Hillary Seeks Popular Vote Win in Last 3 Primaries

The Washington Post reports on Hillary Clinton's last stand in the remaining primaries: to pull out a win in the national popular vote totals:

Trailing in delegates while her debt continues to grow, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is aggressively campaigning in the final three contests of the primary season in the hope of seizing a victory in the overall popular vote from Sen. Barack Obama.

The effect of such a victory -- and the question of whether Clinton hopes to leverage it into the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket or simply leave it as a historical marker -- is less clear. "One hundred percent of her energy is on the popular vote," a senior adviser said. "The only thing she can control is how hard she works and what effort she puts into the remaining three contests. She wants to end this with as many votes as she can."

The pursuit of the popular vote sent Clinton to South Dakota on Friday, then back across the country to Puerto Rico yesterday. It also helps explain the sometimes-contradictory rhetoric she used last week -- on one evening highlighting party unity, and on the next, defiance and determination to continue running hard against Obama.

"Whatever happens, I'll work as hard as I can to elect a Democratic president this fall. The state motto of Kentucky is, 'United we stand, divided we fall,' " Clinton said after Tuesday night's victory. Her address in Louisville was interpreted by some as a sign that she is contemplating her post-campaign stance as Obama moves closer to the requisite number of delegates.

Yet the next day, with renewed vigor, Clinton compared her effort to seat delegates from Florida and Michigan to the abolition of slavery -- a sharp about-face that two advisers said reflects the difficult, emotional nature of this stage of the race for the candidate.

Clinton's sense of urgency about seating the delegates from those states, of course, is also rooted in her desire to move ahead in the popular vote. The Democratic National Committee sanctioned both states for moving their primaries up on the calendar in violation of party rules. Although neither candidate campaigned in Florida, Clinton ran up a big margin over Obama there, and she won the Michigan primary after Obama removed his name from the ballot.

After the two split primaries in Oregon and Kentucky last Tuesday, Obama held a lead of about 400,000 votes, according to various estimates, but counting the raw totals from Florida and Michigan would vault Clinton ahead of him. She hopes to close the gap further with what her campaign expects to be a big win in Puerto Rico's primary next Sunday.

Still, her aides struggled to explain what she hopes the popular-vote victory will yield. On Friday, they beat back rumors that she is negotiating to be Obama's running mate. "Totally false," senior aide Howard Wolfson said of a report that she is in formal talks with the Obama team over conceding. David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, called the same reports "laughable."

Members of the Clinton inner circle said that as the campaign has dragged on, her group of confidantes has grown smaller. One senior adviser normally privy to major decisions said it is unlikely that anyone beyond campaign manager Maggie Williams and attorney Cheryl Mills is having concrete discussions with Clinton about her strategy going forward.

Democratic officials aligned with Clinton continued to say that the race is not over and that she has every right to remain in, despite the long odds.

I doubt the popular vote argument's going to do much more to clinch the nomination for Hillary.

I'm ready for the challenge of a Barack Obama candidacy, although the outrage among Obama supporters from Hillary's comments on Robert Kennedy illustrates how raw things are down at the final stretch.

But see Hillary Clinton's case for why she's still in the race (hat tip: Memeorandum).

Chester County Victory Movement: Protesting the Antiwar Protesters

The Wall Street Journal reports on the Chester County Victory Movement, which is mounting pro-victory counter-demonstrations against America's Stalinist antiwar protest cells (Pictured above: International ANSWER).

Here's a bit from the story:

Memorial Day isn't until Monday. But for Rich Davis, a 20-year veteran of the Navy, it seems to come every Saturday. That's when he pulls out a handmade sign and heads for a street corner near the Chester County Court House in this suburban Philadelphia community.

Mr. Davis, 54, is a pro-military protester who makes a public stand each week in support of the troops and their mission.

In 2001, Mr. Davis retired from the Navy and ended up settling in West Chester, where he spent 2006 and 2007 watching antiwar protesters rally each Saturday from 11 a.m. until noon outside the courthouse near his apartment. The Chester County Peace Movement, Mr. Davis would later learn, had been demonstrating at the site since March 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq. At first he hoped someone would challenge the protesters, speak up for the troops, and defend their mission. On Sept. 8, 2007 he decided that someone had to be him.

Mr. Davis had been building to such a decision for a long time. He was just a kid during the Vietnam War, but he is still bothered by the disrespect heaped on returning Vietnam vets in the 1960s and '70s. In part that is because, in 1967, Mr. Davis attended the funeral of a man he idolized – his sister's boyfriend, Marine Lance Cpl. Alan R. Schultz from Levittown, Pa. Schultz was killed by mortar fire in Vietnam.

"Al was a great guy," Mr. Davis remembers. "When we got the word that he had been killed, I felt the bottom fall out. I cried the rest of that summer."

Even today, Mr. Davis can't look at an antiwar protest without thinking that Schultz, his comrades and their modern-day counterparts are being disrespected. So after seeing the war protesters each week, Mr. Davis said to himself, "Not this war. Not this time."

"We're not silent anymore," Mr. Davis told me. "We refuse to let antiwar protesters have the stage to themselves."

Not that he wants to stifle dissent. He just doesn't want to go unanswered the signs and protests that he believes encourage the enemy and demoralize U.S. troops. So, sign in hand in September, he walked to the corner praying he would have the strength to stand there, to be seen and heard.

Seen he was. Though there was plenty of room on the corner, he says he was bumped, shoved and challenged. One person asked, "Do you live in fear?" Another demanded, "Why don't you go and serve?"

"They had that corner for five years, every Saturday, unopposed," Mr. Davis told me. "They couldn't stand the thought of one person having a sign they couldn't tolerate."

More people than the antiwar protesters took notice. A few weeks after he started his own weekly protests, Mr. Davis had about 40 sign-holding, flag-waving supporters at his side, thanks to support from the Gathering of Eagles, a national organization supporting the troops.

The number of antiwar protesters began to swell in response, which led to an increase in taunts hurled between the two groups. Mr. Davis admits the childish behavior cut both ways. "At times we have been confrontational and done things that were inappropriate, especially in the early days." But now, he says, "I have zero tolerance for yelling and buffoonery."

In March, an angry antiwar protester hit a woman who covers the weekly demonstrations on her pro-troop blog. That led the local police to lay down a few ground rules. Now each group is to keep to its own side of the street, and the two groups swap sides of the street each week.

There are a few other changes. Mr. Davis's once informal group is getting organized. They have a name, Chester County Victory Movement, and a Web site (http://www.americansheepdogs.com/) that they use to share information about welcoming troops home, sending care packages, and joining discussions at West Chester University.

That "woman" is Skye who blogs at Midnight Blue and Flopping Aces.

American Sheepdogs has a post up, "Victory Movement Makes the Wall Street Journal."

Stop over and say hello to some of these good folks.

Robert Kagan and the Return of History

Robert Kagan, a foreign policy advisor to John McCain's presidential campaign, has a new book out, The Return of History and the End of Dreams.

I picked up a copy myself, but the basic gist of Kagan's thesis was laid out well in an essay at Policy Review.

It turns out that the Globe and Mail's got a new essay up discussing where Kagan's "return of history" thesis fits into the larger debates in American foriegn policy and international relations theory:

If you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, can you judge it by its author? It would seem to be a safe bet in most cases, but Robert Kagan delights in defying conventional wisdom. Though his views are always contentious and often questionable, Kagan is one of the most interesting, intelligent and perceptive foreign-policy intellectuals of the past quarter century. He has written several bestselling books on international politics and the U.S. role in the world. He is also one of John McCain's principal foreign-policy advisers. But he is perhaps best known as a leading neoconservative intellectual, probably the leading neocon intellectual now that Francis Fukuyama has deserted the sinking ship. Yet anyone prejudging The Return of History and the End of Dreams will be in for a surprise. This is not neoconservatism as you've known it.

Although he is mentioned only briefly, Fukuyama is Kagan's foil. In 1992, Fukuyama published the provocative The End of History and the Last Man. Like all grand, influential ideas, Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis was deceptively simple: The end of the Cold War marked the final triumph of liberal democratic capitalism. Its rivals, from premodern monarchy and theocracy to ultramodern fascism and communism, had all failed. After 1989, history would no longer be marked by the struggle between competing systems of government; instead, it would be shaped by the inexorable spread of democracy. Thanks to the United States, humanity had reached its end point in a nirvana of political and economic freedom.

Fukuyama's post-Cold War triumphalism became the accepted wisdom for U.S. leaders across the political spectrum. Under Bill Clinton, the dynamic concepts of globalization, free trade and the "democratic peace" replaced the rather static Cold War priorities of containment, deterrence and mutual assured destruction. Not even spasms of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans or violent protests in Seattle and Genoa could deflect the spread of free markets and democracy around the world.

Then came 9/11. History may have appeared to be ending from the comfortable perspective of Washington, but around the rest of the world it continued to rumble along as usual, only to explode, literally, in the political and economic centres of the United States.

As its title suggests, The Return of History and the End of Dreams tries to make sense of what followed 9/11. Kagan portrays a world Fukuyama would scarcely recognize, where autocracy is on the rise and democracy on the defensive. Old-fashioned, great-power politics have returned at the expense of the democratic peace. Kagan dismisses post-Cold War hopefulness as "a mirage." Instead, the world is now entering "an age of divergence."

In making this argument, Kagan causes literary whiplash in the unsuspecting reader by committing an act of sacrilege for any self-respecting neocon: He embraces realism. Realists have always been the bêtes noire of neoconservatives because of their belief that power, not morality, is the language of world politics. To a realist, the narrowly defined national interest, not universal ideals of human rights, should determine foreign policy. Recall James Baker, secretary of state to George H. W. Bush, on why the United States would not intervene to stop genocide in Bosnia: "We have no dog in that fight."

To the neocons, this was tantamount to moral treason. In response, Kagan spent the 1990s formulating a robust doctrine of humanitarian intervention. Yet now he tells us that power really is the language of world politics after all. Russia and China are his two big examples. Contrary to "end of history" expectations, they have not been democratized by globalization. Instead, their new wealth has simply given their autocratic governments greater power to pursue their own national interests. In an arresting analogy that recurs throughout the book, Kagan compares our world to that of the 19th century, when several great powers continually jockeyed for geopolitical positioning - right up to August, 1914. Taiwan, he notes, might end up acting as this century's Sarajevo. Hence history's unfortunate return.

But Robert Kagan is no Henry Kissinger. While much of the book offers a realist's bleak diagnosis of the world today, it ends, somewhat incongruously, by offering a neocon's rousing call to arms as the cure. Kagan dismisses international law as irrelevant and counter-productive because, being based on the principle of inviolable state sovereignty, it allows autocracies to claim that internal repression is nobody else's business. He also dismisses the UN, based as it is on international law, as unhelpful and unworkable.

Where else would Kagan have us turn? To a "Concert of Democracies" comprising North America, Europe, Japan, India and Australia. Whether we like it or not, the future of international relations will be determined not by religious wars or a clash of civilizations, or even by competition for wealth and resources, but by the contest between democracies and autocracies. "History has returned," Kagan declares, "and the democracies must come together to shape it, or others will shape it for them."

The implications of this idea could be profound: In recent speeches, McCain has called for the creation of a "League of Democracies" that would "harness the vast power" of political freedom.

That's a nice essay, although if you go down to the conclusion, the author provides boilerplate slurs about how Iraq's been a "disaster.

Still, pay attention particularly to the notion that Kagan's "no Henry Kissinger." This point may hold implications for a McCain administration's foreign policy direction.

McCain's Foreign Policy Advisers

There's been a lot of debate on the nature of John McCain's foreign policy, with some observers calling the Arizona Senator "The Militarist" in an effort to impugn McCain's robust vision for America in a world of danger.

Others, like those at the Los Angeles Times, have struggled to find neat ideological labels: "McCain's Mixed Signals on Foreign Policy."

I see McCain as essentially neoconservative in his basic outlook, but perhaps more from a sense of personal experience and respect for what might be called an objective natural right of goodnesss in the world, something worth defending, even by force of arms when necessary, than from any overarching ideological framework.

In any case, the Council on Foreign Relations has posted an essay laying out the emerging foreign policy team of the McCain campaign, which gives us some clues to the candidate's likely direction in foreign affairs:

The McCain campaign’s foreign policy coordinator is Randy Scheunemann, a former top legislative aide for Republicans on Capitol Hill, including two former leaders of the Senate, Trent Lott and Bob Dole. Former Congressional Budget Office chief Douglas Holtz-Eakin coordinates economic policy. On national security issues, McCain receives advice from several generations of Republican strategists and former top foreign policy officials such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Armitage, often grouped in the realist camp of foreign policy, as well as William Kristol and Robert Kagan, leading neoconservative voices. The campaign lists Kagan as a leading foreign policy adviser, as noted below, along with State Department veteran Richard Williamson, former top defense and national security official Peter W. Rodman, and former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, who advises on national security and energy issues.

Media following the campaign have reported on jockeying for influence between the groups. The New York Times reported in April 2008 about concerns expressed by pragmatists advising McCain that more conservative Republicans and neoconservatives are gaining increasing influence. But other campaign advisers downplay any schism.

Scheunemann, Kagan, and Kristol are project directors of the Project for the New American Century, an organization formed when Democrats controlled the White House in 1997 around what many analysts say are neoconservative ideals. The project says on its website it aims to promote U.S. leadership in the world and “rally support for a vigorous and principled policy of American international involvement and to stimulate useful public debate on foreign and defense policy and America's role in the world.” The organization’s statement of principles says the United States needs to “increase defense spending significantly,” “strengthen ties to democratic allies,” “promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad,” and “accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”

Some observers point to McCain’s embrace of policy issues identified with neoconservatives dating back to his presidential campaign of 2000, when he called for a “rogue state rollback” policy predicated on aiding opposition groups that could then drive from power some regimes seen as threats to the United States. His plan for a “League of Democracies,” envisioned as a group of like-minded nations that would act in lieu of the United Nations against some threats to international security, is also seen as consistent with the neoconservative aims. But Kagan, writing in World Affairs, challenges the notion expressed in a number of media that in backing such policies neoconservatives have deviated abruptly from U.S. foreign policy traditions.

I love it!

PNAC just drives the lefties nuts!!

But read the rest of the article, which includes discussions (with links) of other advisors, as well as a selected bibliography of McCain's writings and policy proposals.

Islamist Terrorists Will Deploy Mentally Unstable as Suicide Bombers

The enemies of Western civilizaton will sink to the lowest depths of evil, the bottomless pit of nihilist carnage, to destroy the institutions of a decent society.

The Times of London reports that jihadis in Britain have started to recruit the mentally ill as suicide bombers for attacks on British cities (via Memeorandum):

Islamic terrorists may be targeting mentally disturbed or disabled people in Britain in a bid to form a new “brigade” of home-grown suicide bombers, security officials fear.

MI5 and police say the case of Nicky Reilly, who is being held over a nailbomb attack last week in Exeter, may indicate a new strategy of targeting vulnerable people with mental health problems to carry out attacks.

A counterterrorism official said MI5 was investigating the extent to which Reilly had been manipulated by a “charismatic” Al-Qaeda recruiter.

“It is a grotesque concept but they are using people who are clearly mentally subnormal,” the official said. “We know they have clever radicalisers who will take advantage of anyone they think they can manipulate, whether they have an IQ of 60 or 140,” he said.

Reilly, 22, is a Muslim convert who has spent time detained in a mental health hospital. He has been described as a shambling introvert with the mental age of a 10-year-old. He is believed to have Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, and may also suffer from schizophrenia.

Security officials say Al-Qaeda appears to have exported the tactic from Iraq, where disabled “foot soldiers” have been used to devastating effect.

They point to a case in February when a suicide bomber in a wheelchair killed an Iraqi general in Samarra, north of Baghdad. Earlier, two women, initially thought to have Down’s syndrome, acted as couriers for a bomb in Baghdad, killing almost 100 people.

Officials say people with mental disabilities are not only easier to manipulate but also less likely to arouse suspicion. If they are white Muslim converts, they are even less likely to be noticed.

Al Qaeda's earlier shift to recruiting the sick and disabled has been applauded by far left-wing bloggers looking for an American defeat in Iraq.

If anyone sees a defense of the London jihadis recruitment practices among those in the leftosphere, please send me an e-mail with the information.

For more perspective on our fight, see Tony Blair, "A Battle for Global Values."

Lieberman Derangement Syndrome

After George W. Bush, the radical left blogosphere probably hates no one more than Senator Joseph Lieberman.

Why? Well, Lieberman stayed true to his convictions on foreign policy, backing American power toward the goal of victory in Iraq, standing up for our allies in the Middle East, while the Democratic Party moved further to the left. As the war has continued, the outrage against the Senator's apostasies has grown to unstable proportions.

Firedoglake endlessly demonizes the Connecticut Senator.

But check this entry from Daily Kos, which gets close to qualified mental derangement when talking about Joe, and his recent WSJ essay:

There are another dozen things to mock about Lieberman's column -- deconstructing it would take chapters, not just paragraphs -- but in the end Lieberman's very simplistic and fiction-touting assertions boil down to his own simplistic and fiction-touting notions of foreign policy. Lieberman's true problem (and the one that got him booted from the Democratic Party in his own primary) is that for Lieberman, all foreign policy "seriousness" is dependent on supporting the clusterfuck of Iraq and all related possible clusterfucks in neighboring countries. Not just before the invasion, but during the occupation, during all the "reorganizations" and "surges" and turned corners and imminent successes and plans for goddamned Green Zone theme parks, now and in perpetuity, and now continuing into Iran, and we're not supposed to talk about Pakistan because They Are Our Friends.

If you don't support indefinite action in Iraq, if you don't support the most aggressive of uberhawkish positions in the Middle East, Joe Lieberman will declare you an appeaser, pure and simple. It does not matter what other foreign policy positions you may hold: whether you support action in Afghanistan, or wish to see a non-nuclear North Korea, or what your opinions may be about Sudan or Myanmar or Tibet or Russia or Pakistan or the dozens of other crisis points around the world; for Lieberman, Iraq is all. Support Iraq, or you are not "serious." Support Iraq, or you are an "appeaser."

Here is a man unbalanced by the rage that can only come from a steady stream of human failures. Foreign policy is a simple land, for Joe Lieberman; it steadfastly consists of doing the most aggressive thing at the most aggressive time, and all other options are weak to the point of very nearly being anti-American. And yet as Iraq has shown, such actions can be not just unwise, but catastrophically destructive. For Joe Lieberman, asserting his opponents to be complacent or unpatriotic or appeasers is the only possible rhetorical option remaining, and he lacks the wisdom to leave it unused.

I can think of only one example of recent Democratic appeasement: the way Senator Reid and others have constantly appeased Joe Lieberman, in spite of Lieberman's constant and increasingly rabid attempts to undermine his previous party. As has been amply demonstrated by Joe himself, appeasement does not work.

What are the symptoms of a Lieberman Derangment Syndrome?

Perhaps we see, along with the hatred for President Bush, "the acute onset of paranoia" in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies - nay - the very existence of - Senator Joseph Lieberman (hat tip: Dr. Sanity)

For the hard left, Lieberman's just simply evil. By running as an independent in 2006, he defeated the handpicked Kos candidate, Ned Lamont, thus thwarting the radical netroots' push toward a filibuster proof majority in the Senate with which to launch their legislative drive for a neo-Stalinist collectivist state.

The left hates Lieberman, who serves as the focal point of their anger and displacement: The real evil is not the terrorists who took down the World Trade Center, or al Qaeda in Iraq, or the murderers who beheaded Daniel Pearl - that is, the genuinely despicable elements of world evil and violence. Nope, for the left, the true scourge of humanity is the Connecticut Senator (and his "war-loving" allies), with his support for winning a war that Democrats backed in 2002, a war the party authorized with its bipartisan support for the congressional authorization on Iraq.

Thank goodness for Joe!

See also, "Paranoid Discomfort."

Expect to Be Infuriated by John McCain

Via Maggie's Farm, check out Jules Crittenden, who puts the return of McCain derangement in perspective:

John Hawkins gets exercised over what we always knew about John McCain. He’s soft as an egg on illegal border crossing.

Put very simply: John McCain is a liar. He’s a man without honor, without integrity, who could not have captured the Republican nomination had he run on making comprehensive immigration a top priority of his administration. Quite frankly, this is little different from George Bush, Sr. breaking his “Read my lips, no new taxes pledge,” except that Bush’s father was at least smart enough to wait until he got elected before letting all of his supporters know that he was lying to them....

I genuinely regret having to do this because I do still believe the country would be better off with John McCain as President as opposed to Obama or Clinton. However, I just cannot in good conscience cast a vote for a man who has told this big of a lie, for this long, about this important of an issue.

Now Crittenden:

That’s too bad, because a withheld vote for McCain is a vote for Obama or Clinton. That’s a vote for a lot of other unpleasantness and lies, not to mention the abandonment of allies and a return to the wretched foreign policies of the Clinton and Carter administrations.

I’m trying to see where, in Hawkins’ excerpts, McCain previously repudiated his support for “comprehensive immigration reform” and where, in the last-straw remarks, he says he’s dumping border security. He addresses both in each of the quotes. The objection appears to be to McCain’s “but” that the “reform” part is a top priority as of Jan. 9, 2009. There is an apparent shift of emphasis in there. It’s debatable whether it rises to the level of lying, and an honor/integrity dump, but Hawkins apparently feels like he’s been personally lied to. Spend any significant amount of time in close proximity to a pol, it’s going to happen....

Maybe McCain wants his first 100 days to be marked by a repeat of the Kennedy-McCain-Bush immigration crash-and-burn. That’s what will happen if the next “comprehensive reform” isn’t significantly different from the last one, mutually despised on both sides of the aisle, and doesn’t include border security. Maybe he plans to kick it all off by alienating large blocks of the people who backed him, people he’ll need on many other issues. Could happen. He is a notoriously cranky maverick, after all.

Expect to be infuriated by McCain. It is going to happen. This has been, from the start, a hold-your-nose election. It is also, no matter who wins, very likely to be a one-term presidency, with the incumbent facing challenges from within his or her own party in 2012. The electorate, the candidates and the parties are too divided in too many directions, and none of the candidates look likely to manage a good patchup any time soon.

But I predict by the fall, we’ll see some people explaining why they’ve decided to vote for the people they swore they wouldn’t in the spring. Like this Boggfellow, who promises he’d vote for McCain before he’d vote for his treacherous erstwhile sweetheart Hill.

I like Crittenden's Machiavellian angle on politics, but frankly, I've have my run-ins with this "Boggfellow," and I seriously doubt he'd vote McCain.

RFK Comment: Last Straw for Hillary?

Michael Goodwin suggests that Hillary Clinton's reference to Robert Kennedy's assassination while campaigning against Barack Obama could be the last straw for her campaign.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post suggests that Hillary's comments were "unspeakable."

If I had to choose, I'd vote Hillary in the Democratic primaries, but having said that, I'm inclined to go along with this argument from Neocon Express:

I really do want to give Mrs. Clinton the benefit of the doubt here...people utter things in the heat of a campaign that may be true but are better left unsaid. But I sense that this comment came from deep down somewhere in the darkest corners of her mind. Nobody just blurts out this kind of thing in public. She had been thinking about it... hopefully not hoping for such a horrible tragedy, but one cannot help but wonder if her ceaseless ambition, her devastating sense of disappointment, hasn't finally driven her to the brink of madness. And this at a moment when Bobby Kennedy's brother Ted is diagnosed with brain cancer.

See also, "So, Hillary Would Do Anything to Win. Oh Really?"

How Many Gaffes Can Obama Get Away With?

Here's this, from Jammie Wearing Fools:

How many gaffes can a politician get away with?

Obviously none if you're a Republican.

But Barack Obama can pretty much say anything and the media brushes it off.

Aren't double standards wonderful?

More here:

And more:

Perhaps all the sunshine here in the Sunshine State is getting to Barack Obama. On his third day of campaigning in the state, Obama notably flubbed the name of the city where his campaign rally was taking place. “I am so glad to be in Florida, and I am so glad to be in Sunshine,” Obama said at the top of his remarks. Unfortunately, the name of the city is “Sunrise.”

At four different points during the speech, Obama referred to the town as “Sunshine,” as opposed to “Sunrise.” Amazingly, the crowd of 16,000 played along and no one corrected him. Sunrise is a city in Broward County, possibly best known for its role in 2000 presidential election.

Obama said he regrets not having campaigned in Florida, and said he will make up for “some lost time.” He also assured the voters that Florida delegates will be seated at the Democratic Convention in August. “They will be participating, your voices will be heard and most importantly we will work together to make sure that Florida goes Democrat in November and so does the rest of the country,” Obama said.

Communists for Obama?

Let me direct readers to Nice Deb's post, "Reds Who Support Obama":

Well, it looks like the Obama campaign is steamrolling ahead, with the whole Reverend Wright affair just a minor bump in the road, as far as Democrats are concerned.

So this is as good a time as any to present my companion piece to Radicals, Terrorists, and Tyrants of the World Root for Obama. This time, I thought we’d take a look at all of the known communists/Socialists/Marxists who have supported, endorsed, or influenced Obama. Some communists can be found on the Radicals, Terrorists, and Tyrants list, as well, because let’s face it, radicals and tyrants tend to be commies, (Fidel Castro for instance), but in the interest of keeping this post down to a manageable size, I’m going to try to avoid duplications.

What some might call, “guilt by association” I call Obama’s ‘calling card’.

Read the whole thing.

I especially like her link to "Socialists for Obama."

For more on Barack Obama's radical support, see "No Enemies on the Left? Progressives for Barack Obama."

Pot Calls Kettle! Look Out for Those Opportunistic Nihilists!

Firedoglake's probably the last place you'd expect bloggers to throw around epithets like "nilhilist," but that's exactly the case here:

George Packer's New Yorker article asking if conservatives have "run out of ideas" caused quite the stir in the Right Blogosphere this past week. And right bloggers proved Packer wrong: as it turns out, they didn't have any "ideas" to start with. They have obsessions and vindictiveness in plenty, but ideas? Not really.

To me, the response to Packer's piece is far more illuminating than the actual article, which is rather banal. If "movement conservatism" has failed, as I sincerely hope it has, I'd argue that this is because too many of its proponents believed their own press and became persuaded that "movement conservatism" was ever an intellectual movement at all, as opposed to an essentially nihilist politics of vicious opportunism, where the entire goal is power for its own sake.

Packer is of course discussing the GOP's rather bleak electoral prospects this year, especially in the House and Senate. (He pretends to believe that McCain is a new kind of "post-partisan" candidate, a common form of elite journalist wishful thinking that ignores, for openers, Hagee and Parsley.) He speaks to a number of conservative writers, like David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David Frum, and Pat Buchanan. The Brooks part has gotten the most attention, perhaps because of Brooks' admission that "You go to Capitol Hill—Republican senators know they’re fucked," which is of course hugely entertaining. But the overall thesis is that the period of GOP dominance just may be over, because the Nixonian "Southern Strategy" as well as other mechanisms for splitting the old FDR coalition may just have finally run out of steam.

First, I think Packer's late to the party. Karen Tumulty made the case for the ideological decline of the GOP over a year ago, and at that time the thesis wasn't all that novel.

But for FDL to attack GOP partisans for the "nihilist politics of vicious opportunism" is like the pot calling the kettle black.

What's nihilism, in any case? I routinely deploy the term to identify hard-left terror-backing defeatists, many of whom are the main supporters of the Democratic Party.

I generally refer to my politcal opponents as "nihilist" in this sense:

An approach to philosophy that holds that human life is meaningless and that all religions, laws, moral codes, and political systems are thoroughly empty and false. The term is from the Latin nihil, meaning “nothing.”

Nihilist political philosophy's also identified with postmodern ideological movements, which privilege the notion that there exists no objective morality.

Postmodern nihilists on the left include those who've joined together in an anti-American alliance of socialism and Islam to destroy alleged American neo-imperialism worldwide. These are the same folks on the American left who call for the murder of American military service personnel as a putatively legitimate form of antiwar protest. Today's nihilists include the overwhelming majority of congressional Democrats who voted to authorize the war in Iraq in 2002, and within three months of the toppling of Saddam Hussein turned around to denounce the Bush administration for launching a "provocative and unnecessary" war.

That's opportunistic nihilism!

I also include Firedoglake as fundamentally, radically nihilist, root and branch, in its program of demonization, anti-Semitism, bereft of any shred of true traditionalism and essential value.

As always, I'll have more.

Until then, see Dr. Sanity, "The Children of Postmodern Nihilism."

Obama: It's Not Preconditions, Just Preliminary Extensive Diplomatic Work!

Hat's off to the Daily Howler and its post on Barack Obama's folly of "no preconditions" for talks with America's enemies:

Last July, Obama said he “would be willing to meet” with unfriendly foreign leaders “without preconditions,” in his first year (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/21/08). Has Obama changed his position? You can decide that for yourself, after reading this part of Rick Klein’s report for ABC:

RICK KLEIN (5/20/08): Asked about Obama's original statement Tuesday morning on CNN, former Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., a top Obama adviser and supporter, said top-level meetings would not be immediate—and would not happen without preliminary extensive diplomatic work.

"I would not say that we would meet unconditionally," said Daschle. "Of course, there are conditions that we [would] involve in preparation in getting ready for the diplomacy... 'Without precondition' simply means we wouldn't put obstacles in the way of discussing the differences between us. That's really what they're saying, what Barack is saying."

Man! It sure is easy once Daschle explains it! According to his bone-simple limning, Obama will still be meeting “without preconditions;” he just won’t be meeting “unconditionally!” Indeed, when Obama said he’d be willing to meet “without preconditions,” he really meant that he “wouldn't put obstacles in the way of discussing the differences between us.” And of course, none of that alters a basic fact; “there are conditions that we would involve in preparation for the diplomacy.”

But these clarifications surely don’t mean that anything Obama said has changed! (Careful! John Judis might “recoil” if you said that.) A few grafs later, Klein explained Obama’s own thinking, as explained to Jake Tapper:

RICK KLEIN: "I have to say I completely disagree that people have been walking back from anything," Obama said. "They may be correcting the characterizations or distortions of John McCain or others of what I said. What I said was I would meet with our adversaries, including Iran, including Venezuela, including Cuba, including North Korea, without preconditions, but that does not mean without preparation."

Preconditions and preparations are different! What an outrage, that McCain has been out there distorting these simple adumbrations!

I like this section:

...Obama has said—specifically, by name—that he would negotiate with Ahmadinejad. There’s nothing automatically wrong with that, of course—especially after adding all the qualifiers, buzzers, gadgets and doodads which have now been employed to “clarify” Obama’s position (without “walking anything back,” of course—unless you want to “distort” things). But Klein was sure that Obama hadn’t said such a thing. (He doesn’t seem to know that “the crack Time Magazine research department” isn’t real good at crack research.) Using Nexis, it took us roughly a very few minutes to find the event last September where Obama was asked about this matter—and answered. In real time, Beth Fouhy reported it for the AP. And uh-oh! On Thursday, Robert Novak ran transcript:

NOVAK (5/22/08): Time columnist Joe Klein turned up in Savannah, Ga., on Monday for McCain's news conference, declaring that McCain had misrepresented Obama as proposing unconditional talks with the Iranian president. After asserting that "I've done some research" and "also checked with the Obama campaign," Klein said that Obama "never mentioned Ahmadinejad directly by name. He did say he would negotiate with the leaders."

In fact, Obama has repeatedly been questioned specifically about Ahmadinejad. At a news conference in New York last September, Obama was asked whether he would still meet with Ahmadinejad. He replied: "Yeah...I find many of President Ahmadinejad's statements odious....But we should never fear to negotiate.” On NBC’s Meet the Press in November, he defended "a conversation with somebody like Ahmadinejad."

Obama to Russert, last November: “Look, part of the reason it's important for us to talk to countries we don't like and leaders we don't like—it's not that I think that in a conversation with somebody like Ahmadinejad that I am going to somehow change his mind on everything. But what we do is we send a signal to other leadership in Iran, to the Iranian people, and to the world community that we are listening, and that we are willing to try to resolve conflicts peacefully.” But Joe Klein simply knew in his soul that Obama couldn’t have said such things. (Apparently, Time’s crack research staff hasn’t heard about Meet the Press yet.)

Can we talk? Joe Klein played the fool in that post—and when he badgered McCain in Savannah. But that’s the way the world starts to look when major journos start taking your side. They’ve run these games against your hopefuls for years—but now, they’re tired of the GOP War Machine. Result? More and more, excited scriveners are playing dumb games on your side.

We’d like reporters to do their jobs. It seems that just isn’t an option.

Final point: Something else happens when hacks take your side—Josh Marshall rushes to praise their hackistry. And omigod! The bamboozlement spreads! This time, he even hoodwinked Greg Sargent!

Obama's website notes that "Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions."

So while all the quibbling's a riot, the more play this issue gets the more unqualified Obama appears for the Oval Office.

The Will to Blog?

Is there a "will to blog?"

Emily Gould, a former pro-blogger at Gawker, makes the case at the New York Times:

The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear.

Read the whole thing for context (and really read it, if you're thinking about professional blogging!).

Gould's blogging career's been mired in controversy (she believes she has the "right" to blog about anything, no matter how personal, damn the consequences), see here and here. Perhaps it's a pathology of the 20-somethings! The MySpace generation?

I do like this idea of the "will to blog" though - I can feel it!

It's kind of like the "will to power" (or fame?)

GOP Worries About McCain's "Lack of Progress"

The New York Times reports that Republican Party operatives are worried about the slow pace of organizational development in John McCain's presidential campaign:

Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign is in a troubled stretch, hindered by resignations of staff members, a lagging effort to build a national campaign organization and questions over whether he has taken full advantage of Democratic turmoil to present a case for his candidacy, Republicans said.

In interviews, some party leaders said they were worried about signs of disorder in his campaign, and whether the focus in the last several weeks on the prominent role of lobbyists in Mr. McCain’s inner circle might undercut the heart of his general election message: presenting himself as a reformer taking on special interests in Washington.

“The core image of John McCain is as a reformer in Washington — and the more dominant the story is about the lobbying teams around him, the more you put that into question,” said Terry Nelson, who was Mr. McCain’s campaign manager until he was forced out last year. “If the Obama campaign can truly change him from being seen as a reformer to just being another Washington politician, it could be very damaging over the course of the campaign.”

The ousters of some of the staff members came after Mr. McCain imposed a new policy that active lobbyists would not be allowed to hold paying jobs in the campaign.

Some state party leaders said they were apprehensive about the unusual organization Mr. McCain had set up: the campaign has been broken into 10 semi-autonomous regions, with each having power over things like television advertising and the candidate’s schedule, decisions normally left to headquarters.

More than that, they said, Mr. McCain organizationally still seems far behind where President Bush was in 2004. Several Republican Party leaders said they were worried the campaign was losing an opportunity as they waited for approval to open offices and set up telephone banks.

We heard similar arguments last summer, when McCain's bid for the nomination was on the ropes. Was the "maverick" about to drop out of the race? Nope. Who would have believed he'd be the last man standing at the end of the primary process?

We have a long way to go yet. McCain's been in politics a long time, and this is his second run for the White House. The GOP will pull together, and this election will be closely fought all the way to the finish line.

See the other opinions at Memeorandum.

Oh, the Misogyny! An Update

This entry follows-up my previous post, "Oh, the Misogyny!," where I made light of the sexism controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

How serious is Hillary's misogyny problem? What does it mean for the U.S.? This piece from Britain's New Statesman takes a look:

History, I suspect, will look back on the past six months as an example of America going through one of its collectively deranged episodes - rather like Prohibition from 1920-33, or McCarthyism some 30 years later. This time it is gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind. It has been shamelessly peddled by the US media, which - sooner rather than later, I fear - will have to account for their sins. The chief victim has been Senator Hillary Clinton, but the ramifications could be hugely harmful for America and the world.

I am no particular fan of Clinton. Nor, I think, would friends and colleagues accuse me of being racist. But it is quite inconceivable that any leading male presidential candidate would be treated with such hatred and scorn as Clinton has been. What other senator and serious White House contender would be likened by National Public Radio's political editor, Ken Rudin, to the demoniac, knife-wielding stalker played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? Or described as "a fucking whore" by Randi Rhodes, one of the foremost personalities of the supposedly liberal Air America? Would Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein fame) ever publicly declare his disgust about a male candidate's "thick ankles"? Could anybody have envisaged that a website set up specifically to oppose any other candidate would be called Citizens United Not Timid? (We do not need an acronym for that.)

I will come to the reasons why I fear such unabashed misogyny in the US media could lead, ironically, to dreadful racial unrest. "All men are created equal," Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed in 1776. That equality, though, was not extended to women, who did not even get the vote until 1920, two years after (some) British women. The US still has less gender equality in politics than Britain, too. Just 16 of America's 100 US senators are women and the ratio in the House (71 out of 435) is much the same. It is nonetheless pointless to argue whether sexism or racism is the greater evil: America has a peculiarly wicked record of racist subjugation, which has resulted in its racism being driven deep underground. It festers there, ready to explode again in some unpredictable way.

To compensate meantime, I suspect, sexism has been allowed to take its place as a form of discrimination that is now openly acceptable. "How do we beat the bitch?" a woman asked Senator John McCain, this year's Republican presidential nominee, at a Republican rally last November. To his shame, McCain did not rebuke the questioner but joined in the laughter. Had his supporter asked "How do we beat the nigger?" and McCain reacted in the same way, however, his presidential hopes would deservedly have gone up in smoke. "Iron my shirt," is considered amusing heckling of Clinton. "Shine my shoes," rightly, would be hideously unacceptable if yelled at Obama.

The notion that sexism "is now openly acceptable" is not supported by generic survey data. An overwhelming majority of Americans see women as equally qualified for the White House, as shown in a Washington Post poll from last year, "Race, Gender Less Relevant in '08."

To the extent that we have substantial remnants of mysogyny, we may simply be witnessing the combination of highly-visible cases of unacceptable political demagoguery coming at a time of intense media coverage of the campaign.

The Randi Rhodes' and the "iron my shirt" idiots have been revealed as just that. Hillary Clinton's problem this year's not so much sexism as ego: She campaigned as an annointed nominee, not taking her top challenger seriously until it was perhaps too late; her campaign spent extravagantly, illustrating a "drunken-sailor" style of campaign management that's elitist and entitlement-mined.

For all the gender-bashing, Hillary's paved the way for the next woman presidential candidate. These things take time, but the fact that the overwhelming bulk of people reject sexist extremism is one of the most important developments of campaign '08.

Questions of Honesty, Integrity Will Haunt Obama

Michael Barone has found deep liabilities for Barack Obama in the voting data from the West Virginia and Kentucky primaries.

It turns out that half of the voters in those states question Obama's honesty and integrity:

It's a little dangerous in interpreting polls to assume that voters' thinking proceeds along logical lines. People who aren't professionally involved in politics, whose knowledge comes from bits and snippets of news, can hold beliefs that are contradictory or in tension with each other. They don't feel obliged to resolve contradictions. But even granting that, it seems to me that about half of West Virginia and Kentucky Democratic primary voters were saying that Obama lied about not knowing what Wright has been preaching and that he agrees with him a lot more than he has let on.

Now West Virginia and Kentucky are not typical primary states. They, together with Arkansas, where Hillary Clinton was first lady for 12 years, were Obama's weakest states in this year's primaries. And some percentage of registered Democrats in these states have been voting Republican in recent presidential elections. Nevertheless, the negative verdict these voters render on Obama's honesty and his relationship with Wright is likely to be typical of some significant quantum of potential Democratic voters this year. And not just in states like West Virginia and Kentucky, which he will certainly lose, but in marginal states which he must carry in order to be elected.

I find confirmation from this in a recent focus group conducted for the Annenberg Public Policy Center by pollster Peter Hart (for whom I worked for seven years) of non-primary voters in Charlottesville, Va. As Hart and Alex Horowitz note in their analysis of reactions to Obama, "When asked to recount any two memories of the total presidential campaign so far, seven of the 12 participants cite Rev. Wright by name. So far, clips of Rev. Wright clearly are the one 'key defining moment' of this campaign."

Most reporters are liberals, whose circles of friends and acquaintances have included people with views not dissimilar to those of Wright or William Ayers, the unrepentant Weather Underground bomber with whom Obama served on a nonprofit board and at whose house his state Senate candidacy was launched. Such reporters don't find these views utterly repugnant or particularly noteworthy. But most American voters do. And they wonder whether a candidate who associates with such people agrees with them -- or disbelieve him when he says he doesn't.

Though most in the press won't admit it, that's a problem -- for the Obama candidacy and for the whole Democratic Party once it nominates him.

There are a few other questionable relationships out there as well, about which Obama's not been completely forthcoming.

Today's the 10th anniversary of Obama's dinner with Professor Edward Said. See, Gateway Pundit, "10 Years Ago Today... Obama's Dined With Israel-Haters." Perhaps Obama can answer why he's had ties to groups intent on the elimination of the Jewish state?

See also, "Palestinians See Obama as Close Ally."

Obama Would Take California in General Election, Poll Finds

The Los Angeles Times reports that Barack Obama would win California's general election if voting were held today:

Less than four months after losing the California primary, Democrat Barack Obama leads Republican John McCain in projected November general election matchups, a new Los Angeles Times/KTLA Poll has found.

Obama, the Illinois senator who has inched close to his party's nomination, would defeat McCain by seven points if the election were held today. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, whose fortunes have faltered since her Feb. 5 drubbing of Obama in California, would eke out only a three-point victory, the poll found.

The poll appeared to illustrate that Democrats, at least in California, are gravitating toward the candidate who is broadly expected to eventually seize the party's mantle. Obama now runs better against the Arizona senator than does Clinton among many of the groups that powered her victory in the state, among them Latinos, Catholics and those without college degrees.

Although exit polls in recent primaries elsewhere have shown Clinton supporters reluctant to embrace Obama as the nominee, there was little of that sentiment evident in the California poll. But the survey could not measure whether time had eased partisan passions or whether Californians were predisposed to embrace either Democrat.

Overall, Obama led McCain 47% to 40% among registered voters, while Clinton led McCain 43% to 40%.

McCain has insisted that he will compete to win California in the fall. But California has gone to the Democrat in each of the last four presidential elections. Most of the state's political professionals consider it to be reliably Democratic -- and too expensive to prompt a full-throated effort by a Republican candidate who could amass electoral votes more cheaply elsewhere.

McCain's standing against Obama -- coming after months of good news for the Republican and a brutal and continuing Democratic primary battle -- offered the presumptive GOP nominee little solace. One bright spot was support among Latinos. McCain won 38% of Latinos against Obama and 41% against Clinton; both figures are substantially higher than the proportion won by George W. Bush in his two presidential campaigns.

The survey notes some additional liabilites for McCain in the Golden State, but the significance of this poll is how well McCain holds up against the Democrats on the Left Coast.

Bill Clinton beat G.H.W. Bush in 1992 by 14 points, and that's after Ross Perot took 20 percent in the state, likely drawing some disaffected "Reagan Democrats" away from the GOP's 1980s' coalition.

McCain's running very strong among California's Latino's, holding a statistical tie with Obama in the survey.

Plus, the Arizona Senator does better with traditional married couples nationally, and the hot-button initiative campaign surrounding the same-sex marriage controversy may swing a few ideological fence-sitters into the GOP's column. This last variable may be a key to the race, as just a third of the state's electorate is Republican.

See, for example, "Gay Marriage Ruling Helps McCain, Hurts Obama."

Anti-Semitism and the Left

TRex responded to my post yesterday, "Resisting Anti-Neocon Fervor: The Stakes in Election '08":

And for god's sake, being anti-NeoCon is in no way to be anti-Israel or anti-semitic.

I'd be the first to agree, except that this is coming from someone who backs Barack Oback with attacks on Hillary Clinton like this:

Senator Obama has rightfully called her out on this kind of bellicose, Bush-Doctrine posturing, but it’s hardly surprising to me that now Fox News is sighing and following her around like a particularly slow-witted schoolboy who’s hot for teacher, and those human foreskins at the Weekly Standard are writing her mash-notes.

The "human foreskin" in question? William Kristol.

According to Jewish religious doctrine, to be uncircumcised is to be "unclean":

According to the Hebrew Bible, it was "a reproach" for an Israelite to be uncircumcised (Joshua 5:9.) The name arelim ("uncircumcised" [plural]) is used opprobriously, denoting the Philistines and other non-Israelites (I Samuel 14:6, 31:4; II Samuel 1:20) and used synonymously with tameh (unclean) for heathen (Isaiah 52:1).

Further:

Circumcision is commanded in Genesis 17:10-14 as an outward sign of a man's participation in Israel's covenant with God, as well as a sign that the Jewish people will perpetuate through him. The commandment is incumbent upon both father and child - fathers must see that their sons are circumcised, and uncircumcised grown men are obligated to perform the rite.

Those who are not circumcised suffer the penalty of kareit, no matter how otherwise observant they may be. Perhaps in part for this reason, circumcision is the mitzvah most likely to be observed by otherwise non-observant Jews.

Of course, not all neocons are Jewish, but there's an evil attention to Jewish neocons in TRex's blogging program (pogrom). Here's TRex on Charles Krauthammer as well:

This shouldn't be surprising. Although the Bush administration is the most diverse in history, and some of the most influential cabinet members in the Bush years, like Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, were not Jewish, the left has paid particular attention to the alleged Jewish roots of the Bush doctrine. Many far-left writers attacked Jewish influence in American foreign policy. In a 2002 article, the Nation wrote:

On no issue is the [Jewish neocon] hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war--not just with Iraq, but "total war," as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it last year. For this crew, "regime change" by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative. Anyone who dissents--be it Colin Powell's State Department, the CIA or career military officers--is committing heresy against articles of faith that effectively hold there is no difference between US and Israeli national security interests, and that the only way to assure continued safety and prosperity for both countries is through hegemony in the Middle East--a hegemony achieved with the traditional cold war recipe of feints, force, clientism and covert action.

To be clear, my point is not to demonize legitimate disagreements with Bush administration policies (true, a rare thing on the left). Nor am I pleading any kind of squeamish victimology. My objective is simply to reveal the utter depravity of those who ridiculously claim some superior morality to those who have "ass-f#$*!d" the country.

Here's this from FrontPageMag:

Contemporary empirical realities demonstrate one undeniable fact: anti-Semitism is no longer associated prominently with the Right. Instead, the primary source of the hatred of Jews now emanates from the Left. In fact, anti-Semitism has evolved into a cultural code and even a rallying cry for progressive radicals throughout the world. This reality is perfectly illustrated by contemporary efforts to pressure Western universities and institutions to divest from financial holdings in Israel.

It's also illustrated in the hard-left blogging at Daily Kos, Firedoglake, and TRex.

These folks are "beyond the pale."

Related: Little Green Footballs, "Daily Kos Joe Lieberman Two-Minute Hate."

The Political Economy of $4 Gasoline

I'm visiting family in Fresno this weekend, and I filled up my Honda Odyssey for close to $60 this morning. I thought about how the economy's still chugging along as well as it has been, despite the opportunity costs accompanying rising fuel prices. Why is that?

The New York Times has a little more on this:

Hating every minute of it, Americans are slowly learning to live with high gasoline prices. For a nation accustomed to cheap fuel, big vehicles and sprawling suburbs, the adjustments are wrenching.

Cory Asmus of Temecula, Calif., just bought a $4,800 motorcycle for his 20-mile drive to work so he could cut his gas bill to $8 a week, from $110.

Florian Bialas, a retiree who lives near Chicago, sold his Pontiac Sunfire for $3,000 and plans to give up his license when it expires in September. “I can walk to most places where I need to go,” he said.

And Debbie Gloyd of Cleveland has parked her Chrysler Concorde and started taking the bus to work. “I can’t afford these gas prices,” she said. “They’re insane.”

With the nationwide average price for regular gasoline closing rapidly on $4 a gallon, people are bracing for a summer of expensive driving.

As the Memorial Day holiday starts the summer driving season, record prices are provoking dread and upsetting vacation plans. A recent survey by AAA, the automobile club, found a rare year-on-year decline, of 1 percent, in the number of people planning to travel this summer.

Interviews with more than 70 people across the country suggested that the adjustments they were making, mental and otherwise, would last well beyond the summer. Americans have started trading their gas guzzlers for smaller cars, making fewer trips to the mall and, wherever possible, riding public transportation to work.

For years, it was not clear whether rising prices would ever cause Americans to use less gas. But a combination of record prices, the slowing economy and a tight credit market has beaten consumers down.

Gasoline demand has fallen sharply since the beginning of the year and is headed for the first annual drop in 17 years, according to government estimates.

The Transportation Department reported Friday that in March, Americans drove 11 billion fewer miles than in March 2007, a decline of 4.3 percent. It is the first time since 1979 that traffic has dropped from one March to the next, and the month-on-month percentage decline is the largest since record keeping began in 1942.

High gasoline prices, plastered on 20-foot signs from coast to coast, are turning into a barometer of the country’s mood.

“The psychology has changed,” said Sara Johnson, an economist at Global Insight. “People have recognized that prices are not going down and are adapting to higher energy costs. It’s a capitulation.”

Typically, gasoline sales rise before Memorial Day weekend. But gasoline sales dropped nearly 7 percent last week compared with the same week in 2007, according to an estimate by MasterCard.

Gasoline prices almost always rise in the summer, as demand increases. On Friday, gasoline prices reached yet another record, a nationwide average of nearly $3.88 a gallon. That figure was up 4 cents in one day and is 65 cents higher than this time last year, according to AAA. Diesel hit $4.65 a gallon on Friday, up $1.73 a gallon in a year.

The force behind high gasoline prices is the high price of oil, which is being driven up by soaring worldwide demand. Oil reached a record above $133 a barrel this week, nearly five times as expensive as it was five years ago.

All this has led to a vast transfer of wealth from American drivers to domestic and foreign oil producers. Every one-cent increase in gasoline prices means Americans pay $1.42 billion more a year for gas, according to Stephen P. Brown, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Nearly two-thirds of that goes to foreign producers.

In the first four months of the year, Americans spent $158 billion on gasoline. In 2003, just as oil prices started to take off, they spent $88 billion over the same four-month period, according to Michael McNamara, vice president for MasterCard’s Spending Pulse, an indicator of weekly gasoline sales.

Whether today’s high costs will translate into a permanent change in behavior remains to be seen, of course. The Energy Department expects gasoline sales to fall by 0.6 percent this year, the first drop since 1991, but it expects consumption to rebound in 2009 as the economy strengthens.

Still, analysts said that the hardship induced by today’s prices is getting close to the level reached during the oil shock of the early 1980s.

Yes, the prices are getting high, but note one more time, it's because of skyrocketing global demand, not the supply shocks associated with the Carter administration's appeasement of Iran, or with the opportunistic Arab petrodollar recycling following the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

I hope everyone has a great holiday weekend!

Photo Credit: "On Friday, gasoline prices hit a nationwide average of nearly $3.88 a gallon. The average price of diesel reached $4.65 a gallon. A sign at a gas station in La Jolla, Calif., reflects why many drivers are cutting back," New York Times

Barack Obama and America's Enemies

Israel Matzav offers a quick overview to Charles Krauthammer's essay on Barack Obama's foreign policy:

In Friday's Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer shows how Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama is all wrong about meeting with enemies. He explains why what Obama is proposing is completely different from Nixon going to China. He points out that Obama has misread history if he thinks that Roosevelt or Truman met with enemies at Yalta or Potsdam - Stalin was an ally at the time. And he points out that Kennedy's meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna - the only meeting that might compare with Obama meeting with Ahmadinejad - was a pointed disaster.

Read the whole thing.

See also, Scott at Powerline, "A Lesson for Obama."