity had peaked — and had now entered a period of its steepest decline. That Palin could so instantly steal the celebrity spotlight is a reflection of that decline.

It was inevitable. Obama had managed to stay aloft for four full years. But no one can levitate forever. …

James Pethokoukis who writes on money and politics for US News is uniquely situated to comment on the bubble that was Barack.

… Has the “revolutionary optimism” of Obamamania faded? Let’s turn to a second event. I was recently chatting with a top Obama adviser who was explaining in detail the campaign’s ambitious 50-state strategy, how legions of Obamamaniacs were turning up in the reddest counties of the red states. If that was all true, I asked him, how come the polls were so close? If Obama was surging in places where John Kerry and Al Gore got clobbered, shouldn’t the Democratic nominee be ahead by a country mile? The only answer I got was something about how the structure of the American electorate is historically biased against Democrats.

Huh? I felt like a Wall Street analyst during the tech boom sitting through a glitzy PowerPoint presentation—filled with buzzwords like “stickiness” and “eyeballs” and, of course, “sticky eyeballs”—who finally had the temerity to ask: “So if things are so great, why aren’t you making any money?” It’s like the old joke, “Sure, we lose money on each sale, but we make up for it on volume!” (The adviser finally admitted that Obama hadn’t closed the deal on national security.)

Is Obama doomed to go from hero to zero, bubble to complete bust? I don’t think so. Politicians, unlike stocks, don’t go to zero—though Howard Dean did come awfully close in the 2004 Democratic primaries. …

Byron York tries to understand why Obama supporters go crazy contemplating Sarah.

What is it about Sarah Palin that seems to have driven so many smart, thoughtful Obama supporters around the bend?

Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, wrote that Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman” and denounced “the Republican Party’s cynical calculation that because [Palin] has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies … she speaks for the women of America.”

Carol Fowler, the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, said that Palin’s “primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”

Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan, wrote that Palin’s values “more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers” and asked: “What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.” …

Perhaps the strangest episode in the Charlie Gibson interview of Sarah Palin was his willingness to believe the bogus AP reports of her supposed claim our Iraq efforts were a “mission from God” in Blues Bros speak. Jim Lindgren of Volokh has the story.

One thing I learned tonight is that neither Charlie Gibson nor anyone on his staff reads the Volokh Conspiracy (or Hot Air for that matter).

Outrageously, in his interview Gibson claimed that Sarah Palin had called the Iraq War “a task . . . from God.”

No she didn’t. She prayed that it was a task from God. As I said a few days ago:

I find it hard to believe that Anderson Cooper [and now, Charlie Gibson] does not understand the difference between praying for something you hope is true and stating that it is true.

Is praying for peace throughout the world the same as saying that there is peace throughout the world?

If I had prayed for the press to be fair to Sarah Palin that would not be the same as stating that the press is being fair to Sarah Palin.

Here was the exchange between Palin and Gibson tonight:: …

More on this from Hot Air.

Jay Nordlinger posts on Gibson attitudes at the Corner.

ABC News is so stupid they are flagging the “holy war” parts of the interview for promotional purposes. Dartblog with the story

We have snippets of CBS News interview with Hillary’s Mark Penn.

… CBSNews.com: So you think the media is being uniquely tough on Palin now?

Mark Penn: Well, I think that the media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they’re not doing on the other candidates. And that’s going to subject them to people concluding that they’re giving her a tougher time. Now, the media defense would be, “Yeah, we looked at these other candidates who have been in public life at an earlier time.”

What happened here very clearly is that the controversy over Palin led to 37 million Americans tuning into a vice-presidential speech, something that is unprecedented, because they wanted to see for themselves. This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility with them. …

Wisconsin is this week’s bellwether state in The Economist.

… Wisconsin is best known for its dairy products and its love of American football. The Packers, a team from the small city of Green Bay, claim some of the sport’s most obsessive fans, known as “cheeseheads”, a term also used to denote Wisconsans generally. But among politicos, Wisconsin is the swing state that has failed to swing.

Earlier in the last century, the state was at the heart of America’s Progressive movement, enacting liberal social reforms such as compensation for injured workers before the rest of the country did. But Wisconsin pioneered conservative welfare reform in the 1990s, and its voters now plainly prefer divided government on the state level: Wisconsin currently has a Democratic governor, Jim Doyle, and a Republican-controlled state Assembly. And they have split almost exactly evenly when it comes to the presidency. Al Gore took the state by only 5,700 votes in 2000, and John Kerry won it by 11,400 in 2004—0.2% and 0.4% of the vote, respectively. The margins were a lot closer than those in nearby Michigan, which gets a lot more attention. …

Adam Smith blog post on the disruptions of bio-fuel.

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David Warren marks the anniversary looking at Canada’s contributions to the war on terror.

… Canada took a pass on helping the American enterprise in Iraq — the justification for which we did not so much dispute as ignore. We left the British and Australians, the Poles, Georgians, and others, to do our share of the lifting there. The wisdom of the Chrétien government was to focus our embarrassingly limited resources on the task of clearing the Taliban out of Afghanistan.

In this, we have played a modest but distinguished role. Even if our government has not, our soldiers in that theatre of war have recalled Canada’s finest martial traditions, in some wonderfully aggressive campaigns. Our scandalously under-equipped and under-manned units have taken casualties proportionally higher than our allies — but more to the point, they have inflicted casualties far out of proportion to what they have sustained.

It has been a mostly thankless task Their accomplishments have been almost entirely ignored in Canadian media back home, while their losses have been prominently reported. In the last fortnight, for instance, I was aghast to be unable to find, anywhere in the mainstream Canadian media, mention of our soldiers’ part in one major, obviously heroic operation.

Their instruction was to escort a 200-tonne hydroelectric turbine — too large for any helicopter to lift — on a five-day journey across Taliban-infested territory to the Kajaki reservoir in Helmand province. The expedition, led by the British, and including Australian, New Zealand, and American troops, as well as Canadian and Afghan, was under attack throughout the journey. The turbine was successfully delivered, intact. …

Fouad Ajami looks at the foreign policy differences between the candidates.

… When we elect a president, we elect a commander in chief. This remains an imperial republic with military obligations and a military calling. That is why Eisenhower overwhelmed Stevenson, Reagan’s swagger swept Carter out of office, Bush senior defeated Dukakis, etc.

The exception was Bill Clinton, with his twin victories over two veterans of World War II. We had taken a holiday from history — but 9/11 awakened us to history’s complications. Is it any wonder that Hillary Clinton feigned the posture of a muscular American warrior, and carried the working class with her?

The warrior’s garb sits uneasily on Barack Obama’s shoulders: Mr. Obama seeks to reassure Americans that he and his supporters are heirs of Roosevelt and Kennedy; that he, too, could order soldiers to war, stand up to autocracies and rogue regimes. But the widespread skepticism about his ability to do so is warranted. …

American Spectator suggests Sarah fans might want to cool their jets a little.

In the less than two weeks since she was introduced as John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin has become a political sensation.

She has united the Republican base behind McCain’s candidacy in a way that few could have predicted. She has energized conservatives. She’s attracted more than 15,000 to rallies. And her speech to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul last week has prompted comparisons to Ronald Reagan.

With all due respect to the governor of Alaska, are conservatives getting ahead of themselves?

For months, conservatives have mocked the celebrity appeal of Barack Obama, but now they are flocking to Palin in a similar manner. …

Ann Coulter’s great column on 9/11 and seven years of no attacks here at our home.

Morose that there hasn’t been another terrorist attack on American soil for seven long years, liberals were ecstatic when Hurricane Gustav was headed toward New Orleans during the Republican National Convention last week. The networks gave the hurricane plenty of breaking-news coverage — but unfortunately it was Hurricane Katrina from 2005 they were covering.

On Keith Olbermann’s Aug. 29 show on MSNBC, Michael Moore said the possibility of a Category 3 hurricane hitting the United States “is proof that there is a God in heaven.” Olbermann responded: “A supremely good point.”

Actually, Olbermann said that a few minutes later to some other idiotic point Moore had made, but that’s how Moore would have edited the interview for one of his “documentaries,” so I will, too. I would only add that Michael Moore’s morbid obesity is proof that there is a Buddha.

Hurricane Gustav came and went without a hitch. What a difference a Republican governor makes! …

Karl Rove says Barack needs to stop running against Sarah.

Of all the advantages Gov. Sarah Palin has brought to the GOP ticket, the most important may be that she has gotten into Barack Obama’s head. How else to explain Sen. Obama’s decision to go one-on-one against “Sarah Barracuda,” captain of the Wasilla High state basketball champs?

It’s a matchup he’ll lose. If Mr. Obama wants to win, he needs to remember he’s running against John McCain for president, not Mrs. Palin for vice president.

Michael Dukakis spent the last months of the 1988 campaign calling his opponent’s running mate, Dan Quayle, a risky choice and even ran a TV ad blasting Mr. Quayle. The Bush/Quayle ticket carried 40 states.

Adlai Stevenson spent the fall of 1952 bashing Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate, Richard Nixon, calling him “the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, and then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.” The Republican ticket carried 39 of 48 states.

If Mr. Obama keeps attacking Mrs. Palin, he could suffer the fate of his Democratic predecessors. These assaults highlight his own tissue-thin résumé, waste precious time better spent reassuring voters he is up for the job, and diminish him — not her.

Sarah Palin returned today to Alaska. Perfunction.com has the story.

Good Corner post on the enthusiasm at McCain/Palin rally in NOVA.

… One good indication of the enthusiasm were the number of creative signs and campaign paraphenalia by those present. I saw two high-school girls together — one had a custom T-Shirt that said “The Future Mrs. Track Palin,” and her friend’s shirt said “Piper Can Do My Hair” (my memory may not be exact). There were also lots of special needs children and mothers present. One mother had a rather lovely and affecting sign with a picture of her son with Down syndrome that read “47 Chromosomes from Heaven.” Geraghty and I saw another woman with a sign that said “McCain Hero with a Heart and a Veep Just Like Me.” Just like me? Women really seem to identify with Palin. …

Jonah Goldberg on how lucky we are the crazy Dem left nominates their candidate.

… Psephologist and columnist Michael Barone noticed during the primaries that, with the exception of the black vote, Obama’s support within the Democratic party is comprised almost entirely of cultural liberals. He dubbed this intra-Democratic split a divide between “academics and Jacksonians.” The Jacksonians are working-class, culturally conservative whites. The academics are the same people who formed the base for Howard Dean, Bill Bradley, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart, George McGovern, and other successful presidents in the anti-matter universe where Spock has a goatee. …

VDH on Biden.

… He seems to have established a new Biden’s Law: if one makes enough gaffes, they soon reach a point that none of them matter. And even stranger is Biden’s Second Law of Politics: the more you sound obnoxious and offend, you soon reach a point where the shocked listener turns from anger to indifference and finally no less to empathy! …

This week The Economist bellwether state is Missouri.

AT A park in downtown St Louis, three women are drinking Bud Light and watching a demonstration of Scottish tossing-the-caber. It is a peaceful scene at the Festival of Nations, but worries simmer beneath the surface. The women supported Hillary Clinton, and are now undecided. Barack Obama is “a wonderful young man”, but inexperienced in foreign policy. John McCain is “honourable”, but perhaps not up to the task.

These are typical concerns from an average undecided voter in this state. Missouri has 5.8m people and 11 electoral votes. Its moderate size belies its traditional role in presidential elections. There are ways to win the White House without winning Missouri, but few candidates have managed it. The state has voted for the victor in 25 of the last 26 elections. The exception was in 1956, when America went for Dwight Eisenhower, a popular Republican war hero, in a landslide. Missourians gave it to Adlai Stevenson, a cerebral Democrat from neighbouring Illinois. …

Remember the hilarious movie Thank You For Smoking? Christopher Buckley, who wrote the book has written another. This time on the Supreme Court.

Think George W. Bush is unpopular? Pity Donald P. Vanderdamp, the blandly honest bowling enthusiast occupying the White House in “Supreme Courtship.” Congress, which has tagged him “Don Veto” for rejecting every spending bill that lands on his desk, hates him so much it’s trying to amend the Constitution to limit presidents to one term — beginning with him. And now a fresh collision awaits. President Vanderdamp has a Supreme Court seat to fill, and in a stroke of genius, he has nominated America’s most popular TV judge: Pepper Cartwright, star of “Courtroom Six.”

Beautiful and headstrong, Cartwright spews folksy Texas wisdom when not quoting Shakespeare, packs a LadySmith revolver and delivers judicial decisions from the hip. She was once a real judge — a good one — on the Los Angeles Superior Court before her husband-cum-producer, Buddy Bixby, plucked her from the bench and turned her into a star. “I doubt I’m qualified to be a clerk at the Supreme Court,” she admits in a news conference, though she’s better at the media rodeo than her adversaries on the Hill. They include Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dexter Mitchell, a shiny, botoxed Amtrak supporter from Connecticut who bears a passing resemblance to Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. (“Mitchell loved — lived — to talk”) and who is determined to quash Cartwright’s appointment, not least because he lusts after a seat on the court himself. …

Slate’s Explainer tells us who first put lipstick on a pig.

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Last week’s Asia Times column by Spengler predicting Obama would lose, referred to a column he wrote in late February – Obama’s women reveal his secret. It is here today.

“Cherchez la femme,” advised Alexander Dumas in: “When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman.” In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama’s women reveal his secret: he hates America.

We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man – least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father – can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.

America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its creative success is so enormous that its global influence hastens the decline of other cultures. For those on the destruction side of the trade, America is a monster. Between half and nine-tenths of the world’s 6,700 spoken languages will become extinct in the next century, and the anguish of dying peoples rises up in a global cry of despair. Some of those who listen to this cry become anthropologists, the curators of soon-to-be extinct cultures; anthropologists who really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama’s mother, the University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice.

Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother’s revenge against the America she despised. …

… Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama’s campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator. “I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon. He’s an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there’s the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive,” she told a fundraiser in February 2007.

“For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, “She added that the TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she’d like to meet him sometime.” Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.

“Frustration” and “disappointment” have dogged Michelle Obama these past 20 years, despite her US$300,000 a year salary and corporate board memberships. It is hard for the descendants of slaves not to resent America. They were not voluntary immigrants but kidnap victims, subjected to a century of second-class citizenship even after the Civil War ended slavery. Blackness is not the issue; General Colin Powell, whose parents chose to immigrate to America from the West Indies, saw America just as other immigrants do, as a land of opportunity. Obama’s choice of wife is a failsafe indicator of his own sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his mother’s milk. …

Corner post on Obama’s sacrifices.

Another post on the late-night Obama/Biden jokes.

And a post on Obama’s Monday.

James Taranto catches AP trying to help Obama, and making him look ridiculous in the process.

We follow Jennifer Rubin through a number of posts in Contentions.

While Obama supporters flail about and bemoan the state of the race, here’s something to consider: the fix which Barack Obama is now in is entirely of his own making. The obvious blunder was in bypassing Hillary Clinton as VP. With Clinton, the frenzy of excitement would have been for the Democrats and Sarah Palin would be back in Alaska. But that is not Obama’s only flub, not by a long shot. Consider:

– Reneging on his public financing promise: Had he not done that, he might have saved his New Politics reputation and avoided his current money woes.

– Going on the Magical Mystery Tour: Had he not done that, we likely wouldn’t have had the “I still don’t think the surge was worth it” interview, there wouldn’t have been the priceless Berlin rally footage and he might have spent the summer at home talking about energy policy.

– Nixing the townhalls: Had he not done that, he — again — might have sustained the New Politics moniker and could have kept the focus on domestic issues and McCain’s association with George Bush.

– Losing the opportunity of a lifetime: Had he not done the angry liberal routine in Denver he might not be trailing among independents by an unbelievable margin of 52-37%.

There are a host of other, smaller errors (e.g. the atrocious Rick Warren forum, hiding from the press in Hawaii during the invasion of Georgia), but the conclusion is inescapable: if Barack Obama does lose this, there won’t be anyone to blame but himself.

Pickerhead’s been patiently waiting for Sarah Palin in the eyes of Camille Paglia. It’s here today.

… As I said in my last column, I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama’s efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development and which are painfully wrong for the target audience of rural working-class whites that he has been trying to reach. Obama on the road and even in major interviews has been droppin’ his g’s like there’s no tomorrow. It’s analogous to the way stodgy, portly Al Gore (evidently misadvised by the women in his family and their feminist pals) tried to zap himself up on the campaign trail into the happening buff dude that he was not. Both Gore and Obama would have been better advised to pursue a calm, steady, authoritative persona. Forget the jokes — be boring! That, alas, is what reads as masculine in the U.S.

The over-the-top publicity stunt of a mega-stadium for Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention two weeks ago was a huge risk that worried me sick — there were too many things that could go wrong, from bad weather to crowd control to technical glitches on the overblown set. But everything went swimmingly. Obama delivered the speech nearly flawlessly — though I was shocked and disappointed by how little there was about foreign policy, a major area where wavering voters have grave doubts about him. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary event with an overlong but strangely contemplative and spiritually uplifting finale. The music, amid the needlessly extravagant fireworks, morphed into “Star Wars” — a New Age hymn to cosmic reconciliation and peace.

After that extravaganza, marking the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s epochal civil rights speech on the Washington Mall, I felt calmly confident that the Obama campaign was going to roll like a gorgeous juggernaut right over the puny, fossilized McCain. The next morning, it was as if the election were already over. No need to fret about American politics anymore this year. I had already turned with relief to other matters.

Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy — one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama’s triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football — or one of the great light-saber duels in “Star Wars.” (Here are the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, going at it with Darth Maul in “The Phantom Menace.”) This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment. …

John Stossel looks at Obama’s “green jobs.”

Amazing story from the London Times on EU farming rules.

… European Union rules ban farmers from using combine harvesters on wet land to protect soil quality. Those who flout the ban can be prosecuted. …

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Nick Cohen in The Observer, UK writes on how the liberals in the press paved the way for Sarah Palin’s success.

My colleagues in the American liberal press had little to fear at the start of the week. Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually every poll. George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were scrambling around for reasons not to invite the Republican President to the Republican convention. Democrats had only to maintain their composure and the White House would be theirs. During the 1997 British general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.

For once, the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was ‘the other’ – the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against. They might have soberly examined her reputation as an opponent of political corruption to see if she was truly the reformer she claimed to be. They might have gently mocked her idiotic creationism, while carefully avoiding all discussion of the racist conspiracy theories of Barack Obama’s church.

But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor’s office. …

Speaking of ugly and berserk, John Fund says the Dems have sent 30 lawyers to Alaska to dig into Sarah’s past.

Jonah Goldberg says Team Obama is rattled.

Barack Obama, a famous fan of pickup basketball, must recognize his plight: It’s two on one now. John McCain drafted Gov. Sarah Palin, the star point guard from the Wasilla Warriors, to double-team Obama.

(McCain’s team doesn’t care if no one covers Joe Biden, who seems to spend most of his time yelling to the media, “I’m open! I’m open!” But when he gets the ball, all he does is talk about what a great player he is and dribble in place.)

So after the halftime show of the political conventions, to strain the sports metaphor a bit further, it looks as if the change-up in strategy has Team Obama rattled and in danger of choking. Polls — the closest thing we have to a scoreboard — show that McCain, at least temporarily, has taken the lead. The Real Clear Politics average of national polls since Friday shows McCain ahead by a razor-thin (and statistically meaningless) 2.9 percentage points. The USA Today-Gallup poll has McCain leading by a whopping 10 points among likely voters (and four points among registered voters), though that’s almost surely an overstatement.

The McCain-Palin convention bounce also all but closed the ticket’s gender gap. According to Rasmussen, Obama had a 14-point lead among women; now it’s three. According to the latest ABC/Washington Post poll, McCain now has a 12-point lead among white women. …

Roger Simon thinks it’s sweet how McCain got his big bounce just when Olbermann and Matthews got yanked.

I must say it’s amusing that on the day John McCain bounced to a ten-point lead (likely voters) over his unprepared opponent, MSNBC gave the hook to its “nattering nabobs” of bourgeois pseudo-leftism – Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews. Somehow parent company NBC got the idea these clowns were not up to moderating a serious political debate.  So much for sideshows.

Meanwhile the mainstream media must be in a state of shock.  Their hero is in serious jeopardy of losing. …

Byron York says painting Palin as an extremist won’t work.

Jonah Goldberg finds Pelosi touting raising five children as preparation for the work in Congress.

… That experience forced me to be disciplined, diplomatic, focused, and successful, and I brought that discipline and focus to the Congress. Also, having a family keeps you focused on the future, which is the biggest inspiration in politics. …

Say What? Ed Morrissey says now Obama thinks tax cuts might not be a good idea.

… Obama has campaigned successfully on economics mostly through populist rhetoric and class warfare.  He has cast the Bush cuts as egregious without explaining the five years of solid growth they produced.  Now that he has to start getting past the slogans and start producing specifics, he seems lost and self-contradictory.  Small wonder that McCain has closed the gap on economic stewardship from 19 points to three in the latest polling.  Voters have begun to realize that Obama is making it up as he goes along.

Nor does Morrissey think the old “cell phone mime” will save Barack.

Barack Obama’s sudden decline in the polls have some of his supporters, and even some of John McCain’s backers, wondering whether the nosedive accurately reflects popular opinion.  Obama’s strength comes with younger voters, they note, and younger voters use cell phones more often as a substitute for land lines — and pollsters don’t call cell phones.  The implication is that Obama may be underrepresented by these polls and is performing stronger than people suspect.

Well, anything is possible, but as John Kerry can tell you, building hopes on massive youth turnout usually sets a candidate up for severe disappointment. …

Want a great example of how the media is biased against Palin. Jim Lindgren of Volokh catches Anderson Cooper with his pants down.

And Samizdata catches a lie from The Economist.

The Corner catches WaPo. Not a lie per se, but a half truth nonetheless.

Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard with some of the background of the Palin pick.

… With the nomination in hand, McCain decided that he wanted his vice-presidential selection to be bold and leaned toward picking Joe Lieberman. But after an extensive look at the practical realities of selecting Lieberman and listening to the arguments for and against taking that dramatic step, McCain realized it wouldn’t work. He turned his sights to three other candidates: Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, and Sarah Palin. Romney was always a default candidate, but never a likely pick. Pawlenty had several backers among McCain’s top advisers and, though McCain likes Pawlenty, he saw the pick as too conventional. There was a bold if risky choice remaining: Sarah Palin.

McCain had been impressed by Palin during a 15-minute conversation back in February and spoke to her again on August 24. She did not have a strong advocate among McCain’s top advisers, and more than one cautioned him about the risks of picking someone with such limited experience. And as he had on Iraq, McCain listened to that advice, considered the politically safe choice, and then rejected it in favor of something bolder and riskier.

The early results have been promising, and McCain’s team is confident that she will be a major asset over the next two months.

“You do not get to 80 percent approval by not being a good politician,” said a senior McCain adviser. “I don’t care how red your state is or how blue it is–if it’s Alaska or California–you don’t get to 80 percent without being good.” …

David Harsanyi with a dim view of the Fannie/Freddie bailout.

… Isn’t it ironic that government bars a citizen from risking his own Social Security funds because it’s too chancy, yet it uses your money to bail out companies that have engaged in the very behavior government is supposedly safeguarding us from?

And really, what’s more risky than letting Washington handle your money?

Tunku Varadarajan interviews a world-class travel writer.

I knew Paul Theroux could turn a phrase, but I hadn’t realized that he could turn heads, too. As we walk to dinner at the restaurant at the Taj Boston hotel — formerly the dowdy old Ritz, now elegantly restored to world-class panache — a number of ladies of a certain age are . . . how else to put it? . . . checking him out. “It’s this suit,” Mr. Theroux observes. Hand-stitched by a tailor in Bombay, the suit — of Italian white linen, with pinstripes — is indeed eye-catching.

Mr. Theroux has not gone through life unnoticed. How could he? He travels widely, talks to anyone who will talk to him — on trains, planes and buses, in cities, villages and jungles — and then writes about all of it in prose too highly spiced for some prissy palates. “They don’t read me in English departments, you know. I’m too rude about people, they say.”

Rudeness-in-print is not, of course, Mr. Theroux’s only skill. Nor is he rude all the time: In fact, much of his writing reflects affection for the people in whose midst he is apt to find himself, and a spirit of inquiry that is part anthropological and part autobiographical. Yet he hates to be thought of as a “travel writer” — in spite of the fact that he practically invented the modern genre of travel writing. “A traveling writer is what I am, and at times a romantic voyeur.” …

Columbia Journalism Review with the story of Times of London snide remark about Wasilla, Alaska. Local paper responds.

… A description which Wasilla’s Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman calls in an editorial today “as inaccurate and unfair as it would be for anyone else to define England by a stereotypical lack of dental hygiene.”  …

Dilbert posts on the campaign and the Palin pick

Recently I was gigantic. Or so it seemed because I was attending a school open house and sitting in a tiny chair designed either for a small child or an elf with one buttock. Context is everything.

I was thinking about context as I observed with fascination McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. The immediate response from my lefty friends was that McCain was insane to pick a running mate with such a thin resume. That’s one possibility. The other explanation is more interesting.

My first response to McCain’s decision was to assume that Republicans did not suddenly forget how to win elections. If selecting Palin was a brilliant strategy in disguise, how exactly was it supposed to work?

Context.

McCain had a context problem. He was an old (too old) white guy from the failed establishment running against a younger and more exotic agent of change. It was a losing context. His choice of Palin changed the context.

Since selecting Palin, the discussion in the media and in kitchens across America has shifted from “Can you be too old to be President?” to “Can you be too young and inexperienced?” McCain has cleverly put his critics in the position of arguing that experience is a good thing. And McCain has more of it than Obama. If you believe that people only vote for presidents, not vice presidents, this was a clever move. …

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David Warren says our election season could be worse, we could be bored to death with Canadian elections.

The prospect of a Canadian general election leaves me, and I would guess most of my countrymen, bored. Now, boredom comes in slightly different flavours, and I will admit that the emotions associated with betrayal enter into mine. But it is like the vanilla in the ice cream; one is so used to it.

We have about five parties representing five slightly different grades of vanilla. The Tories perhaps anger me the most, because they promise chocolate chips, and don’t deliver. Well, maybe a couple of chocolate chips, but the irritation value of the false packaging more than compensates for them.

The chocolate chips in my analogy correspond to the “faith and freedom” values that are baldly presented in any Republican manifesto, and more timidly even in Democrat ones, in the republic to our south. …

John Fund with notes on Sarah’s Surge.

… In fact, since 1968, no Republican has done worse on Election Day than he was doing in major polls taken around Labor Day. On that basis, Mr. Obama should worry that Mr. McCain has now tied him or is leading in current polls.

Willie Brown too in his SF Chronicle blog.

The Democrats are in trouble. Sarah Palin has totally changed the dynamics of this campaign.

Period.

Palin’s speech to the GOP National Convention on Wednesday has set it up so that the Republicans are now on offense and Democrats are on defense. And we don’t do well on defense.

Suddenly, Palin and John McCain are the mavericks and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are the status quo, in a year when you don’t want to be seen as defending the status quo.

From taxes to oil drilling, Democrats are now going to have to start explaining their positions. …

Mark Steyn popped up for a few Corner posts.

A couple of Piper Palin videos.

One of the very good speeches last week that was overlooked in the Palin madness was the one by Rudy. Jay Nordlinger introduces us to it in a Corner post.

… 19.  My friend and colleague, the sagacious Rick Brookhiser, not long ago said this:  “Rudy is a liberal who hates liberals.  John McCain is a conservative who hates conservatives.”  There’s a lot of truth in that.  Only Rudy is not all that liberal.  And I wonder how conservative he would have been, or would be, in an office outside New York City (where he was plenty conservative — on crime, most prominently and crucially).

20.  This man gave one of the most engaging, rollicking, and fun — yes, fun — speeches I can remember hearing.  That’s if you’re a partisan Republican, of course.  And even if you’re not — you might have gotten some sort of kick out of it.

Way to go, Rudy G.  And, following Mike Bloomberg:  Can’t you run for mayor again?  You don’t want your gains reversed by some Dinkinsian Democrat, do you?

Here’s the written version of Rudy’s speech. The You Tube version follows in Pickings (WORD and PDF).

… Look at just one example in a lifetime of principled stands — John McCain’s support for the troop surge in Iraq. The Democratic Party had given up on Iraq. And I believe, ladies and gentlemen, that when they gave up on Iraq they were giving up on America. The Democratic leader in the Senate said so: “America has lost.”

Well, if America lost, who won? Al Qaida? Bin Laden? In the single biggest policy decision of this election, John McCain got it right and Barack Obama got it wrong.

If Barack Obama had been President, there would have been no troop surge and our troops would have been withdrawn in defeat.

Senator McCain was the candidate most associated with the surge. And it was unpopular.

What do you think most other candidates would have done in that situation? They would have acted in their own self-interest by changing their position.
How many times have we seen Barack Obama do that?

Obama was going to take public financing for his campaign, until he didn’t.

Obama was against wiretapping before he voted for it.

When speaking to a pro-Israel group, Obama favored an undivided Jerusalem. Until the very next day when he changed his mind.

I hope for his sake, Joe Biden got that VP thing in writing. …

Podhoretz, and Rubin posts from Contentions.

… The meme that Sarah Palin is some uncouth, unaccomplished and unqualified hick is crumbling under the weight of actual facts. The Washington Post editors have the blow-by-blow on her role in renegotiating a natural gas pipeline in Alaska. The editors observe that:

while her style has been minutely analyzed, very little commentary has focused on one of the few substantive claims she made about her brief tenure as governor of Alaska: that she “fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history . . . a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence.” Is Ms. Palin right about the importance of the pipeline and her role in moving it forward? Ms. Palin is indeed correct about the need to tap the 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under Alaska’s North Slope, the same region whose oil made the state wealthy but which has begun to run dry.

And it is not just that she had the right idea — it is that she overrode a plan of the incumbent Republican governor, a plan championed by Senator Ted Stevens and Vice President Dick Cheney, and threw the project open to bidding. The Post editors conclude:

Meanwhile, BP and Conoco Phillips have announced plans to build a pipeline of their own without the state’s backing — a sign that the political and economic wrangling over this immense and risky project is far from over. But it is also a sign that Ms. Palin’s outflanking of the oil companies injected some competition and urgency into a process that was previously stalled. Perhaps her Democratic opponent for the governorship in 2006, who campaigned on similar ideas, would have achieved these results. Nevertheless, Ms. Palin actually did.

This raises several issues. First, is there a single item in Barack Obama’s record that compares to this? Nothing comes to mind. Little wonder that the Democrats want to stop talking abut Palin. It turns out she is an accomplished person with demonstrable skills and good judgment. …

And Abe Greenwald.

Barack Obama’s slip-up, in which he referred to “my Muslim faith,” is interesting for a few reasons. Obama’s critics residing in various anti-Muslim fever swamps are harping on it as evidence of Obama being a closet Muslim–he’s not and that’s not what’s interesting.

Obama’s slip of the tongue demonstrates three things. First, he’s getting rattled. While Obama is a bit gaffe-prone, his gaffes are usually political misinterpretation or naïve reactions to world events. (In truth, his gaffes are usually more serious than this, and perhaps not really gaffes at all, but genuine errors in judgment.) That the master of mellifluous oratory would get tripped up on a word shows that he’s off his game. …

WSJ Op-ed on possible auto bail-out.

It was only a matter of time, unfortunately. And now that Michigan is an election-year swing state and Detroit’s auto makers are posting sales declines topping 20% each month, the time has arrived. The issue of a government bailout for General Motors, Ford and Chrysler is moving to center stage.

Barack Obama has said yes to this proposal early on, and last week John McCain climbed on board. So much for change and fighting pork-barrel spending. We’re moving beyond moral hazard here, folks, and into a moral quagmire. At least the Chrysler bailout of 1980 was structured so that taxpayers could reap a reward for taking a financial risk on the company’s future. That’s not what’s happening now. …

Interesting piece from Bob Novak on his brain tumor.

The main reason I am writing this column is that many people have asked me how I first realized I was suffering from a brain tumor and what I have done about it.

But I also want to relate the reaction to my disease, mostly compassionate, that belies Washington’s reputation.

The first sign that I was in trouble came on Wednesday, July 23, when my 2004 black Corvette struck a pedestrian on 18th Street in downtown Washington while I was on my way to my office.

I did not realize I had hit anyone until a shirt-sleeved young man on a bicycle, whom I incorrectly thought to be a bicycle messenger, jumped in front of my car to block the way. In fact, he was David A. Bono, a partner in the high-end law firm Harkins Cunningham. The bicyclist was shouting at me that I could not just hit people and then drive away. That was the first I knew about the accident. Mr. Bono called the police, and a patrolman soon arrived.

After I said I had no idea I had hit anyone until they flagged me down and informed me, Mr. Bono told The Washington Post, “I would not believe that.” Fortunately, the investigating officer, P. Garcia, was a policeman who listened and apparently believed me. While Mr. Bono and other bystanders were taking on aspects of a mob, shouting “hit-and-run,” Officer Garcia issued a right-of-way infraction against me, costing me $50, instead of a hit-and-run violation that would have been a felony. …

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We are heavy with more of our favorites with their Sarah Palin thoughts.

She continues to have a stunning effect on the race. The swing states identified by Karl Rove (CO, VA, MI, and OH) and by The Economist (NV, NM, NC, CO, OH, MN, and MO) are some of the most susceptible to Sarah’s wiles.

If the polls continue to go south on Obama, he’ll have to consider the Torricelli option. (Bob Torricelli gave up his 2002 Senate re-election bid five weeks before the vote, and was replaced by Frank Lautenberg.) Obama needs for Biden to have a health event, and then Hillary can be put on the ticket.

In the meantime, Biden mentioned on Meet the Press he is going to Montana tomorrow. That’ll work. Bush won the state’s 3 electoral votes 59 to 38.

Gerard Baker’s Sarah Palin take.

The best line I heard about Sarah Palin during the frenzied orgy of chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion that greeted her nomination for vice-president a week ago came from a correspondent who knows a thing or two about Alaska.

“What’s the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”

“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let’s be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.

“The other kills her own food.”

Now we know, thanks to her triumphant debut at the Republican convention on Wednesday, that Mrs Palin not only slaughters her prey. She impales its head on a stick and parades it around for her followers to jeer at. For half an hour she eviscerated Mr Obama in that hall and did it all without dropping her sweet schoolmarm smile, as if she were handing out chocolates at the end of a history lesson. …

David Warren says vote for the peace candidates; McCain and Palin.

… The election will necessarily be close, since the American people themselves are about equally divided between “conservative” and “liberal” assumptions about reality, and the swing vote between them is not very large. But in the campaign viewers’ oddly criss-crossed comparison — Obama versus Palin, and Biden versus McCain — the Republicans now have two winners.

The consequence, not merely to the U.S. but to the planet, of a McCain as opposed to an Obama presidency, is almost impossible to overestimate.

As I’ve argued before, the enemies of America and the West will tend to be cautious with John McCain, incautious with Barack Obama. (And with Palin behind him, they’ll be toasting McCain’s health.) It follows that a vote for McCain favours peace and stability, a vote for Obama, instability and worse.

Barbara Amiel, wife of Conrad Black, renews her political columnist vows for a WSJ piece on Sarah Palin, and Margaret Thatcher at age 49.

The glummest face Wednesday night might have been, if only we could have seen it, that of Hillary Clinton.

Imagine watching Sarah Palin, the gun-toting, lifelong member of the NRA, the PTA mom with teased hair and hips half the size of Hillary’s, who went … omigod … to the University of Idaho and studied journalism. Mrs. Palin with her five kids and one of them still virtually suckling age, going wham through that cement ceiling put there exclusively for good-looking right-wing/populist conservative females by not-so-good-looking left-wing ones (Gloria Steinem excepting). There, pending some terrible goof or revelation, stood the woman most likely to get into the Oval Office as its official occupant rather than as an intern. …

… American feminists have always had a tough sell to make. To the rest of the world, no females on earth have ever had it as easy as middle-class American women. Cosseted, surrounded by labor-saving devices, easily available contraception and supermarkets groaning with food, their complaints have always seemed to have no relationship to reality.

Education was there for the taking. Marriages were not arranged. Going against social mores had no serious consequences. Postwar American women (excluding those mired in poverty or the odious restrictions of race) have always had the choice of what they wanted to be. They simply didn’t decide to exercise it until it became more fashionable to get out of the home than to run it.

Sarah Palin has put the flim-flam nature of America feminism sharply into focus, revealing the not-so-secret hypocrisy of its code and, whatever her future, this alone is an accomplishment. As she emerged into the nation’s consciousness, a shudder went through the feminist left—a political movement not restricted to females. She is a mother refusing to stay at home (good) who had made a success out in the workplace (excellent) whose marriage nevertheless is a rip-roaring success and whose views are unspeakable—those of a red-blooded, right-wing principled pragmatist. …

Bill Kristol thanks the people responsible for the GOP success last week.

… Third: A special thank you to our friends in the liberal media establishment. Who knew they would come through so spectacularly? The ludicrous media feeding frenzy about the Palin family hyped interest in her speech, enabling her to win a huge audience for her smashing success Wednesday night at the convention. Indeed, it even renewed interest in McCain, who seems to have gotten still more viewers for his less smashing–but well-received–presentation the following evening.

The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media’s prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.

By the end of the week, after Palin’s tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren’t being narrow-minded enough. …

Sally Quinn provides a graceful exit for her harsh words about Sarah. Jennifer Rubin has the details in Contentions.

… But now Quinn has seen Palin with her own eyes and is singing a different tune. On Fox today with Bill O’Reilly, Quinn had this to say:

I thought that she was amazing. in her speech. She was funny and smart and poised and confident. She gave a great speech, beautifully delivered. I think she is going to be a formidable opponent. all of that I think is — I was wrong about her. and I didn’t know anything about her. I probably didn’t know any more than John McCain did a few days before he picked her.

(Well, perhaps McCain knew plenty and chose her on this basis, but that’s a quibble.) O’Reilly went on to ask her if  ”your column and other columns like yours rallied the folks to her side and actually helped the McCain-Palin ticket dramatically.” Quinn answered “I  think you’re absolutely right.” …

Jennifer also links to a WSJ Kimberly Strassel piece on Palin’s successes in Alaska.

The notion that Sarah Palin is unaccomplished and untested is frankly a media invention. For those who bother to examine her actual record, the facts tell a different story. Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal rightly notes that from media coverage ” you’ve heard plenty about her religious views and private family matters,” but precious little about what she has done in office. Strassel tries to correct this  by describing in blow-by-blow fashion Palin’s record in bringing down a corrupt machine and taking on the oil companies. …

Volokh reports on the Israeli flag in Sarah Palin’s office.

The Economist bellwether series continues. This time with Minnesota.

ON A hot summer day at Shady Oak Lake, teenagers line up for the high-diving board. Parents with small children wade in the shallows near the sandy beach. This suburban idyll, surrounded by leafy trees and big houses, lies near Edina, a town just west of Minnesota’s Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. Despite appearances, it is a political ground zero in a state the Republicans are fighting to snatch from the Democrats.

Minnesota is famous as a liberal bastion. It is the only state not to have voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, and has its own (traditionally leftier) brand of Democrats in the Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party. …

… But look a little closer, and Minnesota seems a more attractive target. Presidential votes in the state have been very close lately, decided by fewer than four points. Barack Obama leads by only low single digits in most recent polls. Minnesota has a Republican senator, Norm Coleman, who beat Mr Mondale in 2002. Many predicted that the state’s Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, would be Mr McCain’s running-mate. The state also tends to move along with fellow “Frost Belt” states such as Iowa and Wisconsin, with which it shares media markets. Combined, that block has as many electoral votes as Florida, a perennial battleground.  …

Instapundit spots an important story about Chicago and its failed administration.

I think we should just pull out of Chicago: …

Here’s the story from CBS News in Chicago.

CHICAGO (CBS) ? An estimated 123 people were shot and killed over the summer. That’s nearly double the number of soldiers killed in Iraq over the same time period.

In May, cbs2chicago.com began tracking city shootings and posting them on Google maps. Information compiled from our reporters, wire service reports and the Chicago Police Major Incidents log indicated that 123 people were shot and killed throughout the city between the start of Memorial Day weekend on May 26, and the end of Labor Day on Sept. 1.

According to the Defense Department, 65 soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq. About the same number were killed in Afghanistan over that same period.

In the same time period, an estimated 245 people were shot and wounded in the city. …

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Palin’s speech brought Mark Steyn out of his hidey hole for a Corner post.

I would like to thank the US media for doing such a grand job this last week of lowering expectations by portraying Governor Palin – whoops, I mean Hick-Burg Mayor Palin – as a hillbilly know-nothing permapregnant ditz, half of whose 27 kids are the spawn of a stump-toothed uncle who hasn’t worked since he was an extra in Deliverance.

How’s that narrative holding up, geniuses? Almost as good as your “devoted husband John Edwards” routine?

I trust even now Maureen Dowd is working on a hilarious new column mocking proposed names for the Governor’s first grandchild. Perhaps Richard Cohen can just take the week off and they can rerun his insightful analysis comparing the Palin nomination to Caligula making his horse a consul. Whereas we sophisticates all know that if McCain were as smart as Obama he’d have nominated a dead horse to be his consul. No wait…

Andy McCarthy Corner post with excerpts from NY Times editorial gushing over Geraldine Ferraro’s pick for VP in 1984. The same NY Times that can’t stop trashing Sarah Palin.

… What a splendid system, we say to ourselves, that takes little-known men, tests them in high office and permits them to grow into statesmen…. Why shouldn’t a little-known woman have the same opportunity to grow?…

Here’s Sarah (excerpts from her speech)

… I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening.

We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco. …

… And there is much to like and admire about our opponent.

But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform – not even in the state senate.

This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word “victory” except when he’s talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed … when the roar of the crowd fades away … when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot – what exactly is our opponent’s plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger … take more of your money … give you more orders from Washington … and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. …

… Our nominee doesn’t run with the Washington herd.

He’s a man who’s there to serve his country, and not just his party.

A leader who’s not looking for a fight, but is not afraid of one either. Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of the current do-nothing Senate, not long ago summed up his feelings about our nominee.

He said, quote, “I can’t stand John McCain.” Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps no accolade we hear this week is better proof that we’ve chosen the right man. Clearly what the Majority Leader was driving at is that he can’t stand up to John McCain. That is only one more reason to take the maverick of the Senate and put him in the White House. My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of “personal discovery.” This world of threats and dangers is not just a community, and it doesn’t just need an organizer.

And though both Senator Obama and Senator Biden have been going on lately about how they are always, quote, “fighting for you,” let us face the matter squarely.

There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you … in places where winning means survival and defeat means death … and that man is John McCain. …

John Fund was there.

Twenty years after Ronald Reagan left office, Republicans who have long missed him may have found a future Margaret Thatcher. If John McCain wins, conservatives may find one of the most enduring accomplishments of his term will have been what he did before it started: helping to fill the Republican Party’s future talent bench with such a fresh and compelling figure.

Sarah Palin is a conviction politician, a naturally compelling speaker and someone who can relate to her audience on very human terms. America has just learned why Mrs. Palin enjoys the highest approval ratings of any governor in America. …

How was the speech received abroad? Daily Telegraph has a sample.

… Like Margaret Thatcher before her, Mrs Palin is coming in for both barrels of Left-wing contempt: misogyny and snobbery. Where Lady Thatcher was dismissed as a “grocer’s daughter” by people who called themselves egalitarian, Mrs Palin is regarded as a small-town nobody by those who claim to represent “ordinary people”.

What the metropolitan sophisticates failed to understand in the 1980s when Thatcher won election after election is even more the case in the US: most (and I do mean most) ordinary people actually believe in the basic decencies, the “small-town values”, of family, marital fidelity, and personal responsibility. They believe in and honour them – even if they do not manage to uphold them.

Middle America – of which Alaska is spiritually, if not geographically, a part – builds its life around those ideals and regards commonplace moral lapses as part of the eternal struggle to be good. …

And the London Sun.

A WEEK ago nobody had ever heard of her.

Today she is the most talked-about woman in the world. And with good reason.

Sarah Palin’s sensational performance at the Republican Party Convention may turn out to be the tipping point of this rollercoaster American election.

Obama fans hoping she would fluff her big night were in for a nasty shock.

This speech has turned the election upside down. It was simply stunning.

Democrats and their Lefty media backers had been sneering that she was a small town nobody, a hick from the Alaskan sticks put into a job way beyond an inexperienced woman.

Believe me, you will not be hearing that again.

Palin turned out to be an electrifying mix of intelligence, passion, energy, optimism and plain speaking.

Full of self-assurance and aggression, she popped Barack’s balloon big-time. …

Now a collection from some of our favorites.

Roger Simon.

Okay, it’s almost three in the morning here in Minneapolis and I am  about as dog tired as I have ever been, but I couldn’t resist putting in my two cents on Sarah Palin’s performance tonight, since I saw it live.  In all my years writing movies, going to drama school, etc., I have almost never seen anything so dramatic.  It was the rebirth of Frank Capra for our times – Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington. …

Ed Morrissey.

Perhaps the media and Democrats would have been better advised to set expectations high for Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech tonight at the Republican convention.  After ridiculing her as a small-town yokel for the better part of three days, Palin would have looked good if she managed to avoid drooling during her speech.  In the event, though, they could have set expectations as high as a Barack Obama acceptance speech, and Palin would still have exceeded them in a tremendous debut on the national stage.

Palin made it clear to the condescending media and her Democratic critics that she is no pushover, no cream puff.  Her nickname, “Sarah Barracuda”, seems a lot more fitting after tonight.  Not only did she defend her small-town upbringing, she attacked Barack Obama on almost every possible front, and for good measure went after Joe Biden and the mainstream media as well. …

Right Coast.

I plan to write something substantive about Gov. Palin’s speech as soon as I stop laughing.  That could be a few days.

I disagree with those who said Giuliani and/or Palin struck a note that was too mocking of the young Obama.  Nope.  The right cure for the grotesque idolatry that has grown up around Obama is to be every bit as mocking as they all were.  He deserves it and the various Obots deserve it too.  The way you beat somebody up is to beat them up.  In the immortal words of Sean Connery, do you feel better now, or worse?  Sorry — I get a little incoherent when I’m laughing my head off. …

Corner Posts.

Contentions’ folks; Wehner, Rubin, and Podhoretz

Power Line.

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Bill Kristol with a short Palin story.

Spengler turns his attention from Russian chess masters to Obama’s losing campaign. On Obama’s speech he has this to say;

… On television, Obama’s spectacle might have looked like The Ten Commandments, but inside the stadium it felt like Night of the Living Dead. The longer the candidate spoke, and the more money he promised to spend on alternative energy, preschool education, universal health care, and other components of the Democratic pinata, the lower the party professionals slouched into their seats. The professionals I sat with were Hillary Clinton people, to be sure, and had reason to sulk, for an Obama victory might do them little good in any event.

The Democrats were watching the brightest and most articulate presidential candidate they have fielded since John F Kennedy snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And this was before John McCain, in a maneuver worthy of Admiral Chester Nimitz at the Battle of Midway, turned tables on the Democrats’ strategy with the choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. …

… Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. However reluctantly, Clinton would have had to accept. McCain’s choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza yesterday: rejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain’s selection was a statement of strength. America’s voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.

That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event. Obama is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama’s prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory.

Biden, who won 3% of the popular vote in the Democratic presidential primary in his home state of Delaware, and 1% or less in every other contest he entered, is ballot-box poison. Obama evidently chose him to assuage critics who point to his lack of foreign policy credentials. That was a deadly error, for by appearing to concede the critics’ claim that he knows little about foreign policy, Obama raised questions about whether he is qualified to be president in the first place. He had a winning alternative, which was to pick Clinton. That would have sent a double message: first, that Obama is tough enough to make the slippery Clintons into his subordinates, and second, that he is generous enough to extend a hand to his toughest adversary in the cause of unity.

Why didn’t Obama choose Hillary? The most credible explanation came from veteran columnist Robert Novak May 10, who reports that Michelle Obama vetoed Hillary’s candidacy. “The Democratic front-runner’s wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party’s nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility,” Novak wrote. …

Jennifer Rubin posts in Pajamas Media on Obama’s resumé padding.

Barack Obama has a solution to his lack of accomplishment and experience: pad his resume. If resume fraud were a crime, Obama would be looking at fifteen to life. And it is not just an isolated incident or two. He is a repeat offender.

Obama started early. Even the [1] New York Times acknowledges that in his book [2] Dreams From My Father Obama accomplished little as a “community organizer.” (”It is clear that the benefit of those years to Mr. Obama dwarfs what he accomplished.”) But he did manage to steal credit for asbestos testing and removal in the Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project in Chicago. But he didn’t quite tell the whole story. The Times writes:

What Mr. Obama does not mention in his book is that residents of the nearby Ida B. Wells housing project, and some at Altgeld itself, had already been challenging the housing authority on asbestos. A local newspaper had also taken up the issue. …

David Warren’s Sarah Palin column.

As everyone with access to the mainstream media knows, the Alaskan 17-year-old, Bristol Palin, is pregnant by a high school hockey jock named Levi, and is going to have the baby and marry him.

The august, liberal New York Times carried three big “analyses” on this yesterday, in which their top correspondents had a go at performing journalistic “gotchas” on Sarah Palin, John McCain, and the Republican Party. They don’t need to find any example of wrongdoing or irregularity in Ms. Palin’s past. For their purpose is to reduce her candidacy to a soap opera, so that readers will not be tempted to listen to the woman, or form any judgment of their own about her qualifications to be on a presidential ticket.

One begins to understand why women other than Hillary Clinton are seldom considered for such positions. For the American liberal media grant themselves a free pass on all traditional principles of decency, and every feminist talking point besides, when they are confronted with a woman not in the feminist stereotype. Similarly, should a black man be put forward for an important office, who is not ideologically one of theirs, he will be received, journalistically, as Judge Clarence Thomas was back in 1991 — publicly lynched. …

And David Harsanyi.

… Who knows? Maybe the lynch mob will bury Palin’s candidacy. Maybe Palin will bury herself, proving to be incompetent and unworthy. But how can a candidate be portrayed as a failure by experts who haven’t heard a word from her mouth?

Not only is this dishonest, it betrays a real political anxiety over Palin’s impact.

Do vice presidential candidates have the ability to sway an election or rally a party? Almost never.

But in this presidential election, excitement has become, for the first time, a shared experience.

Jonah Goldberg says Sarah has brought new life to the GOP.

… This is my sixth Republican National Convention, and I’ve never seen anything remotely like the excitement Palin has unleashed. Some compare it to the enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan in 1976 or 1980. Even among the cynics and nervous strategists, there’s a kind of giddiness over John McCain’s tactical daring in selecting the little-known Alaskan.

Readers of National Review Online – a reliable bellwether of conservative sentiment – flooded the site with e-mails over Labor Day weekend. The messages ran roughly 20-1 in almost orgiastic excitement about the pick. On Friday, one reader expressed Christmas-morning delight over the gift of Palin, proclaiming that McCain had just “given us our Red Ryder BB gun.”

Hundreds of NRO readers announced that they were finally donating to McCain after months of holding out. Many had hard feelings toward the senator, who too often defined “maverick” as a willingness, even an eagerness, to annoy conservatives. They weren’t kidding: Between the Palin announcement Friday and Monday morning, the McCain camp raised $10 million. This enthusiasm reflects how, although the party wants Barack Obama to lose, it is just now getting excited about a McCain win. …

John Podhoretz, Jennifer Rubin, and Peter Wehner in Contentions discuss the media feeding frenzy, and Palin’s speech tonight.

I agree with you, John. The feverish quality to the press coverage of Palin, and the degree to which they want to destroy her (and in the process, her family), is astonishing, even for those of us who have watched media tendentiousness over the years. There is, I suspect, something cultural, as well as political, that is driving this. It is as if Sarah Palin–her views, her life-story, her Alaska roots, and perhaps even her decision to have a Down Syndrome child instead of an abortion–are viewed as a threat and/or an affront to many in the media. It is similar to what Clarence Thomas experienced; his life and views were a direct challenge to those who thought they knew how an African-American man ought to think and act.

The McCain campaign is right, in my judgment, to charge that the media is “on a mission to destroy” Palin and right to name names. Members of the press are acting like a “herd of independent minds.” Having never heard of her before, many within the press have deemed Governor Palin to be a failure and a joke. They are now doing everything they can to advance their views. What we are seeing, especially from CNN and the New York Times, is advocacy journalism on stilts.

Thomas Sowell on changes in politics.

One of the few political clichés that makes sense is that “In politics, overnight is a lifetime.”

Less than a year ago, the big question was whether Rudolph Giuliani could beat Hillary Clinton in this year’s presidential election. Less than two months ago, Barack Obama had a huge lead over John McCain in the polls. Less than a week ago, the smart money was saying that Mitt Romney would be McCain’s choice for vice president.

We don’t need Barack Obama to create “change.” Things change in politics, in the economy, and elsewhere in American society, without waiting for a political messiah to lead us into the promised land.

Who would have thought that Obama’s big speech at the Democratic convention would disappoint expectations, while McCain’s speech electrified his audience when he announced his choice of Governor Sarah Palin for his running mate?

Some people were surprised that his choice was a woman. What is more surprising is that she is an articulate Republican. How many of those have you seen?

Despite the incessantly repeated mantra of “change,” Barack Obama’s politics is as old as the New Deal and he is behind the curve when it comes to today’s economy.

Senator Obama’s statement that “our economy is in turmoil” is standard stuff on the left and in the mainstream media, which has been dying to use the word “recession.” …

Guess what John Stossel thinks about government drinking age mandates.

There’s a myth in this country that the drinking age is 21. But that’s only the legal age. The fact that government says you can’t drink before 21 does not mean younger people don’t drink.

More than 100 college presidents understand this, and now they want the minimum drinking age reconsidered.

“The 21-year-old drinking age is not working,” says the Amethyst Initiative, launched by former Middlebury College President John McCardell, president of Choose Responsibility Inc.

The college leaders’ statement charges that a “culture of dangerous, clandestine ‘binge-drinking’ — often conducted off-campus — has developed” and that “By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.”

It makes the obvious point that 18-21-year-olds are “deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.”

States started raising the drinking age to 21 in 1984, after Congress passed a law that stopped federal highway money from going to states that kept the age at 18. Curiously, the law was backed by President Reagan, a self-proclaimed advocate of federalism. Federalism presumes that we’ll get better laws if states are free to compete in making public policy. Federal mandates kill useful experimentation by enacting one-size-fits-all policies. …