17 April 2008

A day off at school, for some reason, although the holiday--and other day off--was last Monday. It means chauffeur-Dad doesn't have to dress and take the car out to make the school run, then keep one eye on the clock for the pick-up at midday, but can kick back and relax.

Meanwhile, perhaps our rainy season has finally begun? It's been quite a bit cooler (71 this morning) and it rained hard last night. We needed it; the world was becoming far too dusty for my taste. Tony showed up wearing his warm parka, although his feet and legs were bare. Time for some hard rains to wash all of the loose stuff away. The bad part is that the concrete-loving algae will begin thriving again, and it's very slippery. And our power-washer won't get up to speed any more, even though I've tried to have it repaired a couple of times.

My Costa Rican neighbor works for one of the bigger hotels in some managerial capacity and he says they have given up trying to spend money repairing things that stop working; just buy another one. He has a good point. Things are manufactured all around the globe now, and for some reason nobody seems to put a premium on standard parts and sizes. Finding repair parts is the hard part. We still don't have all of the brake parts we need for the Chrysler, although my friend assures me that they are on the way. Along with Christmas, no doubt.

Downloading my email and deleting the tons of junk for improving my sex life, I came across one with a catchy subject-line that made me smile: "make your loins roar". Hard to type that without my fingers automatically spelling "lions".

I see that some of the papers watched a different debate than I did, last night:

Senator Barack Obama found himself consistently on the defensive as he and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton met Wednesday night in a tense debate that left him parrying questions and criticism on issues including values, patriotism and his association with onetime radicals from the 1960s.

I did notice that he sometimes seemed to be stumbling and fumbling for answers, but I didn't think a whole lot about that.

The best "stumped for an answer" response came when George Stephanopolous set Hillary up by using her comment that she wanted to see the country make better use of its past presidents, meaning she had a job all lined up for Bill as Chief Justice (you just watch), and GS asked her how she planned to make use of George Bush. Classic gotcha that she never saw coming.

He at times appeared annoyed as he sought to answer questions about his former pastor, his reluctance to wear an American flag pin on his lapel and his association in Chicago with former members of the Weather Underground, a radical group that carried out bombings in the 1960s that were intended to incite the overthrow of the government.

And, come to think of it, he did come close to lying when trying to downplay the extent of his contact with one of them. He may not have made his break away from the far left far enough back in his history, after all.

They also had differences on the capital gains tax; Mrs. Clinton said that if she were to raise it from its current 15 percent level, it would not be to above 20 percent, while Mr. Obama said he would consider raising it as high as 28 percent.

I thought both candidates were stupid on this one, since Gibson clearly prefaced his question, at least twice, with the statement that since every time capital gains taxes were reduced, tax receipts went up, so why raise them at all? Obama tried to dodge, saying it would depend upon the budget's need for income, but that's a stupid answer. I thought it was clear that both of them intend to raise the capital gains tax rate, no matter what, even if receipts went down, because it's a tax on a certain kind of people that they're after.

And Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama said that as president, they would execute promises to begin the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, even if their military commanders at the time advised them that it would be wiser to keep troops on the ground.

Both of them came off as big-headed Deciders when it came to Iraq, essentially arguing that they would do the same thing that they once faulted Bush for doing--being The Decider--and now faulting him for listening too much to his generals.

Politicians, especially liberal politicians, can easily go both ways, often simultaneously.

And the NYT doesn't want to make a big issue of the way the question was worded, obviously, preferring to paraphrase it rather than quote it, and to misparaphrase it at that, but conservative papers aren't going to be so kind. I don't have the exact quote, myself, but as I recall the question it began with something about even if your commanders said Iraq would dissolve into chaos, would you still go ahead with your plan?

Hillary was so eager to placate the "troops home now" people that she jumped right in, and Obama was mouse-trapped just a little by her dumb answer, such that he couldn't afford to be seen saying "no". Well, let's see what we come across in other newspapers and blogs.

Last week in Terre Haute, Ind., Mr. Obama explained that the people he had in mind “don’t vote on economic issues, because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them.” He added: “So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.”

This is a remarkably detailed and vivid account of the political sociology of the American electorate. What is even more remarkable is that it is wrong on virtually every count.

Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.

Once again, I have to point out that Obama has no way of seeing this for himself. He reminds me of the lady who was astonished to wake up and find that Nixon won because "nobody I know voted for him". Growing up in a foreign country may make for wonderful foreign-policy credentials, if you believe that, but it doesn't do anything for simultaneously understanding the rural American experience. Nor does an expensive prep school in Hawaii, which in many ways is also closer to a foreign country than the rural red states are. Then he went to college at the large prestigious universities, after which he studiously immersed himself into black inner-city culture, just so he would know about that.

How else could be possibly not be wrong on virtually every count? It's not really his fault.

Is John McCain reading this? The author then states some facts and figures to support his thesis:

Small-town, working-class people are more likely than their cosmopolitan counterparts, not less, to say they trust the government to do what’s right. (54% to 38%--ed.) Among these voters, those who are anti-abortion were only 6 percentage points more likely than those who favor abortion rights to vote for President Bush in 2004. The corresponding difference for the rest of the electorate was 27 points, and for cosmopolitan voters it was a remarkable 58 points. Similarly, the votes cast by the cosmopolitan crowd in 2004 were much more likely to reflect voters’ positions on gun control and gay marriage.

Small-town, working-class voters were also less likely to connect religion and politics. Support for President Bush was only 5 percentage points higher among the 39 percent of small-town voters who said they attended religious services every week or almost every week than among those who seldom or never attended religious services. The corresponding difference among cosmopolitan voters (34 percent of whom said they attended religious services regularly) was 29 percentage points.

It seems to me that you have two choices here. One is that Obama didn't really know any of these things when he spoke. The other is that he was pandering to his closed-door audience of ultra-wealthy San Francisco elites.

Mr. Obama’s comments are supposed to be significant because of the popular perception that rural, working-class voters have abandoned the Democratic Party in recent decades and that the only way for Democrats to win them back is to cater to their cultural concerns. The reality is that John Kerry received a slender plurality of their votes in 2004, while John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, in the close elections of 1960 and 1968, lost them narrowly.

Mr. Obama should do as well or better among these voters if he is the Democratic candidate in November. If he doesn’t, it won’t be because he has offended the tender sensitivities of small-town Americans. It will be because he has embraced a misleading stereotype of who they are and what they care about.

Did he willingly embrace that stereotype in order to please his contributors in that audience?

The Washington Post doesn't highlight Obama's other problems, even though it mentions them:

Obama said he understood why some people were offended by what he called a "mangled up" statement and then sought to reframe his comments in less offensive terms. "The point I was making was that when people feel like Washington's not listening to them, when they're promised year after year, decade after decade, that their economic situation is going to change and it doesn't, then, politically, they end up focusing on those things that are constant, like religion."

Good try, but you also included racial intolerance and rejection of free trade among the things to which they would also cling. Now those are studiously missing?

Obama's other problem is that he cannot possibly let the Clinton 8 years be shown as positive, so he's forced to go back "decade after decade". Ouch.

Clinton came under fire as well, for incorrectly stating on several occasions that she had dodged sniper fire on a visit to Bosnia in 1996. The context for the question was a new Washington Post-ABC News poll showing that nearly six in 10 Americans do not find her honest or trustworthy.

Clinton was asked a question in a video clip of a Pittsburgh voter, Tom Rooney, who said she had lost his vote over it and wondered how she could win him back. "Well, Tom, I can tell you that I may be a lot of things. But I'm not dumb," Clinton began. She then added: "I'm embarrassed by it. I have apologized for it. I've said it was a mistake. And it is, I hope, something that you can look over, because clearly I am proud that I went to Bosnia."

What I still don't understand is why Chelsea, who was also on that trip, did not take her Mom aside privately and remind her of the truth after her first time.

If she'd only done it once, she could have explained that those were the conditions she expected to encounter and didn't put that as clearly as she should have. But after three instances, it's clear that what she was trying to do was inflate her experience record. And she still was doing that, last night, unashamedly recounting all of the things that SHE had done!

The humorous thing is that she cannot admit what is the truth about her Bosnia story. They say that we all tend to embellish our memories of previous events (well, at least most of you do, they say) and she probably unconsciously created the fable in her own mind, which got stronger with each telling. But she cannot possibly admit that human failing. Not Hillary. And, to be fair to her, if she did then the first thing her critics would do would not be to admire her humanity or her honesty but attack her with questions about what else she embellished unreasonably.

Sen. Barack Obama released his 2007 tax returns this evening, hours before his debate with Sen. Hillary Clinton.

The tax returns show he made $4,238,165 last year, most of it ($3.9 million) a result of profits from his best selling books. He reported paying $1,396,772 in federal taxes and making charitable contributions totaling $240,370. Those donations included $26,270 to the Trinity United Church of Christ, which was the Chicago parish of his controversial longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Clever timing, though. Do you think anyone else will notice? And only 5.7% to charity from this former community organizer and famous helper of the poor and out-of-work?

"Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton went on the attack against Senator Barack Obama on a variety of issues during a contentious debate Wednesday, warning that he would be deeply vulnerable in a general-election fight if he won the nomination," says the New York Times.

"Helped along by the questioning of the moderators, Mrs. Clinton mentioned several areas in which she said Mr. Obama was vulnerable, including the incendiary remarks by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and his service on a board with William Ayres, a former leader of the radical Weather Underground. She even cited Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, who has endorsed Mr. Obama."

Not that Hillary had any personal concerns, she was careful to point out, she thought Barry was an honorable man, but these were the things those damn Republicans were going to say and it was only her duty to point them out...

Well, you see, he used to call himself that once. Then he went to Barack Hussein Obama, but later decided that the 'Hussein' had unfortunate connotations. I figure the 'Barack' has to have the same thing for a lot of people, if that's one of the criteria by which we have to go, so I'm going back to 'Barry' in order to help him out.

Even Obama booster Andrew Sullivan was disappointed in his man:

"It was a lifeless, exhausted, drained and dreary Obama we saw tonight. I've seen it before when he is tired, but this was his worst performance yet on national television. He seemed crushed and unable to react. This is big-time politics and he's up against the Clinton wood-chipper. But there is no disguising the fact that he wilted, painfully...”

But there's no excuse for being exhausted ahead of an important event like this debate, one that Obama has known was coming for literally weeks. If he didn't have enough common sense to rest up and prepare himself, he doesn't have enough sense to be president.

What Obama was, was wary, not weary. His problem is that he perhaps really--as he originally claimed immediately afterwards--thought he spoke an unwelcome truth when he said the things he did about those voters, the common folk. He didn't really think that he misspoke. Finding out that he did, unwittingly, means that now he has to be doubly worried about doing it again.

It's just like the problems you have when you learn a foreign language...there are some phrases which are perfectly ordinary in English but are offensive in your new language, only you don't know in advance what all of them are. Some, maybe, but not all. And, for Obama, the language of Pennsylvania is a foreign tongue. But it's not just Obama:

Salon Editor Joan Walsh defends Frisco:

"I've seen a lot of dumb excuses for Barack Obama's regrettable remarks about 'bitter' Pennsylvania voters who 'cling' to God, guns and narrow-mindedness in the last few days. But maybe the dumbest are the ones that blame my city, San Francisco. According to the New York Sun, Obama backer Daniel Gerstein opined that 'Obama's mistake was not just what he said . . . but where he said it -- in San Francisco, a center of liberalism often derided by Republicans as culturally apart from the rest of America. The first rule for Obama is: Stop going to San Francisco.' My MSNBC buddy Pat Buchanan picked up that refrain from the right, complaining that Obama's remarks were made 'behind closed doors to the Chablis-and-brie set of San Francisco, in response to a question as to why he was not doing better in that benighted and barbarous land they call Pennsylvania.'

"Of course that's silly. Clearly, Obama could just as easily have made his gaffe at a fundraiser on Wall Street or K Street . . ."

She doesn't get it, either. He wouldn't have made those same remarks on Wall Street or K Street for the simple reason that they wouldn't have been the same kind of audience. He was speaking to an elite, private group--and they were undoubtedly elite liberals, even if you want to give Obama a free pass on that--and knew what they expected to hear from him, so he gave it to them. It didn't really matter whether he believed what he was saying, or not, or even if he actually knew better, or didn't. You throw brie to the Chablis-and-brie set, but a different kind of cheese on your Philly cheasesteak.

"Clinton's caricature of him based on the 'bitter' remark seems unfair. On the other hand, it was a mistake on Obama's part, and as Clinton has noted, it's a particular type of mistake -- seeming out of touch with blue-collar Americans -- that has doomed Democrats in the last 40 years."

And why would that be? Is it because the Democrats haven't nominated a blue-collar American candidate?

Look at Bush vs Kerry, for instance. Liberals now, today, want to argue that Bush comes from every bit as liberal elite a background as Kerry did, but they sure weren't boasting about his suave elitism back during that campaign, were they? No, they weren't...he was a Texas commoner, a cowboy, who walked with a swagger no liberal elite would be caught attempting. Bush was the guy a majority of people wanted to have a beer with and simply chew the fat...another 'commoner' expression. He'd probably go to a NASCAR race with you and the fat would be pork-rinds, among other things. Nobody could imagine Kerry doing blue-collar things like that.

As one of the three liberal columnists from the NYT I quoted extensively last week put it, you wouldn't want to elect a Joe or Josephine Sixpack as president, after all. Perfect.

The O team isn't worried, Marc Ambinder reports, and he has a theory:

"When you ask various members of the Obama campaign about polling after Obama's remarks, they're likely to respond with a variant of a single answer: the coverage of these remarks are media-driven -- old media driven, at that. (It's true: once this story left the confines of the Huffington Post, it pretty much became a staple of the cablers, the newspapers, and the evening news.) Whenever the media tells them that they've misbehaved, Obama's supporters and the penumbra of undecided Democrats (who are really not undecided between two candidates -- they're just unsure whether they're going to vote for Obama) respond in equal fashion, exerting upwards pressure and reversing the trend of the storyline . . .

"Here's what I think is going on. Time after time, from the beginning of the campaign to now, the media has called Obama on a 'major' gaffe or presented his [reaction] to an event as a 'major' problem only to figure out a week later that Obama hasn't suffered a bit and Hillary Clinton numbers have dropped back down to about 40%."

Of course, a minor problem in the Democratic primaries could become a major problem in the general election.

Kurtz is absolutely correct...and it's also the thing Hillary is trying to point out. The fact that Obama's gaffes don't help her is not as important to the Democrats as a whole, the party, as the fact that they will hurt Obama badly against McCain.

"Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), the Democratic Party's 2000 vice presidential nominee, is leaving open the possibility of giving a keynote address on behalf of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) at the Republican National Convention in September."

Kos wonders why the Dems don't strip Lieberman of his chairmanships: "The dude is a Republican. I wish he'd come out and say so already."

And why should he? Payback time is hell, huh? Lieberman has the Democrats exactly where he wants them, and he will have until such time as they broaden their majority enough so that his vote isn't crucial. They made a dumb move when they tried to dump him ignominiously, a former vice-presidential candidate, even, and so they deserve what they have earned for such stark disloyalty.

But it turned out that there were a lot of Lieberman Democrats and independents, and I certainly hope he brings them to McCain's party.

Which strikes me as an interesting observation, even if that's not the way I intended it when I wrote it.

People say that they are tired of two-party elections, where there really isn't an alternate choice. Barry is trying hard to present himself as being that, but his 100% liberal voting record means he's a creature of the far-left Democrat Party trying hard to disguise himself.

McCain, on the other hand, is very often accused of slapping conservative Republicans up alongside the head (per Michelle Malkin: "And who can forget his disdainful admonition to conservatives, whom he berated to 'calm down.'"), and he's co-authored a number of bipartisan bills with Democrats, so he very clearly isn't a conservative Republican. Some have even audibly complained that he isn't a "real" Republican at all.

Greenblatt is typical. Asked about McCain, this longtime Republican said, "I don't like his [Iraq] war policy. I supported the war at the beginning, but I'm increasingly disillusioned with it. McCain just seems to want to keep it going."

McCain doesn't want to do that, of course, but this shows what he needs to emphasize, over and over. Namely that he wants to end this war, as soon as possible, yesterday would have been just fine, but ONLY with a victory! Nothing less will do. Four thousand troops have died and McCain will not dishonor their sacrifice by settling for anything less than total military victory. He will not bring troops home as long as there is an enemy terrorist left standing to gloat about Americans cutting and running.

Hillary and Barry played into his hands last night, if his campaign has the wit to see it, by saying that they'd bring the troops home even if the result in Iraq was chaos.

Now, according to the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker before Congress last week, our main adversaries in Iraq are the Shiite forces being aided by Iran, the Shiite power next door. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has been largely confined to the area around Mosul, and most of the attacks on U.S. forces and on the authority of the Iraqi government, they said, come from Iranian-backed Shiite militias, many aligned with Moqtada al-Sadr, who has spent the past several months in Iran. Then again, Iran also backs the Shiite-controlled government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- which is why it was Iran that negotiated the cease-fire between Maliki's forces and Shiite militias after Maliki's offensive against the militias in Basra ground to a halt.

In a stunning display of Liberal Logic he sees Iran as both backing al-Sadr's war against the elected Iraqi government while simultaneously backing al-Maliki's elected Iraqi government. Thus he sees Iran backing al-Sadr's Shia Militia right up until the point where they take serious losses in Basra, although bringing al-Maliki's offense to a halt, but then he sees Iran as backing al-Maliki by...what...getting al-Sadr to stop?

Does Meyerson seriously think that al-Sadr's militia is capable of defeating both the Iraqi army as well as the forces Petraeus can bring to bear? Is Meyerson unaware of the stunning losses al-Sadr's militia suffered? Is Meyerson actually unaware that the Arab al-Maliki has no love lost for the Persian Iran? Apparently. Look:

The political underpinning for Maliki's government comes chiefly from anti-Sadr Shiite factions, most notably the Hakim family and its Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which was headquartered in Iran during much of Hussein's reign and, indeed, was actually founded by Iran's governing clerics. That's one reason Maliki's government accorded a rapturous public reception to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he visited Baghdad last month...

Quite as if Meyerson considers us unable to read Amir Taheri's account of what actually happened during Ahmadinejad's visit...or, as is more likely, Meyerson didn't read it. Nobody he knows, as the saying goes, did.

Our current policy in Iraq, then, is to defend those Shiite groups aligned with Maliki, their closeness to Iran notwithstanding, against those Shiite groups, also close to Iran, aligned either with Sadr or in any event against Maliki. And just because we're now focusing on enemy No. 3 doesn't mean that enemy No. 1, the Sunni insurgents, won't take the field again against Maliki and our own forces -- only this time, they'll have the arms we gave them to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Our war in Iraq, then, is different from all our previous wars because we are occupying a nation at war with itself, where groups take up arms against us because we defend a government to which they're not reconciled, a government that may itself pose a strategic threat to our interests.

But the facts are clearly otherwise. Our Sunni allies are not fighting either the al-Maliki government OR the al-Sadr militia. They're fighting Sunni al-Qaeda, and in the process of running them completely out of the country. Meyerson admits they are now largely confined to just a single area, rather than all across Iraq.

After they kick out al-Qaeda, will they then turn on the al-Maliki government? That is a fact most definitely NOT in evidence.

And the "groups" taking up arms against us, not counting al-Qaeda, consists entirely of ONE. And this group consists of the Iran-backed al-Sadr militia, which is itself opposed to the elected Iraqi government.

We are not fighting with the Sunni sheiks, we are not fighting with the al-Maliki government, or the Iraqi army, or the Iraqi police, we are not fighting with the Shia loyal to their government. This is precisely why American troop losses have declined so markedly since the surge took hold. Our list of enemies is dwindling down to a precious few, as we reach for September.

This would be clear to even a dunderhead if the dunderhead wasn't obsessed with the idea that Iran somehow was in support of the al-Maliki government, despite all evidence to the contrary. Iran is in support of al-Sadr, who is presently hiding in Iran for his own safety. Iran doesn't want the al-Maliki government to succeed, partly because far from posing a strategic threat to American interests, it is currently busy trying to negotiate a long-range mutual support agreement with the United States!

Does Meyerson not know this? How ignorant can the man possibly be? He's unaware of the treatment Taheri describes Ahmadinejad as receiving and now he's unaware that the al-Maliki government is negotiating an agreement to help maintain stability in Iraq, which is most definitely in the U.S. interest? Or does Meyerson consult with only his mirror? How else could he come up with this?

If our chief concern is, as we now assert, the spread of Iranian influence, what we need is a Sunni-led government, which could not attain or hold power in majority-Shiite Iraq save by force. That is, we need another Saddam Hussein, only this time, one less antagonistic to the United States. But this would be a resolution we could not support, because it would make a mockery of our entire misadventure in Iraq.

And this is the war that John McCain wants to wage until victory is ours. What no one -- including McCain, Petraeus, Crocker and Bush -- can do is articulate just what such a victory would look like.

Meyerson understands only the Sunni/Shia divisions, you see, and thus is able to imagine that the Persian Shia and the Arab Shia are therefore one and the same. Our only chance against Iran, if he was correct, would be to re-enslave the Arab Shia with a Sunni of our choice.

And the reason this would make a mockery? Why, of course: we'd be replacing a democratically-elected government with a dictator we preferred, choosing stability over freedom just like we did in the bad old days.

And how do we avoid making a mockery of our intervention in Iraq? Why, isn't it simple? We continue to support the duly-elected bipartisan secular government of Iraq, even if Meyerson can see only the al-Maliki Shia portion of it (nobody he knows can see anyone else, after all) and sign agreements with it conducive to American interests there and in the region. We do have some, after all.

What victory will look like, after that, will be the continuing rout of al-Qaeda, which even Meyerson has been able to see happening since he now considers them almost negligible rather than on the verse of being victorious, as they once were, and we continue to marginalize al-Sadr until he is living in Iran permanently, retired to the life of a full-time cleric.

What Meyerson and Liberals of his ilk fear the most is that the Sunni will continue their movement towards embracing and participating in their inclusive secular government, as we will see conclusively demonstrated this fall, hopefully prior to the November elections in the U.S. (I hope for; Meyerson hopes against) and Iran will be shut out because they are Persians with their own country, not Arabs.

You see, when that happens then Iraq will not have been the misadventure he perceives, not at all, but a fight worthy of the loftiest ideals of John F. Kennedy. This is the bitter fact that Meyerson cannot support.

I don't know what upsets me the most. That people can think like that? That a person like Meyerson can be a Washington Post columnist? Or that some people are going to read and believe his mischaracterizations as being fact?

Read Amir Taheri and Michael Yon and blogs like "Iraq, the Model" and people who actually know something about the area, and the fact that "Shia" and "Iran" are not synonymous.

Then when you come across someone like Meyerson you will recognize him as kin with the confused lady, a man who knows what he knows because nobody else that he knows any differently.

The private business group clearly said the first sentence. But who uttered the second one? The same group or the, ah, journalist? It isn't clear.

The index is designed to forecast economic activity in the next three to six months based on 10 economic components, including stock prices, building permits and initial claims for unemployment benefits.

"The current behavior of the composite indexes suggests economic weakness is likely to continue in the near term," it (the Conference Board) said in a press release.

But isn't the reason it is a composite rather than a single item simply because the analysis is supposed to be made by taking all of them into consideration, and if a majority go up then that's a net positive? Why, of course it is.

And continued economic weakness is not actually a recession, is it? Isn't it actually a sign of something less than a strong turn-around, at least at the present moment?

I think a lot of liberals are heavily invested in a Bush recession and don't want to see any economic turn-around in the months leading up to the election.

"This situation clearly illuminates the fact that in the citizen blogger, amateur journalism world, the rules that govern the relationship between traditional journalists and their sources are not present. A traditional newsroom would not have allowed someone who was a campaign donor to cover that candidate," said Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

"Mayhill Fowler had access to that fundraiser because they thought she was a supporter, not a journalist. This situation suggests that people who care about blogging and its accuracy and credibility need to think about the rules that define the line between citizen and journalist," he said.

The poor man obviously needs an editor. He isn't arguing against her accuracy, but seems to be saying that her credibility is in doubt because she wasn't a "journalist", who wouldn't have reported at all because he couldn't have gained access, but merely a "citizen".

Journalists hate bloggers, you see, because they not only have more access but are also more willing to publish what they see and hear, whether they support the candidate or not.

All Jurkowitz is really saying is that journalists are more subject to censorship than are citizens and bloggers...and he's right.

Mrs. Fowler, an Obama donor invited to the reporter-free fundraiser, has been both lauded for her chutzpah and condemned for substandard ethics by online peers and mainstream press alike. She says she did not hide her recorder. ...

Blogger busts — an online exclusive amplified in big media with serious repercussions — have emerged as an increasing threat to unwary public figures and a cautionary tale.

Yes, and the caution is for the unwary public figures: you can control your media coverage, but not the bloggers. Journalism "ethics" mean that you're not supposed to tell all that you know if the guy you are reporting about pays you off.

No, not necessarily in money...continued access will do. Anyone remember CNN and Iraq? Here's what the journalist tell you about it:

In 2005, Eason Jordan, then CNN's chief news executive, was snared by online scribes who reported his comment that American troops might have deliberately targeted journalists, made during a world financial summit in Davos, Switzerland. He resigned two weeks later.

In fact, wasn't the big furor over the fact that Saddam had allowed them to stay as long as they didn't report anything he didn't want them to report, and they chose to stay rather than actually defend their independent journalist credentials? Why is this newspaper journalist misleading you?

Except that's not what happened, either. Dan Rather went public as a conventional journalist with his material. He showed it to the world for all to see, journalists and citizens and bloggers alike.

What a blogger did--several, apparently--was POINT OUT some discrepancies which were obvious to all. The JOURNALISTS missed seeing them, perhaps because they didn't really want to see them any more than Rather had. Some ethics.

We are beginning to use words, phrases and assertions without any regard to their meaning. The predicate "Islamist extremism is the defining characteristic of the 21st century," ignores we are now in year 8 of this century — with 92 more years to go. No one can possibly know what will define our century over the next nine decades.

Mr. de B, in the sentence "Go sit down" the subject "you" is allowed to be omitted because it is understood to be there.

Likewise, the words "thus far" are also understood to have been included in that sentence. If the writer wishes to characterize the rest of the 92 years remaining then he will add the words "will be" rather than "is".

What is now emerging in neurosciences at George Mason University or in the convergence of information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics at Arizona State University, is bound to have more of an impact on this century than Taliban's flat-Earth clerics in Pakistan and Afghanistan and al Qaeda's volunteers for suicide terrorism against modernity.

Oh, really? It's bound to be? What if the modernity fails to come about because of a Taliban flat-Earth cleric's supporter bombs and destroys the University, thereby succeeding in his war against modernity?

Doesn't de Borchgrave actually emphasize how defining a characteristic the success or failure of the war against Islamist extremism actually is?

Because if they win, George Mason University, like the rest of us, loses. All century long.

Next to the magnitude of coming scientific attractions, a Shariah-based, global terror-caliphate will hold little appeal for "volunteer" suicide bombers. A weapons-of-mass-destruction act of terrorism would only accelerate al Qaeda's demise.

Please, someone...send me a blogger. It is precisely to prevent this type of coming scientific attraction that Sharia-based government attracts suicide bombers. (The scare quotes apparently means that Arnaud doesn't believe they aren't really any volunteers at all, simply because a few dupes were found to exist, as well.) Like a journalist I respect, Charles Krauthammer, de Borchgrave can't quite grasp the fact that al-Qaeda, like Iran, doesn't really CARE about its demise as long as the cause of Islam is advanced thereby.

It's a concept we don't seem to be able to grasp, even though we seem to be able to understand the Western concept of sacrificing ones own life for the safety and freedom of others. We understanding fighting and dying for liberty, often an abstract concept, so why should it be so difficult to understand suicide bombers willing to destroy not only themselves but entire nations in pursuit of their own abstract concepts?

When Democrats in the 43rd State Legislative District in suburban Seattle met April 5 to select delegates to the state convention, they refused to begin their deliberations by saying the Pledge of Allegiance:

"At the mere mention of doing the pledge there were groans and boos," wrote Web logger Eli Sanders, who attended the caucus. "Then, when the district chair put the idea of doing the pledge up to a vote, it was overwhelmingly voted down. One might more accurately say the idea of pledging allegiance to the flag ... was shouted down."

Senator Obama, don't try this in front of your rural Pennsylvania Rotary Club. Oh, yes...and remember to wear your flag pin. Seattle is on what they call the Left Coast.

This week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sabotaged the free trade agreement between the United States and Colombia on behalf of labor leaders who believe, erroneously, that trade costs their unions jobs. ...

As a matter purely of economics, what Mrs. Pelosi has done is insane. Our trade with Colombia is both relatively small potatoes ($18 billion last year compared to nearly $4 trillion with the rest of the world), and is favorable to us. Thanks to a prior agreement (the Andean Trade Preference Act of 1991) most Colombian imports already enter the U.S. duty-free. The goods we ship to Colombia are subject to tariffs of up to 80 percent. The treaty would eliminate those tariffs altogether.

Uh...wouldn't more exports tend to create U.S. jobs rather than reduce them?

Democrats in recent years have done much to undermine both our economy and our national security. But this is the first time they've been able to accomplish both in a single measure.

Mrs. Pelosi continues to keep the terrorist-surveillance bill from coming to a vote because trial lawyers want to be able to sue telephone companies that cooperated with our intelligence agencies after Sept. 11, 2001.

I'm not questioning their patriotism. (They're doing a fine job of that all by themselves.)

When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc—the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him.

I'm a Republican, I guess, or at least I lean towards Republican candidates, although I'd easily pick Joe Lieberman over most of the Republican candidates for president this year, so I feel like that comment has to be aimed at me. I've never lived in an inner city, or even a really big city, and I've spent most of my life in the western United States, but I don't think I have ever known anyone who actually hated black people. I've known some who were disdainful, some who were scornful of what they saw black people doing, true, but the vast majority of people I have known simply did not care one way or another. Any more than we really cared if they were Italian or Irish or Catholic or anything else. I don't know how old I was before I even realized that Jewish people were supposedly different, somehow. When I saw "Gentleman's Agreement" I didn't understand what the movie was all about, and I couldn't relate to it any more than I can remember relating to "The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit". Hate? Really? Surely that's a word which imputes too much passion, doesn't it? Do other people, especially Republicans, really feel that much differently than I do?

Curiously, Cosby is noncommittal verging on prickly when it comes to Obama. When Larry King asked him whether he supported Obama, he bristled: “Do you ask white people this question? … I want to know why this fellow especially is brought up in such a special way. How many Americans in the media really take him seriously, or do they look at him like some prize brown baby?” The exchange ended with Cosby professing admiration for Dennis Kucinich. Months later, he rebuffed my requests for his views on Obama’s candidacy.

But isn't this an example of false racism, since obviously King's answer had to be 'yes'. Mormons were asked their opinion of Romney, too. Catholics were asked about John F. Kennedy, and Jews were asked about Joe Lieberman. But non-Mormons were also asked about Romney, and Protestants about JFK, and Christians about Lieberman, too. Of course Larry King asked all kind of people whether or not they supported Obama.

At times, Cosby seems willfully blind to the parallels between his arguments and those made in the presumably glorious past. Consider his problems with rap. How could an avowed jazz fanatic be oblivious to the similar plaints once sparked by the music of his youth?

But a true parallel manages to elude me. Almost from the very first, white musicians aspired to become as good at jazz as black musicians were, and in fact it was considered a singular mark of success if they did...or even came close. This was because jazz is uplifting for all who hear it. Louis Armstrong gained fame and fortune among all who heard him, of whatever color. Can the same thing be said about gangsta rap?

Jazz was uplifting. Even the blues represented a human feeling, shared by all. Gangsta rap is demeaning...it routinely calls black people words that most polite white Americans don't even use commonly.

Cosby is fond of saying that sacrifices of the ’60s weren’t made so that rappers and young people could repeatedly use the word nigger. But that’s exactly why they were made. After all, chief among all individual rights awarded Americans is the right to be mediocre, crass, and juvenile—in other words, the right to be human.

But the white man doesn't have it? The famous and renowned "shock jock" Don Imus lost his job for repeating...not originating but repeating...gangsta rap type lyrics. He was roundly condemned by all. Where was his right to be crassly human?

I'd say that black rappers have the same right to be crassly human that Imus does...but that they also have the same right to lose their jobs when they do. Hey, it's a perfectly ordinary human trait to commit murder, too, and millions of people of all colors do it, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be the same penalty for all who do.

The second pledge was just as bad. Nobody knows what the situation in Iraq will be like. To pledge an automatic withdrawal is just insane. A mature politician would’ve been honest and said: I fully intend to withdraw, but I want to know what the reality is at that moment.

I think Obama might have said that if he had gotten to answer first. But Hillary foolishly jumped without thinking, and then he had to match her.

The third point concerns electability. The Democrats have a problem. All the signs point to a big Democratic year, and I still wouldn’t bet against Obama winning the White House, but his background as a Hyde Park liberal is going to continue to dog him. No issue is crushing on its own, but it all adds up. For the life of me I can’t figure out why he didn’t have better answers on Wright and on the “bitter” comments. The superdelegates cannot have been comforted by his performance.

I was a bit surprised about that, too. Can't he really think of anything better? Or Hillary, for that matter?

The general consensus of what I'm reading today seems to be that Obama took a licking last night...but Hillary may not have won too much, either. This, in NRO:

On the first count, one cannot say whether Obama “won” or “lost” without considering what Hillary needed to accomplish. There are only two ways she can win the nomination now. Either she must overcome Obama’s lead in pledged delegates (a.k.a. those won during the primaries and caucuses), which is nearly impossible mathematically, or she must win the votes of enough superdelegates (a.k.a. Democratic-party bosses) to overturn the verdict of the party rank-and-file. For her to do that, she will have to persuade a majority of the superdelegates (or a majority of them must reach the conclusion on their own) that Obama cannot win in the general election against John McCain.

Well, not entirely. For instance, all she may have to do is win the popular vote by any one or more of the counting schemes out there in order to have a very good argument, since a majority of Democrats have agreed that the majority vote should count for more than the pledged delegate count.

After about forty-five minutes, David Axelrod probably should have thrown in the towel and stopped the fight.

Obama got a little better as the night wore on, but the damage was done. He looked terrible tonight. He said he disowned Wright – contradicting his speech line about being no more able to disown Wright than his own grandmother — then backed away and said he only disowned his comments. When Hillary brought up Wright’s 9/11 comments, he merely lamented that some of his comments had been “objectionable.” He never quite explained why he stopped wearing the American flag pin, and he kept digging in deeper on William Ayers. He dismissed the question, then described Ayers as an “English professor.” He completely downplayed Ayers’ terrorist past, and said they didn’t exchange ideas “on a regular basis.” Then he compared his relationship to Ayers to his relationship with Senator Tom Coburn! Way to chase away the last of the Obamacans, Senator.

I wondered how Coburn liked the comparison, but I thought the point was valid...at least to a point. Coburn, after all, is a fellow senator and it is Obama's duty to work with him and pay attention to what he says. Not so with Ayers, the, um, English professor.

If the current president hasn’t been helped by the present campaign, look what’s it’s done to his predecessor. The Clinton legacy is wrecked. Left-wing bloggers, liberal columnists, and some Democratic politicians now despise Bill and Hillary Clinton — even more than did “the vast right-wing conspiracy” of the 1990s. ...

Globetrotting Bill Clinton spent seven years crafting a legacy as a post-partisan senior statesman. Now he’s thrown that away by devolving into a political henchman assigned to take down the Democratic Party’s first serious African-American candidate.

Whatever the final result of the 2008 campaign, the image of an above-the-fray Bill is no more — shattered somewhere between the disclosure of the $109 million Clinton tax returns and his finger-shaking lectures to the press about its supposed unfairness to his wife.

I know elite is a bad word in politics and everybody wants to throw back a few beers and go bowling, but the job you’re applying for? If it goes well, they might carve your head into a mountain. If you don’t actually think you’re better than us than, what the [bleep] are you doing? . . . In fact, not only do I want an elite president, I want someone who’s embarrassingly superior to me.

As any comedian would say when set up with a straight line like that, "fortunately, that isn't too hard to do". Seriously, though, this is remarkably like the liberal columnist I quoted for you yesterday who expressed confidence that nobody would want a president drawn from the likes of Joe and Josephine Sixpack. He stated it matter-of-factly, since it was quite obvious to him.

“And you woulda thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank, the way they carried on about this. And some of them, when they’re 60, they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11 at night, too.”

He just can’t help himself, can he? I mean, it seems reflexive — something for a psychologist to study. But I must say I liked that line about robbing a bank. Very nice. The line is also redolent of an era. Do people rob banks anymore? When I was growing up, I read bank-robbery stories all the time. Now I don’t. Maybe I am merely missing them.

One every hour or so, probably, by this year. That's so many that they aren't news any more, Jay.

The latest from Bill Richardson, New Mexico’s governor? He was explaining why he endorsed Obama, rather than Hillary. And he was refuting the idea that he owes his career to Bill Clinton, whose cabinet he served in. “Look, I was a successful congressman rescuing hostages before I was appointed.”

All class, Bill Richardson is, all class. Amazing that such a man has gone so far — even if his presidential campaign did flop.