To a layman, a key element in any definitive explication of the right to bear arms is perhaps this: what to make of the preamble about the well-regulated militia? The majority opinion in the ruling of the Supreme Court today by Justice Scalia got to the point at page 4.

Antonin Scalia cited Copeman v. Gallant, an English case from 1716, which stated that “the preamble could not be used to restrict the effect of the words of the purview.” In other words, as Justice Scalia said: “operative provisions should be given effect as operative provisions, and prologues as prologues.” Here’s the conclusion of the opinion which unequivocally affirmed the right of law abiding citizens, as individuals, to possess firearms:

we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense. Assuming that Heller is not disqualified from the exercise of Second Amendment rights, the District must permit him to register his handgun and must issue him a license to carry it in the home.

We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country, and we take seriously the concerns raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution. The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns…But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.

Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.

There would appear to be a reason that this matter of the reach of the Second Amendment didn’t need substantial judicial parsing since 1791, namely, there wasn’t much of a controversy about what the plain words of the “operative provisions” meant until recent days. But now that matter has been settled, at least for some significant time.

One of the interesting elements of the Scalia opinion refers to the “whereas” provisions of laws and contracts, and how they do not limit the body of the agreement. In this case the preamble was the rather limited explanation “whereas there is a need for a state militia, etc….” It might be interesting to speculate what other “whereas” provisions were left out of the second amendment in the interest of politeness or reserve (eg, pp. 19-22). As many have said, one of the guaranties of the continued existence of the First Amendment is the threat of armed opposition implied in the Second.

Reuters reports mischief at home and abroad that is causing oil to continue to spike in the face of obvious demand destruction and as the stock market plummets to two year lows:

Oil prices surged to a record over $140 a barrel…”The crude oil market spiked sharply higher in early trading after Libyan National Oil Company chief Shokri Ghanem said that Libya was considering a production cut,” said Tim Evans…Ghanem, Libya’s most senior oil official, said he was studying the possibility of reducing production in response to a bill before the U.S. Congress that would empower the Justice Department to sue members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for limiting oil supplies. “We are studying all the options,” Ghanem told Reuters. “There are threats from the Congress and they are taking OPEC to court, extending the jurisdiction of the U.S. outside the U.S.”…

OPEC President Chakib Khelil said in an interview Thursday that prices could reach $170 a barrel in the coming months, and he reiterated the cartel’s position that speculation — not a supply problem — was driving oil to new highs. “I forecast prices probably between $150 and $170 during this summer. That will perhaps ease towards the end of the year,” Khelil told France 24 television, according to a text of the interview released by the station. “I think that the devaluation of the dollar against the euro, if everything goes as I think it will, will be of the order of perhaps 1 to 2 percent, and this will probably generate an $8 rise in the price of oil,” he said.

Oil prices fell on Wednesday after U.S. government data showed a surprise build in the crude inventories of the world’s top consumer as demand continued to drop.

Why do we think that some of these parties are talking their book? (Finally, given these absurdities, maybe we were correct that a new Great Depression could cause oil to go to $500 a barrel.)

We once thought that the “new patriotism” was that pretentious emblem of Senator Obama’s. Before that we thought the “new patriotism” was the re-branding of America, starring the Senator and Messiah. Alas, we were wrong. The “new patriotism” will be on display in Denver at the Democrat National Convention, from its “first-ever Director of Greening, longtime environmental activist (and very blonde) Andrea Robinson.” WSJ:

To test whether celebratory balloons advertised as biodegradable actually will decompose, Ms. Robinson buried samples in a steaming compost heap. She hired an Official Carbon Adviser, who will measure the greenhouse-gas emissions of every placard, every plane trip, every appetizer prepared and every coffee cup tossed…

Ms. Robinson’s most audacious goal is to reuse, recycle or compost at least 85% of all waste generated during the convention…To police the four-day event Aug. 25-28, she’s assembling (via paperless online signup) a trash brigade. Decked out in green shirts, 900 volunteers will hover at waste-disposal stations to make sure delegates put each scrap of trash in the proper bin. Lest a fork slip into the wrong container unnoticed, volunteers will paw through every bag before it is hauled away. “That’s the only way to make sure it’s pure,” Ms. Robinson says…

Matt Burns, a spokesman for the Republican convention, looks on with undisguised glee at some of the Democrats’ efforts — such as the “lean ‘n’ green” catering guidelines. Among them: No fried food. And, on the theory that nutritious food is more vibrant, each meal should include “at least three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white.” (Garnishes don’t count.) At least 70% of ingredients should be organic or grown locally, to minimize emissions from fuel burned during transportation…

Democrats say the point is to build habits that will endure long after the convention. To that end, the city has staged “greening workshops” attended by hundreds of caterers, restaurant owners and hotel managers. “It’s the new patriotism,” Mayor Hickenlooper says.

From observing the foolishness that these worthies are consumed with, it becomes quite clear that Senator Obama perfectly captures the spirit of the time in his party. Not only does he spout environmental nonsense with the greatest of ease, but his bizarre and outsized sense of destiny is a perfect fit for the self-absorbed ninnies who are his disciples. If such people are a majority in this country, we are in very big trouble indeed.

The state seal of Michigan finally comes in handy, or not, as the case may be. Jim Geraghty thinks that Senator Obama and his seal are just too cool for school. (HT: Powerline)

The sizzling growth of China and India is one reason often cited for high price of oil. But something may be wrong with that picture, since some signs point to a dramatic slowdown in those countries. China’s and India’s stock markets have shed over $2 trillion in value this year. WSJ:

Indian shares are off 28% this year as of Friday, well into bear-market territory. Chinese stocks have tumbled 46%…

The U.S. economic slowdown threatens to dent export growth for both countries. High commodity prices and mounting inflation are an even bigger threat. On Friday, a key measure of Indian inflation, the wholesale price index, jumped to 11% for the week ending June 7, sending the Sensex down 3.4%. China’s consumer-price index for May grew 7.7% year on year, according to China’s national bureau of statistics…

This situation poses a dilemma for policy makers. The typical response to higher inflation is tighter credit, but that would slow growth. Policy makers could allow their currencies to strengthen faster to stem import inflation — but that could hurt exports. Beijing last week took steps to allow highly regulated domestic fuel prices to rise, which could cut into corporate profit margins and squeeze consumers.

It was only last October that the Shanghai market was at 6000. Now it is less than half that. It is said that the stock market looks ahead 6-9 months. Maybe future growth in these two economies is going to be even less than the high single digits currently forecast. Sometimes the market is wrong; but sometimes it is right too. We’ll just have to wait and see if the gloom-meisters are correct.

Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said that Saudi Arabia will increase current production to record levels and total capacity to 15 mbpd. Given the trends in the recent past, we wouldn’t be surprised if these increases in oil supply send prices to $200 a barrel. AP via WSJ:

For the remainder of the year “Saudi Arabia is willing to produce additional barrels of crude oil above and beyond the 9.7 million barrels per day which we plan to produce during the month of July, if demand for such quantities materializes and our customers tell us they are needed,” Mr. Naimi said in the speech…

The conference’s final statement restated the participants’ concern over volatile oil prices, but attempted to strike a balance over the cause. Producers, like Saudi Arabia say it is due to speculation, while the U.S. maintains it is due to insufficient supply.

“Spare capacity throughout the oil supply chain is important for the stability of the global oil market,” said the statement, which also noted that “the transparency and regulation of financial markets should be improved.”…

Mr. Naimi also said that the kingdom was willing to invest to boost its spare oil production capacity above the current 12.5 million barrels per day planned for the end of 2009, reversing previous statements that the country would not go beyond that figure.

“In addition, we have identified a series of future crude oil mega-increments totaling another 2.5 million barrels per day of capacity that could be built if and when crude oil demand levels warrant their development,” he said. (Bloomberg: “The further daily capacity includes 900,000 barrels from the Zuluf field, 700,000 barrels from Safaniyah, 300,000 barrels from Berri, 300,000 barrels from Khurais and 250,000 barrels from Shaybah, Naimi said.)

Also from Bloomberg: Venezuelan Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez, also asked whether the oil price was likely to fall after the Saudi move, said: “I don’t think so because it’s not a problem of supply.” What a world it is when the Venezuelan oil minister just might be right.

Pollster Frank Luntz says that his research indicates that the 2008 election results will depend on the 20% of voters “who reject partisanship because it’s polarizing and those who denounce ideology because it’s limiting.” They are middle age, middle income, middle of the road, and often located in mid-America:

fully 80% of Americans give at least one of the candidates a passing or failing grade, according to polling that I’ve done — and they are breaking relatively evenly for McCain and Obama. That leaves 20% floating around like rowboats looking for a dock slip. According to the website RealClearPolitics, the average of national polls has Obama beating McCain 47% to 43%, with just 10% seemingly undecided or uncommitted.

But the real floating vote is twice that number because it includes people with a slight preference, not just those with no preference at all. And it is that 20%, not the outspoken partisans on either side, that will decide this historic election…Polls and focus groups suggest that they vote against, not for; they are rejecters, not embracers — and the candidate they reject the least is the candidate they will ultimately support…A floating voter is genuinely 50-50.

Who are these voters? Think of the political equation 4M + 2M: middle age, middle income, middle of the road and mid-America, plus Missouri and Michigan…Families with incomes of about $50,000 a year — the national average — are highly pessimistic and negative about the direction of the country and the condition of the economy. From 1994 through 2004, Republicans tended to have a narrow advantage among these floating voters, allowing the GOP to capture and maintain control of Congress for the decade. But they returned to the Democratic fold in the 2006 campaign and are leaning Democratic this year. They despise President Bush’s economic policies and are most certainly “change” voters, but tax increases are the kind of change they will eagerly vote against….

What’s the best message for floaters? In a word, empathy…”Yes we can” is certainly appealing, but “yes we will” is even better. And a declaration that “there are some things more important than an election” will win their votes as well as their hearts.

We continue to believe that using the tackling of high gas prices as a metaphor for a Can-Do America capable of solving its own problems is a pretty good idea for a candidate, and Mr. Luntz’s polling is consistent with that. “Vote for the doers, not the suers,” and so forth.

Michael Barone says that Senator Obama’s position on Iraq is now a problem with electoral consequences. (We wonder how small will be the percentage of Americans who will cast their vote based on Iraq; after all, even the NYT has finally waddled in with a story that should have been written some time ago, “Big Gains for Iraq Security.”)

In January 2007, when George W. Bush ordered the surge strategy, which John McCain had advocated since the summer of 2003, Barack Obama informed us that the surge couldn’t work. The only thing to do was to get out as soon as possible.

That stance proved to be a good move toward winning the presidential nomination — but it was poor prophecy. It is beyond doubt now that the surge has been hugely successful, beyond even the hopes of its strongest advocates…Violence is down enormously, Anbar and Basra and Sadr City have been pacified, Prime Minister Maliki has led successful attempts to pacify Shiites as well as Sunnis, and the Iraqi parliament has passed almost all of the “benchmark” legislation demanded by the Democratic Congress — all of which Barack Obama seems to have barely noticed or noticed not at all. He has not visited Iraq since January 2006 and did not seek a meeting with Gen. David Petraeus when he was in Washington…

The editorial writers of The Washington Post have been paying close and careful attention. And even though they may be temperamentally more inclined to favor Obama’s candidacy over John McCain’s, they have not been unwilling to take Obama to task for his inattention to American success. Obama, the Post noted tartly on June 7, “has become unreasonably wedded to a year-old proposal to rapidly withdraw all U.S. combat forces from the country — a plan offered when he wrongly believed that the situation would only worsen as long as American troops remained.”

On June 18, a Post editorial made the same point again and noted that Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyard Zebari told Obama in a phone conversation that a precipitate withdrawal would embolden al-Qaida and Iran. But Obama told ABC News’ Jake Tapper he said no such thing. Perhaps he’s still trying to avoid facing facts that undermine his narrative. Which might also explain why he said he was willing to meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions while he has not been able to find time to meet with Petraeus.

Perhaps Senator Obama should accept Michael Yon’s offer. (Fareed Zakaria recommends that Senator Obama give a speech that almost no one will likely listen to after the second paragraph.)

The Democratic presidential candidate outlined his understanding of the GOP election strategy at a fundraiser in Jacksonville, Florida. Reuters:

“It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy…We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid…They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?…he’s got a feisty wife…We know the strategy because they’ve already shown their cards.”

It would appear that Senator Obama is not looking to attract too many Republican voters, given his characterization of them and their party.

Leaving aside the slurs offered by Senator Obama, is it now to be considered out of bounds to use the “young and inexperienced” argument too? And why didn’t he mention the positive and substantive Drill Now! policy program that appears to have caught fire in Republican circles? Is the GOP not to use the questionable foreign policy views or numerous gaffes, or the willful, easily checkable misstatements and naive foreign policy initiatives that appear to be not only fair game in an election but also the very embodiment of “young and inexperienced”?

Once again, America’s military is the preeminent US institution in the hearts and minds of the American people. That is no surprise. The surprise is how low Congress has fallen. Gallup has a poll that once again shows the military to be the most respected profession or institution in the United States, with 71% of Americans saying they have a high level of confidence in that group, as opposed to 26% in the Presidency and a startlingly low 12% having such confidence in Congress:

When we looked at these statistics a while back, confidence in the Presidency was much higher at 44%, and that figure has now fallen by over a third to 26%. Congress, at that time controlled by the GOP, was also held in low esteem in the previous poll, with a 22% rating. Now that has fallen almost in half. Congress now gets a mere 12% confidence rating, the largest percentage decline among all institutions.

12% confidence in Congress is a very disturbing statistic. Congress and news about Congress are omnipresent in daily life and the leaders of congress are staples of network news. It would not have been terribly surprising to see Congress’s decline mirroring that of TV news, which fell from the high 20s to the low 20s in the surveys — but confidence in Congress plummeted by twice as much. No doubt Democrats and Republicans will have different spins to attach to the institutional decline of Congress. Our question is this: how much additional power would you want to see in the hands of an institution that is held in low esteem by 80-90% of the American people?

Oil, oil everywhere and not a well to sink, because of current US policies. John McCain came out for more drilling the other day, an utterly common sense thing that is overwhelmingly popular in the polls, and he has Dick Morris swooning at his superior political judgment to Obama. Standards in politics are low, apparently. But what about ANWR? In the course of complaining about Senator McCain’s inexplicable devotion to the remote, utterly unpopulated northern reach of Alaska we call ANWR, Charles Krauthammer reminds us of some history:

Gas is $4 a gallon. Oil is $135 a barrel and rising. We import two-thirds of our oil, sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the likes of Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. And yet we voluntarily prohibit ourselves from even exploring huge domestic reserves of petroleum and natural gas.

At a time when U.S. crude oil production has fallen 40 percent in the last 25 years, 75 billion barrels of oil have been declared off-limits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That would be enough to replace every barrel of non-North American imports (oil trade with Canada and Mexico is a net economic and national security plus) for 22 years.

That’s nearly a quarter-century of energy independence. The situation is absurd. To which John McCain is responding with a partial fix: Lift the federal ban on Outer Continental Shelf drilling, where a fifth of the off-limits stuff lies.

This is a change for McCain, but circumstances have changed. When the moratorium was imposed in 1982, gasoline was $1.20 and oil was $30 a barrel. Since the moratorium was instituted, we’ve had two wars in the Middle East, and in between a decade of garrisoning troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE to preserve the peace and keep untold oil riches out of the hands of the most malevolent of our enemies.

Technological conditions have changed as well. We now are able to drill with far more precision and environmental care than a quarter-century ago. We have thousands of rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, yet not even hurricanes Katrina and Rita resulted in spills of any significance.

Krauthammer makes the common sense case that what is true offshore should obviously be true for ANWR, and chides McCain for his inconsistent stance, and that brings us to whether MCain’s position is political or intellectual. For example, Paul Krugman thinks that Senator McCain’s change of heart on offshore drilling is the result of cynical political calculation: “I’m reasonably sure that Mr. McCain’s advisers realize that offshore drilling would do nothing for current gas prices. But they may believe that the public can be conned.” Krugman’s analysis and McCain’s obstinance to date on ANWR raise the question of whether ANWR poll-tests poorly among swing voters, or whether McCain’s stance is just uninformed and dumb. (UPDATE — the fellows at Powerline think McCain should stick to his guns on ANWR.)

The other day, Saudi Arabia indicated it would pump more oil and probably sell it at reduced prices. The market ignored the news and oil prices barely moved at all. Today it’s China’s turn to be ignored, even as it announced an 18% increase in domestic gas and diesel prices. The market shrugged again. WSJ:

Light, sweet crude for July delivery recently traded $2.52, or 1.8%, lower at $134.16 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude on the ICE futures exchange traded $2.52 lower at $133.92 a gallon.

China will increase fuel prices on Friday, according to a Chinese news service. While most of China’s neighbors have reduced subsidies in the last few weeks, China was seen as capable of weathering the recent upswing in energy costs without raising prices. Higher prices are seen reducing consumption, which would be especially worrisome in the giant Chinese market, traders said.

“This is enough to scare the market,” said Ray Carbone, president of Paramount Options. “This is not what people who are long want to hear.”

“This is enough to scare the market” — hardly; a 1.8% reduction in oil prices is scant evidence of the market being “scared.” (And, given recent history, the market will likely decide in coming days to be concerned about some other miscellaneous matter that will once again send prices to fresh records.) China is often touted as perhaps the main reason that oil prices are stratospheric. But now its demand growth will attenuate, even as more supply is brought onstream. Given events such as these, the “supply and demand” argument for the persistent $135 price of oil is getting a little tiresome as a complete explanation for the phenomenon. Perhaps something else is at work.

Some Democrats are apparently proposing nationalization of at least part of the US oil industry, which seems to follow in the footsteps of British governments of the post-WWII era:

Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY)…We (the government) should own the refineries. Then we can control how much gets out into the market.

And Congresswoman Maxine Waters wants to nationalize the rest of the industry. Much mischief appears to lie ahead in 2009, if these worthies are serious about plans to make America look like the decaying, fraying Great Britain of the 1970’s.

About Rathergate (a subject we know way too much about — really), Tom Wolfe said this in indictment of the practices of Dan Rather and his associates in CBS news:

“Idiots. They should have looked at the piece of paper. Obviously not written by a typewriter.“

That statement applies to this obvious forgery as well. Doesn’t anyone remember what things that were typed in 1961 actually looked like? HT: Ace

Indefatigable doomsayer (and sometimes excitable fellow) Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has quite a lot to work with these days. Here’s his commentary on a forecast from the Royal Bank of Scotland:

“A very nasty period is soon to be upon us - be prepared,” said Bob Janjuah, the bank’s credit strategist…who became a City star after his grim warnings last year about the credit crisis proved all too accurate…”Globalisation was always going to risk putting G7 bankers into a dangerous corner at some point. We have got to that point…The Fed is in panic mode. The massive credibility chasms down which the Fed and maybe even the ECB will plummet when they fail to hike rates in the face of higher inflation will combine to give us a big sell-off in risky assets…”

It’s not just RBS that is sounding the alarm. Morgan Stanley apparently has a similar report, according to Evans-Pritchard:

“We see striking similarities between the transatlantic tensions that built up in the early 1990s and those that are accumulating again today. The outcome of the 1992 deadlock was a major currency crisis and a recession in Europe,” said a report by Morgan Stanley’s European experts…”The tensions will not disappear into thin air. They will find fault lines on the periphery of Europe. Painful macro adjustments are likely to take place. Pegs to the euro could be questioned”…The point of maximum stress could occur in coming months if the ECB carries out the threat this month by Jean-Claude Trichet to raise rates. It will be worse yet — for Europe — if the Fed backs away from expected tightening. “This could trigger another ‘catastrophic’ event”…

Morgan Stanley says the current account deficits of Spain (10.5pc of GDP), Portugal (10.5pc), and Greece (14pc) would never have been able to reach such extreme levels before the launch of the euro. EMU has shielded them from punishment by the markets, but this has allowed them to store up serious trouble. By contrast, Germany now has a huge surplus of 7.7pc of GDP.

The imbalances appear to be getting worse. The latest food and oil spike has pushed eurozone inflation to a record 3.7pc, with big variations by country. Spanish inflation is rising at 4.7pc even though the country is now in the grip of a full-blown property crash. It is still falling further behind Germany. The squeeze required to claw back lost competitiveness will be “politically unpalatable”.

Morgan Stanley said the biggest risk lies in the arc of countries from the Baltics to the Black Sea where credit growth has been roaring at 40pc to 50pc a year. Current account deficits have reached 23pc of GDP in Latvia, and 22pc in Bulgaria. In Hungary and Romania, over 55pc of household debt is in euros or Swiss francs.

We have wondered for some time what would happen with the euro and EU economies when the stresses of major differences in economic policies, inflationary pressures, and productivity became too pronounced to paper over. Apparently we may find out soon.

Reuters today reports yet another exoneration in the matter of Haditha:

A military judge on Tuesday dismissed the case against the highest-ranking U.S. Marine charged in the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha, whittling down the list of those who must still face justice for the 2005 killings to just the accused ringleader. Military Judge Col. Steven Folsom dropped all charges against Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, who was accused of violating a lawful order and dereliction of duty…Folsom threw out the charges against Chessani after finding that a four-star general who oversaw the investigation was influenced by an investigator who later became his advisor.

The appalling Congressman Jack Murtha in 2006 found the Marines guilty of “murder” with zero evidence, and did so on the national stage:

“Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?” Murtha said on “This Week” on ABC. “We don’t know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command.”…”I will not excuse murder, and this is what happened…This is worse than Abu Ghraib.”

Haditha happened in November 2005. The Haditha Massacre entered the lexicon shortly after that, as a result of irresponsible, biased reporting in TIME Magazine and the MSM, and irresponsible, biased accusations like that by Congressman Murtha, all apparently in the service of an anti-war agenda with no consideration for the actual servicemen fighting actual battles with their lives at risk.

Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani and his comrades have suffered nearly 1000 days in hell from this persecution for no good reason whatsoever — and to the detriment of our armed services and the fine men who protect our freedoms. Who will give them back the three years of their lives that our enemies in Iraq, with the help of our media and Congress, have taken from them?

Michael Yon, who has spent more time embedded in Iraq than any other journalist, has something of value to offer to politicians who might care to learn:

One of the biggest problems with the Iraq War is that politics has frequently triumphed over truth. For instance, we went into Iraq with shoddy intelligence (at best), no reconstruction plan, and perhaps half as many troops as were required. We refused to admit that an insurgency was growing, until the country collapsed into anarchy and civil war. Now the truth is that Iraq is showing real progress on many fronts: Al Qaeda is being defeated and violence is down and continuing to decrease. As a result, the militias have lost their reason for existence and are getting beaten back or co-opted. Shia, Sunni and Kurds are coming together — although with various stresses — under the national government.

If progress continues at this rate, it is very possible that before 2008 is out, we can finally say “the war has ended.” Yes, likely there still will be some American casualties, but if the violence continues to drop and the Iraqi government consolidates its gains, we will be able, in good conscience, to begin bringing more of our people home. I will be paying very close attention to the words of Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, who is replacing General Petraeus as the overall commander in Iraq.

Whatever we do in Iraq from here forward, we must strive to make better decisions than those made between 2003 and 2006. And one way to achieve that is by making certain that our civilian leaders are fully informed. All three candidates for President are extremely intelligent, but that doesn’t mean that all three are tracking the truth on the ground in Iraq. Anyone who wants to be President of the United States needs to see Iraq without the distorting lenses of the media or partisan politics. I would be honored to visit Iraq with Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, Senator McCain or any of their Senate colleagues.

I hereby offer to accompany any Senator to Iraq, whether they are pro-or anti-war, Democrat or Republican. I will make this offer personally to a few select Senators as well. Our conversations during the visit would be on- or off-record, as they wish. Touring Iraq with me, as well as briefings by U.S. officers and meetings with Iraqis, would provide an accurate and nuanced account of the progress and challenges ahead, so that the Senators might have a highly informed perspective on this most critical issue. Our civilian leaders need to make decisions based on the best information available. The only way to learn what is really going on in Iraq is to go there and listen to our ground commanders, who know what they are doing. Generals Petraeus and Odierno have years of experience in Iraq, and vast knowledge of our efforts there. But the young soldiers who have done multiple tours in Iraq also have unique and invaluable perspectives as well. These young soldiers have personally witnessed the trajectory of the war shift dramatically, and can articulate those changes in concrete and specific terms. It doesn’t matter if a soldier is only twenty-something. If he or she spent two or three years in the war, that person is likely to have valuable insights.

The best way to understand what is really going on is to listen closely to a wide range of service members who have done multiple tours in Iraq. Some will be negative, some will be positive, but overall I am certain that the vast majority of multi-tour Iraq veterans will testify that there has been great progress, and now there is hope. Combat veterans don’t tolerate happy talk or wishful thinking. They’ll tell you the raw truth as they see it.

Whether any Senators take advantage of my offer, I do hope that the presidential candidates visit Iraq, not just for a photo opportunity, but to spend time with our commanders and combat veterans, who know the truth and are not afraid to speak it.

Meanwhile, a certain presidential candidate apparently already knows more than he needs to know. Senator Obama is already conducting diplomacy with the Iraqi foreign minister five months before there’s even an election in the US: “I emphasized to him how encouraged I was by the reductions in violence in Iraq, but also insisted that it is important for us to begin the process of withdrawing U.S. troops, making clear that we have no interest in permanent bases in Iraq…My concern is that the Bush administration — in a weakened state politically — ends up trying to rush an agreement that in some ways might be binding to the next administration, whether it was my administration or Sen. McCain’s administration…The foreign minister agreed that the next administration should not be bound by an agreement that’s currently made.”

Saudi Arabia is apparently going to put more oil on the market, and at discount prices. This WSJ piece says that the increased supply and reduced price could actually cause oil prices to spike even further, in this time of shrinking demand:

The world’s largest oil supplier does have two blunt weapons in its arsenal if it wants to try to beat down soaring oil prices to assuage the growing outcry over pump prices in world capitals. It can open its spigots wider to put more crude on the market, and it can sharply discount that crude to get refineries to lap it up. Industry insiders say that Saudi Arabia may employ exactly that double whammy in a bid to take the steam out of a market that has sent prices up more than 40% since the start of the year…

The question is whether even a temporary surge of discounted Saudi oil would be enough to reverse the most bullish oil market in decades. And if so, would the price remain lower for long? Some industry analysts say that such a strategy, if it is employed, might not have a lasting effect and could even risk pushing prices higher if Saudi Arabia doesn’t find willing customers for the additional oil at a time when demand is beginning to erode…

One thing that nearly all sides agree on: the market is not now hankering for additional oil. Saudi officials have insisted loudly for months, most recently on Friday, that more oil was not the answer. Instead, they have blamed soaring prices on the falling dollar, U.S. interest-rate policy and the increasing involvement of big investment funds in the commodities market. Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi said Friday that soaring prices were “unjustified by the fundamentals” of supply and demand.

When the law of supply and demand gets rewritten so that increased supply and reduced demand still means higher prices, watch out. If that is not evidence of a bubble, it is surely evidence of some form of derangement.

UPDATE — The FT adds: “oil traders now expect Saudi Arabia to announce a substantial increase in supplies when oil ministers meet in Jeddah on Sunday, although the announcement could come beforehand. This has significantly upped the stakes of the hastily called summit, making it more likely prices will rise from current levels if Saudi Arabia’s actions fail to match expectations.” Aha. Until just recently, no one was expecting the Saudis to do or say anything about increasing oil production. But now the goalposts have been moved. Now, if they say x but the traders want to hear y, prices will spike on that. No bubble here, however. Move along now.

As we think about the troubling energy prices and their solutions, we should remember that ANWR is a hard, mostly empty place, as these pictures by Jonah Goldberg illustrate. It is dark in ANWR continuously for 56 days each year. In the summer, this area the size of South Carolina is still empty but for muskeg, mosquitoes, critters and danger. In the winter, it is so cold and desolate that its sole village, Kaktovik, is home to only 260 people. Hard to get much more empty than that. Indeed, if you were ab initio to pick an ideal out-of-the-way location in all the world to drill for oil, you might just choose the remote and otherwise useless northern reach of Alaska that is now called ANWR.

But it is not just ANWR that is a hard and empty place. That description has been imputed by some to the GOP presidential nominee and his position on drilling in ANWR (“a don’t-drill zombie”). Recent record oil prices would appear to give the GOP and John McCain a tremendous windfall profit — a great political wedge in an election said to heavily favor Democrats. After all, 80% or more of Republicans in Congress favor doing what it takes to increase production in this country (the world’s third largest oil producer), while 90% or so of Democrats in Congress oppose such measures. Alas, John McCain seems to have a tin ear on the politics of the issue in the era of $4 gas, as well as incoherence when it comes to the internal logic of his position. Fred Barnes:

John McCain has warned of the peril to America in sending $400 billion a year to foreign countries in return for oil. He’s been loud and relentless on the subject — and wise. “It’s a national security issue,” he declared last week at a town hall meeting in New York City. Much of the money goes to countries that “do not like us very much,” he noted. That was McCain’s understated way of saying the beneficiaries include Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia, countries in which anti-American forces find aid and comfort.

So you’d think McCain would favor an unbridled effort to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. But he doesn’t. There’s an intellectual and political hole in McCain’s position, a lack of coherence that hurts both his presidential campaign and that of Republican congressional candidates…

McCain favors increased domestic oil production, but not drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the barren area with large (and recoverable) oil reserves. President Bush and most Republicans want to open ANWR for drilling and have for years. But McCain is adamant. His aides insist it’s a waste of time trying to persuade him to change his mind. He wouldn’t want oil companies to drill in ANWR, McCain says, “any more than I would want them to drill in the Grand Canyon or the Everglades.”

As for exploration and drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida, McCain says that’s fine. Only there’s a catch: States must decide. “I would like to give them incentives and increased revenues from oil that was recovered off the shores of Florida and California, et cetera, but being a federalist, I am not going to force them to do that,” he told Glenn Beck last month. A federalist on what he regards as a grave national security threat? That’s an odd stance. It seems more like a dodge…

To us, Drill Here, Drill Now, with all its implications, would appear to be a very useful wedge issue for Republicans. Every American is suffering the consequences of oil prices when they fill up their tank or get on an airplane, so the issue has universal reach (these prices are killing truck and SUV owners and dealers). Moreover, it clearly and completely would separate McCain from Obama on an important domestic issue. He’s never going to win the brie and chablis crowd anyhow, so why should he care what they think (unless he personally holds the same views)? It’s much more important for him to win Hillary Clinton’s demographic in rural America and elsewhere, and attacking gas prices in this direct, action-oriented way (as opposed to the fatuous and lawyerly approach of suing OPEC) would seem one good approach to doing so. In addition, a clear position from candidate McCain in favor of swift development of all of America’s abundant energy resources (a new Apollo program of sorts) might itself exert some downward pressure on oil price expectations.

Perhaps most importantly, there is an overarching electoral theme to drilling for our own oil and solving our own problems — namely, presenting America as the “Can Do” country once more, just as it was in the past. Lately it seems that America has lost its way, and has forgotten that “Can Do” attitude that characterized so much of our last three hundred years and made the country great. Relying on others to solve America’s problems is a loser’s attitude — it is certainly not the America that put a man on the moon, conquered polio, won WWII, universalized the internet, and spread freedom around the globe.

Senator McCain’s campaign, and the whole GOP, are in need of an uplifting theme to present to Americans to counter the vapid, but apparently appealing, “change we can believe in.” On the Republican side, there is an empty place where such an uplifting theme should be, and that is not a formula for success. It remains to be seen whether the GOP and the McCain campaign figure out, before it is too late in this election season, how to tap into the “Can Do” attitude that the majority of Americans practice in their own lives every single day. So far, this is a wasted opportunity — indeed, a self-inflicted wound — for no good reason whatsoever. (HT: Doug Martin)

Bloomberg reports some constructive news from authoritative Saudi Arabian sources in advance of its June 22 meeting of producers and consumers of oil. It appears that Saudi Arabia may have moved from mere jawboning about speculators to proposing and executing “sizeable” increases in production:

Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said record prices are “unjustified” and the state oil company signaled it may soon start pumping from a new field…

Saudi Arabia invited nations including the U.S., U.K. China, Germany, India and Japan to the meeting, al-Naimi said. The kingdom is the world’s largest oil exporter and the most influential member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries…The June 22 “meeting in Jeddah will discuss the increase in oil prices, which are unjustified by market fundamentals, and suggest appropriate solutions,” al-Naimi said in a statement today. The kingdom will start pumping oil from its new 500,000 barrel-a-day Khursaniyah oilfield within the next month, a board member of Saudi Aramco said…

“This meeting is expected, God willing, to produce positive results that will contribute to stabilizing the international oil market,” al-Naimi said. The country is likely to propose a “sizeable” increase in oil production at the meeting, the Middle East Economic Survey reported today…Current oil prices threaten the global economy and hurt the long-term interests of oil producers, Ibrahim al-Muhanna, an adviser to al-Naimi, was cited as saying by the weekly newsletter, based in Cyprus.

Khursaniyah will start “very, very soon, definitely within the next month,” Khalid A. Al-Falih, who is also an executive vice president at Saudi Aramco, said in a telephone interview today. He couldn’t say when full production would be reached. The field is forecast to produce as much oil as the daily output of Ecuador, OPEC’s smallest member.

We’ve discussed the coming increases in Saudi oil production previously. Interestingly perhaps, this frontal assault from Saudi Arabia against the current oil price spike had little immediate impact, with prices falling a mere 1.7% to $134 a barrel or so. Question: if the oil market is effectively ignoring what Saudi Arabia — lynchpin of OPEC and the world’s spare oil capacity — says about bringing down prices, does that mean we are anywhere close to the market top and plunge that some have forecast? Ignoring the Big Dog does not appear, at first glance, to be a sign of market rationality.

The Economist has a piece full of interesting facts. The question is whether its central premise, posed in the italicized paragraph below, is correct.

Over half of the world’s infrastructure investment is now taking place in emerging economies, where sales of excavators have risen more than fivefold since 2000. In total, emerging economies are likely to spend an estimated $1.2 trillion on roads, railways, electricity, telecommunications and other projects this year, equivalent to 6% of their combined GDPs—twice the average infrastructure-investment ratio in developed economies. Largely as a result, total fixed investment in emerging economies could increase by a staggering 16% in real terms this year, according to HSBC, whereas in rich economies it is forecast to be flat.

Such investment will help support economic growth this year as America’s economy stalls—and for many years to come.…

Morgan Stanley predicts that emerging economies will spend $22 trillion (in today’s prices) on infrastructure over the next ten years, of which China will account for 43%. China is already spending around 12% of its GDP on infrastructure. Indeed, China has spent more (in real terms) in the past five years than in the whole of the 20th century. Last year Brazil launched a four-year plan to spend $300 billion to modernise its road network, power plants and ports. The Indian government’s latest five-year plan has ambitiously pencilled in nearly $500 billion in infrastructure projects. Russia, the Gulf states and other oil exporters are all pouring part of their higher oil revenues into fixed investment.

Good infrastructure has always played a leading role in economic development, from the roads and aqueducts of ancient Rome to Britain’s railway boom in the mid-19th century. But never before has infrastructure spending been so large as a share of world GDP. This is partly because more countries are now industrialising than ever before, but also because China and others are investing at a much brisker pace than rich economies ever did. Even at the peak of Britain’s railway mania in the 1840s, total infrastructure investment was only around 5% of GDP.

“Never before has infrastructure spending been so large a share of world GDP.” Is that a good thing or a bad thing? The Economist and some analysts assume it is a good thing, and perhaps makes world GDP more stable in the face of slowdowns in the EU and US. But what iron law says that that is true? Perhaps spending so hugely on infrastructure turns out to produce wasted and idle productive capacity in the face of a big downturn in final demand.

Is it not also possible and plausible that the great trade and growth among developing countries is a more fragile thing? China’s exports appear to be holding up quite nicely so far (up 28%, year over year), but doesn’t it remain to be yet seen if the great progress in the developing world is truly self-sustaining? For example, is it not true that by historical measures, a significant correction is long overdue?

To those who say that nothing like that is apparent on the horizon, we respond: everyone thought the good times were here to stay in internet stocks, housing prices, commodities of all sorts, subprime mortgages, and LBO loan syndication almost up to the very moment that they went over the cliff. It is when articles like the one above seem so unquestioning of their basic premise that we wonder most just what lies around the corner. (For example, if everyone saw the future so clearly and correctly, every energy dependent company in the US would have hedged almost all of their fuel needs a year ago.)

Senator Obama addressed his problem with the embarrassing revelation (or two) about vice Presidential vetter James Johnson. you be the judge of the quality of Senator Obama’s response:

“Well, look…the, the, I mean - first of all I am not vetting my VP search committee for their mortgages…It becomes sort of a, um, I mean, this is a game that can be played - everybody, you know, who is tangentially related to our campaign, I think, is going to have a whole host of relationships — I would have to hire the vetter to vet the vetters. I mean, at some point, you know, we just asked people to do their assignments.

Jim Johnson has a very discrete task as does Eric Holder, and that is simply to gather up information about potential vice presidential candidates. They are performing that job well, it’s a volunteer, unpaid position. And they are giving me information and I will then exercise judgment in terms of who I want to select as a vice presidential candidate.

So this – you know, these aren’t folks who are working for me…They’re not people you know who I have assigned to a job in a future administration and, you know, ultimately my assumption is that, you know, this is a discreet task that they’re going to performing for me over the next two months.”

Vetting a VP would appear to be a very important, as well as highly personal, task for a Presidential candidate. It is certainly not a “tangential” responsibility to be left to “volunteers,” and “people not working for” the candidate. That’s one point.

Perhaps even more important is that neither Obama nor anyone on his staff asked the most basic and preliminary question of the vetters — indeed, it is the question that the vetters themselves are supposed to ask: is there anything in your past, any statement or association, which, if it becomes public, will prove an embarrassment to the candidate? (Johnson’s taking $7 million in loans from Countrywide, a target of Obama’s sharp criticism, would seem to imply that no one asked this question. But why? Why were these particular vetters chosen and not themselves vetted?)

Update: Johnson resigned.

Demand for oil is tanking, but for some reason that fact seems completely disconnected from price. We continue to be wrong about the euphoria that continues to grip the oil market. WSJ:

The IEA…said it sees world oil demand growing just 0.9%, or 800,000 barrels a day this year in a market of 86 million barrels a day. The original forecast last July was for growth of 2.18 million barrels a day…

In the U.S…Americans drove 11 billion fewer miles in March versus the same month a year ago – the sharpest monthly drop since the government began collecting such data in 1942 and the first contraction in that month since the 1979 Iranian revolution. That…was well before pump prices reached a nationwide average of $4 a gallon last week. At current prices, some economists say fuel expenditures as a percentage of workers’ take-home pay is now as high as it was during the oil shocks of the 1970s…

the IEA has dropped its forecast for China’s oil demand this year to 5.5%…from 6.1% last July. It cautioned that Chinese consumption may get an extra kick later this year as areas of the country are rebuilt following the devastating earthquake…

the biggest drop in gasoline demand is coming from the developed world. In Japan, brokerage Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd. says passenger car miles were down between 3% and 5% in 2007 – roughly the same amount that bus and rail miles were up. Businesses are axing work days, travel and opting for teleconferencing to beat high oil costs.

The International Air Transport Association, which represents 230 airlines globally, says premium travel for business and first-class services suffered its biggest drop in five years in March and that economy travel growth slowed to less than 1% at the end of the first quarter…

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is dealing with its second worst PR disaster of this decade by holding an oil conference of producers and consumers on June 22. It’s hard to believe that this is going to work, given the previous self-serving and cynical statements of OPEC members.

(Finally, a question: is it in fact immoral for the Democrats in Congress not to allow drilling in ANWR and other places, when the foolish policy of a lack of such E&P activities, as well as biofuels mandates, have arguably resulted in the poverty and even death of children around the world?)

The WSJ has a piece on the woes of being OPEC. It is called “Worries of Slowing Oil Demand Make OPEC Wary of Raising Output.” We should all have such problems:

Despite Friday’s surge in oil to a new peak above $139 a barrel, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries officials have latched onto recent reports that point to a further fall in crude-oil demand, as sharply higher energy and commodity prices and cooling housing markets take their toll on consumers globally…

“Where is the demand going? It keeps going down. People need to look at that. Why would we produce more?” Shokri Ghanem, Libya’s top oil official, said in an interview. He said he believes the world market has enough oil. A Gulf OPEC official echoed that, saying the 13-nation group “will provide what the market wants. If customers aren’t asking for it, we’re not going to supply it. We don’t think more oil will lower prices anyway.”…

The International Energy Agency, whose reports are taken as the main authority on energy market conditions, has already chopped its 2008 world oil-demand growth forecast by 54% to one million barrels a day…recent revisions by the outlook for world economic growth could prompt the IEA to reduce its forecasts further. Last week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said growth in its 30 member nations, which account for the bulk of the world’s economic activity, will slow to 1.8% this year and 1.7% in 2009 versus earlier forecasts of 2.3% and 2.4%.

“If customers aren’t asking for it, we’re not going to supply it. We don’t think more oil will lower prices anyway.” Hmmm. While it is true that the supply of oil appears adequate, it’s more than a bit self serving to suggest that greater supply would not result in lower prices. How nuts is it to give such pricing power in the futures market to a cartel in an industry in which insider trading is perfectly legal and common? (As nuts as not even bothering to drill for our own oil?)

IBD has an editorial on Senator Obama’s defense policy, as stated in this video to the Caucus for Priorities, an Iowa group that provided 10,000 of his votes in that 227,000 vote contest. The Caucus for Priorities says it wants to cut 15% from defense spending and redirect it into domestic social spending. (IBD clearly does not like Obama’s approach: “The scope of his planned defense cuts, combined with his angry tone, is breathtaking. He sounds as if the military is the enemy, not the bad guys it’s fighting.”) Here’s what Senator Obama said in part:

As President, I will end misguided defense policies and will stand with Caucus for Priorities…First, I’ll stop spending nine billion dollars a month in Iraq…I will slow our development of future combat systems…I will not develop new nuclear weapons…You know where I stand…I don’t switch positions or make promises that can’t be kept…I don’t posture on defense policy…

You may think that Senator Obama’s plans are prudent or you may think them foolish. However, it would appear clear enough where the Senator stands: “I don’t switch positions or make promises that can’t be kept…I don’t posture on defense policy.” Fair enough then. HT: LGF

We discussed this matter the other day, but we’ll take it up again, because the grandiosity in Senator Obama’s June 3 speech (and it’s hardly the only example) is so little noted as downright bizarre by his acolytes in the media. Mark Steyn on Senator Obama’s “All Generations Shall Call Me Blessed” moment:

Sen. Obama has learned an old trick of Bill Clinton’s: If you behave like a star, you’ll get treated as one. So, even as his numbers weakened, his rhetoric soared. By the time he wrapped up his “victory” speech last week, the great gaseous uplift had his final paragraphs floating in delirious hallucination along the Milky Way:

“I face this challenge with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people…I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…”

It’s a good thing he’s facing it with “profound humility,” isn’t it? Because otherwise who knows what he’d be saying. But mark it in your calendars: June 3, 2008 -– the long-awaited day, after 232 years, that America began to provide care for the sick…When Barack wants to walk on the water, he doesn’t want to have to use a stepladder to get up on it.

There are generally two reactions to this kind of policy proposal…”What a different emotional register from John McCain’s; Obama seems on the verge of tears; the enormous crowd in the Xcel Center seems ready to lift Obama on its shoulders; the much smaller audience for McCain’s speech interrupted his remarks with stilted cheers.” The second reaction boils down to: “‘Heal the planet’? Is this guy nuts?”

“Is this guy nuts,” indeed. Will ordinary Democrats notice the disconnect between their candidate’s rhetoric and reality? The gap between his prepared speeches and his impromptu remarks ought to be noteworthy in that regard. Senator Obama is often quite unimpressive when he’s not in full preacher mode, but so far, none of that seems to matter very much, at least to the media. Democratic primary voters are another matter. As Steyn noted:

in the voting booths…Democrat legs stayed admirably unthrilled. The more the media told Hillary she was toast, and she should get the hell out of it and let Obama romp to victory, the more Democrats insisted on voting for her. The more the media insisted Barack was inevitable, the less inclined the voters were to get with the program…In the end, he crawled over the finish line. The Obama Express came a-hurtlin’ down the track at 2 miles an hour.

It remains to be seen how many true believers there are out there in America, and how much of this is media hype. Back in February, with Obamamania at fever pitch, Charles Krauthammer thought the madness could persist until just after Inauguration Day. We seem to be in a similar place again, with the media completely ignoring the grandiosity and outrageousness of their candidate’s rhetoric. We’ll just have to see whether the media are holding a mirror up to America, or just seeing the reflections of their own dreams.

A little history lesson about outsized market moves from Jordan Kahn (more here):

The chart…shows the relationship of the current oil bubble to the last two big bubbles in tech stocks and then the housing market. Around two weeks ago, the rise in oil eclipsed the mammoth rise in tech stocks in the late 1990s…And we know what the end result of those two bubbles were, right? They both ended very badly, especially for folks who got sucked in anywhere near the top. Which brings me to the million dollar question: Where is the top?

No one knows for sure where the top is, and those who tell you that they do are simply lying. If you had bailed on tech stocks in 1998, you missed quite a move higher still. If you sold your house in 2004, you left a lot of money on the table. So my hunch is that I want to remain long oil/energy names, although I do not want to chase the recent move higher. That said, when this bubble bursts, most people won’t believe it and will continue to buy on the way down…

most observers consider it a foregone conclusion that demand has skyrocketed due to the large number of new consumers that have emerged in countries such as China and India. But the recent run-up in oil prices has far outpaced anything seen on the demand side.

Global oil consumption grew 2% in the first quarter of this year, while production increased 2.5%. So there is not an outsized amount of demand being physically consumed. That means that a large amount of demand is coming from speculators, who drive the futures prices of oil higher purely for investment reasons.

Institutional investors, battered by the bear market from 2000 to 2002, turned to a new so-called asset class in the form of commodities. Investment demand came from all sorts of institutions — from hedge funds, endowments, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and exchange-traded funds. In the first quarter of 2008 alone, global investments in commodity indices rose $40 billion (up 28% year over year), to $185 billion, a larger gain than all of 2007…

Someday we’ll be right about oil, but until then, we’ll continue to be wrong. Ah well.

The NYT has an extremely flattering article about Senator Obama that is quite revealing and that dovetails with our piece below:

Barack Obama is a protean figure who inspires devotion in his supporters but remains inscrutable to critics….“I am like a Rorschach test,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “Even if people find me disappointing ultimately, they might gain something.”

We have to say that we find certain aspects of Senator Obama’s appeal to his disciples very disturbing. He is not at all “inscrutable to critics” — rather, he is the fellow who has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. And by the grandiosity of the way he talks about himself above, he resembles nothing less than perhaps a liberal version of the Elmer Gantry type that the MSM have so ridiculed in recent years. Here’s another apparent example of the same phenomenon:

Obama defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton solidly in the Iowa caucuses in January, but five days later she beat him, painfully and unexpectedly, in New Hampshire. That loss showed him that toppling the royal of Democratic politics would not come easily. “I think this was meant to be,” Obama said privately the next day, recalls adviser David Axelrod. “I think we were flying too close to the sun, like Icarus. When you’re fighting for change, it’s not supposed to be easy.”

“I think this was meant to be” — that’s quite a statement of Senator Obama’s belief in his destiny. Is it possible this fellow really believes his own press clippings, or is he merely a salesman who has discovered that this messiah business really sells well in the US — at least for a while?

A Presidential candidate declared that he had secured his party’s nomination. The speech was considered effective even by some of Senator Obama’s ideological opponents — perhaps we are benefitted by never listening to the Pied Piper deliver his addresses, but only reading them after the fact. To us the hyperbole of the speech was so outrageous that it is difficult to believe that this was an actual candidate’s speech rather than a TV show parody of politics:

I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless…(APPLAUSE)…this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…(APPLAUSE)…this was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

(Does Senator Obama not know that unemployment is 5% and that the US has the health care system that is the envy of the world, or — as seems obvious enough — he’s decided that he can sound like Moses or Jesus Christ and get away with it?) He certainly seems to deserve the picture that the media has made for him. He forgot the bit about parting the Red Sea, however.

When it comes to analyzing speculative hedge fund investments, perhaps it’s not a bad idea to ask the man who owns one. According to the FT, investment fund owner George Soros is to tell Congress that the oil market is experiencing a “bubble in the making.” (Of course given his past track record, there’s always the question of which side of the trade he’s really on):

“I find commodity index buying eerily reminiscent of a similar craze for portfolio insurance which led to the stock market crash of 1987…In both cases, the institutions are piling in on one side of the market and they have sufficient weight to unbalance it. If the trend were reversed and the institutions as a group headed for the exit as they did in 1987 there would be a crash.”…

Mr Soros said index-buying was based on a misconception and commodity indices are not a legitimate asset class. “When the idea was first promoted, there was a rationale for it…But the field got crowded and that profit opportunity disappeared…Nevertheless, the asset class continues to attract additional investment just because it has turned out to be more profitable than other asset classes. It is a classic case of a misconception that is liable to be self-reinforcing in both directions.”

Author and consultant Daniel Yergen says that oil has reached its “break point,” where alternatives on both the supply and demand side will be brought to market relatively quickly (although he says that a “missing generation” of investment and people will prolong the oil supply side a bit).

Finally, we note that the phrase “ask the man who owns one” was originally an advertising slogan for Packard. Today’s update of that should probably take note of the forecast that 25% of European cars could be hybrids within a decade. Even if prices were to fall again, as they did in the 80’s and 90’s, we get the sense that people are pretty fed up with OPEC and its posturing this time around, and that trends like hybrids may have found their moment.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed a group of foreign visitors ahead of the 19th anniversary of the death of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. AFP:

“I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene…Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started….I tell you that with the unity and awareness of all the Islamic countries all the satanic powers will soon be destroyed…With the appearance of the promised saviour…and his companions such as Jesus Christ, tyranny will be soon be eradicated in the world.”

In a way, we would actually like to see a meeting between President Obama and President Ahmadinejad, as terrible an idea as that is — it might be worth it just for the absurdity of the joint press conference that followed. (And maybe Ahmadinejad might have the same religious experience that our media do in the presence of Mr. Obama.)

Reuters:

Crude oil speculators on the New York Mercantile Exchange cut their net long positions in half last week as prices began to fall, according to CFTC data. Net crude long positions fell to 25,867 in the week to May 27, from 50,060.

Maybe it’’s the result of the investigations currently underway.

The New York Times casually asserted last month that the US had used biological weapons against foreign countries. What the NYT originally said on May 4:

Dr. Cone, the black liberation theology theorist, has known Mr. Wright for decades and says he much admires his provocations. But when Mr. Wright opined recently that the United States government may have used AIDS as a form of biological warfare against black people (Mr. Wright notes, correctly, that the United States has tried biological warfare on foreign nations), Dr. Cone winced.

The NYT piece as corrected on June 1 omitted the original assertion entirely, not just in an appended correction:

Dr. Cone, the black liberation theology theorist, has known Mr. Wright for decades and says he much admires his provocations. But when Mr. Wright opined recently that the United States government may have used AIDS as a form of biological warfare against black people (Mr. Wright alleges that the United States has tried biological warfare on foreign nations), Dr. Cone winced.

We found it interesting that there is no cached version of the original NYT story on Google, so we wanted to see if we could find the wording of the original story, and we did, though it took a while. It had not vanished down the memory hole. It is also interesting how casual was the assertion by the NYT that the US had committed such war crimes. We wonder: did those war crimes in the imagination of the Times occur before or after President Nixon’s executive order in 1969 prohibiting germ warfare under any circumstances whatsoever? (HT: Powerline)

The UK Guardian says the Senator Obama is “limping” to the finish line in the Democratic primary season. The New York Times has him “wheezing” as he crosses the tape to become the Democratic nominee. If current trends hold, he could have potentially enough delegates to claim the nomination in the next week or two, but that is not clear at this point

Senator Clinton still has the greatest number of votes in the primaries and caucuses, but the media cut her no slack. She and her allies can point to their fairly compelling demographic arguments, but to no avail, and, increasingly, to no notice. The left in the Democratic Party, and more importantly, the media have made their choice and there’s no stopping them now.

Our view is that Senator Clinton is the stronger candidate against Senator McCain in the general election. Senator Obama seems to have peaked in February, and it remains to be seen if the herculean efforts of the MSM can prop him up all the way through the long months until November. But perhaps that is a mischaracterization. Perhaps the MSM don’t really have their work cut out for them at all.

Perhaps America and Americans have changed. Maybe they want to try a new Age of Foolishness on for size by electing such an inexperienced but glib fellow (Scott Johnson uses a different term at the end of this piece). Perhaps the slow motion train wreck of Senator Obama’s chruchgoing and churchleaving (or was that grandma, not a train?) will not be seen by voters as a relevant insight into the man’s judgment. Perhaps that he is a “peacenik by gut” who has poor instincts when it comes to dealing with adversaries will be seen as irrelevant in November. Perhaps his blessedness will carry him to victory. Or maybe America just wants change, no matter what, instead of more grumpy old men (actually, the Grumpy Old Men promise foolish change too). One way or another, it looks like we’re going to find out.