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David Warren leads us off explaining the significance of tonight’s eclipse.
… A lunar eclipse presaged the defeat of Darius by Alexander the Great in the battle of Gaugamela, 331 B.C., and lunar eclipses foretold the deaths of Carneades (the ancient critic of astrology), of Herod, and of Augustus. It has been speculated (wildly) that the eclipse of April 3, 33 A.D., coincided with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. There was a lunar eclipse before the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. During his fourth voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus is said to have survived among the natives of St Anne’s Bay, Jamaica, thanks to the astronomical almanac with which he was able to predict the lunar eclipse of Feb. 29, 1504.
Yet for most of us today, an eclipse is just an eclipse. Among the inhabitants of the Earth’s sprawling conurbations, a person not forewarned will be likely to miss one. The night sky is awash with the big city glare, and even out in the countryside, lights in and around every cottage and farmhouse delete much of the celestial drama. One must wander off the roads, very far out of town, to see what the spectacle was to our pre-electrical ancestors.
For a moonless sky makes a very dark night in the state of nature. The fear of beasts and bandits was real and practical; and even unmolested travelers would easily lose their way. An eclipse of the full moon (it is always full for an eclipse) darkens the landscape appreciably, yet lets the stars shimmer with an intensity to enthrall one’s soul. …
Jonah Goldberg posts on “patient stacking.” The latest outrage from Britain’s NHS.
Here’s the Daily Mail piece Jonah linked to.
Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets.
Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour pledge.
The hold-ups mean ambulances are not available to answer fresh 999 calls. …
Howard Kurtz with a good view of what it’s like to be on the Clinton downward spiral. And this was before she got blown out in Wisconsin.
… The New York Daily News said “the once-mighty Clinton campaign is beginning to feel like the last days of Pompeii.” The New York Times quoted an unnamed superdelegate backing Clinton as saying that if she doesn’t win Ohio and Texas next month, “she’s out.” The Washington Post said “even many of her supporters worry” that the nomination “could soon begin slipping out of her reach.” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Dick Polman likened her campaign to the Titanic. A Slate headline put it starkly: “So, Is She Doomed?” …
… Fueling the sense that the former first lady is sinking is increasingly sharp criticism from liberal columnists who are embracing Obama, while few pundits are firmly in Clinton’s corner. The Nation, the country’s largest liberal magazine, has endorsed Obama. Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, the most prominent liberal blogger, voted for Obama in the California primary and has been ridiculing Clinton’s campaign.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that the Clinton machine is “ruthless” and the candidate “crippled by poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a synthetic product leeched of most human qualities.”
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen said Clinton has “an inability to admit fault or lousy judgment” and made an “ugly lurch to the political right” in backing a 2005 bill that would have made flag burning illegal (which, as he later noted, Obama also endorsed).
Arianna Huffington, one of the Net’s leading Clinton-bashers, has written of “Hillary’s hypocrisy running neck and neck with her cynicism.” New Republic Editor-in-Chief Marty Peretz posted an essay last week titled “The End of BillaryLand Is on Its Way. Rejoice!” …
The Captain posts on Clinton’s prospects.
… We are just about to the end of the Restoration. If Hillary winds up losing Ohio, she has almost no hope of winning Pennsylvania in April, even if she manages to win Texas. She has to pull a rabbit out of her hat in the next two weeks, starting with the debate tomorrow night, and hope Obama melts down in the meantime. Otherwise, the superdelegate firewall will become her Maginot Line. She will be left with two choices: quit or face the humiliation of seeing her superdelegates abandon her at the first possible moment of the convention.
Robert Samuelson looks at Obama and wonders. “Where’s the beef?”
It’s hard not to be dazzled by Barack Obama. At the 2004 Democratic convention, he visited with Newsweek reporters and editors, including me. I came away deeply impressed by his intelligence, his forceful language and his apparent willingness to take positions that seemed to rise above narrow partisanship. Obama has become the Democratic presidential front-runner precisely because countless millions have formed a similar opinion. It is, I now think, mistaken.
As a journalist, I harbor serious doubt about each of the most likely nominees. But with Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain, I feel that I’m dealing with known quantities. They’ve been in the public arena for years; their views, values and temperaments have received enormous scrutiny. By contrast, newcomer Obama is largely a stage presence defined mostly by his powerful rhetoric. The trouble, at least for me, is the huge and deceptive gap between his captivating oratory and his actual views.
The subtext of Obama’s campaign is that his own life narrative — to become the first African American president, a huge milestone in the nation’s journey from slavery — can serve as a metaphor for other political stalemates. Great impasses can be broken with sufficient goodwill, intelligence and energy. “It’s not about rich versus poor; young versus old; and it is not about black versus white,” he says. Along with millions of others, I find this a powerful appeal.
But on inspection, the metaphor is a mirage. Repudiating racism is not a magic cure-all for the nation’s ills. The task requires independent ideas, and Obama has few. If you examine his agenda, it is completely ordinary, highly partisan, not candid and mostly unresponsive to many pressing national problems. …
It’s time for Pickings to pick over Michelle Obama’s gaff. JoPod is first from Contentions with a couple of posts.
… It suggests, first, that the pseudo-messianic nature of the Obama candidacy is very much a part of the way the Obamas themselves are feeling about it these days. If they don’t get a hold of themselves, the family vanity is going to swell up to the size of Phileas Fogg’s hot-air balloon and send the two of them soaring to heights of self-congratulatory solipsism that we’ve never seen before.
Second, it suggests the Obama campaign really does have its roots in New Class leftism, according to which patriotism is not only the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the first refuge as well — that America is not fundamentally good but flawed, but rather fundamentally flawed and only occasionally good. There’s something for John McCain to work with here.
And third, that Michelle Obama — from the middle-class South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, Princeton 85, Harvard Law 88, associate at Sidley and Austin, and eventually a high-ranking official at the University of Chicago — may not be proud of her country, but her life, like her husband’s, gives me every reason to be even prouder of the United States. …
Then a Corner post from VDH.
… Some old cynical campaign veteran, cigar in mouth-a Tip O’Neill-type, with the more scars the better-should sit the two kids down, explain the no-holds-barred rules of the arena outside the university and liberal government agency, remind them that African Americans and elite white liberals probably make up about at most a fourth of the electorate, and emphasize to them that by the public’s own standard of living, the Obamas have been very privileged and done quite well-and that Michelle and Barack should start to say something uplifting other than the current mantra that the U.S. is a depressing and unfair place and has only one chance of ‘hope” and “change” and “redemption” by allowing Barack and Michelle to lead us out of our collective ignorance.
Jonathan Last from the Weekly Standard.
… Instead of seeing America as a place which afforded her the opportunity to create a blessed life, Mrs. Obama seems to view it as a place where some “people” are always trying to hold her back. Whoever these “people” are, we should be glad they haven’t been successful. Michelle Obama’s progress is–despite her telling of it–an inspirational story that should make us proud of America, not frustrated by, and scornful of, it. It says something about her view of this nation, and of her husband and herself, that she seems to find it so difficult–their own experience notwithstanding–to feel gratitude for and pride in her country.
David Harsanyi thinks there’s a good chance we will soon have more freedom to own guns.
It’s election season, meaning candidates across the political spectrum will rediscover their love of shotguns and regale us with tender tales of hunting varmints.
What this pandering actually tells us is that the acrimonious issue of gun ownership is settling in on the side of the Constitution. Though citizens hold varied opinions on how to govern possession, a majority believe that gun ownership is an individual right.
Gallup pollsters asked Americans last year, “Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?” Sixty percent said “should not.” In 2007, a Pew poll asked Americans if they would “favor or oppose a law that banned the sale of handguns.” Fifty-five percent said they would oppose. …