Editorial page columnist Bruce Ramsey in the Seattle Times:

Democrats are rebuking President Bush for saying in his speech to the Knesset, here, that to “negotiate with terrorists and radicals” is “appeasement.” The Democrats took it as a slap at Barack Obama. What bothers me is the continual reference to Hitler and his National Socialists, particularly the British and French accommodation at the Munich Conference of 1938.

What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable. He wanted the German-speaking areas of Europe under German authority. He had just annexed Austria, which was German-speaking, without bloodshed. There were two more small pieces of Germanic territory: the free city of Danzig and the Sudetenland, a border area of what is now the Czech Republic. We live in an era when you do not change national borders for these sorts of reasons. But in 1938 it was different.

Shades of Marge Schott. What is the world coming to? HT: LGF

John McCain is sounding a lot like Al Gore. Is this some kind of April Fools Day joke? The NYT quotes Senator McCain with approval:

“I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears,” Mr. McCain said pointedly. “I will not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges…Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring,” he said at a Vestas wind turbine manufacturing plant in Oregon, where the environment is a central issue for voters. “We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great.”

Unfortunately, many on the Left were not impressed and will continue to support other candidates of their choice. Of course, McCain could have said something like this:

there would be plenty of oil available to the United States if the oil companies were allowed to get it: “Eighty-five percent of offshore oil is off-limits.” Responding to objections to offshore drilling by environmentalists and their allies in Congress, Robertson noted that some of the strongest pro-environment nations in Europe - he mentions Denmark, Norway, the United Kingdom - lease offshore locations for oil exploration. The technology has become so good, he said, that during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, “one thousand offshore wells were destroyed (in the Gulf of Mexico), but not one leaked.” Australia, he said, has allowed offshore drilling for 40 years without any environmental damage.

In addition to the sinking value of the dollar, here is the main problem: According to the Department of Energy, U.S. oil production has fallen approximately 40 percent since 1985, while the consumption of oil has grown by more than 30 percent.

According to government estimates, there is enough oil in areas accessible to America - 112 billion barrels - to power more than 60 million cars for 60 years. The Outer Continental Shelf alone contains an estimated 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Had President Clinton not vetoed exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in 1995, when oil was $19 a barrel, America would currently be receiving more than 1 million barrels a day domestically

It seems doubtful that Senator McCain picked up any meaningful amount of votes from Clinton or Obama supporters by saying the former and not the latter. Maybe the joke is on the GOP.

The AP has once again anointed the blessed one in ways we have not seen for some time:

The amazement was on their faces. Hundreds waited for Barack Obama on that evening in South Carolina, 15 weeks ago, to claim victory — a surprising victory, surprisingly large. And amazing it was. It made it possible for him to stand today on the verge of being the first black person ever nominated for president by a major party.

One could guess the thoughts of the blacks and whites in that crowd: Can you believe that our state — South Carolina, first to secede and first to open fire in the Civil War — is now catapulting a black man to the front of the presidential contest in a year that bodes well for Democrats?

“Race doesn’t matter,” some began to chant. “Race doesn’t matter!” The cry soon gave way to more familiar chants of “Yes we can,” and everyone in the auditorium surely knew that race does still matter in so many ways. But in a pinch-me moment, they seemed to realize that a barrier had been broken with a swiftness and certainty that even they had not foreseen.

“One could guess the thoughts of the blacks and whites in that crowd: Can you believe that our state — South Carolina, first to secede and first to open fire in the Civil War — is now catapulting a black man to the front of the presidential contest” — the treacle doesn’t get any thicker than that. (Furthermore, the AP writer was not reporting what was actually going on in the minds of the crowd; rather he was recounting his own flight of fancy.) And it doesn’t stop there:

Rep. Elijah Cummings…says the Illinois senator convinces people of all races that Americans as a society, and as individuals, can achieve higher goals if they try. “He says we can do better, and his life is the epitome of doing better,” says Cummings, noting that Obama was raised by a single mother who sometimes relied on food stamps. “He convinces people that there’s a lot of good within them.”…

Obama is an electrifying speaker. At virtually every key juncture in his trajectory, he has used inspirational oratory to generate excitement, buy time to deal with crises, and force party activists to rethink their assumptions that a black man with an African name cannot seriously vie for the presidency. A prime-time speech at the Democratic convention in Boston catapulted him to national attention in 2004. When his presidential campaign badly trailed Clinton’s high-flying operation, he gave it new life with a timely Iowa speech that outshone her remarks moments earlier…

Obama has a compelling biography, too. The son of a black African father he barely knew, and a white Kansan mother who took him from Hawaii to Indonesia, he was largely raised by his white maternal grandparents. He finished near the top of his Harvard law class, then rejected big firms’ salaries to work as a community organizer in Southside Chicago, where he found a church, his wife and a place that felt like home…

Jim Margolis…interviewed many of Obama’s Harvard classmates for TV ads and documentaries. They told him Obama “was wise beyond his years, and never talked down to people,” Margolis said. “He has this amazing ability to connect with people and understand their problems,” he said. “And through it all, there is this optimism.” For a politician with only four years of experience at the federal level, Obama also has spot-on instincts, associates say, and a steely confidence in his convictions…

Obama fans often search for words to express their attraction. “He just really electrifies you when you are listening to him,” said Lena Bradley, 78, a beauty salon owner in Washington. “He has something that’s leading him.” As ephemeral as “something that’s leading him” sounds, it’s hard to explain in more clinical terms his impact on people. But it’s there.

So we’re back to the MSM’s revealing its mad crush on the new JFK on steroids (hmmm, wasn’t the first JFK actually on steroids?). But something seems quite different this time in the life and workings of media’s putative First Family, i.e., the First Lady. Robert Novak comments on some of the new Jackie’s activities:

Close-in supporters of Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign are convinced he never will offer the vice presidential nomination to Sen. Hillary Clinton for one overriding reason: Michelle Obama. 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.

Mrs. Obama would appear to be as angry as ever. Hugh Hewitt sees Michelle Obama, Jeremiah Wright, the Ayers/Dohrn cell, and Tony Rezko as the Four Horsemen of the Obama Apocalypse. Of course, with the media reverting to embarrassingly fawning treatment of the candidate, and preparing to launch the epithets of political correctness to silence any uncomfortable character questions, it remains to be seen whether there will be an Apocalypse at all, or whether we’ll just proceed directly to the Rapture.

UPDATE

While we’re on the subject: if John McCain had said there were 58 states, would the media give that a pass, or would McCain get the potatoe treatment or worse?

Lawyer and Powerline member Scott Johnson makes Minnesota Representative and former teacher Mindy Greiling look like a nitwit in her effort to get Star Tribune metro columnist Katherine Kersten fired. It’s a very enjoyable read, and ultimately it’s about a very serious matter.

Christopher Hitchens asks an interesting question that we haven’t heard asked by the media:

What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright’s pews, and at Wright’s mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama’s part for Wright’s views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to “Minister” Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, “Keep my wife out of it,” or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse’s influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be “read” at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she’s much influenced by the definition of black “separationism” offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.

It’s an interesting question. Politicians and media figures both earn their livings through popularity contests, and it is intriguing that Obama’s judgment failed where Oprah Winfrey’s did not. As Newsweek reported: “Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright’s more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America’s favorite daytime talk-show host…’She’s always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn’t be smart. She’s been around black churches all her life, so Reverend Wright’s anger-filled message didn’t surprise her. But it just wasn’t what she was looking for in a church’.” It’s still a puzzle why the Obama family didn’t come to the same conclusion much sooner.

Final point: it is fervently to be hoped that Frank Rich, and those who think like him, keep trying to bring up the faulty parallelism of Jeremiah Wright and this fellow Hagee. It won’t hurt Senator McCain, in our opinion, and it provides yet another excuse for Pastor Wright to make a spectacle of himself, as if he needed one.

Senator Obama criticized Senator Clinton’s position on attacking Iran in the wake of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. He did so on on MTP, according to AP:

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” Clinton said April 22 in an interview with ABC. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”…On “Meet the Press” Sunday, Obama said: “It’s not the language we need right now, and I think it’s language reflective of George Bush. We have had a foreign policy of bluster and saber rattling and tough talk and in the meantime have made a series strategic decisions that have actually strengthened Iran.”

No wonder Hamas endorsed this fellow.

Elizabeth Wurtzel has had a lot of problems in her life, as well as some kooky opinions, and has not been shy about sharing them in her books, including Prozac Nation. She said this about the WTC falling on 9/11 for example: “I had not the slightest emotional reaction. I thought: ‘This is a really strange art project.’ It was a most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance…People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me.” For some reason, the WSJ decided to ask her opinion about Senator Obama and his friends:

As for Mr. Obama’s friends, the Weathercouple: By all accounts, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers are unfathomably charming, brilliant and comely people, absolutely irresistible. Everybody who meets them is taken and forgets what they should know…the senator’s relationship with his radical Hyde Park neighbors is actually quite warm, even close.

Well, that’s one way to see things. Perhaps as a counterpoint to the attractive characterization of Mr. Ayers, Hillary Clinton supporter Larry Johnson (yes, that Larry Johnson) has posted a picture of the “unfathomably charming, brilliant and comely” Mr. Ayers trampling the American flag (similar photo here):

According to the caption, Mr. Ayers is said to be stomping on the American flag in 2001, some six years or more into his political relationship with Senator Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic primaries. (HTs: Larwyn, Jules Crittenden, and Tom Maguire)

America used to be the “can do” country. Now apparently the land of hardy Pilgrims and pioneers often seems to act like sissies who wail and whine instead of solving problems that are fairly trivially addressed. One of those problems is high oil prices. Robert Samuelson:

What to do about oil? First it went from $60 to $80 a barrel, then from $80 to $100 and now to $120. Perhaps we can persuade OPEC to raise production, as some senators suggest; but this seems unlikely. The truth is that we’re almost powerless to influence today’s prices. We are because we didn’t take sensible actions 10 or 20 years ago. If we persist, we will be even worse off in a decade or two. The first thing to do: Start drilling.

It may surprise Americans to discover that the United States is the third-largest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. We could be producing more, but Congress has put large areas of potential supply off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. By government estimates, these areas may contain 25 billion to 30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion barrels of proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves).

What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears, strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity.

At the moment oil prices look like they are declining or set to decline because of the end of a speculative frenzy and a worldwide recession or near-recession. But the long term trend is clear, and it takes a decade or more to get oil produced from places like ANWR. (The US could have been producing oil from ANWR for several years now but for the 1995 Clinton administration veto of an authorization to do so.) So it’s obvious that companies need to be able to start drilling — or have Americans sunk into the permanent state of “sheer stupidity” that Samuelson suggests?

It’s hard to say anything particularly new about the Obama / Wright controversy. For the Senator’s opponents, it looks at this point like a gift that will keep on giving, perhaps all the way to November. First the Senator refused to disown Wright, then all of a sudden he discovered that he really, really dislikes the man, and so on. Despite the claims of Senator Obama and his wife that people are tired of hearing about this strange preacher and his strange opinions, the topic continues to fascinate many in America (and if Americans were able to tire of Reverend Wright in 45 days, how come it took the Obama family 20 years to do so?). Charles Krauthammer has a good summary of where things stand:

“I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.” — Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18. Guess it’s time to disown Granny, if Obama’s famous Philadelphia “race” speech is to be believed.

Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A New York Times columnist said it “should be required reading in classrooms across the country.” College seniors and first-graders, suggested the excitable Chris Matthews. Apparently there’s been a curriculum change. On Tuesday, the good senator begged to extend and revise his previous remarks on race. Moral equivalence between Grandma and Wright is now, as the Nixon administration used to say, inoperative…

Wright’s latest comments — Obama cited three in particular — were so shockingly “divisive and destructive” that he had to renounce the man, not just the words. What were Obama’s three citations? Wright’s claim that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government to commit genocide. His praise of Louis Farrakhan as a great man. And his blaming Sept. 11 on American “terrorism.” But these comments are not new. These were precisely the outrages that prompted the initial furor when the Wright tapes emerged seven weeks ago…

Obama’s turning surprise about Wright into something to be counted against whites — one of the more clever devices in that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud in Philadelphia — now stands discredited by Obama’s own admission of surprise. But Obama’s liberal acolytes are not daunted. They were taken in by the first great statement on race: the Annunciation, the Chosen One comes to heal us in Philly. They now are taken in by the second: the Renunciation…

This 20-year association with Wright calls into question everything about Obama: his truthfulness in his serially adjusted stories of what he knew and when he knew it; his judgment in choosing as his mentor, pastor and great friend a man he just now realizes is a purveyor of racial hatred; and the central premise of his campaign, that he is the bringer of a “new politics,” rising above the old Washington ways of expediency. It’s hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient than renouncing Wright when his show, once done from the press club instead of the pulpit, could no longer be “contextualized”…

For the reasons stated in Krauthammer’s last paragraph and others, it is awfully hard to imagine Senator Obama winning in the general election. Of course there will be forceful condemnation from the elite media any time the Senator’s opponents mention Reverend Wright as the fall rolls along, but Jeremiah Wright just might have some new things to say later this year. As has been reported, Reverend Wright may have an agenda of his own (repaying Obama for his “nonsense and betrayal“) — and he has forcefully shown that, at least so far, he will not silenced.

Will the media be able to ignore the Reverend if he has some further interesting things to say about himself and the Senator in September or October, or are we possibly watching a slow motion train wreck?

It used to be that the rain in Spain stayed mainly in the plain. But that’s all different now thanks to America’s favorite wacky reverend. Gerard Van der Leun explains the enigmatic title above. Also, Michelle Malkin asks a variant of the question: what is the sound of one hand clapping? Ace has more.

For an academic deconstruction of the rantings of Jeremiah Wright, see this article by Heather MacDonald.

A very edifying half hour can be spent listening to extended portions of the sermons of Pastor Jeremiah Wright. We recommend using the link to the entire file to avoid getting the ads that appear on each separate clip, and to get the full, robust flavor of Jeremiah Wright’s views of America and Americans. He really doesn’t like the country very much, and that would appear to include the likes of “Condoskeeza” Rice, “Uncle Clarence” Thomas, and perhaps most bizarrely, Tiger Woods. This Wright is one sick fellow. Further, it would appear impossible that Senator Obama did not know the depth and passion of this man’s anti-Americanism. HT: Hugh Hewitt

Co-founder of Greenpeace Patrick Moore has a few things to say. WSJ:

Greenpeace has evolved into an organization of extremism and politically motivated agendas. Its antichlorination campaign failed, only to be followed by a campaign against polyvinyl chloride. Greenpeace now has a new target called phthalates (pronounced thal-ates). These are chemical compounds that make plastics flexible. They are found in everything from hospital equipment such as IV bags and tubes, to children’s toys and shower curtains. They are among the most practical chemical compounds in existence.

Phthalates are the new bogeyman. These chemicals make easy targets since they are hard to understand and difficult to pronounce. Commonly used phthalates, such as diisononyl phthalate (DINP), have been used in everyday products for decades with no evidence of human harm. DINP is the primary plasticizer used in toys. It has been tested by multiple government and independent evaluators, and found to be safe.

Despite this, a political campaign that rejects science is pressuring companies and the public to reject the use of DINP. Retailers such as Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us are switching to phthalate-free products to avoid public pressure. It may be tempting to take this path of least resistance, but at what cost? None of the potential replacement chemicals have been tested and found safe to the degree that DINP has.

Of course phthalates are much more commonly used than alar was, so they will not likely disappear. However, there would seem to be profit opportunities for the Greenpeace crowd in a scare of that magnitude.

Karl Rove analyzes Pennsylvania and sees problems for the general election for Senator Obama:

Mr. Obama was routed despite outspending Hillary Clinton on television by almost 3-1. While polls in the final days showed a possible 4% or 5% Clinton win, she apparently took late-deciders by a big margin to clinch the landslide.

Where she cobbled together her victory should cause concern in the Obama HQ. She did better -– and he worse -– than expected in Philadelphia’s suburbs. Mrs. Clinton won two of these four affluent suburban counties, home of the white-wine crowd Mr. Obama has depended on for victories before.

In the small town and rural “bitter” precincts, she clobbered him. Mr. Obama’s state chair was Sen. Bob Casey, who hails from Lackawanna County in northeast Pennsylvania. She carried that county 74%-25%. In the state’s 61 less-populous counties, she won 63% – and by 278,266 votes…

Mr. Obama is befuddled and angry about the national reaction to what are clearly accepted, even commonplace truths in San Francisco and Hyde Park. How could anyone take offense at the observation that people in small-town and rural American are “bitter” and therefore “cling” to their guns and their faith, as well as their xenophobia? Why would anyone raise questions about a public figure who, for only 20 years, attended a church and developed a close personal relationship with its preacher who says AIDS was created by our government as a genocidal tool to be used against people of color, who declared America’s chickens came home to roost on 9/11, and wants God to damn America? Mr. Obama has a weakness among blue-collar working class voters for a reason.

More on that reason here and here. Senator McCain would appear, as of this moment, to be one very lucky fellow.

Nora Ephron comments on the contest between Senators Clinton and Obama in Pennsylvania:

it’s suddenly horribly absolutely crystal-clear that this is an election about gender and race. This may have always been true, but weeks ago it wasn’t so obvious — once upon a time there were eight candidates, and although six of them withered away, their presence in the campaign managed to obscure things. Even around the time of Ohio, when there were primarily three candidates, the outlines were murky, because Edwards was still in there, picking up votes from all sectors. But now there are two and we’re facing Pennsylvania and whom are we kidding? This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women.

Ms. Ephron also has some deep thoughts on presumptive Republican nominee Senator McCain and something she refers to as the “Torture Thing”. Charming.

Maureen Dowd on Senator Obama:

There’s no doubt the cat is cool. It’s easy to imagine the wild reception many parts of the world would give a President Obama as he loped down the stairs of Air Force One in his aviator glasses, the chic and chiseled Michelle on his arm. The imagery of the 2008 race is all about cool and hot.

It’s all part of that “re-branding of America” thing that Barbara Ehrenreich said was coming. Wouldn’t it be cool if America was, like, a fashion magazine or America’s Next Top Model or whatever? Then, like, all the problems would go away, because there’d be like change and everything.

Question: how cool is too cool? If the Senator flips his opponent the bird, is that the coolest presidential gesture yet — or is it something else entirely?

The Washington Post has an op-ed from Mahmoud al-Zahar, a founder of Hamas. It contains the following clarifying statement, just in case you harbored any doubt about the group’s objectives:

A “peace process” with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees.

The op-ed is unusual for a number of reasons. One of these is that it is the subject of a denunciation in an editorial in the Post the same day. The Post says, referring to Jimmy Carter, but in a way, also to itself: “it is one thing to communicate pragmatically, and quite another to publicly and unconditionally grant recognition and political sanction to a leader or a group that advocates terrorism, mass murder or the extinction of another state. That is what Mr. Carter is doing by lending what is left of his prestige to an avowed terrorist such as Khaled Meshal — or Mahmoud al-Zahar.” But isn’t that what the Post just did too? HT: LGF

The AP reports on some of the interchanges between the Democratic contenders for President during the debate yesterday:

In a 90-minute debate, both rivals pledged not to raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000, and said they would respond forcefully if Iran obtains nuclear weapons and uses them against Israel. “An attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation by the United States,” said Clinton. Obama said, “The U.S. would take appropriate action.”

Senator Clinton’s answer seems clear enough. But what about Senator Obama? What would constitute “appropriate action”? Food for thought, perhaps, given some of Senator Obama’s support from Hamas.

George Will levitates into the ether in a discussion that begins with Adlai Stevenson and Barack Obama. He asks whether Senator Obama has become today’s “prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting”, as Stevenson was said to be in the 1950’s:

Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated professionals for whom, Barone wrote, “what was attractive was not his platform but his attitude.” They sought from Stevenson “not so much changes in public policy as validation of their own cultural stance.” They especially rejected “American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States was specially good and decent,” rather than — in Michelle Obama’s words — “just downright mean.”

The emblematic book of the new liberalism was “The Affluent Society” by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a “false consciousness” (another category, like religion as the “opiate” of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:

First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.

The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims — the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.

Obama’s dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.

Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders — a “paranoid style” of politics rooted in “status anxiety,” etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension. Obama voiced such liberalism with his “bitterness” remarks to an audience of affluent San Franciscans. Perfect.

It would of course be entirely too mean spirited at this point to wonder if we should reconsider all those fainting episodes of a couple of months ago. Surely there could not have been any calculation or manipulation involved in them. Or, as any preacher’s kid would know, could there have been some manipulation in these events for the rubes that watched them at the revival meeting or on TV? You have to admit that the thought is surely plausible, given all that has happened in the intervening months.

In any event, it is, however, becoming a little clearer that, in some important ways, stylistic if not substantive, Senator Obama appears more and more to be the son, not the nephew, of his spiritual mentor.

Surprisingly, from the Boston Globe:

Corn should be used for food, not motor fuel, and yet the United States is committed to a policy that encourages farmers to turn an increasing amount of their crop into ethanol. This may save the nation a bit of the cost of imported oil, but it increases global-warming gases and contributes to higher food prices.

Candidates for president need to tell Americans the truth about ethanol, but they are falling over themselves in pursuit of the farm belt vote. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want more ethanol factories built than even President Bush envisaged when he called for 15 percent of US gasoline consumption to be replaced by alternative fuels by 2017. John McCain, who correctly called the ethanol push a boondoggle in 2000, now says that it is “a very important way to achieve energy independence.”

Ethanol consumes almost a quarter of US corn production. The energy self-sufficiency that all the candidates seek should not come at the expense of the environment or the food supply.

Increased ethanol production isn’t the only reason for the spike in food costs, but it’s more controllable than drought in Australia, higher fertilizer prices, or increased meat consumption by the Chinese. Unlike those other cost-drivers, ethanol production is encouraged by federal subsidies.

And it’s not as though ethanol improves the environment. When emissions inherent in the production process are included, ethanol consumption generates more carbon dioxide per gallon than gasoline

The beginning of the end of a fad? We’ll drink to that.

Thomas Sowell characterizes Senator Obama as just another standard fare leftist:

Senator Obama’s election year image is that of a man who can bring the country together, overcoming differences of party or race, as well as solving our international problems by talking with Iran and other countries with which we are at odds, and performing other miscellaneous miracles as needed. There is, of course, not a speck of evidence that Obama has ever transcended party differences in the United States Senate. Voting records analyzed by the National Journal show him to be the farthest left of anyone in the Senate. Nor has he sponsored any significant bipartisan legislation — nor any other significant legislation, for that matter…

his recent talk in San Francisco has stirred up controversy because it revealed yet another blatant contradiction between Barack Obama’s public image and his reality. Speaking privately to supporters in heavily left-liberal San Francisco, Obama let down his hair and described working class people in Pennsylvania as so “bitter” that they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

Like so much that Obama has said and done over the years, this is standard stuff on the far left, where guns and religion are regarded as signs of psychological dysfunction — and where opinions different from those of the left are ascribed to emotions (”bitter” in this case), rather than to arguments that need to be answered. Like so many others on the left, Obama rejects “stereotypes” when they are stereotypes he doesn’t like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes about “a typical white person” or “bitter” gun-toting, religious and racist working class people.

In politics, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a “clarification,” when people react adversely to what was plainly said. Obama and his supporters were still busy “clarifying” Jeremiah Wright’s very plain statements when it suddenly became necessary to “clarify” Senator Obama’s own statements in San Francisco…

However inconsistent Obama’s words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi. Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings.

It is becoming pretty plain where Senator Obama has his comfort zone and discomfort zone, as Professor Sowell’s characterization points out. John Judis has a similar analysis.

Senator Obama said some things the other day that some consider controversial and out of touch with the values and lives of Americans and others deem merely a blunder. Here’s part of what he said to explain his remarks:

What I was saying is that when economic hardship hits in these communities, what people have is they’ve got family, they’ve got their faith, they’ve got the traditions that have been passed onto them from generation to generation. Those aren’t bad things. That’s what they have left. And, unfortunately, what people have become bitter about — and oftentimes have told me about, as I traveled through not just Pennsylvania, but I was referring to states all across the Midwest, including my home state — is any confidence that the government is listening to them. They don’t think that government is listening to them.

“They’ve got family, they’ve got faith, they’ve got the traditions that have been passed onto them (guns, social conservatism?)…that’s what they have left.” At least until a government program comes along, apparently. Why do we keep feeling that a certain Senator learned some of his American history from watching movies like The Grapes of Wrath? Or maybe from reading a critique of Hegel? Question: what percentage of Americans now think this way about their country and their countrymen?

From Zombie’s photo shoot of the San Francisco protest:

HT: Roger Simon

A Reuters “story“:

China says foils ‘terrorist’ plot to kidnap Olympians — Chinese authorities have detained 45 East Turkestan “terrorist” suspects, and foiled plots to carry out suicide bomb attacks and kidnap athletes to disrupt the Beijing Olympics, a police spokesman said on Thursday. Uighur militants have been agitating to establish an independent East Turkestan in China’s predominantly Muslim northwestern region of Xinjiang bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Chinese authorities cracked two “terrorist” groups, one of which belonged to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), Ministry of Public Security spokesman Wu Heping told a news conference in Beijing. ETIM was listed by the United Nations as a terrorist group in 2002 and has links to Al Qaeda. The group asked its members to do trial runs using poisoned meat, poison gas and remote control explosive devices, Wu said.

Their aim was “to create an international incident with the goal of disrupting the Olympic Games”, the spokesman said. The first group, led by Aji Muhammat, bought explosive materials and carried out 13 test explosions, Wu said without giving the nationality of the ringleader. Suspects in custody confessed they were ordered to commit suicide when arrested, he said. Police detained 10 suspects and seized 16,000 yuan ($2,300) in cash and a large quantity of “Holy War” training materials, Wu said.

We understand all the problems with China’s authoritarian government. Having said that, if you don’t believe in the story about a “terrorist” plot to wage some kind of “Holy War,” then don’t print the story. Reuters should at least be very clear about what quotation marks mean in a “news” story, so that its readers can properly interpret their imprecise intent.

A certain someone of recent note criticizes the “sensationalist” and apparently Republican New York Times, which he says quoted him out of context, and then amazingly praises Senator Obama as the first and possibly only honest man ever to run for President of the United States:

I have never been exposed to that kind of duplicitous behavior before, and I want to write you publicly to let you know that I do not approve of it and will not be party to any further smearing of the name, the reputation, the integrity or the character of perhaps this nation’s first (and maybe even only) honest candidate offering himself for public service as the person to occupy the Oval Office…

I forgot that The New York Times was leading the bandwagon in trumpeting why it is we should have gone into an illegal war. The New York Times became George Bush and the Republican Party’s national “blog.” The New York Times played a role in the outing of Valerie Plame.

It is interesting that Reverend Wright seems to claim that Senator Obama is the Messiah — or does claiming him as perhaps the first and only honest man to stand for President in 220 years have another meaning? Perhaps it’s just another nutty statement in Wright’s long line of such statements, but it’s a particular kind of nuttiness to assert that a guy who has been a Senator for a couple of years is not just the new Lincoln, but superior to Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Jefferson, and all the others. (HT: Powerline)

UPDATE

It apparently turns out that master showman Jeremiah Wright might just be a big phony baloney who was raised in a very middle class way and is moving into a 10,000 square foot house. So is Wright just a huckster who drives a Porsche and mouths rhetoric that is the precise inverse of the way he lives his own life? This P.T. Barnum aspect to Wright adds an extra fillip to his relationship with the stirring orator he mentored. (HT: Larwyn)

It was 1963. America was A-OK. We were going into space. It was the Jet Age. Progress was non stop towards the New Frontier. And the Ad men of Madison Avenue wanted to cash in on the good feelings abroad in the land. Here was one innovation of the time:

1963: In one of the most significant demographic events in commercial history, the post-war baby boom emerges as a social and marketplace phenomenon. Pepsi recognizes the change and positions Pepsi as the brand belonging to the new generation – The Pepsi Generation. “Come Alive! You’re in the Pepsi Generation” makes advertising history. It is the first time a product is identified, not so much by its attributes, as by its consumers’ lifestyles and attitudes.

Flash forward 45 years. So many Americans are united in their victimhood. But they still want to feel that they’re the coolest, swingingest victims ever. And they’ve found a really hip new theme: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Andrew Ferguson discusses the matter:

What, after all, does “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” mean, precisely? My hunch is that the sentence is one of those things that no one will admit to being confused by, like the movies of Godard or the tenor-sax solos of John Coltrane, lest your peers think you’re a loser or a moron. Certainly Obama fans won’t admit how obscure the sentence is — though several have claimed that it’s lifted from a prophecy of the Tribal Elders of the Hopi Indians. Hopi prophecies are famously obscure.

But this is just wishful thinking. The origins of the phrase aren’t nearly so glamorous or exotic. Two years ago, before Obama even said he wanted to be president, the left wing radical feminist-lesbian novelist Alice Walker published a book of essays and called it We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For. Believe me: If the line had come from the Tribal Elders of the Hopi nation, Alice Walker would have been more than happy to say so. Instead she said it came from a poem published in 1980 by the left wing radical-feminist-bisexual poet June Jordan. Neither Walker nor Jordan has said what the sentence means. But Walker did offer this hint in the introduction to her book of essays: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for because we are able to see what is happening with a much greater awareness than our parents or grandparents, our ancestors, could see.”

That’s a clue, anyway. The sentence may not have any positive content, Walker seems to be saying, but it does have an indirect meaning, an implication, as a kind of self-referential gesture for the people who claim it. When Obama’s supporters say “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” what they mean is that in the long roll call of history, from Aristotle and Heraclitus down through Augustine and Maimonides and Immanuel Kant and the fellows who wrote the Federalist Papers, we’re number one! We’re the smartest yet! Everybody — Mom, Dad, Gramps and Grandma, Great Grandpa and Great Grandma, maybe even the Tribal Elders — they’ve all been waiting for people as clued-in as us!

Is this what Obama means too? No one who’s wandered through an Obama rally and heard the war whoops and seen the cheerful, vacant gazes would come away thinking, “These are the smartest people ever.” I’m sorry, they just aren’t. What is unmistakable is the creepy kind of solipsism and the air of self-congratulation that clings to his campaign. “There is something happening,” he says in stump speeches. And what’s happening? “Change is happening.” How so? “The reason our campaign has been different is about what you, the people who love this country, can do to change it.”

And the way to change it is to join the campaign, which, once you join it, will change America. Because this is our moment. The time is now. Now is the time. Yes, we can. We bring change to the campaign because the campaign is about change. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Obama and his followers are perfecting postmodern reflexivity. It’s a campaign that’s about itself. The point of the campaign is the campaign.

“The point of the campaign” — whether an ad campaign or a political campaign — is to sell the product. (Obama strategist David Alexrod is an advertising man.) However, Americans typically tire of their ad campaigns rather quickly. The Pepsi Generation came and went and was replaced by something else in short order. We’ll just have to see how long these ad campaign slogans (”Yes we can” and “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”) stay at the top of the charts.

We noted the other day the grotesque rantings of the “uncle” of one of the leading Presidential candidates during their close relationship of two decades. Today we were reminded by Mona Charen of another, more casual, relationship of Senator Obama, a certain William Ayers. Though this is old news, we looked in on an article in the NYT about this fellow that appeared on September 11, 2001:

No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives…”I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.” Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970’s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago…

In 1967 he met Ms. Dohrn in Ann Arbor, Mich. She had a law degree from the University of Chicago and was a magnetic speaker who often wore thigh-high boots and miniskirts. In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ”Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach.”…

Ms. Dohrn, Mr. Ayers and others eventually broke with S.D.S. to form the more radical Weathermen, and in 1969 Ms. Dohrn was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer during the Days of Rage protests against the trial of the Chicago Eight — antiwar militants accused of conspiracy to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

In 1970 came the town house explosion in Greenwich Village. Ms. Dohrn failed to appear in court in the Days of Rage case, and she and Mr. Ayers went underground, though there were no charges against Mr. Ayers. Later that spring the couple were indicted along with others in Federal Court for crossing state lines to incite a riot during the Days of Rage, and following that for ”conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings.” Those charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

During his fugitive years, Mr. Ayers said, he lived in 15 states, taking names of dead babies in cemeteries who were born in the same year as he. He describes the typical safe house: there were usually books by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara’s picture in the bedroom; fermented Vietnamese fish sauce in the refrigerator, and live sourdough starter donated by a Native American that was reputed to have passed from hand to hand over a century…

Even today, he finds ”a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,” he writes.

Swell fellow, this Ayers. Of passing interest perhaps is that Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn hosted a critical introductory event in 1995 for the current Senator from Illinois, and that Ayers and Obama served on a board together after that for a few years. Ayers also is a contributor to Obama. Hmmm. Upon further reflection, we’re pretty sure that this relationship of Senator Obama means nothing at all. After all, his relationship with Tony Rezko meant nothing. Obama only received an unsolicited job offer from Rezko in 1990. Indeed, they only had lunch “once or twice a year,” Obama only got $168,000 from Rezko and his circle, and Obama’s accepting of the essentially free backyard from Rezko was a “mistake” that was nonetheless “handled ethically.” So we’re pretty sure that neither the Ayers nor Rezko situations require any further scrutiny. (Nor does the strange case of the earmarks and the raise — nothing to see here, ladies and gentlemen.)

The ultimate proof that these relationships obviously meant nothing at all is that Senator Obama apparently pays little or no attention to what his associates think or say. After all, though Pastor Wright was Obama’s “spiritual mentor” of 20 years who provided not only the title of one of his books but some of the content of his 2004 DNC speech, Senator Obama never heard of the outrageous things he was saying over the course of their long relationship and the hundreds of sermons he attended. As Obama wrote: “The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation.”

Evidently, Senator Obama hasn’t gone to his church’s bookstore to see the readily available DVD’s, or even read the autobiography that Obama himself wrote or the article in last April’s NYT for which the Senator himself was interviewed. (Apparently, a sermon full of profanity and references to “Bush administration bullshit” does not count as sufficiently offensive, since Senator Obama was seen at one of those.) NYT:

Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy…He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Wright said his visits implied no endorsement of their views…[Wright added: “When his enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”]…

Mr. Wright issued a “War on Iraq I.Q. Test,” with questions like, “Which country do you think poses the greatest threat to global peace: Iraq or the U.S.?”…Mr. Wright’s political statements may be more controversial than his theological ones. He has said that Zionism has an element of “white racism.”…On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later he wrote that the attacks had proved that “people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West went on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.”…

Mr. Obama says…He was not at Trinity the day Mr. Wright delivered his remarks shortly after the attacks…

Curious. Many Americans, even those who don’t go to church regularly, attended services on September 16, 2001, and in the weeks thereafter. Apparently Senator Obama is just never around when his supporters are doing or saying outrageous things.

We learned a lot today about the “US of KKK A“. And about how America invented AIDS. And about how the song should not be God Bless America but God Damn America. And about how FDR knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor but let it happen. And about certain nasty words that Senator Clinton has never been called. And far worse as well. Yes, it really is that bad. And we learned it all in church! Hmmm.

We never heard such things in church before. We must have gone to the wrong Sunday School. Speaking of that, would it be considered child abuse to put the kids through sermons of this sort? Does such a church deserve a $22,500 donation from a presidential candidate? What does it say that he attended sermons by this fellow since 1988 or 1990? VDH also has some very pertinent comments on Reverend Wright and Senator Obama.

Question: if this chap were your “uncle“, would you sit next to him at dinner or lock him in the attic?

UPDATE

Spengler explains elements of the strange theology at work in this case. Excerpt:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.

This seems as weird as the idea of President Tom Cruise.

Global warming was a Planetary Emergency. Will this current global cooling merit its own emergency declaration, or is it just a passing thing?

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on…

The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year’s time…it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists…link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

We’ve discussed this cooling and its potential causes previously. If it continues, it is only a matter of time until the global huckster community does a 180 and finds a way to blame this too on human activity, exploiting this new form of “climate change” as an excuse for more taxation and regulation.

CNN’s guidance on the reporting of the Castro resignation:

* Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba – namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration. in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech.

Appalling.

You have to admit there is an odd aspect to some of the populist multi-millionaires who have been running for president. They seem to have gotten ahead very nicely in life, but seem to despair of others doing so without the larder of Washington and the generosity of high-achieving politicians and their spouses to redeem our benighted past. VDH:

Barack Obama may have gone to exclusive private schools. He and his wife may both be lawyers who between them have earned four expensive Ivy League degrees. They may make about a million dollars a year, live in an expensive home and send their kids to prep school. But they are still apparently first-hand witnesses to how the American dream has gone sour. Two other Ivy League lawyers, Hillary and Bill, are multimillionaires who have found America to be a land of riches beyond most people’s imaginations. But Hillary also talks of the tragic lost dream of America.

(The “lost dream of America” was recently found in Kazakhstan.)

The tyrant Fidel Castro, called by Diane Sawyer a “dashing revolutionary,” retired today. Here’s a bit of AP’s attempt at even handed treatment of the event:

Castro’s supporters admired his ability to provide a high level of health care and education for citizens while remaining fully independent of the United States. But his detractors called him a dictator whose totalitarian government systematically denied individual freedoms and civil liberties such as speech, movement and assembly.

“Provide a high level of health care.” That would be a laugh if it weren’t tragic. The average monthly salary in Cuba is $16 a month, according to the State Department. Cuba is a nation so poor that people keep the family pig in the bathroom so he won’t get stolen by the neighbors. The fools in the MSM are would also be a laugh, if they weren’t dangerous in their ignorance and smugness.

A story from the alleged news organization Reuters:

Gangs of rioters set fire to cars and garbage trucks in northern Copenhagen on Friday, the sixth night of rioting and vandalism…Scores of cars and several schools have been vandalized or burned in the past week. Police could give no reason, but said that unusually mild weather and the closure of schools for a winter break might have contributed.

“Unusually mild weather and the closure of schools for a winter break might have contributed.” Hmmm. That doesn’t seem as plausible as this explanation. Maybe Reuters should consider a different line of work. They don’t seem to be much interested in the news, after all.

This is the 50th anniversary of the hula hoop fad that swept America in 1958. We seem to have a new version of the same phenomenon today in the Obama craze that has gripped the media and a good chunk of the populace. John Dickerson, Mark Steyn, and Tom Maguire contribute a few more stories and quips in the Ehrenreich genre of ethereal unreality about America’s current instant messiah, King of Kings, and Man of Steel who will save the planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men:

Barack Obama just seems to get cooler and cooler. He’s the most popular topic on the New York Times topics page…Internet widgets allow you to see what great thing Barack Obama has done for you…on the New York subway Friday morning, one of our copy editors…heard one woman joke to another: “Obama, will you pick me up after my noninvasive minor surgical procedure?” To which the other replied: “Obama, will you hold my hair back when I puke?”…

John Lewis, the venerable civil rights hero and congressman, put words to this feeling recently. “In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit,” he said, suggesting that he might switch his superdelegate vote from Hillary Clinton to Obama. “Something is happening in America and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap.”…On Facebook, people write about dreams featuring Obama. There is only one correct reaction to the will.i.am “Yes We Can” video and that is to start chanting along…

There was the woman in New Hampshire who compared him with Christ. There was Maria Shriver’s comparison of the candidate with the state of California, with the rhetorical fervor usually seen only after a preacher shouts, “You are healed!”…

“Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.”…

“Be not afraid; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born to you this day in the city of Chicago a Savior, who is Barack the Democrat.”

Questions: (a) the 1958 hula hoop craze lasted two years — how long will this one last? (b) if today’s fad politician is the hula hoop, who will be the frisbee (the second fad invented by Wham-O in the late fifties)? (c) and finally, what’s the deal with all the women who faint at the Senator’s rallies and rather disturbing revival meetings — is it real or is it something else entirely? (The list of these suspicious fainting spells seems to be getting longer and longer.)

Barbara Ehrenreich in the Huffington Post:

When did you begin to think that Obama might be unstoppable? Was it when your grown feminist daughter started weeping inconsolably over his defeat in New Hampshire? Or was it when he triumphed in Virginia, a state still littered with Confederate monuments and memorabilia? For me, it was on Tuesday night when two Republican Virginians in a row called C-SPAN radio to report that they’d just voted for Ron Paul, but, in the general election, would vote for… Obama…

Thanks to Iraq and water-boarding, Abu Ghraib and the “rendering” of terror suspects, we’ve achieved the moral status of a pariah nation. The seas are rising. The dollar is sinking. A growing proportion of Americans have no access to health care; an estimated 18,000 die every year for lack of health insurance. Now, as the economy staggers into recession, the financial analysts are wondering only whether the rest of the world is sufficiently “de-coupled” from the US economy to survive our demise…

Obama is different, really different, and that in itself represents “change.” A Kenyan-Kansan with roots in Indonesia and multiracial Hawaii, he seems to be the perfect answer to the bumper sticker that says, “I love you America, but isn’t it time to start seeing other people?” As conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan has written, Obama’s election could mean the re-branding of America. An anti-war black president with an Arab-sounding name: See, we’re not so bad after all, world!

Once upon a time there was a serious country called the United States of America. It often had serious men, from all over the political spectrum, as leaders and as citizens. That was before “the re-branding of America,” however. Heaven help us all.

An IBD editorial warns that some very unpleasant Global Cooling could be just around the corner:

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century. Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe…if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere…

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology…says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales…I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet…Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth…Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again…If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than ‘global warmingR