According to Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press, despite the recent controversy over Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright, the Illinois senator continues to gain on Senator Clinton in the super-delegate count. At the moment, Obama has 243 while Clinton has 263. But overall, Obama leads in delegates, 1,731.5 to HRC’s 1,597.5.

Aren't we all offended that Robert Reich and Barbara Mikulski only count as half-delegates?

The latest Fox News Poll:

Nearly half of Democrats (48 percent) think Hillary Clinton has a better chance of beating John McCain in November — 10 percentage points higher than the 38 percent who think Barack Obama can win, according to a FOX News poll released Wednesday. This represents a significant shift from March, when Democrats said Obama was the candidate more likely to beat McCain....

The ongoing controversy over Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, appears to have damaged how Americans view Obama. His favorable rating is now 47 percent, down 7 percentage points since February when 54 percent had a positive view of him. As may be expected, his unfavorable rating went up from 33 percent to 42 percent today.

There is a lot of good news in this poll for Team McCain. Another interesting note, Democrats find Hillary more trustworthy than Barack Obama, and only 23 percent of Democrats think Obama is "tough" versus 61 percent for Clinton. Oh, and 46 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Independents think Rev. Wright's message is "anti-American." Which is still kind of frightening if it means that a majority of Democrats think preaching God damn America is a patriotic message.

Allahpundit has more analysis here.

It seems that Congressional Democrats may finally take up legislation next week to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of 2008, and into 2009. Because so many liberal are unwilling to vote for a funding bill however, and because Congressional leaders won't pass a bill that Republicans approve of, they are forced into a convoluted strategy to try to approve the needed money:

With the hope of streamlining the process and finishing work on the measure by the Memorial Day recess, Democrats have signaled that their strategy for the supplemental could bypass both Appropriations committee markups and even a House-Senate conference on the bill.

But Republicans and even some Democrats are opposed to such a strategy, saying that if too many lawmakers are left out of the process, the result could be even longer delays in the bill’s enactment.

After weeks of discussions, several House aides confirmed that they could bring to the floor, probably next week, a bill that would be open to three specific amendments: one for over $170 billion in war funding, another for domestic spending items and a third for a series of Iraq-related policy provisions.

The process that Congress will use is still a moving target; there are plenty of Senators and House Members upset over this proposed gimmickry. The simplest thing to do would be to bring up a simple funding bill with no extra spending or policy provisions. That would garner a majority of Republican and Democratic votes. But this Congress continues to put political gamesmanship ahead of the mission, and the troops.

I wrote yesterday about Travis Childers, the Democratic candidate for Congress in Mississippi's first Congressional District. Childer's Republican opponent has been airing an ad that points out that Childers has received support from Barack Obama. In what seems a desperate attempt to preserve his general election chances, Childers has cut a stunning new ad:

Childers describes the association with Barack Obama as an attack. Is that what's in store for the likely Democratic presidential candidate from other Democrats in targeted districts? It's going to make for an awfully uncomfortable campaign if Obama gets such negative treatment from the candidates that Democrats are counting on to expand their Congressional majorities.

The special election is May 13.

I'm so over the Rev. Wright stuff. The question I've been obsessed with all day is this: How good a baller is Obama?

My interest was first peaked by a New York Post photo of Obama putting up a shot over UNC's enormously over-rated Tyler Hansbrough. Evidently, the Big O played in a scrimmage with the Tar Heels yesterday. So he's got to be pretty good, right?

Let's grant a few things right off the top: Of course the UNC players weren't going at it like it was the Final Four. Of course they were probably letting His Hopeness have some fun and not really challenging his dribble or his shot. But look: Basketball isn't golf. It's not like when a bunch of pros take a grinning political hack out on the course and trade jokes with him while he shoots a 107. Even if a bunch of Div I players are showing you a good time, you still have to be able to play just to hang with them on the court.

So how good is Obama? The still photos don't tell us much but the good folks at The Sporting Blog have some more info. We learn that Obama scored zero buckets, no surprise, really. But we also get this fantastic And-1 style tribute video, that includes some footage from the scrimmage:

Obama looks pretty good. He keeps his head up on the dribble, is obviously looking for passing lanes, and even knows enough both to throw head-fakes and to reset his attempt at penetration. I was particularly impressed with his left hand--until I saw him shooting and realized that he's a lefty. There's not a ton of footage here, but I don't see him go right much, which suggests to me that he may not have much of a right. The form on his jumper is classic playground--I don't know how much organized ball he played, but my guess is not much. But--and here's the big thing--he really moves nicely. Fluid, kind of graceful. He looks like he knows how to handle himself and would be a lot of fun in a pick-up game.

That said, if we were choosing teams with famous political players, I'd take the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot first. He's an assassin. For reals.

Maybe now is the time to buy stock in Barack. Futures contracts in Obama winning the election in November have tumbled more than 8 percent in the last week and are now trading at 43.4. Bettors now give Hillary a 25.5 percent chance of winning the nomination--up 50 percent over the last week.

McCain's value is climbing as well. He's up 5 percent over the last week and now has a 40 percent chance of winning in the fall according to the Intrade political prediction market. You can see the full results here.

I'm not sure you can put anymore faith in these numbers than polling, which is to say almost none at all, but it's an interesting reflection of perception, and clearly the perception is that Obama had a rough week.

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey notes an oddity in the Washington Post's water-carrying editorial that lauded Barack Obama's most demonstrative denunciation of Jeremiah Wright to date:

"But Mr. Obama is right when he says that his entire career is antithetical to the divisiveness of the Rev. Wright’s comments.”

To which I can only respond, "What career?"

Coming out of Harvard Law School in 1991, one would have expected young Barack Obama to set the world on fire. He was editor-in-chief of the Law Review, graduated magna cum laude, even penned a well-received memoir soon after his graduation. And yet for a dozen years after law school, Obama toiled away in obscurity as a community organizer, a lawyer at a small firm that had the infamous Rezko as a client, and as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. This career path famously forced him and his wife to have to stretch to pay back their student loans.

Much of this was of course laudable on Obama’s part, passing up the big bucks to better serve humanity. But he didn't have a career that engaged in policy issues. He was an obscure figure whose efforts to forward his obvious political ambitions were uniformly thwarted until his successful run for senator in 2004. Besides, as Morrissey notes, if Obama’s "entire career" really has been "antithetical to the divisiveness of Rev. Wright's comments," it would have been swell if the Post had provided an example or two to support such a sweeping assertion.

Against the Post's unsupported hyperbole, there stands the formulation “20 years and $40,000.” For 20 years, Obama worshipped at Jeremiah Wright's church. And yet Obama's campaign would have us believe that he only became aware that Wright is a moral cretin on Monday. Perhaps even more bothersome is the $40,000 + in donations the Obamas gave to Wright's church in 2005 and 2006. Given Michelle Obama's repeated whining about the precarious state of the Obamas’ finances, we can assume they didn’t demonstrate such largesse without first giving the matter serious consideration.

It's a measure of how problematic the Reverend Wright situation will remain for Obama that his champions in the media have resorted to ludicrous exaggeration in a vain attempt to make it go away. They'd be better off standing by their tried and true (though still ineffective) method of shrieking "Distraction!!"

Hillary's been trying to goad Obama into scheduling another debate. He won't bite, and she's done everything but call him chicken (though her supporters have shown no such restraint). Yet Obama looked deep within himself to muster the courage for an appearance on Fox News Sunday this weekend, after more than a year of avoiding the harsh interrogation techniques of Chris Wallace. It sort of made Obama seem, if only momentarily, like he had a little backbone.

So what does Hillary do? She one-ups him with an appearance on The Factor tonight. It's the talk show equivalent of landing under sniper fire in one of the world's most dangerous warzones. Except Sinbad's not there. Or your teenage daughter.

It could get ugly, but she's got nothing to lose.

After several days of heavy fighting in the Mahdi Army stronghold of Sadr City, the press tells us that over 900 "people" have been killed during fighting in Sadr City over the past five weeks. But how many of those killed were Mahdi Army fighters? AFP doesn't even try to answer these questions, and in failing to do so, the reporting gives the impression that all of these “people” are civilians, and U.S. and Iraqi forces are using indiscriminate force in Sadr City.

I've made a count of the Mahdi Army fighters confirmed killed during engagements in and immediately around Sadr City since the fighting began on March 25. U.S. and Iraqi troops killed 173 from the period between March 25 and March 30, when the Basra offensive began until Muqtada al Sadr issued a ceasefire. Seventy-one Mahdi Army fighters killed from March 31 to April 19 during a relative lull in the fighting. One hundred and ninety-one Mahdi fighters were killed between April 20 and April 30, the period starting after Sadr threatened a third uprising and as U.S. and Iraqi forces took control of the bottom third of Sadr City.

That makes for 435 Mahdi Army fighters killed in and around Sadr City since the fighting intensified there after the government of Iraq launched its crackdown in Basra on March 25. Almost half of the “people” killed were Mahdi Army fighters. And the odds are even more of those killed were Mahdi Army fighters, as we have little way of knowing how many wounded later died of their injuries during battle. Sadr’s people control the hospitals in Sadr City.

The Mahdi Army is taking heavy casualties when running up against U.S. and Iraqi forces in Baghdad, and the high numbers have an impact on morale and recruiting over time. The media loves to tell us how many U.S. soldiers were killed during fighting--were told that 47 US troops were killed in Iraq this month, and more than 20 in Baghdad alone--but seems to shy away from reporting the number of enemy casualties. The fight against the Mahdi Army certainly won't be determined by body counts, but there clearly is a double standard in reporting. U.S. body counts are news, but Mahdi Army body counts are to be avoided.

CBS News reporter Richard Butler was rescued by Iraqi troops in Basra on April 10 after being held captive for two months. Throughout his ordeal, his hands were kept in restraints and a sack kept over his head, although he was able to hear plenty of Hezbollah propaganda and ringtones. His sparse diet caused him to lose 42 pounds.

Not pretty. But it could have been worse:

Butler said he felt it was better to be kidnapped in Iraq then taken into custody by Americans in Afghanistan.

"I was pleased I wasn't being mortarboarded in Guantanamo or being held for six and a half years like an Al-Jazeera cameraman, for instance," he said.

Absolutely. American troops are renowned for torturing network reporters. You read about that all the time. Poor bastards are dropping like flies at the hands of our soldiers. It's a real scandal.

In related news, the ratings for CBS News hit a record low last week.

Don’t worry about Richard Butler, by the way. He’s recovering at his home. In France. But you just knew that, right?

(And I know what you’re thinking: Hezbollah ringtones?!)

Commence firing:

A day after he called for a pause in his "Operation Chaos" plan to keep the Democratic primary going, Rush Limbaugh today opened up his show by urging his conservative listeners to keep up the hijinks.

"You are to go out and sustain the primary season by virtue of voting for Hillary Clinton," Limbaugh said....

Today he said "the operational pause is now lifted."

As Jonathan Martin says, "this may actually matter." The race could be very tight in Indiana, and Clinton will need all the help she can get. Of course the irony is that the netroots started it by asking Democrats to vote for Mitt in Michigan instead of 'undecided.' Kos explained the rationale for the campaign: "Because we can. Because it'll be fun." Rush couldn't have said it better.

Earlier this morning, House Republican Leader John Boehner gave this presentation to all of his colleagues in the House Republican Conference. Boehner’s message is straightforward and sobering -- House Republicans have a tough road ahead, but with hard work and a few breaks they could have good year. Previewing a new branding phrase, Boehner talked about how if Republicans can "earn back the majority in Congress," they will "fix a broken Washington."

Despite the ongoing problems with Republican party popularity, Boehner reminded his colleagues that the most recent polling (NBC News/Wall Street Journal) shows 37 percent of Americans describe themselves as conservative, 34 percent moderate and 23 percent liberal -- numbers that fit well with House Republicans ideological perspective.

He also believes McCain helps with down ticket congressional races, particularly against many of the new freshman Democrats first elected in 2006 -- 21 of whom are in districts carried by Bush in 2004. Boehner also argues Obama’s liberal policy views will either force congressional Democrats to run against the top of the ticket or play the politically awkward separation game.

As House Democrat grow increasingly reliant on liberal 527 organizations to supplement the Democratic National Committee, the latter strategy becomes trickier.

Money concerns, however, continue to trouble the GOP. The Republican leader notes Republicans were outspent in 2004 by $100 million. His presentation strongly encourages all of his colleagues to put their shoulders to the wheel when it comes to raising resources.

These are tough times for House Republicans given the large number of open seats (29 right now) they’ll have to defend. Boehner’s doing his best to lead, lift morale and focus his troops’ energy.

David Denby, the lesser half of the New Yorker's critical duo, made a revealing couple of comments in his review of Iron Man. First, he takes issue with the character's origin, deriding the fact that Tony Stark was "captured and enslaved by Wong-Chu--a chubby Commie tyrant. One might blush at this memory of sinister Orientalist Cold War pop, but the updating of the material for 'Iron Man' hasn't made it any smarter. The director, Jon Favreau, and two writing teams . . . have enlisted Iron Man in the war on terror."

Because, you see, just like the Communist threat in Vietnam, the terrorist threat in Afghanistan isn't worth worrying about! Oh, silly Favreau, why can't you just see that the terrorists just want to be left alone? Denby then goes on to write "the freelance fanatics . . . waterboard Tony Stark, which, considering what some American interrogators and their surrogates have done to suspects recently, is enraging to watch. Such are the ways of pop: we cast our sins onto others."

That's right: the filmmakers are merely projecting America¹s shortcomings on her enemies. After all, terrorists never do anything wrong. They treat their prisoners with compassion and respect. Nope, no torture or beheadings in the mountains of Afghanistan. If the terrorists really wanted Tony Stark to do their bidding, they would have reasoned him into submission. Thanks, Professor Denby.

[Check out Sonny's new blog at AFF. --ed.]

While the rest of the country debates the ongoing fallout from the Pastor Disaster, I want to take just a moment to address another urgent concern – the sagging ratings of American Idol.

While American Idol remains a ratings juggernaut, this year’s numbers have dropped significantly from previous seasons. In response, the producers of the show are seeking input from the show's fans. According to the Los Angeles Times (so consider the source), the producers are focusing on Ryan Seacrest as the potential culprit for the ratings decline.

I’ll save the American Idol people the bother of performing serious market research and convening endless focus groups. Seacrest is not the problem. Indeed, the way he effortlessly pulls off Idol's live broadcasts, shows that have roughly a million moving parts, is a marvel to anyone who has ever done broadcasting with hard commercial breaks.

“Hard commercial breaks” means the timing of the commercials is predetermined. Even if Simon Cowell were in mid-sentence or that dreadlocked kid in mid-caterwaul, the show would still go to commercial at the predetermined time. So if the show doesn't run on time, it becomes a train wreck.

It's Seacrest's job to keep the show on time and he makes it look easy - which it most definitely is not. For an object lesson on this point (if you can stand it), spend an hour of your life trying to watch brilliant political analyst Chris Matthews try to hit his hard breaks. And, needless to say, the Matthews show is much less of a production with far fewer moving parts than American Idol.

Idol's problem is that it has watered down its product and in so doing, broken faith with its audience. The audience loves the competition aspect of the show. And yet each week, for its "Results Show," Idol presents a hideously distended one hour broadcast filled with over-hyped drama, irrelevant musical performances, and pregnant pauses galore. Idol used to do its Results Shows in a half hour, and even that felt long. At an hour, they're borderline unwatchable without heavy reliance on the DVR.

This kind of abuse of your customers' goodwill will inevitably incur a cost. The cost here has been lost fans. It's particularly ironic that Idol's ratings are sagging this year since, as the show’s promotions endlessly bray, Idol has its most talented field of contestants ever. Particularly interesting is the dynamic between the two obvious frontrunners, talented rocker David Cook and saccharine, boring teen David Archueletta. In case the previous sentence was too subtle, I think Cook should win. I also think he will because I have an abiding faith in my fellow citizens. Regardless of who emerges victorious, Cook will be a much bigger star.

If American Idol wants a ratings rebound, its producers should focus on producing the best show they can rather than trying to figure out how to squeeze a dollop of extra milk out of their cash cow at their viewers' expense. American Idol viewers have been a loyal lot for the better part of a decade. As a matter of good business, Idol's producers should try to reward that loyalty rather than exploit it.

From TWS Online: Obama a Wimp? by Dean Barnett.

From the Wall Street Journal: Getting to Know John McCain, by Karl Rove.

From the Wall Street Journal: Hook-Up or Shut Up, by Harvey Mansfield.

From National Review: Obama Still in Danger, by Byron York.

From the Daily News: Ayers Tried to Kill My Family, by John M. Murtagh.

He’s good enough, he’s rich enough – but, doggone it, he isn’t smart enough:

Senate candidate Al Franken says he will pay about $70,000 in back income taxes in 17 states going back to 2003.

The Minnesota Democrat has been under attack by Republicans for failing to file tax returns in California for several years when the comedian-turned-candidate earned money there.

Franken tells The Associated Press he never intended to avoid paying taxes. He says during the years in question, he paid his entire income tax bill to the city and state where he lived.

Memo to Al: My wife and I use the H&R Block software to file our taxes. In addition to being mighty easy, it asks you questions like Did you earn any extra income outside your place of residence? Perhaps that might have jogged your memory regarding income earned from over one-third of the United States. A $44.95 investment in that software could have saved you 70 grand.

Or -- and here’s an idea -- if elected, help give the rest of us taxpayers the same break you gave yourself.

After Jeremiah Wright's recent speeches to the NAACP and the National Press Club, Obama took the advice of bloggers and denounced his former pastor once and for all:

Barack Obama said he was "outraged" by Wright’s comments at the National Press Club Monday, and "saddened by the spectacle."...

"The person I saw yesterday is not the person I met 20 years ago.”

Bloggers are skeptical that Obama never heard the true Wright. Michelle Malkin says, "Anyone with eyes...saw that Wright’s was a finely-honed, time-tested act." At the Corner, Byron York explains that "watching Rev. Wright for the last few days, watching the fluidity with which he moved from educational theories to musical theories to racial theories, it's hard to believe that that material hasn't been in the sermons Obama has heard Wright preach over the last 20 years, so I'm skeptical about Obama's new outrage over Wright's words."

As for Obama, Rich Lowry says, "What's been most disturbing about this entire episode is how dishonest Obama has been, from his pretense that he didn't know about Wright's radicalism to his excuse now that Wright has somehow become a different person." It simply "strains credulity," says Tom Bevan at the Real Clear Politics blog.

At Contentions, Jennifer Rubin asks, "How low did the poll numbers go? How many superdelegates had to warn him? What finally changed his mind? Because, as anyone following the story knows, Wright has been remarkably consistent." Goldfarb has the answer: "Obama sat in the pews for 20 years, indifferent to the hatred Wright spewed towards all quarters of American life. It was only when Wright turned on Obama that he repudiated him." At Pajamas Media, Rick Moran agrees that "he has only addressed his pastor’s hateful remarks when they have become a political problem for him."

But it seems that Obama might have even more problems now. Hugh Hewitt says, "Either way it creates a huge issue for voters. Is Obama a dupe, or just duplicitous? Do you want him in charge of the nation's security, making judgments about our enemies?" Hot Air's Ed Morrissey adds, "It doesn’t address questions of judgment at all to finally act after being backed into a corner." And NRO's Jim Geraghty says that it makes Obama's race speech "look ridiculous now"--to which Mary Katharine Ham adds, "If you'd Sister Souljah-ed [Wright] instead of your grandma, maybe you wouldn't be here now."

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor in New York, is author of the new, much-discussed book Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. I'm in the middle of reporting two pieces and haven't yet had a spare minute to read it, but it is my top priority when my current obligations are met (next Tuesday). I'll have much more to say about it here at that point.

McCarthy is a razor-sharp thinker and his writing reflects the clarity and precision of his thought. More often than not, when McCarthy sets out to challenge an argument he not only wins but leaves his opponents arguments in tatters. I can't tell you how many emails I've sent him, after reading one of his pieces, that begin with one word: Devastating.

I sent him another one today. Over at National Review Online, McCarthy takes on Laurie Mylroie's error-riddled review of his book. It is devastating. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing, here, but let me just address two points.

First, on Iraq and terrorism. McCarthy writes of Mylroie: "Indeed, for commentators (like Steve Hayes, Tom Joscelyn, and I) who have argued that there were, in fact, important ties between Iraq and radical Islam, Mylroie has been a thorn in the side for years — the analyst whose zany assertions are routinely used to discredit credible evidence of cooperation." He's right, and that was the case not just with those of us outside the government, but those on the inside, too. Mylroie comes up In several of the books written about the Iraq War as a terrorism analyst who led the Bush Administration into making questionable claims about Iraq and al Qaeda. (George Packer, the New Yorker writer and author of the otherwise well-reported book, "The Assassin's Gate," makes this mistake.) This vastly overstates her role. Although her emails may have occasionally made their way to Bush administration officials, no one I know took her arguments very seriously. For good reason. Mylroie has seen an Iraqi hand behind virtually every terrorist attack on American interests. Indeed, in our one brief conversation, she faulted me for failing to understand that al Qaeda is little more than an Iraqi "front group." That's crazy. Iraq was an active state sponsor of terror and, as the recent Pentagon report confirms, a willing sponsor of al Qaeda leaders, their terrorist associates, and a wide variety of jihadist groups.

Second, in her review of McCarthy's book, Mylroie seems to misunderstand -- or misrepresent -- McCarthy's views on the proper U.S. policy approach to terrorism. She argues that McCarthy -- as a prosecutor and an author -- does not take seriously enough the role that states play in sponsoring jihadist terror. As I say, I have not yet read the book, but having discussed these issues with McCarthy on literally dozens of occasions, it's inconceivable that he is guilty of that offense. Indeed, anyone who has read his writings over the past decade knows not only that he understands the role of states but that he sees rogue states as a primary source of the terrorist threat against us.

So, I believe him when he concludes:

A central theme of my book is the incapacity of the criminal-justice system to deal adequately with a national security threat. Another is that, while the threat that confronts us is fueled by a strain of Islamic ideology, terror networks would not be able to project power on a consequential scale absent facilitation by such rogue nations as Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Sudan. Reading Laurie Mylroie’s review, a reader would come away figuring I must have argued, in contravention of what Willful Blindness actually says, that international terrorism is merely a crime and state sponsorship a trifle. Under the guise of reviewing a book, Mylroie ignores the book, using the opportunity instead to reprise her half-baked theories and cavalier dismissal of Islamic radicalism. It’s a shame the Sun let her do it.

Again, Obama at yesterday's press conference:

And as I said before, I continue to believe that Reverend Wright has been a -- a -- a leader in the South Side. I think that the church he built is outstanding. I think that he has preached in the past some wonderful sermons. He provided, you know, valuable contributions to my family.

But at a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that's enough. That's -- that's a show of disrespect to me. It's a -- it is also, I think, an insult to what we've been trying to do in this campaign.

Wright has showed so much disrespect to so many people, but only when Wright shows disrespect to Obama himself does the candidate take umbrage. Chickens coming home to roost? That doesn't rise to the level of throwing the guy overboard. The government created AIDS? You wouldn't disown your grandmother for saying that. How about God damn America? Surely you wouldn't abandon your community, your roots, just because your preacher damned the country that gave you every opportunity you've ever had. But disrespect moi? Well, every man has his breaking point.

In fact, the whole affair has a rather Beauchampian quality. Deny, deny, deny, nothing to see here. Then when that doesn't work, disavow selected items in the narrowest way possible so as to avoid the embarrassment of disavowing the whole. And when that fails and you have no other choice and the damage is already done, toss the guy overboard with a minimum amount of grace and a maximum amount of self-centered indignation. Oh, and get Andrew Sullivan to make your case well beyond the point when any such case is tenable, only to have him declare your judgment and management of the affair beyond reproach at the very moment you're forced to admit what everybody else has known for months.

Obama at the press conference yesterday:

Now, to some degree, you know -- I know that one thing that he said was true, was that he wasn't -- you know, he was never my, quote-unquote, "spiritual adviser."

He was never my "spiritual mentor." He was -- he was my pastor. And so to some extent, how, you know, the -- the press characterized in the past that relationship, I think, wasn't accurate.

Obama in January 2007:

"He's much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I'm not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that's involved in national politics."

So would it have been more accurate to describe him as a "life coach"?

Geraghty has some interesting poll analysis:

So while Survey USA is the only one putting North Carolina in single digits, their track record lately suggests we shouldn't expect them to be too far off the final results. Also note that Survey USA puts Hillary ahead in Indiana by 9 percent.

Geraghty tracks the firm's performance over the last few contests and thinks the most recent surveys may be indicating a shift away from Obama. More on that over at Slate as well.

First Obama said he could no more disown Wright than he could disown his own grandmother, or the black community. Leaving aside the fact that, in retrospect, this was an insult to the black community and his grandmother, the decision to distance himself now begs the question, what changed?

Wright had said horrible things about this country and many of the ethnic groups that comprise it, but all this was initially dismissed by Obama as an unfair caricature based on soundbytes taken out of context. Wright was just like a crazy uncle, we were told--harmless. But all of a sudden, Obama recognizes Wright as the malefactor that he truly is. Why the change of heart? Says Ana Marie Cox (she's respectable now, right?):

Is it overly cynical of me to think that Wright diminishing Obama as a mere politician was the true tipping point? Because that seems to be one of the few new arguments (ideas? rants? conspiracy theories?) that Wright made. Sadly for Obama, it may also be the only correct one.

This is the only possible explanation. Andrew Sullivan hit the nail on the head as to why the time had come for Obama to disown Wright: "He now has the obvious defense that Wright has attacked him and disowned him."

Obama sat in the pews for 20 years, indifferent to the hatred Wright spewed towards all quarters of American life. It was only when Wright turned on Obama that he repudiated him. That's the awful truth of the matter.

Pew Research released a new survey yesterday titled "Gen Dems: The Party’s Advantage Among Young Voters Widens," outlining a growing Democratic advantage with younger voters (age 18-29) in party identification. The report argues the shift in allegiance foreshadows even greater Democratic Party strength in the future. According to Pew:

Trends in the opinions of America's youngest voters are often a barometer of shifting political winds. And that appears to be the case in 2008. The current generation of young voters, who came of age during the George W. Bush years, is leading the way in giving the Democrats a wide advantage in party identification, just as the previous generation of young people who grew up in the Reagan years--Generation X--fueled the Republican surge of the mid-1990's.

The report shows a 58%-33% Democratic advantage in party preference for young Americans 18-29 in March of 2008. This compares to a smaller 49%-41% lead in 2000 and parity (46%-47%) in 1992.

These numbers underscore the Republican Party’s "brand" problem and are no doubt driven by President Bush’s low popularity numbers among those in this age cohort.

But a couple of caveats are also in order. First, I’m not sure that the numbers foretell a political realignment or an enduring sea change in public opinion. Party identification numbers in general are notoriously volatile. Those with weaker attachments to one party or the other often move back and forth between independent and "lean partisan" categories over time, shifting the numbers in significant ways.

Second, I looked back at some even earlier surveys to put the Pew research in a little broader perspective. First, in 1972, the same year Richard Nixon won a landslide reelection, Democrats held a 51%-29% advantage in party identification of Americans under 30 according to the American National Election Studies (ANES) at the University of Michigan. Eight years later, when Ronald Reagan was first elected, the ANES poll shows a 50%-26% Democratic edge in party ID among younger adults. So maybe the current Pew figures are just reverting back to historical norms--a circumstance that didn’t seem to hurt Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan’s electoral fortunes.

Republicans would obviously prefer higher numbers from the under 30 crowd, but partisan attachments are largely driven by short-term political circumstances, and sometimes less determinative of election outcomes than you might think.

The Battle for Sadr City is on. Several weeks ago, U.S. and Iraqi forces took control of the southern third of the city and began constructing concrete barriers to secure the area. Since U.S. and Iraqi forces moved into Sadr City, units have conducted patrols and distributed humanitarian aid to the Iraqis living in the neighborhoods. The U.S. military is also conducting aerial patrols of Sadr City, and is striking at Mahdi Army fighters as they plant roadside bombs, move weapons, and gather for attacks.

This has provoked a violent response from Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army, which is struggling to prevent the Iraqi government from maintaining a foothold in Sadr's power base in Baghdad. Over the past several days, Mahdi Army fighters have grouped for mass attacks. Each time U.S. and Iraqi forces beat them back, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy while suffering few of their own.

One of the largest engagements occurred today. A large force of Mahdi Army fighters ambushed a U.S. patrol on the border area where the wall is being built. U.S. forces responded and killed 28 Mahdi Army fighters while suffering six wounded. None of the casualties are life-threatening. On Sunday, 22 Mahdi Army fighters were killed as they massed to strike at a checkpoint in Sadr City. Sixteen more were killed in separate engagements that same day.

There have been numerous other air and ground engagements with the Mahdi Army in Sadr City and the surrounding areas over the past several weeks. Since Sadr threatened to conduct a third uprising nine days ago, U.S. and Iraqi troops have killed 186 Mahdi Army fighters in Baghdad alone. Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki has said he is serious about taking control of Sadr City and disarming and disbanding the Mahdi Army. There are no signs that he plans to halt the offensive.

As things currently stand, the Space Shuttle program will be suspended in 2010, as the existing orbiters reach the end of their useful lives. The U.S. will then have a window of approximately 5 years in which it will have no independent capacity for manned space flight until the Orion system comes on line. During that 5 year period, American astronauts are expected to travel to and from the International Space Station on Russian ships.

That plan took a big hit on April 19, when a returning Soyuz command module reportedly failed properly to separate from its service module, endangering the 3 astronauts on board (including one American). This was the second consecutive Soyuz mission that ended this way -- strongly suggesting a systemic flaw. With the Russians downplaying the problem, there's a real concern that it may not be safe to put all our eggs in the Soyuz basket.

Several NASA advocates in Congress -- Floridians Bill Nelson and Dave Weldon -- are beginning to suggest that we need some sort of plan 'B:'

"We could have six astronauts up on the space station and literally no way to get them down and all the people of the world will be in the sad prospect of watching them die as they run out of food and supplies," said Rep. Dave Weldon (R - Indialantic)....

Senator Nelson said one problem is President Bush has put in motion the plan to shut down the shuttle program during the next president's term. By the time the next president takes office, it will be too late to try to keep the shuttle program going.

In the wake of the latest Soyuz accident, the Orlando Sentinel argued for an additional $2 billion for the speedy development of Orion, to reduce the window between Space Shuttle and Orion from 5 years to 3 years. This is an issue that bears watching; right now $2 billion seems a small price to pay to for self-sufficiency.

Remember all that talk about how Barack Obama was a trans-partisan uniter who could help Democrats be competitive in solidly red states? He was going to help boost African-American turnout and bring out waves of new voters to back Democrats at all levels? Well, it's appropriate that as Obama desperately and disingenuously tries to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright, a surprisingly strong Democratic Congressional candidate is trying to distance himself from Obama.

Childers very nearly captured this strong Republican district without a runoff, and he may yet win on May 13. But there's no question that Obama's backing has become a thorny issue for the Democrat.

HT: Marc Ambinder

CBS reports:

“This lady right here makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy,” said Governor Mike Easley, D-N.C., today, referring to Hillary Clinton. “There’s nothing I love more than a strong powerful woman.”

Lefties are getting their panties in a bunch over the fact that Easley used a word that could be interpreted as anti-gay. Apparently the dictionary agrees. Fine, more blue on blue identity-based violence.

Still, how could Hillary not defend Rocky's honor? She appropriated the myth when she was campaigning in Philadelphia, but as soon as she moves on to another state Rocky's a pansy? She stands by silently while Easley insults the greatest Philadelphia sports hero that never lived? Yo, Hill, where's the loyalty?

Allahpundit:

After 20 years of friendship, if Obama didn’t know Wright held these beliefs he’s a moron and if he did know he’s a fraud.

It's better for everybody that we assume Obama is a fraud, and it's almost certainly the correct explanation. As Bob Herbert wrote today, "Barack Obama went to Rev. Wright’s church as a young man and was blessed with the Christian bona fides that would be absolutely essential for a high-profile political career." It was the cost of doing business.

But Obama must think us all bitter morons to try and pass off this embarrassment as the product of some kind of ideological evolution on Wright's part. Is it that he didn't leave the church but the church left him? How many other members of the church do we expect will distance themselves at the sudden revelation that their (former) pastor is a vile racist?

Obama said today of Rev. Wright: "The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago."

Obama's recollection in Dreams from My Father of his first time at Trinity United 20 years ago:

The title of Reverend Wright's sermon that morning was "The Audacity of Hope." He began with a passage from the Book of Samuel—the story of Hannah, who, barren and taunted by her rivals, had wept and shaken in prayer before her God. The story reminded him, he said, of a sermon a fellow pastor had preached at a conference some years before, in which the pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope….

"It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That's the world! On which hope sits!"

And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. As the sermon unfolded, though, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate. The reverend spoke of the hardship that the congregation would face tomorrow, the pain of those far from the mountaintop, worrying about paying the light bill…

Wright doesn't sound all that different.

Again, at the Indianapolis Star.

Statistical tie. And Frank Newport adds, "There have been minor changes in the shape of the national registered voter preferences for the fall, with John McCain now leading Obama by a slim two percentage point margin, while Clinton has a slight 2-point margin over McCain."

The question is, why has Hillary closed the gap? I suspect it's the PA bounce, but the Rev. Wright stuff can't be helping. The Indiana primary should shed some light. The demographics there may be even more favorable to Clinton than Pennsylvania. If she isn't able to recreate her PA victory in Indiana, then there's something wrong with her campaign. If she builds on her victory, then there's something wrong with Obama.

It's official – Barack Obama, however belatedly, threw his Meshugenah Minister under the bus at a press conference today. According to Obama's telling, Jeremiah Wright's appearance yesterday at the National Press Club made it clear to Obama that Wright is a crackpot, a lunatic, a nut. (The preceding are my terms, not Obama's.) So, in other words, Wright's oddness managed to elude Obama during 20 years of spiritual mentorship and while the Obamas were sending $40,000 worth of support to Wright, but yesterday Obama had a proverbial Road to Damascus experience. At the risk of being blunt, pull the other leg, Senator – there are bells on it.

Obama's style during the extended presser is worth some commentary. His delivery, as is ever the case when he doesn't have a teleprompter, was weak and halting. He claimed outrage, but instead he showed a low energy level form of sorrow.

I thought of three other political appearances while watching the Obama press conference:

1) Just prior to the Iraq War, President Bush gave a presser where he tried to emphasize his seriousness and not look at all cowboy-ish. The results were disastrous. The press labeled Bush as “slouching off to war” thanks to his grim, low energy efforts. Similarly, Obama should have shown some feistiness and fighting spirit today. Instead he looked like a beaten man. (Perhaps he had seen the latest SUSA Poll for North Carolina that shows Hillary Clinton pulling to within 5 points.)

2) Ted Kennedy's “Mudd Slide” – Ted Kennedy's 1980 presidential ambitions bit the dust when he stumbled over a series of innocuous questions that Roger Mudd asked him. That interview has long been the gold standard for a politician giving a disastrous interview. Like Kennedy during the Mudd Slide, Obama was strikingly inarticulate. Obama always says "um" a lot when speaking extemporaneously, but today's effort was particularly disastrous in that regard. Obama said he was outraged by Wright, but he spoke slowly and laconically, hardly traits that one typically associates with outrage.

3) Bill Clinton in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing called the perpetrators cowards and vowed that they would face vengeance. Clinton was visibly angry, and appropriately so. It was the first time in his presidency that he obviously was telling the truth. His tone and his emotions matched the moment perfectly.

Obama needed to forcefcully and perhaps a bit angrily distance himself from Reverend Wright. Reverend Wright's comments would outrage just about every American, and Obama had more reason to be furious than most. And yet he spoke in measured and hesitant tones. Some might think this style evidences a heightened state of thoughtfulness. Regardless, Obama’s tone today did not match the moment.

As such, it will do nothing to put this issue to bed.

Any lingering doubts that the Obama campaign is a cult of personality should be erased by this news that the campaign is offering a "limited edition" car magnet for donors who give $15 or more before Wednesday.

The campaign is marketing its own collectibles!

(Will donors get a certificate of authenticity with their limited edition magnet?)

Mind you, the campaign is just cashing in on a market that's already thriving on eBay. There are 1,433 Obama items currently on offer under the "Collectibles" category. They range from fake license plates to designer ceramic tiles to original artwork. There's even a Barak Obama lock knife and Obama trading cards.

The discerning collector, of course, will avoid the tchotchkes and go for the rare items with value. Here, for instance, is a "memorialized transcript collector's print" of the great Philadelphia race speech. (Photo of racist grandmother not included.) Items signed by His Hopeness--books, magazines, baseballs, Chicago Bears mini-helmets--are priced in the hundreds of dollars.

And that limited edition magnet may be a real steal for only $15. The Obey Obama posters, once sold on the campaign website, go for hefty sums now. One listing is asking $1,199 for the set of two. Another seller is offering just one of them--again, originally bought for a few bucks from the campaign website. The current bid is $256.

From TWS Online: The Wrong Stuff, by Dean Barnett.

From Contentions: The Virtue of Obama's Trials, by John Podhoretz.

From Real Clear Politics: Questions without Answers, by Jay Cost.

From City Journal: Sexism Isn't Holding Hillary Back, by Kay Hymowitz.

From the New York Times: The Pastor Casts a Shadow, by Bob Herbert.

Via the Hotline: Too chicken to debate?

There’s not much I can add to the remarks regarding Rev. Wright’s "Take Down Obama ‘08" tour, currently playing to packed houses everywhere. However, one of his comments seems to have slipped by without analysis.

In speaking of one of his dearest friends, Rev. Wright said, "Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn't make me this color."

Taking the latter part of the quote first: Unless the Honorable Minister Farrakhan was his father, I don’t think anyone would ever believe he had anything to do with Rev. Wright’s skin color. Certainly they share a worldview -- angry, narrow-minded, racist -- but that’s not necessarily genetic.

And about that chains and slavery business -- Rev. Wright looks like a free man to me. Free enough to spout nasty things about the land of his birth that, in some countries, would land him behind bars. In fact, I believe it’s Rev. Wright who’s made himself a slave -- to publicity -- and kept himself chained to television cameras. And in doing so, he’s gone from obscure motormouth to front-page news almost overnight, treated as a celebrity by Bill Moyers, CNN and the National Press Club. To paraphrase the good reverend, God bless America!

Rev. Wright continues to sink Obama. At the Real Clear Politics blog, Tom Bevan sums up the buzz after Wright's National Press Club speech: "Jeremiah Wright has managed to do the impossible this political season: unite pundits from the left and the right in agreement about how badly he's hurting Barack Obama's quest for the White House." And bloggers across the spectrum are much the same.

Some bloggers question Wright's motives. Live-blogging the NPC speech, Michelle Malkin asked, "Is he working for the Hillary campaign? Is he angry at Barack Obama? Because he has got to know this is killing his spiritual protege’s campaign." As John McCormack noted here earlier, Wright doesn't seem like he'd even support a President Obama: "What will come of Wright if Obama captures the White House? 'I said to Barack Obama last year, "If you get elected, November the 5th, I'm coming after you because you'll be representing a government whose policies grind under people."" The Left agrees; Time's Joe Klein says, "Wright's purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself--the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton--and destroy Barack Obama."

And bloggers agree that Obama must denounce and distance himself from Wright if he wants to save his campaign. Yesterday Obama said that Wright's views "don't represent my views and they don't represent what this campaign is about. But he's obviously free to make those statements." But is that denunciation enough? At the Corner, Byron York says, "It's pretty clear that the most urgent task today for the Obama campaign and its advocates in the media is to cut Obama free from Rev. Wright." Hugh Hewitt explains, "Unless Senator Obama moves quickly and decisively to completely repudiate Reverend Wright, his fall campaign will be doomed. (And even a complete repudiation of Wright may not save the nomination if Hillary Clinton stays to her own course and begins to talk about Michelle Obama's vision of America for the rest of the primary season.)" At Contentions, John Podhoretz thinks Obama still has a shot: "If Wright and Ayers had come to dominate the news in October, that would have spelled the end to Obama’s presidential hopes. The fact that they have dominated the news in April will, I suspect, prove to have been something of a lucky break." But Jennifer Rubin thinks it's too late and concludes, "Wright is twisting the knife by pointing out that Obama never denounced him and that he merely 'distanced' himself (like any good politician). This spells only bad news for Obama."

Whatever happens to Obama, I think we can all agree with Ross Douthat's characterization of Wright: "a pure creep straight out of an Augusten Burroughs memoir, who's happy to sabotage a younger, finer man who might just be the first black President of the United States in the hopes of feeding his own ego and becoming...what? The next Al Sharpton? The next Willie Horton? How vile and pathetic."

One of the low points in the often keel-scraping Mitt Romney for President campaign was the day when some junior staffer had the none too bright idea of signing poor Romney up for a lifetime membership in the National Rifle Association. Romney, who previously had done most of his big game hunting in the M&A jungle armed only with a Mont Blanc fountain pen, thereby endured endless ridicule for his newfound NRA enthusiasm and more tellingly, was burdened throughout the campaign by the NRA moment as a damning symbol of his alleged need to pander and please.

Apparently the McCain people somehow missed this blunder because I see in the Novak inside dope column that McCain's campaign has decided to send him to an NRA convention in Louisville.

It is a foolish move. Now don't get me wrong. Your Cardinal is the biggest pro-gun cleric since Muqtada al Sadr. If my Huguenot enemies ever attack this Cathedral, they will meet a hail of incoming lead that would make Yosemite Sam blush. But the larger point here is politics and symbolism.

There is something about the world of gun love and NRA conventions that is absolute kryptonite to moderate voters. As bad GOP karma goes, gun fetishism punches way above its' weight. Not the gun rights issue mind you, which is a winner that cuts our way, but gun OPTICS. Like the perception one is sucking up to the NRA.

There was probably a meeting at McCain HQ and somebody said, "Hey, that nutty Obama is offending white rural Democrats and blue collar guys with his Dukakis rap on guns, so let's exploit this and go the NRA convention!" Murmurs of approval all around. But it is the wrong move. McCain is already a second amendment guy. He doesn't need to chase the gun vote with clumsy appearances that will in turn scare off moderate voters. McCain's victory formula in this awful GOP year is simple: if McCain is acceptable to the white independents and Democrat moderates who will inevitably fall off Obama, he will win. Gun optics are a jarring tuba blast that will powerfully disrupt this reassuring and winning McCain Sonata.

Team McCain needs to remember that despite a few "tours" their candidate is vulnerable and far from defined as the centrist he truly is and needs to be to win. McCain has never been a down the line NRA supporter, but his record is much stronger on gun rights issues than Obama or Clinton. McCain already visited an NRA national convention last year during the primary season. That was plenty. The Second Amendment issue can and will work fine for McCain, but waving a blunderbuss at an NRA convention will get McCain nothing he doesn't already have and could cost him votes he needs.

David Axelrod says of Rev. Wright's performance yesterday:

“Obviously, it’s not ideal,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior strategist. “It’s pretty clear that Reverend Wright is not out there to help Obama — he’s out there to help himself. It’s a sideshow, and the media is consumed by it.”

And the "analysis" from Alessandra Stanley in today's New York Times:

Now it turns out that Mr. Wright doesn’t hate America, he loves the sound of his own voice. He is not out of touch with the American culture, he is the avatar of the American celebrity principle: he grabbed his 30-second spots of infamy and turned them into 15 minutes of fame.

It would be easier if they just gave Axelrod a column.

Andrew Sullivan on March 14:

You don't disown a man this close to Obama's spiritual development over the years for political reasons. Obama's not a Clinton.

Andrew Sullivan on March 18:

I would think much, much less of him if he disowned a spiritual guide because of that man's explicable if inexcusable resort to paranoia and racial separatism and anger.

Andrew Sullivan on March 25:

I do not believe his refusal to disown Wright is a function of politics, but a function of human loyalty and love, which can often transcend or even be empowered by that loved one's flaws, and even malice.

And finally, Andrew Sullivan today:

I believe he has to publicly and clearly and irrevocably disown him and say in words that are clear and bright that Wright is now anathema to the campaign.

HT: Patterico

Obama at the press conference yesterday:

Now, to some degree, you know -- I know that one thing that he said was true, was that he wasn't -- you know, he was never my, quote-unquote, "spiritual adviser."

He was never my "spiritual mentor." He was -- he was my pastor. And so to some extent, how, you know, the -- the press characterized in the past that relationship, I think, wasn't accurate.

Obama in January 2007:

"He's much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I'm not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that's involved in national politics."

So would it have been more accurate to describe him as a "life coach"?

At the National Press Club this morning, Rev. Jeremiah Wright deflected a number of questions by accusing the press of being uninformed. When asked to explain his remarks that 9/11 was payback for American misdeeds, Wright replied: "Have you heard the whole sermon?" The moderator said she had heard most of the sermon, and Wright retorted: "No, no, the whole sermon, yes or no? No, you haven't heard the whole sermon? That nullifies that question."

At one point, the moderator asked: "You just mentioned that Senator Obama hadn't heard many of your sermons. Does that mean he's not much of a churchgoer? Or does he doze off in the pews?" Wright answered: "He goes to church about as much as you do. What did your pastor preach on last week? You don't know? OK." And that was that.

When asked if he still believes the U.S. government created HIV "as a means of genocide against people of color," Wright asked the moderator if she had read Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional? Then, Griff Jenkins, a Fox News correspondent who apparently wrote the question, stood up and asked Wright to answer the question. "No questions from the floor," Wright shot back. All questions from the press were submitted to a National Press Club moderator, who did not press Wright on follow-up questions. Wright said, "I believe our government is capable of doing anything," but he never directly answered whether he thinks the U.S. government created HIV.

Again and again, Wright was not held to account for his own disputed claims, such as his contention that in his post 9/11 sermon he was merely quoting the ambassador from Iraq that "America's chickens are coming home to roost." To be fair, most of those in the press gallery didn't openly applaud Wright during his speech--as did Christopher Hayes of the Nation and Nadia Charters of Al-Arabiya TV, who were both sitting (appropriately) to the left of me.

Speaking of Fareed Zakaria, I found the following passage in his column this week puzzling:

"The neoconservative vision within the speech is essentially an affirmation of ideology. Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies." (Emphasis added.)

Leave aside the silly idea that only neoconservatives are driven by ideology, whereas "realists" are "pragmatic." Where in McCain's speech did he "declare war" on Russia and China? Nowhere. And if he had, wouldn't that have been, you know, major news?

Exaggeration and distortion - it must be an election year!

Earlier today I wrote that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s hard fought campaign in Pennsylvania benefited John McCain in the Keystone state, based on the most recent polling. But the brutal primary fighting is also exposing broader weakness for the Illinois Senator in national surveys and creating doubts about his long term electoral juice among some of his party’s strategists.

There is a growing sense of unease among Democratic political pros I talk to that he may be unstoppable when it comes to the nomination, but very beatable in a general election. He’s like a launched political missile that the party can’t recall. This all ads up to mounting worry (not yet panic, but close) among many party faithful that the Illinois Senator’s consistent lack of vote-getting prowess among certain key groups--such as Hispanic, Jewish, Catholic, and low-income white voters--creates a huge opportunity for John McCain and real trouble for Democrats in November.

"Obama’s not ready for prime time and is not the best candidate with these key groups," one political consultant told me today. "I don’t know how they let it get to this point, but there’s no turning back now," he said.

This Rasmussen report released today suggests Republicans are growing more confident in their ability to beat Obama as well. The number of GOP identifiers who believe Obama would be a tougher candidate dropped by 17 points in the last month. It also notes independent voters--a key target bloc for both McCain and Obama--are also losing confidence that the Illinois Senator is the best potential Democratic candidate.

The survey notes that self-identified Democrats are not feeling the inside-the-Beltway consultant worries--at least not yet. According to Rasmussen:

"While Republicans and unaffiliated voters are less likely to see Obama as the stronger general election candidate, attitudes among Democrats remain unchanged. By a 51% to 37% margin, Democrats believe Obama will do better in November."

But if he continues to lose Catholics who attend church regularly by a 74%-26% margin, or white voters earning under $50,000 per year by large margins--as this exit poll suggests--the wall of worry will spread among Democrats.

Fareed Zakaria attacks McCain's talk of purging authoritarianism from the G8:

In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil—but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power....

...What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war....

International groups are not cheerleading bodies but exist to help solve pressing global crises. Excluding countries won't make the problems go away.

Sure, but the G8 also serves to legitimize Putin's regime. No one has been a more vocal advocate for ejecting Russia from the group than Garry Kasparov, the country's most prominent democracy activist. For Zakaria to dismiss the idea with such disdain, as though the only effect would be to complicate global crises, is to ignore entirely the crisis that is Putin's Russia. The Bush administration has embraced "realism" in its dealings with Russia, and now we have proof that such policies have only strengthened Putin.

Does Zakaria believe there is no merit to Kasparov's position? Who knows? He doesn't even attempt to address it. Instead he makes it sound like only radical neoconservatives are troubled by Russia's inclusion in the group, rather than Russia's own repressed, democratic opposition.

As I noted yesterday, the Fightin' Netroots were none too pleased with Barack Obama for taking his road show to Fox News over the weekend. Today, the king of the progressive blogopshere, Markos Moulitsas himself, filed an extensive grievance on the matter.

Moulitsas had four main complaints:

1) "A right-wing media outlet taunts you for a few months, and the way to show strength is to cave in to those taunts? Kind of an odd approach." Kos went on to lament, "We've spent the last few years in the netroots working to discredit Fox News as the propaganda network strives for mainstream respectability”

2) "It made Obama look weak, and he was."

3) "It gave Fox a propaganda victory."

4) "It exposed his campaign as a bunch of liars. The Obama campaign's press show promised people that Obama would ‘take on’ Fox News. Of course, none of that happened. That would've electrified 'the left,' and we know that Obama doesn't want to do anything that might make him look like a 'captive' to it."

Personally, I find Markos' anger somewhat baffling. I have to admit it - I thought he was shrewder. Obama is running for president. That means he has to go get votes. While discrediting (or not "legitimizing") Fox News may be a priority for the Netroots, Obama has bigger fish to fry. Or look at it this way: Can you imagine a conservative eschewing the networks or CNN because the interlocutors between him and the voters aren’t to his liking?

The common thread running through Moulitsas' complaint is that Obama's not angry enough. He should be angry at Fox News, and thus have refused to appear there even though Chris Wallace is hardly a pit-bull. He should have "taken on" Fox News, potentially offending Fox's millions of viewers but "electrifying" a hundred thousand or so blog readers.

The last complaint is especially telling. The charge that the Obama campaign is "a bunch of liars" is a potent one. It shows that a measure of the anger that the far left habitually vents could well be headed in Obama’s direction. The Netroots love blaming political setbacks on their politicians failing to "act like Democrats" which by their definition includes frequent instances of spittle-flying rage. In appearing on Fox News, Obama has failed to act like a properly enraged Democrat in a big way.

Lastly, the Moulitsas' grievance reveals the Netroots' unbecoming self-importance. Blogs are an important thing; as an alumnus of the blogopshere, I’d be the last to argue otherwise. But the accrediting of Fox News does not depend on some hundred thousand blog readers, but rather the network's far more massive audience of a few million eyeballs. Chris Wallace is a serious newsman. No one (with the exception of a purple-faced Bill Clinton) has argued otherwise. Obama had a positive appearance with Wallace yesterday, and certainly based on that experience he has no reason to fear a return engagement.

As for the significance of this Kos post, the best way for a politician to use the blogs is as an early alarm system. Things often percolate in the blogosphere before entering the mainstream media and becoming part of the campaign narrative. It seems like Markos has concluded that Obama isn’t tough enough.

Funny – I’ve reached the exact same conclusion. Obama's tendencies to vacillate, equivocate and to try to befriend everyone suggest that he lacks the requisite feistiness to be president. If Obama has to begin dealing with a "wimp factor" on top of all the other baggage he’s currently lugging, that may be more than his candidacy can bear.

Jonathan Alter on Barack Obama:

"Opposition to him is not so much old-fashioned racism as fear of the 'other,' with the subtext not just our tortured racial history, but tangled views of class and patriotism."

Hmm. Maybe opposition to Obama is not so much any of the above as it is opposition to Obama's politics? Opposition to a policy program that calls for higher taxes to pay for bigger government, more regulation, and a less assertive foreign policy?

Nah, that couldn't be it.

George F. Will on Michelle Obama:

"Michelle, who was born in 1964, says that most Americans' lives have 'gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl.' Since 1960, real per capita income has increased 143 percent, life expectancy has increased by seven years, infant mortality has declined 74 percent, deaths from heart disease have been halved, childhood leukemia has stopped being a death sentence, depression has become a treatable disease, air and water pollution have been drastically reduced, the number of women earning a bachelor's degree has more than doubled, the rate of homeownership has increased 10.2 percent, the size of the average American home has doubled, the percentage of homes with air conditioning has risen from 12 to 77, the portion of Americans who own shares of stock has quintupled ..."

Barack Obama has promised to roughly double capital gains tax rates -- a move that he acknowledges might reduce tax revenues, but which is needed because it's 'fair.' Friends of ATR points to this piece from USA Today, which explains how much the Obama capital gains tax increase will cost you:

If the current 15% tax rate on both capital gains and dividends, which has been in force since President Bush pushed them through in 2003, are made permanent beyond the 2010 expiration date, the estimated fair value of the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index would be 1523, nearly 9% higher than Friday's close of 1398, says Strategas. In contrast, if Democrat Barack Obama wins and boosts the capital gains tax rate to 28% and dividends to pre-Bush levels of 39.6%, the fair value dips to 1375, or 1.6% below the market's current level.

Simply put, if you have $100,000 in your Roth IRA, and the higher tax rate goes into effect, you'll lose $1,600 from your nest egg. If rates remain the same however, you'll see an increase of $9,000. Will American voters really want to reduce their retirement benefits by 10 percent -- especially when doing so will actually increase the federal budget deficit?

A number of contributors to this blog have written on the controversial tanker deal awarded by the Air Force to EADS, and currently being investigated by GAO (examples here, here, here, here, and here). Now it looks like the House at least, is getting ready to pass legislation to undo the deal:

First, those lawmakers are readying measures that would prevent the Air Force from following through on the contract, which was awarded to a team led by Northrop Grumman Corp. and the U.S. arm of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space company (EADS).

Second, they propose to permanently change Pentagon contracting rules that they believe favor foreign firms over U.S. companies...

The Buy American movement could be helped by a slowing economy, growing concern about the outsourcing of jobs abroad and the pressures of an election year, analysts said. In the House, particularly, the odds are good for passage of legislation related to the tanker deal.

The White House is likely to issue a veto threat on any legislation to retroactively overturn the contract award. This probably gives Boeing advocates in Congress a free pass: they can vote for legislation to protect American jobs, knowing that in the end it won't be enacted. That's assuming of course, that Congressional leaders are content to let the issue die after a veto.

The more significant question is what U.S. trading partners do if and when Congress adopts legislation to reverse the award. Congressional actions typically get a lot of attention in foreign capitols.

The Post reports (via Ben Smith) on Wright's speech at the National Press Club:

...Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks ("God damn America") and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.

In front of 30 television cameras, Wright's audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama's vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio's April Ryan, confirmed that Wright's security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

Go read the whole thing. Wright also gets in a nice dig at the garlic noses: "Britain has apologized to Africans. But this country's leaders have refused to apologize. So until that apology comes, I'm not going to keep stepping on your foot and asking you, does this hurt, do you forgive me for stepping on your foot, if I'm still stepping on your foot. Understand that? Capisce?"

It's hard to see how this could get worse for Obama, who Wright once again denigrates as a mere politician doing what he needs to do to get elected--with the implication being that Obama really does agree with this madness. That can't be true, but it all leads back to the same question: how could Obama sit in this church for 20 years without saying boo.

Attacking the politics of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is like subjecting Penthouse Forum to literary criticism. So when I took in a matinée of the stoner sequel last Friday, I was prepared to overlook the film’s distasteful depiction of our president. I was even prepared to disregard the fact that, aside from Harold and Kumar, no one has ever been sent from American soil to Guantanamo, and the only U.S. citizen ever imprisoned there was released once his citizenship became known.

What crossed the line, however, is that the American soldiers stationed in Guantanamo Bay were portrayed as rapists. Political operatives at the Homeland Security Department are fair game, but I don't think I'm going out on a limb in saying that the film's suggestion our troops sodomize detainees disrespects the many soldiers stationed there who are making great sacrifices to protect our country.

Although it’s hard to believe that Harold and Kumar will be released in any Middle Eastern country, I have no doubt that many foreigners would take this parody of Bush administration policies seriously. Do recall the Turkish film, Valley of the Wolves Iraq, showed U.S. doctors harvesting the organs of detainees to send to Israel.

I hate to pick on Jay Leno, but he really makes it too easy. While Leno is a famous gearhead, he seems to share the same basic misunderstanding as many environmentalists who paint the internal combustion engine as the scourge of the planet. Specifically, he seems to think that if a car is powered by something other than gas, it magically becomes non-polluting:

LENO: it's pretty neat. and this week, we drove -- today, I drove the ford escape hybrid. This is what they call a plug-in hybrid. Now, this is not something on the market yet. It's still a little bit experimental. It's a hybrid car, but you plug it in at home and you get 40 miles free, essentially.

EUBANKS: Whoa.

LENO: So, after about 40 miles, the gas engine will kick in. You can charge up the battery if you drive it again. But my commute is like, 18, 19 miles. So, I drive in, plug it in here, drive home. I use no fuel at all...

If Ford really had developed a car that can travel 18 or 19 miles using no fuel, the company would undoubtedly be doing a lot better. The reality is that Leno is eschewing gasoline in favor of a combination of coal, natural gas, and nuclear to power his car. (That's assuming he lives in the City of Los Angeles and gets his electricity from Los Angeles Water and Power). I don't know how old the Los Angeles coal-fired plants are, but the Sierra Club warns that coal plants are a significant global warming threat.

This is just a reminder that when it comes to policy responses to global warming, you're rarely going to get the unvarnished truth. The lawmakers that point to alternative fuels and CAFE standards rarely talk about the cost to taxpayers and car owners. The Leno example is a reminder that for all the excitement over electric cars, there's no such thing as a free lunch -- no matter who tries to tell you there is.

Stuart Rothenberg is an analyst and columnist for the beltway publication Roll Call. He's also the father of the Rothenberg Political Report, and a contributor to CNN. He suggests that John McCain's 'perfect' choice for VP would be his colleague Joe Lieberman:

Lieberman’s selection to McCain’s ticket would send a clear message about bipartisanship and about McCain’s desire to change the way things are done. While the Democratic nominee surely will talk about bringing people together and “change,” a truly bipartisan McCain-Lieberman ticket would trump any and all Democratic rhetoric.

The selection of Lieberman would have particular appeal to independent voters, who are likely to be a key swing group later this year...

But wouldn’t social conservatives, in particular, go bananas, since Lieberman is moderate or liberal on most issues other than Iraq? He supports abortion rights, generally votes with organized labor and is an unapologetic environmentalist. Conservatives would revolt, wouldn’t they?

Probably not. While there would be the usual fist-pounding from some “movement conservatives,” their anger at the selection would quickly dissipate when they saw the fury unleashed by liberals and Democratic bloggers.

Rothenberg gets a lot right here. One thing he fails to point out is that assuming Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, McCain may have more of an opening to win over Jewish voters who rarely vote Republican. Lieberman would likely be a significant boost to that effort, and could give McCain a tiny edge in states like Pennsylvania and Florida.

I'm not suggesting you bet on Lieberman, but it would scramble the race, wouldn't it?

On Meet the Press yesterday, Tim Russert questioned the accuracy of a new DNC ad about John McCain. Others have even accused Howard Dean of illegally making the ad in coordination with the Clinton and Obama campaigns. In any case, almost nobody will see this inaccurate, possibly illegal ad, because the DNC is near broke. With a measly $5.3 million cash on hand, the DNC trails the RNC by nearly $26 million.

For all the talk in the blogosphere about not everything being sunshine and daisies for John McCain, it is wroth noting the RNC can make up a decent part of the fundraising gap. This election cycle, the RNC has raised $50 million more than the DNC, and that’s why the RNC was able to spend almost twice as much in March. Also, with the Democratic nomination looking more in doubt than ever, Clinton and Obama may be hemorrhaging cash as they attack each other all the way until the Democratic Convention.

From Rev. Wright's address last night to the NAACP:

"Africans have a different meter, and Africans have a different tonality," he said. Europeans have seven tones, Africans have five. White people clap differently than black people. "Africans and African-Americans are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style," he said. "They have a different way of learning." And so on.

And from Reggie White's famous address to the Wisconsin Legislature in 1998:

White said he has thought about why God created different races. Each race has certain gifts, he said.

Blacks are gifted at worship and celebration, White said. "If you go to a black church, you see people jumping up and down because they really get into it," he said.

Whites are good at organization, White said. "You guys do a good job of building businesses and things of that nature, and you know how to tap into money," he said. "Hispanics were gifted in family structure, and you can see a Hispanic person, and they can put 20, 30 people in one home." The Japanese and other Asians are inventive, and "can turn a television into a watch," White said. Indians are gifted in spirituality, he said.

"When you put all of that together, guess what it makes: It forms a complete image of God," White said.

There is a striking similarity here.

Update: For the record, I'm a huge Reggie White fan. And nobody disputes he was a decent guy who did a lot of good for his community. A reader complains, "Lots of Packer fans would vote for an alien space lizard if he had Reggie White's endorsement." Perhaps true, but despite White's admirable character, he had some pretty loopy opinions on race, as does Rev. Wright. And of course, no presidential candidate would have attended White's ministry for 20 years to hear about how the Japanese make great watches because that's God's plan.

The party's over:

In a Democratic Primary in Indiana today, 04/28/08, 8 days until votes are counted, Hillary Clinton finishes ahead of Barack Obama, according to a SurveyUSA poll conducted for WHAS-TV in Louisville and WCPO-TV in Cincinnati. The results are identical to a SurveyUSA TV poll released 4 weeks ago, on 04/01/08. Clinton led then 52% to 43%, leads now 52% to 43%.

It's hard to see how Obama can pull this out, especially given Hillary's impressive performance among late deciders throughout the primary season. Insult to injury: "Hillary Rodham Clinton has a better chance than Barack Obama of beating Republican John McCain, according to a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll that bolsters her argument that she is more electable in the fall than her rival for the Democratic nomination."

This couldn't play out better for conservatives. Yes, yes, McCain is still a big time underdog in the general election, but Hillary's going to close this thing out with wins in Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico. Worst case for conservatives, Dean corrals the supers in mid-June and Obama takes the nomination despite deep doubts about his electability.

And here I thought it was Pershing Missiles and the Strategic Defense Initiative, not boring soap operas.

After a long hip parade of unironic countercultural icons such as Luke of "Cool Hand Luke" and Randle Patrick McMurphy of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Dallas" created a new archetype of the anti-hero we loved to hate and hated to love: an establishment tycoon who's always controlling politicians, cheating on his boozy wife and scheming against his own stubbornly loyal family. But no matter how evil various translators tried to make J.R. and his milieu ("Dallas, you merciless universe!" ran the French lyrics added to the wordless theme song), viewers in the nearly 100 countries that gobbled up the show, including in the Warsaw Pact nations, came to believe that they, too, deserved cars as big as boats and a swimming pool the size of a small mansion.

Joseph Stalin is said to have screened the 1940 movie "The Grapes of Wrath" in the Soviet Union to showcase the depredations of life under capitalism. Russian audiences watched the final scenes of the Okies' westward trek aboard overladen, broken-down jalopies -- and marveled that in the United States, even poor people had cars. "Dallas" functioned similarly.

Next up: unifying the Korean Penisula with The Hills.

From the New York Times: Hillary Gets No Respect, by the boss.

From THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Go For the Bitter Bloc, by Reihan Salam.

From the New Yorker: Bill vs. Barack, by Ryan Lizza.

From Newsweek: Dear Senator Obama..., by Karl Rove.

From City Journal: An Anatomy of Surrender, by Bruce Bawer.

It seems like Obama's pastor problem isn't going away anytime soon.

Obama appeared on Fox News Sunday yesterday, and Hot Air's Ed Morrissey sums it up: "It wasn’t a disaster, but it still reveals Obama to be out of touch and hard to the Left. Don’t expect this to help in Indiana."

The most talked-about soundbyte from the show is Obama's admitting that Rev. Wright is a "legitimate political issue." After denouncing the NC GOP's attack ad featuring Wright, McCain seems to have changed his tune as he said after Obama's FNS interview, "I believe that Senator Obama does not share those views. But Senator Obama himself says it’s a legitimate political issue so I would imagine that many other people would share that view and it will be in the arena." Politico's Ben Smith explains that "he said, more or less, that he didn't plan to attack Obama on Wright, but that Obama--by calling the question 'legitimate'--had legitimized it." As NRO's Jim Geraghty says, "Apparently the Obama campaign expected John McCain to argue with Obama that his relationship with Wright wasn't a legitimate issue." And this is unfortunate timing for Obama: Wright provided more outrageous comments while speaking to the NAACP last night (and surely will provide more after his speech at the National Press Club this morning).

The Corner's Byron York says simply, "Wright is a continuing disaster for Obama." At Contentions, Jennifer Rubin explains why: "Wright seems to be on a speaking tour designed to test the endurance of Democratic primary voters for deeply offensive rhetoric about America, whites, Israel, Italians, and numerous other topics."

And bloggers think that the latest from Wright will certainly hurt Obama. As Marc Ambinder put it, Wright "seems not to care about Barack Obama's politics or aspirations anymore." Hugh Hewitt says, "With a week of wall-to-wall Wright ahead, it is hard to see how Obama wins Indiana, a near home-field loss which would be yet another hammer blow to the collective consciousness of the super-delegates." And Hot Air's Ed Morrissey concludes, "Wright spent his time talking about differences; McCain can now start talking about what we all have in common. While Obama’s pastor reminds everyone that his Trinity United years, with Obama in attendance, focused on neurological buncombe to divide blacks and whites, McCain can unite Americans based on the American concepts of freedom and liberty."

Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Lin Zhao, a fearless critic of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party who was executed at the height of the Cultural Revolution. This past February, a campaign was launched in Chinese cyberspace calling on the public to gather on April 29 by her tomb in Suzhou, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, for a memorial.

The online proposal seems to have caught the eye of the authorities. Hu Di, one of the signatories, has been summoned by police for questioning. Video cameras have reportedly been installed around Lin Zhao’s grave. A plaque marking the entrance to the cemetery has been removed, and local residents have been instructed by police not to disclose the location of her tomb.

Lin Zhao is the pen name of Peng Lingzhao. In 1957, while studying at Peking University, she was branded a "rightist" and a "class enemy" after criticizing Mao’s Anti-rightist Movement.
In 1960, Lin Zhao drafted a petition regarding the case against Peng Dehuai, the Red Army commander and onetime defense minister who incurred Mao’s wrath for his criticism of the disastrous Great Leap Forward. In October of that year, Lin Zhao was arrested on charges of "active counter-revolution" for publishing an underground magazine. Shortly after her arrest, Lin Zhao’s British-educated father, who had himself been labeled a "counter-revolutionary," committed suicide by taking rat poison.

In 1962, Lin Zhao was sentenced to 20 years in prison. While there, she continued her writings. After the authorities confiscated her pen and paper in September 1964, she used a hairpin dipped in her own blood to write poems and essays on her cell walls, clothes, and bed sheets.

On April 29, 1968, Lin Zhao’s 20-year sentence was changed to death by immediate execution. Gagged and handcuffed, Lin Zhao was shot dead at Longhua Airport in Shanghai. She was 36. Her mother and sister learned of the execution two days later when the police showed up at their doorstep demanding payment for the bullets used to kill her.

The beefed-up security at Lin Zhao’s tomb in anticipation of tomorrow’s graveside memorial is Beijing’s most recent attempt to erase her from the collective memory of the Chinese people. The majority of her writings remain sealed by the authorities. A 2004 documentary titled Looking for Lin Zhao’s Soul was limited to private showings. Filmmaker Hu Jie lost his job with the official Xinhua News Agency because of his involvement in the project. And Lu Xuesong, an instructor at the Jilin College of Fine Arts, was suspended after showing the film to her students.

What has the Chinese government got to fear from a woman who perished four decades ago? Organizers of the memorial expressed one view when they noted that "even though Lin Zhao’s country has witnessed many changes in the 40 years since her passing, the totalitarian politics that she strove to change remain the same."

In Afghanistan. I hope this one involves member states actually...y'know, fighting.

NATO will be changing tactics and strategy in Afghanistan, according to the head of the alliance's Operations Section.

"We've learned the lessons and we're refocusing [ISAF's campaign]," said Brett, adding that one strand of ISAF's new effort would be to put a Provincial Reconstruction Team of military and civilian development personnel in each of Afghanistan's 32 provinces.

ISAF's other objectives include efforts "to boost co-operation with Afghanistan's neighbours and to increase [its] support along the [Afghan-Pakistani] border" to counter the Taliban's cross-border manoeuvres, he continued.

Guess not. Hope remains though, as NATO has proven more than willing to jointly bomb the bejesus out of Scotland.

An old political boss of mine liked to say, "Sometimes in the heat of battle you shoot some of your soldiers." I’ve seen his observation play out -- figuratively of course -- numerous times over the years. And now it looks like it happened again, as some electoral shrapnel landed on the Democrats in Pennsylvania according to this Rasmussen poll released late last week.

The survey suggests fierce competition and negative ads in the primary there took a toll on both Democratic presidential contenders. It shows John McCain gained ground on both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, compared to two weeks before, giving credence to some Democratic strategists' worst fears that the intra-party battle would end up damaging whoever wins the nomination in the November election.

According to Rasmussen, "two weeks ago in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a nine-point lead over McCain and Barack Obama had an eight-point edge over the Republican hopeful. Now, however, Clinton’s lead is down to five points and Obama trails McCain by a point."

George H.W. Bush (1988) was the last Republican to win Pennsylvania. Collateral damage caused by Democratic infighting might help John McCain put the Keystone state back in the win column 20 years later.

Lots of babble in the press and among the cable TV gasbags about the network exit polling being off in Pennsylvania due to race. This is worth some discussion over the entire pagan's Cathedral of media polling. First, the media's obsession with polls is a big weakness in modern political coverage. For some reason many in the media elite forget polls are never static and make silly predictions based on early polls that later prove to be very premature. These polls fuel the worst in mindless herd journalism. I have clear memories of this from more than a year ago when I was predicting Obama would win the nomination despite Hillary's "invincible" lead in the polls. More than one poll waving expert journalist laughed at me.

The problem is that all too many people who loudly opine about polls and campaigns have little idea of how polls actually work. All polling, including Pennsylvania exit polling, has a certain built-in error factor. Statistical science demands a truly random sample of the exact population one is trying to measure and in today's America achieving that is pretty much impossible. Some people don't answer the phone, some people lie on the phone to interviewers, some people don't have landline phones at all. So all phone polling today is pretty much a highly educated (and usually quite accurate) guess.

Exit polls are especially heavy on the guesswork; how do you get a perfect random sample of people who actually turned out and voted in a given election? You can try, as the networks do, with a mixture of phone polling to self-proclaimed absentee voters, real live precinct exit sampling, and computer modeling based on some actual early results to try to project specific turnout. The big problem here -- beyond the sampling stuff -- is that all exit polling is initially modeled to history as regards turnout. But some elections have different turnout from the historical average and it is very hard to adjust that to perfection on the fly. One should always keep in mind that exit polling was designed by political scientists as a tool for analyzing election results AFTER they happened, not to predict the results with pinpoint accuracy before the voting is complete. But one day the TV network news carnival showed up in Polling Town and the result was the game show version of exit polling that people are clamoring about today. When all the error factors exit pollsters face are considered, it is actually pretty impressive that most exit polling results are as close to the final results as they are. To hold exit polling to a perfect election night prediction, however, is silly.

As my colleagues noted earlier, Barack Obama made his long-awaited sojourn to Fox News Sunday. Barnett and Goldfarb hit on a couple of important topics, but the boss may have had the most succinct evaluation: An "elegant and attractive performance, but somewhat substance free." About the only thing of interest was Obama’s insistence on raising taxes on the upper-middle and upper class.

On This Week, meanwhile, Clinton-surrogate Evan Bayh laid out the groundwork for counting Florida’s vote in the overall popular vote. "Florida does count in terms of the popular vote. The DNC can choose not to seat the delegates, but they don’t have the right, by law, to not count the votes; the state of Florida counts the votes. They voted for state legislator, for state senator, for Congress . . . they voted to amend the state constitution! As a matter of law, those votes count, and the DNC can’t override state law." Clinton’s newfound lead is, literally, the worst case scenario for the Democrats--it creates the possibility of a convention in which the superdelegates will be forced to choose between a candidate who wisely gamed the system to rack up a big pledged delegate lead by taking caucus states and a candidate who won the most total votes.

Clinton advisor Howard Wolfson showed up on Face the Nation to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of the superdelegates on his boss’s trump card: Obama’s electability. "I think after significant losses in Ohio and Pennsylvania on behalf of Senator Obama," he said, "I think Democrats do have questions about whether or not he is going to be able to reach out and successfully win over the kind of blue-collar voters that Democrats need to win in order to take the White House back in November."

Chris Wallace asked Obama if he would vote to confirm Petraeus as commander of CENTCOM. Obama responded:

Yes. I think Petraeus has done a good tactical job in Iraq. I think as a practical matter, obviously that’s where most of the attention has been devoted from this administration over the last several years.

I was also a big respecter of Admiral Fallon, who Petraeus is now replacing and I think it was unfortunate that the administration wasn’t listening more to the observations of Fallon that we have to think about more than just Iraq. That we’ve got issues with Iran and Pakistan and Afghanistan and our singular focus on Iraq I think has distracted us.

My hope is that Petraeus would reflect that wider view of our strategic interests.

Obama has no choice but to pretend that Iraq is a tactical sideshow with little relevance to our broader conflict against Islamic extremism. This is why he praises the 'good tactical job' Petraeus has done in Iraq but in the same breath falsely asserts that the general hasn't viewed Iraq in the 'wider view of our strategic interests.' Though ignored by most in the media, just two weeks ago Petraeus explained, in his opening congressional testimony, how Iraq fits into our broader conflict with al Qaeda and why success there will strike a significant blow against Islamic extremism:

As we combat AQI we must remember that doing so not only reduces a major source of instability in Iraq, it also weakens an organization that Al Qaeda's senior leaders view as a tool to spread its influence and foment regional instability. Osama bin laden and Ayman al- Zawahiri have consistently advocated exploiting the situation in Iraq, and we have also seen Al Qaeda-Iraq involved in destabilizing activities in the wider Mideast region.

Why does this matter? Obama opposed the surge and went even further by voting to cut off funds to American combat troops in the field. Had Obama prevailed, the surge wouldn't have happened, our enemies in Iraq would be on the offensive, and an energized al Qaeda leadership would be declaring victory over America.

Obama can't let this -- that the surge has been critical to our overall war -- become the narrative, so he will do everything possible to diminish the value of our gains there when talking with voters and downplay the consequences of his own reckless withdrawal policy. This is exactly what he did on Fox today.

It seems like a long time ago that Barack Obama delivered these stirring words in the wake of his victory in the Iowa caucuses:

On this January night - at this defining moment in history - you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do. You have done what the state of New Hampshire can do in five days. You have done what America can do in this New Year, 2008. In lines that stretched around schools and churches; in small towns and big cities; you came together as Democrats, Republicans and Independents to stand up and say that we are one nation; we are one people; and our time for change has come.

You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that's consumed Washington; to end the political strategy that's been all about division and instead make it about addition - to build a coalition for change that stretches through Red States and Blue States. Because that's how we'll win in November, and that's how we'll finally meet the challenges that we face as a nation.*

My, how times and the perceptions of Barack Obama have changed. Will his unifying rhetoric someday seem as much a quaint curiosity as George W. Bush's promise to be a uniter and not a divider?

OBAMA BRAVELY ENTERED the lion's den this afternoon, daring to answer questions from the ferocious Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. People who have lives and don't set their Sunday plans around the Beltway weekend chat-fests are probably wondering how he did. (I'm sure our Sonny Bunch will be along shortly with his take.)

I say Obama did quite well for himself. Earlier today, I posted something that analogized Obama to Ronald Reagan. Well, brace yourself, because here comes another Reagan/Obama comparison. When Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980, the most common charge that Reagan had to handle was that he was a crazed warmonger who couldn't wait to blow up the world. The best way for Reagan to counter these charges was to appear on TV and let his natural affability shine through. The narrative that Reagan's foes peddled didn't square with the genial 69 year-old candidate who popped up in America's living rooms.

Right now, the biggest threat Obama faces is the solidifying narrative that he's an elitist who comfortably keeps company with some rather unsavory characters. His associations have led many to infer that Obama isn't just a liberal, but a member of the fringe left, a part of this country that repulses the majority.

When Obama makes appearances like this morning's on Fox News Sunday, he helps dispel this narrative. He's likable and engaging. He's appealing. He certainly doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would condone bombing the Pentagon or support a pastor who yells "God Damn America!" In other words, Obama got great mileage out of this morning's performance. Even though he’s a clunky extemporaneous speaker (as Reagan was in the latter part of his career) and stumbled over his own words repeatedly again this morning, he should make appearances like today's a habit.

Of course, Obama didn't do anything today to add more substance to his unity shtick. His claim that he stood up to the left by supporting John Roberts even though he voted against Roberts's confirmation comically highlighted the emptiness of Obama's rhetoric. Nevertheless, this was a good morning for the Obama campaign, which will have to tackle its existential threats one at a time.

(*HT: Someone else quoted Obama’s Iowa speech and noted his relative fall from grace since then, but I forget who. Sorry. May have been Tom Maguire. He does lots of clever stuff.)

In their own kooky way, the Kos Kids are making peace with Barack Obama's decision to appear on Fox News. Diarist "Eugene" explains how he has managed to make peace with Obama's apparent betrayal:

When Obama suggests going to Tehran to meet with Ahmedinejad, he's saying the functional equivalent of "I should go on Fox News."

Will someone promise to wake me when the transpartisan healing begins?

In Friday's New York Times, Paul Krugman attacked Barack Obama's campaign for its reliably vapid tone:

From the beginning, I wondered what Mr. Obama's soaring rhetoric, his talk of a new politics and declarations that "we are the ones we’ve been waiting for" (waiting for to do what, exactly?) would mean to families troubled by lagging wages, insecure jobs and fear of losing health coverage. The answer, from Ohio and Pennsylvania, seems pretty clear: not much. Mrs. Clinton has been able to stay in the race, against heavy odds, largely because her no-nonsense style, her obvious interest in the wonkish details of policy, resonate with many voters in a way that Mr. Obama's eloquence does not.

Yes, I know that there are lots of policy proposals on the Obama campaign's Web site. But addressing the real concerns of working Americans isn't the campaign's central theme.

For what it’s worth, unlike many of his peers, Krugman has steadfastly resisted entering swooning mode when it comes to the Obama campaign. To date, no charges have run up the columnist's leg. And if they have, Krugman has shown admirable discretion and kept such private moments to himself.

Krugman's complaint echoed a line of thought that drifted around the Netroots for the first year of the campaign until they collectively settled on Obama as their guy after John Edwards retired from the field and repaired to his humble North Carolina abode. Before Edwards' exile, liberal bloggers often angrily noted Obama's refusal to build his campaign around progressive issues. They also didn't much care for his lack of anger and his willingness to reach out to such contemptible creatures as Republicans.

Even this weekend, prominent lefty blogger Matt Stoller took a swipe at Obama for appearing on today’s installment of Fox News Sunday, having the audacity to reach out to millions of voters who don’t get all their news from the Daily Kos and Keith Olberman:

I also don't believe the Obama campaign when they say that Obama took 'on Fox News'. It is also telling Obama has not posted on Dailykos since 2005.

There are a variety of backchannel conversations based on this comment from Chris Wallace wondering, in shock, why Obama would legitimize Fox News like this. It's stupid, right? It doesn't help him, correct? I think so. He doesn't.

I'll admit the last paragraph isn't entirely decipherable. And I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the utter soundproofness of the left wing echo chamber in that it somehow concluded that the most watched cable news network somehow needs legitimizing. More on point, it seems that the Obama campaign has gotten under the Netroots' skin. Indeed, the relationship between Obama and the most vocal progressives has been testy since day one.

So what's this all mean? For the moment, probably nothing. Although it's become trendy in some parts to say Clinton actually has a chance of wresting the nomination from Obama, Obama remains the prohibitive favorite. But the Krugman column and the Stoller critique illustrate the flimsy foundation that the Obama campaign rests on. Obama has created a campaign whose appeal is almost entirely based on personality.

Too many conservatives spend too much time idealizing the Reagan era while sorrowfully disparaging the present, but Reagan's example is actually quite instructive when it comes to Obama. If you think back to the Gipper, his popularity rested as much on his clear stances on the issues as it did his attractive personality. One could say the same for John Kennedy.

Those men were identified with specific issues that were bigger than themselves. The Obama movement is different, as the movement and the man are one in the same. Therefore, when some of the shine comes off the man, some of the shine also comes off the movement.

Here's something I don't say everyday: Krugman and the Netroots have been right all along. By shooting for a cult of personality and eschewing the more quotidian task of using his soapbox to seriously address the country's critical issues, Obama has sewn an enormous vulnerability into the fabric of his candidacy.

PBS will debut their new reality series Carrier on Sunday night. The show features an unvarnished look at life aboard the USS Nimitz and includes some scenes that may reflect poorly on the Navy according to the Los Angeles Times. But the paper also reports that Adm. Gary Roughead emailed "approximately 1,000 senior active, reserve and retired officers, and civilian executives, earlier this month to explain why the Navy agreed to the series, and to allay fears about the program’s potential negative impact." It should make for interesting television one way or another, and at least one Navy blogger thinks the gamble is likely to pay off.

Some unconventional wisdom from the Australian:

THE US war in Iraq has strengthened its strategic position, especially in terms of key alliances, and the only way this could be reversed would be if it lost the will to continue the struggle and abandoned Iraq in defeat and disarray.

Eli Lake reports on the latest developments in the Syrian/North Korean reactor story. He quotes David Frum, "It's Almost Like They Formed An Axis or Something."

Allah posts the definitive takedown on today's Times editorial: "The MSNBC-ization of the editorial page is thus complete."

Hillary lays down the gauntlet, challenging Obama to a Lincoln-Douglas style debate.

Counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen returns to the blogosphere with a new post at the Small Wars Journal.

And Michael Weiss has a good piece up at PJM on Obama's arrogant new strategy.

Winning Pennsylvania is the worst thing that could have happened to Hillary Clinton. Had she lost, her now ragtag campaign would have been mercifully put out of its long misery. Barack Obama alone would be accountable for his general election performance. Instead, Clinton won Pennsylvania's primary with a strong margin and the Democratic race has a new media narrative. Obama is no longer the perfect general election juggernaut, inspiring new voters and driving fear into the hearts of Republicans. He's become a general election loser who cannot attract the vital votes of white blue collar Democrats.

While all of this cocktail party supposition is unproven since the actual general election is months away and spring primaries are very different contests from fall elections, the damage to Obama has been done. Weeks from now, when the dust settles after a few more final primaries and the odd Clinton tactical victory, the pre-convention rubbishing of Barack Obama will be complete and the credit for most of it will go to Hillary Clinton.

She is likely to pay a price for it in the future, when it is likely she will at least try to run again. She will face a penalty for wounding a presumptive Democratic nominee and helping make a general election race far more competitive than anyone thought it would be.

In fact, if the GOP has a large Bronze medal of distinction, we should cast one at once and gleefully award it to Mrs. Clinton for her meritorious service to our cause. For seldom has the generic environment looked so bad for Republicans. November will still be difficult and much is now uncertain, but is does appear that a perfect storm could be brewing. First, the nomination of John McCain, a different kind of Republican in a year where only such independence can survive. Second, a long and damaging Democratic primary pitting one vital part of its base in deadly combat against another and continuing that fight long beyond a sensible conclusion. Mrs. Clinton's hand alone is on this throttle of Democratic fratricide and she appears to be accelerating the engine of Democrat destruction rather than easing it back.

From the Times Online:

"Iraqi forces see victory in Basra"

The paper's Baghdad correspondent notes that "Iraqi soldiers are standing proud in Basra," and that "many of them say the operation has boosted their confidence." So, more evidence that this wasn't quite the humiliating defeat the New York Times first reported.

HT: Instapundit

Via Hit & Run, a Harris Interactive poll of climate scientists:

A slight majority (54%) believe the warming measured over the last 100 years is not “within the range of natural temperature fluctuation.”...

Based on current trends, 41% of scientists believe global climate change will pose a very great danger to the earth in the next 50 to 100 years, compared to 13% who see relatively little danger. Another 44% rate climate change as moderately dangerous.

In addition, "84 percent believe that man-made global warming is occurring." Color me unimpressed. If 16 percent don't believe man-made global warming is occurring--that's a minority, but hardly a lunatic fringe. Sort of like thinking John Edwards would make a good a president, except with a chance you might be proved right. And what about the degree of confidence? Only 74 percent believe there is actual evidence of man-made global warming, which leaves 10 percent who take it as an article of faith--not very reassuring.

Bottom line: more than a quarter of all scientists don't see any conclusive evidence of man-made warming, which leaves us well short of anything that might reasonably be called a scientific consensus.

Last year Congress cracked down on banks making too big a profit off of student loans. Democrats were delighted to stop rapacious lenders like SLMA from taking a pound of flesh from America's students. Speaker Pelosi was so proud of the bill that she even convened a photo-op intended to make it look like a presidential signing ceremony, and then instructed people to applaud (around 1:56).

The only problem with slashing the rate of return on student loans? Lenders are now losing money hand over fist. Sallie Mae continues to write loans in the hopes that Congress fixes the mess it created, but many other banks have dropped the business entirely.

Congress is frantically trying to enact a fix before May, when many college-bound students will be submitting loan applications. But rather than admit their error and repeal the bad bill they passed last year, Democrats in Congress are getting ready to craft a bill that provides taxpayer subsidies to hurting lenders:

Usually, the law of unintended consequences takes so long to reveal itself that no one remembers the culprits. But the speed at which Congress's student lending changes have gone south is raising political danger for Democrats, if Republicans had the wit to point it out. (They don't; that's why they're Republicans.)...

The result is that the same man who authored last year's bill to cut lenders' returns has crafted a new bill to subsidize those same lenders. Last week the House passed Education and Labor Chairman George Miller's latest foray into collegiate finance. The bill gives the Department of Education new authority to purchase loans directly from lenders.

To summarize: Congress mandated a return on student loans that is too low to attract private capital in the current market. So Congress will now use your money to create artificial investor demand. Taxpayers will bear more risk so that Congress can fashion a new business model to replace the one it just destroyed. The Bush Administration, unwisely but typically, has endorsed this approach.

The hypocrisy defies belief. And it gets worse when you realize that Congress is also trying to convince the Fed and the U.S. Treasury to take on these nonperforming student loans, even as they criticize the Fed for accepting bad mortgages. It seems the essential difference is that if the Fed puts itself on the hook for the student loans, at least the Senate might not look so bad. Not to worry though -- at the end of the day it'll all be papered over with a little more taxpayer money.

Marc Ambinder found it, and it's pretty consistent with the rest of the stuff they've tried lately.

He's expected any minute at the Indianapolis Star. Click on the video to watch. Via Ben Smith.

An unvarnished assessment from Dan Wofford, the son of Harris Wofford and an Obama supporter:

8. Working class PA folks, esp those over 45, don't trust Obama...this is a problem and other than getting them to meet Obama retail style...don't know how we solve it, unless we can get him to do a quick tour of duty in Iraq...

9. Losing the Catholic and Jewish vote: Way to[o] cautious in outreach to Jewish community...did not put enough assets out on the table...not enough Jewish folks involved....self perpetuating problem...Think the same is true for Catholics.....A friend close to the campaign said she was surprised to see how few Catholics and Jews there were on the campaign...don't know how true this is...but most campaign's we've been on, Catholics and Jews seem to predomoinate....As a proud Wasp, I have been an oppressed minority in many a campaign...

Worth reading the whole thing, which was obtained by the Politico's Ben Smith. Wofford does think bittergate had an impact, but to me the most interesting bit here is his conclusion that Obama was "way too cautious in outreach to Jewish community." Obama has Jew problems, but more importantly he has Israel problems. Whether he would, in the event, be just as strong a supporter of Israel as McCain or Clinton is irrelevant, because nobody but Obama supporters believe that to be the case (and their idea of "support" may be different from the rest of us). Obama needs to make an effort to assuage the doubts about his candidacy among those who view Israeli security as an important issue--the vast majority of whom are not Jewish, though they may take some cues from the Jewish community. But he makes no effort to do this.

It seems like Obama will pander on any issue but Israel. No wonder Hamas endorsed him.

Wait a minute. I don't think I can keep up with the science of climate change. I was pretty sure that the ozone hole was bad. Now I discover that it was helping to keep global warming from raging out of control...

The scientists found that as ozone levels recover, the lower stratosphere over the polar region will absorb more harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. This could cause air temperatures roughly 6 to 12 miles above Earth's surface to rise by as much as 16 degrees Fahrenheit, reducing the strong north-south temperature gradient that currently favors the positive phase of SAM, said the research team.

The supercomputer modeling effort also indicated that ozone hole recovery would weaken the intense westerly winds that currently whip around Antarctica and block air masses from crossing into the continent's interior. As a result, Antarctica would no longer be isolated from the warming patterns affecting the rest of the world.

So the ozone hole is bad, because... well, it just is. But if and when the ozone hole closes, we'll face further global warming. And that's bad, because there's a 'consensus' on global warming -- even if the globe is the coolest it's been since 1930, and may be headed for a new ice age.

Or are we still on the last environmental scare? I have a hard time keeping up.

Speaker Pelosi recently appeared with Larry King to discuss the rise in gas prices, but she doesn't seem to pump her gas very often. She's off on the price by about $1.00 per gallon. Remind me again, who's out of touch with ordinary Americans?

It might be helpful to review the climbing price of gas a little, since Speaker Pelosi seems to think President Bush is responsible. She says that when President Bush took office, gas prices were 'a dollar something' per gallon. According to the Energy Information Administration, the national average retail price -- all grades, all formulations -- was $1.51 per gallon in January, 2001. By January, 2007, when Nancy Pelosi became Speaker, that price had climbed to $2.21 per gallon -- an increase of 70 cents per gallon. Now we're up to $3.56 per gallon -- an increase of an additional $2.05 per gallon.

So to the extent that you apportion blame based on 'who's watch' the price rise took place under, gas prices rose 46% in the 6 years of the Bush administration before the Democratic Congress took power. They've risen an additional 135 percent in the 15 months since the Democrats took power. It seems the only logical thing for the president to do is to unilaterally restore Republicans to power, but I suspect Pelosi would object.

No worry though: the Democrats have a commonsense plan to get prices back under control. Perhaps some day they'll share it with the rest of us.

Says Gallup, "Support for Clinton is significantly higher in these post-primary interviews than it was just prior to her Pennsylvania victory, clearly suggesting that Clinton's win there is the catalyst for her increased national support." The pollsters also add that "Clinton is running two points ahead of McCain, 47% to 45%, while Obama is running one point behind, 45% to 46%."

Meanwhile Hillary is running three points behind Obama in the latest poll out of Indiana, but 21 percent of voters have yet to make up their minds. Given that undecideds have broken heavily in Clinton's favor in most of the recent contests, it's certainly possible that she carries the state by a comfortable margin.

Which isn't to say I see anyway she actually wins this thing, but given where things are now, she should win in Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and Puerto Rico. It's just a shame the DNC moved the Puerto Rico primary from June 7 to June 1. This was explained as a "typo," but the move clearly helps Obama. Americans aren't comfortable with the notion that a team, or campaign, can be eliminated despite winning the last contest in a series. Obama will have a much better chance of closing the race out with wins in Montana and South Dakota, now the last two states scheduled to vote.

Still, Clinton will have inflicted a maximum amount of damage (short of inflicting defeat) by setting the narrative for coverage of the general election. There will be doubts about Obama's electability, his support among the white working class, and among Latinos. There wasn't supposed to be any doubt this year.

From the Hotline:

Hillary Clinton, with eight retired military leaders at her back, challenged Barack Obama to let North Carolinians have their own debate, offering to meet him "anytime, anywhere."

If that's not a challenge to Obama's manhood, I don't know what is.

John McCain keeps on flogging the N.C. GOP for this ad featuring Rev. Wright and Barack Obama. This morning McCain said on CBS's Early Show: "I'll do everything in my power to make sure not only they stop it but that kind of leadership is rejected." And he said on the Today show: "They're not listening to me because they're out of touch with reality and the Republican Party. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and this kind of campaigning is unacceptable."

Jim Geraghty wrote yesterday that McCain is being shrewd, but now that a TV station has refused to air the ad, is it possible McCain is too clever by half? Sure, McCain shouldn't lead on the Wright connection, but he's coming very close to making any talk of Wright beyond the pale. This is a legitimate issue--just as John Kerry's slander that his band of brothers were a bunch of rapists and murderers was a legitimate issue in 2004. I would commend this advice from Chris Cillizza to the McCain campaign:

Stop Criticizing Outside Groups: McCain may not like all of the outside money coursing through the system but in an election where he is likely to be badly outspent by the Democratic nominee and his (or her) allied groups, McCain needs some third party spending on his side as a counterweight. McCain has made his disdain for 527s and 501(c)(4)s clear over the past few years, and the donors who fund these groups know it. Republican strategists worry that if McCain is too tough on these conservative aligned groups the donors may take their money and walk away, a situation that many GOP operatives would equate to fighting the general election with one hand tied behind their backs.

From the Washington Post: Obama's 'Distractions'? by Charles Krauthammer.

From TNR: Barack in Iraq, by Michael Crowley.

From the Times: Two Cynical Losers, by Gerard Baker.

From the New York Times: How Not to Build a Ship, by Philip Taubman.

From Contentions: Obama's Radioactive Potato, by Abe Greenwald.

The Wounded Warrior Project kicked off its "White House to Lighthouse Challenge" yesterday with remarks by the president:

Four years ago, Chris Carney decided to ride coast-to-coast to raise awareness and money for our wounded warriors. In the first year he biked more than 5,000 miles, from Long Island to the Pacific Ocean, and raised more than a million dollars for the Wounded Warrior Project. He started what's called the annual Soldier Ride.

The next year, wounded vets started coming along. In 2006, 75 wounded warriors took turns riding portions of the cross-country journey. These servicemen and women rode to raise money for their fellow soldiers, including those who were hurt too much to ride. And they also rode to show themselves what they could do, and in so doing, they showed the world what they could do.

Wounded Warrior is a very worth charity...you can click here to donate and click here for more information.

McCain spoke with bloggers this morning on a number of issues ranging from William Ayers to Rev. Wright to Tony Rezko. Jennifer Rubin noted that Hamas had endorsed Senator Obama and asked McCain whether Obama might have given "an unhelpful signal" to the terrorist group. McCain's response:

All I can tell you Jennifer is that I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States. So apparently has Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare....If senator Obama is favored by Hamas I think people can make judgments accordingly.

Earlier this month, Ahmed Yousef, chief political adviser to the Prime Minister of Hamas, told WABC radio, "We like Mr. Obama and we hope he will win the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy." When Obama campaign manager David Axelrod was informed of the endorsement following last week's debate in Pennsylvania, he said it was "flattering when anybody says that Barack Obama would follow in [JFK's] footsteps."

Ambinder reports:

Peter Daou, Hillary Clinton's internet director, confirms that, by midnight last night, the campaign had recieved more than $10 million in web-based contributions. efforts. Not pledges. Not promises. But $10 million transferred directly from the credit and debit cards of about 100,000 donors. (The average donation was about $100 -- which means that the campaign steered some bigger donors to the net.)

It's an impressive haul, and the largest one day total of the campaign for any candidate. So here's the question: could Republicans be contributing to this number in any significant way? Given McCain's fundraising troubles, there have to be a lot of folks who contributed to Bush in 2000 and 2004 but haven't given a dime yet in this cycle. And if these folks aren't McCainiacs, they almost certainly loathe Obama. Maybe they figure they get more bang for their buck by giving to Hillary.

Jamie Kirchick writing in today's Journal:

In short, Mr. Mugabe's opponents need weapons soon. This is not to effect regime change, but for simple self-defense.

Critics of American support for dissidents abroad often cite how such backing, once it becomes public, could endanger the dissidents' cause and credibility. This critique might make sense in the Middle East, but it does not carry much water in Africa.

Zimbabwe definitely seems like one of those problems where there's nowhere to go but up. What's the worst that could happen if we started sending weapons and funding to anti-Mugabe forces? The guy isn't going to stay in power for ever, so now seems like as good a time as any to start building relationships with the opposition. At least it's a plan, and we don't hear a lot of other bright ideas for solving that country's crisis.

I'm pretty sure I've detected the left's new meme that has arisen out of the ashes of the Pennsylvania disaster: In short, America is not worthy of Barack Obama. In his Time Magazine column, Joe Klein elaborates:

In his 1991 book, The Reasoning Voter, political scientist Samuel Popkin argued that most people make their choice on the basis of "low-information signaling" — that is, stupid things like whether you know how to roll a bowling ball or wear an American-flag pin. In the era of Republican dominance, the low-information signals were really low — how Michael Dukakis looked in a tanker's helmet, whether John Kerry's favorite sports were too precious (like wind-surfing), whether Al Gore's debate sighs over his opponent's simple obfuscations were patronizing. Bill Clinton was the lone Democratic master of low-information signaling — a love of McDonald's and other assorted big-gulp appetites gave him credibility that even trumped his evasion of military service.

The audacity of the Obama campaign was the belief that in a time of trouble — as opposed to the peace and prosperity of the late 20th century — the low-information politics of the past could be tossed aside in favor of a high-minded, if deliberately vague, appeal to the nation's need to finally address some huge problems.

On the one hand, liberal whining of this sort serves a useful purpose, as it sprouts up reliably every four years. It can help the rest of us keep track of time. It's sort of like the Summer Olympics, but without the stupid stuff like synchronized swimming.

But on the other hand, this kind of pouting is awfully annoying. It eventually acquires the flavor of an acorn plummeting to earth and carping about gravity. Politics is and always has been an ugly, full-contact sport. For goodness sakes, the politics of an earlier time were so "low" that Andrew Jackson’s wife was pretty much driven to her death by the antics of his political enemies. It was fortunate for Old Hickory's foes that he wasn’t the grudge bearing type. For more reading on the subject, I commend to you Edward Larson’s highly entertaining book, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign.

Predictably, the whining takes on a particularly grating character when attached to the Obama campaign. If Obama really is so determined to run an unprecedentedly high-minded campaign, why does he insist on mischaracterizing John McCain's comments about "100 years in Iraq?"

In truth, Barack Obama understands that politics ain't pretty. Even Joe Klein probably knows this. They just want the other guy to have to deal with all the ugliness.

Organic foods are suddenly not so popular:

The percentage of consumers who believe organic products are good for them is down to 45%, while those who believe they're good for the environment has fallen to 48%, according to the latest survey from consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail. Both measures stood at a 54% approval rating two years ago.

Higher cost of organic products versus mass market alternatives is a primary deterrent to many consumers, especially during a period when families are already struggling to stretch the household budget.

It's encouraging to see some skepticism regarding the environmental and health benefits of organic products. There's ample reason to question whether consumers are being sold a bill of goods -- perhaps even at the expense of the environment and their health. As always, the Economist produced a superb piece on the problem with the green product movement some months ago. It notes that while it may sound nice to eschew use of pesticides and fertilizers, organic farming produces far lower yields, consumes more real estate, may well use more energy, and produce more pollution related to transportation :

All food choices involve trade-offs. Even if organic farming does consume a little less energy and produce a little less pollution, that must be offset against lower yields and greater land use. Fairtrade food may help some poor farmers, but may also harm others; and even if local food reduces transport emissions, it also reduces potential for economic development. Buying all three types of food can be seen as an anti-corporate protest, yet big companies already sell organic and Fairtrade food, and local sourcing coupled with supermarkets' efficient logistics may yet prove to be the greenest way to move food around.

The piece is dense enough that there's not really one excerpt I can select to do it justice; you should read the whole thing. The answer here is probably not to condemn organic farming, but to call for a reality check. Consumers who pay extra for more expensive products probably ought to be sure that they're actually getting benefit.

According to David Paul Kuhn writing at Politico:

For all the campaigning and money spent, Hillary Rodham Clinton won Pennsylvania with the same base of white women, working-class voters and white men that revived her candidacy in Ohio last month.

Imagine spending all that money and only having white people and the working class to show for it--the horror!

A candidate prone to mistakes on the campaign trail just made another, according to Lynn Sweet:

McCain denounced the North Carolina GOP party ad. "It's not the message of my campaign," he said. He wrote a letter to the state party chairman imploring them to pull the spot. The ad "degrades our civics," McCain said. The Republican National Committee also told the North Carolina party the ad was not "appropriate or helpful."

Obama, in Indiana, said he assumes if McCain "thinks that it's an inappropriate ad, that he can get them to pull it down since he's their nominee and standard bearer." The spot as I write this has not been pulled.

Does Obama really believe that a major party nominee has control over the independent expenditures of the campaign's nominal allies? First of all, the presidential campaign is legally prohibited from coordinating with independent groups that advertise for or against a presidential candidate. Second, the ad in question isn't even a presidential campaign ad; it's an ad for two gubernatorial candidates. Does Obama expect McCain to control other Republican candidates for state office?

Assuming he's the Democratic nominee, will Barack Obama hold himself to such a high standard? George Soros, the labor movement, the environmental community, the antiwar crowd, and others are sure to spend hundreds of millions against John McCain. Obama is clearly implying that if he wants to, he can serve as the filter -- deciding what's fair and what's not. If an ad hits below the belt, or is simply inaccurate, Obama will simply direct the interest group to take it off the air.

That would certainly be consistent with a new kind of candidate, who aims to bring a new style of politics. What makes me doubt he'll deliver?

The number one Senate Republican takeover target this cycle is the Louisiana the seat held by Mary Landrieu. Chances of success improved after the GOP enticed state treasurer John Kennedy to switch parties to challenge her, and after Bobby Jindal won such a resounding victory in the state's gubernatorial race last year.

Then Rasmussen released a poll a few weeks ago showing Landrieu defeating Kennedy by 16 points. You can no longer find the poll results on Rasmussen's site, but the release is cached here. There was plenty of gloating around the Leftoshpere.

The left was right to crow, too. If the GOP was genuinely trailing that badly in their top takeover target, they'd be in real trouble this year. Fortunately, Rasmussen later acknowledged that the poll data was completely wrong:

In other Louisiana Senate news, a spokesman for Rasmussen Reports said that “human error” was to blame for the incorrect Landrieu-Kennedy race polling numbers that were released last week on the company’s Web site. The automated polling company first released figures that showed Landrieu ahead by 16 points and then later took down that release and posted new numbers that showed the race to be within the margin of error. After acknowledging that neither of the polling numbers were valid, the company spokesman said no new polling numbers were available on the race.

Besides not holding a dramatic lead in the polls, Landrieu also trailed Kenendy in first quarter fundraising. That's not a promising position for an incumbent.

Aside from Pennsylvania, the recurrent buzz this week has been Obama's connection to terrorists/criminals Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. The conservative blogosphere has been particularly dilligent in covering yet another of Obama's alarming connections. Power Line's John Hinderaker describes them as "famous radicals, and fugitives from the law, in the late 1960s and early 1970s." In 1995, they held a fundraiser for Obama, and Obama continues to defend his relationship with them despite their anti-American comments as late as 2007. Hot Air's Ed Morrissey explains why all of this is important: "Obama and the Left want to demand an end to the probing of the years-long Obama-Ayers association as irrelevant. Never mind that Ayers has openly bragged of bombing the Pentagon. Never mind that Obama and Ayers voted to give $75,000 to Rashid Khalidi, a Yasser Arafat protege in the PLO, during their tenure with the Woods Foundation."

The past two days, John Hinderaker posted numerous audio clips of Ayers's and Dohrn's hateful comments both past and present. Radio host Guy Benson uncovered the audio. "These clips show that Obama's pals are as unhinged as ever, and they severely undermine Team Obama's spin that Ayers and Dohrn are now 'respectable' members of the political 'mainstream,'" he said. Hinderaker added, "Obama emerged from the far-left fringe of Chicago politics, and his relationship with Ayers and Dohrn, like his relationship with spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright, raises important questions about Obama's own political beliefs." Hugh Hewitt has also been covering the story, and wonders why the MSM didn't find these clips a long time ago, "What else will we be discovering about Barack Obama's friends, and about the candidate?"

Why are these clips, particularly the most recent ones, important? Obama's supporters have claimed that Obama was only a child when Ayers and Dohrn were terrorists, but Ace reminds us that they were "engaging in the hardest of hard-left America-hating rhetoric in 2007 (when, as they note, Obama was at the tender, potty-training age of 47." And Hugh Hewitt reports Politico's Mike Allen's conclusion: "[I]t undercuts Senator Obama’s, one of Senator Obama’s defenses, which is that Bill Ayers’ outrageous statements were made when he, the Senator, was in elementary school."

What does this relationship tell us about Obama? Goldfarb wrote here that "Obama doesn't view left-wing radicals the way the rest of the country does, he doesn't understand why anyone would be upset that he associates with them, and more than that he seems dismissive of any such concerns." Ace adds, "The left continues to insist that prior terrorism against the United States and her citizens, if part of a leftwing 'movement,' is all just a 'youthful indiscretion' easily forgiven and better forgotten. I don't agree, and neither do most Americans."

Obama has some more explaining to do.

Bloomberg reports several potentially massive oil finds off the coast of Brazil:

Brazil's state-controlled Petroleo Brasileiro SA in November said the offshore Tupi field may hold 8 billion barrels of recoverable crude. Among discoveries in the past 30 years, only the 15-billion-barrel Kashagan field in Kazakhstan is larger.

Haroldo Lima, director of the country's oil agency, last week said another subsea field, Carioca, may have 33 billion barrels of oil. That would be the third biggest field in history, behind only the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia and Burgan in Kuwait....

Flannery told clients during an April 16 conference call that 600 million barrels is a ``reasonable'' estimate and suggested Lima may have been referring to the entire geologic formation to which Carioca belongs.

This on top of a recent report by the USGS of at least 4 billion barrels of recoverable deposits in the Bakken formation straddling the North Dakota-Canada border. There may be as much as 15 billion barrels in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, more than 10 billion barrels in ANWR, and there could be hundreds of billions of barrels in the Arctic.

The Bloomberg story says the Brazilian fields "could help end the Western Hemisphere's reliance on Middle East crude." That can't happen soon enough, and it won't, but this type of news does make one more skeptical of claims that we're running out of oil.

Political pundits and the media will bestow a lot of attention on Minnesota this political season. Its Governor Tim Pawlenty is on John McCain’s short list for vice president. Minneapolis-St. Paul is the site of the Republican Convention in November. And, it features one of the country’s most competitive Senate races between incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and comedian Al Franken, the Democratic challenger.

Coleman has built an impressive conservative record in the Senate, and he has a reputation for being honest and hard-working. And Al Franken? What can I say . . . loved him on Saturday Night Live. But this is Minnesota, a state with a deep liberal and sometimes even wacky political tradition. Senators like Eugene McCarthy, Hubert Humphrey, and Paul Wellstone are all examples of the state’s progressive bent and liberal past, while former pro-wrestler turned Governor Jesse Ventura shows Minnesotan’s proclivity for occasionally delving into the electorally bizarre.

So I was heartened to read this Rasmussen poll today that suggests the North Star state’s voters are beginning to see that Senator Coleman deserves reelection.

Any incumbent below 50% in these polls is no doubt vulnerable. So this race will inevitably take some twists and turns. But Coleman was essentially tied a month ago and below 50%. He has now opened up a 7-point lead and is right at 50%. This poll shows him moving in a strong positive direction.

Robert Kaplan weighs in:

That they will again constitute a team overseeing the Iraq war, now at an even higher level of command, means the Bush administration is going for victory in Iraq over all other priorities. Indeed, the personnel changes indicate that the administration is desperate to show enough improvement in Iraq by the end of the year that an incoming Democratic president wouldn't dare reduce troop levels precipitously and risk being blamed for a dramatic security meltdown. To wit, these appointments demonstrate that, irrespective of who will be the next president, the presidential transition has already begun -- on this administration's terms.

Read the rest at the Current.

To secure U.S. permission, Israel actually presented the United States with a video of the Syrian nuclear facility it bombed last September:

Sources familiar with the video say it also shows that the Syrian reactor core’s design is the same as that of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, including a virtually identical configuration and number of holes for fuel rods. It shows “remarkable resemblances inside and out to Yongbyon,” a U.S. intelligence official said. A nuclear weapons specialist called the video “very, very damning.”

Syria’s Ambassador likens this to the evidence the United States presented to the UN about Iraq, and warns Americans not to be so gullible this time around. But the real suckers are reporters, like Seymour Hersh, who buy this drivel. In his story last February, Hersh quotes anonymous Syrian officials claiming the facility only housed a chemical weapons program and the North Koreans were just ordinary construction workers. Yet Syria has extensive experience with chemical weapons and would not need the help of North Koreans to build them. And speaking of chumps, one of Hersh’s original sources is sticking to his story:

David Albright, president of Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and a former U.N. weapons inspector, said the absence of such evidence warrants skepticism that the reactor was part of an active weapons program.

“The United States and Israel have not identified any Syrian plutonium separation facilities or nuclear weaponization facilities,” he said. “The lack of any such facilities gives little confidence that the reactor is part of an active nuclear weapons program. The apparent lack of fuel, either imported or indigenously produced, also is curious and lowers confidence that Syria has a nuclear weapons program.”

To Albright, it is not enough to demonstrate that the Syrians are secretly building an unapproved nuclear reactor with a rogue nuclear state. The burden doesn’t even shift back to the Syrians. Does Albright think the Israeli video was obtained with the consent of the Syrians? Does he think the Syrians would have eagerly admitted UN weapons inspectors? Left-wingers decry so-called climate change deniers, but what amount of evidence will it take them to recant their denials of Syria’s nuclear weapons program?

The new Pakistani government has wasted no time in kicking off negotiations with the Taliban. Just two months after taking office, the government has cut a deal with a radical Taliban group in the Malakand Division of the Northwest Frontier Province. This Monday, a peace deal was struck with the Movement for the Implementation of Mohammad's Sharia Law, a group that sent more than 10,000 fighters to attack U.S. troops during the opening phase of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001 and 2002. The government, which had declared this Taliban group illegal, has openly negotiated with it and freed its leader, Sufi Mohmammed, who was captured while attempting to lead fighters into Afghanistan to attack U.S. forces.

Yesterday, the government announced it was negotiating with none other than Baitullah Mehsud, the man behind the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Baitullah has also led a suicide and military campaign against the military and government over the past two years. Al Qaeda’s senior leadership is believed to shelter in South Waziristan, where Baitullah rules. Al Qaeda maintains terror camps in the region.

The US State Department has weighed in on the negotiations. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher said the department is "supportive"" of the negotiations. "You have to talk to people," said Boucher. "The Pakistani government is engaged in discussion designed to stop violence. It's got to be done in a way that produces results, that reduces violence."

The Pakistani government cut similar deals with the Taliban in North and South Waziristan in 2006 and in Bajaur, Mohmand, and Swat in 2007. The Taliban consolidated control in these regions and expanded their power base into many settled districts in the Northwest Frontier Province. The Taliban never lived up to the terms of the agreements, instead they established Islamic emirates, enforced sharia law, and used their new safe havens to strike inside Pakistan and at Afghanistan, India, and the West.

As a Sopranos fan, I was disappointed to be cheated out of a great death scene to end a superb series. Insult was added to injury however, when one of the more show's more interesting characters -- Johnny Sac -- was revealed to be a Clinton fan.

Now at least, Johnny Sac is pushing a cause I can get behind:

Card Check is likely to be a significant issue in a number of Congressional races this year. The Curatola ad plays well on his Sopranos image, and does a good job of illustrating why workers might not want to lose the right to a secret ballot on unionizing. Do they really want their employers and union bosses to know how they stand on such a decision?

From TWS Online: Paying for the War, by Frederick W. Kagan.

From the Wall Street Journal: Is Obama Ready for Prime Time, by Karl Rove.

From the New Republic: The Next McGovern? by John Judis.

From the Atlantic: Whose Party? by Reihan Salam.

From the Wall Street Journal: What's at Stake in Colombia, by James Baker.

Andrew Sullivan provides a provocative anecdote this morning:

I found out that a friend supported Clinton last night. I was stunned. I asked him why. He said he liked the 1990s, they were good times, he'd like them back. That was it. He had no real feelings about Obama, but he knew the Clinton name and associated it with good times. I pushed further. That was it. He's a man who isn't too interested in politics but knew enough to back the familiar. It may be that simple.

On the one hand, I feel Andrew's pain. As was the case with a lot of conservatives, the Clintons' popularity constantly irritated me in 1990s. What I found especially grating was the way Clinton admirers credited the then-president for our prosperity. The fact that a boom based on ludicrous valuations of worthless dot-coms (among other overpriced entities) either caused or greatly exaggerated our temporary prosperity rubbed further salt in the wounds.

But "the people are dolts" argument that Andrew offers is never a winner in politics, even if Andrew has found one particularly ill-informed individual to buttress it. What's more, the argument sounds especially petty in the wake of a defeat. If you want to run a winning campaign, the last thing you want to do is become Bob Dole beseeching America, “Where’s the outrage?” That question implied that voting Americans were too obtuse to make sense of the world around them.

An additional problem with falling back on the “people are dolts” truism is that it's too easy. It signals surrender, that you're not even going to try to persuade the voters because, after all, they're so flawed as to be beyond persuasion.

The day after the 2006 midterm elections, one of my favorite readers sent me an email imploring me to not slag on my countrymen for failing to vote in the manner I had prescribed. I doubt I would have offered such a column anyway, but the letter offered a sober reminder of a few notions that I hold dear: The American people are good, just and wise. If my side had lost an election, it was by definition our fault. It wasn't as if the American people's sagacity which had been so evident in 2004 had suddenly evaporated.

The fundamental problem with Obama supporters is they want it both ways. They saluted the American people after his triumph in Iowa. Now they've decided that the country is being overwhelmed by halfwits after Pennsylvania.

In truth, Andrew Sullivan's friend notwithstanding, Obama is the issue. He was a brilliant and attractive candidate in Iowa. Can even the most deluded Obama partisan deny that he looks a lot less special now than he did three months ago? In this key area, the pro-Obama echo chamber does the Obama campaign no favors. Obama has real problems that he has to address. Instead, the campaign wishes to slough off these concerns as "distractions." His supporters enable this self-defeating strategy by working themselves into a lather whenever the "distractions" become prominent.

Given the Obama campaign’s dilatory response to existential threats, I’ve posited in many private conversations that it would have been better for John McCain if Jeremiah Wright had become a household name around Labor Day instead of Valentine’s Day. Alas, the Obama campaign will still have 6+ months to right itself. And yet Team Obama's every instinct, and their supporters’ every instinct, is to insist that the Obama campaign doesn't need righting, but that the American people do.

We’ll see how that strategy works out in November.

Brought to you by Abercrombie & Fitch

After the PA primary, everyone was buzzing about the three young guys in Abercrombie & Fitch logo shirts prominently behind Obama during his concession speech (right). Is this a genius new advertising technique? And who is selling who? WWD reports:

But it was Obama's people, not A&F's, who put them there--possibly to bolster the candidate's youth appeal after losing to Sen. Hillary Clinton by a 10-point margin.

"Thanks to the Obama campaign for the great product placement. We wish we thought of it," said Tom Lennox, A&F's vice president of corporate communications. "If Hillary is interested, we've got stores in North Carolina, Indiana and Oregon."

Adding "more white people" to the risers didn't work out so well for Obama in Pennsylvania, but maybe "more white people in A&F logo shirts" will do the trick for Indiana.

It's nearly impossible for Clinton to surpass Obama's pledged delegate lead, but that's been apparent for some time. The question remains how heavily the uncommitted superdelegates must break in Clinton's favor in order to cover the delegate gap.

If the total delegate gap stays at about 130, Clinton would need to win 72 percent of the 303 uncommitted superdelegates. But there are 404 pledged delegates up for grabs in the remaining contests, and in a best case scenario for Clinton, she could make a net gain of 40 pledged delegates. In this case, Clinton would still need 64 percent of the uncommitted superdelegates.

So the odds are long, but not "mathematically impossible" as some like to say. No matter what happens in the remaining contests, Clinton will need the uncommitted superdelegates to choose her over Obama 2 to 1, which is only conceivable if she wins the popular vote. And that's certainly a possibility, especially if you count Florida.

Lastly, it's important to remember that pledged delegates are not bound by party rules to vote for Obama--another reason why Clinton might take this race all the way to the convention.

Nothing:

Kansans will be able to own machine guns, other fully automatic weapons, sawed-off shotguns and silencers starting July 1.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius signed a bill Monday to legalize the possession of such weapons. The state banned owning machine guns in 1933, but some legislators said a change was necessary because legal questions threaten to keep dealers from delivering weapons to law enforcement agencies.

In 2006 Sebelius vetoed a concealed carry law that the state senate ultimately overrode, so maybe signing this bill is just a concession to reality. On the other hand, Sebelius has been mentioned as a possible running mate for Barack, so maybe this is an attempt to up her credibility with Americans who cling to silencers and machine guns out of economic fear.

The New York Times' Patrick Healy, apparently drawing the short straw among Times Obama supporters, has penned a column defending Obama's electability compared to Hillary Clinton's. Most noteworthy is this ringing endorsement:

Yet for all of her primary night celebrations in the populous states, exit polling and independent political analysts offer evidence that Mr. Obama could do just as well as Mrs. Clinton among blocs of voters with whom he now runs behind. (Emphasis added)

The experts that led Healy to such a startling conclusion? Obama campaign advisers. But hey--if the Democrats wish to hang their White House hopes on "could," I for one won't complain.

Healy offers still more theories as to why Obama will be a formidable general election candidate:

Indeed, if Mr. Obama does become the first African-American nominee of a major party, the electoral landscape of the South could be transformed with the likelihood of strong turnout of black voters in Republican-leaning states like Georgia and Louisiana, which Mr. Obama carried this winter.

Hmmm – Georgia and Louisiana only "lean" Republican? Interesting. For what it's worth, George W. Bush squeaked out a 58% - 41% victory in Georgia in 2004. In Louisiana, it was another nail-biter, with Bush prevailing by the razor-thin margin of 57% - 42%. I could further stroll down memory lane and document how poorly Bush fared among African American voters and how in fact the Democrats have little room for improvement in that area, but why bother? It's not like actual facts played any role in Healy's analysis. Anyway, I like the idea of the Democrats sacrificing Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota because they're planning on picking up Alabama.

Healy's piece, afforded precious front page real estate in today's Times and already being lauded on the Daily Kos for "obliterating Hillary’s electability meme," signals a new movement has begun in the Obama campaign. Inconvenient facts will be ignored or distorted, as Obama's supporters frantically circle the wagons in an effort to distract from Obama's political weaknesses.

Wait, I'm sorry – that's not a new movement. That’s business as usual for the swooning Obama-philes. Only now with increased desperation!

When Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats shot down the Colombia Free Trade Agreement earlier this month, I wondered when we'd see mainstream reporters point out their arrogant, go-it-alone foreign policy. Well, Nick Kristof does just that today. Worth reading.

We get a lot of really interesting feedback, and it is always appreciated. I'm going to try and put more of the stuff up here going forward, so please keep sending it...wws@weeklystandard.com

Re: Reid Statement on Petraeus

It's also pretty low for Reid to even suggest, as he does in the last line of the quote you provided, that GEN Petraeus and LT GEN Odierno might undermine the next administration's national security strategy, whatever that might be. Reid is essentially suggesting that these fine professional soldiers (the same ones, BTW, who have "fixed our [previously] costly strategy in Iraq" with "fresh, independent and creative thinking") are merely political operatives of the Bush Administration. Reid is beneath contempt.

Re: Kristol's An Impressive Candidate

I have to admit that this campaign is causing me to develop a grudging respect for Sen. Clinton. Even her most ardent foes have to admire the grit she has shown during this campaign. Do I want her as President? Absolutely not! But I don’t see her as the caricature she was before the campaign. These near death experiences have made her more human to the electorate. I think Republicans are beginning to realize that she would be the more difficult to defeat in November.

Re: Matus's Explaining the Appeal of CNN's Election Coverage

Nice observations in re MATCH GAME, but the clear answer, at least for me, is that CNN's HD coverage, aside from being better eye candy even apart from lines of resolution, fills my big screen. Fox has become my little screen news network.

Fox News' failure to go HD is, for me, the great uncovered media SCANDAL of the '08 election. God help us all if they don't complete the switchover (they're already HD on their business channel and of course on the big network) by convention time.

Re: Noonan's Gates Still Knuckling it out with USAF Brass

You’ve got it. As an active duty Major (physician) in the Air Force I can tell you that the President could fire 2/3 of the active duty Lt Cols, Cols, and Generals tomorrow and not only would no one notice, but the Air Force and American public would be better served. In addition, the Air Force has way too many lawyers on the payroll, and we all know what damage they can do.

Despite continuing to lag in pledged delegates, if Hillary can win the popular vote it would create a strong moral argument for boosting her superdelegate support and chances for the nomination. Even that seems like a heavy lift given the remaining primary schedule, but Jay Cost at Real Clear Politics notes that after her win last night, it is not out of the question.

Yet this race is so close and has experienced so many bizarre shifts (e.g. Florida and Michigan issues), "how" you count popular votes now makes a big difference. Real Clear Politics actually tracks six different categories of popular vote. With last night's win, Senator Clinton now leads in two of the six popular vote counts they monitor after adding the net 215,169 votes she picked up last night. Key to this math is adding the Florida and Michigan numbers to her total, which provides her a popular vote margin of 122,728.

And of course, the argument that every vote should be counted is likely to resonate with some Democratic voters.

An inconvenient truth:

On Friday, it was revealed by ABC News that one of the famous shots of supposed Antarctic ice shelves in the film [An Inconvenient Truth] was actually a computer-generated image from the 2004 science fiction blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow."

Adding delicious insult to injury, this was presented by one of ABC's foremost global warming alarmists Sam Champion during Friday's "20/20".

This brings up a couple of questions. One, how did it take a matinee-idol weatherman to point out this gigantic bit of fraud? (Champion’s usual gig is warning of wind gusts on Good Morning America.) Two, between the truth-stretching, crafty editing, and outright lies of movies like Farenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth, doesn’t the concept of "Academy Award-winning documentary" sound terribly, uh, fictional? Or have moviemakers been drowning in fantasy so long that they can no longer distinguish between fiction and reality?

No word yet on if Gore & Co. received permission from 20th Century-Fox, the studio that released The Day After Tomorrow, to use the iceberg clip--or if they simply liberated it for the good of the people.

Army Times reports:

Concerned that the military is selling pornography in exchange stores in spite of a ban, one lawmaker has introduced a bill to clean up the matter.

“Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit,” said Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., unveiling his House bill April 16.

His Military Honor and Decency Act would amend a provision of the 1997 Defense Authorization Act that banned sales of “sexually explicit material” on military bases.

The good news: Barry Fleming, Broun's challenger in this summer's Republican primary, has outraised him 9-1. Writing in Reason a few months back, Dave Weigel said "Fleming may start this campaign as the favorite, but there is substantial, enduring support for a congressman [Broun] who shares the voters’ contempt for Congress." Yes, contempt for Congress, I wonder where that comes from...

Is it Barack Obama, or the one who's pushing his party to shelve the attack ads?

Presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) has written a letter to the North Carolina Republican Party asking officials to stop running an ad targeting Democratic gubernatorial candidates that features Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and his controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The ad, endorsed at the end by state Party Chairwoman Linda Daves, targets Democratic candidates Beth Perdue and Richard Moore for being "too extreme for North Carolina," but the most prominent person in the ad is Wright, who is seen and heard giving one of his more inflammatory sermons.

I'm not really sure that qualifies as one of Wright's 'more inflammatory' sermons. There are so many to choose from. That said, it's clear who's putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to civility in the campaign. Further, Democrats are undoubtedly going to complain when Wright and other controversies come up due to third party expenditures, but it's Senator Obama who reneged on a deal on public financing that would have committed McCain to push those third parties not to bring up such unpleasantness.

Harry 'the war is lost' Reid put out this statement on Petraeus's move to CENTCOM:

The next CENTCOM commander and field commander in Iraq will have to help the next President with a number of critically important challenges: making America more secure, restoring America's power and influence in the world, fixing our costly strategy in Iraq, and articulating a more effective strategy for winning in Afghanistan and defeating Al Qaeda in Pakistan....Our ground forces' readiness and the battles in Afghanistan and against al Qaeda in Pakistan have suffered as a result of the current costly Iraq strategy. These challenges will require fresh, independent and creative thinking and, if directed to by a new President, a commitment to implementing major changes in strategy...The Senate will carefully examine these nominations and I will be looking for credible assurances of a strong commitment to implementing a more effective national security strategy.

Not a word of thanks or praise for the remarkable job Petraeus has done in Iraq. Stay classy, Harry.

Update: It's interesting to note the contrast with the statement from Lieberman, which praised Petraeus saying he "has won the admiration and respect of the entire country over the past fifteen months." Isn't that objectively true? Or has the Democratic party been entirely co-opted by the 'Betray Us' crowd at MoveOn.org.

Hillary Clinton fundraising chief and noted Fox News admirer Terry McAuliffe took to MSNBC's airwaves (cable-waves?) a few hours ago to boast that that Hillary has raised over $10 million online from over 50,000 new donors since her victory last night. Markos Moulitsas channels my own thoughts on this development: “Impressive if true.”

Assuming it's true, this is excellent news for Republicans who have been hoping for a competitive primary race on the Democratic side that will run right through the convention. Yet it's even better news for students of Terry McAuliffe's insufferability which is sure to be driven to astonishing new heights by this latest coup. The flights of ego that this cash haul will surely generate will leave even veteran McAuliffe observers agape.

Writing at the Atlantic, Ross Douthat speculates on McCain's standing in the head to head, hypothetical match-ups for November. Douthat says this should be a high-point for McCain and yet he seems to have hit a ceiling at 45 percent in most national polls. The problem with this argument is that it's wrong. I'm not alone in having speculated that a drawn out Democratic battle actually hurts McCain. Until the Democrats pick a nominee, there's simply nothing McCain can say or do to make headlines. A divided Democratic convention, moreover, would make for great news, even if it ultimately hurt whoever the Democrats do select.

The most important numbers right now are the head-to-head polls that show McCain is nearly tied with Obama. In this respect, it is a highpoint for McCain who trailed by 5 to 10 points for the first two months of the year. If the Democrats ever decide on a nominee, McCain will work his way back onto the front pages--and his poll numbers should respond one way or the other.

Despite Hillary Clinton's victory yesterday, the Democratic party is likely to nominate for president a candidate who lost primaries in large, key states like California, Florida, Michigan, New York, Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. One reason this will happen is that Obama leads in states won and in pledged delegates. That is because he has won - in addition to primary victories in places like Wisconsin, Illinois, Virginia, and Maryland - almost every one of the caucuses held so far. And he has won many of them - dominated by antiwar grassroots activists hostile to Sen. Clinton - by significant margins. He won Alaska 75 percent to 25 percent, for example; Hawaii 76 percent to 24 percent; Nebraska 68 percent to 32 percent. He also won the Texas caucuses by 12 points. Those margins of victory translate into Obama's probably insurmountable lead among pledged delegates.

When the history of this primary campaign is written, therefore, a major theme will be the Clinton campaign's hubris. It was hubristic to believe that the backing of the party establishment and a sense of "inevitability" meant that grassroots organizing at the state level was unnecessary. It was hubristic to assume that the nomination fight would be over by February 5 - an assumption which led to confusion, the misallocation of resources in the post-Super Tuesday One states, and Obama's string of victories that month.

Thanks to demographics and Obama's past few bad weeks, Clinton now has a (slim) second chance. But all of this could have been avoided. If her campaign had treated the caucuses seriously and won a fair share of them, Hillary Clinton would now be the Democratic nominee for president.

(Thanks to WEEKLY STANDARD intern Robin E. Wright, who helped research this blog.)

At this point, it's rather unclear how Hispanics will vote this year. Barack Obama has had a hard time with this constituency, and John McCain's record of support for legislation to grant visas to illegal immigrants may give him an edge. On the other hand, McCain has been firmer on border security -- at least rhetorically -- during the primary campaign.

One thing is for sure though: the Democrats won't help themselves with tone deaf performances like this.

Yesterday:

The Democratic National Committee, in announcing its 2008 Hispanic Leadership Council, accused McCain of betraying Hispanics on immigration reform and failing to address critical issues such as the economy in an ad he produced in Spanish in New Mexico.

Today:

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus denounced House Democratic leaders Wednesday as "spineless" and no better than Republicans for failing to take on comprehensive immigration reform.

Leaders of the all-Democratic caucus, which numbers two dozen, criticized their party leadership at a news conference for scheduling hearings on enforcement legislation and specific visa issues instead.

So the DNC taps Hispanic leaders to criticize McCain for subordinating the goal of legalization to the goal of border security, while Hispanic Democrats in Congress attack the House leadership for... the same thing.

From the WORLDWIDE STANDARD: Kristol: Petraeus to CENTCOM

From TWS Online: Hillary Builds Her Case, by Fred Barnes

From the Wall Street Journal: Obama's Media Army, by Dorothy Rabinowitz

From RealClearPolitics: Unconventional Thoughts on the Democratic Primary, by Jay Cost

Obama's friend Bill Ayers
Read all about their relationship at Power Line.

From the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

" ... Mr. Obama can be forgiven if he wakes up at night thinking he's in one of those 'Terminator' movies where the machine in the form of a human being just keeps coming. Nothing – not Bill Clinton's gaffes, not the Bosnian sniper-fire fantasy, not even being outspent 3-to-1 – has been able to stop her."

Years ago, Tom Bethell coined the phrase "strange new respect" to describe the media's treatment of conservatives who turn left as they spend more time in Washington. Lately we've been seeing a strange, new "strange new respect," in which the conservative media (grudgingly!) acknowledge the merits and tenacity of ... Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Not John McCain, that's for sure.

Despite being out-spent, out-hoped, and out-changed, Hillary won yesterday’s Pennsylvania primary by about 10 points. She will continue the primary fight, even though she remains out-delegated, and unless she unexpectedly sweeps the upcoming primaries, Obama will be the likely Democratic nominee. Bloggers say this is terrible news for the Democrats, since yesterday's primary really only makes McCain look good.

First, not all Democrats support the inevitable Obama. At the Politico, David Paul Kuhn says, "Hillary Rodham Clinton won Pennsylvania with the same base of white women, working-class voters and white men that revived her candidacy in Ohio last month. The demography that has defined the Democratic race went largely unchanged, according to exit polls." But Hot Air's Ed Morrissey says, "A compelling front-runner should have a large majority of late-deciders breaking his way, not away from him. Obama’s supposed inevitability should have swept him into victory at this late stage. If he can’t swing undecided Democrats, he won’t win independents or centrist Republicans in November against John McCain."

And Bittergate might have contributed to Obama's loss. John Podhoretz explains at Contentions: "Obama outspent Hillary 3-to-1 in Pennsylvania because he thought he could win it. Instead, he lost it. He lost it. He said rural Pennsylvanians cling to their religion and their guns because they’re bitter and they told him to go jump in the nearest vat of Scrapple." And at the Corner, Rich Lowry says simply, “If Barack Obama can make Hillary Clinton a tribune of the people, just image what he'll be able to do for John McCain.” If his snappy comment to a reporter Monday while eating his waffle is any indication, Obama seems like the bitter one now.

Bloggers agree that the Democratic party has trouble ahead. Vodkapundit Stephen Green concludes that Hillary's win "is pretty clear and quite convincing--that Hillary will go on, that Obama is a great pitch man but a lousy closer, and that the Democratic nominating process is dysfunctional at best and bipolar at worst." McQ at QandO explains further: "Democrats are left with the unenviable choice of ending the democratic process by appealing to the superdelegates to choose now and not allowing remaining Democratic primary voters to vote, or letting this run its full course and suffering the consequences in November."

Whatever the Democrats do, it seems like it will be a lose-lose situation. Richelieu says here that the race will drag on and "the only realistic albeit long-shot Clinton scenario, a super delegate reversal and last minute Hillary coup, would rupture the Democratic party." But on the other hand, Hot Air's Ed Morrissey asks, "And just how would it look to Democrats in upcoming states to see Hillary shoved aside after winning Ohio and Pennsylvania by 10 points each? It would look like Obama couldn’t beat her in a tough but fair contest, and he had to be rescued by the party establishment. That, combined with his apparent refusal to meet Hillary in another debate, makes it look like Obama is a cream puff."

Either way, fight it out, Democrats.

Lauren Bush and date with her hideous FEED bag.

Lauren Bush, that is.

Lauren, a model and George W.'s niece, has created FEED Bags (right), which benefit the U.N. World Food Program (H/T Felissa Benjamin). Women's Wear Daily reported that the eco-friendly bags will be sold at Whole Foods and each bag sold "will provide 100 school meals to hungry children in Rwanda."

It's great if you want to donate money to hungry children in Rwanda, and it's fine by me if you want to carry an eco-friendly bag to the grocery store. But these ugly bags are not okay. I'd much rather see these burlap sacks in a cattle pen than on the shoulders of fashionistas.

And to embarrass cousin Jenna--who is reportedly wearing fabulous Oscar de la Renta at her wedding--even more, Lauren might not even be a Republican! New York's The Cut blog reported recently that Lauren's vote for president is "in the air." She said, "I think this election is very exciting. I mean, to have a woman and a black man as leading candidates is pretty amazing, and it's about time."

I guess politics isn't necessarily hereditary.

We may conclude three things with absolute certainty after the Pennsylvania primary.

The first is that Hillary Clinton is a formidable campaigner, and as her deadpan consumption of a shot of Crown Royal attests, possesses the requisite combination of nerve and psychosis to run for president, serve, and thrive. This is the fourth cycle in which we have been assured that Mrs Clinton is a dead duck, and speculation has been rife about who would be delegated (Vernon Jordan? Dianne Feinstein? Hugh Rodham?) to persuade her to withdraw from the race--only to be followed by a decisive victory in an important state for the Democrats.

The second conclusion is that, despite the soothing affirmation of the media--especially after his 'historic' speech on race--Barack Obama has been grievously wounded by the Reverend Wright and Obama's 'bitter . . . cling . . . guns . . . religion' comments about the great unwashed to an appreciative cocktail audience in San Francisco. Suddenly Obama does not seem so much a national treasure as a callow freshman senator who, after a lifetime of being told how remarkable he is, finds himself stunned and angry to encounter resistance.

The third conclusion is that Sen Clinton's prospects for the nomination have risen from the 10 percent universally ascribed to her before Pennsylvania to something in the neighborhood of 35-45 percent. She has every reason to persist; the superdelegates have every reason to ignore Dr Dean and continue enjoying the attention; and she has certainly demonstrated that her appeal to voters is significantly broader than Sen Obama's in places and categories that are critical to any Democratic victory in November.

The death match continues, thank God.

David Gergen from a March 14 broadcast on CNN:

Well, because there's a long tradition, Anderson. And among black leaders to have a different view of American history, going all the way back to Frederick Douglass, who was one of the greatest American heroes of the 19th century, you know, who -- who gained his freedom from slavery in a great order.

He was invited the a July 4th celebration to give a July 4th speech in 1852, and he showed up and said, "You know, you whites see July 4 very differently from what I see it. This is not a day of celebration for us."

And I have found that in my classroom with black students frequently. When they speak their minds and when they speak their hearts, they have a very different view. I've had a young woman tell me, "July 4, we still can't celebrate it in my family, because of what's happened to us."

And I think that we as whites have to be understanding and empathic toward that and try to understand that, that people who are African-Americans legitimately have a different perspective on what American history has meant and take that into account as we hear this.

And it's not a lack of patriotism. It is a different form of patriotism. Actually, Reverend Wright may love this country more than any of us but feel we've fallen short of what we preach and believe.

Exit question: Is it wrong to enjoy David Gergen’s monumental moronitudousnes on a kitsch level?

Alternate exit question: Is it possible to distinguish between the America of 1852 and the America of today?

Paul Auster, looking back at the 1968 Columbia University student uprising: "I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much since that year of fire and blood, and as I sit alone in this room with a pen in my hand, I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever."

A few thoughts in the wake of Pennsylvania.

1) Another reminder that demographics are often far stronger than the campaigns the press obsess over. Despite Obama's huge spending muscle and campaign firepower advantage, PA still looks like Ohio and voted like Ohio. Downscale whites gave a 10 point edge to Clinton in the overall primary race.

2) A great psychological victory for Clinton -- even my esteemed friend Monsieur Kristol appears deeply moved -- but the delegate story remains the same. Obama is still in the driver's seat.

3) The media bounce from PA should be enough to give HRC a shot at Indiana. But would a few more delegates gained in Indiana make any real difference? And Oregon lurks on the horizon, another Obama hole-card.

4) The bottom line: the race goes on and on. But the outcome is still unlikely to change. And the only realistic albeit long-shot Clinton scenario, a super delegate reversal and last minute Hillary coup, would rupture the Democratic party. Another ultimate win for McCain.

AP reports:

The Associated Press has learned that Gen. David Petraeus, the four-star general who has been leading troops in Iraq, has been tapped to become the next commander of U.S. Central Command....

Taking Petraeus' position as the senior commander in Iraq would be Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, who had until recently been serving as Petraeus' deputy.

The allegedly lame duck Bush administration has--if this report is correct--hit a home run. CENTCOM is the central theater of the war on terror, and the president is putting our best commander in charge of it. What Odierno achieved as day-to-day commander in Iraq was amazing (see Fred and Kim Kagan’s article, "The Patton of Counterinsurgency"), and he’s clearly the right choice for MNFI. Bush has done the right thing, overriding opposition from within the Pentagon. He deserves congratulations--and thanks.

Do you find yourself somehow inexplicably drawn to CNN's coverage of the primaries? I do, but for months I didn't know precisely why. There was something so comforting about the format, something so familiar. Then it dawned on me: The studio set-up, the double panel of guests, the host going to each table to get his answers. Quite cleverly, CNN producers have modeled their election team of pundits around the legendary 1970s game show, Match Game.

Host Wolf Blitzer is Gene Rayburn, Leslie Sanchez is Brett Somers, David Gergen is MacLean Stevenson, Gloria Borger is Betty White, Bill Bennett is Richard Dawson, and Paul Begala is Charles Nelson Reilly (strictly because they share the same vocal range).

We just can't seem to change channels because, subliminally, we're waiting for Wolf to say, "Jeffrey Toobin left his blank in San Diego."

Other than the sacking of museums during the early days of the liberation, Iraq’s culture hasn’t gotten much press. Melik Kaylan of the Wall Street Journal tried to set things right on that score. Among the several people he interviewed, all connected to the Iraqi art world, was Nazar Rawy, the director of the Contemporary Visual Arts Society.

Iraqi culture needs to gel [said Mr. Rawy]. We are isolated and lost from each other. We need to be freed from politically directed culture. This will be the true liberation. Where are the intellectuals and artists and filmmakers of America--why don't they help people like us?"

Funny you should ask, Mr. Rawy. The friends and family of Theo VanGogh have wondered the same thing. So let me give you the answer: American intellectuals, artists and filmmakers, by and large, were against the liberation of your country and the routing of al Qaeda. In fact, they’ve demanded that President Bush and his cabinet be tried for war crimes. At the same time, their only responses to Islamofacism are excuses, silence or, in the case of the filmmakers, movies about the evil of your country’s liberation and our country’s government. The reason? Well, I’d suggest you ask them yourself, but they’d duck you in a Hollywood second.

Indeed, Mr. Rawy, you and your fellow artists have shown more courage just running a film festival than your American counterparts will ever possess. Just don’t expect anything as trifling as a pat on the back for your troubles.

Fred Kaplan stakes out a risky position:

In other words, we find ourselves lassoed into an armed intra-Shiite power struggle on two fronts—and the Iranians are positioned to benefit from one or both contests, no matter whether the side we're backing wins or loses.

Whatever the outcome, Kaplan can claim it's a disaster for the United States. And I wouldn't expect anything less of him.

John Podhoretz on the chances of wrapping this thing up early:

Yes. Sure. Because politicians with the most valuable votes in America are just going to choose up sides and not spend three months being courted and feted and promised. They are going to forswear having their feet kissed, their backs massaged, their views requested, their wants fulfilled, their needs anticipated. They are going to throw their vote away rather than milk it for all it’s worth....

A thousand or so people are going to decide this primary. It behooves those people to have this go on as long as possible, because that is how they are going to get the most goodies. Maybe this is what Hillary truly understands.

Howard Dean has admonished superdelegates for the bazillionth time to declare which candidate they intend to support, but don’t hold your breath. The fact is the Democratic superdelegates are in a classic prisoner’s dilemma. It is in their collective interest to wrap up the nomination, but each of them gains influence as they hold out their vote. Dean recently set down a June 3rd deadline for the superdelegates. I’m looking forward to that day: the Democratic nomination won’t be settled, and Dean will inevitably look like the incompetent, impotent party leader he is.

Hillary Clinton’s convincing Pennsylvania victory is the third consecutive back-to-the-wall big-state win she’s managed (following on Ohio and Texas seven weeks ago). She’s done this despite being outspent by Obama, and with most of the Democratic establishment and the media rooting against her. In all, about 16 million people have voted for her so far in this nominating contest. That’s the most votes any presidential candidate has ever gotten in any primary cycle of either party.

So here’s a thought: Maybe we should acknowledge that Hillary Clinton is a pretty impressive candidate. She’s tough, disciplined, and not unappealing. She’s a good debater and adapts pretty quickly (if a bit clunkily) to campaign developments. Her campaign organization and strategists have been inferior to Obama’s--but she’s gotten more total votes than he (counting Michigan and Florida--the voters there are people too!). And she’s done this while bearing the burden of her husband.

So a tip of the hat to Hillary. Fight on!

The numbers are coming in, the exit polls can be seen here, the raw vote totals here. It looks like Hillary will meet but not exceed expectations. A couple observations...

Obama supporters are already starting to spin to the effect that tonight changes nothing, that Hillary remains a huge underdog and she's likely to pick up very few delegates tonight. All entirely true, which is why the damage done here to Obama is so needless. Obama supporters have to be crying on the inside.

Also, Rove keeps talking about the Jews of Montgomery County, my people. If they were crucial there for Hillary, part of it is likely to be female solidarity, but part of it is surely Obama's weakness on Israel--especially with Hillary talking so tough on the issue lately.

Finally, if Hillary manages somehow to pull this thing out, she'll have gone a long way to softening her image among Republicans. Obama may be more electable, at this point he's also more likely to energize the Republican base. Terry McAuliffe just praised Fox News as fair and balanced for being first to make tonight's call, Hillary's out drinking beers, trashing MoveOn, and threatening to obliterate Iran. She's earning a lot of good will on the right.

As I mentioned in my post this morning, I’m watching the late deciders tonight in Pennsylvania. The exit polls report 24% decided in the last week and Clinton won 56%-44% among those voters. Those are encouraging numbers for the Clinton camp.

See the CBS exit poll here.

ABC news pollster Gary Langer points out that Clinton has done better among late deciders in recent contests. Tonight she continued that pattern, which contributed to her victory.

AP reports:

The Iraqi army command in Basra is giving top leaders of the Mahdi Army in the city 24 hours to surrender.

The order comes from Gen. Mohan al-Freiji, who told reporters Tuesday that Basra city and the surrounding province are back under government control.

Al-Freiji says he has warrants for 81 people, including senior leaders of the Mahdi militia, and they have 24 hours to give up.

It's almost like Maliki didn't go crawling to Sadr and the Iranians to plead for a humiliating cease-fire.

Tom Donnelly has a piece on the website today explaining how the press botched this story so badly.

And the revolution is televised by the capitalists at reason.tv:

American cultural hegemony continues to abound throughout the world. Indeed, even as McDonald’s revenue fell in the United States, it grew by a double-digit margin in Europe.

McDonald’s Corp., the world's largest restaurant company, said first-quarter profit rose more than analysts estimated after European revenue gains blunted the first drop in U.S. comparable-store sales in five years.

Sales by European restaurants open at least 13 months jumped 11 percent in the quarter, as France, the U.K. and Germany led a record gain for the region. U.S. comparable-store sales fell 0.8 percent in March, the first decline since March 2003 as consumers pinched by rising fuel costs and sinking home values cut spending.

McDonalds is a staple of American capitalism and excess. In bygone days, a French farmer who opposed globalization drew worldwide renown when he led an attack against the chain in southern France. Let me be the first to welcome our new European friends to this gluttonous paradise.

We've heard about the waffles. Now Illinois's Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich, dogged by questions over his relationship with indicted Chicago fixer Tony Rezko, recently deployed the trademark political dodge:

Blagojevich came out of his Capitol office after meeting with top legislators about a public works construction bill. He was accompanied by former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Southern Illinois University President Glenn Poshard. Hastert did the talking while Blagojevich remained silent.

While this was going on, a group of school kids touring the Capitol crowded around to catch a glimpse of the governor. Then the questioning turned to events in the federal corruption trial of Blagojevich fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko, including statements by one witness that Blagojevich had offered him state business in exchange for raising money for a possible run at national office.

Blagojevich turned from reporters and looked at the kids.

“Kids, get over here when I need you,” Blagojevich said.

Continuing to ignore questions, Blagojevich lifted a security rope and invited the students into his office. “C’mon over. C’mon,” he said.

(HT: Political Diary.)

The New York Times featured an intriguing profile of Robert Downey Jr. this Sunday. Star of the upcoming Iron Man, Downey is best known as the most-wasted talent of his generation (both literally and figuratively). His drug problems became so bad that he even spent some time in the clink; since his last stretch he seems newly dedicated to sobriety. Downey also emerged with a different take on society:

"I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since."

It’s unlikely that Downey will start campaigning for McCain any time soon (note the hint of intimidation that lingers in the air when he mentions "polite" Hollywood conversation), but it is nice to see that he’s putting his life back together and taking a measure of personal responsibility for his previous difficulties. Read the whole profile and make sure to check out Iron Man when it is released May 2.

Not only is the Labour Party expected to lose local elections, Prime Minister Gordon Brown risks a revolt from his own party in Parliament. Labor’s problems stem from Brown’s support for the elimination of the 10p tax bracket, which will result in a tax-increase for five million of Britain’s poorest. The public outcry against Brown’s proposed tax-hike has been so severe that some have predicted Labour will likely finish not only behind the Tories, but also behind the Liberal Democrats on May 1!

Left-wing loon and London mayor Ken Livingstone is even in a tight race for reelection after the British tabloids revealed that he has a third love child. (It would seem there are limits to what even Europeans consider personal.) As much as I’d love to see the Tories take over London, I will miss Livingstone’s pearls of wisdom as when he advised London citizens, in an effort to promote water conservation, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.” Well, the people might heed this advice when they flush the Labour Party down the toilet along with number two.

The latest salvo? The SECDEF says that the Air Force is sandbaggin' it in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"In my view we can do and we should do more to meet the needs of men and women fighting in the current conflicts while their outcome may still be in doubt," he said. "My concern is that our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield."

He cited the example of drone aircraft that can watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents without risking the life of a pilot. He said the number of such aircraft has grown 25-fold since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He said he has been trying for months to get the Air Force to send more surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, like the Predator drone that provides real-time surveillance video, to the battlefield.

"Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it's been like pulling teeth," Gates said. "While we've doubled this capability in recent months, it is still not good enough."

I'm curious about context here. From what I've seen, the Air Force has been more than eager to prove their small war utility, mostly in the form of UAV coverage, tactical airlift, and close air support. So I'm thinking that this may be a case of the force being willing, but the bureaucracy being weak. In other words, Air Force has clogged itself with so many regulations, it appears to have lost touch with two of the guiding lights of successful warfare: speed and simplicity.

While I'm skeptical of claims that the Air Force is reluctant to get in the fight, the service is in need of a massive system flush, one that purges the ranks of overregulation, top-heavy leadership, and unnecessary bureaucratic constructs. Most of the public affairs wounds that the Air Force has suffered in the past few months have been self-inflicted, so looking inward may be the best way to cure the service's woes.

Pennsylvania voters might produce a surprisingly close outcome in today’s Democratic primary. The buzz in Washington from several Democratic operatives I talked to yesterday suggests Team Obama is fired up and ready to over perform.

"They’re putting out the word they won’t win, but it will be close," a veteran Democratic operative told me. And in this expectations game, "close" is a win, especially since Clinton needs a 8-10 point win to keep her narrative alive. They must see something in their tracking numbers that suggests the race has tightened.

Jeanne Cummings’s piece in Politico yesterday supports this view. She looks at the surge in voter registration over the past four months and some evidence that much of that increase is tilting toward Obama.

According to the Secretary of State’s office, since January about 217,000 new voters have registered for the April 22 primary, the vast majority of whom signed up as Democrats. In Philadelphia, by far the state’s largest city, more than 12,000 new Democrats were added to the rolls in the final week before the March registration deadline, compared to just 509 Republicans. That statewide Democratic surge has been accompanied by a flood of party-switching. More than 178,000 voters have changed their party status since January--and the Democrats have captured 92 percent of those voters.

Cummings also reports a Pennsylvania survey of new registrants and party switchers by pollster Terry Madonna with a distinct Obama tilt:

(It) found that Obama was the preferred candidate for 62 percent of them. Clinton insiders said they are also bracing for the same 60-40 split among newly registered Democrats. Depending on turnout, Madonna said, those newcomers could help Obama cut a Clinton victory margin by 2 to 3 percentage points and keep her below a double-digit win that would breath new life into the hard-fought race.

Looking at other recent polling, this view has some merit. Five out of the last six Pennsylvania polls at Real Clear Politics show Clinton below 50%. With 10%-14% "undecided" in these polls, the New York Senator would have to perform extremely well among late deciders to achieve the 8-10 point win many pundits believe she needs to stay alive.

So look for the late-deciders in the exit polls tonight. If Senator Clinton gets less than half, Obama may still lose, but score an important symbolic victory. Remember, closeness counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and unexpectedly close Pennsylvania primaries!

In recent days Barack Obama has made his closing argument to Pennsylvania voters. It doesn't seem to have gone too well. And that's what bloggers generally sympathetic to Obama are saying. Naturally, those bloggers are making excuses for Obama:

The New Republic: "As for Obama's closing-night appearance on 'The Daily Show' ... I found it pretty disappointing. Maybe the brutally long, brutally, uh, brutal campaign has beaten all the spontaneity out of him (boiled all the hope out of him?) - I don't know."

Time: "Obama seems either bummed or pissed or exhausted. He could be near death and still be a pretty good speaker, but he's very much off his game right now."

Andrew Sullivan: "Obama doesn't seem to have a killer instinct."

Maybe it's possible that Obama simply isn't as good a political performer as some make him out to be?

In any case, how on earth is he going to stay up for that 3 a.m. phone call if he's this "exhausted" now?

(Thanks to WEEKLY STANDARD intern Robin E. Wright, who helped research this blog.)

Now that E.J. Dionne is asking whether or not Obama is Adlai, we're on the cusp of it becoming conventional wisdom.

Multinational Forces Iraq has dramatically changed it’s messaging concerning the Mahdi Army and attacks in Baghdad. While MNF-I continues to refer to the Shia militias as “criminals” or Special Groups in their press releases, there are no longer any calls for the Mahdi Army to obey Muqtada al Sadr’s cease-fire order.This is occurring as the Iraqi government and MNF-I are pressing the fight against the Mahdi Army in Baghdad, Basra, and elsewhere in the South.

In the past, MNF-I press releases would refer to Sadr with the honorific “al-Sayyid” and appeal to the Mahdi Army to adhere to the ceasefire. Here is an example of a typical press release from late December 2007, which leaves an opening for Sadr and his Mahdi Army to end the violence:

"We commend all those who honor al-Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr’s ceasefire pledge… Significant progress has been made in the fight for a secure and stable Iraq, but dangerous criminal elements still exist."

Now, MNF-I is explicitly stating the goal is to “capture or kill these criminals” while dropping any pretenses about the neutrality of the Mahdi Army. Here is an example from a press release today:

”Iranian-backed Special Groups and other criminal elements who refuse to honor the rule of law are directly responsible for the current violence in Baghdad, as well as the deaths of countless innocent civilians,” said Lt. Col. Steven Stover, a spokesman for MND-B. “We will continue to work with Iraqi civilians and Iraqi Security Forces to identify, capture or kill these criminals who are terrorizing the people of Baghdad.”

A press release from April 20 actually noted that “criminal” fighters “retreated to building that contained the local Sadr Trend office” after a clash with Iraqi soldiers and special police. In the past, MNF-I would not directly link the “criminals” and “Special Groups” to Sadr’s political movement.

The change is significant. Just a few weeks ago, General David Petraeus was giving Sadr an out by saying he had a place in Iraq’s political process. Last week, Admiral Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sadr could either participate in the political process or not, the choice is his. This weekend, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice openly insulted Sadr by calling him a coward for hiding in Iran while he instructed the Mahdi Army to fight U.S. and Iraqi forces. "I know he's sitting in Iran," Rice said. "I guess its all-out war for anybody but him. I guess that's the message; his followers can go to their deaths and he's in Iran." Now MNF-I drops its friendly titles for Sadr and references to the cease-fire, while killing or capturing Mahdi Army fighters on a daily basis. MNF-I is withdrawing the carrot and applying the stick.

Air Force news story here. But I was more taken with this delightful quote from General Gary Harencack:

"The B-2 is airpower at its purest, most elegant and deadliest form," the general said.

Open admiration for air-delivered death and destruction is rare in this day and age of politically correct Air Force leadership. Some people think that military leaders should play the part of remorseful warrior, always apologetic for the terrible violence they must commit in defense of the Republic. Nonsense...let good men like General Harencack make our enemies squirm.

From a Bay Area protestor's sign:

Would we allow Nazi Germany to host the Olympics?

No. Of course not.

....except for that one time.

From TWS Online: Sadr's in a JAM, by Tom Donnelly.

From the Wall Street Journal: Enlarging the Atlantic Alliance, by the Big Boss.

From the New York Post: Green and Smart, by Glenn Reynolds.

From Politico: A Measure of Racism: 15%? by Roger Simon.

From National Review: Change That Sees No Evil, by Andrew C. McCarthy.

We keep hearing that Muqtada al Sadr has gained the upper hand after fighting “bogged down” in Baghdad and Basra. Time magazine has led the charge on this front. The April 15 article titled "Al-Sadr Tightens the Screws” epitomizes the tone of Time’s coverage in Iraq. “Sadr's Mahdi Army has effectively stopped an advance by U.S. and Iraqi forces into its strongholds in Baghdad and Basra after weeks of fighting” writes Mark Kukis. “Sadr's political power appears to be growing even as the crisis wears on.” These are difficult arguments to make considering:

a) Sadr called for a cease-fire in Basra and Baghdad just as the Iraqi Army began to push reinforcements into the troubled areas.

b) The Iraqi government decided to prevent political parties from participating in the upcoming provincial elections. Sadr’s spokesmen were in a near panic and admitted they were politically isolated as the continuum of Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish parties backed the measure.

c) Iraqis troops have pushed through at least three of the five of the Mahdi Army strongholds in Basra.

d) Iraqi and U.S. troops now occupy the southern third of Sadr City.

e) Sadr has issued a series of demands, insisting that the Iraqi military pardon those who deserted during the recent fighting and halt military operations lest he call for a third uprising. The Iraqi government has not pardoned the soldiers and police, nor has it stopped military operations.

f) Sadr called for a million man march in Najaf, then moved the march to Baghdad, then canceled the march. He claimed the military was interfering with his supporter’s movement but his recent marches have been less than stellar, drawing at most 10,000 supporters.

The latest bit of news from Iraq shows the Sadrist political movement is desperate to end the advance in Sadr City. Voices of Iraq reported that the Sadrists has asked former Prime Minister Iyad Illawi to mediate a cease-fire with the U.S. military. “Sadrist bloc lawmakers called on [me] two days ago to mediate with U.S. troops to cease military operations and to stop the concrete walls siege imposed on Sadr city for over a month,” Illawi said at a press conference in Baghdad, referring to the barriers being put up to partition the city to allow Iraqi and U.S. forces to stabilize the neighborhoods.

It will be interesting to see how this latest move by Sadr will be spun into a moment of triumph.

Happy Pennsylvania primary day. Since this is the first Democratic primary in weeks, here are two - count 'em, two - quotes from Democratic voters that may spell trouble for Barack Obama in November:

"I originally started out with Barack, but the more and more I learned about him, the less and less I liked him," Michael Hunt, a 55-year-old Indianapolis day trader, tells the Wall Street Journal this morning.

And from today's Washington Post:

"I don't care too much for Obama," Maria Norgren, the daughter and granddaughter of steelworkers, said in the parking lot of the Giant Eagle shopping center here, near the Obama rally.

"I don't even think he's American," added her husband, Edward, who lost his job when the steel mills closed and now mans the counter at the Puff Discount Tobacco and Lottery shop next to the Giant Eagle.

"His father's from Nigeria, right?" asked Maria, wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt.

Actually, Obama's father was Kenyan. But that's not the point. The point is that the Democrats need the white working class vote to win in November, as Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz argue here. With Obama as the nominee, they might not get it.

In the debate last week Hillary warned that an Iranian attack on Israel "would incur massive retaliation from the United States." In response to the same question, Obama offered a lame threat of "appropriate action." So yesterday Hillary upped the ante in an interview with ABC. Her response to a hypothetical Iranian first strike on Israel:

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president we will attack Iran," Clinton said. "In the next ten years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

Ben Smith says she's "almost daring Obama to criticize her as going overboard."

I often wonder if Hillary really isn't the most likely of the three to launch a preemptive strike on Iran (a different question, but there's little doubt Iran would be obliterated on way or another if they started it). You'd expect any president that pulls troops out of Iraq to compensate by projecting power somewhere else--maybe Afghanistan, maybe elsewhere--and there's something about Hillary that makes me think she's more likely to overcompensate than most.

Of course, Howard Wolfson says Clinton wasn't referring to nukes at all...he then announced the campaign had raised 50 million doll hairs over the last month.

From Centcom:

Use silenced guns to kill Coalition forces at Iraqi security checkpoints, smuggle weapons in gradual shipments to reduce the risk of detection, and poison Iraq’s water supply with nitric acid to spread disease and death.

Such tactics were fleshed out in a terrorist letter intended for Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the foreign-born leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. But the document never reached Masri. Instead, Coalition forces lifted it from the body of a terrorist they killed last month during an operation 30 miles northwest of Baghdad.

The slain terrorist and author of the 11-page missive was Abu Safyan, from Diyala, Iraq, according to military officials who made available all but two pages deemed “not releasable” on the Multi-National Force - Iraq Web site.

Now while that sounds like a nasty recipe for death and destruction, there's plenty of good news in between the lines there (besides the fact that the note was plucked from the body of a dead tango).

First, al Qaeda is acknowledging that the tactics which sustained them since 2003 have been rendered obsolete by General Petraeus. Second, they are reacting to us, instead of us reacting to them. Last, while al Qaeda's tactics appear to be changing, they continue to cling to the same failed strategy of death and destruction. That battleplan succeeded in landing an additional 28,000 American troops on Iraqi soil and turning almost the entire population of Iraq against al Qaeda's foreign jihadists--it's an objectively bad strategy.

I take it the Associated Press is not a fan of the "Dirty Dozen" approach.

Under pressure to meet combat needs, the Army and Marine Corps brought in significantly more recruits with felony convictions last year than in 2006, including some with manslaughter and sex crime convictions.

Data released by a congressional committee shows the number of soldiers admitted to the Army with felony records jumped from 249 in 2006 to 511 in 2007. And the number of Marines with felonies rose from 208 to 350.

There's two sides to this coin. On one hand, the military is an excellent way to realign misguided souls who would--in all likelihood--continue down the wrong path upon release from prison.

On the other hand, I tend to agree with guys like General Barry McCaffrey, that these "are not people who should be wearing the uniform." So I suspect there's a happy medium here, and that the Army and Marines are carefully screening individuals with records before assimilating them into the military ranks, thus rendering breathless reporting on the subject unnecessary.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are facing a difficult primary in Pennsylvania today, and bloggers are sizing up each candidate's chances.

Hillary is doing well in PA. Yesterday Marc Ambinder said that Hillary's campaign has "a fierce urgency of the now." The Fix's Chris Cillizza noted that "polling conducted in the runup to a series of states that voted earlier in the year seems to suggest that surveys underestimate support for the New York Senator. Polls in California and Ohio in advance of those states' votes showed Clinton and Obama running neck and neck, but she claimed solid margins in each. Her campaign has to hope the same pattern holds true in Pennsylvania tomorrow." If the numerous polls reported by the Real Clear Politics blog are any indication, Hillary has a shot at winning by as much as 10 points.

Another big polling buzz yesterday was a Drudge report of an internal Clinton campaign poll that predicted an 11-point win. Although the Clinton campaign denied the existence of this poll, Dave at the Political Machine pointed out that "the perception is more important than the actual numbers. Appearing to be ascendant is more important than the difference between nine points and 11 points." But Hot Air's Allahpundit said the report could actually hurt her: "All it does is make it easy for the media to frame a close win as a de facto loss while giving those late deciders she’s banking on an excuse to stay home or toss a sympathy vote at Obama to keep him from getting blown out."

Still, most bloggers see Hillary coming out on top. Hot Air's Ed Morrissey predicted: "Hillary wins Pennsylvania by eight. I suspect that Obama’s support in Philadelphia will keep him competitive, but the twin blows of Crackerquiddick and his awful debate performance will have convinced Pennsylvanians that Obama needs more experience--a lot more experience." Slate's Christopher Beam agreed: "Conventional wisdom suggests that Clinton needs to win by about 10 points in Pennsylvania in order to stay in the race. Her campaign puts the number around one point. What this means, of course, is that Clinton will win by eight points--just high enough for her to stick around, just low enough for Obama supporters to claim she's done."

Even Barack Obama himself said, "I’m not predicting a win. I’m predicting it’s going to be close and that we are going to do a lot better than people expect," Politico's Ben Smith reported.

With such a close race and so many different polls, Democrats in PA may feel like each vote really counts this primary. So it's really a shame that, as Michelle Malkin says, the choice boils down to, "Will it be the snob or the liar?"

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain all appeared on USA Network's WWE Raw tonight. That's wrestling, for you snooty, literary types.

Appearing via tape, Clinton joshed that "tonight, you can call me Hill-Rod" and that "this election is starting to feel a lot like King of the Ring." "The only difference," she continued, "is that the last man standing may just be a woman." She talks about bringing the troops home from Iraq and making college more affordable. "If things get a little tough," she says with a mortifyingly fake twinkle in her eye, "I may even have to deliver The People's Elbow."

You see, "The People's Elbow" is a wrestling move once used by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, but it's also an echo of "We the people," which is a famous phrase from the Declaration of the Independence or the Bible or something. The point is, she's totally down with the type of people who watch Raw.

Obama does a softer sell, saying that "this is a historic time for America, it's not just that the reign of Randy Orton may be coming to an end," but that we have the chance in this election "to end business as usual" in politics. He gives a 20-second version of his stump speech and it's pretty endearing until he ends by saying, "Do you smell what Barack is cooking?" He gives his big toothy grin as the camera cuts away. This, too, is a reference to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, one of whose catch-phrases was, "If you smell what The Rock is cooking." (No it doesn't make any sense. That's what makes it awesome.)

When it's John McCain's turn, he also channels The Rock opening with, "Finally, the Mac has come back to Greenville."

But then, McCain whipsaws through a slew of other legendary wrestling catchphrases, and unlike Clinton and Obama, he seems in on the joke. He does Flair ("If you want to be the man, you've got to beat the man."), he does Triple H ("Game over!"), he does Hulk Hogan ("Watcha gonna do when John McCain and all his McCainiacs run wild on you?"), he does Stone Cold ("And that's the bottom line because John McCain said so."). He promises to "introduce Osama bin Laden to the Undertaker." And then he rakes the eyes, noting that "Americans don't watch wrestling because we're bitter."

He totally gets over.

After the video tributes, and back in live action, Bill and Hillary Clinton look-a-likes come to the ring to the strains of "I am a real American." It's an inspired bit of comedy, actually, and the crowd isn't as hostile as you might expect. There's only a smattering of boos. The real boos come when an Obama look-a-like comes out. The faux candidates then stage a wrestling match. It's less dignified than it sounds.

Look, I was going to make fun of how unseemly it is for presidential aspirants to go begging for votes on a show which is half a step up from tentacle porn on the cultural food chain. But I tuned into Raw with a Boylans and a bag of chips tonight and I didn't even know they were going to be on. So really, who's sadder?

PS: This is a good excuse to remind readers about Paul Cantor's fantastic essay on "Pro Wrestling and the End of History." Treat yourself to it.

Washington Capitals outshot the Philadelphia Flyers 40-35 tonight, and won 4-2. Game seven -- and the potential extension of the Caps extraordinary season -- is Tuesday at 7pm in Washington.

A video has surfaced showing Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell heaping praise upon Minister Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam at a Philadelphia church on April 14, 1997. Andrew Sullivan is in an uproar:

One thought that this video inevitably raises: what if Obama had ever said such a thing or been to such an event? Given what we know now about this campaign, would it not be the conventional wisdom that it would be the end of his candidacy? And yet, Rendell is still a pillar of the Democratic party, central to the Clintons' Pennsylvania strategy, and praised as a classic old-style white ethnic pol. I don't imagine his credibility or reputation will be affected one iota by this. Even if it were Rendell running for president this year, I don't think this video would have Hannity and O'Reilly and Steyn and Coulter in a lather.

What do we learn from this? That Obama has to be even more distanced from these things because he's black. That's all....

First off, let me just say that I condemn unequivocally Rendell's shameless pandering to the Nation of Islam. But let it also be noted that Rendell has always been a shameless panderer, as is the candidate he has endorsed in the Democratic primary. And this is why Sullivan's wrong. Race is not what drives the concerns about Obama's connection to Rev. Wright, Farrakhan, or William Ayers. It's convenient to blame it on that and be done with it, but Sullivan should know better than anyone that Obama is to be held to a higher standard because unlike Hillary, Obama is not a shameless panderer.

Rendell is indeed a sleazy, machine politician, which is why everyone can watch this and know he doesn't believe a word of what he's saying. But Obama keeps promising us that he's different, and Sullivan keeps insisting it's true. The problem, then, is that if Obama is different, people have to assume he sat in the pews of Trinity United because he likes hearing God Damn America from the pulpit on Sunday mornings and not simply because his political career demanded it.

If Obama would only get off his high horse, and if his supporters would only concede that not everything he says or does is the product of deep conviction, then the connections to Ayers and Wright would largely be dismissed as shameless pandering to his Chicago community.

The Washington Post ran a story on McCain's temper over the weekend, but the piece seems to be falling apart amid accusations that the reporter distorted, exaggerated, and perhaps even fabricated some of the events he described. McCain aide Mark Salter responded yesterday that:

If one half of it were true, it would give me pause. As it happens, the piece is 99% fiction....

The story about the Young Republican in 1982 is entirely fictional. The Bob Smith incident is entirely fictional. The Karen Johnson story is entirely fictional. Most of the others are exaggerated beyond recognition.

Salter also claims that his own words were taken out of context to exaggerate the details of an argument between Sens. McCain and Grassley in 1992. Now Salter's version has been confirmed by former Senator Bob Kerrey. Jonathan Martin reports that Kerrey disputes the Post's account, which had him intervening to prevent the argument from turning physical:

"First, I did nothing to intervene; the two Senators worked it out on their own," Kerrey wrote in a comment posted this morning under his name at 7:45....

The two senators were both "extremely angry," Kerrey adds, but McCain was "at no time threatening."

Kerrey, a Democrat and Hillary Clinton backer, concludes: "My experience is that [McCain's] anger always has a purpose and in this case the purpose was to defeat Senator Grassley's argument which he did decisively."

Everybody knows McCain has a temper, but none of these events seems to have happened the way they were reported, if at all. Still, and maybe it's just the warmonger in me, I tend to think McCain's disposition is more of an asset than a liability. Don't the American people want a president who's actually pissed off when he gets a phone call at 3 am saying the Iranians, or al Qaeda, or William Ayers (or all three working together) have just killed a bunch of Americans.

Because I don’t get invited to Howard Dean's conference calls, I have to rely on the reports of others present to monitor the goings on. I found Ben Smith's write-up of today's confab provocative:

During the Q and A part of a DNC conference call Howard Dean defended his 2004 statement where he said, "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," because of his stances on economics issues.

"I think I connected to rural people because of what I said," Dean said on the call. "An awful lot of people -- both black and white -- came up to me and said "I know what you are talking about, keep it up.’" (Editor's note: Apparently few of them voted for him.)

"It's time that Democrats address guys with gun racks in the back of their trucks," Dean continued. "Those are our voters."

Could Governor Dean really be so deluded as to think he achieved a connection with the Confederate flag waving population? Perhaps he considers his victory in Vermont evidence of how the Confederate flag set just adored him.

Anyway, I guess the Democrats have decided to make condescension a lynchpin of their 2008 electoral strategy. The problem with Chairman Dean's strange new outreach program is that it's transparently disingenuous. While Dean may pretend to feel common cause with a guy who plasters the Stars and Bars on to the back of his pick-up, we all know that if the Deans ever saw a Confederate flag bumper sticker adorning a car at the Brattleboro Whole Foods (where I’m told the price of arugula is quite outrageous), they would come down with a serious case of the vapors.

That doesn't mean the Democrats have to permanently cede the Confederate flag vote to the Republicans. If Jim Webb were the Democratic nominee, he could make a case for a shared kinship with those voters that would be honest and heartfelt. But Howard Dean? Not so much.

Gallup's Frank Newport:

Despite the enormous attention paid to global warming over the past several years, the average American is in some ways no more worried about it than in years past. Americans do appear to have become more likely to believe global warming's effects are already taking place and that it could represent a threat to their way of life during their lifetimes. But the American public is more worried about a series of other environmental concerns than about global warming, and there has been no consistent upward trend on worry about global warming going back for two decades. Additionally, only a little more than a third of Americans say that immediate, drastic action is needed in order to maintain life as we know it on the planet.

It must be maddening for supporters of immediate, drastic action on climate change to know that support for their cause is about as strong as support for the president. But credit where it's due, the Goracle was quoted yesterday as saying that "if you give [people] a list of 25 or 30 issues and ask them to rank them in order of seriousness, climate change comes at the bottom or near the bottom...I remember one poll where it came under dog litter." Indeed, Gallup confirms that far more people are concerned about contamination of soil by toxic waste. Gore really does know this issue backwards and forwards.

From Susan Estrich's latest column:

It’s too bad, in a way, that John Kerry was able to win the Democratic nomination so easily last time, without any of his competitors in fact taking him on about his war record and then his post-war criticisms of American troops. It might have caused him to think twice before beginning his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention with the ill-fated line, “Lieutenant John Kerry, reporting for duty.” Indeed.

You see, this hurts Clinton more than it hurts Obama--she's only doing it because she cares.

With the news over the weekend that the Iraqi Army has now effectively cleared Basra, that the Iranians are backing away from their support of the Mahdi militia, and that Sadr suddenly appears rather desperate and marginalized, writing at Contentions, Abe Greenwald observed:

What a strange ceasefire it was, leading as it did to three more weeks of fighting; what a strange powerlessness Maliki suffered, leading as it did to total victory; and what a strange power flaunted by Sadr, leading as it did to total defeat.

Indeed, the headline from the Times read "Iraqi Army Takes Last Basra Areas From Sadr Force." Not exactly what one would have expected a few weeks ago as the left celebrated Sadr's apparent victory over the Iraqi security forces. And it has produced some real soul searching on the left. Take Kevin Drum, for example:

As always, it's hard to say what's really going on here. But it's possible that the ground is shifting. This might be good news, or it might be in the "be careful what you wish for" category.

Be careful what you wish for? It's almost as if Drum was hoping for a humiliating defeat, and, seeing that slip away, now hopes victory will somehow teach us all the lesson we so richly deserve.

I think Maureen Dowd is actually on to something:

Asked about his friendly relationship with the former Weather Underground anarchist William Ayers — an association that The Wall Street Journal suggests could turn into the Swift Boat of 2008 given Ayers’s statement that “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough” — Obama defended him with a line that only the eggheads orbiting his campaign could appreciate. Ayers, he said, is “a professor of English in Chicago.”

Obama has to prove to Americans that, despite his exotic background and multicultural looks, he shares or at least respects their values and understands why they would be upset about his associations with the Rev. Wright and an ex-Weatherman.

A lot of folks were perplexed by Obama's comparison of Rev. Wright to his grandmother, but when he compared Ayres to Tom Coburn--well, then we had a pattern. Obama doesn't view left-wing radicals the way the rest of the country does, he doesn't understand why anyone would be upset that he associates with them, and more than that he seems dismissive of any such concerns (it's just dirt on his shoulder). On this issue, Obama is out of touch.

Drudge reports:

Controlled excitement is building inside of Clinton's inner circle as closely guarded internal polling shows the former first lady with an 11-point lead in Pennsylvania!

Given the ferocity of Obama's attacks on Clinton this weekend, his internal polling may show the same result. But there are a bunch of polls out today that show a much closer race. For what it's worth, the boss predicted an 8-10 point margin for Clinton yesterday on Fox News Sunday. I wouldn't be surprised--conversations with liberal friends and family living in the Philly suburbs lead me to believe that Obama's support there isn't as strong as it could be. I wonder whether Pennsylvanians might not take some perverse pleasure in bucking the Obama hype and keeping the race alive. If there's one thing that everyone in Philly loves it's a good fight.

From the New York Times: Exodus Exegesis, by the boss.

From THE WEEKLY STANDARD: 24 Hours on the 'Big Stick', by P.J. O'Rourke.

From the Wall Street Journal: The Keystone Primary Stakes, by Michael Barone.

From the New Republic: The End of History, by Robert Kagan.

From the Washington Post: Afghan Commandos Emerge, by Ann Scott Tyson.

German conservative interior minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has come out with a bold initiative to provide asylum for thousands of Iraqi Christians forced to leave their homeland in recent years because of religious persecution at the hands of Muslim extremist groups. According to the Schaeuble plan, which is backed by the interior ministers of the 16 German states, Iraqi Christians would be allowed to stay in Germany until conditions on the ground in Iraq have improved to the point where they can return home. While the Interior Ministry has not officially come out with any concrete refugees quotas, Berlin insiders believe that Germany could end up accepting anywhere between 5,000 and 7,000 Iraqi Christians per year.

For far too long, European governments have ignored the terrible fate suffered by Iraq’s most vulnerable minority; Christians, after all, are viewed by both Sunni and Shia terrorists as supporters of the American-led "Crusader Coalition." Scandinavian countries like Sweden have already granted asylum to tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees, many of them Christians. In Germany, in contrast, the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees scattered around neighboring countries like Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, has only recently garnered attention. Catholic and Protestant church organizations in Germany have been particularly vocal. At the moment, Iraq is already the number one country of origin of asylum seekers in Germany. In 2007, 4,327 Iraqis applied for asylum, more than twice the number compared to the year before.

So far, politicians from Germany’s governing conservative CDU/CSU parties have taken the lead in calling for new asylum programs specifically targeted at Iraqi Christians. In contrast, their left-wing SPD coalition partners and the opposition Green party have voiced skepticism about the Schaeuble initiative. For example, Brigitte Zypries, Germany’s SPD justice minister, argued that "It’s a difficult path when you start saying that we’re accepting somebody because of their religious conviction."

The Greens, a party with a long track record of calling on Germany to open the floodgates to refugees and asylum seekers from virtually around the world, voiced reservations, too. "We have to help everybody who is persecuted and cannot say there are our Christian brothers and sisters, and for others with a different identity we don’t care," says Volker Beck, a senior Green MP. Finally, Wolfgang Schaeuble’s other 26 EU partners yesterday rejected his call for a similar EU-wide refugee plan at a ministerial-level meeting in Luxembourg. Countries such as Slovenia (which currently holds the rotating EU presidency) and Luxembourg were particularly opposed to the German initiative, arguing again that one must not single out Iraqi Christians for preferential asylum treatment.

Closing in on the Pennsylvania primary, it’s no surprise that the principle topic of conversation on the talk shows this weekend was Hillary vs. Barack. Their surrogates were all over the place, and Ed Rendell made an intriguing point on Face the Nation about Obama’s spending. Earlier in the race, Rendell had predicted a cakewalk for Clinton (who, at the time, was leading by double digits in the polls). "I had no idea that the spending would be at a record level," Rendell said of Obama’s advertising expenditures. "I've always been a good money raiser, and I've put a lot of money on TV in the closing weeks of my campaign, but I never exceeded $1.2, $1.3 million. The Obama campaign, $2.9 million. You can't go anywhere in the Philadelphia region, you can't listen to TV for 10 minutes without seeing an ad. Given that level of spending, it's even overcoming what was a subpar performance in the debate by Senator Obama and a great performance by Senator Clinton."

This is a point that transfers over to the general; as my colleague pointed out, Obama seems poised to break his promise to participate in public financing. McCain currently polls surprisingly well against the junior Illinois senator, but it will be interesting to see if his numbers can hold up against a $100-$150 million Obama media blitz in the campaign’s waning months.

David Brooks, meanwhile, pointed out the damage that this primary has done to Obama’s image on Meet the Press. "It's been 15 months since he's been running, and the last three months have been different. … The tone of that conversation, believe me, is very different from the tone of Barack Obama's speech in Des Moines three months ago. And the campaign has changed him. And I think it's changed him in two ways, which has made him less inspiring for a lot of us who are not orthodox liberals. It's changed him because he seems like a more conventional politician, trading jibes about who's throwing which negative ad at each other, which is not particularly hopeful. And then he's become--as he's had to chase Democratic primary votes, he's become [a] much more orthodox liberal."

Sam Donaldson warned of the damage a Clinton nomination might do to the Democratic party on This Week. "The Obama supporters, a lot of them feel that there’s an entitlement there…it’s not as if ‘I hope he wins, and we worked very hard and all of that.’ It’s ‘if he doesn’t win, it’s a cheat. There’s something unfair about this.’ Guys, grow up. This is politics."

And Karl Rove was on Fox News Sunday; when asked to choose the tougher candidate, he gave the ever-so-slight nod to the junior senator from New York. "She is a more durable candidate who is better known and tougher to move; on the other hand, Obama is the untested candidate and can either perform extremely well, as he did in Iowa, or extremely badly, as he did in the debate last week. I would have to say that on points I’d give it to Clinton, but not by much."

Woody Allen will film his next movie in New York, and then promptly return to Europe to do three more pictures in Spain. Everyone knows the pint-sized Jewish auteur was in something of a lull before departing for England to shoot Match Point, Scoop, and Cassandra’s Dream. And he just completed the Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in you guessed it, Spain. But New Yorkers shouldn’t take his so-called boycott too personally. One of the key reasons I would guess he’s plans to shoot another three pictures in Spain after a brief return to New York is all the money the government is giving him. As it were, the Barcelona city government dished out $1.6 million for Allen’s last picture. Of course, they claim it’s a "public investment"--not a government subsidy--but a government subsidy by any other name still smells . . .

In defense of Allen though, I must say the conventional wisdom that he did nothing of value between Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point is slander. Two of Allen’s great works--or at least best writing--are from the 1990s. I am thinking of Bullets Over Broadway and the Sweet and Lowdown. And though Allen is not typically associated with the conservative movement, there are several gems in his canon for the (precious few) right-leaning souls out there who actually have a sense of humor. Consider the scene in Annie Hall when Allen goes over to his ex-girlfriend’s apartment at 3:00 am to kill a spider.

ANNIE: I called you; you wanna help me ... or not? H'h? Here.

She hands him a magazine.

ALVY: (Looking down at the magazine) What is this? What are you, since when do you read the National Review? What are you turning in to?

ANNIE: Well, I like to try to get all points of view.

ALVY: It's wonderful. Then why don'tcha get William F. Buckley to kill the spider?

This isn’t Allen’s only amusing potshot about conservatives. In Bananas, when he goes to buy a pornographic magazine, National Review is hanging between Hustler and Playboy.

It's true this blog is dedicated mostly issues of politics and national security. But the Washington Capitals will play a crucial game six this evening against the much-despised Philadelphia Flyers (i.e. Goldfarb's team), and it's just too important to let it pass without comment. The Flyers, like so many other Philly sports teams in recent years, are not very good. They nonetheless hold a 3-2 lead in the best-of-seven series and tonight's game is in Philly.

To make the playoffs, the Capitals reversed their early-season follies winning two of every three games since Thanksgiving and eleven of the final twelve. It was an historic run. But now they are on the verge of elimination. There is one reason: They're not shooting the puck. In the event that Caps coach Bruce Boudreau is spending his afternoon reading TWS Blog, here's what he should tell his team. Shoot, shoot, and shoot some more. In the Stanley Cup playoffs having more shots than your opponents almost always leads to wins -- an odd bounce of the puck can be the difference between winning and losing.

Take yesterday's game between the Detroit Red Wings and the Nashville Predators. With time running down in the 2nd period and the game tied 0-0, the Predators were awarded a power play. After the puck dropped, Red Wings captain Nicklas Lidstrom took the puck near his own blue line and, after pausing for a moment, threw it two-thirds of the way down the ice toward the Predators net. The puck dipped just before it reached the goal and bounced over the shoulder of the Predators goalie -- giving the Red Wings the game-winning goal.

The Caps should take a lesson from this. They've spent much of the first five games looking for the perfect pass, at times passing up wide open shots from inside the Flyers' zone and even a few in front of the net. If they do the same tonight, they'll lose. And that'll be a shame. The Flyers aren't that good.

Reports from the trail indicate that Barack Obama has been off his game, apparently having been beaten into a lifeless campaigning torpor by the veritable waterboarding that George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson put him through last week. Even noted Obama-phile Joe Klein has taken note of the new and not improved champion of hope and change, actually mixing in a little criticism with his typical sycophancy:

“Obama seems either bummed or pissed or exhausted. He could be near death and still be a pretty good speaker, but he's very much off his game right now.”

How bad have things gotten for Obama on the trail? Check out this gaffe that the AP captured:

"You have a real choice in this election. Either Democrat would be better than John McCain," Obama said to cheers from a rowdy crowd in central Pennsylvania. Then he said: "And all three of us would be better than George Bush."

I seem to recall a wise man once saying that when Obama lacks a teleprompter, the stuff that comes out just isn't that good. Oh yeah – I was that wise man. Anyway, since Obama appears intent on basing his general election campaign on the theme that a McCain victory would be tantamount to a third term for George W. Bush, this latest flub shows he can't stay on message for even the most basic stuff when a teleprompter isn't lighting the way.

Or, as one of my favorite bloggers Tom Maguire put it, “I love these ‘Ooops, I accidentally said what I actually believe’ gaffes.”

Oh, the indignities a politician must suffer! Our own Bill Kristol devotes his New York Times column today to discussing the messages that the three presidential campaigns released to celebrate Passover with their potential Jewish voters. Chances are, all three would let Passover come and go without a thought if they weren't office-seekers, much akin to the way Ramadan doesn’t provoke any deep thoughts in me that I simply must express publicly. Nevertheless, they are politicians, and like kissing babies, there are certain things a politician must do.

Hillary Clinton's claim to “have always been inspired by the enduring words of the Haggadah” struck a rich comedic note, reminding me of her claim to have always loved the New York Yankees. Still, I found the Obama statement particularly interesting. Here's the entire thing, lifted from his website:

This week, Jewish families across America and around the world are preparing for Passover. And on Saturday night, Jews will gather around the Seder table and retell the ancient story of a journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Land of Israel.

The Seder, with all its rich traditions, has much to teach us all. Its emphasis on teaching children, and letting them demonstrate their knowledge through the traditional asking of questions, embodies the great Jewish traditions of family and education. Most of all, the Haggadah tells us an ancient story to both recall history, and to teach us lessons about the moral imperatives that we must aim to live by today; it demonstrates the power of maintaining faith and determination, and reminds us that we must constantly work on behalf of freedom in the face of injustice.

American Jews have always played a vital role in our national conversation. As we approach this Passover holiday, let us continue to engage in dialogue, and to ask ourselves and each other how the Passover story challenges us to question the world as it is, and to seek a future that is more just and more peaceful for all.

Michelle, Malia, and Sasha join me in sending warm wishes for a joyous and meaningful Passover.

A few things leap out. What actually happened to occasion the holiday hardly merits a mention. Instead, the statement focuses on how we celebrate Passover today. This is characteristic Obama campaign narcissism, right out of the "We Are the Change We've Been Waiting For" school. Meanwhile, the salute to the "vital role" that American Jews "have always played in our national conversation" verges on self parody. In the Obama worldview, everything including Passover is seemingly an invitation "to continue to engage in dialogue."

In truth, Passover is a challenging holiday. As Jews, we celebrate our liberation but we mourn the suffering of the Egyptians that accompanied it. What's more, Passover has no happy endings. The generation of Jews that got liberated from Pharaoh didn't get to enter the Holy Land, God having deemed them too debased by their decades of enslavement to be worthy of such an honor. And the Passover Seder still ends with the table praying, "Next Year in Jerusalem," an acknowledgement of the millennia that the Jewish people spent exiled from Israel.

As a man of faith, Obama probably could have offered some interesting thoughts on Passover and the mixed feelings the holiday engenders. Also, the pining for a Jewish homeland in the Holy Land remains a relevant issue today. Instead, the candidate jammed even Passover into the Obama canon of meaningless tripe.

Whether it involves chatting up foreign despots or a national conversation on race, Obama habitually elevates the act of talking to a level of meaning it doesn’t deserve. And yet for all of Obama’s talk, he avoids the significant issues and concrete action like, well, a plague.

Rick Santorum is supporting John McCain and urges other conservatives to do the same.

Blockbuster:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The piece goes on for some ten pages, with one damning revelation after the next.The Pentagon distributes talking points, provides special access to retired generals, and even arranged a meeting for them with the Secretary of Defense. You'll also be very surprised to learn that many retired generals have business interests in the defense industry.

The paper offers no evidence that any of these men were using their influence to directly further a personal interest (unless one counts "networking"), and it offers no evidence of coercion on the part of the administration. So the charge is a lack of transparency, and it rests on the assumption that Americans are too stupid to surmise the likely ideological and institutional biases of a former general officer in the United State military.

Of course, Americans are not so stupid, and I suspect most will appreciate the irony of the New York Times judging retired military officers as insufficiently objective in their analysis of the war in Iraq.

Earlier this week, much hay was made when an Iraqi Army company deserted its position in Sadr City. The next day, the New York Times interviewed an Iraqi Army company commander, also from Sadr City, who left his unit to take leave and speculated he may not come back. In two days, the narrative for the Iraqi Army and U.S. military incursion is set: The Iraqi Army is falling apart.

Both of these stories get a feature-length report, while successes of the Iraqi Army are relegated to single paragraph throwaways. Buried in the April 16 story is the fact that an Iraqi company was rushed into Sadr City to take the place of the deserting company. In today’s New York Times, Michael Gordon writes about the wall being built to partition Sadr City. Buried in the article, we learn that the Mahdi Army assaulted a police station and the Iraqi forces were running low on ammunition. As the U.S. military prepared to reinforce the position, the Iraqi Army beat them to the punch:

The militias’ main effort on Thursday was focused on dislodging Iraqi forces from a police station. American advisers took up positions with the Iraqi unit.

As the fighting intensified and there were reports that militia fighters had closed to within 100 yards, Colonel Barnett moved tanks into position so they could rush to the Iraqis’ aid. Stryker vehicles also moved forward.

But two Iraqi T-72s and four other Iraqi armored vehicles arrived on the scene before the American tanks were needed. The Iraqi Army has rushed ammunition to Sadr City, including machine-gun rounds and rocket-propelled grenades to give its units more firepower and address complaints of shortages.

Moving armor into Sadr City while under fire is no small feat, particularly for the young Iraqi Army. The Iraqi Army outperformed their American betters on that day. Isn’t that worth a headline as well? There is certainly nothing wrong with reporting the defection of the Iraqi company on April 16, although the context of the story was seriously flawed. But when the Iraqi Army exceeds its expectations, that is news as well, and it should be treated in the same manner.

Get ready to laugh, America! The 9/11 comedies are on their way:

Over the next few weeks, theaters will be screening far-out fare such as an Osama bin Laden documentary by the maker of “Super Size Me”; an absurdist slam against merchants of war featuring John Cusack; a zombie soldier flick with XXX star Jenna Jameson; a stoner movie about Guantanamo Bay; and a Sept. 11 parody--yes, parody--made by Uwe Boll, a little-known filmmaker often ridiculed as the worst director in Hollywood since Ed Wood.

I’m of the opinion that just about any topic short of child abuse is ripe for satire. Certainly Duck Soup, Dr. Strangelove, M*A*S*H, and To Be or Not to Be proved that dark laughter can be gotten from war movies. But compare, if you will, the talents behind these movies--the Marx Brothers, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, and Ernst Lubitsch--with the crew mentioned above. I don’t think we’ll be seeing any of those movies on TCM 50 years from now. Just to give you a rough idea of the talent involved, let’s turn to Jenna Jameson’s take on her anti-war epic, Zombie Strippers: “There's a lot of political undertones against the Bush administration. And that's part of the reason why I did the movie. I kind of fancy myself a political girl.” You can tell that’s true just by the title of some of the movies she’s famous for: Where the Boys Aren’t Pt. 14, Dirty Bob’s Xcellent Adventures Pt. 35, and Udderly Ridiculous. (Apparently that last one wasn’t good enough to inspire any sequels.)

No word on a scathing take on Osama bin-Laden and his al Qaeda cohorts, though. Come on, Hollywood--not even the Three Stooges were afraid to take on Hitler!

It seems that some on the Left (and we're looking at you, ThinkProgress) have forgotten how federal budgeting works. They're trying to turn Senator McCain's promise to veto all bills with earmarks into a statement that he won't provide any financial aid to Israel:

It is astounding then that McCain has essentially vowed to eliminate U.S. funding assistance for Israel. In a speech yesterday on the economy, McCain said that as president, he will eliminate pork barrel spending, otherwise known as “earmarks...”

The problem is that the CRS--the group Holtz-Eakin cited as the basis for McCain’s earmark elimination plan--says that U.S. aid to Israel is considered an earmark.

While there is no universally-agreed-upon definition of an earmark, the gist is pretty simple. Slate says that "the word 'earmark' refers to any element of a spending bill that allocates money for a very specific thing." The House Rules Committee references the Congressional Research Service, and says that to earmark is to "set aside funds for a specific purpose, use, or recipient."

Now comes the tricky part: If Congress appropriates money to the federal government, and does not earmark the money, it is leaving it to the discretion of the president how to spend it. The president could even choose to spend it on an initiative that has at other times been earmarked. Thus, if a hypothetical president--let's call him "Bohn McBain"--vetoed a bill that earmarked assistance for a hypothetical country--let's call it "Bisrael"--he could still provide assistance to Bisrael through his own discretion. If the president vetoes a bill that earmarks for highway projects, his Department of Transportation could still provide funding for some of those very same projects--through grants at the discretion of the president. Much of federal spending works this way.

If this is the best that the Left can do in attacking McCain--along with age insults--then they're in worse trouble than we thought.

Sometimes graphs convey a message more powerfully than words. University of Wisconsin–Madison political scientist Charles Franklin recently posted this plot of the “most important problem”--comparing the economy to the Iraq war. The visual representation of CBS News survey data is pretty dramatic.

Both issues bumped along in tandem until 2006, when the war in Iraq became the dominant issue by a wide margin. In 2007, as the situation in Iraq improved, the number of Americans considering the war the most important issue declined. Yet in 2008, opinion shifted again. The number considering the war the most critical concern continued to ease, but when the economy slowed and the credit crunch emerged, the number of people choosing the economy as the most important problem shot up sharply.

Political strategists and pundits need to pay careful attention to several issues raised in the chart. First, the issue matrix can always shift swiftly and dramatically. With the election seven months away, it might shift again. Second, without an incumbent president seeking reelection, will voters “blame” Republicans for the slowing economy? Or, will the bipartisan economic stimulus bill Congress passed and the President signed earlier this year kick in and reverse these numbers again? And finally, what about Congress? Will historically low approval numbers help Republicans chip away at the Democratic majority’s current margin? And how will these concerns about the economy impact House and Senate races?

Based on the shifts demonstrated in this chart, seven months is a lifetime in politics. We may go through at least a couple more political “decades” between now and November.

Infamous Taliban leader assumes room temperature:

A senior Taliban commander who became a hero to Islamic militants for his role in shooting down a U.S. helicopter in 2005, killing all 16 special forces troops aboard, has been killed by Pakistani security forces, officials and Taliban militants tell CBS News.

Mullah Ismail, a notorious Taliban commander from the Afghan province of Kunar, was killed in a shootout with Pakistani police as he traveled with a kidnapped trader, a local police officer said Wednesday. He was apparently on his way into the lawless Northwest Frontier Province along the Afghan border.

If you read Marcus Luttrell's