THERE'S ONLY ONE STORY:

WALL-E a winner for Pixar (Reuters, June 30, 2008)

Animation giant Pixar hit the box office jackpot once again yesterday as its robot love story WALL-E snagged the No. 1 spot during its first weekend of release across North America.

The movie, bolstered by near-unanimous critical praise, earned an estimated $62.5 million in its first three days, said Pixar's Walt Disney Co parent.

Indeed, properly considered, the film is a re-enactment of the Fall and, while you aren't likely to read it in Disney press material, Wall-E is Satan.

(I'll put the rest in the extended entry, just in case the explanation contains spoilers.)

Humankind has been floating around in space for 700 years, but is unbothered by the fact because they are taken care of by machines. They live in lounge chairs, staring into electronic screens, a giant drink in their fists at all time. They have perfect security.

Meanwhile, Wall-E gives Eve, a probe that the human spaceship sends out, the first bit of plant life that he's come across in all those years. When she returns to the ship with this tree of knowledge, the previously indolent and uninterested captain suddenly becomes insatiably curious about Earth and determines to return.

The humans follow through on this exercise in newly rediscovered free will despite the sorry state of Earth when they arrive there. The captain even going so far as to say: "I don't want to survive. I want to live." The film ends with him showing people how they'll farm and raise crops to feed themselves--Cain-like--rather than just accept the bounty that's provided. Thus is Eden forsaken...yet again.

AREN'T THEY SUPPOSED TO BE TWO-FACED?:

French man with two asses surprises Swedish officials (The Local, 30 Jun 08)

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST HINT?:

Labour 'too dependent on trade unions' (James Kirkup, 30/06/2008, Daily Telegraph)

Labour is now unhealthily dependent on the trade unions for money, a former party treasurer has told Gordon Brown.

The warning from Baroness Prosser came as trade union leaders prepared to step up the pressure on ministers for more left-wing policies including increased rights to strike and higher taxes on middle earners.

UNFORTUNATELY...:

Obama’s Iraq Problem (George Packer July 7, 2008, The New Yorker)

In February, 2007, when Barack Obama declared that he was running for President, violence in Iraq had reached apocalyptic levels, and he based his candidacy, in part, on a bold promise to begin a rapid withdrawal of American forces upon taking office. At the time, this pledge represented conventional thinking among Democrats and was guaranteed to play well with primary voters. But in the year and a half since then two improbable, though not unforeseeable, events have occurred: Obama has won the Democratic nomination, and Iraq, despite myriad crises, has begun to stabilize. With the general election four months away, Obama’s rhetoric on the topic now seems outdated and out of touch, and the nominee-apparent may have a political problem concerning the very issue that did so much to bring him this far.

WHICH IS WHERE MAHMOUD GOES AWRY:

Thirty Years of Light & Glory: The Perils of Providential History John Fea, June 2008, Touchstone)

For Christians who believe in divine providence, the study of history certainly presents a conundrum. As believers, we want to know God’s will for our lives. We spend time in prayer and meditation trying to discern what he is calling us to do in the circumstances of our lives. We often look back on our lives and reflect on the way the Lord has led us.

So if we try to discern providence in our own spiritual lives, what is wrong with trying to do the same thing with the most important events of the past? This is a tough question indeed.

Writers such as Marshall and Manuel must be willing to reconcile their certainty about God’s plan for America with St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now in part, but then I shall know fully just as I also have been fully known.” Books like the Light and the Glory often offer a simple and direct providential reading of American history that assumes an understanding of the secret things of God, things that sinful men cannot fathom outside of the Scriptures.

St. Augustine is helpful here. In Book 20 of The City of God Against the Pagans, he reminds us what Christians can and cannot know about God’s work in the world. We can be confident, from what the Scriptures teach us, in the hope of Christ’s return and final judgment. History will end with the glorious triumph of the Son of God.

But as we live with this hope, we must be cautious about trying to pinpoint the specific plan of God in history. We must avoid trying to interpret what is hidden from us or what is incomprehensible because our understanding is so limited. As Augustine writes,

There are good men who suffer evils and evil men who enjoy good things, which seems unjust, and there are bad men who come to a bad end, and good men who arrive at a good one. Thus, the judgments of God are all the more inscrutable, and His ways past finding out. We do not know, therefore, by what judgment God causes or allows these things to pass.

"NERD-VANA":

LAFF Review: Hellboy II: The Golden Army (James Rocchi, Jun 29th 2008, Cinematical)

[H]ellboy II has more than a little heart to it; it's scrappy and self-aware, and never out of touch with what it is. Adapting Mike Mignola's post-superhero retro-styled comic series Hellboy for the second time, writer-director Guillermo del Toro corrects some of the mistakes of the first Hellboy, makes a few mistakes of its own, picks itself up, keeps going. And, on the way, knocks the back of your eyeballs for a loop. [...]

Is Hellboy II all sound and fury, signifying nothing, or, worse, nerdiness? Quite possibly, but it's got the heart that the slick Wanted lacks, the brute you can root for that The Incredible Hulk didn't quite give us, and more geeky slapdash fun than the shiny-fast Iron Man and a better mix of effective story and special effects than Speed Racer -- and if Hellboy II signifies nothing, well, at least there's a hell of a lot of it. Like all sequels, Hellboy II's a bit overstuffed, but I can't also say what you would lose; the fat provides a lot of the flavor. And I never felt transported to another world or invested in the characters past their four-color surfaces, even as del Toro's sights and wonders put me in a lookitthat! state of nerd-vana. And the finale sets up places to go for the series, even if it doesn't conclusively make us crave that; as much as del Toro's the only man for that hypothetical job, I'd rather see him making his own films, which is part of why I'm so unenthused by the prospect of his version of The Hobbit. I don't know if I need a Hellboy III, but Hellboy II feels like a summertime comic-book movie that doesn't want, or need, to be a blockbuster movie and instead simply and sincerely succeeds as a great matinee.

SET ASIDE FOR A MOMENT THE HILARITY OF INDIVISIBLE FRANCE AND GERMANY...:

Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran. (Seymour M. Hersh, July 7, 2008, The New Yorker)

In recent months, according to the Iranian media, there has been a surge in violence in Iran; it is impossible at this early stage, however, to credit JSOC or C.I.A. activities, or to assess their impact on the Iranian leadership. The Iranian press reports are being carefully monitored by retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the National War College and now conducts war games centered on Iran for the federal government, think tanks, and universities. The Iranian press “is very open in describing the killings going on inside the country,” Gardiner said. It is, he said, “a controlled press, which makes it more important that it publishes these things. We begin to see inside the government.” He added, “Hardly a day goes by now we don’t see a clash somewhere. There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and the Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been killed.”

Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have assassinated a Revolutionary Guard colonel, and the Iranian government acknowledged that an explosion in a cultural center in Shiraz, in the southern part of the country, which killed at least twelve people and injured more than two hundred, had been a terrorist act and not, as it earlier insisted, an accident. It could not be learned whether there has been American involvement in any specific incident in Iran, but, according to Gardiner, the Iranians have begun publicly blaming the U.S., Great Britain, and, more recently, the C.I.A. for some incidents. The agency was involved in a coup in Iran in 1953, and its support for the unpopular regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi—who was overthrown in 1979—was condemned for years by the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to great effect. “This is the ultimate for the Iranians—to blame the C.I.A.,” Gardiner said. “This is new, and it’s an escalation—a ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies support for the regime and shows the people that there is a continuing threat from the ‘Great Satan.’ ” In Gardiner’s view, the violence, rather than weakening Iran’s religious government, may generate support for it.

Many of the activities may be being carried out by dissidents in Iran, and not by Americans in the field. One problem with “passing money” (to use the term of the person familiar with the Finding) in a covert setting is that it is hard to control where the money goes and whom it benefits. Nonetheless, the former senior intelligence official said, “We’ve got exposure, because of the transfer of our weapons and our communications gear. The Iranians will be able to make the argument that the opposition was inspired by the Americans. How many times have we tried this without asking the right questions? Is the risk worth it?” One possible consequence of these operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush Administration a reason to intervene.

A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.

The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”

The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has also been reported to be covertly supported by the United States, has been operating against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three years. (Iran, like Iraq and Turkey, has a Kurdish minority, and PJAK and other groups have sought self-rule in territory that is now part of each of those countries.) In recent weeks, according to Sam Gardiner, the military strategist, there has been a marked increase in the number of PJAK armed engagements with Iranians and terrorist attacks on Iranian targets. In early June, the news agency Fars reported that a dozen PJAK members and four Iranian border guards were killed in a clash near the Iraq border; a similar attack in May killed three Revolutionary Guards and nine PJAK fighters. PJAK has also subjected Turkey, a member of NATO, to repeated terrorist attacks, and reports of American support for the group have been a source of friction between the two governments.

Gardiner also mentioned a trip that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, made to Tehran in June. After his return, Maliki announced that his government would ban any contact between foreigners and the M.E.K.—a slap at the U.S.’s dealings with the group. Maliki declared that Iraq was not willing to be a staging ground for covert operations against other countries. This was a sign, Gardiner said, of “Maliki’s increasingly choosing the interests of Iraq over the interests of the United States.” In terms of U.S. allegations of Iranian involvement in the killing of American soldiers, he said, “Maliki was unwilling to play the blame-Iran game.” Gardiner added that Pakistan had just agreed to turn over a Jundallah leader to the Iranian government. America’s covert operations, he said, “seem to be harming relations with the governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the connection between Tehran and Baghdad.”

IT'S ALL FIST...:

Anger Over Rape-Murder Case Sparks Riot in China (Jill Drew, 6/29/08, Washington Post)

Thousands of people thronged a police station in southwestern China to protest the alleged coverup of a teenage girl's rape and murder, witnesses and officials reported Sunday. The crowd set fire to a government complex and several police vehicles.

The violence, which began Saturday, was brought under control by authorities at about 2 a.m. Sunday. There were conflicting reports about the number of injuries and arrests as news of the riot spread over the Internet. Pictures and video from the incident were posted on Chinese online discussion forums and Web sites but quickly became inaccessible, apparently as government censors stepped in.

Spasms of public anger against perceived injustices or government corruption occur periodically in China, but this weekend's riot, in the seat of Weng'an County in Guizhou province, was larger and more destructive than usual. The government has been anxious to contain such incidents, especially as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in August, pledging to show the world its prosperous, "harmonious" society, as the ruling Communist Party calls it.

Children as young as 12 began blocking the entrance to the police station sometime after 4:30 p.m. Saturday, said a middle school teacher who witnessed the incident.

THE POOR DEMOCRATS...:

Clark blasts McCain's military service (JOSH KRAUSHAAR, 6/29/08, Politico)

Gen. Wesley Clark, acting as a surrogate for Barack Obama’s campaign, invoked John McCain’s military service against him in one of the more personal attacks on the Republican presidential nominee this election cycle. [...]

“I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”

ONCE YOU CONCEDE...:

Principles give way to politics as Obama courts mid-America (Michael Crowley, 6/29/08, The Observer)

During the Democratic primary season, all those eons ago, Barack Obama deployed no more powerful line against Hillary Clinton than his insistence that 'we can't just tell people what they want to hear. We need to tell them what they need to hear'. More than just a catchy couplet, the phrase was a deadly arrow into the heart of Clintonism.

Few things crippled Hillary's campaign like the belief that she would say or do anything to get elected, from supporting the Iraq War to claiming she'd dodged sniper fire at Tuzla. In Obama, Democrats seemed to have found something refreshing: a brave truth-teller unmoored to pollsters such as Mark Penn, someone who had spoken out against Iraq the war and could at last restore integrity and honesty to Washington politics.

But since Obama dispatched Clinton, he has seemed rather more attuned to what the people want to hear or perhaps he has simply traded the wants of a liberal audience for those of a more moderate one.

ESTRELLA DAMM'S ALL AROUND:

Spain revels in new spirit of unity as football team heals divisions: Since Franco's death in 1975 Spain has seen the growth of powerful nationalist movements. But, as they take on Germany in the Euro 2008 final, the old divisions are giving way to a new unity (Graham Keeley in Barcelona and Jason Burke, 6/29/08, The Observer)

This evening, from Corunna to Cartagena, from the Pyrenees to the Sierra Nevada, millions will be glued to the television, willing the 11 men wearing red and yellow to victory in the final of the 2008 European championships.

For citizens of most of the nations in this competition, the question of allegiance to the national side is relatively straightforward. The only people doubting the loyalty of France's immigrant population to Les Bleus were the racist right-wing. The Azzurri have had every Italian behind them. The Russians surfed a wave of pent-up patriotic fervour that led to their government organising a flow of tens of millions of pounds to the sport. Spain's opponents, the Germans, have become a much-needed symbol of the benefits of reunification and of a new, proud guilt-free sense of nation. But in Spain - and in the regions of Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, which each have their own culture, language and fierce claims to autonomy - not everyone sees the match the same way.

When Spain beat Russia 3-0 in the semi-final last week, car horns blared, bars emptied, fireworks exploded. Nothing out of the usual in the Plaza Cibeles in downtown Madrid, but extraordinary in Barcelona, capital of the proud northeast region with its seven million inhabitants.

MORE:
Spain Takes European Soccer Title From Germany (BARRY WILNER, 6/29/08, Associated Press)

Big-game flops no more, Spain won the European Championship 1-0 over Germany today for its first major title in 44 years.

Fernando Torres scored in the 33rd minute and the Spaniards never backed down against such a formidable opponent. Their last significant title came in the 1964 Euros at home.

In beating a team that makes a habit of appearing in championship finals, the Spaniards put to rest a reputation for underachieving. Always loaded with talented players, Spain has spent four decades falling short of expectations.

That all changed at these Euros, where the Spaniards swept their first-round games, eliminated World Cup champion Italy in a penalty-kicks shootout in the quarterfinals, then routed Russia 3-0 in the semifinals.

OBAMASTAN, WHERE AMERICA'S FUTURE IS CANADA'S PAST:

Canadian Health Care We So Envy Lies In Ruins, Its Architect Admits (DAVID GRATZER, June 25, 2008, Investor's Business Daily)

As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates' comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few.

But no one will mention Claude Castonguay — perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn't an American and hasn't held office in over three decades.

Castonguay's evolving view of Canadian health care, however, should weigh heavily on how the candidates think about the issue in this country.

Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: "the father of Quebec medicare." Even this title seems modest; Castonguay's work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in "crisis."

"We thought we could resolve the system's problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it," says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: "We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice."

LIBERTY, NOT FREEDOM:

When Ambassadors Had Rhythm (FRED KAPLAN, 6/29/08, NY Times)

HALF a century ago, when America was having problems with its image during the cold war, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the United States representative from Harlem, had an idea. Stop sending symphony orchestras and ballet companies on international tours, he told the State Department. Let the world experience what he called “real Americana”: send out jazz bands instead.

A photography exhibition of those concert tours, titled “Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World,” is on display at the Meridian International Center in Washington through July 13 and then moves to the Community Council for the Arts in Kinston, N.C. There are nearly 100 photos in the show, many excavated from obscure files in dozens of libraries, then digitally retouched and enlarged by James Hershorn, an archivist at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. There’s Dizzy Gillespie in 1956, charming a snake with his trumpet in Karachi, Pakistan. Louis Armstrong in ’61, surrounded by laughing children outside a hospital in Cairo. Benny Goodman in ’62, blowing his clarinet in Red Square. Duke Ellington in ’63, smoking a hookah at Ctesiphon in Iraq.

The idea behind the State Department tours was to counter Soviet propaganda portraying the United States as culturally barbaric. Powell’s insight was that competing with the Bolshoi would be futile and in any case unimaginative. Better to show off a homegrown art form that the Soviets couldn’t match — and that was livelier besides. Many jazz bands were also racially mixed, a potent symbol in the mid to late ’50s, when segregation in the South was tarnishing the American image.

Jazz was the country’s “Secret Sonic Weapon” (as a 1955 headline in The New York Times put it) in another sense as well. The novelist Ralph Ellison called jazz an artistic counterpart to the American political system. The soloist can play anything he wants as long as he stays within the tempo and the chord changes — just as, in a democracy, the individual can say or do whatever he wants as long as he obeys the law.

DECLINE AND FALL OF THE MAOIST EMPIRE:

Christianity is flourishing in China: The religion, long repressed and often outlawed in the communist nation, appeals to citizens seeking a moral framework amid the chaotic rise of capitalism. (The Chicago Tribune, June 28, 2008)

[I]n a sign of Christianity's growing prominence, in scores of interviews for a joint project of the Tribune and PBS' "Frontline/World," clerical leaders and worshipers from coastal boomtowns to inland villages publicly detailed their religious lives for the first time.

They voiced the belief that the time has come to proclaim their place in Chinese society as the world focuses on China and its hosting of the 2008 Olympics in August. [...]

This rise, driven by evangelical Protestants, reflects a wider spiritual awakening in China. As communism fades into today's free-market reality, many Chinese describe a "crisis of faith" and seek solace from mystical Taoist sects, Bahai temples and Christian megachurches.

Today, the government counts 21 million Catholics and Protestants -- a 50% increase in less than 10 years -- though the underground population is far larger. The World Christian Database's estimate of 70 million Christians amounts to 5% of the population, second only to Buddhists.

At a time when Christianity in Western Europe is dwindling, China's believers are redrawing the world's religious map with a growing community that already exceeds all the Christians in Italy.

And increasing Christian clout in China has the potential to alter relations with the United States and other nations.

But much about the future of faith in China is uncertain, shaped most vividly in bold new evangelical churches such as Zion, where a soft-spoken preacher and his fervent flock do not yet know just how far the Communist Party is prepared to let them grow.

"We think that Christianity is good for Beijing, good for China," Jin said. "But it may take some time before our intention is understood, trusted, even respected by the authorities. We even have to consider the price we may have to pay."

YOU HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE "SIMON SAYS, TAKE PESHAWAR":

Pakistan claims control of warlord's former stronghold: Paramilitary forces take positions they had fled months ago in a district that had been used as a staging ground for raids into Peshawar. (Laura King, 6/29/08, Los Angeles Times)

The government moved on Saturday against Bagh and another insurgent leader after armed, bearded militants began staging brazen patrols in Peshawar, a city of more than 3 million people. The insurgents also menaced people in outlying districts of the city, seeking to impose a Taliban-style social code and carrying out a series of abductions.

Bagh's men had also taken control of roads providing access to the famed Khyber Pass, one of the main supply routes for NATO troops across the border in Afghanistan, and had been attacking military convoys. Authorities said Sunday those routes had been re-secured.

The military operation marked an apparent policy change on the part of the Pakistani government, which until now has sought to reach truces with local Taliban commanders. But the government left open the door for the resumption of such talks, even as it warned Bagh's men and other insurgents to stay away.

THERE'S A REASON YOU LEARN BY ROTE:

Your brain lies to you (Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, June 29, 2008, NY Times)

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer's hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man's curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don't remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

With time, this misremembering gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls.

CORE CONFUSION:

Israel Approves Prisoner Swap (Reuters, 6/29/08)

The government decision cleared the way for the German-mediated exchange with Hezbollah, possibly within days. Under the deal, Israel would free five Lebanese guerrillas and repatriate the remains of around 10 slain border infiltrators.

THE SENIOR CITIZEN CIRCUIT:

As the AL lords over the NL, even the lowly Royals are flush (John Shea, June 29, 2008, SF Gate)

The Royals are 13-4 against NL teams and lead the majors in interleague wins, which is why they're not buried in last place in the AL Central. They're 24-40 against the AL.

If the Royals hadn't blown a four-run lead to the Giants on June 20, they would have had an 11-game win streak before Saturday's loss to the Cardinals - of course, all 11 games came in interleague play.

Thursday, AL teams were 8-1 against NL teams, and it would have been a sweep if Kevin Millwood (seven runs yielded in his first two innings) hadn't forgotten his Rangers were supposed to beat the Astros. Plus, the NL caught a break with a rainout in Pittsburgh; the Yankees were leading 3-1.

The AL is 45 games above .500 (141-96 ) in games against the NL, and let's not omit the Twins, who zoomed into contention by beating up on the other league.

Hummingbird Cake, a Southern favorite (KIM PIERCE, 6/24/08, The Dallas Morning News )

3 cups all-purpose flour

2 cups sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon salt

3 large eggs, beaten

1 ½ cups vegetable oil

1 (8-ounce) can crushed pineapple, undrained

2 cups chopped nuts (pecans, walnuts or hazelnuts, divided use)

2 cups chopped bananas

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

Icing (recipe follows)

Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease 3 (9-inch) round cake pans with butter; dust the bottom and sides with flour. Set aside.

Combine flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon and salt in a large bowl and stir until well blended. Add the eggs and oil, and stir until the dry ingredients are moistened, taking care not to beat them. Stir in the pineapple and juice, 1 cup of the nuts, the bananas and vanilla.

Divide the batter evenly among the prepared pans. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cakes comes out clean, about 25 to 30 minutes. Let the cakes cool in the pans for about 10 minutes, then turn them out onto racks to cool completely.

Spread the icing between the layers, stacking them on a cake plate. Ice the top and sides of cake, and sprinkle remaining nuts over the top. Makes 10 to 12 servings.

Icing: Combine 2 (8-ounce) packages of cream cheese with 1/2 pound (2 sticks) butter, both at room temperature. Add 2 (16-ounce) boxes of powdered sugar, sifted; beat until light and fluffy. Add 2 teaspoons vanilla extract.

BLT Dip (Donna Pierce, 6/24/08, Chicago Tribune)

4 slices bacon

3 green onions, thinly sliced

¼ cup each: mayonnaise, low-fat Greek yogurt

¼ cup arugula, chopped

¼ teaspoon salt

Freshly ground pepper

1 pint grape tomatoes, quartered

1. Place the bacon in a medium skillet over medium heat; cook, turning, until crisp, about 6 minutes. Transfer to a plate lined with a paper towel.

2. Combine the onions, mayonnaise, yogurt, arugula, salt and pepper to taste in a food processor; pulse until chunky, about 5 times. Transfer to a medium bowl.

3. Crumble the bacon into the bowl; stir into the mayonnaise mixture. Stir in the tomatoes.

WHILE BOTH WOULD PASS AMNESTY...:

A Win by McCain Could Push a Split Court to Right (Robert Barnes, 6/29/08, Washington Post)

For much of its term, the Supreme Court muted last year's noisy dissents, warmed to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s vision of narrow, incremental decisions and continued a slow but hardly steady move to the right.

But as justices finished their work last week, two overarching truths about the court remained unchanged: It is sharply divided ideologically on some of the most fundamental constitutional questions, and the coming presidential election will determine its future path.

A victory by the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, would probably mean preserving the uneasy but roughly balanced status quo, since the justices who are considered most likely to retire are liberal. A win for his Republican counterpart, John McCain, could mean a fundamental shift to a consistently conservative majority ready to take on past court rulings on abortion rights, affirmative action and other issues important to the right.

HEADLINES AT THE END OF HISTORY:

Mongolia votes in key elections (BBC, 6/29/08)

GIVEN HOW LITTLE EITHER GRASPS ECONOMICS...:

Immigration policy reform has Obama, McCain in agreement (Richard Simon, 6/29/08, Los Angeles Times)

Courting the increasingly influential Latino vote, the rival presidential candidates each pledged Saturday to make overhauling the nation's immigration policies a top priority. [...]

McCain noted that he represents Arizona, "where Spanish was spoken before English," and remembered a fellow Vietnam prisoner of war, Everett Alvarez, "a brave American of Mexican descent."

McCain said that he pushed for overhauling immigration laws when "it wasn't very popular with some in my party."

THEY JUST KEEP SERVING UP THESE UNTESTED SENATORS....:

Descent of St. Barack (Paul Greenberg, June 28, 2008, Washington Times)

For all its smooth, Internetted aspects, the Obama campaign begins to develop overtones of George McGovern's crack-up in the summer of 1972. Sen. McGovern was the beneficiary that year of the Democrats' newly rigged nominating system, which remains much the same. This year it allowed Barack Obama to cinch his party's nomination even as his rival was sweeping the popular vote in the big states.

George McGovern required only a few torrid weeks back in '72 to go from shining hope to utter incompetent. And now Barack Obama, the Different Kind of Presidential Candidate, has begun his metamorphosis into the same old kind of presidential candidate by backing away from his earlier promise to accept public financing.

Naturally, he claims it wasn't a promise at all but just a possibility, depending on whether John McCain would agree to accept public financing, too, which Mr. McCain did, and on various other escape clauses. We all know the drill by now: When caught in an obvious contradiction, obfuscate.

HMMMM, TOTALLY NEW IDEAS TO HELP MAKE THE WORKING CLASSES INDEPENDENT...:

The Sam's Club agenda of the GOP (David Brooks, June 28, 2008, NY Times)

Ross Douthat and my former assistant, Reihan Salam] open the book with a working-class view of recent American history. Douthat and Salam write admiringly about the New Deal. They mention Roosevelt's economic policies, but they also emphasize the New Deal's intense social conservatism. Self-conscious maternalists such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins ensured that New Deal programs were biased in favor of traditional two-parent families.

Liberals write about economic inequality and conservatives about social disruption, but Douthat and Salam write about the interplay between values and economics, and the way virtue and economic security can reinforce each other.

In the 1950s, divorce rates were low and jobs were plentiful, but over the next few decades that broke down. The social revolutions of the 1960s and the economic revolution of the information age have emancipated the well-educated but left the Sam's Club voters feeling insecure.

Gaps are opening between the educated and less educated. Working-class divorce rates remain high, while the mostly upper-middle-class parents of Ivy Leaguers have divorce rates of only 10 percent. Working-class kids are unlikely to complete college, affluent kids usually do.

Liberals have a way to address these inequalities – the creation of a Denmark-style welfare state. Conservatives have offered almost nothing. The GOP has lost contact with its own working-class base. This is the intellectual vacuum that “Grand New Party” seeks to fill.

The heart of the book is the last third, where Douthat and Salam lay out a series of policy ideas to help working-class families cope with economic, health care, neighborhood and family insecurity.

“What all these ideas, from the sober to the speculative, have in common is a vision of working-class independence – from bosses, from bureaucracy, from entrenched interests of all kinds,” Douthat and Salam write. This is not compassionate conservatism (which flattered the mind of the compassionate donor), it's hard-work conservatism, which uses government to increase the odds that self-discipline and effort will pay off.

THAT IS ONE AMERICAN BROAD:

Queen owns a McDonald's (Daily Telegraph, 28/06/2008)

The Queen owns a drive-through McDonald's burger restaurant, the Royal accounts have revealed.

Among Her Majesty's most recent acquisitions was a retail park in Slough - which encompasses a drive-through McDonalds.

MORE:
The Queen’s Tears (Mark Steyn, September 17, 2001, National Review)

The foreign leader who said it best last week was the Queen, though she didn't really say a word. I have met Her Majesty from time to time (I am one of her Canadian subjects), and to put it at its mildest, for those with a taste for American vernacular politics, she can be a little stiff: The Queen stands on ceremony and she has a lot of ceremony to stand on. But on Thursday, for the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, she ordered the Coldstream Guards to play "The Star-Spangled Banner" — the first time a foreign anthem had been played at the ceremony. The following day something even more unprecedented happened: At Britain's memorial service for the war dead of last Tuesday, the first chords of "The Star-Spangled Banner" rumbled up from the great organ at St Paul's Cathedral, and the Queen did something she's never done before — she sang a foreign national anthem, all the words. She doesn't sing her own obviously ("God Save Me"), but she's never sung "La Marseillaise" or anything else, either; her lips never move.

And at that same service she also sang "The Battle Hymn Of The Republic," for the second time in her life — the first was at the funeral of her first prime minister, Winston Churchill. On Friday, she fought back tears. When she ascended the throne, Harry Truman was in the White House. The first president she got to know was Eisenhower, back in the war, when he'd come to the palace to brief her father. She is the head of state of most of the rest of the English-speaking world — Queen of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Bahamas, Belize, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu, etc. But she understands something that few other leaders of the West seem to — that today the ultimate guarantor of the peace and liberty of her realms is the United States. If America falls, or is diminished, or retreats in on itself, there is no "free world." That's the meaning of the Queen's "Ich bin ein Amerikaaner" moment.

Don't ask me who else you can count on.

PAGING ENDER WIGGIN:

In a Virtual Galaxy, Assembly Is Required (SETH SCHIESEL, 6/28/08, NY Times)

Eve Online is more like a sandbox, where the players have been thrown in with a bunch of tools, like shovels and buckets, and are left to their own devices to create what they will. In Eve’s futuristic setting, miners extract ore from asteroids and refine it into minerals. Industrialists run huge factories to turn the minerals into spaceships, weapons and modules. Financiers provide investment capital, and traders take products to market. Finally, pilots buy the ships and fly them in combat, carving out player-controlled empires among the thousands of solar systems in the Eve galaxy.

Players can enjoy Eve in any of those roles, a diversity of experiences unmatched in any other game. But the most glamorous aspect of the game is participating in the epic wars for territory that can go on for months or years, involving tens of thousands of players. (Unlike those of most games, all of Eve’s more than 200,000 players are in one shared game universe, rather than split up among different copies of the virtual world; on weekends there can be 35,000 players or more online at once.)

For at least two years, the dominant conflict in the game has been between two alliances known as Band of Brothers and Goonswarm. Band of Brothers, known as BOB, is a wealthy, elite (some would say elitist) group that many players simultaneously admire, fear and despise. Goonswarm is a proudly profane group that conducts highly effective psychological warfare alongside its military campaigns. Like the members of BOB, Goons are also simultaneously admired, feared and despised by many Eve players.

BUT WHENEVER I WATCH MY 50 INCH TV OR PLAY ON MY NEW COMPUTER....:

A Skeptical Take on the Economy: Best-selling author Keith McFarland argues against getting overly concerned about the bad economy (Keith McFarland, 6/27/08, Business Week)

It would seem that there really are two Americas, at least two American economies—the real economy and the perceived one. At first glance, the discrepancy can be explained by decreasing home prices and increasing energy costs. Home prices inform the fundamental wealth identity of most Americans, and fuel prices provide a weekly reminder that a fundamental change has taken place.

But there is an even greater discrepancy than the one between the real economy and the perceived, and it cannot be explained solely by the volatility in housing and energy. What really accounts for it is the way most Americans view their own situation and their impression of the economy as a whole.

In November 2007, only 19% of respondents to an Investor's Business Daily/TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy & Politics poll answering the question: "Do you consider yourself to be a part of America's haves or part of America's have-nots?" described themselves as "have-nots." An astounding 75% of the overall sample described themselves as "haves." In a 1988 Gallup survey with similar demographics, only 59% considered themselves "haves."

Even more striking is a Harris Poll that asked: "If you compare your present situation with five years ago, would you say it has improved, stayed about the same, or gotten worse?" A full 82% reported that their situation had improved or held steady. In response to the question: "In the course of the next five years, do you expect your personal situation to improve, stay the same, or get worse?" most people anticipated a bright future. Sixty-two percent expected improvement, with only 7% expecting their situation to get worse.

The truth is our impressions of our own economic well-being are based on actual experience, while our impressions of the national economy are shaped by the Chicken-Little loop of the media. The bad news is: The prognosis is not encouraging. With the increasingly competitive demands of the 24/7 news cycles, the doomsday drumbeat will only intensify. It seems that by today's media standards the traditional tempest in a teacup is unsatisfactory and is yielding to the perpetual quest for the Category 5 hurricane in a thimble.

WHAT IRONY?:

Ladies first for Obama (The Economist: Democracy in America, 6/27/08)

This could be an emerging historical irony in this campaign: because the first serious female candidate lost, and Mr Obama needs to gather her female supporters in a seductive yet respectful embrace, women's issues are going to get more play in 2008 than they would have if Mrs Clinton was the nominee.

RIGHT AROUND NOW...:

Rights organization dismisses complaint against Maclean's (Joseph Brean, 6/27/08, National Post)

Brought by Mohamed Elmasry, national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, the complaint was the centrepiece of a three-pronged offense against what he sees as Islamophobia in the national newsweekly, with columnists Mark Steyn and Barbara Amiel the main offenders.

An identical complaint, brought with the help of three Muslim law students who became the public faces of the complaint, was rejected in Ontario on jurisdictional grounds. The third was heard this month by a British Columbia tribunal, which is now deliberating.

Announcing the decision (the CHRC does not publicize dismissals of complaints), Maclean's said in a statement that it "is in keeping with our long-standing position that the article in question, "The Future Belongs to Islam," an excerpt from Mark Steyn's best-selling book America Alone, was a worthy piece of commentary on important geopolitical issues, entirely within the bounds of normal journalistic practice."

"Though gratified by the decision, Maclean's continues to assert that no human rights commission, whether at the federal or provincial level, has the mandate or the expertise to monitor, inquire into, or assess the editorial decisions of the nation's media. And we continue to have grave concerns about a system of complaint and adjudication that allows a media outlet to be pursued in multiple jurisdictions on the same complaint, brought by the same complainants, subjecting it to costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the inconvenience. We enthusiastically support those parliamentarians who are calling for legislative review of the commissions with regard to speech issues."

ANTI-TERRORISM VIA GILBERT & SULLIVAN:

America's fury as Hamza smuggles hate messages to Bin Laden's No 2... From UK jail cell (Jason Lewis, 28th June 2008, Daily Mail)

American counter-terrorism chiefs are demanding a full explanation from Britain of how radical cleric Abu Hamza was able to smuggle murderous messages from his UK prison cell to Al Qaeda's deputy leader.

The major diplomatic row comes in the wake of a long-running battle by US prosecutors to extradite the former imam of London's Finsbury Park mosque to stand trial in America.

WELCOME TO THE HELLFIRE CLUB:

Taliban chief who killed Cpl Sarah is taken out by laser-guided missiles (Christopher Leake, 28th June 2008, Daily Mail)

The fanatical Taliban mastermind behind recent attacks in which six British soldiers died in Afghanistan has been killed in a missile attack by an Army Apache helicopter.

In what military chiefs described as a 'deliberate and surgical strike', the 35-year-old rebel leader - known as Sadiqullah - died alongside nine fellow Taliban fighters after the Apache fired two laser-guided Hellfire missiles at their red pick-up truck and destroyed it.

WHAT CHOICE DID THEY HAVE BUT TO SHIFT?:

Pakistani city under threat of militant takeover: Security increases around Peshawar as Islamic extremists mass at outskirts of strategic provincial capital close to Afghan border (SAEED SHAH, June 28, 2008, The Globe and Mail)

Security around Peshawar, the provincial capital in northwest Pakistan, has been dramatically stepped up amid fears that the city could fall to heavily armed Islamic militants who have now massed around its outskirts.

From three sides, Peshawar, which borders Pakistan's wild tribal belt, is menaced by Taliban groups and other warlords.

If Peshawar is taken over by extremists, the rest of the North West Frontier Province is also threatened, raising the possibility that religious fundamentalists may gain control of a state on Afghanistan's border. The drama in Peshawar reinforces existing doubts about the new Pakistani government's policy of pulling back the army and seeking peace deals with militants.

Pakistani forces blew up a militant leader's headquarters and pounded other suspected Taliban bases with mortar fire Saturday, as authorities launched a major offensive against gunmen operating in the volatile region along the Afghan border.

The offensive in the Khyber tribal region appeared a shift in strategy by Pakistan's new government, backing its calls for peace deals in the tribal areas with the threat of forceful action against militants who get out of line.

WHEN A BABY RIDES A TIGER:

Religious and Political Shiism in Syria (Manal Lutfi, 6/28/08, Asharq Al-Awsat)

Strategic relations between Iran and Syria are crucial for both states. However, these relations have been consolidated in Syria, rather than Iran. Today, most inter-political, -economic, -cultural and -religious projects are established in Damascus, which has become a hub for Iranian religious tourism.

Iranian tourists to Syrian religious sites number between 500,000 and one million, and dozens of Shia theological centers, or hawzas, as well as Iranian cultural and educational centers have been established across Syria. However, bilateral relations have also generated tension, especially in Syria.

Iranian activity in Syria, particularly restoring and building Shia shrines, has Syria worried about the spread of Shiism in the country. The Ahlul Bayt Society, headed by former Iranian ambassador to Syria Mohammad Hassan Akhtari, is active in Syria. The Society, which is affiliated to the Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khamenei and plans and finances Shia centers around the world, expanded a theological center in Damascus, making it the third largest hawza in the world, after the Hawza al Ilmiyah in Qum, Iran and Najaf, Iraq.

Syria hosts 500 hawzas and Husseiniyat, which edify thousands of Iranian clerics. The Ahlul Bayt Society will soon inaugurate an Islamic bank, a television channel and an Islamic financial institution to promote multilateral relations among Islamic countries.

Regarding the activities of the Ahlul Bayt Society, Syrian Muslim Brotherhood leader Ali Sadreddin Al-Bayanouni said to Asharq Al-Awsat: "The real problem is not that a number of people have become Shia, but that Shiism has been disseminated and caused problems within Syrian society. When people convert from being Sunni to Shia, it provokes Sunni scholars and individuals and creates problems within the fabric of the Syrian society. I know that significant divisions have occurred in some villages due to the dissemination of Shiism. Many reports have declared unlimited Iranian support to Shiism in Syria. There is an attempt to establish cultural centers for disseminating Shiism in Syria in different governorates and cities that have never known this before."

Al-Bayanouni also discussed the causes of the spread of Shiism in Syria: "There is a religious doctrinal reason and a political one. The wave of Iranian progress in Syria hasn’t been limited to Shiism. There is cultural, charitable and even military Iranian activity. Iranian influence in Syria is not only doctrinal, but also political, social and military. Husseiniyats are being built for the Shia minority in Aleppo, Idlib and the new Shia villages in Jaser Ashour and others. On the radio in Damascus, the call to prayer is broadcast at times from the shrine of Sayyeda Zainab or Sayyeda Ruqayah according to the Shia method; that is, they add 'come to the good deed' after saying 'come to prayer and come to success.' This wasn’t the case before in Syria."

WHEN THE FACTS ON THE GROUND ARE PRESENTED...:

No Babies? (RUSSELL SHORTO, 6/29/08, NY Times Magazine)

IT WAS A SPECTACULAR LATE-MAY AFTERNOON IN SOUTHERN ITALY,but the streets of Laviano — a gloriously situated hamlet ranged across a few folds in the mountains of the Campania region — were deserted. There were no day-trippers from Naples, no tourists to take in the views up the steep slopes, the olive trees on terraces, the ruins of the 11th-century fortress with wild poppies spotting its grassy flanks like flecks of blood. And there were no locals in sight either. The town has housing enough to support a population of 3,000, but fewer than 1,600 live here, and every year the number drops. Rocco Falivena, Laviano’s 56-year-old mayor, strolled down the middle of the street, outlining for me the town’s demographics and explaining why, although the place is more than a thousand years old, its buildings all look so new. In 1980 an earthquake struck, taking out nearly every structure and killing 300 people, including Falivena’s own parents. Then from tragedy arose the scent of possibility, of a future. Money came from the national government in Rome, and from former residents who had emigrated to the U.S. and elsewhere. The locals found jobs rebuilding their town. But when the construction ended, so did the work, and the exodus of residents continued as before.

When Falivena took office in 2002 for his second stint as mayor, two numbers caught his attention. Four: that was how many babies were born in the town the year before. And five: the number of children enrolled in first grade at the school, never mind that the school served two additional communities as well. [...]

DEMOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING, Laviano is not unique in Italy, or in Europe. In fact, it may be a harbinger. In the 1990s, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. Non-number-crunchers largely ignored the information until a 2002 study by Italian, German and Spanish social scientists focused the data and gave policy makers across the European Union something to ponder. The figure of 2.1 is widely considered to be the “replacement rate” — the average number of births per woman that will maintain a country’s current population level. At various times in modern history — during war or famine — birthrates have fallen below the replacement rate, to “low” or “very low” levels. But Hans-Peter Kohler, José Antonio Ortega and Francesco Billari — the authors of the 2002 report — saw something new in the data. For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country’s population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: “lowest-low fertility.”

To the uninitiated, “lowest low” seems a strange thing to worry about. A few decades ago we were getting “the population explosion” drilled into us.

A CRACK IN THE UNITY FACADE:

Bill Clinton says Barack Obama must 'kiss my ass' for his support (Tim Shipman in Washington and Philip Sherwell in New York, 28/06/2008, Daily Telegraph)

Bill Clinton is so bitter about Barack Obama's victory over his wife Hillary that he has told friends the Democratic nominee will have to beg for his wholehearted support.

THE SAD THING IS...:

'WE COULD DO IT TODAY': Israel Prepared to Use Force Against Iran (Der Spiegel, 9/28/08)

Israel is capable of mounting a successful military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, a former Israeli air force general told SPIEGEL. Isaac Ben-Israel, now a member of the ruling Kadima party, said: "If necessary we will use force," adding: "We could do it today."

Ben-Israel, who as an air force general took part in the planning of the 1981 air raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, admitted it might be "more difficult" to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

He told SPIEGEL that the dispute over Iran's nuclear activities could be solved "by other means" and advocated much tougher sanctions against Iran. "Only once the critical point has been reached will we choose the final option."

JEWS FOR BA'ATHISM!:

A Surprise Negotiation (David Ignatius, June 25, 2008, Washington Post)

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad favored an opening to Israel to counter attempts by the United States, France and Saudi Arabia to isolate his country. Syrian confidence in the Turkish negotiating channel increased after Israel indicated informally that it was prepared to accept terms for return of the Golan Heights (and related issues, such as water rights) that had been reached in direct Syrian-Israeli negotiations during the 1990s.

WHAT COULD BE LESS SURPRISING...:

Conservatives warm to McCain on the law (BEN ADLER, 6/28/08, Politico)

Conservatives may not be enamored of John McCain, but on subjects that are near and dear to their hearts — legal philosophy and judicial appointments — they are finding a lot to like about the Arizona senator.

Between his campaign trail rhetoric and a stable of legal advisers who are well-regarded in conservative circles, McCain is winning over converts who at one time harbored deep suspicions about his commitment to appointing reliably conservative judges.
.
It’s a surprising turn of events for a candidate who was once booed at the Conservative Political Action Conference and especially for one who played a key role in brokering the “Gang of 14” compromise in 2005, a deal that some conservatives contend undermined the Republicans’ opportunity to ban filibusters against judicial nominees.

One of Maverick's big advantages is that he can stand still and the "alienated base" will come to him. Meanwhile, Senator Obama has to scramble Right, alienating his base in fact and appearing craven to the rest of us.

AND THEY WONDER WHY W ISN'T WORRIED ABOUT HISTORY'S JUDGEMENT?:

America to hand back Anbar, Iraq's biggest province, to Baghdad (Damien McElroy, 28/06/2008, Daily Telegraph)

America will next week crown its progress in driving al-Qa'eda out of Iraq by handing back the province of Anbar to local control.

Anbar was once the heart of extremist Islamic resistance to America but was transformed into one of Iraq's most peaceful regions in a matter of months.

The event is a vindication of General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq who transformed the situation with a "surge" of 30,000 extra troops last year and by persuading the local populace to work with them against the insurgency.

FROM ADAM TO ATOMIZED:

The Little Robot That Could: Pixar's Andrew Stanton first thought of WALL•E in 1994, and now it's hitting theaters. We caught up with Stanton to discuss his faith, creativity, and that lonely little 'bot. (Mark Moring, 06/24/08, Christianity Today)

Apparently the idea for WALL•E was first born in 1994?

Stanton: At the time, it wasn't a whole story. It was just the foundation of a great character—and it was literally born from the sentence, "What if humankind left earth and somebody left the last robot on, and it just kept doing the same futile thing forever?" And I thought that was the saddest, loneliest character I ever heard of in my life. [Co-writer] Pete Docter and I loved that idea, and thought we'd love to see a movie like that.

But since we hadn't even finished Toy Story yet, our next sentence was, "Nobody would ever let us make a movie like that." And we put it on the shelf and got caught up doing all these other things. But the idea stayed with me all these years, and when I was writing on Nemo, I started thinking about WALL•E again—and I couldn't stop. That's when I realized that I was attracted to the pure loneliness of this character, and the opposite of loneliness is love—so it should be a love story. From then on, suddenly the skies opened and I just couldn't stop writing.

It is a wonderful love story. But at the same time, it seemed to have heavier social commentary than most Pixar films. It seemed like a story about fat, lazy, American consumers who don't care about the environment and …

Stanton: That's your interpretation, but that's not where I was coming from. I certainly see the parallels, but honestly, all those factors came from very different places. All my choices in the film came from what I needed to amplify the main point, which was the love story between these robots. The theme that I was trying to tap into was that irrational love defeats life's programming—that it takes a random act of loving kindness to kick us out of our routines and habit.

You could blame consumerism as one thing that's happening in this film, but there's a million other things we do that distract us from connecting to the person next to us and from furthering relationships, which is truly the point of living. So I came up with the idea that as WALL•E was picking up trash, it would have all these signs of humanity for him to rifle through, to get him interested in what humans were all about. I loved the idea of WALL•E finding something real. He was fascinated with the idea of living. And what's the point of living? Something real. He was a manmade object with something real inside him. And he found something real while surrounded by manmade objects. That just was poetic for me.

OK, but why were the humans on the space station all fat and riding around in their hovering lounge chairs?

Stanton: I wasn't trying to make the humans into fat, lazy consumers, but to make humanity appear to be completely consumed by everything that can distract you—to the point where they lost connection with each other, even though they're right next to each other. The reason I made them look like big babies was because a NASA guy told me that they haven't yet simulated gravity perfectly for long-term residency in space. And if they don't get it just right, atrophy kicks in and you begin to lose your muscle tone—you just turn into a blob of goo. For a while, that's what I did with the humans in the movie; they were just big blobs of Jell-O. But it was so bizarre, we had to pull it back. So I said, well, let's just make them look like big babies. That's where all that came from.

I wasn't trying to make some sort of mean-spirited comment on consumerism or today's society. I was going with just the logic of what would happen if you were in a perpetual vacation with no real purpose in life. So I went with the idea that we'd become sort of big babies with no reason to grow up. I definitely saw humanity as victims of this system that they were in. They were just big babies that needed to stand on their own two feet. [...]

Stanton: [G]uys like you and others at Pixar, and other Christians like Scott Derrickson and Ralph Winter, are bringing biblical themes into the movies without making them feel "preachy." Where are you on all of that thinking?

Stanton: I agree with what you said. Just because you're strong in your faith doesn't mean that you suddenly have to be dumb and pander to a certain audience. When did that become a rule? I think you were given a brain to use it, and I think you were given talents to use it. And so the same intoxicating, seducing talents and cleverness and wisdom that you see in what may be considered "secular" entertainment, there's no reason that those things should be held back for anything else, I like to think.

ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU, ASK WHAT OBAMA WILL DO TO YOUR COUNTRY:

Grim proving ground for Obama's housing policy: The candidate endorsed subsidies for private entrepreneurs to build low-income units. But, while he garnered support from developers, many projects in his former district have fallen into disrepair. (Binyamin Appelbaum, June 27, 2008, Boston Globe)

Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing - an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama's former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama's constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.

Some of the residents of Grove Parc say they are angry that Obama did not notice their plight. The development straddles the boundary of Obama's state Senate district. Many of the tenants have been his constituents for more than a decade.

GIVEN THAT HIS WEAKNESSES ARE BEING TOO INEXPERIENCED TO BE PRESIDENT AND TOO FAR LEFT TO BE ELECTED...:

Obama Looks to Balance Vulnerabilities With Veep Choice: Obama may pick a vice president with more national security experience (Kenneth T. Walsh, June 27, 2008, US News)

Obama would be America's first African-American president, and his strategists say he wants to reassure white voters that he is a mainstream candidate who shares their values and will protect their interests, especially on the economy. Democratic strategists say Obama also needs a running mate who has credentials on national security, where he is considered vulnerable.

BOY, NO ONE BELIEVES IN GALILEO ANYMORE:

Stephen Hawking's explosive new theory (Roger Highfield, 26/06/2008, Daily Telegraph)

By quantum lore, when a particle of light travels from A to B, it does not take one path but explores every one simultaneously, with the more direct routes being used more heavily.

This is called a sum over histories and Prof Hawking and Prof Hertog propose the same thing for the cosmos.

In this theory, the early universe can be described by a mathematical object called a wave function and, in a similar way to the light particle, the team proposed two years ago that this means that there was no unique origin to the cosmos: instead the wave function of the universe embraced a multitude of means to develop.

This is very counter intuitive: they argued the universe began in just about every way imaginable (and perhaps even some that are not). Out of this profusion of beginnings, like a blend of a God’s eye view of every conceivable kind of creation, the vast majority of the baby universes withered away to leave the mature cosmos that we can see today.

But, like any new idea, there were problems. [...]

Most models of the universe are bottom-up, that is, you start from well-defined initial conditions of the Big Bang and work forward. However, Prof Hertog and Prof Hawking say that we do not and cannot know the initial conditions present at the beginning of the universe. Instead, we only know the final state - the one we are in now.

Their idea is therefore to start with the conditions we observe today - like the fact that at large scales one does not need to adopt quantum lore to explain how the universe (it behaves classically, as scientists say) - and work backwards in time to determine what the initial conditions might have looked like.

SOMEBODY NEEDS TO COME TO AMERICA:

Oh, how I hate the Beautiful Game (Craig Brown, 28/06/2008, Daily Telegraph)

How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and - perhaps most of all - its unpluggable "analysts". I hate its imbecilic chanting and its self-righteous saloon-bar expertise. I hate its ersatz working-classness, especially now that the price of tickets compares unfavourably with Royal Ascot or Henley. I have even begun to hate those pampered little kiddies the footballers are now obliged to escort on to the pitch before the start of each game, as though all set to embark on a pervy kind of waltz.

Above all, I hate its inescapability. Honk! Honk! Even in a pretty street on a quiet night in Brussels, it was impossible to escape it. Back in our hotel bar, we were confronted by five screens, all showing endless slow-motion replays of failed goals interspersed with furrow-browed trainers and self-pitying footballers. On screen, a succession of experts and analysts and commentators all jabbered away; meanwhile, in the bar itself, Americans and Belgians and Dutch and English exchanged their equally forceful and self-confident opinions as to where things had gone wrong, and how they personally would have made them go so much better.

It is hard being a football loather, a football unfan. I sometimes feel as lonely as the sole survivor in the last reel of a Zombie film, as, one by one, old friends reveal themselves, with their glassy stares and outstretched arms, to have succumbed to the lure. People you had always assumed were salt-of-the-earth anti-soccer stalwarts suddenly start jabbering incoherently about how Cornelius from Aston Villa should be shot for that tackle by Aldomovar of Tottenham Hotspur and, from the look of them, you suddenly realise that all is lost.

SKETCHY POWERS OF OBSERVATION:

Iran: The Threat (Thomas Powers, 7/17/08, NY Review of Books)

Nothing in the modern affairs of nations has been more exhaustively analyzed and debated than the utility and dangers of nuclear weapons, and yet the dangers posed by Iran with a bomb have been barely discussed. They are treated as a given. The core idea is that Iran cannot be trusted because the country is run by religious fanatics crazy enough to use a bomb if they had one. This is not the first time such arguments have been made. Some Americans, including Air Force generals, believed in the late 1940s that a preemptive war against the Soviet Union was justified by the peril of Moscow with a bomb. Twenty years later the Russians, in their turn, were so alarmed by the prospect of Beijing with a bomb that they quietly proposed to the Americans a joint effort to destroy the Chinese nuclear development effort with a preemptive attack.

The world's experience with nuclear weapons to date has shown that nuclear powers do not use them, and they seriously threaten to use them only to deter attack. Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all acquired nuclear weapons in spite of international opposition. None has behaved recklessly with its new power. What changes is that nuclear pow-ers have to be treated differently; in particular they cannot be casually threatened.

More recently the examples of Iraq and Libya have suggested that international sanctions work more effectively than military threats to persuade nations to give up bomb programs. As is now well known, American fears of Saddam Hussein with a bomb were unfounded. In early 2003, when the US was loudly insisting that only military invasion and regime change could keep Saddam from acquiring a bomb, the United Nations arms inspector Hans Blix said that whether the danger was real or imaginary could be determined by international weapons inspectors in a matter of months. In the event, the Americans themselves, after a year spent ransacking Iraq for evidence of nuclear weapons activity, announced that Saddam's bomb program had been completely shut down a dozen years previously, in 1991.

THAT'S NOT CRICKET:

New Zealand take controversial last-ball thriller (Jamie Alter at The Oval, June 25, 2008, CricInfo)

In easily the tightest contest of the summer, England were struggling to stay in the contest with New Zealand well placed on 173 for 4 in the 35th over, but hit back to dismiss Styris (brilliantly run out by Graeme Swann and Paul Collingwood), Oram (pulling to the deep) and Daniel Vettori (excellently held by Bopara at midwicket) in the space of 24 balls and for 16 runs - turning The Oval into a cauldron.

A fourth followed in the most controversial manner. With 26 needed from 39 balls, Mills called Grant Elliott for a sharp single. As Elliott bolted out of the blocks he collided with Sidebottom, rugby style, and fell flat to the ground. Ian Bell threw the ball to Kevin Pietersen, who broke the stumps, but England did not withdraw their appeal despite the umpire, Mark Benson, offering Collingwood the chance to think again. A peeved Elliott hobbled off for 24.

With 12 needed from 21, Bell knocked down the stumps with Tim Southee short of his crease. Mark Gillespie then survived a tantalizingly tense maiden 47th over from Swann, and no runs had been scored for nine deliveries when Mills, who had been sizing up the midwicket boundary, swatted Collingwood off the middle for a 106-metre six, to transform the equation from 12 from 10 to six from nine.

Manic singles followed, and it came down to three from six balls. Mills pinched a single, but the next five deliveries seemed to take an eternity as Luke Wright ploughed a channel outside off and Gillespie fished and missed repeatedly. Then, on the last ball, he pushed the ball to Swann at cover and set off for the single that would have secured the tie. Swann's shy, however, missed the stumps and with England's fielders all converging on the stumps, New Zealand's sprinted through for a delirious winning over-throw. England's final blemish in the field proved decisive.

SHOUTING THEMSELVES HORST (via Matt Murphy):

Is Europe Repainting Its Nazi Past? (Janet Levy, 6/26/08, American Thinker)

In recent years, soccer crowds have gone so far as to simulate the hissing of Nazi gas chambers, pairing the sound with Nazi salutes. In Belgium, Muslim fans at a soccer match between Israel and Belgium shouted "Jews to the gas chambers" and "strangle the Jews," while waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags. Freed from the restraints of acceptable behavior, with inhibitions loosened by alcohol consumption and the intense camaraderie of team spirit, soccer fans freely unleash anti-Semitic slurs with abandon and without fear of retribution.

This alarming behavior prompts questions as to whether anti-Semitism is becoming acceptable again in a Europe that has forgotten its Nazi past, and whether guilt has been supplanted by denial. Is the era of Nazism being re-examined and re-framed in a more positive light that contributes to such gratuitous and ugly outbursts?

SINCE THE DANG THINGS WON'T SPECIATE IN NATURE...:

Bird Family Tree Gets Re-Write (AFP, 6/28/08)

A five-year project has revolutionized scientific thought on the evolution of birds and the results are so surprising that now even the textbooks will have to be rewritten, a study said Thursday.

"With this study, we learned two major things," said Sushma Reddy, lead author and a fellow at The Field Museum in Chicago, Ill.

"First, appearances can be deceiving. Birds that look or act similar are not necessarily related. Second, much of bird classification and conventional wisdom on the evolutionary relationships of birds is wrong."

The results of the largest ever study of bird genetics are so widespread that the names of dozens of birds will now have to be changed, says the study to be published in Science magazine.

THE NECESSITY OF MESSIANISM:

In Iran’s Holy City, Dissent Over Mixing Islam and Politics: The regime faces criticism from an unexpected source (Anuj Chopra, June 27, 2008, US News)

Such dissent fomenting in Qom, a center of Shiite scholarship, shows that the current Iranian government leadership faces rumblings of opposition not just from secular-minded intellectuals in affluent areas of northern Tehran but from elements in Iran's clerical class, too. This cleric—once a staunch supporter of the 1979 Islamic Revolution—is disillusioned with the "frightening direction" the revolution has veered toward, making way for what some have labeled a "turbaned dictatorship."

The revolution, which toppled U.S.-backed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, brought to power Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and transformed Iran into a theocracy. Clerics wear both the hats of government and the turbans of religion. The principle of velayat e faqih [rule of Islamic jurisprudence], which places the clergy above all other institutions, holds that society should be governed by a supreme leader, a cleric best qualified to enforce Islamic law, until the appearance of the Shiite messiah. It is this doctrine that makes Khomeini's successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader and all others subordinate to him.

While Iranian liberals have yearned for a constitutional separation of religion and state, Qom, too, was never completely at ease with Khomeini's idea of velayat e faqih. With its many decrepit buildings bearing scribbled slogans and stenciled portraits of an unsmiling Khomeini, Qom is home to hundreds of seminaries. It might appear to be the nerve center of global Islamic fundamentalism. Yet views here are not homogeneous. Some revered clerics, in private conversations, repudiate the idea of involving religion so deeply in politics and governance. And they blame the politicization of Islam for Iran's pressing woes—human-rights abuses, international isolation, and an economy that is crippled despite being blessed with the world's fourth-largest oil reserves

WHAT ELECTION?:

Politics Goes Viral Online (Aaron Smith and Lee Rainie, June 15, 2008, Pew Internet & American Life Project)

In total, 46% of all adults are using the internet, email or phone text messaging for political purposes in this election. This percentage includes those who are doing at least one of the three major activities we probed -- getting news and information about the campaign, using email to discuss campaign-related matters, or using phone texting for the same purpose.

* 40% of all Americans (internet users and non-users alike) have gotten news and information about this year's campaign via the internet.
* 19% of Americans go online once a week or more to do something related to the campaign, and 6% go online to engage politically on a daily basis.

HERE'S AN IDEA...:

Stimulus payments lift spending in U.S. (Michael M. Grynbaum, June 27, 2008, NY Times)

The economic stimulus package, which mailed about $50 billion worth of tax rebates in April and May, provided a lift to income and savings of consumers last month, the government said on Friday.

Consumer spending increased as well.

KIDS MAY NOT LIKE IT...:

From Pixar, A Droid Piece of Filmmaking (John Anderson, 6/27/08, The Washington Post)

One of the summer's presumptive blockbuster-tentpole-hits-to-be, the Pixar film is clearly making co-producer/distributor Disney nervous. And it's not hard to see why. It's too good. Too smart. And, most importantly, too dark.

Set in a future where the Earth has become covered in trash, swept by monstrous, rumbling dust storms and whose only bona fide wildlife is the cockroach (a literally running gag), "WALL·E" refers to our hero -- a Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth class. The cute, mechanically chirping robot has been left behind to toil endlessly in the shadow of the planet's rubbish skyline, collecting garbage, compressing garbage, living his solitary life amid his amassed artifacts of bygone human society (a Rubik's cube, a flashbulb, a museum's worth of Zippo lighters).

Oh, yes -- and he ends each day growing misty-eyed (or misty-goggled) rewatching an old copy of "Hello, Dolly!"

It's embarrassing -- is this what would be left of us?

Apart from WALL-E and Eve, the most interesting character is the skipper of the Axiom, Captain McCrea. Portraits of the vessel’s previous captains line the walls of his cabin, and reveal that the human race has been becoming increasingly obese, soft, and baby-like. Captain McCrea can’t get into his uniform jacket, but wears it buttoned over the shoulders of his stretchy soft unitard, the garment worn by everyone on the spaceship. Contented humans have nothing to do but ride along in hoverchairs, gazing at personal video screens that serve all their entertainment and communication needs. They eat continually, sucking food from plastic cups through beverage straws (advertisements blare, “Lunch in a cup!” “Cupcake in a cup!”). They are barraged by commercials urging them to buy more, eat more, and hop on the latest fad. “Try blue! It’s the new red!” a voice announces, and instantly all the unitards turn blue. A cheery recorded voice calls out, “Consume again soon!”

But Captain McCrea is intrigued by the possibility that vegetable life is sprouting on earth, and begins to overcome his bloated passivity. He asks his computer to define terms like “dancing,” “farms,” and even “hoe down,” and views the images with increasing wonder. Entranced by earth’s fertility and beauty, he begins to consider the possibility of returning to inhabit the earth once more, planting “vegetable seeds and pizza seeds.” This dream is opposed by the ship’s auto-pilot, a HAL-like device called Auto (Otto?), which has a single glowing red eye. Their struggle for power supplies the closing conflict of the movie.

The conflict is somewhat ambiguous, though, because Auto has a pretty good argument on his side. The captain’s naiveté and ignorance would seem to make a return to earth disastrous. We’re given the further detail that centuries of reduced gravity have caused the human skeleton to become smaller and weaker; Captain McCrea’s feet and hands are little more than pudgy blobs. How could such people, with such disadvantages, thrive on earth? Wouldn’t a McCrea victory mean a defeat for humanity?

Well, it’s only a movie, of course. But I’ll urge you to stay for the closing credits, because they offer a resolution to that question that is not just ingenious but satisfying, as well as moving.

EVEN SETTING ASIDE THE NOTORIOUS FACT...:

The Unbelievably Annoying Problem of Christian Moral High Ground : A seventh LOSER LETTER (Mary Eberstadt, 6/27/08, National Review)

Today’s subject concerns an idea that is absolutely critical to the success of Our godlessness: namely, how the believers’ capture of the moral high ground on certain issues — in particular, what they call the “life issues” — continues to deprive us atheists of the converts we deserve. I’ll start by discussing the particular leading “life” issue where they’ve left us Brights in the p.r. dust: i.e., abortion.

Now, let’s begin by noticing that there is such a thing as an atheist position on abortion — namely, that just about every Bright in history or currently in print is unanimously in favor of it. At first, I have admit, I didn’t quite get why Everybody should be so North-Korean-election lopsided about this. After all, we atheists are supposed to be Freethinkers. We do disagree about some important things, like — well, like nothing I can think of offhand, but I’m sure there’s something We don’t all think alike about, somewhere. This issue isn’t one of them, though. You can scour almost all contemporary works on Our side, and find not a Molecule of difference on the question of the morality of abortion.

It’s funny, isn’t it? Because even as recently as a few generations ago, at least a couple of people were apparently able to be atheists and anti-abortion at the same time. For example, two of the few influential Female atheists in history, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were exactly that. Even Our spiritual anti-mother Margaret Sanger was apparently conflicted about the morality of abortion — or at least about abortions committed by white people. (Don’t worry! I would not ordinarily bring Margaret Sanger’s name into anything, at least not around the Dulls aware of Her work. We all know what a liability her flamboyant racism can be. See the excruciating NRO book excerpt by public enemy Jonah Goldberg this very week reminding Everybody of what we’d just as soon forget). For whatever reason, though, it appears that this kind of dissent in atheist thought just quit Evolving. By now, being anti-Loser is pretty much a proxy for being pro-abortion, and usually vice versa too.

Now, there seem to be two arguments for abortion on which today’s Brights unanimously agree. The first, which is simple enough, goes like this: Religious people, and only religious people, are against abortion; religious people are misled, and usually stupid; therefore, being against abortion is not something a Bright should be.

NOR WILL YOU HEAR MAVERICK CALL HIM...:

Grover Norquist has a label for Barack Obama (Don Frederick, 6/27/08, LA Times)

John McCain has been trying hard of late to link Barack Obama with Jimmy Carter in the public consciousness, hoping that the "ineffectual" label that many voters affix to the former president will prove transferable.

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist touts Goc. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota as prime vice presidential prospects for presumptive Republican presdiential nominee John McCainBut Grover Norquist -- the conservative activist who specializes in promoting an anti-tax agenda and, more generally, revels in the role of agent provocateur -- is offering a different comparison.

Norquist dropped by The Times' Washington bureau today and, as part of his negative critique of Obama's liberal stances on economic issues and other matters, he termed the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee "John Kerry with a tan."

THERE'S A MISTAKEN IMPRESSION...:

Campaign Scorecard (Mark Halperin, 6/27/08, TIME: The Page)

McCain's Good Week (Jonathan Chait, 6/23/08, TNR: The Plank)

[M]cCain did a spectacular job of stopping Obama this last week. Obama was trying to focus on the economy, and he got virtually no traction because McCain has been driving the debate by attacking him on debates, public financing, and terrorism.

The first two, especially, seemed to take a toll. Political reporters are interested in politics, not policy, and a process fight will always eclipse a debate over economic plans. And it's pretty clear that Obama's image has been tainted by the process fights.

...that the quality of the campaigns matters, when really the race is just a function of political dynamics. Everything that helped Senator Obama defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination is a liability for him in the general, while nought that aided John McCain is. Now, Senator Obama has to jettison all his baggage -- his identity politics, his voting record, his affiliations, etc. -- and can't help but seem two-faced as he does so. Worse, since no one really knows who he is their first impression of him is that he's so changeable as to be hollow. Republican attacks on his original politics and his shucking them for political purposes simply reinforce this image.

Maverick isn't winning so much as Senator Obama can't win.

SENATOR BUTTERFIELD (via Glenn Dryfoos):

A Diplomatic Success That Defies the Critics (STEVEN LEE MYERS, 6/27/08, NY Times)

“The regime’s nuclear declaration is the latest reminder that, despite Mr. Bush’s once bellicose rhetoric, engaging our enemies can pay dividends,” Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, whom Mr. Bush defeated in the 2004 presidential election, said in a statement after the declaration on Thursday.

“Historians will long wonder,” he continued, “why this administration did not directly engage North Korea before Pyongyang gathered enough material for several nuclear weapons, tested a nuclear device and the missiles to deliver them.”

History will not judge Mr. Bush as a dove, even if North Korea steps back from the nuclear threshold. The war in Iraq and his sanction of aggressive tactics in the war on Al Qaeda and other terrorists will shape his legacy more than anything he accomplishes diplomatically.

EVERY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION JUST BOILS DOWN TO...:

For Obama, a Pragmatist’s Shift Toward the Center (MICHAEL POWELL, 6/27/08, NY Times)

Barack Obama has taken a stroll this week away from traditional liberal political positions, his path toward the political center marked by artful leaps and turns.

On Thursday, he seemed to embrace a Supreme Court decision, written by the court’s premiere conservative and upheld 5-to-4, striking down Washington, D.C.’s ban on handguns.

Mr. Obama seemed to voice support for the ban as recently as February. On Thursday, however, he issued a Delphic news release that seemed to support the Supreme Court, although staff members later insisted that might not be the case.

WHICH MAKES CALLING IT AN EPIDEMIC A LIE:

H.I.V. And Aids Diagnoses Rise in Men Who Have Sex With Men (DAVID TULLER, 6/27/08, NY Times)

Diagnoses of H.I.V. and AIDS in men who have sex with men rose significantly from 2001 to 2006, while declining in other demographic groups, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. The increase in infection rates was especially high among males ages 13 to 24, with an annual increase of 12.4 percent, compared with 1.5 percent for men over all. The annual increase was higher still among young African-American men who have sex with men, nearly 15 percent. “It’s a grim report,” said Dr. Ronald Stall, an epidemiologist and professor of public health at the University of Pittsburgh. “It means roughly speaking that about half of the American AIDS epidemic is occurring among a few percent of the adult population."

THE SIDES:

Feeding the Sectarian Frenzy (Mshari Al-Zaydi, 6/26/08, asharq alawasat)

According to the Lebanese newspaper Al-Nahar, Al-Musawi attacked Saudi Arabia without naming it, saying, "This Gulf country is financing the sectarian sedition in Lebanon". Al-Musawi added, "The problem is that this is a political battle that this Gulf country is waging and it should know that it cannot transform Lebanon into an emirate appended to the emirates that it controls" as he referred to the formula of Lebanese co-existence among its sects. This is what was said - from north of the Arabian Peninsula- by one of the leaders of the Iranian-Lebanese party whose master [Hassan Nasrallah] admitted that he was a follower of Waliyat el Faqih. So what was said from south of the Arabian Peninsula and almost in the same week?

In inconsistent remarks to the weekly Yemeni newspaper Al-Wasat (on 18 June) following the recent battles with the Yemeni army, Abdul Malik al-Huthi, the field commander of the Al-Huthist insurgents in the northern mountains of Yemen and the strongholds of Al-Zaydiyah in Sa'dah and elsewhere, said: "The Saudis are hostile to us although we are not their enemies. But their participation in the aggression against us with money and other things force us to treat them like enemies. We have many options and various files that we can revive and raise alongside other Yemeni files". Al-Huthi added: "But so far we have not declared war". In a statement to the Yemeni newspaper Al-Nida on 12 June, Al-Huthi accused Saudi Arabia of "involvement in shedding Yemeni blood to placate the United States". He warned that if Saudi Arabia's aggressive behavior continues, "We may be driven to classify it as an enemy". Abdul Malik al-Huthi also expressed to Al-Wasat his deep admiration for the Iranian state and its policies saying that he supports these policies.

The fact is that the criticism of Saudi intervention by Al-Musawi or Al-Huthi is like trying to block the sunlight with a sieve. Regardless of the true source of corruption and harmful interference - that is Iran - and even if we agree with them that Saudi Arabia is the biggest corrupter and interventionist in Lebanon and Yemen, why is Saudi intervention viewed as an evil deed of the devil while Iran's intervention is deemed sweeter than rainwater?

FREE MARKETS REQUIRE INTELLIGENT DESIGN:

High Oil Prices: It's All Speculation: The Administration says oil's runup is due to shortages, but the evidence points to manipulation (Ed Wallace, 6/27/08, Business Week)

Today, while energy prices are crushing American families, I think we'd all benefit by reflecting on what happened with energy in 2001. Seven years ago, Enron was fleecing California, extorting its people for electricity to the tune of billions of dollars. As is true today, some voices in the Administration claimed that supply shortages, not manipulation, formed the core of California's soaring electricity prices. Yet, now that we know the whole story of Enron's criminal manipulations, many menbers of the media have forgotten how in 2001 the White House deflected any blame for California's suddenly stratospheric electrical costs away from their Houston friends.

Likewise, our Energy Secretary has a real problem discussing issues with facts. Like a broken record, he continues to maintain that in no way has speculation had anything to do with today's high oil prices. No, to hear Sam Bodman tell it, they are now and always have been caused by too many buyers chasing too few barrels of oil. But, while that might have been true in 2004, things have changed. And so I give you just one week of news from the oil market.

THE OPTIMAL PROGRESSIVE ENVIRONMENT:

Gordon Brown Suffers Humiliating Anniversary Defeat<, 6/26/08/a> (Reuters)

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has suffered a humiliating defeat in a mid-term election for a vacant parliamentary seat, the latest setback coming exactly a year after he took power.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama enters the General Election with a tight lead, 43% to 38%, over Arizona Senator John McCain, according to a new TIME Magazine poll of registered voters. The poll shows Obama gaining only a slight bounce from Hillary Clinton's departure from the campaign early this month.

When undecided voters leaning towards Obama and McCain are accounted for, the race narrows to a mere 4 percentage points, barely above the poll's 3.5% margin of error. Thirty percent of those who remain undecided said they lean towards McCain, 20% said they were leaning toward Obama with 46% citing no preference.

THE BULLDOG-PILE:

Bulldogs overcome deficits, injuries to shock college baseball world (Tim Griffin, 6/26/08, ESPN)

Fresno State outfielder Steve Susdorf knew he wanted to come back for his senior season for a reason. But he couldn't have imagined it would have turned out quite so satisfying.

Steve Susdorf (No. 27) decided to come back for his senior season, and he's glad he did.

After he became a part of the most improbable college sports championship story in recent years, Susdorf was glad he listened.

"This is a fairy tale come true," Susdorf said as he held the championship trophy on Wednesday after the Bulldogs vanquished Georgia 6-1. "This is phenomenal. I can't describe it."

The hyperbole around Fresno State's wild charge to the NCAA baseball championship probably isn't overstated. The Bulldogs' emergence from underdogs to wonderdogs will go down in history as one of the most memorable title runs in college sports history, maybe even in all of sports history.

Fresno State, which brought home the school's first men's national title of any kind, entered the NCAA tournament as a No. 4 seed in the Long Beach regional. Its RPI ranking of 89 suggested it was more likely to go "two and barbecue" in the first round as to make a long run.

The Bulldogs became the first No. 4 seed ever to make the College World Series, but they accomplished so much more. They gave hope to all the directional schools and the low majors who are always a part of the 64-team tournament.

"In college baseball, everybody has a chance," Susdorf said. "We just got hot at the right time."

A lot of commentators have noted that the Fresno State team did not lack motivation and that they all seem to have a lot of "heart." Well, remember how Villanova once won the NCAA basketball title over Georgetown? They were an eight seed, and what Fresno State just accomplished is equivalent to a twelve seed winning the basketball tournament. Sometimes heart gets you places.

MORE:

Thousands at Beiden tribute (George Hostetter and Paula Lloyd, 6/26/08, Fresno Bee)

More than 5,000 fans packed the stands and the playing field at Beiden Field this evening to greet the NCAA champion Bulldogs.

Throughout the mile-long parade route and when they walked onto the field, the players were greeted with roars of "Fresno State, Fresno State."

The estimate of people in the stadium doesn't include those who lined the parade route on Barstow Avenue and Cedar Avenue, 10 to 12 deep in some places.

A unofficial estimate put the crowd at about 10,000.

Bulldog players and coaches rode in golf carts and on fire trucks in the parade. Despite crowd control efforts by law enforcement, many fans broke through to shake the hands of players and of Bulldog coach Mike Batesole. The constant refrain was "You're No. 1" and "We love you."

HOW ABOUT?:

REVIEW: of WALL*E ( Josh Hurst, 06/26/08, Christianity Today)

When Toy Story opened in 1995, it was heavily marketed as the first-ever full-length computer-animated film--essentially, as a novelty. Anyone who saw the film, of course, knew that it was anything but a flash-in-the-pan or a gimmick, as Pixar's technical innovation was overshadowed only by the movie's exemplary storytelling. And ever since then, with each new film they've produced, Pixar has delivered on the promise of that first movie time and time again, both in terms of technology and storytelling excellence--strangely, though, as the technology has gotten better and better, it is talked about less and less. Perhaps it's because Pixar's success spawned such a wide slew of sub-par imitators; perhaps it's because their standards of animation are so consistently high, it's simply pointless to even try coming up with new superlatives.

It's more than a little ironic, then, that the studio's greatest achievement to date is a movie that is, on one level, about technology--and that the picture it paints is not a pretty one. WALL*E, from director Andrew Stanton of Finding Nemo, is arguably the purest work of hard science fiction to appear on the big screen in ten or fifteen years, and the world that it creates is bleaker and more dystopian than in any American animated film you care to name.

In WALL*E's world, Earth is no longer inhabited by humans; they fled the planet over 700 years ago, having rendered their home world unlivable. Now, mankind floats through space in a giant space station/spa/shopping mall called the Axiom--a race of fat, stupid, lazy and lethargic slobs, too bloated to even stand on their own two feet as they cruise around in hovering lounge chairs. Their planet is in ruins--literally--but they don't care; they're too busy shopping … from the mega-retailer Buy N Large, which seems to have a monopoly on everything. George Orwell would have had nightmares had he seen such a vivid rendering of unchecked consumerism.

But that's just the backdrop.

Many will attempt to describe WALL-E with a one-liner. It’s R2-D2 in love. 2001: A Space Odyssey starring The Little Tramp. An Inconvenient Truth meets Idiocracy on its way to Toy Story. But none of these do justice to a film that’s both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate—and, for a good long while, absolutely bereft of dialogue save the squeals, beeps, and chirps of a sweet, lonely robot who, aside from his cockroach pet, is the closest thing to the last living being on earth.

Cobbled from so many familiar spare parts—from Star Wars to Buster Keaton to Tron to the Marx Brothers—WALL-E feels, here and there, formulaic: Lonely boy and sexy girl meet cute, fall in love, save the planet. It’s a lifetime of celluloid memories cut and pasted into a spiffy computer program that buffs off the rough edges and leaves us with the shiny, sumptuous brand-new. Writer-director Andrew Stanton, among the founding fathers of the Pixar Empire, even admits as much. In the press materials, he name-checks all of the above, plus Alien and Blade Runner and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Such reverence for movie history in general and sci-fi in particular is vital to the story, because it’s what ultimately gives WALL-E its wow factor and its weight—this reinvigoration of the past on the way to the future of filmmaking.

THE NEOCONS WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND WHY WE'RE RELEVANT AND EUROPE ISN'T...:

Sliding toward irrelevance (Robert Kagan, June 26, 2008, IHT)

The Lisbon Treaty was supposed to solve some of these problems. It would have created two potential leaders to represent Europe on the world stage: a president and a foreign minister.

Names being bandied about for the two jobs, from Tony Blair to Sweden's Carl Bildt, made it possible to imagine Europe taking a stronger role in the world, even amid all the doubts.

To Euro-enthusiasts across the Continent, the new constitution was the answer to Europe's malaise and the next step toward global leadership. But what now, since the treaty is dead?

All of this is bad news for the United States. In a world of rising great powers, of which two happen to be autocracies, the United States needs its fellow democracies to be as strong as possible.

A unified, independent, capable Europe is in American interests, even if we may disagree at times. I would much rather see Europe run the 21st century than Vladimir Putin's Russia or Hu Jintao's China.

The danger of this latest blow to European confidence is that America's allies, including Britain, could gradually sink into global irrelevance. Already there are voices in London welcoming it. Gideon Rachman of The Financial Times believes that the majority of Europeans, if not their leaders, prefer irrelevance and are right to do so.

NICELY NARROW...:

Individual Gun Rights Protected, Top U.S. Court Says (Greg Stohr, June 26, 2008, Bloomberg)

``The enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table,'' Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. ``These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.''

Scalia said the ruling doesn't cast doubt on concealed weapons bans or laws barring handgun possession by convicted felons and the mentally ill. Still, the decision may make gun restrictions in Chicago, New York City and other cities more vulnerable to legal challenges.

The court divided along now-familiar grounds, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy joining Scalia. Justices John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented, and Stevens read from his dissent on the bench.

TRY FINDING A PRESIDENT...:

Louisiana vows to nullify child-rape ruling (Tom Ramstack, June 26, 2008, Washington Times)

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said he will seek to enact laws that would invalidate Wednesday's U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down the death penalty for raping a child.

"One thing is clear," said Mr. Jindal, a Republican. "The five members of the court who issued the opinion do not share the same standards of decency as the people of Louisiana."

HOW DOES ONE GET TO BE A POLITICAL ANALYST...:

Why is McCain joining the Bush party? (GLENN HUROWITZ, 6/26/08, Politico)

The weird thing about this newly obedient McCain, however, is that he’s drawing close to the Bush establishment at the very moment when it and its policies are widely blamed for America’s deepening malaise. At a time when the rest of the country is experiencing a Bush hangover, McCain is just popping the champagne. He’s gone from being a maverick who defies the establishment to a kind of gonzo maverick who defies the people — and that’s a very dangerous thing for a presidential candidate.

When, for instance, President Bush pushed his tax cuts for the ultra-rich during the early years of his administration, McCain opposed them, even though the tax cuts enjoyed relatively strong public support. Now, when Bush and his economic policies have fallen into disrepute, McCain is campaigning to make them permanent.

When denying the reality of the climate crisis was de rigueur in the Republican Caucus, McCain fashioned himself as a Grand Old Party green and repeatedly defied the oil companies and his colleagues in the fight for clean energy. Now, with America in a rage about high gas prices and concerned about the fate of the planet, McCain has shied from standing up to the oil barons he used to delight in tweaking. [...]

McCain’s great shift has even extended to torture, once the former POW and torture victim’s signature issue.

THEY TURNED SHE INTO NEWT:

Dems' energy proposals stymied (PATRICK O'CONNOR, 6/26/08, Politico)

Speaker Nancy Pelosi hoped to send House Democrats home for the Fourth of July recess with a series of votes that would show they’re serious about easing the pain at the pump. [...]

The price-gouging bill failed to garner the two-thirds support necessary to pass. An accounting issue forced leaders to put off for a day the so-called “use it or lose it” measure. And the legislation to curb speculation is now caught up in a member fight over the proper path forward — a fight that exposes the misgivings some Democrats have about this activist agenda.

PLEASE USE A RAZOR TO REMOVE PAGES 349-351 IN YOUR GREAT OBAMA ENCYCLOPEDIA...:

Getting ready for a gun ruling (Ben Smith, 6/26/08, Politico)

The Obama campaign, getting ready for an expected Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of Washington, D.C.'s gun control legislation, reverses a statement it put out last year that the ban was constitutional.

(The campaign now describes the statement as "inartful," but it wasn't ambiguous: "Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.")

THE BRAND IS THATCHERISM...:

Cameronism: The Tory leader has done a brilliant job rebranding the "nasty party", but he has yet to come up with a coherent political philosophy - or anything especially new. Richard Reeves on the continuing Conservative makeover (Richard Reeves, 26 June 2008, New Statesman)

If Labour politicians were a bit worried in 2005, they are terrified now. Unless there is a significant change in the political weather, Cameron is set to be prime minister within two years. For a long time, Labour refused to believe that Cameron was executing a brilliant strategy to return the Tories to office by reshaping Con servatism. Cameronism is real - as real as new Labour, or the Third Way - and is likely to be the guiding light of the next government.

As a political strategy, Cameronism represents a largely successful attempt to detoxify the Tory brand. Andrew Cooper, the Tory modernisers' favourite polling guru, spent years presenting evidence to party elders showing that people supported various Conservative policies - until they were told they were Conservative policies. Cameron was the first leader to understand this. The first two years of his leadership was like a sorbet between courses, intended to cleanse the electorate's palate of late Thatcherism. It consisted of a relentless marketing exercise to dem onstrate that Cameron was, variously, a "compassionate", "modern", "liberal", "centre-right", "practical" Conservative: and that he was leading his party in the same direction. At his boldest, Cameron has claimed himself as the true "heir to Blair". He and colleagues such as Oliver Letwin now audaciously claim to be pursuing "progressive ends by conservative means".

Now the bitter taste is gone, tougher policies on welfare, immigration and public services can be pursued without being dismissed as typical products of the "nasty party".

THEY'D ALL BE SAFER...:

Airline safety can depend on aisle seat (Lee Glendinning, June 26, 2008, guardian.co.uk)

The safest place to sit on a plane is an aisle seat close to the emergency exit row, a study of 105 accidents and accounts of 2,000 survivors has found.

The seats with the best survival rate were in the exit row and the rows in front or behind, says the study carried out by Greenwich University for the Civil Aviation Authority.

BUT YOU HAVE TO RUN LIKE A KANSAN:

Obama Criticizes Supreme Court Death Penalty Ruling (SARA KUGLER, June 26, 2008, AP)

Senator Obama said yesterday he disagrees with the Supreme Court's decision outlawing executions of people who rape children, a crime he said states have the right to consider for capital punishment.

"I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes," Mr. Obama said at a news conference. "I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that does not violate our Constitution."

THE WAY THINGS 'SPOSED TO BE (via Glenn Dryfoos):

Ensuring It Still Feels Like the Old Ball Game (JOHN BRANCH, 6/23/08, NY Times)

[Lambert Bartak] sat, shoeless, in an enclosed booth, just a man and his weathered 1935 Hammond organ, alone and anonymous in their timeless endeavor. A ballpark organist is part of the unobtrusive background of baseball, or used to be, until most were quietly silenced by time and outsourced by recorded music.

But after decades of playing largely behind the scenes — as an accordion accompaniment to Johnny Carson’s early magic shows (both spent childhoods in Norfolk, Neb.), as a studio musician for a radio station and as a ballpark organist here during the College World Series — Bartak can finally be seen as something more than a lithe-fingered provider of space-filling background music.

He is a reminder of how ballparks used to sound, and feel, and how they increasingly do not.

According to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, organs gained a place at ballparks after the Chicago Cubs brought one to Wrigley Field for a game in 1941. It was instantly popular. In 1942, the Brooklyn Dodgers added a full-time organist at Ebbets Field.

Other teams followed, and the trend peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. Their numbers have dwindled since. The Hall’s director of research, Tim Wiles, traced at least part of the beginning of the end to a change in ownership for the Mets after the 1979 season. The longtime organist Jane Jarvis was nudged out at Shea Stadium in favor of canned music. Teams wanted their music to rock, not reverberate.

Most major league teams do not employ organists anymore. Even the Omaha Royals, Rosenblatt’s primary tenants, stopped using Bartak a few seasons ago. It is possible that none of the players on the eight teams that made this year’s College World Series have played in another stadium with an organist.

The slow death of organ music may soon hit this event, where the organ still thrives as if there were no tomorrow, only yesterdays. A new stadium is planned for downtown Omaha in 2011, and Bartak doubts that there will be a spot reserved for an organist.

Until then, he punctuates every third out with a three-chord coda, and fills part of the still air between innings with a three-song medley. He does not plan the song lists, relying simply on some indescribable intuition and the hundreds of song titles he has scrawled before him.

BEFORE THE BRADLEY EFFECT....:

Gallup Daily: Obama, McCain Tied at 45%: Obama had held at least a slim advantage for most of June (Jeff Jones, 6/25/08, Gallup Daily)

The latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking update on the presidential election finds John McCain and Barack Obama exactly tied at 45% among registered voters nationwide. [...]

Since the changes from Tuesday's results are well within the margin of sampling error, it is unclear at this point if today's results represent a further tightening of the race. The last two individual nights of polling have, however, been more favorable to McCain that what Gallup has shown for most of June.

DO THEY THINK THE CONSTITUTION'S MEANING CHANGED SUDDENLY?:

ACLU Threatens to Sue U.S. Naval Academy Over Daily Prayer (Jacqueline L. Salmon, 6/24/08, Washington Post)

The American Civil Liberties Union is threatening to sue the U.S. Naval Academy unless it abolishes its daily lunchtime prayer, saying that some midshipmen have complained that they felt coerced to participate. [...]

In a statement, the Naval academy rejected the request.

"The academy does not intend to change its practice of offering midshipmen an opportunity for prayer or devotional thought during noon meal announcements." It said some form of prayer has been offered for midshipmen at meals since the Naval Academy 's founding in 1845 and that it is "consistent with other practices throughout the Navy."

IT WASN'T ENOUGH TO SWAP THE GREAT SEAL...:

Europe Fears Obama Might Undercut Progress With Iran (Glenn Kessler, 6/22/08, Washington Post)

European officials are increasingly concerned that Sen. Barack Obama's campaign pledge to begin direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program without preconditions could potentially rupture U.S. relations with key European allies early in a potential Obama administration.

The U.N. Security Council has passed four resolutions demanding that Iran stop enriching uranium, each time highlighting the offer of financial and diplomatic incentives from a European-led coalition if Tehran suspends enrichment, a route to producing fuel for nuclear weapons. But Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has said he would make such suspension a topic for discussion with Iran, rather than a precondition for any negotiations to take place.

European officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they are wary of giving up a demand that has been so enshrined in U.N. resolutions, particularly without any corresponding concessions by Iran. Although European officials are eager to welcome a U.S. president promising renewed diplomacy and multilateralism after years of tensions with the Bush administration, they feel strongly about continuing on the current path.

"Dropping a unanimous Security Council condition would simply be interpreted by Iran and America's allies as unconditional surrender, and America's friends would view this as confirmation of America's basic unreliability," said François Heisbourg, a Paris-based military analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "A hell of a way to start a presidential term."

AND HE'S THE SMARTEST DEMOCRAT EVER TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT?:

America’s Next Chapter (GARY HART, 6/24/08, NY Times)

The idea that American politics moves in cycles is usually associated with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., but it has an even longer currency. Ralph Waldo Emerson noted the political oscillations between the party of memory and the party of hope, the party of conservatism and the party of innovation. Henry Adams believed that “a period of about 12 years measured the beat of the pendulum” during the era of the founders. Schlesinger, borrowing from his historian father, estimated that the swings between eras of public action and those of private interest were nearer to 30 years.

What matters more than the length of the cycles is that these swings, between what Schlesinger called periods of reform and periods of consolidation, clearly occur. If we somewhat arbitrarily fix the age of Franklin D. Roosevelt as 1932 to 1968 and the era of Ronald Reagan as 1968 to 2008, a new cycle of American political history — a cycle of reform — is due.

The Republican coalition — composed of the religious right on social issues, the radical tax cutters or “supply-siders” on economic issues, and the neoconservatives on foreign policy....

THE BASIS OF ROE...:

Abortion Moves Back Into Political Spotlight With Black Minister Protest (Paul Bedard, 6/25/08, US News)

Race and abortion politics will merge Thursday when a group of African-American pastors, led by the niece of Martin Luther King Jr., march on the Democratic and Republican Party headquarters to demand that candidates refuse donations from Planned Parenthood. The reason: They believe that Planned Parenthood allows racist donors to designate that their money go to fund abortions of blacks. Planned Parenthood has outlined a $10 million campaign to fund candidates who support abortion. But the ministers say they have evidence in videos that African-American babies are being targeted. The group tells Washington Whispers that it is circulating two YouTube videos in which a racist donor wins agreement from Planned Parenthood workers to have his donation designated for blacks. A similar protest took place in front of Planned Parenthood in Washington in April.

THE DELUSIONS OF A REALIST:

Taking ownership of Iraq? (Thomas L. Friedman, June 25, 2008, NY Times)

Having recently returned from Egypt, I have the Suez Canal on my mind. And looking at Iraq from Cairo, the thought occurred to me that maybe the Iraqis have just crossed the Suez Canal. If so, that's good news.

What am I talking about? There is no way that Egypt's President Anwar Sadat could have ever made peace with Israel had he not first launched his lightning strike across the Suez Canal on Yom Kippur, 1973. "The crossing," as that surprise attack became known in Egyptian lore, was as psychologically important as it was militarily important. It wiped away Egypt's humiliating loss in the 1967 war and gave Egyptians the dignity and self-confidence to make peace with Israel as military equals.

WAKE US...:

Tory MPs 'still overwhelmingly Thatcherite' (Andrew Porter, 25/06/2008, Daily Telegraph)

The majority of new Conservative candidates selected to fight the next election are unabashed supporters of Margaret Thatcher's ideals, a new survey has disclosed.

They advocate lower taxes and are more concerned about terrorism than global warming. There is also still a very strong anti-European Union bias among Tory candidates.

MORE:
Netroots feel jilted by Obama's FISA stand (CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN | 6/25/08, Politico)

When former Sen. John Edwards dropped out of the presidential race, the progressive Netroots took their affections to Barack Obama, defending him against attack from Hillary Rodham Clinton and others.

But with his support of a government surveillance bill that offers retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies — a bill that he vowed last year to filibuster — the honeymoon has ended.

Disappointed over his position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the online activists feel jilted and betrayed and have taken to questioning his progressive credentials. One prominent blogger, Atrios, has even given him the moniker “Wanker of the Day.”

BACKWARDS MAN:

Away from the Cold War (Greg Sheridan, June 26, 2008, The Australian)

KIM Beazley, always an astute observer of American politics, makes a fascinating observation about US presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Obama, Beazley points out, is the first post-Cold War man to run for the presidency of the US. [...]

The great Cold War questions were things such as how does the US maintain its geo-strategic influence in key regions of the world; what is the interaction between US military posture and other nations' economic development; how do you keep allies in line with grand Western coalition policy; what is the underlying global balance of power equation; how do you manage the emergence of great powers; how do you balance one power against another; when is it worth embarking on a counterinsurgency campaign and when should the US just stand back from a situation? [...]

[I]n due course, naturally, all US political leaders will be people whose minds were not formed in the Cold War. But I do think Beazley's generational insight is acute. Obama is the first of a new breed.

THINK OF THE PENGUINS ... (via Our Legal Correspondent):

Court slashes judgment in Exxon Valdez disaster (Associated Press, June 25, 2008)

The court ruled that victims of the worst oil spill in U.S. history may collect punitive damages from Exxon Mobil Corp., but not as much as a federal appeals court determined.

Justice David Souter wrote for the court that punitive damages may not exceed what the company already paid to compensate victims for economic losses, about $500 million compensation.

Souter said that a penalty should be "reasonably predictable" in its severity.

Which just reinforces the point that, thanks to Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush, it's the most pro-business Court since the "Switch in Time". Perhaps even too pro-business for a Republic.

SO MUCH DONE, SO MUCH YET TO DO:

Interconnected we prosper (William J. Amelio, June 25, 2008, IHT)

The World Bank recently revisited its "dollar a day" global poverty yardstick and came to a startling conclusion: It was wrong when it said some 250 million people in China had escaped from severe poverty between 1990 and 2004.

Instead, by its latest count, some 407 million Chinese citizens rose out of poverty during those 14 years - roughly one-third of the entire population of the most populous country on the planet!

This upward shift is being repeated around the world with amazing implications for society. The Brookings Institution recently forecast that one billion people would join the ranks of this rising middle class by 2020.

This is cause for global celebration: The world's riches are being opened to all of its citizens, who in turn are contributing new value and advances that will propel the world economy to greater heights of shared prosperity.

Why, after centuries of human endeavor, is this amazing transformation happening now?

Because we have moved decisively from what we called "globalization" into a new era of global inter-connectedness, where not just goods but information and ideas flow across borders constantly and (for the most part) freely as near universal access to Internet-enabled communications moves closer to reality.

WHY WAIT?:

HIRAs Are The Future (DIANA FURCHTGOTT-ROTH, June 25, 2008, NY Sun)

Economists at Texas A&M University, Andrew Rettenmaier and Thomas Saving, were in Washington, D.C. last week to present their answer to Congress: Health Insurance Retirement Accounts, or HIRAs.

Here's how HIRAs would function: Workers would deposit 4% of their paychecks into their HIRAs, while current Medicare payroll taxes deducted from their paychecks would be used to pay for current and future Medicare expenditures.

When workers retire, the HIRA would be used to purchase a lifetime annuity. Annual income from that annuity would be available each year to pay medical costs above an initial deductible of $2,500.

If there were money left over in the account at the end of a year, retirees could keep it and spend it on whatever they wanted. If, on the other hand, medical expenses exceeded the annuity amount and the base deductible, the difference would be paid by Medicare.

Since low-income workers would have smaller HIRAs, the federal government might make a supplemental contribution, from tax revenues, and perhaps lower the $2,500 deductible. Workers of all income levels would shop around for medical services, a process that would help stem the increase in medical costs.

Current retirees now on Medicare would continue to pay Medicare premiums under the present arrangement.

HIRAs have major advantages for future generations of Americans:

* They prepay retirement health spending, taking advantage of the miracle of compound interest. That gives workers a nest egg from which to pay medical bills.
* They encourage shopping around for medical care. If people know they get to keep the unspent balance of their annual medical allowances, they would be more cost conscious. Just as prices for Lasik and cosmetic surgery have fallen, so would other medical costs. Doctors would compete against each other by posting lists of services and fees.
* They are fair. Because the size of the annuity is determined by past wages, those with higher incomes pay a larger fraction of their medical care with their larger annuities before dipping into the common Medicare pot.

THE DEMOCRAT WAR ON SCIENCE:

A grim reckoning: What has a 16th-century astronomer got to do with the defeat of governments and the possible extinction of the human race ? Answers in fractions please (J. Richard Gott III, November 15, 1997, New Scientist)

In the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus pointed out that the Earth revolved about the Sun, rather than vice versa, and in one swift move, displaced humanity from its privileged place at the very centre of the Universe. We now see the Earth as circling an unexceptional star among thousands of millions of others in our unexceptional Galaxy. This perspective is summed up more generally in the "Copernican principle", which is the supposition that one's location is unlikely to be special.

Early this century, when astronomer Edwin Hubble observed approximately the same number of galaxies receding from Earth in all directions, it looked as if our Galaxy was at the exact centre of a great explosion. But reasoning with the Copernican principle, scientists concluded instead that the Universe must look that way to observers in every galaxy - it would be presumptuous to think that our galaxy is special. As a working hypothesis, the Copernican principle has been enormously successful because, out of all the places intelligent observers could be, there are only a few special places and many nonspecial places. A person is simply more likely to be in one of the many nonspecial places. But the Copernican principle doesn't apply only to placement of galaxies in space - it works for the placement of moments in time as well.

What does it imply for "Homo sapiens ?"We have been around for about 200 000 years. If there is nothing special about the present moment, then it is 95 per cent certain that the future duration of our species is between 1/39 and 39 times 200 000 years. That is, we should last for at least another 5100 years but less than 7.8 million years.

Since we have no actuarial data on other intelligent species, this Copernican estimate may be the best we can find. It gives our species a likely total longevity of between 0.205 million and 8 million years, which is quite in line with those for other hominids and mammals. The Earth is littered with the bones of extinct species and it doesn't take much to see that we could meet the same fate. Our ancestor "H. erectus" lasted 1.6 million years, while "H. neanderthalensis" lasted 0.3 million years. The mean duration of mammal species is 2 million years, and even the great "Tyrannosaurus rex" lasted only 2.5 million years.

For us, the end might come from a drastic climate change, nuclear war, a wandering asteroid or comet, or some other catastrophe that catches us by surprise, such as a bad epidemic. If we remain a one-planet species, we are exposed to the same risks as other species, and are likely to perish on a similar timescale.

Some people might think that the discoveries of our age - space travel, genetic engineering and electronic computers - place us in a special position. These breakthroughs, they might say, could lead us to spawn new intelligent species, including intelligent machine species, enhancing our chances of survival. But such thinking may raise false hopes. For, according to the Copernican principle, you are likely to be living in a century when the population is high because most people will be born during such periods. And since it is people who make discoveries, it is not surprising that you will live in a century when many interesting discoveries are being made. But your chance of being born 200 000 years after the beginning of your intelligent lineage, in the very century when a discovery is made that guarantees it a billion-year future, is very small, because a billion years of intelligent observers would be born after such a discovery, and you would be more likely to be one of them. If you believe that any current discovery will dramatically increase our longevity, you must ask yourself: why am I not already one of its products ? Why am I not an intelligent machine or genetically engineered ?

HE IS WHO OBAMA WISHES HE WAS:

The Battle of Newark, Starring Cory Booker: The battle for America's soul isn't in Baghdad. It's right here at home, in a place forsaken long ago and ruled by depravity and despair. Then Cory Booker came to raise a city from the dead. (Scott Raab, Esquire)

"Before they came after me in 2002," he says, "they offered me every job imaginable. McGreevey" -- that'd be disgraced former New Jersey governor and self-described "gay American" Jim McGreevey, a Sharpe James ally -- "offered me Secretary of State, Secretary of Commerce, or Secretary of Labor. They said, 'The county bosses will give you the line for the Essex County Executive -- you'll be the first black county executive' -- all that kind of stuff."

His voice goes from matter-of-fact to plummy with passion in a heartbeat.

"These people don't understand what this is about. This is not about a position -- it's about a mission, and a city that should be so much further along than it is."

As the movie credits roll, Booker mounts the slope of theater carpet with a jock's whooshing stride -- six foot three, he's packing 250 or so pounds, " 'Twofitty,' as they say," Booker says, making him one of the world's bulkiest vegetarians -- and as he stops in the near-empty lobby, his green eyes are shining bright, his smile a mile wide.

"I'd gladly take a grenade," says Cory Booker, beaming, "if it meant saving Newark."

Goddamn hero.

The grenade thing? He means it. As a law student at Yale, Booker commuted from Newark to New Haven -- a three- or four-hour haul, depending on I-95 traffic -- and moved into Brick Towers, one of Newark's nastiest human warehouses. If it was a publicity stunt, as political enemies have claimed, it was bizarre unto insane: He moved to town two years before he ran for any office -- Booker won a Newark City Council seat in 1998, ousting a sixteen-year incumbent -- and he stayed for eight years, leaving only after the drug- and crime-infested place was condemned. Like Will Smith, Booker was the last human resident to go.

"There was a small point in my life in law school," he says, "right before I moved to Newark, when I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I felt so lost. I said, Well, where I want to be is Newark -- let me move to the worst street I can find and just be there, a young lawyer. Be there. For people."

IT BARELY WARRANTS THE FUNNY PAGES:

The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal': The House and a shot not yet heard 'round the world (Nat Hentoff, June 24th, 2008, Village Voice)

In a June 6 letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey—largely ignored by a press immersed in the future of Hillary Clinton—56 Democrats in the House of Representatives asked for "an immediate investigation with the appointment of a special counsel to determine whether actions taken by the President, his Cabinet, and other Administration officials are in violation of the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441) . . . and other U.S. and international laws."

This isn't front-page news?

SILLY GOOSE...:

French Pol: Europe Has 'Enemies' in the U.S. (Honor Mahony, 6/25/08, Business Week)

France's Europe minister, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, has said that Europe has enemies in Washington, suggesting that neo-conservatives played a significant role in the Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty earlier this month.

French daily Le Monde reports Mr Jouyet as saying that "Europe has powerful enemies on the other side of the Atlantic, gifted with considerable financial means. The role of American neo-conservatives was very important in the victory of the No."

WERE THE THIEVES NAMED David, Don, & Tom?:

Falcon chicks 'stolen for trade' (BBC, 6/25/08)

Three peregrine falcon chicks stolen from a nest in Cheshire were taken by people illegally trading in falconry birds, a wildlife charity believes.

IN POLITICS, ALL TRUTHS ARE UNSPEAKABLE:

Nader's invokes race to criticize Obama (Domenico Montanaro, 6/25/08, NBC First Read)

In an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, Ralph Nader says this on Obama:

"There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American," Nader said.

Was Charlie Black right?

Did he simply commit the political sin of saying something that is unspeakably true?

SO LET'S SEE IF WE HAVE THIS STRAIGHT...:

Study Says Student Reading and Math Scores Are Improving (Eddy Ramírez, 6/24/08, US News)

Since No Child Left Behind took effect about six years ago, most states have found some success narrowing the achievement gap between white and minority children. Student achievement in mathematics and reading has also improved in a majority of states. But it's impossible to say how much credit the federal education reform law deserves. These are the major findings of a new report (.pdf) by the Center on Education Policy, an independent group in Washington, D.C., that analyzes education reforms.

"We cannot draw a causal connection between these results and NCLB," Jack Jennings, president and chief executive officer of the group that conducted the study, said this week. He stressed that the report's findings are good news at a time when confidence in U.S. public schools is shaky. "We are moving in the direction of improving schools," he added.

SO ISN'T IT FAIR TO STATE WHAT FOLLOWS FROM THIS LOGIC?;

Surge Protection (Joe Klein, 6/24/08, TIME)

The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked--still smacks--of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MYTH AND HISTORY... (via The Mother Judd):

Researchers hit a homer with 'The Odyssey': Using astronomical clues, they date one of literature's most heralded events: Odysseus' slaughter of his wife's suitors. But the finding leaves many questions unanswered (Thomas H. Maugh II, June 24, 2008, Los Angeles Times)

Delving into a 3,000-year-old mystery using astronomical clues in Homer's "The Odyssey," researchers said Monday they have dated one of the most heralded events of Western literature: Odysseus' slaughter of his wife's suitors upon his return from the Trojan War.

According to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the wily hero who devised the Trojan Horse hefted his mighty bow on April 16, 1178 BC, and executed the unruly crowd who had taken over his home and was trying to force his wife into marriage.

The finding leaves many perennial questions unanswered, such as whether the events portrayed actually occurred or whether the blind poet Homer was the author of the tale.

But it casts a new sheen of veracity on a story that has existed in a hazy realm of fantasy and history since it was first composed 400 years after the Trojan War.

MORE:
Homecoming of Odysseus May Have Been in Eclipse (JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, 6/24/08, NY Times)

That Odysseus took his time, 19 years, getting home to Ithaca from the Trojan War is the story Homer engraved in the “Odyssey.” But exactly when did he rejoin his Penelope, who had been patient beyond belief?

Plutarch thought a crucial passage in the 20th book of the “Odyssey” to be a poetic description of a total solar eclipse at the time of Odysseus’ return. A century ago, astronomers calculated that such an eclipse occurred over the Greek islands on April 16, 1178 B.C., the only one in the region around the estimated date of the sack of Troy. But nearly all classics scholars are highly skeptical of any connection.

An analysis of astronomical references in the epic has led two scientists to conclude that the homecoming of Odysseus, usually considered a fictional character set in the context of a real historical event, possibly coincided with the 1178 solar eclipse.

WHY WASTE TIME AND ENERGY THAT COULD BE SPENT BURNING WITCHES?:

Poll: Salvation through myriad faiths: 70 percent acceptance stuns researcher (Julia Duin, June 24, 2008, Washington Times)

Most Americans say that many roads lead to heaven, according to a U.S. Religious Landscape Survey released Monday by the Pew Forum.

Seventy percent of all Americans say their religion is not the only path to eternal life, according to the second half of a massive survey of 35,000 Americans that charts religious attitudes and beliefs.

Only two religious groups did not agree with the phrase "many religions can lead to eternal life." Eighty-four percent of Jehovah's Witnesses and 61 percent of Mormons disagreed with that phrase, followed by 43 percent of evangelical Christians - the next largest group.

The poll showed "an enormous diversity" in American religion, said John Green, a senior fellow at Pew. "I was stunned."

LESSON ONE...:

General David Petraeus: My philosophy on war: David Petraeus, the top US general in Iraq, has moved to cement his reputation as a thinking soldier by issuing a 23-point list of lessons learned from salvaging America's 'lost war.' (Damien McElroy, 24/06/2008, Daily Telegraph)

Much of the memorandum could be an inversion of Mao Zedong's principles of guerrilla warfare. Mao declaimed that a successful resistance must arouse the population to swim alongside like fish in the sea. In the Petreaus version, troops are told to secure and serve the population: "The Iraqi people are the decisive terrain."

But Gen Petraeus, a warrior of capitalism, places a high importance on cash as a battle winner. Money is a weapon, he writes.

The author of the latest revision of the US Army field manual, Gen Petraeus arrived in Iraq in February last year, with a mandate to implement his own ideas. FM 3-24, as the draft was known, sought mastery of counter-insurgency.

By surging combat troops and shifting the army out of massive bases into smaller outposts, the high command was able to disrupt and destroy its enemy. Control of the streets allowed the US to build confidence in Iraq's security forces, which are now confronting the country's strongest militias.

IT'S ALWAYS AUGUST IN MAGGIE WORLD:

Exchange: 'Nixonland' or 'The Age of Reagan'? (Part Two): How influential were Nixonian ideas and tactics on Reagan's presidency?: In this TNR debate, two powerhouse political historians--Sean Wilentz, the author of The Age Of Reagan and contributing editor for The New Republic, and Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland--try to figure out which president continues to have the stronger hold over our political culture. (Rick Perlstein, June 23, 2008, New Republic)

Dear Sean,

I've been wielding my Nixon hammer for so long now--I signed the book contract for Nixonland in November of 2001--that sometimes the whole world starts to look like Nixon-shaped nails. Ask my friends: I've got a Nixon story for every occasion. And I mean every occasion: You call my book "sassy," and that reminds me of a story about Alger Hiss's car. ...

And your opening thoughts get to that issue of hammers and nails: Do I see Nixonland everywhere, to the exclusion of Reaganville? How much influence should Nixon be granted as midwife of our present political moment, and how much Reagan? It's a question I'm not entirely comfortable with, because I never intended to write a book with direct relevance to our present political moment.

My book originally ended this way: Richard Nixon, the greatest Electoral College victory in hand since James Monroe in 1820, is brooding angrily about the Republican Party's failure to capture the Senate. He's berating the press ("that's how they'll piss on it"), and he's getting ready to reward his cabinet by firing them all. My editor Colin Harrison, whose judgment is superlative, sent me back to the drawing board. My readers had come this far (746 pages!), and they wouldn't be satisfied with a mere reflection on the mood of Richard Nixon because the main character of the book was actually "the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least on that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason." I needed, my editor said, to explain what happened to that voter. And so I gave Colin and Nixonland two more pages--one thousand words to explain what the previous 325,000 had been "about." I'm proud of what I wrote, and stand by my words. But it's left me in the position of having to talk more about the snappy conclusion than the messy book--which means defining what it means to say that we're still living in Nixonland.

Sean, with your usual severe intelligence, you argue that Nixonism was a "hiccup" and that the last 25 or so years of American history tie more directly back to Reagan. Because, on the one hand, Reagan sanded the edges off Nixon-style Republican tactics, and on the other, he sharpened the edges of Nixon's ideology.

I'm not sure if that's entirely true, though. For my next book, which will cover the years from 1973 to 1980, with Reagan's ascent to the presidency as its frame, I'll be testing my hypothesis that the differences between the two presidents are overstated.

Both also fought domestic Communists and so understood the degree to
which American intellectual elites were estranged from the country and
its ideals. This obviously is where they part company with mainstream
liberalism and explains some of the social divisiveness associated
with the two, though it's part and parcel of things like the Scopes
trial decades earlier. American anti-intellectualism is an eternal
theme, not a Nixonian innovation.

But Reagan also became quite wealthy in the 50s/60s and so came to see
what big government cost in taxes. This made him a tax-cutter and
rhetorically anti-big-government, another departure from the Left. He
also had an empathy that Nixon lacked and so found it intolerable that
billions lived under Communist regimes, whereas Nixon, like the Left,
couldn't care less about those people as long as their leaders
preserved stability and didn't threaten us.

Ultimately, Nixon was almost entirely a creature of the Second Way,
while Reagan began the process of breaking away, though not to the
degree that conservative peers like thatcher and Pinochet did. But the
true paradigm shift, to the Third Way, only came with
Gingrich/Clinton/W.

YIKES, IS SHE CONFUSED:

What’s The Big Idea? (Dorothy Wickenden, June 30, 2008, The New Yorker)

On October 7, 2002, in Cincinnati, Ohio, George W. Bush delivered the defining speech of his Presidency. In the face of “clear evidence of peril” from a regime harboring terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, he declared, “we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

Five days earlier, a forty-one-year-old Illinois state legislator had given a momentous speech of his own, although few recognized it as such at the time. “I don’t oppose all wars,” Barack Obama told a few hundred Chicago protesters, adding:

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars. [...]

Still, sixteen months after announcing his candidacy, and after twenty-six Presidential debates and thousands of public-speaking engagements, Obama remains a puzzle to many voters. Almost as dedicated a policy wonk as Hillary Clinton and arguably more centrist in his economic beliefs, he offers plenty of specifics about what needs to be done. But his captivating eloquence and his slogan—“Change We Can Believe In”—have seemed to lift him dangerously high above the concrete. He has proved his steadiness of purpose without clearly defining his priorities. What, above all, does he intend to accomplish if he is elected President?

Obama is said to have been dissatisfied with the slogan. If so, he has a point. The “change” he advocates can be understood as a pragmatic correction to the radical policies and the ineptitude of the Bush brigade. His political departure is a kind of return. He has written two unusually revealing books—one describing how he came to be who he is, the other delineating how he proposes to reclaim the qualities that once made America so admired. He argues that the United States must relearn the fundamental lessons of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and its own long journey toward a more perfect union, and then apply them to the global upheavals of the twenty-first century.

(1) Given that W has used his presidency to fix his old man's mistakes--tax hikes, Souter, Saddam, etc.--does anyone really think he'd have left office without regime-changing Iraq? 9-11 was a convenient pre-text, not a paradigm-shifter.

(2) WMD was, likewise, just a pre-text, asked for by Tony Blair and Colin Powell, to try and get the United Nations to pass a new resolution, The defining speech on the Iraq War came a month earlier when W challenged the UN to live up to its own Charter and enforce its own prior resolutions, which Saddam was in violation of, President's Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly (George W. Bush,
New York, New York, 9/12/02 ):

Twelve years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation. And the regime's forces were poised to continue their march to seize other countries and their resources. Had Saddam Hussein been appeased instead of stopped, he would have endangered the peace and stability of the world. Yet this aggression was stopped -- by the might of coalition forces and the will of the United Nations.

To suspend hostilities, to spare himself, Iraq's dictator accepted a series of commitments. The terms were clear, to him and to all. And he agreed to prove he is complying with every one of those obligations.

He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations, and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge -- by his deceptions, and by his cruelties -- Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.

In 1991, Security Council Resolution 688 demanded that the Iraqi regime cease at once the repression of its own people, including the systematic repression of minorities -- which the Council said, threatened international peace and security in the region. This demand goes ignored.

Last year, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights found that Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights, and that the regime's repression is all pervasive. Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents -- and all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state.

In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolutions 686 and 687, demanded that Iraq return all prisoners from Kuwait and other lands. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke its promise. Last year the Secretary General's high-level coordinator for this issue reported that Kuwait, Saudi, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Bahraini, and Omani nationals remain unaccounted for -- more than 600 people. One American pilot is among them.

In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolution 687, demanded that Iraq renounce all involvement with terrorism, and permit no terrorist organizations to operate in Iraq. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke this promise. In violation of Security Council Resolution 1373, Iraq continues to shelter and support terrorist organizations that direct violence against Iran, Israel, and Western governments. Iraqi dissidents abroad are targeted for murder. In 1993, Iraq attempted to assassinate the Emir of Kuwait and a former American President. Iraq's government openly praised the attacks of September the 11th. And al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq.

In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.

From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs, and aircraft spray tanks. U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared, and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons. Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

United Nations' inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.

And in 1995, after four years of deception, Iraq finally admitted it had a crash nuclear weapons program prior to the Gulf War. We know now, were it not for that war, the regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993.

Today, Iraq continues to withhold important information about its nuclear program -- weapons design, procurement logs, experiment data, an accounting of nuclear materials and documentation of foreign assistance. Iraq employs capable nuclear scientists and technicians. It retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon. Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year. And Iraq's state-controlled media has reported numerous meetings between Saddam Hussein and his nuclear scientists, leaving little doubt about his continued appetite for these weapons.

Iraq also possesses a force of Scud-type missiles with ranges beyond the 150 kilometers permitted by the U.N. Work at testing and production facilities shows that Iraq is building more long-range missiles that it can inflict mass death throughout the region.

In 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the world imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. Those sanctions were maintained after the war to compel the regime's compliance with Security Council resolutions. In time, Iraq was allowed to use oil revenues to buy food. Saddam Hussein has subverted this program, working around the sanctions to buy missile technology and military materials. He blames the suffering of Iraq's people on the United Nations, even as he uses his oil wealth to build lavish palaces for himself, and to buy arms for his country. By refusing to comply with his own agreements, he bears full guilt for the hunger and misery of innocent Iraqi citizens.

In 1991, Iraq promised U.N. inspectors immediate and unrestricted access to verify Iraq's commitment to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles. Iraq broke this promise, spending seven years deceiving, evading, and harassing U.N. inspectors before ceasing cooperation entirely. Just months after the 1991 cease-fire, the Security Council twice renewed its demand that the Iraqi regime cooperate fully with inspectors, condemning Iraq's serious violations of its obligations. The Security Council again renewed that demand in 1994, and twice more in 1996, deploring Iraq's clear violations of its obligations. The Security Council renewed its demand three more times in 1997, citing flagrant violations; and three more times in 1998, calling Iraq's behavior totally unacceptable. And in 1999, the demand was renewed yet again.

As we meet today, it's been almost four years since the last U.N. inspectors set foot in Iraq, four years for the Iraqi regime to plan, and to build, and to test behind the cloak of secrecy.

We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we must not take.

Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more than patient. We've tried sanctions. We've tried the carrot of oil for food, and the stick of coalition military strikes. But Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a -- nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one. We owe it to all our citizens to do everything in our power to prevent that day from coming.

The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?

The United States helped found the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced. And right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime. Our partnership of nations can meet the test before us, by making clear what we now expect of the Iraqi regime.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shi'a, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans, and others, again as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait, and fully cooperate with international efforts to resolve these issues, as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It will accept U.N. administration of funds from that program, to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

If all these steps are taken, it will signal a new openness and accountability in Iraq. And it could open the prospect of the United Nations helping to build a government that represents all Iraqis -- a government based on respect for human rights, economic liberty, and internationally supervised elections.

The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people; they've suffered too long in silent captivity. Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it; the security of all nations requires it. Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and conquest, and open societies do not threaten the world with mass murder. The United States supports political and economic liberty in a unified Iraq.

(3) Last, note that W's speech and the Iraq War did precisely what Senator Obama claims to want to do, apply the standards of the American Founding globally. Not that this is new. After all, even the President's father--an arch-Realist/Pragmatist--was responsible for those resolutions, which, among other things, required that Saddam regime-change himself and grant the Iraqi people their God-given liberty.

Senator Obama's argument is that if a war may cost money and lives and be opposed by other foreign regimes that he'd not seek to vindicate American principles. That's a classic Realist trope, just an unAmerican one.

GROUNDHOG DAY IN AFGHANISTAN:

Officials: Dozen militants killed in Afghanistan (The Associated Press, June 24, 2008)

Afghan officials say an airstrike has killed more than a dozen militants in the east of the country.

Police and militants fought a gunbattle in Sayid Karam district of Paktia province at about midnight Monday. When the gunmen withdrew toward nearby mountains, a warplane attacked them.

Provincial police chief Ismatullah Alizai said 15 militants were killed.

APPLIED DARWINISM IN A SKIRT:

A Dark Past: Contraception, abortion, and the eugenics movement: An excerpt from Liberal FascismJonah Goldberg, National Review)

Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth-control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the Progressive pantheon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, “I stand by Margaret Sanger’s side,” leading “the organization that carries on Sanger’s legacy.” Planned Parenthood’s first black president, Faye Wattleton — Ms. magazine’s “Woman of the Year” in 1989 — said that she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.” Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sanger’s cause. Recipients are a Who’s Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC’s West Wing. What Sanger’s liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other “raceologists.” Indeed, she made many of them seem tame. [...]

Under the banner of “reproductive freedom,” Sanger subscribed to nearly all of the eugenic views discussed above. She sought to ban reproduction of the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else. She scoffed at the soft approach of the “positive” eugenicists, deriding it as mere “cradle competition” between the fit and the unfit. “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control,” she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, “We want fewer and better children...and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.” Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world “swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny.”

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger’s books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. As editor of The Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racists we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, The Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For example, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, The Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need,” by Ernst Rüdin, Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

One of Sanger’s closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: “Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.” When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League.

Sanger’s genius was to advance Ross’s campaign for social control by hitching the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation.

DEMOCRAT SURRENDER, AMERICAN VICTORY:

How Hoyer got the deal done (JOHN BRESNAHAN & PATRICK O'CONNOR, 6/24/08, Politico)

The Maryland Democrat shepherded a set of FISA amendments through the House last week — winning praise from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and even some in his party to who opposed the deal — but now finds himself subjected to a barrage of criticism from his party’s left.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) called the House bill a “capitulation.” Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald called Hoyer an “evil, craven enabler of the Bush administration.” Firedoglake.com blogger Jane Hamsher — delivering the lowest possible blow from the liberal blogosphere — declared Hoyer “the new Joe Lieberman.”

SPEAKING OF NEEDING MAVERICK MORE THAN HE NEEDS YOU....:

Dobson to Attack Obama Tuesday for Distorting the Bible, Having a "Fruitcake" Interpretation of the Constitution (Jake Tapper, June 23, 2008, ABC News: Political Punch)

Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family -- who has stayed unusually quiet in this election cycle likely due to his loathing of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. -- will tomorrow attack Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, on Tuesday for a speech the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee delivered in 2006 to the liberal Christian group Call to Renewal.

The AP was given an advance copy of Dobson's 18-minute radio segment, which has already been taped, and will air Tuesday.

In it, Dobson hammers Obama's views of religion, and says the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is trying to govern by the "lowest common denominator of morality," and calls Obama's views "a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.

BEING A DECENT PEOPLE... (via Brian McKim and Glenn Dryfoos):

Everything seemingly is spinning out of control (ALAN FRAM and EILEEN PUTMAN, 6/21/08, Associated Press)

Is everything spinning out of control?

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance. [...]

American University historian Allan J. Lichtman notes that the U.S. has endured comparable periods and worse, including the economic stagflation (stagnant growth combined with inflation) and Iran hostage crisis of 1980; the dawn of the Cold War, the Korean War and the hysterical hunts for domestic Communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and the Depression of the 1930s.

"All those periods were followed by much more optimistic periods in which the American people had their confidence restored," he said.

Unemployment is 5.5%, low by historical standards; income is rising slightly ahead of inflation; housing prices are down, but the typical house is still worth a third more than in 2000; 94% of Americans do not have threatened mortgages, and of those who do, most will keep their homes.

Inflation was up in 2007, but this stands out because the 16 previous years were close to inflation-free; living standards are the highest they have ever been, including living standards for the middle class and for the poor.

All forms of pollution other than greenhouse gases are in decline; cancer, heart disease and stroke incidence are declining; crime is in a long-term cycle of significant decline; education levels are at all-time highs.

Sure, gas prices are up, the dollar is weak and credit is tight – but these are complaints at the margin of a mainly healthy society. [...]

Campaigning in Pennsylvania in April, Hillary Clinton said "We need to go back to the prosperity of the 1990s," a comment that drew loud, enthusiastic applause. Converted to today's dollars, per-capita income in the Keystone State is 23% higher than in 1990. People may think Pennsylvania was more prosperous in the past, but the state is better off today. The same can be said for most (needless to say, not all) parts of the country and most demographics. Most are, right now, the best-off they have ever been. [...]

The relentlessly negative impressions of American life presented by the media, including the entertainment media, explain something otherwise puzzling that shows up in psychological data. When asked about the country's economy, schools, health care or community spirit, Americans tell pollsters the situation is dreadful. But when asked about their own jobs, schools, doctors and communities, people tell pollsters the situation is good. Our impressions of ourselves and our neighbors come from personal experience. Our impressions of the nation as a whole come from the media and from political blather, which both exaggerate the negative.

GOT MINE; GET YOURS:

Foreshadowing 2008 (SETH LIPSKY, June 23, 2008, NY Sun)

One of the memorable moments in my career was a lunch with Isaac Bashevis Singer. It took place in July 1984 at the home of Simon Weber, who was then editor of the Jewish Daily Forward. Weber lived on the top floor of an apartment block overlooking Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. I've often told the story. When lunch commenced, I reported that the Wall Street Journal, for which I was then working, had just come out in favor, at least in principle, of open borders. "Oy," said the Nobel laureate, without looking up from the bagels and smoked fish, "all those Mexicans."

THE SEAL SLEEPS WITH THE FISHES:

A No "Seal" Zone, Starting..... (Marc Ambinder, 23 Jun 2008, Atlantic Blog)

I've had my fun with the Obama campaign's seal, and now that fun ends. I'm told that Obama recognizes that it was a silly mistake, that the universal reaction at Wacker and Michigan was, "Boy, was that dumb," and that they don't think the seal staging will matter to actual voters.

Does the press think Obama is arrogant? Yes. Does the seal represent arrogance? Only tangentially, actually. The worry for Obama's image managers is that it gives the press a pretext to call Obama arrogant, an example for them to add to a list of arrogant moments, and a way to distract them from what Obama is saying.

HE'S THE REPUBLICAN STANDARD BEARER...:

The evolution of John McCain : As a maverick Senator, he took pride in just saying no to everyone's wish list. But as a presidential contender, he's become a tax cutter and defender of home mortgages. The inside story of how the candidate is shaping his plan to fix the economy. (David Whitford, June 23, 2008, Fortune Magazine)

Perhaps no issue has tested McCain over the years more than taxes. Four years ago, before he launched his second campaign for President, McCain was the keynote Republican speaker at a bipartisan conference on the budget titled "Restoring Fiscal Sanity - While We Still Can." The event was sponsored by a half-dozen think tanks representing all points on the political spectrum. "I'm a proud Republican," McCain said then, by way of introduction. "I'm a Barry Goldwater Republican. I revere Ronald Reagan and his party of limited government. Sadly, that party is no longer." He went on to sharply criticize colleagues on both sides of the aisle for runaway "pork-barrel spending" and "expanding entitlements," but he didn't quit there. He also talked about taxes. "And why do we have to have tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans when the gap between the wealthiest Americans and the poorest Americans is growing?" he wondered. Later he added, "We're at war. Tell me one time in the history of this country when this nation was at war when we've enacted tax cuts, especially for the wealthiest."

McCain tried valiantly to hold the line. Twice he voted against Bush's tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003, angering many in his own party. But that was then. Now, first step, McCain wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent; then he wants to keep going. He would repeal the alternative minimum tax, slash the corporate tax, increase the tax exemption for children, and, at least temporarily, allow businesses to write off the full cost of capital investments in one year. It'll be expensive - the independent Tax Policy Center estimates, optimistically, that McCain's plan would add $4.5 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years, compared with $3.3 trillion for Obama's plan - but McCain insists that he can balance the budget in four years with promised savings from running a tighter ship and increased tax revenues as the economy expands.

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), who has sharply criticized McCain in the past, says now, "I'm happy." Norquist still can't get McCain to sign ATR's no-new-taxes pledge, but he has the next best thing: video of the candidate promising as much on national television, three times. "With the campaign's approval," says Norquist, "we took those three YouTube videos and sent them to everybody and their brother on the planet." Now when Norquist convenes his weekly Wednesday strategy meeting at ATR headquarters in Washington, there's always a McCain campaign representative at the table. Apparently all is forgiven. "He was just voting against Bush in general" is how Norquist explains McCain's reversal. "I think it was pique."

DUDE CAN'T EVEN BOWL:

Rove: Obama's the Guy at the Country Club Holding a Martini Making Snide Comments About Everyone Else (Jake Tapper, June 23, 2008, ABC NEWS: Political Punch)

ABC News' Christianne Klein reports that at a breakfast with Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club this morning, former White House senior aide Karl Rove referred to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, as "coolly arrogant."

"Even if you never met him, you know this guy," Rove said, per Christianne Klein. "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

Rove said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., "needs to come right at him."

THE LONELINESS OF THE AMERICAN BRIGHT:

92% of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit, Pew survey finds (Duke Helfand, 6/23/08, Los Angeles Times)

Americans overwhelmingly believe in God and consider religion an important part of their lives, even as many shun weekly worship services, according to a national survey released today that also found great diversity in religious beliefs and practices.

Ninety-two percent of those interviewed for the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey said they believe in the existence of God or a universal spirit, and 58% said they pray privately every day.

THE WEIMAR PHASE:

Worst of times for Iran (Spengler, 6/24/08, Asia Times)

Iran has shown in the most vivid fashion that it cannot solve its internal problems. It is therefore likely to seek an external solution.

What happened to the US$35 billion of oil revenues that Iran's Shabab News, in a now notorious account, claims disappeared from official accounting during the year through March 2008? Half the country's oil revenues disappeared from the books. A great deal of it left the country for banks in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere; capital flight already was running at a $15 billion annual rate last year, by my estimate.

During the past year, though, conspicuous consumption in the form of a luxury housing boom has absorbed even more of Iran's oil windfall. Luxury apartments in Tehran's better neighborhoods now sell for $15,000 per square meter, Agence France Presse reported May 26, equal to the best neighborhoods in Paris or New York. A 200-square-meter apartment in northern Tehran sells for about $1 million. Real estate prices in outlying suburbs and some provincial cities have doubled over the past year.

Corruption has metastasized, that is to say, for the scale of the property boom implies that tens of thousands of Iranians are taking six-to-seven figure bites out of the oil budget. Rather than a handful of officials siphoning state funds into bank accounts in Dubai, an entire class of hangers-on of the Islamic revolution is spending sums beyond the dreams of the average Iranian, and in brazen public view.

Ahmadinejad's patronage system generates payoffs to the political class that have set in motion uncontrolled inflation - officially 25% per year but certainly much higher - and a rush into real assets. A side effect is that the average Iranian urban household, which spends $316 a month, is gradually being priced out of the rental market.

Not only rents but foodstuffs, fuel and other essentials have registered double- or triple-digit price increases during recent months, according to fragmentary reports trickling out of the country. The government's 25% inflation figure cannot be correct. The German Suddeutsche Zeitung's Tehran correspondent wrote on June 17, "Price increases follow one another in batches. After the prices of rice and detergent suddenly jumped by a multiple, tea prices have their turn. In just a few days different types of tea have become 300% to 700% more expensive." It is too early to speak of hyperinflation, but the the Iranian bazaar already presents with symptoms of incipient hyperinflation. How do households survive?

NOW HE'LL HAVE A GREAT VIEW:

Cult US comedian George Carlin dies at 71 (Times of London, 6/23/08)

He was a cynic with a gloomy view of mankind. “The world is a big theatre-in-the-round as far as I’m concerned, and I’d love to watch it spin itself into oblivion,” he said. “Tune in and watch the human adventure.” [...]

His comedy revolved around a central theme: humanity is a cursed, doomed species. “I don’t have any beliefs or allegiances. I don’t believe in this country, I don’t believe in religion, or a god, and I don’t believe in all these man-made institutional ideas,” he said.

THE CHARACTER FLAWS ARE A BONUS...:

St. Barack Was a Mirage: The senator is losing what made him seem special and inspiring. (Peter Wehner, 6/23/08, National Review)

Obama announced on Thursday that he will opt out of public financing for his presidential run. Offering a breathtakingly jaded and calculating explanation (the Republicans made him do it), Obama betrayed what we were told was the closest thing the candidate had to a high and inviolate principle: political and campaign finance reform. When that principle collided with his political self-interest, Obama invoked the same method that he used, for instance, with Jeremiah “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother” Wright: He disposed of that which is not politically expedient.

Obama has become what Jennifer Rubin at Contentions refers to as the “never mind” candidate. “Never mind” what he said about the Reverend Wright, flag pins, NAFTA, the importance of not losing in Iraq (in 2004-2005), the threat of Iran, meeting with Ahmadinejad, Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel, and so on.

The problem for Obama is that his core appeal has been largely aesthetic; he positioned himself as St. Barack, flying high and high-mindedly above the “old” politics of distractions, divisions, and cynicism. He wouldn’t play the “Washington game.” Obama has been sold to us as post-everything (post-partisan, post-ideological, post-racial, and post-label). If that appeal is stripped away, then Obama will be seen as a deeply and reflexively liberal one-term senator — and as something of a fraud. That combination may be enough to defeat him in a year that should overwhelmingly favor Democrats.

JUST LIKE THE GREAT DEPRESSION...:

Despite Economic Dip, Giving Rose in 2007: Donations Passed $300 Billion for 1st Time (Philip Rucker, 6/23/08, Washington Post)

Americans donated $306 billion to charities in 2007, as U.S. philanthropic giving rose to a record level despite a downturn in the national economy, a survey being released today has found.

Charitable giving increased 1 percent last year, when inflation is taken into account, and surpassed $300 billion for the first time, according to the Giving USA survey.

IT'S BECOMING KNOWN THAT IMPLODES THEIR CAMPAIGNS:

Now that he's known, Obama positions his image (Christina Bellantoni, June 23, 2008, Washington Times)

Sen. Barack Obama's team once worried that the presidential hopeful was widely unknown, but now he faces a challenge in making sure voters know the right things about the presumptive Democratic nominee. [...]

The problem is, many don't know much about his background or where he stands on the issues, and Republicans and groups working for his defeat in November are working to define him on their terms.

THERE'S AN EXCELLENT CASE TO BE MADE...:

The case for keeping the Bush tax cuts (DR. MARTIN REGALIA, 6/23/08, Politico)

[A]ny honest discussion on taxes must begin with an honest examination of who pays. For 2005, the most recent year for which information is available, IRS data indicate that taxpayers with an adjusted gross income in the top 25 percent of the population bore 86 percent of the federal income tax burden. If you expand it to the top 50 percent, the number jumps to 97 percent. In other words, the bottom half of the country pays a paltry 3 percent of the country's taxes. This proves, in part, the steep progressivity of the income tax system.

But what about the Bush tax cuts? They only favor the wealthy, right? Again, let’s go to the facts. Since 2000, when President Bush entered office, the share of federal tax liabilities borne by the lowest and middle quintiles has decreased, while the share borne by the highest quintile has increased. In 2000, the lowest quintile bore 1.1 percent of total federal tax liabilities compared with 0.9 percent in 2004, the year that all of the Bush tax cuts were in effect. Thus, the federal tax liability of the lowest quintile dropped 18 percent. However, the highest quintile paid 67.2 percent of these liabilities in 2004, an increase of 1 percent in their liability since 2000, when they paid 66.6 percent. Far from favoring the wealthy, these numbers suggest that the wealthy are bearing more of the tax burden

The Department of the Treasury recently released a paper studying the impact of letting tax relief expire: “A four-person, one-earner family with wage income each year of $40,000 in 2007 dollars would see a tax increase of $2,345; a four-person, one-earner family with wage income each year of $80,000 in 2007 dollars would see a tax increase of $2,000; a three-person, one-earner family with wage income each year of $40,000 in 2007 dollars would see a tax increase of $1,655; and a head of household with two children and wage income each year of $30,000 in 2007 dollars would see a tax increase of $1,615.”

More than 116 million Americans would see their taxes go up. And small businesses that pay their taxes based on individual rates (which is most of them) could see their effective rate rise to more than 44 percent.

THERE IS NO BOLIVIA:

Bolivia region 'chooses autonomy' (BBC, 6/23/08)

Bolivia's gas-rich Tarija province has voted overwhelmingly in favour of greater autonomy, exit polls suggest.

About 80% of the voters in the eastern province backed the measure in a referendum, several pollsters said.

The result is seen as a rejection of left-wing President Evo Morales' drive to redistribute wealth in South America's poorest nation.

Tarija is the fourth province to back greater autonomy.

And now, since the Irish voted no in a referendum on a plan to reorganize the EU, and the EU's leaders held a flailing, ineffectual summit meeting to talk about what has been called a body blow to the community's integrated future, Europe is asking how to heal itself.

This is intriguing for three reasons:

a) It involves Europe articulating more home truths - although far from all of them - about the EU than it usually dares.

b) Those divisive truths, as the rest of the world is noting, suggest Europe is not going to be a unified global power anytime soon.

c) Yet the remedies being offered up for knitting the community together don't deal with the most excruciating realities.

The New Truth discussion acknowledges that Europe is not an affair of the heart that is welding self-sacrifice, resolve and patriotism into a common goal as a world player.

BECAUSE BEING A LIBERAL REQUIRES...:

"Bonnie And Clyde Was The Most Important Text Of The New Left" (Ed Driscoll, June 23, 2008, EdDriscoll.com)

Making the rounds to promote his new book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein tells Reason:

reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.

Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.

The 1967 release of the movie certainly coincides with the period where traditional liberalism and the far left began to merge; not coincidentally, this was also the period where traditional morality began to break down. The next year would be 1968, a year the left is alternately trying to recreate, or is permanently trapped in, or both. Mick Jagger's lyrics to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" called the philosophy of the day "heads is tails", and whereas liberals once worshiped science and progress, they soon found themselves admiring the Black Panthers and William Ayers' Weatherman group, and tossing both modernism and hope for the future under the bus.

ENDING THE REVOLUTION AND STARTING THE REFORMATION...:

Getting the French to work (Alasdair Sandford, 6/22/08, BBC News)

Christine Lagarde, the country's first female minister for finance and the economy, says it is time for French people to "roll up their sleeves" and stop thinking about holidays.

The former international lawyer, impressed by the work ethic during her time in the US, is intent on instilling the same spirit in her countrymen and women. [...]

"Instead of thinking about their work, people were thinking about their weekend… organising, planning and engineering time off," she says.

ANNOUNCE HER EARLY...:

Three women who might join the GOP ticket (DAVID PAUL KUHN, 6/22/08, Politico)

The most-mentioned potential running mates — former Republican candidate and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty — are all men. Yet no clear front-runner has emerged, and there are at least three women McCain might select to fill out the ticket. [...]

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin may be nationally unknown, but in her state she is nothing short of a political phenomenon.

Palin, 44, would add youth to the GOP ticket. As governor she has shown a willingness to veto some of the state’s large capital projects, no small plus for fiscal conservatives. But it’s her personal biography, which excites social conservatives, and reformist background that might most appeal to McCain.

She’s stridently anti-abortion, and recently brought to term her fifth child — who she knew would have Down syndrome. A hunter, fisher and family woman with a rapid professional rise, Palin is a natural for Republican framing.

In 1982, Palin led her underdog high school basketball team to the state championship, earning the nickname “Sarah Barracuda.” Two years later she won the beauty pageant in her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska — and was also named “Miss Congeniality.” By her early thirties, she was the mayor of Wasilla.

In 2003, as ethics commissioner on the state's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, she risked her rising political star by resigning her position in protest of ethical misconduct within the state’s Republican leadership as well as then-Gov. Frank Murkowski’s acceptance of that impropriety. Though this briefly made her an outcast within the party, within a year several state Republican heavyweights were reprimanded for the conduct she’d decried.

Her reputation with the party thus redeemed, Palin defeated Murkowski in the 2006 Republican primary on the way to being elected governor.

As governor, she’s continued challenging the state’s powers that be, even winning tax increases on oil companies’ profits. Her approval rating has soared as high as 90 percent, making her one of America’s most popular governors.

“Palin is becoming a star in the conservative movement, a fiscal conservative in a state that is looking like a boondoggle for pork barrel spending,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster who specializes in women’s politics.

“She’s young, vibrant, fresh and now, and a new mother of five. She should be in the top tier,” Conway continued. “If the Republican Party wants to wrestle itself free from the perception that it is royalist and not open to putting new talent on the bench, this would be the real opportunity.”

DYING ALONE:

Italy struggles with immigration and aging (Elisabetta Povoledo, June 22, 2008, NY Times)

It is an everyday symbol, touching almost, of Italy's troubled demographics: an older Italian out for some air, at times arm in arm with an immigrant aide. The aides often are not here legally but have been tolerated because they do work few Italians do: care for the nation's rapidly aging population.

But much as Italy is growing older, it is also more worried about crime.

And in the eyes of many Italians, for whom immigration is a relatively new phenomenon, immigrants also have a central role in this. Under a law proposed by the far right wing of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's new government, it would become a felony offense to come to Italy illegally, punishable by prison.

THE GOOD COP:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: The interrogator who made him talk (Tom Leonard, 22/06/2008, Daily Telegraph)

Speaking quietly and patiently, and sometimes bringing his prisoner snacks such as dates, Mr Martinez was brought in after harsher interrogation techniques had been used on Mohammed, an American-educated engineer.

"They'd have long talks about religion", comparing notes between Islam and Mr Martinez's Catholicism, a CIA officer told the New York Times. "He wrote poems to Deuce's wife." Mr Martinez would listen to Mohammed's despair that he would probably never see his children again and his complaints about his living conditions, in particular his lack of a view.

Their relationship progressed to the stage that - according to Mr Martinez - Mohammed would offer key information unvolunteered.

This included his claim to have killed Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal correspondent kidnapped in Pakistan, which Mr Martinez told colleagues came out of the blue.

Mr Martinez was a specialist in analysing computer data on drug shipments but, aged 36, was moved to the CIA's counter-terrorism operation in Islamabad in 2002.

Intelligence chiefs struggling with their inexperience in dealing with an organisation such as al-Qa'eda, had concluded that searching for drug lords was not that different to looking for terrorist leaders.

After his capture, Mohammed cooperated sporadically with his captors, who believed that he was often giving incorrect information.

However, he talked most freely to Mr Martinez. Colleagues noted that they had a certain amount in common - they were a similar age, they both went to universities in the American South, they were both religious and they were both fathers.

The poetic "tributes" to Mr Martinez's wife, scribbled in ungrammatical English, were intended as a mark of respect to the interrogator, said a colleague.

The intelligence provided by Mohammed was reflected in the report of the official 9/11 commission, which listed 60 occasions on which he provided facts about al-Q'aeda.

OF COURSE THE GAME BITES...:

Soccer player arrested for chewing out ref (CHRISTINE OLLEY, 6/21/08, Philadelphia Daily News)

Instead of quietly following orders after he was ejected from the game between the Fulhundred team and the Pizza by Elizabeth team, Jones bit the ref's chin.

"The official attempted to back away from the player at which time the player grabbed the victim's shoulders and pulled him towards his face with his mouth wide open," New Castle County police said in a statement.

The 38-year-old official suffered deep lacerations just below his lower lip and underneath his chin from the severe bite, police said.

$500 MILLION DOESN'T BUY WHAT IT USED TO:

McCain Rises and Obama Dips in Fund-Raising for May (LESLIE WAYNE, 6/22/08, NY Times)

After raising record amounts of money all year, Mr. Obama continued spending heavily as the primary campaign extended into early June, and he ended May with $33.3 million in cash for the primary race. Mr. McCain, who raised less all year, was virtually assured of the Republican nomination by February and so spent less, ending the month with $31.6 million in the bank.

THE GUBERNATORIAL ADVANTAGE:

Crime Debate Reduced to Incarceration Debate (George Will, 6/22/08, Real Clear Politics)

If crime revives as an issue, it will be through liberal complaints about something that has reduced the salience of the issue -- the incarceration rate. And any revival will be awkward for Barack Obama. Liberalism likes victimization narratives and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which "society" writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.

Last July, Obama said "more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities." Actually, more than twice as many black men 18-24 are in college as there are in jail. Last September he said, "We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives." But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, writing in the institute's City Journal, notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population. Furthermore, Mac Donald cites data indicating that:

"In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer."

IT'S NOT A HOUSE, IT'S A PUP TENT:

House Passes Spy Bill; Senate Expected to Follow (Paul Kane, 6/21/08, Washington Post)

The House, in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, yesterday approved a sweeping new surveillance law that extends the government's eavesdropping capability and effectively would shield telecommunications companies from lawsuits for cooperating with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

Ending a year-long battle with President Bush, the House passed, by a 293 to 129 vote, an overhaul of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). [...]

Only one Republican opposed the bill, but Democrats were sharply divided. And the legislation presented a fresh foreign policy dilemma for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). The party's presumptive presidential nominee announced his support of the FISA bill despite active opposition to it from the liberal activist base that has financially fueled his campaign.

UNDERSTANDABLE HYPOCRISY:

McCain Defends Trade Pact: As Candidate Visits Canada, His Team Bashes Obama on NAFTA (Perry Bacon Jr., 6/21/08, Washington Post)

McCain said his visit to Canada was "not a political campaign trip," and his remarks centered on keeping relations between the United States and Canada strong. The Republican from Arizona did not refer to Obama by name and refused to take questions on political matters at a news conference after his speech, though he was accompanied by top political adviser Charles R. Black Jr. McCain spent much of his trip in closed-door meetings with Canadian officials.

Nonetheless, his comments on NAFTA invoked Obama's criticism of the agreement, and McCain's campaign attacked the senator from Illinois on the issue throughout the day, accusing him of changing his position after becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee.

"For months, Barack Obama said that he would 'make sure that we renegotiate' NAFTA, demanded unilateral changes and threatened to unilaterally withdraw if he did not get his way," McCain said in a statement released by his campaign. ". . . Now he claims: 'I'm not a big believer in doing things unilaterally.' "

Throughout his primary battle with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), Obama was a strong critic of NAFTA, describing it as a "big mistake." He said he wanted to renegotiate the deal with Mexico and Canada to impose requirements on worker pay and environmental safeguards.

Obama's position was questioned after a report that adviser Austan Goolsbee had downplayed the candidate's rhetoric as "political maneuvering" in a meeting with a Canadian diplomat in Chicago.

Obama says he still wants to renegotiate parts of the deal, but he backed off of some of his harsh language in an interview with Fortune magazine published this week.

MORE:
Whereas, truckling in the GOP primaries forces you to take morally proper and optimal political positions, Is Pastor Hagee Good for the Jews? (DAVID VAN BIEMA, 6/20/08, TIME)

Cutting ties with John Hagee has proved to be a lot easier for Senator John McCain than it has been for some of the very Jewish groups most offended by the conservative Evangelical pastor's statements about God and the Holocaust. McCain moved to dissociate himself from Hagee after a 1999 sermon was publicized in which Hagee claimed that God intended the Holocaust, and had prophesied it in the Book of Jeremiah. "And that will be offensive to some people," Hagee boomed. "Well, dear heart, be offended. I didn't write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, 'My top priority to the Jewish people is to get them back to Israel.' "

But where McCain cut ties with the Evangelical mega-pastor who had endorsed his candidacy, Abe Foxman, head of the anti-Semitism watchdog organization the Anti-defamation League, appeared more willing to forgive. The reason for Foxman's reluctance to abandon Hagee may have been summed up in a letter from the pastor carried on the ADL's website, in which Hagee points out, "I have devoted much of my adult life to combating anti-Semitism and supporting the state of Israel."

Hagee's support for the Jewish State — he also heads up the influential organization Christians United for Israel, and was a key speaker at last year's conference of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — has brought Israel millions, if not billions of dollars from Evangelical tourism, and it has delivered political support for a strong pro-Israel policy in Washington.

FALLING UPWARDS:

Big Promises Bump Into Budget Realities: New President Won't Have an Easy Time Paying for New Initiatives, Fiscal Experts Say (Lori Montgomery, 6/22/08, Washington Post)

In a new paper titled "Facing the Music: The Fiscal Outlook at the End of the Bush Administration," University of California at Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach and two co-authors from the Brookings Institution conclude that, if spending grows at historic rates, simply keeping the Bush tax cuts and halting the spread of the AMT would drive the budget deficit to $481 billion by the end of the next president's first term, or 2.7 percent of the economy.

IN A CONTEST BETWEEN IDEAS AND IDENTITY...:

McCain Driving Debate, But Some Fear Swerving: GOP Insiders Want More Consistent Theme (Michael D. Shear and Juliet Eilperin, 6/22/08, Washington Post)

In the two weeks since Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee, John McCain has demonstrated a knack for driving the daily political debate, forcing his opponent to respond to a challenge to meet in town hall debates, accusing him of being "delusional" about terrorism and saying he flip-flopped on public financing for his campaign.

BUT IT'S AN EXAMPLE OF PARODY (via Buttercup):

Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill (Meredith F. Small, 6/20/08, LiveScience.com)

Neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin at the University of California, San Francisco, has also recently discovered that sarcasm, which is both positively funny and negatively nasty, plays an important part in human social interaction. [...]

According to Dr. Rankin, if you didn't get the sarcastic tone of the previous sentences you must have some damage to your parahippocampal gyrus which is located in the right brain. People with dementia, or head injuries in that area, often lose the ability to pick up on sarcasm, and so they don't respond in a socially appropriate ways.

Presumably, this is a pathology, which in turn suggests that sarcasm is part of human nature and probably an evolutionarily good thing.

CARS & CITIES, A DEADLY COMBINATION:

Car hits NYC pedestrians for 3rd time in 2 days (Associated Press 06.21.08)

For the third time in two days, a vehicle plowed down pedestrians on a New York City sidewalk, this time leaving three bystanders injured and a driver under arrest.

SPEAKING OF DARWIN DAY...:

Call for Change Ignored, Levees Remain Patchy (MONICA DAVEY, 6/21/08, NY Times)

After the last devastating flood in the Midwest 15 years ago, a committee of experts commissioned by the Clinton administration issued a 272-page report that recommended a more uniform approach to managing rising waters along the Mississippi and its tributaries, including giving the principal responsibility for many of the levees to the Army Corps of Engineers.

But the committee chairman, Gerald E. Galloway Jr., a former brigadier general with the Corps of Engineers, said in an interview that few broad changes were made once the floodwaters of 1993 receded and were forgotten.

“We told them there were going to be more floods like this,” said Dr. Galloway, now an engineering professor at the University of Maryland. “Everybody likes to go out and shake hands on the levee now and offer sandbags, but that’s not helpful. This shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

While the committee’s recommendations certainly would not have prevented the Mississippi and its tributaries from rising to catastrophic levels, Dr. Galloway said they could have lessened the sense of helplessness and limited some of the damage.

RINSE...LATHER...REPEAT...:

The 3,000 Mile Oil Change Myth (Bill Siuru, Greencar.com)

It’s been a misconception for years that engine oil should be changed every 3000 miles, even though most auto manufacturers now recommend oil changes at 5,000, 7,000, or even 10,000 mile intervals under normal driving conditions.

Greatly improved oils, including synthetic oils, coupled with better engines mean longer spans between oil changes without harming an engine. The 3000 mile interval is a carryover from days when engines used single-grade, non-detergent oils.

IT'S TOO PERFECT THAT WALLACE BIFFED HIS ICON TOO:

How Darwin won the evolution race (Robin McKie, 6/22/08, The Observer)

In early 1858, on Ternate in Malaysia, a young specimen collector was tracking the island's elusive birds of paradise when he was struck by malaria. 'Every day, during the cold and succeeding hot fits, I had to lie down during which time I had nothing to do but to think over any subjects then particularly interesting me,' he later recalled.

Thoughts of money or women might have filled lesser heads. Alfred Russel Wallace was made of different stuff, however. He began thinking about disease and famine; about how they kept human populations in check; and about recent discoveries indicating that the earth's age was vast. How might these waves of death, repeated over aeons, influence the make-up of different species, he wondered?

Then the fever subsided - and inspiration struck. Fittest variations will survive longest and will eventually evolve into new species, he realised. Thus the theory of natural selection appeared, fever-like, in the mind of one of our greatest naturalists. Wallace wrote up his ideas and sent them to Charles Darwin, already a naturalist of some reputation. His paper arrived on 18 June, 1858 - 150 years ago last week - at Darwin's estate in Downe, in Kent.

Though definitions vary, in general hybrids are created when different species interbreed -- or, if not species, then animals or plants from distinct lineages or with distinct adaptations to their environment. Hybridization has been found in a long list of species: mice, leopard frogs, sunfish, insects, Darwin's finches in the Galápagos Islands, hummingbirds, birds of paradise, willow, iris, oak, sunflower. White-tail deer and mule deer hybridize, as do domestic cattle and bison, cattle and yaks, wolves and dogs, wolves and coyotes, and coyotes and dogs.

The new research on hybridization is casting new light on evolutionary processes and raising questions about biodiversity and the preservation of endangered species. In the mid-1990's, wildlife biologists saved the endangered Florida panther from extinction by crossbreeding it with the closely related Texas cougar. That program opened the way for the use of hybridization in saving endangered species.

Most species cannot crossbreed because the genetic, behavioral and ecological barriers are too great to overcome. An elephant will not interbreed with a lion or wildebeest, nor will a wolf mate with a bear or a prairie dog with a squirrel. Still, the new findings indicate that hybridization between species does occur and can sometimes produce new species -- calling into question the longstanding view that a species is a population of interbreeding organisms that is reproductively isolated from other species.

WHEN BEING SADDAM-LIKE IS PROGRESS:

Big Gains for Iraq Security, but Questions Linger (STEPHEN FARRELL and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr., 6/21/08, , NY Times)

What’s going right? And can it last?

Violence in all of Iraq is the lowest since March 2004. The two largest cities, Baghdad and Basra, are calmer than they have been for years. The third largest, Mosul, is in the midst of a major security operation. On Thursday, Iraqi forces swept unopposed through the southern city of Amara, which has been controlled by Shiite militias. There is a sense that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government has more political traction than any of its predecessors.

Consider the latest caricatures of Mr. Maliki put up on posters by the followers of Moktada al-Sadr, the fiery cleric who commands deep loyalty among poor Shiites. They show the prime minister’s face split in two — half his own, half Saddam Hussein’s. The comparison is, of course, intended as a searing criticism. But only three months ago the same Sadr City pamphleteers were lampooning Mr. Maliki as half-man, half-parrot, merely echoing the words of his more powerful Shiite and American backers. It is a notable swing from mocking an opponent perceived to be weak to denouncing one feared to be strong.

For Hatem al-Bachary, a Basra businessman, the turnabout has been “a miracle,” the first tentative signs of a normal life.

“I don’t think the militias have disappeared, and maybe there are sleeper cells which will try to revive themselves again,” he said. “But the first time they try to come back they will have to show themselves, and the government, army and police are doing very well.”

While the increase in American troops and their support behind the scenes in the recent operations has helped tamp down the violence, there are signs that both the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi government are making strides. There are simply more Iraqi troops for the government to deploy, partly because fewer are needed to fight the Sunni insurgents, who have defected to the Sunni Awakening movement. They are paid to keep the peace.

Mr. Maliki’s moves against Shiite militias have built some trust with wary Sunnis, offering the potential for political reconciliation.

NOT SO BRIGHT:

Poll: most Britons doubt cause of climate change (Juliette Jowit, 6/22/08, The Observer)

The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer.

The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

THERE IS NO BRITAIN:

Tiny Shetland island declares independence (Kate Kelland, 6/21/08, Reuters)

The owner of a tiny island in off Scotland declared its independence from the United Kingdom on Saturday, saying he wanted the territory, population one, to be a crown dependency like the Channel Islands.

In a declaration on his Web site, Stuart Hill, who owns the 2.5 acre island of Forvik in the Shetland Islands in the North Sea, said he no longer recognised the authority of the government or the European Union, and cited a centuries-old royal marriage dowry deal as the basis for his claim.

"Forvik owes no allegiance to any United Kingdom government, central or local, and is not bound by any of its statutes," Hill wrote.

Hill, 65, has lived in the Shetland Islands on the edge of the Atlantic since 2001, when his boat capsized there during an unsuccessful attempted to circumnavigate Britain.

OTHER THAN THATV WHAT WLL YOU DO TO THE ECONOMY, MR. OBAMA?

Robert Mundell: An Economist Who Matters (KYLE WINGFIELD, June 21, 2008, Wall Street Journal)

Robert Mundell isn't in the habit of making fruitless policy recommendations, though some take a long time ripening. Nearly four decades passed between his early work on optimal currency areas and the birth of the euro in 1999 – the same year he received the Nobel Prize for economics. [...]

[M]r. Mundell says "the big issue economically . . . is what's going to happen to taxes."

Democratic nominee Barack Obama regularly professes disdain for the Bush tax cuts, suggesting that those growth-spurring measures may be scrapped. "If that happens," Mr. Mundell predicts, "the U.S. will go into a big recession, a nosedive."

One of the original "supply-side" economists, he has long preached the link between tax rates and economic growth. "It's a lethal thing to suddenly raise taxes," he explains. "This would be devastating to the world economy, to the United States, and it would be, I think, political suicide" in a general election.

Should taxes instead be cut again, I ask him, to stimulate the sluggish economy? Mr. Mundell replies that he favors a ceiling of 30% on marginal rates (the current top rate is 35%). He recounts how the past century experienced a titanic struggle over whether tax rates are too high or too low: from a 3% income tax in 1913; up to 60% during World War I; down to 25% before Congress and President Herbert Hoover raised taxes back to 60% in 1932 and "sealed the fate of our economy for a long, long time"; all the way up to 92.5% during World War II before falling in three steps, reaching 28% under President Ronald Reagan; and back to nearly 40% under Bill Clinton before George W. Bush lowered them to their current level.

In light of this fiscal roller coaster, Mr. Mundell says, "the most important thing that could be done with respect to tax rates now is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Eliminating that uncertainty would be more important than pushing for a further cut – in the income tax rates, anyway."

One tax that he would cut, to 25%, is the corporate tax rate. "It could be even lower," he says, "but I think it would be a big step to lower it to 25% . . . I made that proposal back in the 1970s."

THE ENTIRE IMPROVEMENT IN HUMAN HEALTH IN THE "SCIENTIFIC" AGE...:

British babies are born bigger than ever (Aislinn Simpson, 09/06/2008, Daily Telegraph)

Babies in Britain are being born bigger than ever thanks to an improvement in diet and living standards.

The average weight of babies has risen steadily for the past 30 years. Male babies in this country now weigh an average of 7lb 8oz - up 2oz from 1970, while female babies weight 7lb 4oz - up 1.5oz since 1970.

THE ONLY ART ASSOCIATED WITH CARS...:

Railways: When Artists Look Down the Track: Railway Imagery Is Explored At Two Museums (CHARLOTTE COWLES,
June 9, 2008, NY Sun)

The mystique of the railways has attracted artists since the mid-1800s. [...]

While art is often a medium for reflecting a cultural mindset, it is also a tool used to shape opinion — a theme that is taken up here. "British Victorian artists would use the railways for social comment," Mr. Kennedy said. "People were thrown together in train cars like never before."

NEED A BEACH BOOK?:

The Conservative Mind (W. Wesley McDonald, 06/16/08, First Principles)

[W]hen the bulk of established intellectuals were prepared to dismiss conservatism as a permanently discredited ideology, [Russell] Kirk’s rediscovery and articulation of a viable intellectual conservative tradition in the English-speaking world restored credibility to a body of ideas once airily dismissed as the mere bleatings of bourgeois Babbitts. By defining and applying its principles to modern challenges, he fortified and strengthened the conservative position. He demonstrated in a compelling fashion that conservatism is an integral part of the Western political tradition.

Lastly, Kirk was writing a history of conservative ideas, the first historian to attempt such a task. But his intent was more than historical: it was didactic and polemical. The rationalism of the philosophes, the romantic idealism of the Rousseauists, Benthamism, positivism, Marxism, Social Darwinism, pragmatism, and socialism were among the ideologies he condemned as inimical to the social order of the post-1789 world. From them sprang the belief in the perfectibility of man, enthusiasm for social and economic leveling, the impulse for innovation coinciding with a concomitant contempt of tradition, the denial of the power of Providence in history, and the rejection of what Eliot called “the permanent things,” those enduring moral norms that make civilized social existence possible. Against the proponents of radical innovation, Kirk enthusiastically defended tradition, old values, and prescriptive establishments.

The book had an immediate impact. At the suggestion of Whittaker Chambers, Time magazine devoted its entire book review section to The Conservative Mind. Numerous other journals and newspapers, including the New York Times, published reviews praising or at the least expressing respect for the book. As the book’s publisher, Henry Regnery, noted, after Kirk’s volume appeared “one could call himself a conservative without apology.”

SHIFTING SANDS:

Shifting sands tell the tale of the Chinese west (Howard W. French, June 12, 2008, The International Herald Tribune)

There has never been a marker on the ground in this area, and had there been, it would have been long ago removed, but through much of its long history, the country we know today as China has largely petered out somewhere in the vicinity of this Silk Road outpost.

A visitor today can imagine that spot as towering dunes with their shifting sands that sit at the edge of this sleepy town. You could just as easily place it somewhere in the forbidding badlands that lie within a few hours’ drive from here.

I visited them recently to get a taste of the history in this desolate corner of the country, wandering into gigantic sandstone formations cut and shaped over the ages by the wind into a sight as breathtaking as the Grand Canyon.

Intrigued by the travel stories of the exiled Chinese author, Ma Jian, along the way, I had my driver wander off the simple, two-lane road that winds through the region in search of western end of the Great Wall. Throughout the morning, my mind had raced with images of what I might find. I had imagined myself climbing atop the structure, as every visitor who travels to the wall near Beijing surely does.

When I mentioned this to my driver, he shot me a look that suggested I was crazy. He was having trouble enough finding this section of the Great Wall, which was built during the Han Dynasty two millennia ago. There would be no climbing, he informed me. What remains of the wall is scarcely high enough, and rather brittle.

When we finally caught sight of it, I was chastened but not disappointed. The voyage had been all about understanding China’s definition of itself over time, and its relationship with the “other.”

Quite rightfully, the recent earthquake in Sichuan Province has captivated the world’s attention and drawn unprecedented sympathy and support for China from countries all over the world. From the perspective of Beijing, it has also conveniently pushed out news from beyond the Great Wall of unrest that had roiled Tibet and Xinjiang - provinces that are known as “autonomous regions,” in an administrative fiction that Orwell would have appreciated.

Xinjiang alone comprises one-sixth of the land of the People’s Republic of China, and Tibet, such as it is defined today, is only marginally smaller. At various times in its history, including recently, Tibet has been much larger, comprising parts of several other provinces.

On the surface, Tibetans and the indigenous Uighur population of Xinjiang would seem to have little in common. The Tibetans are Buddhist and the Uighurs are largely Muslim. But they are united in their sense of oppression, as native people of distinctive cultural spheres with a history of autonomy and even independence, all of which has been recently snuffed out by China.

MUCH AS WE ADMIRE THE ADMISSION THAT ATHEISM IS JUST ADOLESCENT REACTION...:

Holiday in Hellmouth : God may be dead, but the question of why he permits suffering lives on: a review of Bart D. Ehrman’s God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer (James Wood, June 9, 2008, The New Yorker)

Theologians and philosophers talk about “the problem of evil,” and the hygienic phrase itself bespeaks a certain distance from extreme suffering, the view from a life inside the charmed circle. They mean the classic difficulty of how we justify the existence of suffering and iniquity with belief in a God who created us, who loves us, and who providentially manages the world. The term for this justification is “theodicy,” which nowadays seems a very old-fashioned exercise in turning around and around the stripped screw of theological scholastics. Still, if polls are correct, about eighty per cent of Americans ought to be engaged in such antiquarianism. Union University, in Jackson, Tennessee, might profit from intense classes in theodicy. “God protected this campus,” one of the students there said, because no one was killed in the tornadoes that devastated parts of Tennessee on February 5th. Since ordinary Tennesseans were killed elsewhere that night, the logic of such shamanism is that God either did not or could not protect those unfortunates from something that the state’s governor once likened to “the wrath of God.”

Antique and abstract it may be, but thinking about theodicy still has the power to change lives. I know this, because it was how I began to separate myself from the somewhat austere Christian environment I grew up in. I remember the day, in my late teens, when I drew a line down the middle of a piece of paper, on one side of which I wrote my reasons for belief in God, on the other my reasons against. I can’t remember the order of my negatives now, but the inefficacy of prayer was likely at the top. Here was a demonstrable case of promises made (if you have faith, you can move a mountain) but not kept (the mountain not only stays put but suddenly erupts and consumes a few villages). During my teens, two members of my parents’ congregation died of cancer, despite all the prayers offered up on their behalf. When I looked at the congregants kneeling on cushions, their heads bent to touch the wooden pews, it seemed to me as if they were literally butting their heads against a palpable impossibility. And this was years before I discovered Samuel Butler’s image for the inutility of prayer in his novel “The Way of All Flesh”—the bee that has strayed into a drawing room and is buzzing against the wallpaper, trying to extract nectar from one of the painted roses.

Theodicy, or, rather, its failure, was the other major entry on my debit side. I was trapped within the age-old conundrum: the world is full of pain and wickedness; God may be jealous but is also merciful and all-loving (how much more so, if one believes that Christ incarnated him). If he has the power to alleviate this suffering but does not, he is cruel; if he cannot, he is weak. I wasn’t consoled by the standard responses. Suffering is a mystery, I was told, as is God’s absence in the face of suffering. But this was what I was also told when prayers failed to make their mark: the old “incomprehensibility” routine. It seemed to me that the Gospels, central to my family life, made some fairly specific promises and laid on us some fairly specific obligations; yet that specificity could simply go on holiday whenever God himself seemed to have gone on holiday. (“God moves in mysterious ways.”)

God “suffers with us,” I was told; he feels our pain. If Christ was God incarnate, then God suffered on the Cross. He walks with us in our suffering. This has been the great twentieth-century addition to the familiar arguments, which is perhaps unsurprising, amid so much carnage. The Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues, in his book “On Belief,” that when God abandoned Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane he abandoned himself. Christianity, he asserts, returns at this moment to the story of Job, the man abandoned by God: “It is Christ (God) himself who has to occupy the place of Job. . . . Man’s existence is living proof of God’s self-limitation.” A God whose power has been so drastically limited, and who sounds so like us in our abjection, might be loved, but why should he be worshipped? Twenty-five years ago, as I hunched over my piece of paper with its vertical line, I decided that if God existed, which I strongly doubted, then this entity was neither describable nor cherishable but was a vaporous, quite possibly malign force at the horizon of the sayable.

Another attempted consolation is that God intended us to have free will, and free will requires the liberty to do bad as well as good. If we were unable to err, our relation to God would be robotic, meaningless in its hapless obedience. It is regrettable that Hitlers are allowed to exist; but universal freedom is a higher good than the release from local pain. This is still the best available response to the theodicy problem. But even at sixteen I could see an enormous, iridescent flaw in this colorless argument: it is that the Bible is full of divine intervention, full of infringements of free will. God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and brings plagues, and spares the firstborn of the Israelites (while conveniently murdering the Egyptians’), and, if you accept the New Testament, anoints his son as a sacrificial lamb for the sins of the world. We pray to him precisely because we believe in the power of such intervention. But when we actually need his intervention—say, to put a stop to a few concentration camps—he has . . . gone on holiday again, leaving people to drone on about the paramount importance of unmolested “free will.”

They were at it again when the tsunami killed hundreds of thousands in 2004. The Archbishop of Canterbury, a distinguished theologian, wrote an article at the time, reminding his Anglican communion that such tragedies challenge faith. But then he circled around a kind of physicist’s version of the free-will argument when he cautioned that “the world has to have a regular order and pattern of its own. . . . So there is something odd about expecting that God will constantly step in if things are getting dangerous.” Well, there would be something odd if you had never read the Bible. But one of the repeated indices of God’s power, as invoked in many of the Psalms, is his ability to control the waves—after all, the Psalmist knew that a great flood had consumed the world, at God’s command, and that the Red Sea had been divinely parted. How dangerous would things have to get before divine intervention was justified? To this, the Gospels can reply succinctly: not very. For when the disciples were out on the Sea of Galilee, and things took a stormy turn, Jesus appeared, walked on water, and calmed the storm. Perhaps the disciples just meant more to Jesus than a few hundred thousand Asians.

There is something adolescent about such complaint; I can hear it like a boy’s breaking voice in my own prose. For anti-theodicy is permanent rebellion. It is not quite atheism but wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God it is supposed not to believe in.

BETTER TO DENUDE WORDS OF MEANING THAN ADMIT WHAT YOU ARE:

Perverted politics: Deviance for its own sake is reactionary, not rebellious (Matthew Taunton, 12 June 2008, New Statesman)

The alternative to transgression need not be a return to the dreaded - and often unfairly caricatured - Victorian morality. Actually, nobody is more dependent on these kinds of rules than the person who lives by breaking them, as Bataille himself realised, opposing the sexual revolution for this reason. And there are cases in oppressive societies where contravening laws and conventions is not just worthwhile, but the duty of the responsible citizen. But this is transgression as a means, and not an end in itself.

Those who dissent from the critical orthodoxy are labelled "conservative", as if being uninterested in cyborgs, pornography and vampirism were tantamount to a betrayal of socialist principles. Yet writers such as Terry Eagleton - a Marxist who bemoaned the ubiquity of PhD theses on "the literature of latex or the political implications of navel piercing" - or Ashley Tau chert, a feminist whose important new book, Against Transgression (Blackwell), debunks many of the myths around the subject, can hardly be described as figures of the right.

As Eagleton and Tauchert both argue, there is something narcissistic and deeply conservative about revelling in transgression. In Tauchert's words, to do so is "reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling".

MOBIUS STRIP TEASE:

REVIEW: of Dolly Parton: Backwoods Barbie (Dolly Records) (Susan Wunderink, Christianity Today)

Trying to figure out whether Dolly Parton is ironic is like looking for the end of a mobius strip.

In Backwoods Barbie, Parton once again offers what has made her famous since 1963: songs that any country girl can belt out in the car with utter conviction. And true to her country roots, two or three of the songs are about cheatin', five more are about being cheated on or abandoned, and one is about emancipation from a no-good arrogant man. And then there are the personal songs that only Parton can carry off: a couple of inspirational autobiographical songs, as well as one about Jesus.

Her songs put forward Christian spiritual elements, like faith and prayer, but Parton has never been one to get specific with theology. She told Larry King in a 2003 interview that, while she is very spiritual, "I wouldn't say that I'm religious. I grew up in a very religious background. … I trust God, I love God, and I love the thoughts of it. Even if there was no God, I'd prefer to believe it, because I prefer to believe in something greater than we are. It takes all of the pressure off of you. You don't have a bunch of ego problems."

It's hard to see how all of these themes can work together on the same album without knowing that Parton pitches herself as the product of "backwoods sensibilities." This is her explanation for her sense of beauty, her sense of morality, and her religion. "The way I look is just a country girl's idea of glam," she sings in the title track. "Too much makeup, too much hair/Don't be fooled by thinking that the goods are not all there … I've always been misunderstood because of how I look/Don't judge me by the cover, cause I'm a real good book."

Those who only know Parton as the godmother of Miley Cyrus or her guest stint on American Idol might think she is the concoction of marketing experts. But Dolly Rebecca Parton grew up part of a poor, Pentecostal family of 14 in a small town in Tennessee's Smoky Mountains. She has shown remarkable consistency in her persona over the last 45 years: self-deprecating, bawdy, kind, vulnerable, flamboyant, all-American, smart, and ambitious. And those traits, carried throughout her songs and her career, make Dolly both loveable and formidable.

In a way, Backwoods Barbie is a re-introduction of that same Dolly Parton that Johnny Carson fans got to know. She is trying to resist moving into that stage where every album is a slightly modified retrospective (from 1970's The Best of Dolly Parton to 2007's The Very Best of Dolly Parton), contributing her Christian –themed "Travelin' Thru" to the controversial transgender film Transamerica and writing the music and lyrics for with 9 to 5: The Musical.

MAVERICK HAD THE GUY'S NUMBER FOUR YEARS AGO:

Obama move irks reform allies (KENNETH P. VOGEL, 6/19/08, Politico)

Barack Obama’s shift away from a public financing program has drawn fire from Republicans, but it’s also irked his sometime allies in the good government community.

They had come to see the Illinois senator as a budding champion for their efforts to reduce the role of special interest money in politics. And they praised his announcement last year that his presidential campaign would “aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee” under which both would accept taxpayer money in the general election.

So they were disappointed with Obama’s Thursday announcement that he would opt out of the public financing system and torn over his efforts to frame the move in the language of the campaign finance reform movement.

HE HASN'T EVEN BEEN ATTACKED YET:

Ghosts in the GOP attack machine (JONATHAN MARTIN, 6/20/08, Politico

The truth is that, less than five months before Election Day, there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group.

RELAY FOR LIFE

I (The Other Brother) will be walking in a Relay for Life event in Wolfeboro, NH on June 21st and 22nd, 2008.

Relay For Life® of Wolfeboro is a fun-filled overnight event designed to bring together those who have been touched by cancer in our community. More than 200 Relays will be held throughout New England in 2008, all celebrating survivorship and raising money to help the American Cancer Society in its mission to save lives, help those who have been touched by cancer, and empower individuals to fight back. During the event, teams of people gather at schools, fairgrounds, or parks and take turns walking or running laps. Each team tries to keep at least one team member on the track at all times.

Anyone wishing to donate to the American Cancer Society by sponsoring me may go to my online pledge form.

Thanks for your consideration.

Update: I participated in this event last year, and thanks to the generosity of BrothersJudd readers and friends, raised over $200 dollars. I'll be participating again this year, in particular to honor my long-time friend and mentor Thomas P. Fairchild, who lost a long battle with cancer last year. Any donations are greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Steve

SURRENDER IS HABIT-FORMING, EH?:

Warrantless Wiretapping Deal Struck (PAMELA HESS, 6/19/08, AP)

House and Senate leaders have agreed to a new compromise surveillance bill that would effectively shield from potentially costly civil lawsuits telecommunications companies that helped the government wiretap citizens' phone and computer lines after the September 11 terrorist attacks without court permission. [...]

A congressional official said he believes all the companies have such orders, and therefore all 40 cases would be dismissed. There was small chance of them progressing anyway; the Bush administration has stymied them by invoking its state's secret privilege to bar evidence from being brought into court.

GOPHER 50:

Source: McCain Vice President Search Now Focuses on Pawlenty (James Pethokoukis, 6/19/08, US News)

Internal McCain polls show that adding Pawlenty, 47, to the ticket would help McCain win not only Minnesota but also the neighboring state of Wisconsin. Both are close swing states. In 2004, John Kerry beat President Bush by 3.48 percentage points in Minnesota and 0.38 percentage point in Wisconsin. In 2000, Al Gore beat Bush by 2.4 points in Minnesota and 0.22 in Wisconsin.

This all validates my theory that Team McCain is pursuing a "Big 10" victory strategy, trying to win the states from the college football conference, especially Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

A MAN IS AS GOOD AS HIS WORD:

Obama to Break Promise, Opt Out of Public Financing for General Election (Jake Tapper, June 19, 2008, ABC News: Political Punch)

In a web video to supporters -- "the people who built this movement from the bottom up" -- Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, announced this morning that he will not enter into the public financing system, despite a previous pledge to do so. [...]

In November 2007, Obama answered "Yes" to Common Cause when asked "If you are nominated for President in 2008 and your major opponents agree to forgo private funding in the general election campaign, will you participate in the presidential public financing system?"

Obama wrote: "In February 2007, I proposed a novel way to preserve the strength of the public financing system in the 2008 election. My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the public financing system for the general election. My proposal followed announcements by some presidential candidates that they would forgo public financing so they could raise unlimited funds in the general election. The Federal Election Commission ruled the proposal legal, and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has already pledged to accept this fundraising pledge. If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election."

Not so "aggressively," according to the McCain campaign, which argues that Obama did not discuss this or try to negotiate at all with the McCain campaign, despite writing that he would "aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election."

THE UNFORTUNATE REALITY IS THAT...

The Supreme Court Made a Mistake in 'Boumediene' (Glenn Sulmasy, June 19, 2008, US news)

The Boumediene holding permits aliens to exercise constitutional rights within U.S. courts of law. This has never been the policy of the United States, nor has the court ever granted such rights to those detained outside of U.S. jurisdiction. Additionally, it should be noted that this is the first of the Supreme Court cases since the attacks of 9/11 that actually declares that the military commission process contains a constitutional violation. While many on both sides of the aisle believe that Guantánamo and the military commissions might be flawed as a matter of policy (and, some say, of law) and think it is in the best interests of the nation to close Guantánamo, this case actually goes further and will have greater impact than if the commissions themselves were found to violate the Constitution. Justice Kennedy went to lengths to limit the decision to only those detained at Gitmo now, but his decision clearly will be analogized by some to other military bases overseas (e.g. Afghanistan) where detainees are held. The practical effect of flooding an already overburdened federal court system is more than likely. These detainees will not only have access to federal district courthouses but will gain the rights of American citizens to challenge their cases within the United States. One can only imagine further unprecedented constitutional challenges, such as applying the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment to the detainees, arguing these provisions of the Constitution apply to those searched or captured on the field of battle. This is not a stretch but a frightening, arguably unintended consequence of the decision.

VICTORS' JUSTICE ISN'T:

Barack Obama: I won't martyr Osama bin Laden (Alex Spillius, 19/06/2008, Daily Telegraph)

Though he refused to detail what approach he would take to bring bin Laden to justice, he sought to show a more sympathetic American face to the world when he described the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders as an exemplar of sound victors' justice.

"What would be important would be for us to do it in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he's engaged in and not to make him into a martyr, and to assure that the United States government is abiding by basic conventions that would strengthen our hand in the broader battle against terrorism," he said.

AND ONE OF THE MOST UNDER-RATED FILMS OF THE PAST THIRTY YEARS:

Tests find arsenic poisoning killed Phar Lap (The Australian, June 19, 2008)

After dominating Australian tracks, the legendary racehorse died in mysterious circumstances in California in 1932.

While conspiracy theories flourished following Big Red's death, including suggestions gangsters had killed him off, poisoning had always been suspected.

A handwritten notebook of homeopathic recipes used by his trainer Harry Telford, auctioned in Melbourne in April, revealed arsenic and strychnine among the ingredients in the tonics and ointments he used on his horses.

AT LEAST IT'S CONSISTENT...:

Muslim Woman: Scarf Kept Her From Seat Near Obama (JEFF KAROUB, 6/18/08, Associated Press)

A young Muslim woman said she and another woman were refused seats directly behind Barack Obama — and in front of TV cameras — at a Detroit rally because they wear head scarfs.

Hebba Aref said Wednesday that she and Shimaa Abdelfadeel were among 20,000 supporters who gathered to see the Democratic presidential hopeful on Monday at the Joe Louis Arena when the groups they were with were separately invited by Obama campaign volunteers to sit behind the podium. But Aref said the volunteers told members of both parties in separate discussions that women wearing hijabs, the traditional Muslim head scarves, weren't included in the invitation and couldn't sit behind the podium.

Aref, a 25-year-old lawyer, said a member of her group was told by a volunteer that she could not invite Aref because of "a sensitive political climate."

WE CAN SAFELY AWARD THE TROPHY FOR "FUNNIEST LINE IN PRINT--2007":

Obama's European Problem (Joe Conason, 12/29/07, Salon)

The senator may have traveled widely, but the critically important subcommittee on Europe has languished under his leadership.

Though, we will have to give some thought to which is less significant: Europe or a Senate subcommittee?

I'M MISSING THE DOWNSIDE HERE:

Taking More Risks Because You Feel Safe (Shankar Vedantam, June 9, 2008, Washington Post)

The housing market is in free fall: Quick -- let's protect homeowners against foreclosure.

The country is in recession: Quick -- let's give Americans money to spend to restart the economy.

Big Wall Street firms are failing: Quick -- let's bail out businesses that are "too big to fail."

Trying to fix problems that affect vast numbers of people has an intuitive appeal that politicians and policymakers find irresistible, but several warehouses of research studies show that intuition is often a poor guide to fixing systemic problems. While it seems like common sense to pump money into an economy that is pulling the bedcovers over its head, the problem with most social interventions is that they target not robots and machines but human beings -- who regularly respond to interventions in contrarian, paradoxical and unpredictable ways.

"How well does government do in helping the market to improve what it does?" asked Clifford Winston, an economist at the Brookings Institution and the author of the 2006 book "Market Failure Versus Government Failure." "The research consistently finds that, in fact, government efforts to correct market failures have little effect, or actually make things worse."

"There is a tendency for people to say, 'If things are safer, then I will take more risk,' " he added.

MONDALE '84 MAY HAVE BEEN ODD...:

Read My Lips: We Need These Taxes (Roger Lowenstein, June 15, 2008, Washington Post)

Let's imagine an alternate universe. The U.S. government is running a large and growing deficit. Not far down the road it faces huge increases in Social Security and Medicare costs. Naturally, the candidates for president want to remedy this by raising revenue. They don't want us to bequeath bigger deficits to our children or stake our future on foreigners' willingness to keep lending us money.

But have you heard this speech? "My fellow Americans, I have a plan to raise taxes so that the budget will be closer to balance and future Americans won't have to worry about their retirement security." Neither have I.

Somebody, though, should be giving it.

OBAMA VS. AMERICA:

SCOTUS Gitmo Ruling (Jon Cohen, June 17, 2008, Washington Post: Behind the Numbers)

Most Americans oppose last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba should be able to challenge their incarcerations in the civilian court system.

In the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 61 percent said non-citizens suspected of terrorism should not have these rights under the U.S. Constitution; 34 percent said they should. The view that these suspects do not share these privileges cuts across party lines, with majorities of Democrats (53 percent), independents (56 percent) and Republicans (77 percent) taking that position.

SO I WENT TO A KRITALLNACHT...:

Nazi lyrics screened during Germany-Austria Euro 2008 match (Daily Telegraph, 18/06/2008)

A Swiss television channel has apologised after it mistakenly broadcast the Nazi lyrics to the German national anthem during a Euro 2008 football match.

Broadcaster SRG offered subtitles to Germany's national anthem during live coverage of Austria versus Germany – but mistakenly included the "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" lyrics to the first verse, which have been ignored since the fall of the Third Reich.

Fans were invited to sing along as the subtitles appeared on Swiss screens.

ONE OF THE MOST DELICIOUS IRONIES OF THE IRAQ WAR...:

Democracy in Decline (Tony Blankley, 6/18/08, Real Clear Politics)

Democracy, broadly understood as government by the people being governed, has been the upward aspiration of Western civilization for about 1,000 years -- and of the rest of the world for about 100 years. Certainly since the Magna Carta in 1215; arguably going back another millennium to when the Germanic tribes selected their chiefs through a more-or-less popular rather than hereditary method. The pace quickened in our Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, advanced further with Woodrow Wilson's call for the self-determination of nations after World War I. The democratic urge gained further rhetorical support in the post-World War II United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 21:

"(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

"(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

"(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures."