Challenged by an old cur's growl- puppy loses his yap!

McCain's renewed challenge to debate in an open forum and wide ranging no holds barred format has been rebuffed again by "the one." Were McCain to show an ad debating an empty chair no doubt the Obama campaign would find that offensive.

Why won't the great orator, the meteoric messiah debate "Der Alte?" Because he fears he will be smoked out, made to answer questions he has effectively avoided and which the press and media have refused to ask him? Is it because Obama has been able to controlled his flips and flops and does not want to be engaged in a direct challenge?

Yet, this is the "one" whose judgement causes him to believe we must sit across the table with terrorists and rabid Islamists with no predetermined agenda, put it all on the table as it were. Perhaps if McCain said the debate could be held sitting down the youthful inexperienced empty suit candidate for president would accept. Is Obama being boomeranged by his previous rhetorical comment that "words matter?"

Has this youthful puppy lost his yap? Has the growl of a wizened "old cur" caused him to tuck tail? Obama's dodging and weaving, regarding an open debate, will not go down well with undecided voters, it should put him on the defensive and could prove to be another direct torpedo hit in his 'taking on water' ship.

The Clintons' must be licking their "we told you so" chops and the Left Wing, which controls the Democrat Party, must be squirming. (See 1 below.)

Stanley Kurtz, fills in some gaps and lo and behold: "The senator's tenure as a state legislator reveals him to be an old-fashioned, big government, race-conscious liberal." (See 2 below.)

Obama said he wanted to heal and that he would not make race an issue. Ironic, that Obama's self conscious deck of cards prevented him from avoiding just that and in fact caused him to play them. Now it has bitten him back because "the race" is all about him (See 3 below.)

Olmert to hang around for many more months because of the way it is. (See 5 below.)

A friend joins me in presenting his arguments against Obama. (See 6 below.)

Dick



1) Obama's Place in the Annals of High-Flying Rhetoric
By George Will

WASHINGTON -- As the presidential candidates enter the three-month sprint to November, Barack Obama must be wondering: If that did not do it, what will? The antecedent of the pronoun "that" is his Berlin speech. The antecedent of the pronoun "it" is assuage anxieties about his understanding of the need to supplement soft power (diplomacy) with hard power (military force).

He spoke in Berlin at the bullet-scarred base -- it was in the crossfire 63 years ago as Russian troops neared Hitler's bunker about a mile away -- of an 1873 monument to German militarism. To be precise, the monument celebrates the Franco-Prussian War and lesser triumphs of the militarism that would help ruin the next century.

Anyway, at that monument Obama exhorted Germans -- does the candidate of "change" appreciate how much beneficent change made this exhortation necessary? -- to be more willing to wage war, in Afghanistan. He was right to do so.

But polls taken since his trip abroad do not indicate that Obama succeeded in altering the oddest aspect of this presidential campaign: Measured against his party's surging strength in every region and at every level, he is dramatically underperforming. Surely this fact is related to anxieties about his thin resume regarding national security matters, the thinnest of any major party nominee since Wendell Wilkie's in 1940. But the fact also might be related to fatigue from too much of Obama's eloquence, which is beginning to sound formulaic and perfunctory.

Even an eloquent politician can become, as Benjamin Disraeli described William Gladstone, "a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity." John Kennedy said in Berlin, "Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free." That half-baked and badly written thought was either trivial because it was tautological (when one man is enslaved, not every man is free) or it was absurd (when one man is not free, no man is free). That absurdity is dangerous because it makes a grandiose mission seem imperative, as in President George W. Bush's second inaugural address: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

Does Obama have the sort of adviser a candidate most needs -- someone sufficiently unenthralled to tell him when he has worked one pedal on the organ too much? If so, Obama should be told: Enough, already, with the we-are-who-we-have-been-waiting-for rhetorical cotton candy that elevates narcissism to a political philosophy.

And no more locutions such as "citizen of the world" and "global citizenship." If they meant anything in Berlin, they meant that Obama wanted Berliners to know that he is proudly cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism is not, however, a political asset for American presidential candidates. Least of all is it an asset for Obama, one of whose urgent needs is to seem comfortable with America's vibrant and very un-European patriotism, which is grounded in a sense of virtuous exceptionalism.

Otherwise, "citizen of the world" and "global citizenship" are, strictly speaking, nonsense. Citizenship is defined by legal and loyalty attachments to a particular political entity with a distinctive regime and culture. Neither the world nor the globe is such an entity.

In Berlin, Obama neared self-parody with a rhetoric of Leave No Metaphor Behind. "Walls"? Down with them. "Bridges"? Build new ones between this and that. "A new dawn"? The Middle East deserves one. And Berlin was the wrong place to vow to "remake the world once again." Modern Berlin rose from rubble that was the result of the last attempt at remaking "the world."

Of course, from Obama, such tropes, although silly, are not menacing, any more than they were from Ronald Reagan, who was incorrigibly fond of perhaps the least conservative, and therefore the most absurd, proposition ever penned by a political philosopher, Thomas Paine's "we have it in our power to begin the world over again." No. We. Don't.

The world is a fact, and facts are indeed stubborn things. After eight years, if such there are, of an Obama presidency, if such there is, the world will look much as it does today -- if we are lucky.

Swift and sweeping changes are almost always calamitous consequences of calamities -- often of wars, sometimes of people determined to "remake the world." Wise voters -- polls might be telling us that there are more of them than Obama imagines -- hanker for candidates whose principal promise is that they will do their best to muddle through without breaking too much crockery.

2) Barack Obama's Lost Years
The senator's tenure as a state legislator reveals him to be an old-fashioned, big government, race-conscious liberal.
By Stanley Kurtz

Barack Obama's neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, has a longstanding tradition of opening its pages to elected officials-from Chicago aldermen to state legislators to U.S. senators. Obama himself, as a state senator, wrote more than 40 columns for the Herald, under the title "Springfield Report," between 1996 and 2004. Read in isolation, Obama's columns from the state capital tell us little. Placed in the context of political and policy battles then raging in Illinois, however, the young legislator's dispatches powerfully illuminate his political beliefs. Even more revealing are hundreds of articles chronicling Obama's early political and legislative activities in the pages not only of the Hyde Park Herald, but also of another South Side fixture, the Chicago Defender.

Obama moved to Chicago in order to place himself in what he understood to be the de facto "capital" of black America. For well over 100 years, the Chicago Defender has been the voice of that capital, and therefore a paper of national significance for African Americans. Early on in his political career, Obama complained of being slighted by major media, like the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Yet extensive and continuous coverage in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald presents a remarkable resource for understanding who Obama is. Reportage in these two papers is particularly significant because Obama's early political career-the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004-can fairly be called the "lost years," the
period Obama seems least eager to talk about, in contrast to his formative years in Hawaii, California, and New York or his days as a community organizer, both of which are recounted in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. The pages of the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender thus offer entrée into Obama's heretofore hidden world.

What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign. As details of Obama's early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It's no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.

THE CENTRALITY OF RACE

Any rounded treatment of Obama's early political career has got to give prominence to the issue of race. Obama has recently made efforts to preemptively blunt discussion of the race issue, warning that his critics will highlight the fact that he is African American. Yet the question of race plays so large a role in Obama's own thought and action that it is all but impossible to discuss his political trajectory without acknowledging the extent to which it engrosses him. Obama settled in Chicago with the declared intention of "organizing black folks." His first book is subtitled "A Story of Race and Inheritance," and his second book contains an important chapter on race. On his return to Chicago in 1991, Obama practiced civil rights law and for many years taught a seminar on racism and law at the University of Chicago. When he entered the Illinois senate, it was to represent the heavily (although not exclusively) minority 13th district on the South Side of Chicago. Indeed, race functions for Obama as a kind of master-category, pervading and organizing a wide array of issues that many Americans may not think of as racial at all. Understanding Obama's thinking on race, for example, is a prerequisite to grasping his views on spending and taxation. Thus, we have no alternative but to puzzle out the place of race in Obama's broader political outlook as well as in his legislative career.


When it comes to issues like affirmative action and set-asides, Obama is anything but the post-racial politician he's sometimes made out to be. Take set-asides. In 1998, Obama endorsed Democratic gubernatorial hopeful John Schmidt, stressing to the Defender Schmidt's past support for affirmative action and set-asides. Although Obama was generally pleased by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 acceptance of racial preferences at the University of Michigan, he underscored the danger that Republican-appointed justices might someday overturn the ruling. The day after the Michigan decision, Obama honored the passing of former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson Jr., eulogizing Jackson for creating model affirmative action and set-aside programs that spread across the nation.

In 2004, a U.S. District Court disallowed the ordinance under which Chicago required the use of at least 25 percent minority business enterprises and 5 percent women's business enterprises on city-funded projects. In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, Obama and Jesse Jackson were among the prominent voices calling for a black leadership summit to plot strategy for a restoration of Chicago's construction quotas. Obama and his allies succeeded in bringing back race-based contracting.

Prominent among those allies were two of Obama's earliest and strongest political supporters, Hyde Park aldermen Toni Preckwinkle and Leslie Hairston. These two are known as fierce advocates of set-asides and key orchestrators of demonstrations and public-relations campaigns against businesses that question race-based contracting. When, in 2001, construction work was planned for South Lake Shore Drive, a major artery that connects Hyde Park to the rest of Chicago, Preckwinkle and
Hairston seized the occasion to call for an extraordinary 70 percent minority quota on contracts for the project. They even demanded that, for the sake of race-based hiring, normal contractor eligibility requirements be waived. Then when work on South Lake Shore Drive was not awarded to minority contractors, a group consisting of Preckwinkle, Hairston, two neighboring aldermen, and numerous activists staged a surprise raid on the construction site, shutting it down and forcing the contractor to hire more blacks. A raid on a second construction site collapsed when several blacks were found already at work on the project. (The aldermen said these African-American laborers had been hired at the last minute to stymie their protest.)

Biographical treatments of Obama tend to stress the tenuous nature of his black identity-his upbringing by whites, his elite education, his home in Chicago's highly integrated Hyde Park, personal tensions with black legislators, and questions about whether Obama is "black enough" to represent African Americans. These concerns over Obama's racial identity are overblown. On race-related issues Obama has stood shoulder to shoulder with Chicago's African-American politicians for years.

Occasionally, Obama has even gotten out in front of them. In 1999, for example, he made news by calling on the governor to appoint a minority to the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC), a body that had previously attracted little notice among Chicago's blacks. In 2000, the Chicago Defender named Obama one of a number of "Vanguards for Change," citing him for "focusing on legislation in areas previously unexplored by the African-American community including his call that a person of color be appointed to the ICC." Obama did bring a somewhat different background and set of interests to the table. Yet the upshot was to expand the frontiers of race-based politics.

And the story doesn't end with Obama's support for set-asides. A Chicago Defender story of 1999 features a front-page picture of Obama beside the headline, "Obama: Illinois Black Caucus is broken." In the accompanying article, although Obama denies demanding that black legislators march in perfect lockstep, he expresses anger that black state senators have failed to unite for the purpose of placing a newly approved riverboat casino in a minority neighborhood. The failed casino vote, Obama argues, means that the black caucus "is broken and needs to unite for the common good of the African-American community." Obama continues, "The problem right now is that we don't have a unified agenda that's enforced back in the community and is clearly articulated. Everybody tends to be lone agents in these situations."

Speaking in reply to Obama was Mary E. Flowers, an African-American state senator who apparently broke black caucus discipline and voted to approve the casino's location in a nonminority area. Said Flowers: "The Black Caucus is from different tribes, different walks of life. I don't expect all of the whites to vote alike.  .  .  .  Why is it that all of us should walk alike, talk alike and vote alike?  .  .  .  I was chosen by my constituents to represent them, and that is what I try to do." Given Obama's supposedly post-racial politics, it is notable that he should be the one demanding enforcement of a black political agenda against "lone agents," while another black legislator appeals to Obama to leave her free to represent her constituents, black or white, as she sees fit.

Obama's fight to unify the black caucus on the casino vote was undertaken in partnership with state senator Donne Trotter. Yet nearly every biographical account of Obama lavishes attention on Trotter's claim that Obama was just a "white man in black face." The significance of that bit of campaign hype, offered while Trotter was running against Obama for Congress, has been exaggerated, perhaps because Trotter's epithet helps to defuse the notion that Obama himself practices race-based politics. Yet Obama does exactly that. His public legislative cooperation with Trotter, and with other black Illinois politicians, yields more insight into Obama's political plans than any electoral rhetoric or private intra-black-caucus backbiting. To the extent that Obama can be accused of having shaky "black credentials," that very accusation pushes him to practice race-conscious politics all the more energetically.

When the 2000 census revealed dramatic growth in Chicago's Hispanic and Asian populations alongside a decline in the number of African Americans, the Illinois black caucus was alarmed at the prospect that the number of blacks in the Illinois General Assembly might decline. At that point, Obama stepped to the forefront of the effort to preserve as many black seats as possible. The Defender quotes Obama as saying that, "while everyone agrees that the Hispanic population has grown, they cannot expand by taking African-American seats." As in the casino dispute, Obama stressed black unity, pushing a plan that would modestly increase the white, Hispanic, and Asian population in what would continue to be the same number of safe black districts. As Obama put it: "An incumbent African-American legislator with a 90 percent district may feel good about his reelection chances, but we as a community would probably be better off if we had two African-American legislators with 60 percent each."

Obama's intensely race-conscious approach may surprise Americans who know him primarily through his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention of 2004. When Obama so famously said, "There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America-there's the United States of America," most Americans took him to be advocating a color-blind consciousness of the kind expressed in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that his children would one day be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Anyone who understood Obama's words that way should know that this is not the whole story. In an essay published in 1988 entitled "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City," Obama tried to make room for both "accommodation and militancy" in black political engagement. He wrote,

The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and board-room negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches.

However his views may have evolved in the ensuing 20 years, Obama surely knew that the King-like rhetoric of his keynote address would be taken by most Americans as a repudiation of the kind of race-based politics he and his closest allies have consistently practiced throughout his electoral career. It's difficult to gauge the extent to which Obama may have consciously permitted this misunderstanding to take hold, or the extent to which he still believes that the opposition between "integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy" is a false one. Neither alternative is particularly encouraging.

LIBERALS AND RADICALS

Throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama has made a point of refusing the liberal label. While running for Congress against Bobby Rush in late 1999 and early 2000, however, Obama showed no such compunction. At a November 1999 candidate forum, the Hyde Park Herald reported that "there was little to distinguish" the candidates, who "struggled to differentiate themselves" ideologically. Acknowledged Obama, "[W]e're all on the liberal wing of the Democratic party." Indeed, the common political ideology of the candidates was a theme in Herald coverage throughout the race. Rush's background suggests what that ideology was: A Chicago icon and former Black Panther, Rush received a 90 percent rating in 2000, and a 100 percent rating in 1999, from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. Both years the American Conservative Union rated him at zero percent.

So how exactly did these two liberal candidates "struggle to differentiate" themselves in debate? During a candidate forum, for example, when Rush bragged that since entering Congress, he hadn't voted to approve a single defense budget, Obama pounced, accusing Rush of having voted for the Star Wars missile defense system the previous year. Since that contest, Obama's liberalism hasn't exactly been a secret to the folks back home. In 2002, Obama himself could speak hopefully of plans "to move a progressive agenda" through the state legislature, and local observers commonly identified Obama as a "progressive." When it endorsed him for the U.S. Senate in 2004, the Chicago Defender proclaimed Obama "represents renewal of the liberal, humanitarian cause." The Defender went on to assure readers that Obama would support "progressive action" in Washington.

The most interesting characterization came from Obama himself, who laid out his U.S. Senate campaign strategy for the Defender in 2003: "[A]s you combine a strong African-American base with progressive white and Latino voters, I think it is a recipe for success in the primary and in the general election." Putting the point slightly differently, Obama added, "When you combine  .  .  .an energized African-American voter base and effective coalition-building with other progressive sectors of the population, we think we have a recipe for victory." Obama consciously constructed his election strategy on a foundation of leftist ideology and racial bloc voting.

The overwhelming majority of Obama's "Springfield Report" columns in the Hyde Park Herald deal with state or local issues. It's interesting, therefore, that one of the tiny handful of Obama columns explicitly dealing with national politics is a 2000 column pleading with readers to support Al Gore rather than Ralph Nader for president. Obama opens his column noting that he's heard many people complain that Al Gore and George Bush are beholden to the same "big money interests." In pressing his case for Gore-which hinges on Republican/Democrat differences on issues like Supreme Court appointments, abortion, affirmative action, the environment, and school vouchers-Obama makes a point of agreeing with some of Nader's criticisms of the major parties. Obama raises no objections to Nader's agenda and implicitly presents himself as someone who might support Nader, were it not for the danger of a wasted vote aiding the Republicans. It's also striking that so many of the policy considerations Obama counts as decisive are classic sixties-derived issues-precisely the sort of polarizing culture-war conflicts Obama nowadays claims to have transcended. In the end, Obama needn't have worried. Hyde Park voted 91 percent for Gore, 6 percent for Bush, and 3 percent for Nader.

Obama's strong liberalism is nowhere more evident than on the subject of crime. Throughout his Illinois State Senate career, crime was a top Obama concern. Crime is also a key contact-point between Obama and his most celebrated radical associate, William Ayers. We've heard a good deal of late about Ayers's Weatherman terrorism back in the 1960s and his lack of repentance. Ayers refuses to answer questions about his relationship with Obama, while Obama has dismissed Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." Yet several Obama-Ayers connections are known: Obama's 1995 political debut at the home of Ayers and his wife (and fellow former terrorist) Bernardine Dohrn, Obama's joint service with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a couple of appearances with Ayers on academic panels, and what the New York Times called Obama's "rave review" (not actually a full review, but a warm endorsement) of Ayers's book on juvenile justice, which Obama dubbed "a searing and timely account" in the Chicago Tribune.

For all the attention, the actual content of Ayers's 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, as well as the political context of Obama's interest in it, have so far passed unremarked. Obama supporters paint Ayers as having mellowed since his radical days, pointing to his wonkish interests. Yet Ayers's radicalism pervades his book on Chicago's juvenile court system. Founded in 1899 (long before juvenile murder rates shot off the charts), Chicago's juvenile court was the first in the world, intended to serve as "a kind and just parent" to offenders. Ayers's title, he explained in the book, is meant to "bristle with irony" as a commentary on an American "society out of control." Ayers expressed the same sentiment more bluntly in an interview published in the New York Times shortly after 9/11, when he not only dismissed the notion of the United States as a "just and fair and decent place," but said the claim "makes me want to puke." A Kind and Just Parent is a thoughtful, well-informed, and beautifully written book, which provides revealing and sometimes disturbing glimpses of life at a Chicago juvenile detention facility. The book also virtually defines the phrases "liberal guilt" and "soft on crime." Ayers agon-izes over a high school field trip years ago, on which he and other white students toured a juvenile court system largely populated by black boys. When recounting horrific crimes-and even his own mugging-Ayers focuses on the terrified insecurity of the perpetrators, rather than the harm they inflict. Testifying at the trial of a young felon he'd been tutoring, Ayers calls him "nervous, a little shy  .  .  .  eager to please." The prosecutor responds: "Would you call shooting someone eight times at close range 'eager to please?'" Actually, Ayers effectively does do this, opening his book with the claim that a young murderer had "slavishly followed the orders" of his gang leader, rather than acting of his own free will.

Ayers opposes trying even the most vicious juvenile murderers as adults. Beyond that, he'd like to see the prison system itself essentially abolished. Unsatisfied with mere reform, Ayers wants to address the deeper "structural problems of the system." Drawing explicitly on Michel Foucault, a French philosopher beloved of radical academics, Ayers argues that prisons artificially impose obedience and conformity on society, thereby creating a questionable distinction between the "normal" and the "deviant." The unfortunate result, says Ayers, is to leave the bulk of us feeling smugly superior to society's prisoners. Home detention, Ayers believes, might someday be able to replace the prison. Ayers also makes a point of comparing America's prison system to the mass-detention of a generation of young blacks under South African Apartheid. Ayers's tone may be different, but the echoes of Jeremiah Wright's anti-prison rants are plain.

Given his decision to recommend Ayers's book in the Tribune, it's fair to say that Obama is at least broadly sympathetic to this perspective. When Obama offers examples of ill-conceived legislation, he often points to building prisons: Instead of building another prison, why not expand health care entitlements? Biographer David Mendell cites Obama's irritation with fellow legislators who "grandstand" by passing tough-on-crime legislation, while letting bills designed to bring "structural change" languish. Debating Bobby Rush in 2000, Obama bragged that he had "consistently fought against the industrial prison complex." Obama's Hyde Park Herald column echoes these points.

The most intriguing thread linking Obama, Ayers, and crime, however, runs through Ayers's wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Dohrn founded the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University, and along with her associates there, she regularly and energetically opposes "get tough" crime laws. Ayers draws on his wife's wisdom in A Kind and Just Parent, and Dohrn, like her husband, publicly presents her work on juvenile justice not as a repudiation of her youthful radicalism, but as a continuation of it.

The Ayers-Dohrn-Obama nexus was jolted into action in late 1997 and early 1998, when a major juvenile justice reform bill was introduced in the Illinois General Assembly. Written by prosecutors and sponsored by a Republican ex-prosecutor, the bill was neither simplistic nor partisan. Well aware of evidence that sending juveniles to adult prisons can backfire and actually raise recidivism rates, sponsors met rehabilitation-minded critics halfway. The proposed bill was an early example of "blended sentencing," in which juveniles who have committed serious crimes are given both a juvenile sentence and a parallel adult sentence. So long as the offender keeps his nose clean, doesn't violate parole, and participates in community-based rehabilitation, he never has to serve his adult sentence. But if the offender violates the provisions of his juvenile sentence, the adult punishment kicks in. That gives young offenders a powerful incentive to do right, and puts toughness at the service of offering kids a second chance.

Blended sentencing is generally viewed as an innovative compromise. To those on the far left, however, blended sentencing is just another mean-spirited "get tough" crime measure in disguise. That's why, when the Illinois blended sentencing bill was introduced in 1997, both Obama and Bernardine Dohrn were cited by the Chicago Sun-Times as key local critics of the bill. Steven A. Drizin, an associate of Dohrn's center (who is thanked in Ayers's book) was a member of the study commission that helped produce the bill, yet remained an energetic critic, not only of blended sentencing, but of nearly every other prosecutor-favored provision in the bill.

Meanwhile, Obama worked closely with the Illinois Black Legislative Caucus to slow the bill's progress, expressing skepticism about the blended sentencing provisions. While one report speaks of Obama negotiating with Cook County state's attorney Richard Devine for a compromise, there is good reason to believe that Obama's actual aim was to scuttle the entire bill. We have this on the authority of someone who may very well be Michelle Obama herself. Michelle Obama organized a University of Chicago panel about Bill Ayers's crime book in November 1997, just as the battle over the juvenile justice bill was heating up. That panel featured appearances by some of the key figures discussed in Ayers's book, along with Obama himself, who was identified in the press release as "working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system." In effect, then, this public event was a joint Obama-Ayers effort to sink the juvenile justice bill-Obama's decision to plug Ayers's book in the Chicago Tribune the following month was part of the same political effort.

In January 1998, a front-page headline in the Defender touted Obama's claim that the juvenile justice bill might be on the verge of failure. Obama hoped that black caucus opposition to the sentencing provisions might be matched by concerns among some Republicans that the bill could force expensive jail construction (based on the prospect that the deterrent effect of blended sentencing might fail, thereby forcing more juveniles into adult prisons). Obama's hopes were wildly off-base. In the end, the juvenile justice bill passed overwhelmingly. Given his ambitions for higher office, Obama was no doubt reluctant to vote against the final bill. A last-minute, minor and uncontroversial adjustment to the blended-sentencing provisions by the governor appears to have provided enough political cover for the bill's sharpest critics including Obama to come around and support it.

Also in 1998, according to the Hill, a Washington newspaper, Obama was one of only three Illinois state senators to vote against a proposal making it a criminal offense for convicts on probation or on bail to have contact with a street gang. A year later, on a vote mandating adult prosecution for aggravated discharge of a firearm in or near a school, Obama voted "present," and reiterated his opposition to adult trials for even serious juvenile offenders. In short, when it comes to the issue of crime, Obama is on the far left of the political spectrum and very much in synch with his active political allies Ayers and Dohrn.

Obama's signature crime legislation was his effort to combat alleged racial discrimination by the Illinois police. In 2003, the Defender said Obama had "made a career" out of his annual battle for a bill against racial profiling. For years, profiling legislation was bottled up by the Illinois senate's Republican leader. When senate control shifted to the Democrats in 2003, Obama's racial profiling bill finally passed-just in time to give his drive for the U.S. Senate nomination a major boost. At the time, Obama touted his profiling bill as "a model for the nation." It's also said that Obama showed a willingness to listen to police during the negotiations that led to the final bill. With the Democrats in control, however, the police had little choice but to work with Obama. As Obama himself made clear at the time, the police never abandoned their opposition to the bill.

Police doubts were entirely justified. Obama's bill is a deeply flawed example of precisely the sort of grievance-driven race-based politics that fuels legislation on affirmative action and minority set-asides. All of these "remedies" falsely leap from statistical evidence of racial disparities to claims of discrimination. In the case of racial profiling, disproportionate police stops of black or Hispanic motorists in no way prove discrimination.

In her path-breaking 2001 study, "The Myth of Racial Profiling," Heather Mac Donald assembled the evidence. It showed that racially disparate patterns of drug-interdiction stops in New Jersey, one of the first states supposedly proven to have practiced racial profiling, in fact reflected racial differences in the transport of drugs. Drug trafficking is not evenly spread across the population (as profiling activists improperly assume), and for the most part New Jersey police were simply going where the drugs were. Wrote Mac Donald, "When white club owners, along with Israelis and Russians, dominated the Ecstasy trade, that's whom the cops were arresting." When the big shipments shifted to minority neighborhoods, arrests followed. That's good crime intelligence, not racism. The reason virtually every major law-enforcement organization opposes racial-profiling legislation is that these bills invariably fail to provide benchmarks based on actual group-based variations in crime rates. Without such benchmarks, there is no basis for leaping from statistical disparities in traffic-stops to accusations of police racism.

Obama's February 16, 2000, Hyde Park Herald column was a textbook example of the racial-profiling fallacies Mac Donald exposed. Arguing for legislation to require the collection of traffic-stop data by race, Obama made the bogus leap from disproportionate traffic-stops and searches to accusations of racism using the same, baseline-free ACLU-supplied statistics Mac Donald critiqued. Obama then made a still greater leap: "Racial profiling may explain why incarceration rates are so high among young African Americans-law enforcement officials may be targeting blacks and other minorities as potential criminals and are using the Vehicle Code as a tool to stop and search them." The notion that the high black incarceration rates are due to racist traffic stops is utterly fanciful. (Mac Donald lays out the evidence not only in her profiling piece, but also in a second important study, published this year, "Is the Criminal-Justice System Racist?") Obama's column takes a leaf right out of Jeremiah Wright's playbook, stoking the worst sort of race-based conspiracy theories.

Indeed, Obama's racial profiling crusade shows his political alliance with Wright, Pfleger, and Meeks in action. We know from Obama's 1988 "Why Organize?" essay that a long-term goal of his was to politically organize "liberationist" black churches:

Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership, and-most important-values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago.

We also know from a 1995 profile that Obama viewed his legislative role as an extension of his grass-roots organizing career. So it's unsurprising to see in the Hyde Park Herald of February 28, 2001, that Obama's "grass-roots lobbying effort" for racial profiling legislation is to feature not only the ACLU and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, but also appearances by Meeks and Pfleger. The Chicago Defender notes the additional presence of Reverend Michael Sykes, an associate pastor of Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ. So Obama's drive for racial profiling legislation brought to fruition his long-time goal of politically organizing Chicago's most liberationist black churches. Of course Wright, Meeks, and Pfleger are known for their demagogic accusations of white racism. Obama's racial profiling bill fit squarely in that tradition. As with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, it's evident that the liberationist preachers were also his valued political allies.

Like other racial-profiling activists, Obama frequently cites New Jersey's experience as proof of his case. A little-noticed 2007 study by University of Chicago professor Paul Heaton sheds some fascinating light on the profiling crusade in that state. Heaton found that as a result of anti-profiling reforms, annual arrests of minorities for motor vehicle theft in New Jersey declined by 20-40 percent. Unfortunately, during the same period, motor vehicle theft increased in minority areas. Heaton concluded: "It appears that official and public scrutiny of profiling behavior by police can lead to substantial reductions in arrests of minorities, although this enforcement reduction may carry the unintended consequence of encouraging crime in minority areas." In other words, Heaton's work tends to corroborate Heather Mac Donald's analysis-not Barack Obama's. Disproportionate traffic stops are largely a response to disproportionate crime, while using simplistic statistics to falsely accuse police of racism yields more crime, not less.

A NEW WAR ON POVERTY

Important though it is to Obama, the crime issue runs a distant second to his deepest passion: social welfare legislation. "Big government liberal," "redistributionist"-call him what you like, Obama's fondest hope is to lead America into another war on poverty. Everything in his state-legislative career points in this direction, and Obama calls for a renewal of expensive national anti-poverty programs in his book The Audacity of Hope. True, Obama's promotion of government partnerships with private-sector housing contractors (like Antoin "Tony" Rezko) was supposed to open up novel, post-Great Society solutions to the problem of poverty. Yet, as a devastating Boston Globe report on Obama's Illinois housing policy recently showed, the results of Obama's new war on poverty are just as counterproductive as those of the old war on poverty. Neighborhoods supposedly renovated now lie deserted by the private developers who took Obama's government handouts and ran-quickly building or renovating housing units, but failing to maintain them.

Race and crime issues excepted, Obama's Illinois legislative career as covered in the newspapers essentially boils down to a list of spending measures. Many of Obama's proposed expenditures were tough to oppose. Because he was working under a Republican majority for the bulk of his time in the Illinois State Senate, Obama became a master of incrementalism. His pattern was to find the smallest, most appealing spending proposal possible, pass it, then build toward more spending on the same issue. An Obama bill exempting juvenile prisoners from paying for nonemergency medical or dental services isn't something you'd want to vote against. Obama's small, targeted spending measures tended to pass and to be followed by more: Obama called for a $30 million youth crime prevention package; Obama requested additional funds to expand the regulation of electrical utilities; Obama asked for $50 million over five years to overcome the "digital divide"; Obama proposed to fund anger management classes for children age 5-13; Obama ran for Congress promising to restore federal block grants to pre-Republican levels, and so on.

In a 2007 speech to Al Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN), Obama touted his Illinois legislative experience and challenged members of Sharpton's group to find a candidate with a better record of supporting the issues they cared about. (Incidentally, Sharpton named Jeremiah Wright's daughter Jeri Wright, publisher-editor of Wright's Trumpet Newsmagazine, to head NAN's new Chicago chapter in 2007. He named Wright's successor, Reverend Otis Moss III, its vice president.) Intrigued by Obama's challenge to Sharpton's group, Randolph Burnside, a professor of political science, and Kami Whitehurst, a doctoral candidate, both at the Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, decided to put Obama's Illinois record to the test. The two scholars made a study of bills sponsored and cosponsored by Obama during his Illinois State Senate career.

Published in the Journal of Black Studies, the results are striking. Burnside and Whitehurst produced two bar graphs, one representing bills of which Obama was the main sponsor, arranged by subject, and a second displaying bills Obama joined as a cosponsor. In the chart depicting bills of which Obama was the main sponsor, the bar for "social welfare" legislation towers over every other category. In the chart of Obama's cosponsored bills, social welfare legislation continues to far exceed all other categories, although now crime-related bills are visibly present in second place, with regulation and tax bills close behind. According to Burnside and Whitehurst, other than social welfare and a bit of government regulation, "Obama devoted very little time to most policy areas."

This brings us to what is perhaps the most striking result of our tour through Obama's Springfield days. Conventional wisdom has it that John McCain holds a political advantage over Obama on war and foreign policy issues, while Obama is favored to handle the economy. Yet Obama's economic experience is largely limited to social welfare spending. Indeed, precisely because of his penchant for spending, Obama's fingerprints are all over Illinois's burgeoning fiscal crisis.

The Illinois state budget has been in an ever-widening crisis since 2001. In an April 2007 report, a committee of top Chicago business leaders warned that the state was "headed toward fiscal implosion." Illinois's unfunded pension debt is the highest in the nation, while Illinois is sixth in the nation in per capita tax-supported debt. Yet the Illinois General Assembly-now controlled by Obama's Democratic allies-churns out at will exactly the sort of spending programs Obama pushed for, with only partial success, under the Republicans. The result is a fast-growing gap between revenues and expenditures (unimpeded by the statutory requirement of a balanced budget), rising fears of fiscal meltdown, finger-pointing, and political gridlock.

A watershed moment in Illinois's fiscal decline came in 2002, when crashing receipts and Democratic reluctance to enact spending cuts forced Republican governor George Ryan to call a special legislative session. While Ryan railed at legislators for refusing to rein in an out-of-control budget, the Chicago Tribune spoke ominously of an "all-consuming state budget crisis." Unwilling to cut back on social welfare spending, Obama's chief partner and political mentor, senate Democratic leader Emil Jones, came up with the idea of borrowing against the proceeds of a windfall tobacco lawsuit settlement due to the state.

This idea sent the editorial pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Tribune into a tizzy. Editorialists hammered cut-averse legislators for "chickening out," for making use of "tricked-up numbers," for a "cowardly abdication of responsibility," and for sacrificing the state's bond rating to "short-term political gains." As critics repeatedly pointed out, borrowing against a onetime tobacco settlement-instead of balancing the budget with regular revenues-would be a recipe for long-term fiscal disaster.

What was Obama doing while all this was going on? He was promoting the tobacco securitization plan in his Hyde Park Herald column, railing against the governor in the Defender for balancing the budget "on the back of the poor," and voting to override cuts in treasured programs like bilingual education. Actually, far from "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor," the governor had trimmed evenly across all the state's most expensive programs. In the end, Ryan did force a number of cuts, yet the resistance of Obama and his allies took a toll. When, just a year later, Democrats added control of the governorship and state senate to their existing control of the house, they revealed that the state deficit had reached $5 billion-far larger than most had feared. Since then it's been a swift downhill tumble toward fiscal implosion for Illinois. Now ruling, the Democrats have continued their profligate ways, pushing the state's budget woes to new heights.

Illinois's fate may foreshadow the nation's. Obama's small and carefully targeted spending bills were expressly designed to win passage by a Republican-controlled state senate. But if Obama takes the presidency with a Democratic Congress at his back, we'll likely see a grand-scale version of the fiscal mayhem Obama and his colleagues brought to Illinois.

Obama's overarching political program can be described as "incremental radicalism." On health care, for example, his long-term strategy in Illinois was no secret. He repeatedly proposed a state constitutional amendment mandating universal health care. Prior to the 2002 budget crisis, Obama's plan was to use the windfall tobacco settlement to finance the transition to the new system. That would have effectively hidden the huge cost of universal care from the taxpayer until it was too late. Yet Obama touted his many tiny expansions of government-funded health care as baby steps along the path to his goal. The same strategy will likely be practiced-if more subtly-on other issues. Obama takes baby-steps when he has to, but in a favorable legislative environment, Obama's redistributionist impulses will have free rein, and a budget-busting war on poverty (not to mention entitlement spending) will surely rise again.

Obama's vaunted reputation for bipartisanship is less than meets the eye. The Illinois legislature has long been home to a number of moderate Republicans, less fiscally conservative than their colleagues, many from districts where the parties are closely balanced. It was easy enough to get a few of these Republicans to sign onto small, carefully tailored spending bills directed toward particularly sympathetic recipients. The trouble with Obama's bipartisanship is that it was largely a one-way street. Overcoming initial opposition from Catholic groups, for instance, Obama cosponsored an incremental bill on abortion, requiring hospitals to inform rape victims of morning-after pills. Yet rejecting compromise with the other side, Obama voted against bills that would have curbed partial-birth abortions. In other words, Obama is bipartisan so long as that means asking Republicans to take incremental steps toward his own broader goals. When it comes to compromising with the other side, however, Obama says "take a hike." Obama voted against a bill that would have allowed people in possession of a court order protecting them from some specific individual to carry a concealed weapon in self-defense. The bill failed on a 29-27 vote. Bipartisanship for thee, but not for me: That's how Obama ended up with the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate.

The real Obama? You see him in those charts. Fundamentally, he is a big-government redistributionist who wants above all to aid the poor, particularly the African-American poor. Obama is eager to do so both through race-specific programs and through broad-based social-welfare legislation. "Living wage" legislation may be economically counterproductive, and Obama-backed housing experiments may have ended disastrously, yet Obama is committed to large-scale government solutions to the problem of poverty. Obama's early campaigns are filled with declarations of his sense of mission-a mission rooted in his community organizing days and manifest in his early legislative battles. Recent political back flips notwithstanding, Barack Obama does have an ideological core, and it's no mystery at all to any faithful reader of the Chicago Defender or the Hyde Park Herald.

3)Whether voters support Barack Obama or John McCain, it is their opinion of Obama that drives their decision.
By Charlie Cook


What is this presidential election about? According to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, it's about Barack Obama, not John McCain or really even a choice between the two men. As pollster Peter Hart, the Democratic half of the duo who conducted the survey, puts it, "Obama will be the 'point person' in this election."

When the 1,003 registered voters interviewed July 18-21 were asked, "As you think about the presidential race and how you are going to vote, do you find yourself focusing more on what kind of president you think Barack Obama would be or more on what kind of president John McCain would be?" 51 percent said Obama, just 27 percent said McCain, and 16 percent volunteered "both."

Results of another question in the same poll showed Obama leading McCain, 47 percent to 41 percent. Conducted during the first stage of Obama's trip abroad, the survey also asked, "When it comes to your vote for [your chosen candidate], would you say that you are excited to be voting for him, you are satisfied to be voting for him, or you are voting for him as the lesser of two evils?" Among Obama voters, 44 percent were "excited," 33 percent were "satisfied," and 22 percent viewed him as the "lesser of two evils." But among McCain supporters, 43 percent said they plan to vote for him because he is the "lesser of two evils," while 42 percent were "satisfied" with him, and just 14 percent were "excited."

These findings dovetail with Hart's conclusion after conducting focus groups in Albemarle County, Va., and York, Pa., over the past three months: Obama is the defining candidate in the race. Whether voters support Obama or McCain, it is their opinion of Obama that drives their decision.

That explains why Obama has only a 6-point lead even though Republicans are trying to hold the White House for a third consecutive term (something that has been done but once since World War II), while just 13 percent of voters say that the country is headed in the right direction and just 30 percent approve of President Bush's performance.

The current political climate makes this election look like it should be a gimme putt for Democrats, yet with Obama seen as the only golfer on the green sizing up the shot, Democrats can't be certain that they will nail it.

One can sense a chorus of "I told you so" about to be shouted from Whitehaven Street NW, where Chez Clinton sits. For a year, Hillary Rodham Clinton warned fellow Democrats that an Obama nomination would distract from the larger sentiment for change and the anger at Bush and the Republican Party.

Ironically, at the race's outset, many expected a controversial and polarizing Clinton to be the pivot point in this election. Instead, she simply became the alternative to Obama and the beneficiary of the resistance to his overtures and seductions.

And now the general election appears likely to come down to how Obama wears with voters over time. As Republican pollster Neil Newhouse puts it, "In order to win this election, Obama's challenge seems less that he needs to overcome John McCain; rather, he needs to overcome doubts voters have about himself. This election is clearly more about Barack Obama than it is either about John McCain or even President Bush."

It's pretty clear that Obama's strength among African-Americans is very durable: He could pull more than 90 percent of the African-American vote and pump up that bloc's turnout to perhaps a quarter higher than in 2004. Similarly, despite predictions that rivalries between African-American and Hispanic leaders and voters and McCain's strengths might allow the GOP to eat into Democratic support among Hispanics, polling shows that Obama is well above the 60 percent that John Kerry received in 2004. And Obama is also doing well with white voters younger than 50.

The real question is about the "gray whites"--that is, white voters who are 50 or older. If they embrace Obama in meaningful numbers, perhaps one-third or a bit more, he will become the next president. If they decide against him, he will lose.

The bottom line: It's about Obama.

4) PM Olmert for Another Eight Months?
By Yisrael Ne'eman


Israeli PM Ehud Olmert announced this past week he will not seek the chairmanship of his Kadima faction in the Sept. 17 primaries. As soon as a replacement will be voted in, Olmert is to resign the premiership. Demands for the beleaguered PM’s resignation are a result of six different corruption investigations and continuing criticism of Israel’s failure to defeat the Hezbollah in the 2006 Second War in Lebanon. But most likely Olmert will be PM until March or even April.

The scenario is such:

To win the Sept. 17 primaries the candidate must obtain at least 40% of the vote. Failure to do so leads to a runoff on Sept. 24, the most reasonable possibility at the moment since there are four candidates in the running. Full official results should be known two days later.

Assuming Olmert resigns, the government falls and the new Kadima chairman/woman (either Shaul Mofaz or Tzipi Livni are expected to win) will have 45 days to establish a new coalition, figure by Nov. 10.

Upon failure to slap together another government, elections will be held in 90 days. Olmert is still PM in a transition government. We are now in early February 2009 holding general elections. By the second week of February the full results will be known and now a month and a half of haggling to form a coalition will commence. Most likely Benyamin Netanyahu and the Likud will win (but who knows?), gluing together a government by April 1.

It appears Olmert will be PM for another eight months, meaning he will have been PM for over three years - adding in that he was acting prime minister for several months after Ariel Sharon’s stroke in early January 2006. That is the same span as Netanyahu’s term (1996 – 99), Yitzhak Rabin’s first term (1974 – 77) and longer that Ehud Barak (1999 – 2001), Shimon Peres (1984 – 86), Yitzchak Shamir’s first term (1983 – 84) or Moshe Sharett (1954 – 55). David Ben Gurion’s first government (1949 – 51) lasted only two and a half years. So much for statistics.

Israel faces crucial issues over the next eight months such as how to handle Iran’s nuclear program, Hezbollah’s rearmament with the help of Syria and Iran (in particular the possible acquisition of the latest surface to air missiles), Palestinian instability in both Gaza and the West Bank and Knesset approval for the 2009 state budget. Furthermore there are peace negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) of the Palestinian Authority and indirect talks with the Syrians through Turkish mediation.

But it can get more complicated as Olmert may be indicted in at least one, but most likely two cases within a month. Will he lead a transition government while under indictment? He cannot technically leave office although he can refuse to function as PM and take a leave of absence. His Kadima successor will then become “acting” prime minister, but not officially.

A bit of advice: whoever is supposedly at the helm during the transition period until the elections should organize a national unity framework where the opposition is a full partner in making policy. This will demand temporary concessions by all involved but no need for a division of ministerial portfolios. Such a step will give Israel administrative stability which is so crucial during these trying times.

Livni, Mofaz, Barak, Netanyahu and Lieberman, are you listening?

6)August is the Month

Dick Morris believes August the month when most conspicuous and effective political combat takes place in a presidential election year. I believe two recent McCain ads attacking Obama on the basis of image are in keeping with Morris' opinion. Ads that ridicule Obama are appropriate at this point in the election. People in general, and the "media" in particular, need to see McCain burst the Obama-the-holy-one bubble once and for all. Now, however, it is time for McCain and his surrogate spokesmen, including you and me, to press forward on substantive issues. In other words, when Obama is exposed in an effective way as a charlatan, McCain should attack him relentlessly on issues. The attacks should be sharply worded and hard-on-the-mark. So, here are the issues as I see them:

1. National security: We are engaged in a war of defense against a Jihad bent on our annihilation. We must defend ourselves with absolute resolve. Success in Iraq must be made permanent. The guerilla war in Afghanistan must be won. Iranian inspired terror must be eliminated. We need a competent leader to accomplish these goals. McCain could do this. Obama cannot.

2. The economy: We may be in a recession, or on the cusp of a recession. The way out of this mess is to press on with free market solutions, not government panaceas. The basic issue is tax policy. We must cut taxes and eliminate waste. Raising taxes is suicide.

3. Public education is a total shambles. Parents must be given maximum freedom to pursue a sound education for their children. That's all.

4. Energy policy must be pragmatic, aggressive, and devoid of ideologic nonsense. Save-the-planet baloney needs to be laughed off the stage of national discourse.

5. Medical insurance should be addressed as an essential service that requires a healthy free market to promote health for individuals . We should press for competition among insurance companies, free choice by individuals, removal of employers from the equation, tax incentives to promote good choices, AND AN APPROPRIATE DEGREE OF GOVERNMENT REGULATION. Regulations must be established to prevent insurance fraud. No one should be denied an opportunity to purchase health insurance at an affordable rate because of a "pre-existing" condition. People should not be penalized because they are diabetic, hypertensive, or otherwise chronically ill. The only "rateable" conditions should be those based on bad individual choices to include tobacco/alcohol/illicit drug use and other high risk behavior. Putting everyone on Medicare is insane. You need to believe this: universal national health insurance would be a medical system with the compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the Postal Service. They have this in Canada. Ask a Canadian.

6. Up to three Supreme Court justices will be replaced in the next four years. Got it?

7. Israel. One bad war and they are gone.

Obama - Toreador, Ferdinand or Man from La Mancha?

Yoni Goldstein finds nothing redeeming about Olmert's time in office. (See 1 below.)

Obama now favors off shore drilling. Obama keeps changing his views and embracing McCain's. Obama is becoming a clone of McCain and perhaps McCain could ask Obama to run as his VP. (See 2 below.)

I only want to sit down with terrorists because debating McCain might be too revealing. Obama the toreador, Ferdinand or Man from La Mancha? (See 3 below.)

Assad and Ahmadinejad celebrate victory over West. Merkel gas deal undercuts potential Western sanctions. She visited in Israel, spoke to the Knesset all the while cutting a deal with Iran which just became known. Duplicity? You Judge. (See 4 below.)

Hamas clobbers Fatah and where do they escape to - Israel of course. (See 5 below.)

Investor's Daily on Obama's energy program. (See 5 6 below)

Dick


1)Yoni Goldstein: Good riddance to Ehud Olmert

Ehud Olmert, the current Israeli Prime Minister who announced on Wednesday his intentions to step down as leader of the ruling Kadima party in September, will leave no legacy at all. This is the ultimate mark of a failed statesman. During his two-and-a-half years as PM, a position he assumed when Ariel Sharon was felled by a massive stroke that has left him unconscious to current days, he accomplished virtually nothing. Compare Israel in August, 2008, to the Israel of January, 2006: Nothing much has changed, and the things have changed have been inarguably for the worse.

One might argue that it is unfair to compare Olmert to his predecessor Sharon, who will surely go down in history as one of Israel’s greatest, most courageous leaders. Olmert, it’s quite obvious, isn’t built of the same kind of stuff. But in the Middle East’s sole democracy, in a country surrounded by enemies bent on its destruction, there is no latitude for indecisive, passive leadership. Every Israeli head of state must be ready to move aggressively — to make peace or in self-defence — at a moment’s notice. Israeli leaders must be the embodiment of conviction, anything else represents weakness, and Israel can never afford to be, or even appear to be, weak.

This was Olmert’s mistake throughout the 2006 Lebanon war, which he mishandled pathetically. Olmert and his cabinet never pulled the trigger on a full-scale ground invasion of Lebanon, which was necessary to weed out Hezbollah terrorists hiding amongst the general Lebanese populace. Instead, Olmert ordered air strikes, which did destroy Hezbollah outposts, but also quite a bit of non-Hezbollah stuff. And all the while, Hezbollah rockets rained down on Israel, forcing a million people from their homes.

Only in the final days of the war, with a UN-brokered ceasefire already negotiated, did Olmert initiate major ground attacks. Within two days, Israel was out of Lebanon again, having accomplished virtually nothing in its own war on terror. Mission unaccomplished.

The January, 2008, final report from the Winograd Commission, established in the aftermath of that war to figure out how Israel had managed to lose in Lebanon, stated: “A semi-military organization of a few thousand men resisted for a few weeks the strongest army in the Middle East, which enjoyed full superiority and size and technology advantages. The barrage of rockets aimed at Israel’s civilian population lasted throughout the war and the IDF did not provide an effective response to it.” Ultimately, the blame for those failures fall at the feet of Ehud Olmert.

Lebanon was Olmert’s biggest gaffe, to be sure, but there are others as well.

He destroyed Kadima, Sharon’s centrist party. Kadima represented the once unthinkable possibility of true coalition governance in Israel — not a patchwork minority government, but a powerhouse majority composed of politicos genuinely willing to work together to find common ground. Now, Kadima faces the probability of members defecting back to Labour and Likud, two parties never happy to help each other.

He failed to stop the barrage of bombs in Sderot. More than 1,000 bombs have exploded in the small southern city in the past year, yet the Olmert government has refused to take serious action against Gaza.

Israeli-Palestinian relations are no better — or worse — since Olmert took office. Hamas remains in power in Gaza, left to gather and organize jihadi terrorists and arms as it sees fit. And in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas remains a weak authoritative figure. There have been renewed peace talks of late, but despite some confident speechifying, there is little real sense that a significant peace deal is close, or even achievable.

To be forgotten is a difficult accomplishment for a head of state, but I suspect Ehud Olmert’s reign as leader of Israel will quickly be swept under the rug by historians. And Israelis. To stand prone, to not act, is the worst path a politician can ever take for it presents as weakness, and the voting public have little patience for anemic leadership. In the end, Ehud Olmert never appeared interested in undertaking the kinds of bold actions that mark the greatest, and the worst, of world leaders. He was happy to just stand still; Israeli voters have made it clear they want movement.

2) In major change, Obama says he'll support offshore drilling
By David Lightman

WASHINGTON — Barack Obama Friday dropped his opposition to offshore oil drilling, saying he could go along with the idea if it was part of a broader energy package.

Obama made his comments in St. Petersburg during an interview with the Palm Beach Post. "My interest is in making sure we've got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices," he said.

"If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage - I don't want to be so rigid that we can't get something done," the paper quoted Obama as saying.

The change is dramatic because Obama often pointed to his opposition to drilling as a key difference between himself and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

"I will keep the moratorium in place and prevent oil companies from drilling off Florida’s coasts," Obama said in Florida in June.

Friday, he said he was still not a fan of drilling, telling the Palm Beach paper, "I think it's important for the American people to understand we're not going to drill our way out of this problem."

Obama also said, in a separate statement issued by his campaign, that he supported the bipartisan energy plan offered by 10 senators Friday.

"Like all compromises, it also includes steps that I haven't always supported," he said. "I remain skeptical that new offshore drilling will bring down gas prices in the short-term or significantly reduce our oil dependence in the long-term, though I do welcome the establishment of a process that will allow us to make future drilling decisions based on science and fact."

The proposal would end most of the ban on drilling. It would allow a 50-mile buffer on the east coast, as well as Florida's west coast. Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and South Carolina would be permitted to start oil and natural gas exploration outside the buffer.

Any oil, the senators said, would have to stay in this country.

McCain reacted quickly to Obama's switch in positions, telling the Associated Press, "We need oil drilling and we need it now offshore. He has consistently opposed it. He has opposed nuclear power. He has opposed reprocessing. He has opposed storage."

Experts estimate that even if drilling proves to sharply increase oil supplies, its effects will not be felt for at least seven and probably 10 years.

But the concept has proven popular, and McCain has made it a centerpiece of his stump speeches and some of his television ads.

Political momentum has been moving in favor of opening up U.S. coastlines. There were two bars to offshore drilling, one first imposed by Congress in 1981 and another signed by President Bush's father in 1990 and renewed in 1998 by President Clinton. Bush lifted the executive ban last month; Congress, which left Friday for a five-week recess, has not acted.

The government bans exploration and drilling on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and most of the eastern Gulf of Mexico, to protect U.S. beaches and fisheries from pollution.

3) Obama backs away from McCain's debate challenge
By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL

WASHINGTON - Democratic candidate Barack Obama on Saturday backed away from rival John McCain's challenge for a series of joint appearances before the political conventions, agreeing only to the standard three debates in the fall.


In May, when a McCain adviser proposed a series of pre-convention appearances at town hall meetings, Obama said, "I think that's a great idea." In summer stumping on the campaign trail, McCain has often noted that Obama had not followed through and joined him in any events.

On Saturday, in a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said the short period between the last political convention and the first proposed debate made it likely that the commission-sponsored debates would be the only ones in the fall.

"We've committed to the three debates on the table," campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Saturday in an interview. "It's likely they will be the three appearances by the candidates this fall."

Asked by The Associated Press if that meant Obama would not agree to any other debates, Psaki said, "We're not saying that." She said the McCain campaign had rejected Obama's proposal for two joint town hall meetings.

The McCain campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The first debate planned by the commission is set for Sept. 26 in Oxford, Miss., three weeks after the Republican National Convention concludes Sept. 4. The Democratic convention is scheduled for Aug. 25-28.

The other presidential debates are set for Oct. 7 and Oct. 15 and the vice presidential debate for Oct. 2.

A day after Obama clinched the Democratic nomination in early June, McCain challenged Obama to a series of 10 town hall meetings with voters in the months leading up to the conventions. The candidates' campaigns began negotiations, telling reporters that they agreed in spirit to the joint appearances.

When the idea first came up from the McCain campaign that May, Obama was still battling Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Obama said then: "Obviously, we would have to think through the logistics on that, but ... if I have the opportunity to debate substantive issues before the voters with John McCain, that's something that I am going to welcome."

In June, Plouffe had suggested Obama-McCain meetings more along the lines of the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates. In 1858, during Abraham Lincoln's Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas, the candidates met seven times across Illinois. One spoke for an hour, the other for an hour and a half, and the first was allowed a half-hour rebuttal.

Plouffe said Saturday that Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois will be Obama's representative in further discussions with the commission.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, established in 1987, sponsors and produces debates featuring the presidential and vice presidential candidates of the major parties. The nonprofit and nonpartisan organization has sponsored all the presidential debates since 1988.

4)Tehran hosts Assad to celebrate winning nuclear dispute with West and cooling of US-Israel ties


The Syrian president Bashar Assad was due to visit Tehran in a week’s time. The trip was brought forward to Saturday, Aug. 2 to coincide with the deadline the six powers gave Iran for an answer to its offer of benefits in return for its consent to suspend uranium enrichment – or face a fourth round of sanctions.

Middle East sources report: Iranian and Syrian rulers are so pleased with their unforeseen success in outmaneuvering the West that they called an urgent summit for follow-up planning.

When a line of Iranian leaders rejected the ultimatum on their “right” to develop a nuclear program, Washington responded mildly “we are not counting the days”, while the European Union said there was no hurry. In any case a huge German energy deal with Iran has drawn the sting of any prospective penalties.

The Syrian-Iranian get-together also follows the failure of top Israeli leaders traveling to Washington in the past three weeks to persuade the Bush administration of the urgency of considering military action against Iran’s nuclear installations – or at least backing an Israeli operation.

Transport minister Shaul Mofaz was the last arrival after chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, foreign minister Tzipi Livni and defense minister Ehud Barak.

Iran’s supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, president Mahmoud Ahminejad and Assad can therefore pat each others backs over the cooling of US-Israeli strategic relations in on top of their other successes.

Their feats owe more to the way the West plays into their hands than their own ingenuity:

1. In mid-June, the Bush administration decided to embark on a secret dialogue with the Islamic Republic. After procuring a direct line for business with US government leaders, and wrapping up deals, mostly behind Israel’s back, on the burning issues of oil pricing, Iraq and Lebanon, Iran nullified any leverage Washington had. Tehran can now afford to make light of the six-power ultimatum on its nuclear activities.

2. At about the same time, Israel entered into peace talks with Syria through Turkish mediation. The result: While Iran was developing its back-door rapprochement with the US, the Syrian ruler had hit the jackpot for buying back international legitimacy and a respected role in Middle East politics, without giving up his warm ties with Tehran or his sponsorship of terror.

Damascus can now afford to dump its diplomatic track with Israel as soon as Ehud Olmert steps down as prime minister in September.

The insistence of Olmert’s would-be successors – Livni and Mofaz from his own Kadima and Labor leader Barak – on continuing the talks with Syria, on condition that Assad pulls away from Tehran – not only mislead the public about their purpose, but feed the Damascus-Tehran alliance which is aimed against Israel.

3. French president Nicolas Sarkozy gave Assad a massive boost to the stability of his regime when he hosted him as the guest of honor at the last French Bastille Day parade. Sarkozy assured him then that he would act through the UN Security Council to abolish the international tribunal set up to prosecute the murderers of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. This let the chief suspects, Assad’s close kin and intelligence chiefs, off the hook.

4. A torrent of studies suddenly coming out of US think tanks in recent weeks shows how hard American research and intelligence circles are leaning on the administration to expand its dialogue with Tehran. Bush is being urged to call off sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program and withdraw US backing from Iran’s disaffected minorities’ revolt against the Islamic regime – all for the purpose of putting US-Iranian relations on a normal footing.

5)Fatah men flee in droves to Israel after battling Hamas

Over 180 Fatah loyalists - some wounded during a bloody day-long battle with Hamas operatives in the Gaza Strip that left four dead and dozens hurt - fled to the Israel late Saturday as Hamas mortar shells and small army fire attempted to prevent their escape, Army Radio reported.
Hamas security forces are...


The IDF confirmed that it allowed wounded Palestinians to cross the border after having been stripped of their weapons, saying that permission was granted as part of a "humanitarian gesture." At least 20 of them were taken to hospitals in Beersheba and Ashkelon for medical treatment, while others were being transferred to the West Bank.

Earlier in the day, loud explosions and gunfire could be heard across Gaza City. as Hamas security forces asserted control in a stronghold of political rival Fatah. Hamas said it arrested dozens of people, including 10 who had tried to flee disguised as women, and confiscated weapons. In addition to the fatalities, at least 80 people were wounded.

The fighting raged for most of the day in the crowded Shijaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City, home to some 100,000 people, including members of the Fatah-linked Hilles clan. Hamas alleged that the clan was hiding suspects in a car bombing last week that left five Hamas members dead and sparked a Hamas crackdown on Fatah.

By Saturday afternoon, hundreds of Hamas security forces members were deployed in the neighborhood, patrolling the streets and searching houses. Hamas policemen fired in the air in celebration. A senior Hamas police official said searches would continue in coming days. Hamas also fired several mortar shells toward the nearby border with Israel, apparently to prevent fugitives from getting away.

Since last week's bombing, Hamas has systematically rounded up Fatah supporters, in an apparent attempt to crush remaining pockets of opposition and cement control.
The remains of a car that...


Following the bombing, Hamas seized more than 200 Fatah supporters in the biggest crackdown since wresting control of the territory from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in June 2007. Fatah retaliated by arresting scores of Hamas activists in the West Bank.

On Saturday, Abbas's forces widened their sweep to include members of the Liberation Party, a pan-Islamic movement that has sharply criticized the West Bank leadership but says it espouses non-violent change. In the past, members of the movement were able to march in the West Bank without hindrance.

However, demonstrations in recent days were broken up by Abbas's security forces, and one senior security official said there is growing fear Hamas is using the Liberaton Party as a front in the West Bank.

Since Thursday, dozens of Liberation Party members have been arrested, said its spokesman, Baher Saleh. On Saturday, dozens more party members were detained as police tried to break up a rally in Ramallah.

Deeb al-Ali, chief of the national security forces in the West Bank, said all political gatherings were banned because of the growing tensions with Hamas. "We have to stop rallies and marches or anything that leads to mass gatherings," he said.

Saturday's raid in Gaza began under heavy morning fog when Hamas police took up positions in Shijaiyeh. Hamas security men stormed several high-rise buildings and arrested rooftop snipers, as well as gunmen and wounded fighters, said Islam Shahwan, a Hamas police spokesman.

Ahmed Hilles, a clan leader and Fatah official, said Hamas police cut off electricity as they launched the raid. Explaining why the clan fought back, he said: "You have to decide: Either be trampled under Hamas' shoes, or stand in dignity."

Three Hamas police and a member of the Hilles clan were killed.

By Saturday afternoon, Hamas police seized control of the neighborhood, declaring it a closed military zone and arresting more than 50 in house-to-house searches.

Hamas officials also shut down a radio station affiliated with the small Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, saying that the station was reporting "lies and rumors and inciting sedition," the group said.

A senior Abbas aide in the West Bank, Tayeb Abdel Rahim, denounced Gaza's Hamas rulers as "the new Mongols." But in act of goodwill, Hamas released 10 Fatah leaders after Egyptian mediation.

Hamas said two more supporters were arrested in the West Bank overnight, bringing the total in the past week to more than 150.

Meanwhile, five Palestinians were killed and 18 wounded in a smuggling tunnel under the Gaza-Egypt border after Egyptian troops blew up the entrance, officials said Saturday.

The destruction of the entrance deprived those inside the tunnel of oxygen, said the Egyptian official, who is stationed at the border and spoke on customary condition of anonymity.

The tunnel entrance was destroyed late Friday, near the Gaza border town of Rafah.

Networks of tunnels run under the Gaza-Egypt border and are used to bring supplies into Gaza. The territory has been virtually cut off from the world since June 2007 when Hamas seized control by force. Both Israel and Egypt have enforced the closure of Gaza.

In the past week, Egypt has destroyed 14 tunnels, the Egyptian official said. Since the beginning of the year, 27 Palestinians have been killed in tunnels, including the five killed late Friday.

6) Phony 'Emergency'
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAIly

Stimulus: Barack Obama's newly unveiled "Emergency Economic Plan" is quite a document, sounding more like the rantings of an extremist fringe candidate than a serious contender for the presidency.

Read More: Economy | Election 2008

The six-page package is a doozy, replete with populist ideas that will wreck the economy and leave us poorer. The only real emergency we should worry about is the debacle that would follow its passage.

It's shocking that a mainstream candidate, with so many supposedly well-regarded economists advising him, would produce such a shoddy, poorly thought-out plan.

Take his proposal to send every family a check for $1,000. Don't worry, he assures us, we won't have to pay for it. "Windfall profits from Big Oil" will pick up the tab — in this case.

Sen. Obama seems to be trying to take advantage of reports that Exxon Mobil reported record second-quarter income — indeed, the highest quarterly profit for any corporation ever.

But the reality is that as Obama and his equally unknowing friends push windfall taxes, Exxon Mobil has already given the U.S. a massive windfall. As economist Mark Perry has noted, Exxon Mobil will pay more taxes this year to the U.S. Treasury than the bottom 50% of all taxpayers — combined.

In the first half, Exxon Mobil's after-tax income rose 15% to $22.6 billion. A lot of money, to be sure, until you consider that Exxon Mobil paid $61.7 billion in taxes — also a record.

People shouldn't fall for such cheap, recycled class-warfare argument. Yet many will. Sadly, it will saddle big energy companies with higher taxes and crimp their exploration and drilling budgets. That means less oil on the market and higher prices.

We know this because it has been tried before. Jimmy Carter's windfall profits tax led to a 6% drop in domestic oil output and as much as a 15% surge in oil imports, according to the Congressional Research Service. Now, Obama wants to play it again.

The rest of Obama's plan is just as nonsensical. It would spend $50 billion on various kinds of stimulus, including $25 billion to help erase state government budget deficits. In other words, he'll reward profligate states and punish thrifty ones. This is "stimulus" only if you think stimulus is saving government jobs.

Another $25 billion would go towards "replenishing" the Highway Trust Fund to rebuild the nation's roads and bridges. The problem with this idea is that we're already paying for it, with a 18.3- cents-a-gallon tax on gasoline and even more on diesel.

Unfortunately, under the last transportation bill, Congress chose to spend more than it had coming in — the result of runaway pork-barrel politics, not need.

As the Transportation Department's inspector general wrote in a scathing 2007 report, "Many earmarked projects considered by the agencies as low priority are being funded over higher-priority, non-earmarked projects."

The real problem is not that we pay too little in taxes, or that "Big Oil" is enjoying "windfall profits." It's a big-spending, big-taxing Congress that "emergency" plans such as Obama's will only embolden. This lame plan will hurt the economy, not stimulate it.

Turn on, turn off! Fish for votes- avoid race bait!

McCain was correct in criticizing the way GW initially fought the Iraq War and McCain was correct in supporting the surge. McCain was early and the public is just catching up to his judgment.

Obama opposed both the war and the surge and cannot bring himself to admit the latter's success. Had we listened to Obama we would have pulled out years ago, lost in Iraq and no telling what the consequence would have been in terms of Iran and our veracity going forward.

McCain has been in favor of off shore drilling, nuclear and came recently to realize drilling in Anwar is now acceptable. McCain has been right and the public now has shifted over to his position.

Obama opposes virtually all drilling and nuclear and is a captive of the Greens.

Realistically, we will continue to use oil for the next thirty years, hopefully less going forward. We must begin developing and embracing alternative energy sources. Whether Obama understands we will be dependent upon oil for a long period is not clear. Furthermore, from a security standpoint alone, oil dependency from unstable foreign sources is dangerous. Thus, one would think it wise we develop as much of our own resource base as is feasible. It took $4 gasoline to get the nation to understand this reality and change its previous anti-exploration views.

McCain opposes raising taxes and with a weak economy he is correct because anything that discourages capital formation directly impacts employment. Furthermore, capital investments in research and development makes us more competitive and enhances worker productivity.

The public is divided on this issue because Democrats have been effective in selling the populist line about wealth disparity. Facts suggest almost 1/2 of the nation's revenue comes from less than 2% of the population.

Obama wants to raise taxes and redistribute the income in a typical socialistic fashion. Obama also wants to increase spending and the size of government in pursuit of fairness. What is fairness and how would bureaucrats define it? Can fairness even be defined or is it too subjective and something more in the eye of the beholder?

If Obama has his way, Americans and their corporations will become the highest taxed of any developed nation.

In the matter of protecting our nation from terrorism and external threats McCain knows more about this subject and has been involved in this area more years than Obama has been an adult. Democrats have a fairly ragged record when it comes to defense expenditures and/or maintaining a strong military posture.

Obama comes across as a typical liberal when it comes to the military. He favors negotiations but fails to recognize the years of fruitless negotiations the Germans, French, Brits and ourselves have engaged in with Iran. What about Iran's rejection of the entire world community's efforts acting through the U.N? Iran's behaviour parallel's Sadaam's in this regard.

McCain is in favor of allowing education choice and challenges ingrained union resistance to competition. He urges unions to change their outmoded and counterproductive thinking.

Obama remains a captive of teacher unions and though he talks about improving education he seeks to do so through the existing system. He is willing to cheat his own race's youth of a decent education that will prepare them for life.

Ironically, black children are the ones most impacted by our current education approach and Obama's head in the sand attitude is most negative toward their education prospects. Are black voters, whose children suffer from poor education , sophisticated enough to understand this? Probably not, because they are not well educated themselves, are heavily influenced by black leadership which preaches dependency on government and is historically beholden to unions.

On these five issues - Taxes, Defense of the Nation, energy dependency, the Iraq War and education the two candidates are miles apart.

As for the candidates themselves, Obama is very young, has a thin resume. McCain is old enough to be Obama's father and it would take Obama another 25 years to match McCain's experience and public service.

Obama is a new face, an accomplished orator and presumably in good health. McCain is a face that has been around a long time, has recovered from melanoma and is a dull un-inspirational speaker.

Obama has run a tight and disciplined campaign. McCain is still trying to gain campaign traction.

Obama has a fairly checkered history of questionable associations. McCain seems to have fewer association skeletons in his closet.

Obama has demonstrated a willingness to change his mind, almost with abandon, and this has raised questions about his value system and what unshakable principles, if any, he holds dear. Obama has a sparse voting record, seldom on any major issue so it is difficult to discern what he truly believes.

McCain has also switched his thinking in order to align himself with some of the far right views of his party but he has a long consistent voting record.

This is the way I see both candidates on critical issues. Both have warts. In Obama's case I believe his are scarier. McCain may not turn me on but Obama certainly turns me off.

Is the campaign horse Obama saddled up beginning to buck? (See 1 below.)

If Obama is fishing for votes he would be well advised not to use race bait. As I have suggested, and as does Victor Hanson, it will become Obama's IED.(See 2 below.)

Ward Connerly on Obama. (See 3 below.)

Pelosi is as slick as snake oil and now she has dug a hole that does not gush for her party. (See 4 below.)

5)What goes around comes around. (See 5 below.)

We buried a dear friend today. His younger brother gave the eulogy and I learned a great deal more about my friend and how broad, deep and varied his interests were. He was 56 and had so much more to live for. Mike's death was untimely and it serves to remind all to make the most out of each day.

Be sure to inflate your tires.

Dick

1) Time To Change, His Campaign That Is
By Jennifer Rubin

One of the downsides of living in the bubble of the MSM and the warm embrace of most of the punditocracy is that you think everyone buys what you are selling, or at the very least is too polite to mention that you are making a fool of yourself. When the McCain camp called Barack Obama out for playing the race card, I imagine the Obama camp was stunned. But by the end of the day on Thursday it became apparent that Obama’s gambit was failing, and creating far more problems than the Obama team anticipated.

Obama’s Bill Burton tried to take back the race card. (But whoops– not in sufficient time to prevent the New York Times from looking foolish. Yes, yes you have to get up very early in the day to do that.) When The New Republic calls Obama’s move a “blunder” and the Hardball panel unanimously calls out Obama, it’s time to fold your hand.

What lasting impact, if any, does this have? Well for starters I think Obama will stop overtly playing the racial victim. And that frankly is likely a good thing for him since few voters in the undecided camp are going to be swayed by that sort of thing. (The opposite is more likely.)

But the more lasting impact is the sense that one by one the lofty premises of the Obama campaign are crumbling. New Politics? He dumped public financing and shifted on a dozen issues. Post-racial? Reverend Wright and now amateurish race baiting. (Victor Davis Hanson dissects the utter message confusion on this score here.) A new era in international relations? An embarrassing overreach in Berlin.

Why isn’t it working? What’s wrong? You can imagine Hillary Clinton and her supporters banging their heads on their desks and emailing one another (”We told them!” “No one believed us!”) Time it appears has not been Obama’s friend. It has given more and more people time to think and discover that there may not be much behind the grand rhetoric. Others have figured out the degree to which Obama has concealed, evaded and fudged in setting out his political views. What does he believe? It’s unnerving to know so little and to realize he is perhaps the least forthright candidate in recent memory. And, of course, The Ego has just grown and grown so not even the MSM can ignore it. A smart Jonathan Chait has figured out that if the election is about Obama he loses. (Wow. From savior to drag on the Democratic brand in six months.)

But McCain supporters shouldn’t get their hopes up quite yet. Obama is adaptable if nothing else. And he is entirely capable of navigating back to bread-and- butter issues and effectively tying McCain to the Bush administration. Whether he can pour the old wine into new bottles — that is, find forums and language that are appropriately proportioned and are not open to ridicule –is what remains to be seen.

When you’ve been creating a “movement” that morphed into a cult, it is hard to dial it back. But if he does and gets back to talking about something other than himself, it is still his election to lose. It is remarkable, though, stunning really, that there is some possibility that he might do just that.

2) Why is Obama foolishly evoking race time after time?
By Victor Davis Hanson

And it's still only July...

Obama's problems with race have nothing to do with his half -African ancestry or his own experience with racism and unfairness, but boil down to his deftly wanting it both ways: reminding the Germans he is a different sort of American from what they're used to (false, they knew Rice and Powell well enough), while preempting by suggesting others will evoke race, but in a negative context. But his polls, I wager, will begin to slip from all this, because all this sophisticated triangulation is about to blow up in the public mind.

1) The voter is starting to hear serially from Obama about race; they were promised a racially transcendent candidate, but so far Obama seems obsessed with identity, either accusing others of racism, or using heritage himself for political advantage. This is a tragic blunder.

2) He has the same want-it-both-ways with odious racists: Rev. Wright is a former spiritual advisor, and "brilliant" scholar who nevertheless serially slurs America, whites, Italians, Jews, etc. Ludacris is "a great talent" and "talented" to such an extent Obama wants him in his I-pod menu, and has met with him—but also a racist to be shunned. Ditto Pfleger. A pattern is emerging: Obama associates with or tolerates racists when such quasi-intimacy cements street-cred as an authentic minority or someone cool in the anti-Bush mode; but then when they inevitably revert to form, he not merely casts them off, but is "shocked" at their usual expression, and so like speed bumps they litter the roadway as he barrels ahead.

3). The "typical white person", grandma under the bus riff, Pennsylvania "clingers" rant etc. , 'no more disown Rev, Wright/ but now leaving Trinity Church', etc. themselves are immaterial, but in toto provide a thin margin of tolerance when something like Ludacris or Obama's latest accusation of racism surfaces.

4) Right now Obama does not need to solidify his 90% African-American base or the Moveon.org white liberal adherents; but instead he must remember why he lost all those primaries to Hillary and to what degree his campaign since then has addressed those concerns that lost him those electorates. When a West Virginian hears that Obama is accusing others of racism, or hears him promise that racial reparations will now be a matter of government deeds not words, or a rapper brags he is a favorite of Obama and then slurs Clinton, McCain, Bush in thinly disguised racist terms, it starts to create an image of someone who is not bringing people together, but precisely the opposite.

Why all this? Inexperience and hubris—the same overconfidence that makes him say we need a Pentagon-sized new civilian aid department, to inflate our tires to avoid drilling, and must stop merely talking about reparations and starting doing something about them. His handlers need to return to the teleprompter, since all these incidents have in common the impromptu moment.


3) My Preferences: John McCain, Barack Obama, and civil rights today.
By Ward Connerly

One thing I have learned from more than 13 years of fighting for equal treatment for every American regardless of race, sex, color, or ethnicity is that politicians can triangulate more about this issue than almost any other — and get away with it. A few days ago, Sen. John McCain gave his support to our effort in Arizona to prohibit preferences through a constitutional amendment. In explaining his reason for doing so, McCain said, “I have always opposed quotas.” Instantly, Sen. Barack Obama pounced.

Speaking at a convention of “journalists of color” (the participants gave him standing ovations at the beginning and at the end of his appearance), Obama said, “I am disappointed that John McCain flipped and changed his position. I think in the past he had been opposed to these kinds of Ward Connerly referenda or initiatives as divisive. And I think he's right. You know, the truth of the matter is, these are not designed to solve a big problem, but they're all too often designed to drive a wedge between people.”


Having been thrust into a presidential campaign, it is appropriate for me to offer my thoughts.

Over the past ten years, no American president, Congress, legislature, or governor has acted to eliminate preferences — in other words, to enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which commands the government to treat us all “without regard to race, color, national origin or sex.” In addition, the United States Supreme Court has handed down conflicting opinions about the matter.

In response, I have led the national effort to enforce the act through ballot initiatives in states that allow them. I find it interesting that the only people who consider such initiatives “divisive” are the ones who oppose them, such as Sen.Obama. Such people never seem to find preferences themselves “divisive.” Apparently, as long as those who are harmed by such policies — and those who believe preferences are fundamentally wrong — keep their mouths shut, sweet harmony will ring throughout the land.


Also, it seems that Obama is divided against himself on the issue. In his famed “race speech,” when he was trying to appeal to white Democrats to get the issue of Jeremiah Wright off his back, he acknowledged that affirmative action engenders resentment. Just a few days ago, Obama suggested he was ready to support class-based instead of race-based affirmative action: “I am a strong supporter of affirmative action when properly structured so that it is not just a quota, but it is acknowledging and taking into account some of the hardships and difficulties that communities of color may have experienced, continue to experience, and it also speaks to the value of diversity in all walks of American life. We are becoming a more diverse culture, and it's something that has to be acknowledged.”

I concur, but I might define “properly structured” differently than Obama does. What he fails to say is that it is not only “communities of color” that experience hardships and difficulties. Nor does he say how, as president, he can achieve his stated goal of uniting the American people while asking those not “of color” to look the other way when discriminated against.

If Obama is truly concerned about divisiveness, why didn’t he speak out when his foot soldiers at ACORN were taking pride in blocking our petition circulators from gathering signatures in Missouri? Their despicable tactics of harassment give new meaning to the term “divisive.”

It is true, by the way, that McCain has “flipped” about whether ballot initiatives are appropriate as a device for ending preferences. It is not true that he has “flipped” with regard to preferences themselves. He has consistently expressed disdain for preferential treatment based on race.

And even if he had changed his position substantively, he would be far from alone. Millions of Americans are at a different point in their thinking about race today than they were ten years ago, when McCain opposed legislation to place an initiative on the ballot to end preferences in Arizona. For this, Senator Obama should be thrilled. Without race “flippers,” he would not be the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party for president of the United States.

Until we reach the point that we are living out what Martin Luther King Jr. often called the “true meaning of our creed” that all men (and women) are created equal, how we deal with the issue of race will be a work in progress. Something tells me that, deep in his soul, Sen. Obama knows this. Certainly, he should.

4) Pelosi: Save the Planet, Let Someone Else Drill
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes lifting the moratorium on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the Outer Continental Shelf. She won't even allow it to come to a vote. With $4 gas having massively shifted public opinion in favor of domestic production, she wants to protect her Democratic members from having to cast an anti-drilling election-year vote. Moreover, given the public mood, she might even lose. This cannot be permitted. Why? Because as she explained to Politico: "I'm trying to save the planet; I'm trying to save the planet."

A lovely sentiment. But has Pelosi actually thought through the moratorium's actual effects on the planet?

Consider: 25 years ago, nearly 60 percent of U.S. petroleum was produced domestically. Today it's 25 percent. From its peak in 1970, U.S. production has declined a staggering 47 percent. The world consumes 86 million barrels a day; the United States, roughly 20 million. We need the stuff to run our cars and planes and economy. Where does it come from?

Places like Nigeria where chronic corruption, environmental neglect and resulting unrest and instability lead to pipeline explosions, oil spills and illegal siphoning by the poverty-stricken population -- which leads to more spills and explosions. Just this week, two Royal Dutch Shell pipelines had to be shut down because bombings by local militants were causing leaks into the ground.

Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.

The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling. Today, directional drilling -- essentially drilling down, then sideways -- allows access to oil that in 1970 would have required a surface footprint more than three times as large. Additionally, the U.S. has one of the most extensive and least corrupt regulatory systems on the planet.

Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?

The net environmental effect of Pelosi's no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world -- thereby increasing net planetary damage.

Democrats want no oil from the American OCS or ANWR. But of course they do want more oil. From OPEC. From where Americans don't vote. From places Democratic legislators can't see. On May 13, Sen. Chuck Schumer -- deeply committed to saving just those pieces of the planet that might have huge reserves of American oil -- demanded that the Saudis increase production by a million barrels a day. It doesn't occur to him that by eschewing the slightest disturbance of the mating habits of the Arctic caribou, he is calling for the further exploitation of the pristine deserts of Arabia. In the name of the planet, mind you.

The other panacea, yesterday's rage, is biofuels: We can't drill our way out of the crisis, it seems, but we can greenly grow our way out. By now, however, it is blindingly obvious even to Democrats that biofuels are a devastating force for environmental degradation. It has led to the rape of "lungs of the world" rainforests in Indonesia and Brazil as huge tracts have been destroyed to make room for palm oil and sugar plantations.

Here in the U.S., one out of every three ears of corn is stuffed into a gas tank (by way of ethanol), causing not just food shortages abroad and high prices at home, but intensive increases in farming with all of the attendant environmental problems (soil erosion, insecticide pollution, water consumption, etc.).

This to prevent drilling on an area in the Arctic one-sixth the size of Dulles Airport that leaves untouched a refuge one-third the size of Britain.

There are a dizzying number of economic and national security arguments for drilling at home: a $700 billion oil balance-of-payment deficit, a gas tax (equivalent) levied on the paychecks of American workers and poured into the treasuries of enemy and terror-supporting regimes, growing dependence on unstable states of the Persian Gulf and Caspian basin. Pelosi and the Democrats stand athwart shouting: We don't care. We come to save the planet!

They seem blissfully unaware that the argument for their drill-there-not-here policy collapses on its own environmental terms.

5) Hezbollah official: Group is stronger than before, ready for war
By Reuters
Tags: Hezbollah, Lebanon, Terrorism

A senior Hezbollah commander on Friday told the U.K. Telegraph that the militant group is stronger than before, and that it does not seek war with Israel but is prepared for a military confrontation.

Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, who commands Hezbollah's forces on Lebanon's border with Israel, was quoted as saying, "The resistance is now stronger than before and this keeps the option of war awake."

"If we were weak, Israel would not hesitate to start another war," Kaouk added. "We are stronger than before and when Hezbollah is strong, our strength stops Israel from starting a new war."
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Kaouk also said that Hezbollah is proud of its relationship with Syria and Iran, but declined to address whether the two countries supply Hezbollah's arms.

Meanwhile, Lebanon's new national unity government agreed to a policy statement on Friday that political sources said recognized Hezbollah's right to use all possible means to liberate land they say is occupied by Israel.

The statement, agreed to at the 14th meeting of a ministerial committee set up to draft it, will be presented to parliament next week for a vote of confidence.

All major parties are represented in parliament, including the U.S.-backed majority coalition and the Hezbollah-led opposition, and the confidence vote is seen as a formality.

The draft implies the group can keep its arms and opens the way for parliament to approve a new government that includes the militant group.

"The ministerial statement is drafted and forwarded to the cabinet with the agreement of all its members," Information Minister Tareq Mitri said after the meeting.

The cabinet, in which Hezbollah and its allies hold effective veto power, is expected to approve the draft on Monday before passing it to parliament.

The government was formed on July 11, in line with a Qatar-brokered deal in May which ended an 18-month political crisis that drove Lebanon to the brink of civil war.

The policy statement had been delayed by bickering over the role of Hezbollah's guerrilla army, which fought a 34-day war against Israel in 2006.

Prime Minister Fouad Seniora and his majority coalition initially wanted to exclude mentioning Hezbollah's right to regain Lebanese land by force and defer the subject to a national dialogue to be chaired by President Michel Suleiman.

Hezbollah's weapons became an even more divisive issue after the group used its military muscle to defeat its political foes in street fighting in Beirut and other areas in early May.

The policy statement recognizes the right of Lebanon, its government, people and resistance to use all means possible to regain Lebanese sovereignty over Shaba Farms and nearby Israeli-held parts of Ghajar village.

Israel and the United Nations say Shaba, captured during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, is Syrian, while Damascus and Beirut, which never demarcated borders, say it is Lebanese.

The UN has recently backed renewed efforts to establish the identity of the territory.

Political sources said the statement renewed Lebanon's commitment to UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which ended the 2006 war and refers the fate of Hezbollah's weapons to the drafting of a "national defence strategy" to be agreed at the national dialogue starting in the coming weeks.

The statement also adopted economic reforms agreed at an international aid conference held in Paris in 2007.