Racist Double Standards

The left's deafening silence on Ludacris' controversial rap that Barack Obama's going to "paint the White House black" is matched today with the latest hypocritical campaign by Obama backers to smear the GOP as racist.

In response to John McCain's new ad buy questioning Barack Obama's experience to lead, the nihilists have charged the McCain campaign with exploiting white fears of black predation on young white women. Here's Crooks and Liars:

The McCain campaign is looking increasingly desperate with each attack ad has chosen to take a tried and true approach to their latest ad — veiled racism. Referring to Barack Obama as the “biggest celebrity in the world,” McCain’s ad conveniently and quite overtly slides footage of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton into the mix.

Here's Melissa McEwan's attack:

Once again, McCain reveals himself to be eminently, shockingly willing to embrace the heinous tactics of the Bush team that he once deplored. That anyone still considers this guy an honorable rogue, a maverick, or a hero is beyond laughable. He doesn't possess any lingering shred of integrity, and his alleged independent streak came to a screeching halt as it collided with the stumbling zombie corpse of his credibility the moment he stood in New Hampshire with his arm around the shoulders of the man whose operatives called his wife a junky and his adopted daughter illegitimate. He may have been honorable and brave once upon a time, but he’s not anymore.

Is there any reason left in the political world?

Various observers, including journalists at the major national dailies, have noted the presumptuousness of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. But making that argument, too, it turns out, is racist:

But what I'm most interested in today is the new meme the McCain campaign has been pushing for the last few weeks that Obama is presumptuous, arrogant and well ... just a bit uppity.

Both sides, left and right, make the same allegations - that the other has nothing going for itself but allegations of corruption or racism.

Yet throughout the entire 2008 campaign, the genuine racism that Americans have seen has been in the Democratic Party ranks, from Bill Clinton to Jesse Jackson to Luducris' incitement for John McCain to be shot and paralyzed.

Obama's Presumptuous Arrogance Risks Stunning Loss

Here's Dana Milbank on Barack Obama's "victory tour":

Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee....

As he marches toward Inauguration Day (Election Day is but a milestone on that path), Obama's biggest challenger may not be Republican John McCain but rather his own hubris.

Bonnie Erbe at U.S. News agrees:

Democratic Party leaders would have you believe they are barreling toward victory in November with a youthful, enigmatic, messiahlike candidate capable of resolving every ill and satisfying competing constituencies. The GOP candidate, on the other hand, switches message from the war to the economy to offshore oil drilling and back again. Sen. John McCain goes through staff, advisers, and surrogates more quickly than McDonald's changes burger flippers. What is wrong with this picture? Why are Democrats so united and on-message this year and Republicans so fractiously incompetent?

Stay tuned, friends, because this, too, could change. The cracks are growing in the Democratic unity dam. and McCain may be on the verge of getting his act together. Sen. Barack Obama needs to step off his "holier than thou" platform and get his designer shoes dirty. He needs to let voters catch a glimpse of the regular guy who may actually lurk under his veneer of superiority. From using a logo resembling a presidential seal at one speech earlier this year (an obvious error and never seen again) to addressing a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin and meeting with heads of state before he has reason to, Obama's puerile self-absorption may backfire on him and turn off the very voters he needs to turn on: the white working class. His campaign's use of Cecil B. De Mille speaking backdrops rivals Karl Rove's brilliant manipulation of wedge issues. But as Steve Kornacki of the New York Observer notes, this, too, has its downsides:

Mr. Obama's campaign has featured Reagan-like stagecraft that has made his opponents look like midgets, producing an effect that prompted Chris Matthews, in a moment that will haunt him to his grave, to talk of a certain "thrill going up [his] leg." But it never seems to move his polls numbers.

Indeed, according to Gallup and Rasmussen Reports daily tracking polls, Obama's European trip poll bounce dwindled almost immediately to pretrip levels.

See also, "Pro-Bama Media Bias May Mobilize Republican Enthusiasm."

Going Negative: McCain's New Attack Campaign

Unlike some in the GOP, I'm not worried about John McCain's new aggressiveness in attacking Barack Obama's cultural and political liabilities.

The latest indication of McCain's increasing focus is the new "Celeb" ad buy:

Here's the text:

He's the biggest celebrity in the world.
But, is he ready to lead?
With gas prices soaring, Barack Obama says no to offshore drilling.
And, says he'll raise taxes on electricity.
Higher taxes, more foreign oil, that's the real Obama.
JOHN MCCAIN: I'm John McCain and I approved this message.

Here's some analysis on McCain's new tack:

As Obama seems to be preparing to become president following his whirlwind trip to the Middle East and Europe, the McCain campaign is stepping up its criticisms with an aggressive new communications strategy.

McCain, himself, has suggested that Obama would prefer to lose the Iraq war in order to win the election. He has run a television ad blaming Obama for high gas prices, and has criticized him for skipping a meeting with injured U.S. troops in Germany because he couldn't bring television cameras along. All are charges that the Obama campaign vehemently disputes and are disputable.

But McCain advisers say that Obama's hyper-charged celebrity is one thing not open for debate, noting that no one else could just show up in Berlin to find 200,000 Germans screaming his name.

"There are some things about this race that cannot be changed. The fact that Barack Obama is the biggest celebrity in the world is a fundamental truth in the eyes of most Americans and people around the world," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. "We cannot argue against what is true. What we can make a case for is that despite his enormous celebrity status, his policies and his positions are not what the American people want in a president because he's inexperienced and his policies underscore a lack of judgment that Americans will not vote for in November."

In the meantime, the Obama camp is squirming under the microscope.

Perhaps Obama's non-bounce from the European tour is proving just how politically disastrous the trip was.

Ludacris Raps Assassination Chic for Obama

Ludacris, the popular rap music star, is known for glamorizing "a life of guns, violence, drugs and disrespect of women."

So perhaps it's unexceptional that Ludacris would attack presumptive GOP nominee John McCain as not belonging in "any chair," in the Oval Office or otherwise, "unless he's paralyzed." Via Gateway Pundit, Hot Air, and The Swamp:

Here are the key lyrics:

... so get off your ass, black people, it's time to get out and vote!
paint the White House black and I'm sure that's got 'em terrified
McCain don't belong in ANY chair unless he's paralyzed ...

So, is this racist?

Not for Spencer Ackerman:

Dave Weigel tipped me off to Hot Air posting this as an example of what they're too pussy-assed to call Luda's unforgivable blackness. But look: you're playing into our hands. Play every race card you want. Expose yourselves completely and irrevocably. Get out there on the record. Just remember what they say about payback.

Assassination chic, defended with some extreme left-wing demonology of vengeance.

Well then, who's exposing whom?

Turns out that Obama's hip to it, in any case: "Outrageously Offensive."

Deconstructing Obama's Legal Pedagogy

Recall what I noted last night, in my post on Barack Obama at the University of Chicago Law School:

I haven't seen any law professors weigh in yet, but I thought I'd throw in my two-cents from the political science perspective."

In focusing on Obama's reading selections, I suggested that his assignments reveal a particular postmodern pedagogy. Obama puts special emphasis on the work of Derrick Bell, the country's original proponent of critical race theory.

I'm thus pleased to see I'm not only one who's noticed something skewed here. The New York Times is updating Jodi Kantor's original articles with commentary from four legal experts, in its update to "Inside Professor Obama’s Classroom." John C. Eastman, from Chapman University Law School, observes that while he's impressed that Obama included readings from "across the ideological spectrum," the special attention to Bell's postmodernism raises red flags:

My one criticism of the course is his recommendation that students read Derrick Bell’s summary of some landmark (if notorious) Supreme Court decisions. Cases such as Dred Scott v. Sanford, The Slaughterhouse Cases, and Plessy v. Ferguson, and in particular the strong dissenting opinions in those cases, cry out for careful study of the original materials, not a secondary summary.

Yes, especially not a secondary summary from a predetermined deconstructionist approach. But see also Randy Barnett's entry, where he tries to preempt criticism of Obama by noting:

While the course materials themselves do not tell us very much about Senator Obama, the candidate, what they do tell is about Obama, the teacher, is generally favorable....

Indeed, if one is looking to these material to learn more about Senator Obama’s own views of either “racism and the law” or the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, one will be disappointed.

I think that lets Obama off the hook too easily, especially since Obama's syllabus assigned seven selections from Derrick Bell, in contrast to one from Robert Bork and one from Randall Kennedy.

Instead of pedagogy, Professor Ann Althouse focuses on legal credentials, and especially Obama's position as a tenured lecturer without publishing one word of legal research:

After his loss in the 2000 Congressional primary race to former Black Panther Bobby L. Rush, "colleagues noticed that he seemed exhausted and was smoking more than usual," and they offered him a tenured faculty position (with a job for his wife). Think about that! He never produced a word of legal scholarship, after all those years teaching, and now they would simply give him tenure — at the University of Chicago Law School, a top 5 school, where the faculty is known for voluminous scholarly publishing. The case for tenure in law school depends predominantly on scholarship. You don't get tenure for being a very popular teacher. The failure to publish anything should be fatal to the tenure case of a lawprof who was hired with a belief in his promise as a scholar, but here tenure is bundled into the original offer to someone who had demonstrated that he lacked that promise. So this is interesting. The University of Chicago Law School has some explaining to do.

The question of Obama's qualifications also comes up at the Wall Street Journal, "‘Publish or Perish’? Apparently Not for Obama at U. of Chicago Law."

See also my original post, "Professor Obama's Radical Syllabus."

Professor Obama's Radical Syllabus

Jodi Kantor's pair of stories on Barack Obama's teaching years at the University of Chicago Law School should help fill in some gaps on what Americans genuinely know about the presumptive Democratic nominee (here and here).

I haven't seen any law professors weigh in yet, but I thought I'd throw in my two-cents from the political science perspective.

Kantor's first piece, "Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Apart," provides an overview and character sketch of Obama's faculty days at the Chicago law school. The feeling here is that Obama was well-liked and highly-respected. He also left some colleagues wanting a little more in the way of change, growth, personal challenge, and academic reflection:

The Chicago faculty is more rightward-leaning than that of other top law schools, but if teaching alongside some of the most formidable conservative minds in the country had any impact on Mr. Obama, no one can quite point to it.

“I don’t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,” said Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. “His entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.”

The essence of the story is that Obama was a committed, impassioned, inspiring professor, but teaching was literally an adjunct to his political aspirations. He didn't push too hard - never pressed buttons or stepped on toes - and didn't publish for fear of an ideological paper trail.

But he did leave one, in a sense, that provides at least telltale indicators to his ideological thinking.

As Kantor notes, in her second piece, "Inside Professor Obama’s Classroom," the newspaper's research into Obama's Chicago days unearthed some of his teaching materials, including syllabi, examinations, and internal memos.

Particularly revealing is Obama's syllabus to his Spring 1994 law seminar, "Current Issues in Racism and the Law." If Obama was resistant to conservative ideas at Chicago, his reading assignments open the door to his closeted postmodern approach to legal curricula.

It's not as though Obama failed to provide scholarly balance for his students. Included in his reading packet were selections from Robert Bork, the esteemed conservative constitutional scholar whose Supreme Court nomination was rejected for confirmation in 1987.

Yet, beyond Bork it appears Obama was intensely concerned with promoting an social-activist interpretation of race and the law (Kantor's main article stresses this as well). It's revealing, for example, that Obama indicated that on recommended readings students might substitute the work of Derrick Bell for some of the other selections:

My main purpose in preparing this packet was to present, in easily accessible form, a basic primer regarding both the themes that have dominated the race debate in this country, as well as some of the key cases and statutes that reflect this debate.

Some of you will already be familiar with the material; others will find the material new. As a result, I've made at least half of the material optional (indicated in the syllabus). Those with the time and inclination can read the entire packet, while those with tighter schedules or a strong background in civil rights law can confine themselves to the required reading.

More particularly, in both the Slavery and Reconstruction sections, I have included short excerpts from Derrick Bell's, Race, Racism, and American Law, that may serve as substitutes for some of the optional material.

Additional optional materials suggested were Derrick Bell's summaries of major cases such as Dred Scott, or his analyses of Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

Again, readers will have to check with the law professors, especially regarding the civil rights law casebook (which looks unexceptional), but the privileged position of Derrick Bell in the course provides a partial roadmap to Obama's teaching goals and ideological foundations.

Bell is a founder of the law profession's "critical race theory" of legal scholarship.

Critical race theory combines activism and scholarship in legal studies. Guiding questions in the genre focus on the nexus of race, racism, power, and privilege in civil rights and American history. The field is explicitly postmodernist, in that it takes issue with "conventional narratives" and seeks to unpack the social construction of white supremacy and black oppression. Critical race theorists are inherently radical; the goal of activist teaching and scholarhip is to break down all forms of subjugation, as well as the eradication of society's materialist edifices of elite hiearchy and classism.

The significance of Obama's pedagogy should be now become apparent.

Throughout the primaries Obama was battered with eruptions and revelations of controversal relationships with people way out of the mainstream of society.

Obama, if anyone could forget, was a parishioner at Trinity Unity Lutheran Church, who's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, preached a theology of black liberation, a religious tradition of Marxit-based social justice and the empowerment of the marginalized. Some adherents of liberation theology, particularly in Latin America during the Cold War, explicitly advocated the revolutionary overthrow of conservative governmental regimes. Obama also held longstanding and troubling ties to '60s-era domestic revolutionaries, William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn. In addition, the extent of Obama's relationship to radical groups such as ACORN are still being revealed.

The question for many people, who know little of such radicals and their front-organizations, is how could a U.S. Senator - and now presumptive Democratic nominee - have such extensive ties to extremists?

Professor Obama's radical syllabus is one of the pieces of the puzzle. The Illinois Senator could sit in the pews listening to Reverend Jeremiah for twenty years, nodding his head in agreement, because he spent his working days grading law school essays seeking to deconstruct the hegemony of black marginalization under America's legal apartheid. Obama could organize for social change - attending rallies and campaign events - with Weathermen terrorists because he was down with their ideological foundations. He could push a politics of social agitation in housing because he saw the slumlords of the South Side as the appendages of the capitalist oppressor state.

This is the intellectual environment cultivated in Obama's teaching and studies in civil rights law.

Barack Obama is America's first postmodern presidential candidate.

By training and profession, he's a social deconstructionist comfortably embedded in the lifestyle of oppositional legal and political culture. He has carefully navigated the waters of legal academe and municipal machine politics to carve out an outwardly non-confrontational demeanor, while on the inside he's informed by post-material, postmodern activist priorities, and his possible accession to the presidency would bring to power an occupant in the Oval Office dramatically unlike any of those who have come before.

Image Credit: New York Times

What Record Deficits Teach Us

It is significant news that the Bush administration is expected to leave office with the federal budget showing a record $482 billion deficit. There's even some added outrage that defense appropriations for Afghanistan and Iraq are held "off-budget," which ostensibly swells the numbers even further.

It's interesting, though, that liberal economist Dean Baker notes that in terms of deficits as a percentage of GDP, the Bush budget legacy should be less controversial than his predecessors:

The latest projections show a deficit of $490 billion. By the absolutely meaningless measure of nominal dollars this is a record. But if anyone thinks this is giving information to readers, then they have no business writing news. The relevant measure is the deficit as a share of GDP. The 2009 deficit will be equal to about 3.3 percent of GDP. Even if you add in 1.3 percent of GDP for the money borrowed from Social Security this only gets you to 4.6 percent, well below the 6.0 percent deficit hit in 1983.

President Reagan was in office in 1983, which leads Matthew Yglesias to hammer home the point, with reference to the following graph:

Dean observes that "the 2009 deficit will be equal to about 3.3 percent of GDP," similar to the deficits earlier in the Bush administration and to the deficits ran in the mid-1970s. The real "record" deficits hit in the 1980s and early 1990s were substantially larger than today's deficits.

This visual display of quantitative information helps put things in perspective. Yglesias focuses on the "real" record deficits, which preceded President Clinton's two terms in the 1990s.

But note how President Bush's budget legacy at 3.3 percent of GDP is roughly equal to the deficit graphed in 1968, near the end of Lyndon Johnson's presidency. According to the data, the fiscal situation moved to surplus in President Nixon's first term and then deteriorated following the Johnson adminstration's global monetization of America's balance-of-payments difficulties, as well as the exogenous oil-shocks of the 1970s. After the initial "record" budget shortfalls of the Reagan years, the deficit neared 2.5 percent of GDP by 1989, not much different from where we stand today.

What seems clear is that a Democratic Bill Clinton administration is the exception to a U.S. fiscal policy pattern of deficit-financed economic growth. Further, the implications of the pattern of long-term budgetary imbalance remain unclear, given the size, dynamism, and resilience of the U.S. economy.

As Paul Samuelson noted in the 1990s:

Those who study economics or make economic policies ... will confront the need to service a large external debt and the possibility of sluggish economic growth. But in the midst of today's tempest, keep in mind the observations on growth and debt of the English historian Lord Macaulay, written more than a century ago:

At every stage in the growth of that debt, the nation has set up the same cry of anguish and despair. At every stage in the growth of that debt, it has been seriously asserted by wise men that bankruptcy and ruin were at hand. Yet still the debt went on growing; and still bankruptcy and ruin were as remote as ever.

The prophets of evil were under a double delusion. They erroneously imagined that there was an exact analogy between the case of an individual who is in debt to another individual and the case of a society which is in debt to a part of itself ... They made no allowance for the effect produced by the incessant progress of every experimental science, and by the incessant efforts of every man to get on in life. They saw that the deficit grew; and they forgot that other things grew as well.

What can Macaulay teach us ... ? We can hardly doubt that high fiscal deficits are producing an unprecedented growth in ... debt in the United States....

But it would be unwise to forecast economic collapse. The spector of national bankruptcy or financial ruin is remote for the United States...

That's a good bit of perspective, after all.

Graphic Credit: Matthew Yglesias

Pro-Bama Media Bias May Mobilize Republican Enthusiasm

Gallup reports that John McCain may ultimately benefit from Barack Obama's overseas trip last week.

It turns out that public opinion, especially among Republicans, is reacting negatively to the aggressive media coverage of Obama's world tour:

John McCain benefit from Barack Obama's much-publicized foreign trip? Several observations from the just-completed USA Today/Gallup poll suggest that this is a possibility....

The heavy coverage of the trip may have fueled speculation (or reinforced pre-existing attitudes) about news media bias in Obama's favor. A separate set of questions in the weekend poll asked Americans about their views of the news media's coverage of the two major-party candidates. Americans are more than twice as likely to say media coverage of Obama is unfairly positive as to say it is unfairly negative. For McCain, the opposite is true, with many more seeing coverage of him as unfairly negative than as unfairly positive.

The differences in views of the media are enormous between those who are voting for McCain and those voting for Obama. In general, McCain voters largely believe their candidate is being treated unfairly while Obama is getting overly friendly media coverage. In turn, Obama voters tend to view the media coverage of both candidates as even-handed....

The media's coverage of Obama's foreign trip, coupled with a strong reaction from McCain and other conservatives, may have created the seemingly paradoxical effect of increasing Republicans' energy and excitement about voting for McCain. If this is the case, the degree to which this is short-term versus long-term is still not clear.

My feeling is that conservative outrage at media favoritism toward Obama will be lasting.

Just yesterday liberal Frank Rich at the New York Times suggested that Obama is now the "acting president" and that, in fact, the media's really giving John McCain a "free pass."

Thus, it's entirely likely that we'll see lingering conservative resentment, as more and more of such coverage looks to annoint Obama presumptuously.

Jonathan Martin and Mike Allen capture the essence of this in their essay, "The Campaign is All About Obama":

If you were to make a movie about the general election campaign so far, John McCain would be a supporting actor.

Despite vulnerabilities that have kept the race closer in polls than most analysts expected — and McCain even jumped to a 4-percentage-point lead among likely voters in a USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday — Barack Obama dominates the race by virtually any other measure. He is dictating the agenda and soaking up news coverage as McCain and his team scramble to react.

As Martin and Allen observe, however, the race remains entirely within McCain's grasp. The key will be for the McCain camp to hone-in on an effective campaign message to drive the battle on the hustings until November.

Fortunately, with McCain's "Troops" ad buy last weekend, we're seeing a turnaround in the McCain organization toward a more forthright aggressivness, and this shift may provide the focus to increase Obama's negatives and sow doubt among an electorate ready for change but hestitant about the acession of oppositional values and untried leadership to the Oval Office.

Graphic Credit: Gallup

Blue Dogs Under the Bus? Go for it, Democrats!

You've got to love Glenn Greenwald. He provides conservatives with so much humorous fodder.

The latest example is Greenwald's call for progressives to target "Blue Dogs," the centrist Democrats who recently "caved" on FISA and are alleged to be "Beltway Democrats" increasing their own power by "mimicking Republicans."

The essay's gotten quite a response. Especially good is this from Jennifer Rubin:

In a piece filled with perfectly awful analysis and advice Glenn Greenwald says that the problem with Congress is that is was too accommodating of the evil agenda of George W. Bush. FISA passage is at the top of the list. If they hadn’t passed that bill, allowing terrorism surveillance to continue and had cut off funding for the war, they wouldn’t have poll numbers in the teens.

He offers no factual support for this, of course, and indeed polling showed that while the decision to go to war remains unpopular voters did not and still don’t favor a cut off of funds. And Greenwald assumes, again without data, that the public like Barack Obama is stewing that the surge worked — and now taking its wrath out on Congress. His solution? Punish the conservative Blue Dog Democrats, target them for defeat and run them out of town on a rail.

To that I say: oh please do. Let’s see them run Nancy Pelosi clones in the South, anti-gun advocates in Colorado and ultra-liberals in Pennsylvania and Ohio. (See, sometimes you forget that conservatives are not alone in their desire to so purify the party that they would winnow it down to a phone-booth size contingent of true believers.)

But, alas, I do not see any sign that the Democrats are following Greenwald’s advice. Unfortunately for the Republicans, Rahm Emanuel figured out that a party — at least one which seeks majority status — must be broad-based and willing to run people who can win in disparate parts of the country.

So on second thought, forget all the criticism. Go for it, Democrats! Throw the Blue Dogs out, vote to cut off funding for the surge and repeal FISA while you’re at it. And don’t you listen to those poll numbers about off-shore drilling either. It’s just a scheme by Fox news to get you to destroy the environment.

This is the biggest kick I've gotten from lampooning Greenwald since Megan McArdle noted that:

Mr. Greenwald's anger at the establishment power structure seems to be rapidly transmuting into anger at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure.

I took a bit more serious a stab at the progressive's attack on "Blue Dogs" in "The Left's Demonology of Vengeance."

Reading Rubin, though, is relaxing. I agree: Go for it, Democrats! LOL!!

Between War and Peace in Iraq

Today's bombing attacks in Baghdad and Kirkuk are a tragic reminder that Iraq remains dangerous amid an overwhelming improvement in the nation's security.

The Los Angeles Times reports on a country that lives between war and peace:

The departure this month of the last of the 28,500 extra troops sent in a U.S. military buildup leaves Iraq in a rickety calm, an in-between space that is not quite war and not quite peace where ethnic and sectarian tensions bubble beneath the surface.

Politicians and U.S. officials hail the remarkable turnaround from open civil war that left 3,700 Iraqis dead during the worst month in the fall of 2006, compared with June's toll of 490, according to Pentagon estimates.

Signs abound that normal life is starting to return. Revelers can idle away the hours at several neighborhood joints in Baghdad where the tables are buried in beers and a man can bring a girlfriend dolled up in a nice dress.

Despite the gains, the political horizon is clouded: Shiite Muslim parties are locked in dangerous rivalries across central and southern Iraq. Kurds and Arabs in the north compete for land with no resolution in sight. U.S.-backed Sunni Arab fighters who turned on the group Al Qaeda in Iraq could return to the insurgency if the government does not deliver jobs and a chance to join the political process.

Bombings, assassinations and kidnappings still occur almost daily. And those out enjoying Baghdad's night life feel safe only because they are staying inside their own districts in a city transformed into a patchwork of enclaves after years of sectarian violence.

Whether the quiet endures hinges on many factors, including the results of yet-unscheduled provincial and national elections and whether Iraq's religious and ethnic factions can find a fair power-sharing formula.

The country is bedeviled by the question: What happens as the U.S. military vacates outposts in Baghdad neighborhoods, where it has stood as a buffer and occasional arbiter between Sunnis and Shiites and even arrested police and army commanders suspected of sectarian agendas?

This really is the central question, not just in Iraq, but in the United States as well, where Barack Obama continues to argue that Iraq's a "distraction" from our challenges elsewhere in the world.

As we can see in the photo above, while some threats remains, Iraqis live today without the fear of violence that was routine just 18-months ago.

Iraqis no longer face ethnic cleansing and genocide. There is no more civil war. Regional commanders of the Iraqi army report no threat from al Qaeda in most of the country.

The rates of Iraqi civilian deaths from violent crime pale in comparison to South Africa.

None of this is to minimize today's suffering, or other deaths of recent months. It is to put things in perspective.

It is also to put things in contrast to war opponents on the left who are nodding approvingly at the attacks, arguing that this morning once again demonstrates the failure of the surge:

The essence of the "success" of the surge is that, as in 2004 and 2005, you only sometimes read about that kind of thing, whereas at its worst you read about it frequently. That's not nothing, but people should understand that even in its "better" state Iraq is very much a shattered society featuring an unenviable quality of life.

That's just not true, as we can see from the analysis - and images - here.

See also, Long War Journal, "Female Suicide Bombers Kill 70 Iraqis in Kirkuk, Baghdad."

Photo Credit: "Iraqi children run in a park in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, July 21. In Baghdad, parks are filled every weekend with families playing and picnicking with their children. That was unthinkable only a year ago, when the first, barely visible signs of a turnaround emerged," Los Angeles Times.

McCain Leads Obama 49-45 Among Likely Voters

Chris Bowers strained over the weekend to find some daylight for Barack Obama in polling data vis-à-vis John McCain, strangely seeing in Obama a move away from the ideological center in the Illinois Senator's European tour:

Obama has regained the sense of pride and inspiration that he lost with the appearance of moving to the center. Moving to the center, or really moving in any direction, is dangerous for a politician because it sends a message that the politician is ashamed and apologetic for who s/he actually is. This head-hanging feeling will almost invariably translate into a loss of support because, in the same way that we don't want to feel ashamed of our country or of ourselves, few Americans want a President who is ashamed of who s/he is. Thus, Obama's overseas trip was the perfect anecdote for the move to the center meme.

This is an unusual interpretation of Obama's trip.

Indeed, Obama himself had "cast the tour as a chance for substantive discussion on issues relevant to the American public."

The tour, in other words, was a chance for the Illinois Senator to gain credibility with Americans in the mainstream, in contrast to what Bowers wants folks to believe.

What is more, the European bounce for Obama that many hailed last week appears to have evaporated.

In contrast to the subjective reality among Bowers and his friends at Open Left, McCain actually leads Obama among like voters in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain moved from being behind by 6 points among "likely" voters a month ago to a 4-point lead over Democrat Barack Obama among that group in the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. McCain still trails slightly among the broader universe of "registered" voters. By both measures, the race is tight.

The Friday-Sunday poll, mostly conducted as Obama was returning from his much-publicized overseas trip and released just this hour, shows McCain now ahead 49%-45% among voters that Gallup believes are most likely to go to the polls in November. In late June, he was behind among likely voters, 50%-44%.

Among registered voters, McCain still trails Obama, but by less. He is behind by 3 percentage points in the new poll (47%-44%) vs. a 6-point disadvantage (48%-42%) in late June.

Results based on the survey of 791 likely voters have margins of error of +/- 4 percentage points -- so McCain's lead is not outside that range. Results based on the survey of 900 registered voters also have margins of error of +/- 4 percentage points.

Gallup editor Frank Newport tells Jill that "registered voters are much more important at the moment," because Election Day is still 100 days away, but that the likely-voter result suggests that it may be possible for McCain to energize Republicans and turn them out this fall.

See also, Rasmussen Reports, "Daily Presidential Tracking Poll," which sees Obama’s Berlin bounce collapsing:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that Barack Obama’s Berlin bounce is fading. Obama now attracts 45% of the vote while John McCain earns 42%. When "leaners" are included, it’s Obama 48% and McCain 45%. Both Obama and McCain are viewed favorably by 56% of voters.

An interesting hypothesis is whether McCain's attack on Obama's indifference to wounded veterans - seen in McCain's "Troops" ad buy over the weekend - is having an effect on the numbers.

See, "McCain: Obama All Politics On Iraq."

Comments on Tennessee Valley Church Killings

Firedoglake is attacking the conservative blogosphere for its alleged silence on the news that "some wingnut crazy shot up a Unitarian church in Tennessee, killing 2 and wounding 7."

Dave Neiwert, also at Firedoglake, argues that the "chickens came home to roost."

I'm troubled to see political polarization in times like these.

I first send out my condolences for the bereaved, and God's blessings to the survivors. But I also want to lay down a moral challenge, to those on both the left and right, for an end to the politicization of these personal tragedies.

The Knoxville News Sentinel has the full story, but the Yankee Confederate has observations on Jim Adkisson, the suspect apprehended in the case:

While many in the political blogosphere will no doubt focus on the fact that Adkisson said he hated liberals and gays, the fact of the matter is that the didn't target a gay club or local progressive political groups, he specifically targeted a church. He did so after expressing beliefs to neighbors in the past that he had an abiding anger against Christianity, an anger that appears rooted in his childhood. The church appears to have been targeted because it embodied at least three things this pathetic human being hated, not just the one or two things I know certain critics will single out as they view the world through their own warped prisms.

Adkisson had apparently planned to keep murdering church-goers until gunned down by police. He planned to keep killing innocents until he died in a hail of police bullets... suicide-by-cop. But he was instead tackled and restrained by church-goers just seconds into his attack as he attempted to reload after shooting his shotgun's magazine dry....

Sunday was a horrible day for the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, and there will be terrible days ahead as they seek to recover, and to heal.

The Tennessee church killings might be seen as an example of domestic terrorism (take note Melissa McEwan) , and no one, no reasonable, thoughtful person, should try to score political points from this tragedy.

A background story, also from the Knoxville News Sentinel, indicates that Adkisson has a history of psychological instablity. He hated "anyone who was different," and he had treatened to kill his wife in 2000. Adkisson had trouble holding down stable employment.

This is a story of personal and community tragedy, not of political payback. Let the healing begin.

Robert Novak Diagnosed With Brain Tumor

Robert Novak, the "dark prince" of American conservative journalism, has been diagnosed with a brain tumor, the Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak said today he has been diagnosed with a brain tumor but says that, “God willing,” he plans to be back at work soon.

Novak said he was diagnosed Sunday with a tumor and will soon begin treatment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

He issued the following statement:

“On Sunday, July 27, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I have been admitted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where doctors will soon begin appropriate treatment. “I will be suspending my journalistic work for an indefinite but, God willing, not too lengthy period."

Novak is alert and talking — he wrote the statement announcing his illness — but in intensive care, where the hospital does not allow phone calls or flowers, according to his assistant, Kathleen Connolly.

"He's talking,'' Connolly said. "He seemed fine."

The diagnosis was sudden. Novak became ill Sunday during a family outing near Cape Cod, Mass. A family member called 911, and he was brought by ambulance to Brigham and Women's Hospital, where the diagnosis was made.

It’s too early to know whether the tumor is malignant or benign, his assistant said.

"They haven't even done the biopsy yet," Connolly said.

That’s to be done later today, she said.

There's more at the link.

He was visiting his daughter in Massachusetts when he became ill.

Among his many great journalistic moments, Novak predicted that John McCain would become the GOP nominee after the Arizona Senator's comeback win in the New Hampshire primary in January. Novak's been with the Chicago Sun-Times since 1966.

Perhaps his medical condition contributed to his automobile accident last week, when he hit a pedestrian in Washington, D.C. Some bloggers hoped "karma" would catch up with him at the news of the incident (see also Dan Collins).

I wish him a successful recovery. God's blessings to Novak and his family.

**********

UPDATE: It didn't take long for the secular demonologists to attack:

Just go away Novak. No sympathy for you here. You’re [sic] aiding and abetting this criminal administration in treasonous activity will be your well deserved legacy. Say “hi” to Reagan when you get to Hell.

I'll add additional examples of the left's attacks on Novak in later updates, although I won't quote any further demonization. We just need a timeout on the hate once in a while.

Added: The Huffington Post's article on Novak's illness is closed to comments, which is the policy there now, thankfully, to preempt the hate-filled attacks.

Barack Obama is Creepy

Rick Moran demonstrates why he's one of the best conservative writers in the blogosphere, with his essay this morning, "Top Ten Things That Creep Me Out About Obama."

This is a must-read piece, but Moran's smart to come right out and say, "I know it is not politically correct to say that Obama 'creeps me out. '"

It's not, and I think that's why many folks on the right are attacked mercilessly, because they see all the way through Obama's pomp and unseriousness.

In any case, I do want to quote a couple of passages, for example:

6. It creeps me out that with the exception of most conservatives, Obama’s radical associations and radical past – including his being on a first name basis with an unreconstructed terrorist – doesn’t seem to bother many people. What am I missing here? When Obama makes an actual political alliance with a radical Maoist organization like The New Party, going so far as to attending their meetings and recruiting their members to work on his state senate campaign, why is there no call for the candidate to explain himself? Nor has there been any effort – save a couple of scattered stories in the National Review and elsewhere that detail Obama’s association with the radical group ACORN.

It’s as if the entire “Obama movement,” made up mostly of good, mainstream Democrats, is so in thrall to the candidate that they can’t see the warning signs of this fellow’s true radicalism. They dismiss his past by simply pointing to the here and now and saying “See? He really is a moderate kind of guy after all.” We don’t know that because no one has ever – ever – asked him to explain why he sought the endorsement of a radical communist group when running for the state senate and why he associated himself with the radical group ACORN.

Beyond creepy. Truly scary…

5. Has there ever been a creepier presidential hopeful’s spouse than Michelle Obama? She actually said this to a political gathering last February: “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

Rarely has there been a creepier utterance by a major candidate for president or his spouse (Ron Paul has said some very, very creepy things). This one set off alarm bells in my head the moment I heard it. It elicited the question that many of us who oppose this guy have been asking more and more frequently lately.

Just who in the hell does this guy think he is? “Require” us to do what? “Demand” what? Besides coming off sounding like Evita Peron, Michelle Obama has a very weird view of the art of politics which works by persuasion and not by compulsion.

That one registers a 8.5 on the Creepy-O-Meter.

4. It creeps me out that Obama continues to speak as if he is president already and that the election is some mere formality that if he had his druthers, we could do without. His use of the royal “we” is very weird as well. Jack Tapper of ABC News noticed the same thing about Obama and his staff. Just one example of many: During an interview with ABC’s Nightline, he said he “wouldn’t be doing my job as Commander in Chief” if he just did whatever the generals said in Iraq. Obviously, it is not his job. And this is not the only example as Tapper points out in that Newsbusters piece.

A couple of times where the candidate falls into the mental state of what he would do as president and referring to himself as already elected would be understandable. Obama does it all the time and is seemingly unaware of how it makes him appear.

I've long-noted Obama's radical ties, which are so substantial that it's frightening that someone with his background may dramatically influence much of America's future, especially in foreign policy.

But this last part about Obama's creepy tendency toward presumptuousness came home powerfully to me last week. I mean, face it: Obama's Berlin speech was a presidential speech without being president. Obama borrowed liberally from past presidents in making the address, which only made him look more like a "great" presidential wannabe.

But note Moran's top creep:

The number one thing about Obama that creeps me out is the ease and comfort with which he lies. All politicians lie. Presidential candidates lie more than other politicians. But Obama’s lies are brazen and breathtaking.

And just think, this creep might actually win in November!

The Pendulum of Governmental Activism

Friday's Wall Street Journal featured a comprehensive analysis of the ebb and flow of activist government in U.S. history, "Unraveling Reagan: Amid Turmoil, U.S. Turns Away From Decades of Deregulation."

The piece is deceptively titled, I think.

While the article correctly notes a deep shift in government policy toward deregulation and the relaxation of antitrust in the Reagan years, in areas like defense and entitlements government's role expanded during that time. What the story's really getting at, I would argue, is how the public philosophy shifts over time from periods of private interest to periods of public purpose. This the formulation of the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The Cycles of American History (1986).

Oftentimes, crises of wrenching tumult in the economy and society force a realignment in the public philosophy toward a new period of political activism and social obligation. Schlesinger was writing during the age of Reagan, and through both Democratic and Republican adminstration's since the late-1980s, we have not seen a shift to Schlesinger's hypothesized era of public purpose.
Are we heading into a new era now, with the acesssion of a new era of activism and governmental responsibility under a possible Democratic adminstratin in 2009?

The housing and financial crisis convulsing the U.S. is powering a new wave of government regulation of business and the economy.

Federal and state governments alike are increasingly hands-on in their effort to deal with failing businesses, plunging house prices, worthless mortgages and soaring energy prices. The steps add up to a major challenge to the movement toward deregulation that has defined American governance for much of the past quarter-century since the "Reagan Revolution" of the early 1980s. In fact, some proponents today of a bigger oversight role for government are Republican heirs to the legacy of President Reagan....

Already, the Federal Reserve has dialed up its scrutiny of Wall Street investment banks, placing officials inside the giant firms and weighing in on their capital requirements, after taking the unusual step of offering tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans. The Fed has also agreed to lend money to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, potentially giving the agency more oversight of the two giant housing-finance companies as well.

At the same time, state utility commissions are re-establishing control over power companies that they ceded during earlier waves of deregulation. The Education Department is taking a step toward nationalizing the market for student loans, after private lenders abandoned that business.

The debate over Washington's hand in the economy is at the heart of the presidential campaign. Both major-party candidates are endorsing proposals to create new, Federal Reserve-style commissions to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and decide how to spend billions of dollars on energy-efficient technology....

The degree of change will depend on who occupies the White House next January. Sen. Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic candidate, has talked about a sharp increase in taxes on wealthy Americans, and a windfall-profits tax on oil companies. Republican rival Sen. John McCain would cut taxes on corporations.

I thought about the question of an expanding public sector this afternoon, while reading Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

Douthat and Salam, while making the case that the GOP must shift from a near-exclusive focus on social issues and national security to concern for the political-economy of working class constituencies, they also note that periods of public reform work best when they harness the nation's traditional moral conservatism and the blue-collar work ethic of responsiblity and social stakeholding:

These voters were receptive to economic populism (as the success of George Wallace in '68, and then Ross Perot a generation later, made clear), but they weren't particularly receptive to the tax-and-transfer redistributionism that the Democrats of the 1970s and '80s were associated with, because it seemed primarily aimed at taking money out their pockets and handing it out to the underserving poor.

Blue-collar workers were the working class, after all, and the genius of the New Deal had been to use government power to help those who helped themselves - to offer a helping hand to people clambering up the ladder, rather than lavishing subsidies on the indigent. If you had a job, in the New Deal dispensation, you received Social Security benefits. If you saved for a home, you earned a home-mortgage deduction. If you worked hard and played by the rules, you received a pension, medical care, and a large enough salary that your wife could afford to stay at home with the kids.

Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, by contrast, often eliminated the coercive and moralistic element from government spending, and as a result, working-class voters felt themselves to be subsidizing a growing, failing welfare system that cost them money and seemed to undermine their values into the bargain. As a young Republican strategist put it as early as 1969, the "Democratic Party fell victim to the ideological imperatives of a liberalism which had carried it beyond the taxing of few for the benefits of many (the New Deal) to programs taxing the many on behalf of the few."

So, our dilemma for the present era of rising political activism is coming shape of rived governmental power: Will a potential Democratic administration next year preserve traditional conceptions of working-class moralism, or will the failing big-government of the Great Society era reemerge, with an additional propulsion from the postmodern, one-worldist sensiblities of Barack Obama and his affinity to maching-style politics and "progressive" ideological socio-economic reengineering?

Graphic Credit: Wall Street Journal

(Postscript: Douthat and Salam do not provide a footnote for that unnamed "young Republican strategist," but it sounds like Kevin Phillips, who published The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969).

The Far Left's Attack on Direct Democracy

I'm not always a big fan of the initiative process, one of the mechanisms of direct democracy. For the most part, at least in California, the measures have been taken over by the moneyed interests, exactly the opposite of what the Progressive reformers had in mind a century ago.

Yet, there's a majoritarianism to initiatives that's hard to dismiss, and in recent years conservatives have been able to beat back the excesses of the postmodern rights movement with popular revolts from the ballot box.

It's no surprise then, that entrenched minority special interests would work to thwart the will of the voters by abusing the signature petition process by which intiatives qualify for the ballot. John Fund has the story:

The initiative is a reform born out of the Progressive Era, when there was general agreement that powerful interests had too much influence over legislators. It was adopted by most states in the Midwest and West, including Ohio and California. It was largely rejected by Eastern states, which were dominated by political machines, and in the South, where Jim Crow legislators feared giving more power to ordinary people.

But more power to ordinary people remains unpopular in some quarters, and nothing illustrates the war on the initiative more than the reaction to Ward Connerly's measures to ban racial quotas and preferences. The former University of California regent has convinced three liberal states -- California, Washington and Michigan -- to approve race-neutral government policies in public hiring, contracting and university admissions. He also prodded Florida lawmakers into passing such a law. This year his American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) aimed to make the ballot in five more states. But thanks to strong-arm tactics, the initiative has only made the ballot in Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska.

"The key to defeating the initiative is to keep it off the ballot in the first place," says Donna Stern, Midwest director for the Detroit-based By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). "That's the only way we're going to win." Her group's name certainly describes the tactics that are being used to thwart Mr. Connerly.

Fund details a long list of abuses by BAMN and other left-wing actors: Claiming that random "duplicate" blank lines on a petition sheet is evidence of fraud; completely rewriting an initiative's ballot summary to negatively influence voter understanding of the measure, as in case of Missouri's Secretary of State; and harassing and citing local signature-gatherers for circulating petitions in front of a local library in Kansas City, for example.

The article goes on:

In Nebraska, a group in favor of racial preferences ran a radio ad that warned that those who signed the "deceptive" petition "could be at risk for identity theft, robbery, and much worse."

Those on the left are asssumed to more concerned with the "rights" of the people, and with the "democratic process." Indeed, leftists are often thought to be more "tolerant" than the mean, old conservative troglodytes.

In truth, it's a mistaken view that liberals are more concerned about "rights," and they're not more "tolerant." In fact, precisely the opposite is true.

For more on this, see Arthur Brooks, "Liberal Hatemongers."

More Cowbell! Obama Spurns His Poor Kenyan Family

Barack Obama's soaring rhetoric is all fluff. He talks the talk but won't walk the walk. In Berlin, he called to lift up the poor, but it turns out he's left his own poor Kenyan family members to fend for themselves:

It is an extraordinary sight to walk into a basic two-room house under a mango tree in rural east Africa and discover what is essentially a shrine to Barack Obama.

The small brick house with no running water, a tin roof and roving chickens, goats and cows is owned by Sarah Obama, Barack's 86-year-old step-grandmother. Inside, the walls are decorated with a 2008 Obama election sticker, an old "Barack Obama for Senate" poster on which he has written "Mama Sarah Habai [how are you?]", a 2005 calendar that says "The Kenyan Wonder Boy in the US", and more than a dozen family photos.

But this bucolic scene in his father's village of Kogelo near the Equator in western Kenya conceals a troubling reality that, until now, has never been spoken about. Barack Obama, the Evening Standard can reveal, after we went to the village earlier this month, has failed to honour the pledges of assistance that he made to a school named in his honour when he visited here amid great fanfare two years ago.

At that historic homecoming in August 2006 Obama was greeted as a hero with thousands lining the dirt streets of Kogelo. He visited the Senator Obama Kogelo Secondary School built on land donated by his paternal grandfather. After addressing the pupils, a third of whom are orphans, and dancing with them as they sang songs in his honour, he was shown a school with four dilapidated classrooms that lacked even basic resources such as water, sanitation and electricity.

He told the assembled press, local politicians (who included current Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga), and students: "Hopefully I can provide some assistance in the future to this school and all that it can be." He then turned to the school's principal, Yuanita Obiero, and assured her and her teachers: "I know you are working very hard and struggling to bring up this school, but I have said I will assist the school and I will do so."

Obiero says that although Obama did not explicitly use the word "financial" to qualify the nature of the assistance he was offering, "there was no doubt among us [teachers] that is what he meant. We interpreted his words as meaning he would help fund the school, either personally or by raising sponsors or both, in order to give our school desperately-needed modern facilities and a facelift". She added that 10 of the school's 144 pupils are Obama's relatives. Obiero was not the only one to think that the US Senator from Illinois, who had recently acquired a $1.65 million house in Chicago, would cough up. Obama's own grandmother Sarah confidently told reporters before his visit: "When he comes down here, he will change the face of the school and, believe me, our poverty in Kogelo will be a thing of the past."

But the Evening Standard has heard that the promises he made to help the school as well as a local orphanage appear to have been empty.

Maybe Obama just has the fever of self-satisfied charismatic hypocrisy ... "and the only prescription . . . is more cowbell!"

Image Credit: The People's Cube

Debating Digital Reading

Are we really reading when we're logged on to the web, surfing and social networking to our heart's content?

I don't think so, which is why this piece from the New York Times caught my attention, "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?":

Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.

Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

Note, first, that I just love the picture!

We have two laptaps at home, plus a desktop downstairs, and someone's always online - so this debate's hitting close to home.

It's a serious question, though, whether digital communications are destroying serious reading.

I'm online now, as a blogger, all day sometimes. I'll read the newspaper in hardcopy and on the web, multi-task with a baseball game or an old movie, while I cruise web checking for the hottest news controversies. A blog post follows shortly thereafter.

But I take time every day to read. I have about three or four books going currently, plus I keep up with print periodicals and scholarly journals. I make it a point to get out and read at Barnes and Noble in the afternoons or on weekends, and I read every evening. For me, the online life enhances and improves my teaching and thinking. Online communications seem to be integral to the life of the mind in the digital age.

I worry about young people, though.

My oldest son's entering 7th grade in September. I've been bugging him for the last month to put down his cell phone and his iTouch and pick up a book! He's so smart, and does well in school, and, frankly, I'm not one to harangue him all the time. We work hard during the school months, and he's a very disciplined student. He also like to read Manga comics and Harry Potter, so it comes and goes with my boy.

My students are another story. Cell phones are out of control in the classroom. Nowawadays I just stand near students who are texting in class, and I have students who routinely surf the web during lectures. Rare is the studious student, the young scholar who delights in books and holds forth on the latest litarary or political controversies. Oh, sure, I get many who are engaged, but it does seem for too many that books aren't as important as talking on the phone.

The remainder of the Times' piece looks at the debate in educational scholarship.

The question of how to value different kinds of reading is complicated because people read for many reasons. There is the level required of daily life — to follow the instructions in a manual or to analyze a mortgage contract. Then there is a more sophisticated level that opens the doors to elite education and professions. And, of course, people read for entertainment, as well as for intellectual or emotional rewards.
It is perhaps that final purpose that book champions emphasize the most.

“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

I'm inclined to agree with McCullough. So, it's off to read something in hardback.

Oh, no, there's another hot story at Memeorandum. That book will have to wait!!