JustOneMinute

Self-Invention

Michael Dobbs of the WaPo busts another part of the Obama myth:

Obama Overstates Kennedys' Role in Helping His Father

Addressing civil rights activists in Selma, Ala., a year ago, Sen. Barack Obama traced his "very existence" to the generosity of the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father to travel to America on a student scholarship and thus meet his Kansan mother.

The Camelot connection has become part of the mythology surrounding Obama's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. After Caroline Kennedy endorsed his candidacy in January, Newsweek commentator Jonathan Alter reported that she had been struck by the extraordinary way in which "history replays itself" and by how "two generations of two families -- separated by distance, culture and wealth -- can intersect in strange and wonderful ways."

It is a touching story -- but the key details are either untrue or grossly oversimplified.

Contrary to Obama's claims in speeches in January at American University and in Selma last year, the Kennedy family did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the United States that included Obama's father. According to historical records and interviews with participants, the Kennedys were first approached for support for the program nearly a year later, in July 1960. The family responded with a $100,000 donation, most of which went to pay for a second airlift in September 1960.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton acknowledged yesterday that the senator from Illinois had erred in crediting the Kennedy family with a role in his father's arrival in the United States. He said the Kennedy involvement in the Kenya student program apparently "started 48 years ago, not 49 years ago as Obama has mistakenly suggested in the past."

Mr. Dobbs also reminds us that Obama tried to bend space-time in his Selma address:

Obama's Selma speech offers a very confused chronology of both the Kenya student program and the civil rights movement. Relating the story of how his parents met, Obama said: "There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Junior was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama."

After bloggers pointed out that the Selma bridge protest occurred four years after Obama's birth, a spokesman explained that the senator was referring to the civil rights movement in general, rather than any one event.

The bit about the airlift was not on the Hillary-provided list of Obama's stretchers, so this looks like an independent debunking.

 

Bracing For Opening Day

Let's use tomorrow's Opening Day as an excuse for a tribute to the Captain of the Yankees.  First, from coverage of the recent Yankee trip to Virginia Tech:

BLACKSBURG, Va. — The buses wound through the Blue Ridge Mountains, taking the Yankees from the airport in Roanoke to the heart of a campus changed forever last April. Fans cheered from the sidewalks at Virginia Tech, snapping pictures and waving. If the players looked out the windows, they could see decals of memorial ribbons on the backs of many cars.

The buses stopped at Drill Field, the memorial site for the 32 victims of a gunman’s rampage 11 months ago. The players and staff members, led by the Yankees’ general partner, Hal Steinbrenner, walked solemnly in a semicircle, past the stone markers for the dead.

Derek Jeter was the first player off his bus. Near the far edge of the memorial was the stone for Michael Pohle, a biochemistry major from Flemington, N.J. On the ground beside it was a T-shirt with Jeter’s name and number. A young woman named Marcy Crevonis stepped from the crowd.

“Derek, do you mind if I take a picture by my fiancé’s stone?” she said. “I won’t cry, I promise.”

Jeter said he has felt like this before, after Sept. 11, when he wondered how baseball players could possibly help people recover from devastation. He still does not know, he said. Maybe they could simply make them smile.

Jeter told Crevonis she could have the picture if she smiled. She did.

“That’s part of the reason that we’re here,” Jeter said.

Derek Jeter has had a consistent philosophy on this point; this is from Sept 27, 2001:

Yesterday, Jeter had two special guests watching batting practice: the sisters Brielle and Kirsten Saracini of Yardley, Pa. 

They are the daughters of Victor J. Saracini, the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, which was hijacked and crashed into 2 World Trade Center.

Ten-year-old Brielle wrote to Jeter, who called the Saracinis' home on Tuesday, inviting the girls and their mother, Ellen, to last night's game. They watched the game from Jeter's seats behind home plate.

''She was asking me why I stand so straight up when I hit,'' Jeter said of Brielle. ''She told me how much it meant for her to come here. We made her smile, at least for today.''

The girls lined up for the high-fives after the Yankees' victory, and Torre presented them with the lineup card.

''They said it was a dream come true,'' he said.

Let's have some pictures to verify those smiles.

Well.  If the team with the best captain wins, it's over.  But that rule hasn't held for years.

Responsible Drinking

The TigerHawk is a font of wisdom, as expected.

"No End In Sight" (But A Lot Of Asses Exposed)

The NY Times Book Review ponders Charles Ferguson's "No End In Sight", based on his 2007 documentary of the same name (thoughts on the film in this old post).

There are really two debates going on about the Iraq war, but only one of them is being heard at the present time. Was the decision to invade a mistake from the beginning? For the most part, Democrats say yes and Republicans say no. The other debate centers on the invasion’s aftermath. Is the current debacle the result not of the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein but of the inept policies that followed? Since this question suggests that success in Iraq was always a possibility, it is generally being ignored both by Democrats, who don’t want to muddy their antiwar position, and by Republicans, unwilling to face up to the Bush administration’s serial failings.

Charles Ferguson’s 2007 documentary, “No End in Sight,” was unusual because it focused on this second question.

Of course there is a third question, which they get to in the conclusion of the review:

Ferguson’s final, and most timely, section moves beyond his film, and takes as its title the question everyone is left asking: “Where Do We Go From Here?”

Ferguson doesn’t have an answer, but he supplies the kind of essential information his readers will need to come up with one. For example, most of his interviewees, American and Iraqi alike, are satisfied that the surge has worked to reduce violence in the short term, but are skeptical about the long term. The underlying structural divisions threatening to tear Iraq apart are still in place, and in some instances may have gotten worse. The Iraqi office manager for The Washington Post explains that the insurgents have lowered their level of fighting but are simply waiting for the Americans to leave. Ferguson’s Kurdish bodyguard tells him the United States has actually weakened the central government by working with local Sunni militias that feel no allegiance beyond their particular tribes and neighborhoods. “They don’t care about the government. And the government, they don’t have any power over what’s going on.” Another informant says Washington has been “promoting warlordism.” Ferguson reports the “stunningly unanimous opinion” among his interviewees “that the surge is producing no lasting military or security benefit whatsoever.”

And if the Americans withdraw? Most of the people Ferguson talked to believe the result would be full-scale civil war; one analyst speaks of three or four civil wars at once. Even some of those who favor withdrawal accept the likelihood of a blood bath. “You would see the Sunnis of Baghdad certainly getting finished off quick,” says one. Another, an American specialist on democracy and development obviously wearied by Iraq, says the mere threat of withdrawal might bring the rival factions together, but if not, “they can have their civil war.”

It’s not that simple, however. A bloody civil war, several experts observe, probably would not be limited to Iraq. Neighboring countries would almost inevitably be drawn in, and the entire region could be engulfed in chaos. Iran would support the Shiites, while Saudi Arabia, Jordan and possibly Egypt would back the Sunnis. Turkey, meanwhile, might become more deeply enmeshed in Iraq’s Kurdish areas. Juan Cole, a historian at the University of Michigan, was an influential opponent of the war who now opposes a pullout. He’s not the only one. Cole points out that a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia could endanger the world’s oil supplies. “Iraq is not like Vietnam, where the U.S. could withdraw precipitately and altogether and let the chips fall where they may. ... The U.S. has destabilized the cockpit of the world economy. The plane is now spiraling down.”

Yet those urging a continued American presence are short on solutions for the long term. Partition claims few adherents, not only because most Iraqis oppose it — Iraq’s United Nations ambassador for part of 2007 says, “Nobody in Iraq is fighting to partition the country” — but also because Iraq’s neighbors worry how partition would be received by their own restless minorities. A regional conference including Iran and Syria has its supporters, though none who are convinced it would accomplish very much. Muddling through with an ineffectual government that wins the confidence of no one is the best that some of the interviewees can come up with, but without a coherent plan for creating a viable central authority, this is a policy that truly has “no end in sight.” John McCain’s comment that the United States could be in Iraq for 100 years is mudling (sic) through’s reductio ad absurdum.

Many Iraqis favor a military coup. An Iraqi journalist says, “Going back to the dictatorship definitely would help,” and this view, Ferguson writes, “is surprisingly popular among educated, secular Iraqis.” It’s easy to understand why. Since 1920, when it was created, the Iraqi Army has been a national, nonsectarian institution with a broad degree of popular support. Armies in the region have often played a stabilizing and modernizing role, as the next-door example of Turkey demonstrates. The real question is whether the army could be reconstituted in anything like its traditional form.

Abetting a coup against an elected government is no one’s idea of a happy ending. According to one Iraqi sympathetic to the coup suggestion, it would constitute a second American invasion, only from the inside. But as the former United Nations ambassador explains to Ferguson, “If you are a military officer looking at this political class unable to make basic decisions ... the temptation must be great to think you can’t do it any worse.”

A week ago I would have said that a hidden benefit of the surge was that the Iraqi police and military have had an additional year to train in relative peace.  With the non-success of the Iraqi-led effort against the Shi'ite militia in Basra, I am less sure how valuable that additional year actually was.

Genocide Bad; China Helping

The NY Times Magazine details the surprisingly successful effort to link the Beijing Olympics to China's support of the Sudanese government and the genocide in Darfur.  Part of the effort has been to create among American sponsors the sensation that they are entering a minefield; a snippet and a suggestion:

Savitt next asked for advice to give Ben Cohen for his jihad against the Olympic mascots. “Tell him to keep his message short,” Ward said. “The message here isn’t hard: Genocide bad; China helping.”

Looking over a list of Olympic sponsors, Ward advised Savitt to streamline her targets: “Choose two or even one company and hammer it. Everyone had sweatshops but it took that woman” — referring to Kathy Lee Gifford — “to make it real. McDonald’s is a phenomenal target; they are so retail. Johnson & Johnson is less of a brand and therefore less useful. Same goes with General Electric.”

“O.K.,” Savitt said. “But then we have to give up on my crazy bumper-sticker idea. She jumped to a white board and wrote “(GE)nocide.” She looked at Ward and deadpanned, “The only problem is G.E. isn’t actually responsible for any genocide”

“That’s an issue,” Ward said with a smile.

McGenocide.

Keep Hill Alive!

Obama for Hillary:   “My attitude is that Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants...” says the Gib Lib.  And why shouldn't she stick around?  She is likable enough.

Well, that extends the "Obama is arrogant" file; let's toss in this summary of his debacle in seeking the Edwards endorsement.

What Howard Said (Then)

Jake Tapper of ABC News has fun with his Lexis; the topic is Howard Dean's current blast against John Sidney McCain:

That's all noise. What's more interesting are the Dean quotes from 2004 that may come back to haunt him this year.

"The real issue is this," Dean said in March 2004, when endorsing formal rival Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., "Who would you rather have in charge of the defense of the United States of America, a group of people who never served a day overseas in their life, or a guy who served his country honorably and has three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star on the battlefields of Vietnam?"

McCain, by the way, has been awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, two Bronze Star Medals, a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Presumably that is not the real issue anymore.

Let's Just All Agree That Wright Apologized And Move On

Can someone help me with what looks like the latest fantasy from Obama as he explains his Reverend Wright (emphasis added) [and see LAST WORD below for Obama's side]:

WASHINGTON - White House hopeful Barack Obama suggests he would have left his Chicago church had his longtime pastor, whose fiery anti-American comments about U.S. foreign policy and race relations threatened Obama's campaign, not stepped down.

"Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying at the church," Obama said Thursday during a taping of the ABC talk show, "The View." The interview will be broadcast Friday.

Let's make the working assumption that this excerpt is accurate and in context - time will tell, since the show airs tomorrow.

So, when did Wright acknowledge that what he had said was deeply offensive and inappropriate?  The AP story recounts some of Wright's controversial comments but oddly omits to mention his apology, as does all other news coverage with which I am familiar.  And I am strangely certain that a Wright apology would have made the news - unless he never made it publicly.

So what are we supposed to believe - that Wright apologized to Obama, who is now apologizing to the rest of us on Wright's behalf?  For heaven's sake, this really does show that Obama is made of Presidential stuff - maybe he can do an Apology Tour, just as Bill Clinton did.

But why is Wright apologizing to Obama, who only heard these remarks second hand - well, "second hand" if we still believe Obama's insistence that he missed every service with these controversial comments (Huffington Post) but heard others (The Speech) but didn't hear anything at all (town hall).  Shouldn't Wright be apologizing to those of us who took offense?  Or after thirty years of delivering three sermons per week, has Wright developed a fear of public speaking?

Oh, well - even though this is clearly just extemporaneous BS from Obama, I suppose a few follow questions would be in order, if only to generate more extemporaneous BS. 

Away we go - when did Obama give serious thought to leaving the church - presumably it was when he became aware of these ghastly comments from Wright and received an apology, but when was that?  Per his Huffington Post Obama claimed, implausibly, that he only learned that Wright had attitude issues at the outset of his Presidential campaign.

When did Wright apologize, or explain, or whatever, and in what forum, and to what audience?  Was this apology in response to a specific protest from Obama?

And how did it happen that this apology was not mentioned in Obama's statement at the Huffington Post or in the big race speech?  Are we to believe that Obama only just decided to mention it now - why keep that helpful news about Wright's redemption and repentance in reserve?  Or did Wright's apology follow "The Speech", which implies that Obama was considering leaving his church just last week, a month after Wright's retirement?

I suspect the MSM will be all over this one.

PROPS:  To Don Surber:

When it came time to leave the church, Obama voted present.

MORE:  Does Wright seem repentant in this back-and-forth with the Times, in their coverage of his disinvitation to Obama's campaign kick-off?  Ponder this:

Mr. Wright said that in the phone conversation in which Mr. Obama disinvited him from a role in the announcement, Mr. Obama cited an article in Rolling Stone, “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama.”

According to the pastor, Mr. Obama then told him, “You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.”

In a follow-up blast at the Times reporting, Wright added this:

I do not remember reading in your article that Barack had apologized for listening to that bad information and bad advice. Did I miss it? Or did your editor cut it out?

Repentant?  How about in this Times story a month later:

Mr. Wright, who has long prided himself on criticizing the establishment, said he knew that he may not play well in Mr. Obama’s audition for the ultimate establishment job.

“If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me,” Mr. Wright said with a shrug. “I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.”

Barack is shoveling nonsense.

SPEAKING OF NONSENSE:  Wright's new digs, a 10,000 square foot home in a gated community.  In "Dreams From My Father" Obama recounts Wright urging someone or other not to take his family from the the 'hood for the suburbs; Obama offers that it might be safer, and Wright rejoins that a black man isn't safe anywhere.  Well, that was twenty years ago.

Wright grew up in comfort and will retire in same, Black Values and its Disavowal of the Pursuit of "Middleclassness" notwithstanding.  Whatev, Rev.

THE CAPTAIN ALLAHPUNDIT TAKES A STAB at bailing Obama out:

Tom Maguire thinks Obama’s deceitfully trying to suggest here that Wright has apologized when of course he hasn’t. I don’t read it that way at all. I think he’s speaking purely hypothetically, if inartfully: If Wright was still pastor of the church and if he refused to apologize for the sermons, then Obama would have to quit. Since he’s not still pastor, there’s no need to quit irrespective of whether Wright has apologized or not.

Hmm - one of the most articulate politicians of this generation speaks inartfully (or very artfully!), inadvertently creating an impression helpful to himself.  If it's that complicated, it's still misleading - listeners aren't sitting at home drawing Venn diagrams.

I certainly agree that the presentation was not artful, but let's see - as AllahP presents it, it is clear that Obama's message was that Wright had to either resign *or* apologize, or else Obama would leave the church.  So let's imagine this construction - this is Obama, in a hypothetical re-write; the highlighted sentence captures the current controversy:

I was only comfortable staying in the church if Wright either resigned or apologized.  In other words, I would have left the church if he had not resigned and not apologized.  However, he resigned, so it's all good.

Hmmph.  As a matter of strict logic and deep charity we could agree that Obama's statement is not false.  However, it is still very misleading, since it is (in my opinion and personal experience) likely to create the impression that an apology has been delivered when in fact it has not, publicly at least.  This impression arises in part because Obama is describing both a reality (Wright's announced retirement) and a hypothetical (Wright's apology) as having equal weight in his stay/go decision, when in fact, Obama may never have sought an apology.  As presented, Obama lays out a lot of detail for a hypothetical and factually irrelevant apology - why bother, other than to confuse the issue?

It is also neither unreasonable nor unprecedented to think that Obama might have wanted both an apology and a retirement, as when Samantha Powers got tossed under the bus.  For example, this could be a hypothetical re-write of Obama:

I was only comfortable staying at the church if Wright both apologized and resigned.  If he had not resigned and not apologized, I would have left the church; fortunately, he did resign and  he apologized to me in a secret session, so it's all good.

In that construction Obama wanted Wright to satisfy two conditions, not simply order from the menu and choose one.

When a skilled speaker delivers a false-but-favorable idea wrapped in a true-if-parsed-favorably cloak, I still think is close enough to lying to be called that.  These aren't depositions with legalistic wiggle room; in the court of public opinion we value straight talk.  That said, now that I see Obama's comments both ways, I can see how someone might have seen it the other way first, or only that way.  A very familiar feeling...

BONUS DETAIL: Jim Geraghty stoops to conquer by live-blogging The View:

Barbara Walters: "Had the reverend not retired would you have left the church?"

Obama: "Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying at the church."

It looks like he was ready to say more, but *sigh* Hasselbeck interrupts.

Karl at PW delivers a savage beat down (I'm jealous...).

So the Captain sees Obama responding to Barbara with, roughly, had Wright not retired and, having stayed on, had he not apologized, I would have left.

I am reading it as 'had he not both stepped down and apologized, I would have left'.

Closer to the mainstream, Ben Smith of The Politico headlines the "Might have left church" and seems to be sniffing BS:

In a clip posted by ABC, Obama says: 'Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country -- for all its flaws -- then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying there at the church."

In Obama's speech in Philadelphia last week, he said: "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community."

At the WaPo blog, bafflement about what did Obama hear and when did he hear it, if ever.

Kate Phillips of the Times Caucus reports on The View revelations without comment, but adds this:

He also told the show’s hosts that he had spoken with Mr. Wright since controversy erupted over excerpts of some of the pastor’s sermons. “I think he’s saddened by what’s happened, and I told him I feel badly that he has been characterized just in this one way, and people haven’t seen this broader aspect of him,” the Democratic candidate said.

Is that meant to be understood as some sort of private apology?  C'mon, "saddened" is pretty broad - Wright might be saddened that Rush Limbaugh didn't choke on his microphone while covering this.

LAST WORD:  The AP takes this up with Obama's press flack and gets the "it was hypothetical" defense:

WASHINGTON - Democrat Barack Obama seemed to suggest in an interview aired Friday that his former pastor has acknowledged that his controversial remarks were inappropriate and hurtful, although there are no public accounts of the minister having done so.

...

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the senator's remarks did not imply that Wright has expressed misgivings about his statements.

"Sen. Obama was clearly saying that were Rev. Wright not retiring, he would need to be assured that the reverend understood why what he had said had deeply offended people and mischaracterized the greatness of this country," Burton said.

I question whether Obama was "clearly" communicating that Wright had not, in fact, apologized, but I understand the logic of the position they are promoting.

Always Mock Content From "Think Progress"

"Think Progress" delivers some high-powered attack blogging - they accused John McCain of plagiarism, but apparently had not exerted themselves to actually check McCain's speeches available at his Senate website - he claims first dibs on the disputed phrases by pointing to a speech he gave in 1995 to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but how much prescience would have been required for Think Progress to have pinned this down?  For example, one of the McCain phrases that stood out was "War is wretched beyond description."  A search on the word "wretched" at McCain's Senate site produces just three hits, one of which is the 1995 speech.

What seems to have confounded the person who noticed this is that Google's search spiders seem to be blocked from the McCain site; neither a conventional Google search nor a Google search on McCain's Senate site deliver the 1995 speech.

Leadership That's Working, Or In This Case, Walking

In one corner stands Marty Peretz, with a fog-like defense of Barack Obama:

Of course, while one can assume that there is something in the style of Trinity's Christianity that attracts Obama, no one has even suggested that Obama agrees with any of Wright's controversial words. In fact, one knows from the senator's own words past and present that his love of country is unsurpassed--and unsurpassed in a way that will attract younger people who had lapsed into an unthinking and unrealistic internationalism.

Leaving a church is never a simple transaction. Episcopalians in America (and Anglicans elsewhere) have had all kinds of provocations. A gay bishop in New Hampshire has virtually split the communion. Some are secessionists because of Gene Robinson's elevation. Some want to stay and fight it. Others want to put the oppositionists to the fire. Some on the outs want to put themselves under the discipline of a religiously conservative African diocese. Mostly, they stay and grumble, one way or another.

In the other corner, Howard Dean, DNC Chairman and one-time Netroots fave:

"Was it just over a bike path that you left     the Episcopal Church?" (Even Judy Woodruff seems incredulous, doesn't she?)     Dean: "Yes, as a matter of fact it was.

Where was Obama's leadership or judgment in staying with his church?

A Score From Boston: Old Politics 3, Hope and Change 0

In a cautionary tale the NY Times tells us that Deval Patrick, the smooth-talking "Hope and Change" Governor of Massachusetts, is floundering.

“I came here to change politics as usual,” Mr. Patrick said at the state Democratic convention in 2006. “Because what’s missing from politics as usual is hope. We have been governed for too long by fear and low aim and salesmanship.”

Even some of Mr. Patrick’s strongest supporters have lost a little faith, including liberal Democrats who oppose casinos. (“Has Patrick become a lesson in the limitation of words?” a local radio host, David Boeri, asked at the start of a show on the subject last month.)

Cory Booker, now Mayor of Newark, looks like the real thing and he is building his resume with jobs for which he is qualified.

WHEN IRISH EYES ARE SMILING:

Governor Deval Patrick and his political nemesis, House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi, did their best today to put a good public face on their fractured and increasingly acrimonious relationship.

Patrick referred to the speaker as "my friend and partner" this morning at a press conference about a transportation reform that marked the first time the two men had appeared together publicly since DiMasi orchestrated a crushing defeat of the governor’s casino proposal. They stood together in the Senate Reading Room on a day that Patrick called the speaker undemocratic and blamed him for his political losses in a front page story in the New York Times.

Patrick deflected a question from a reporter about the Times story and listed a series of projects that he said he and DiMasi has accomplished together, which included a $1 billion life sciences initiative and tax credits for filmmakers. As Patrick spoke, DiMasi avoided eye contact with the governor, nodded, and licked his lips.

Lots Of Baggage, Lots Of Excitement

Condi Rice for VP?  Black, female, single (nudge...) - these are the groups Democrats and the MSM (pardon my redundancy) love as long as they are properly aligned.

Can't say she lacks for qualifications, either.  On the other hand, she is closely aligned with an unpopular President and a dreadfully managed war.  Dems would use her candidacy to refight every word uttered in 2002 and 2003, and that would probably not work for Republicans (Could it work?  Well, if the Dems come off as obsessed with yesterday instead of tomorrow, maybe.  But yesterday is when Ms. Rice established her bona fides, or lack thereof, so a backwards-looking obsession by a wary public is not unwarranted).

I thumped Ms. Rice's lackadaisical effort in the summer of 2001 back during the 9/11 Commission hearings.  Add to that her inability to referee the Rumsfeld-Powell dispute about who would take charge of post-liberation Iraq and you have a pretty unimpressive record.
For my money, McCain could do better.

Nominations are open.

Let's Fleece The Illegals

Paul Krugman and Kevin Drum are poring over the latest report from the Social Security trustees and finding good news.  Krugman:

In fact, however, the actuarial balance has been improving rather than worsening. It’s now better than it’s been since 1993. What this tells us is that projections made in the mid-to-late 1990s were, in the light of subsequent revisions, way too pessimistic.

Kevin Drum dives into the number for an explanation:

Click here for the answer: Table IV.B9 has only one significant change from 2007: "Methods and programmatic data." And what might that entail?

Scroll down for the answer: immigrants. To be specific, better estimates of the taxes and benefits received by illegal immigrants — or, as the trustees refer to them, "other-immigrants":

...Bottom line: "This year's report results in [...] a substantial increase in the number of working-age individuals contributing payroll taxes, but a relatively smaller increase in the number of retirement-age individuals receiving benefits in the latter half of the long-range period." Give or take a bit, it turns out that this shores up the Social Security system to the tune of around $13 billion per year. Thanks, illegal immigrants!

First, since Bush was pushing for comprehensive immigration reform, one might wonder whether this is a politically motivated switch in methodology designed to promote Evil BushCo.  One might wonder, that is, if one were other than Krugman or Drum; for those stalwarts, the numbers fit their agenda, so, politically motivated or not, it's all good.

And since we are thinking outside the box, let's conjure some other Federal initiatives that might help Social Security, as a complement the "no border enforcement, quasi employer enforcement" scheme that lets illegals come here and work illegally in exchange for payroll taxes not matchable to future benefits.

Just some ideas - a new "Thank You For Smoking" campaign should increase the number of people who make payroll tax payments their entire working life and then keel over of a heart attack or lung cancer on their 65th birthday.  No benefits for them!

This can be supplemented with a bold "AIDS Unawareness" initiative; again, the idea is to kill 'em before they live to retire.

Worried that all these smokers and AIDS Unaware will drive up medical costs?  Hey, not Social Security's problem (OK, except for disability), just as the other costs/benefits of illegal workers aren't showing up in these calculations.

But I hear you.  So let's also ban seatbelts and airbags - that should result in a lot of quick kills, and a resultant Social Security windfall.  Hmm, maybe we can ban windshield wipers too.

Say it with me - Thanks, illegal immigrants!  Thanks, smokers!  Thanks, crazy lovers and drivers!  And thanks to the Federal statisticians who found the silver lining in the immigration status quo.

A BIZARRE AND UNEXPECTED "TO BE FAIR" MOMENT:  Far be it from me to infer or imply that K Drum or P Krug are actually lauding the fleecing of illegals; K Drum is certainly entitled to a bit of sardonicism with his "Thank You".  (Hmm, my vocabulariziation is struggling just now...).

I UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING EXCEPT WHY A DUCK:  Longtime readers who remember "pgl" from his vivid commenting or keen map reading will see that he is blogging to his expected standard on this topic.  Since he seems to be a trust fund fantasist I will offer him pearls and water (but I can't make him think...).

More Obama Bashing

Ed Koch bashes Barack on Wright as a failure of leadership:

What is it that I and others expected Obama to do? A great leader with conscience and courage would have stood up and faced down anyone who engages in such conduct. I expect a President of the United States to have the strength of character to denounce and disown enemies of America - foreign and domestic -- and yes, even his friends and confidants when they get seriously out of line.

What if a minister in a church attended primarily by white congregants or a rabbi in a synagogue attended primarily by Jews made comparable statements that were hostile to African-Americans? I have no doubt that the congregants would have immediately stood up and openly denounced the offending cleric. Others would have criticized that cleric in private. Some would surely have ended their relationships with their congregation. Obama didn't do any of these things. His recent condemnations of Wright's hate-filled speech are, in my opinion, a case of too little, too late.

The Captain has some Michelle material:

In this case, she starts by challenging students to actually embrace diversity by having the courage to reach beyond their social comfort zones, and winds up calling America ignorant...

Let's cut to the Gateway Pundit for more:

Oddly enough... Knowing that Michelle and her husband sat in front of a racist, anti-American preacher for 20 years sort of takes away from their whole "change" theme. 
It does explain her disgust for the country, though.

Dare I mention her senior thesis from Princeton, where she was very worried about the manner in which she might be integrated into white society?  And I think it would be fair to say she has developed a race-oriented resume; here is the Chi Trib on her latest job:

For all its national prestige, the University of Chicago Medical Center had a local public-relations problem.

The academic center was spending millions of dollars on care that would have been more effectively dispensed by a primary care provider. It was a dicey issue because it put the prestigious hospital in the position of telling its low-income, underinsured and mostly African-American neighbors to go somewhere else.

Michelle Obama was charged with tackling the problem—a delicate issue not just for her but potentially for her husband. A close ally and supporter of Barack Obama, the Service Employees International Union has been one of the hospital industry's fiercest critics of how it handles care for the uninsured.

But the U. of C. program has won praise from community health providers who say Michelle Obama was uniquely suited to tackle the issue.

"Because she is of color, that gives her some credibility," said Wendy Cox, chief executive of Chicago Family Health Center, which operates health centers on the South and Southeast Sides.

Having a hubby who could deliver earmarks didn't hurt either.

But now she is ready to lead the rest of us towards a glorious racial reconciliation, after living over forty years headed in the opposite direction.  Can't wait.

PILING ON:  Michelle Obama graduated in the spring of 1988 from Harvard Law School and took a job at Sidley Austin.  Normally, she would have taken the Illinois Bar exam in July and started at SA soon thereafter (an associate revolt here); a different law firm but what I bet is a similar schedule here - lawyers, join in (are there lawyers on the net?)).

But she was admitted to the Illinois Bar in May 1989, which would follow the February 1989 bar exam.  One infers that, despite the many assurances we read telling us that she was a future superstar, she didn't pass the bar first time.

Well, she is not the candidate.  Still, the Glib Lib has an angry minister, an angry wife, and a deplorable racist of a grandma - troubling.

About That North Carolina Poll...

Noam Scheiber is agog over Barack's surge in North Carolina:

Wow, this is either a statistical fluke or a pretty remarkable turn-around. A week ago, Public Policy Polling, an outfit I hadn't heard of before this year but which has had a respectable run during the primaries, had Obama up only a single point on Clinton in North Carolina. In a poll out today, he's up 21 points.

Statistical fluke, dramatic turn-around, or... change in methodology?  Go with "methodology" - Mickey Kaus had this, emphasis added:

In North Carolina, Obama doesn't seem to be losing ground. He's up 21 points, according to the RPP poll. He was up only one point in the same poll a week ago--although the results aren't strictly comparable because RPP expanded its universe of "likely" voters this week to include all 2006 general election participants. Still. ... Obama gained substantially (19 points) among white voters.

DIVIDED THEY FALL:

Gallup has a survey of likely Dem defectors:

If McCain vs. Obama, 28% of Clinton Backers Go for McCain;
If McCain vs. Clinton, 19% of Obama backers go for McCain

My guess?  It is easier for elderly and working class whites to defect to the war hero than it is for blacks and hipsters to defect to the old white guy.  Or from a more negative perspective, I bet it is easy for elderly and working class whites to resist the appeals of the Glib Lib grievance candidate, although it can't be hard for blacks and hipsters to be turned off by the nagging white woman.  But a caveat - I am not nearly smart enough to be a Dem strategist.  Just for example, I would never have figured out to disenfranchise Florida and Michigan.

HILLARY'S APPEAL:  Help me here - do youngsters see Hillary as the cool aunt they would like to go shopping with or the nagging grandmother always pushing Brussels sprouts at them?  Tough call!

FWIW, I am advised by a youngster who met John Sidney McCain at a barbecue in New Hampshire that he is a lot of fun in a small group, or at least, not nearly as boring as might be expected; must be those Annapolis hellion days.

Team Obama - Someone Buy 'Em A Subscription To Google

Per Ben Smith's blog at The Politico I see that Team Obama is alerting reporters to earlier incidents of Hillarity mis-speaking about her Excellent Adventure in Bosnia.

But the Obama crowd has not found her December tale-telling, as reported in Newsday and busted by various member of the Right Wing Noise Machine.

And these are the people that are going to track down out-of-control Federal spending?

Google it.  Clueseekers will find that this from Dec 31 is currently at the bottom of page 1.

MORE:  MAYBE IF HILLARY HAD CLAIMED THAT THE SNIPER FIRE WAS "SEARED" IN HER MEMORY...

I deplore the sexist double standard being applied to Hillary on her Bosnia fantasy.  John Kerry just made stuff up about his wartime heroics to promote himself, as for example with his Christmas mission to Cambodia or his first Purple Heart, and did loyal Dems denounce him bitterly?  Did the media pry under every rock in a relentless quest for the truth, or even new evidence?

Of course not!  Instead of looking for the truth, Dems and their media enablers looked for new words, coining "swiftboating".

So why are they "swiftboating" Hillary?

ERRATA:  Here is a good definition of "swiftboating":

"exposing the lies, deceit and fraud of self-glorifying public officials or candidates for office who exaggerate their military service by lying about their feats of heroism and combat wounds."

SEE YOU IN DECEMBER:  Newsweek dredges up a WSJ story set in Dubuque, Iowa:

On the campaign trail the Bosnian tarmac anecdote has grown more dramatic. In Dubuque, Iowa, in December, Clinton reportedly asserted that the area was considered too dangerous for her husband to visit. "I was the first high-profile American to go," Clinton told Iowan voters, according to a Wall Street Journal account.

But where is the sniper fire?  Glenn Thrush of Newsday had this account from Dubuque, with a Dec 31 date:

VINTON, Iowa - Ever since Barack Obama suggested Hillary Clinton's eight years as first lady were a glorified tea party a few days back, she's looked for an opening to strike back.

On Saturday night in Dubuque she pounced, arguing she risked her life on White House missions in the 1990s, including a hair-raising flight into Bosnia that ended in a "corkscrew" landing and a sprint off the tarmac to dodge snipers.

Same event?  One would think so; where is the video?

Here is the WSJ blog coverage, dated Dec 30:

At an event on Saturday in Dubuque, Clinton, who has been carefully avoiding questions about tea, gently approached the topic. “I was so honored to be able to travel around the world, representing our country, going to places that oftentimes were not necessarily a place the president could go,” Clinton said. She told the audience about a trip to Bosnia in 1996 when the war-torn country was still deemed too dangerous for the president to personally visit. “I was the first high-profile American to go,” Clinton said.

She went on to explain a precarious corkscrew landing and how she had to run out of the airplane because there might have been sniper fire. “I don’t remember anybody offering me tea on the tarmac when that was happening,” she said sparking laughter and applause from the audience.

The WaPo blog has a slightly different take, with a Dec 29 date from Dubuque:

She said she saved Kosovar refugees by persuading Macedonia to reopen its border. And in a direct jab back at Obama, she recalled visiting Bosnia on a plane that made a tight corkscrew landing to avoid potential attacks. "Somebody said there might be sniper fire," she said, adding tartly, "I don't remember anyone offering me tea on the tarmac."

No explicit sprint on the tarmac here.  Here is the Times Caucus blog from Dubuque, Dec 30:

Then, she recounted a trip to Bosnia in 1996 after the Dayton Peace Accords were signed, noting: “I was the first high-profile American to go.”

“We landed in one of those corkscrew landings and ran out because they said there might be sniper fire,” Mrs. Clinton recalled. “I don’t remember anybody offering me tea on the tarmac when that was happening.”

Now she is getting a quick cardio workout again.

That is lots of coverage and broad agreement that she claimed to have been running on the tarmac.

KITCHEN SINK:  Team Clinton reprises every Obama stretcher ever.

Two Liars Walked Into A Saloon...

We'll never tell, but you get to vote - poll at Hot Air.

Ok, a hint - lest you doubted that a cornered rat will fight, Hillary said today that

...she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor made.

“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”…

“You know, I spoke out against Don Imus (who was fired from his radio and television shows after making racially insensitive remarks), saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that,” Clinton said. “I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving.”

Keep Hill Alive!

Barry And Jerry - Why Is Jeremiah Wright So Angry?

Barack Obama talked a great deal about his kook of a minister in The Speech and took a stab at explaining the anger of black of Wright's generation:

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

That background of deprivation takes a different hue in light of this, from a correspondent of TNR's Marty Peretz:

OBAMA'S PASTOR RAISED IN PRIVILEGE, NOT POVERTY

How do I know?

It happens that, as a Philadelphian, I attended Central High School – the same public school Jeremiah Wright attended from 1955 to 1959. He could have gone to an integrated neighborhood school, but he chose to go to Central, a virtually all-white school. Central is the second oldest public high school in the country, which attracts the most serious academic students in the city.  The school then was about 80% Jewish and 95% white. The African-American students, like all the others, were there on merit. Generally speaking, we came from lower/middle class backgrounds. Many of our parents had not received a formal education and we tended to live in row houses. In short, economically, we were roughly on par.

I attended Central a few years after Rev. Wright, so I did not know him personally. But I knew of him and I know where he used to live – in a tree-lined neighborhood of large stone houses in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. This is a lovely neighborhood to this day. Moreover, Rev. Wright's father was a prominent pastor and his mother was a teacher and later vice-principal and disciplinarian of the Philadelphia High School for Girls, also a distinguished academic high school. Two of my acquaintances remember her as an intimidating and strict disciplinarian and excellent math teacher. In short, Rev. Wright had a comfortable upper-middle class upbringing. It was hardly the scene of poverty and indignity suggested by Senator Obama to explain what he calls Wright's anger and what I describe as his hatred.

Obviously, plenty of other blacks were raised in dire circumstances and anyone with empathy could be angry about that (or glad of the progress we have made, but where is the authenticity in that?).

In any case, the "reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up" was quite a bit more mixed than described by Barack.  And segregation (as other have noted) was hardly "the law of the land" other than in a few unreconstructed Southern states.

Dating Hillary's Lies

The press is struggling with a not-utterly-unexpected question - when did Hillary start lying about her not-so-perilous trip to Bosnia?  The best they have so far is late February, but we can push that back to late December.

The hazards of her Bosnia trip are now fully debunked:

Clinton Says She ‘Misspoke’ About Dodging Sniper Fire

By PATRICK HEALY and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

BLUE BELL, Pa. — As part of her argument that she has the best experience and instincts to deal with a sudden crisis as president, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton recently offered a vivid description of having to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire after landing in Bosnia as first lady in 1996.

Yet on Monday, Mrs. Clinton admitted that she “misspoke” about the episode — a concession that came after CBS News showed footage of her walking calmly across the tarmac with her daughter, Chelsea, and being greeted by dignitaries and a child.

We had a bit of fun with the video earlier this week.  Here is where the reporters show a desperate lack of basic skills:

[Press flack Howard Wolfson] said that in her memoir, “Living History,” Mrs. Clinton wrote about sniper fire in the hills and “clearly meant to say that” when she brought it up last week. He said she had described the event many times the same way and that “in one instance, she said it slightly differently.”

In her comments Monday, Mrs. Clinton made a similar point, saying, “I didn’t say that in my book or other times.”

Mrs. Clinton had described the sniper fire in similar terms at least twice in recent weeks. She mentioned it on Feb. 29 in Waco, Tex., when she was rolling out her “red phone” commercial, recalling the trip to Bosnia and saying that the welcoming ceremony “had to be moved inside because of sniper fire.”

In "this one instance" she said it differently?  And the Times can only find a similar misstatement on Feb 29?  Geez, why do we bother?  This "dodging sniper fire" was in a Newsday story just before New Years and was widely mocked by the Stop Hillary righties at the time (yes, seems like a long time ago).

I still think reporters are missing the real story - Hillary's trip was just a few weeks before Bill Clinton assassinated Ron Brown on a plane in Bosnia, so Hillary probably felt as if she were truly in danger; hence the importance of being escorted by Chelsea and Sheryl Crow.

OK, maybe not.  But breathes there a reporter dumb enough to ask?  That would be an instant YouTube classic.

Bob Herbert Delivers Obama's Press Clippings

The reliably boring Bob Herbert is utterly predictable with his reaction to the Obama speech (he liked it!) but poses a puzzle lat in his column.  Sorry, the boring bit:

The speech, which has gotten wonderful reviews, should be required reading in classrooms across the country — and in as many other venues as possible. With a worldview that embraces both justice and healing, Senator Obama is better on these issues than any American leader since King.

"[C]lassrooms across the country" - right.  Bob Herbert would leap from a tall building if a Reagan speech decrying Communism or a Bush speech explaining our presence in Iraq were presented as part of American history/current events.

Conservative Lawyer Endorses Obama, Gets Ripped By Conservative Lawyer

Ouch.  Douglas Kmiec, a leading conservative Republican lawyer Sunday endorsed Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., for U.S. president.

Paul Mirengoff of the PowerGuys reprises Kmiec's endorsement of Mitt Romney and is baffled by the unanswered questions and seeming contradictions created by this new endorsement.

Sympathy For The Bear

Per the Times, JP Morgan is in negotiations with Bears Stearns and the Fed; in an attempt to prevent a shareholder revolt JP Morgan may raise its offers for Bear Stearns shares from $2 to $10.  The Fed is balky because it has been claiming that $2/share is not a Federal bailout; that is a less compelling position at $10 per share.  BSC closed at about $6 on Thursday.

This is outrageous, but not surprising:

Mr. Dimon became increasingly desperate in recent days. He offered certain employees cash and stock incentives to stay on and made calls to his rival chief executives on Wall Street — John J. Mack at Morgan Stanley and John A. Thain at Merrill Lynch, among them — pleading with them not to recruit Bear employees during the transition.

The NFL has rules restricting free agents; Wall Street does not.

This is funny and surprising:

JPMorgan and Bear were prompted to renegotiate after shareholders began threatening to block the deal and it emerged that several “mistakes” were included in the original, hastily written contract, according to people involved in the talks.

One sentence was “inadvertently included,” according to a person briefed on the talks, which requires JPMorgan to guarantee Bear’s trades even if shareholders voted down the deal. That provision could allow Bear’s shareholders to seek a higher bid while still forcing JPMorgan to honor its guarantee, these people said.

Mistakes were made!  Now, that non-extinguishing guarantee does sound bone-headed, but I have read elsewhere that JP Morgan was granted an option on the Bear Stearns headquarters in midtown Manhattan; maybe this guarantee was in consideration of that option, hmm?  Tell it to a judge.

Meanwhile, Fed action has raised the value of Bear's assets, and the new liquidity facility is available to Bear creditors.  Maybe Pauline, having been pulled from the tracks, won't ride off with the hero.

MORE:  Don't like the Perils of Pauline?  How about, now that we have all clapped and Tinkerbell is revived, she has flown out of Peter's grasp?

IF MY CAT WERE A DAY TRADER: My bold prediction this morning (OK, not bold enough to be heard by humans...) was that Bear Stearns stock would go to $12 on this story.  It opened at $9.92 and is now at $12.54.

NUMBERS:  Per Calculated Risk the share price is incidental to other merger expenses, so even at $10 its no big deal:

JPMorgan estimated the transaction-related costs of approximately $6 billion pretax. This included litigation, cost of de-leveraging, conforming accounting and consolidation. The $2 per share price was almost irrelevant compared to the other costs - the $2 per share was approximately $236 million.

Changing the deal to $10 per share increases the purchase cost from about $6.25 billion to about $7.25 billion, and will probably help obtain shareholder approval (a serious problem at $2 per share). This isn't a huge difference for JPMorgan, but it makes a significant difference to Bear shareholders.

Based on market movements in the past week Bear's assets are worth more - hey, a big win for the Fed!  Should that windfall go to Bear Stearns, JP Morgan, or we the People, via the Fed? 

Why choose?  I see the Fed reducing its formal guarantee to Morgan, Morgan paying a bit more, and the Bear people taking the deal.

And in my world, a Fed official would promise the Bear people that he will loose the hounds and exhort every regulator and state or Federal prosecutor in America to put Bear and its officers under a microscope if they hold this deal up.  Even if the officers win, they lose.  Call it the Gitmo option, although in this case the Bear officers (here it comes) Git-less.

Pardon My Paranoia

The FT has an interesting article (by Christopher Caldwell of the weekly Standard) about race relations in the US; his launch point was the Obama speech, but we ended up here:

A very interesting book published this week shows why. In Racial Paranoia (Basic Books, $26/£15.99), the University of Pennsylvania anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr suggests that extravagant theories of white racism – from the widespread Aids rumour to Louis Farrakhan’s allegation that the US actually blew up the levees to cause the deadly New Orleans floods during Hurricane Katrina – have their roots in the decorous language that mostly white leaders have invented for talking about race.

The US has not managed to eliminate racism, Mr Jackson thinks, but it has succeeded in eliminating racist talk. Remarks the slightest bit “insensitive” draw draconian punishment. White people, because they feel thoroughly oppressed by this regime, assume that it must be some kind of “gift” to minorities, especially blacks.

It is not. It is more like a torment. It renders the power structure more opaque to blacks than it has ever been, leaving what Mr Jackson calls a “scary disconnect between the specifics of what gets said and the hazy possibilities of what kinds of things are truly meant”. If the historic enemies of your people suddenly began talking about you in what can fairly be called a secret code, how inclined would you be to trust in their protestations of generosity?

This is the core of the problem Mr Obama aims to address. Bringing subterranean racial narratives into the light of day, where they can be debated openly, is a risk. Although the early news coverage of his speech has been positive, polls appear show that what Americans most want from Mr Obama is a simple demonstration that he is not like Rev Wright.

Here is the "Racial Paranoia" website and author bio, with a helpful encoded picture to answer the obvious question Mr. Caldwell was too PC to tackle.  The New Black Man also clips some reviews.

As an example of the PC police in action we need look no further than my previous post.  "Old Punk" of the InstaPunk crowd posted his thoughts on why specific behaviors of a specific subset of the black community annoys him [that is a willfully generous but defensible characterization - see below].  Frankly, there is very little in his post I would be inclined to defend, but I would be very curious to learn how widely held his viewpoints might be.  As an example, I would guess his aversion to the hip-hop gangsta sub-culture is widely shared.

Well.  Rather than trying to look for the message in his message, the Usual Suspects, led by Glenn Greenwald, seized on the offensive sections as an opportunity to brand Glenn Reynolds and the entire conservative movement as racists.

So let me summarize the exchange:

Obama: We should have a national conversation about race.

Old Punk: OK, here is what annoys me about some black people.

Lefties:  The Old Punk is a racist, as are all righties.

One might well argue that this does discourage anything like a candid conversation.

Ann Althouse provides an interesting perspective.

BELOW:  I assert that the Old Punk has problems with "specific behaviors of a specific subset of the black community".  Does that square with this:

I don't hate black people. I can't pretend to be color-blind because absolutely nothing in my culture will allow me to be. I admire Thomas Sowell, Duke Ellington, Roberto Clemente, Muhammed Ali, Alexandre Dumas, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Count Basie, Tiger Woods, and Bill Cosby. There are many others but that's a sampling of the famous folks whose courage, genius, character, and achievements I would be proud if I could get anywhere in the vicinity of. The bald truth of the matter is that they're better than I am, and it doesn't arouse a flicker of racial feeling in me to acknowledge it. They have enriched and elevated my own experience of life.

On the other hand, I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn't it? I live in an eastern state almost exactly on the fabled Mason-Dixon line. Every day I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees -- and jeans belted just above their knees. I'm an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It's impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their trashed old Hondas with 19-inch spinner wheels and rap recordings that shake the foundations of the buildings. It's like a broadcast dare: Go ahead! Call me a nigger! And then I'll cap your ass.

There are black people he likes but he hates them as a group - what does that mean?  I am opting for the notion that he objects to specific manifestations of a collective black culture, but folks intent on shutting down the dialogue will insist he just doesn't like all blacks.

MORE:  John Cole provides a chuckle:

That being said, this Tom Maguire post had me laugh out loud:

...If Tom Maguire thinks that when Obama was writing his speech and Caldwell was writing his piece, what they had in mind for a candid discussion about race was a bunch of jackasses stating “Here is what I hate about niggers,” then he probably really didn’t understand the speech or the FT piece.

Hmm.  I have put about as charitable interpretation on the Old Punk's tirade as I care to, but it does lend itself to a less nuanced summary.

How Many Punks Does It Take To Embarrass Glenn Greenwald?

Glenn Greenwald opens a new frontier by criticizing Glenn Reynolds for a post he didn't link to.  Folks who go to Greenwald's  post will currently see this:

One of Instapundit's favorite blogs speaks on race

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds today linked to what he called "EASTER THOUGHTS" from one of his favorite right-wing blogs gers, his namesake, "Instapunk." That Easter post has a large picture of a crucified Christ along with a lovely religious poem.

But there is trouble in paradise, as the InstaPundit explains in an UPDATE:- "InstaPunk" is a group blog!

Careful readers of Greenwald will note a subtle acknowledgment of that problem by his presentation of the crossed out "favorite right-wing blogs gers".

Now if Greenwald could only contact Memeorandum, which preserved his original title:

One of Instapundit's favorite bloggers speaks on race

Oh, dear.  Despite three Updates, Greenwald has yet to mention explicitly the little problem with his creative attack.

TRICK QUESTION: How many punks does it take to embarrass Glenn Greenwald?  I haven't seen evidence that he is capable of embarrassment.

PILING ON:  Can we count on Dave Neiwert to just make stuff up that suits his narrative?  Yes We Can!

Glenn Greenwald has a superb piece pointing out a Glenn Reynolds-endorsed post from Instapunk that truly lays bare the ugly racism that has been rising, like all scum, to the top of the conservative movement these days...

Of course the post in question was not "Reynolds-endorsed", but wouldn't it be great for Neiwert if it had been?  So let's pretend!  Long time readers will recall that Dave Neiwert was one of the libs who discovered that Ann Coulter could bend space-time.  The reality was interesting enough, but not nearly as interesting to the reality-based community as their own fiction.

I WASN'T LOOKING IN THAT DIRECTION:  Cavalry from the left in the person of Mark Kleiman (who missed this Oprah follow-up from Glenn).

TIME WARP:  Mark Kleiman still misses the Oprah news and fails to surprise, in his second Update:

Tom Maguire, intending to defend Reynolds and attack Greenwald, instead succeeds in illustating Greenwald's point: that hate speech isn't offensive to some people on the "respectable" right. The good news is that, hypocrisy being the tribute vice pays to virtue, Maguire has to pretend that the hate speech he's defending isn't actually hateful. Instead of arguing for the value of what the Old Punk had to say, Maguire pretends he said something else and then argues for the value of that imaginary contribution instead, accusing Greenwald and other "lefties" of intolerance for wanting not to hear it.

Calling the Old Punk "hateful" ends any thought of dialogue, which is obviously Kleiman's objective.  If this were a group discussion I would be looking for a commonality to draw a person into the talk, not an extremity that could be used to exclude them.  As to how typical the Old Punk might be, with the dialogue over we will never reach that question.

Kleiman makes hay of an internal contradiction in the Old Punk's post which I skated past - after telling us he likes some black people the Old Punk tells us he dislikes all black people.   Tricky.  Since the OP then focused on the gangsta wanna-bes as offensive, I resolved the contradiction in favor of trying to interpret his real message.  Obviously, folks inclined to find the worst he said and use that as an excuse to ignore everything else are free to do so.

Kleiman concludes with unexpected drollery:

I'm astonished that Tom Maguire sees it differently. But then the Irish-Americans were always a potential a fifth column: slaves to the Pope, friends to slavery and traitors to the Union, dirty, lazy, drunken, and dishonest.

Let's have a conversation about it.

I think we had that conversation; certainly John Kennedy addressed the "slaves to the pope" question in 1960, although others insist that anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice. 

So his point is what - that his anti-Irish sentiment is as historically antique as the Old Punk's anti-black sentiment?  Interesting opinion, since we are often told that anti-black sentiment is alive, well, and a problem in need of a solution.

Or is his point that anti-Irish sentiment is as out of the mainstream as anti-black sentiment?  Again, this is news to me.  Good news, if I can believe it.

Or maybe he is thinking that I would never engage in a dialogue with a loon such as he.  Good point!  But one might argue that Obama sort of encouraged loons to come forward by inviting a national conversation about race.  "I want to hear what people think about the Irish, but not if it's nasty" - sort of phony, yes?

Let's close on a positive note - if national reconciliation on race means ignoring the views of people who express a problem with blacks, it should be an easy project.

Happy Easter Sunday

Away we go.

"There's No Reason Why [Iraq] Shouldn't Be A Walkover"

Barack Obama's capmain co-chair, Gen. Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak (Ret.), is in the news with his comic thrust tagging Bill Clinton as Joe McCarthy.

But the Dark Captain has dug up a classic interview with Barack's campaign co-chairman; this is from 2003, just after US troops had entered Iraq:

Is time on the United States' side in this battle?

Yeah. I really think time is on our side here. This is a fragile society, a little old one-town country, the size of Nebraska, maybe a little bigger, with the GDP about half the Army budget. So if this is a hard problem, we ought to get ourselves some new generals. I mean there's no reason why this shouldn't be a walkover.

And a bit later we get the General's timeframe:

Is Iraq the last country we confront in the Middle East?

Who wants to volunteer to get cross-ways with us? We'll be there a century, hopefully. If it works right.

I'll tell you one thing we should not hope for (is) a democratic Iraq. When I hear the president talking about democracy, the last thing we should want is an election in Iraq. We're not very popular. So I don't think we'll see any open elections in Iraq for a long time.

Hopefully over time they can be brought along like Japan and Germany -- Japan and Germany were relatively easy, I think, and South Korea.

The Captain has a question:

Isn’t this the exact argument McCain has made repeatedly, and which Obama derides as “a hundred-years war”? ...

This should raise some eyebrows on the Obama campaign’s willful deception on this point. Didn’t McPeak bother to explain to Obama the exact same reasoning he had in March 2003, at the start of the war? Did Obama not bother to listen?

I can handle this without even vexing the Obama spinners - Obama was not in the briefing that Sunday when McPeak made his controversial remarks.

In any case, McPeak is a part of the American story; Barack can no more disown him than he can disown his own grandmother, who made comments about the war effort against the Japanese that made Barack cringe.

MORE:  McPeak has been out in front of Barack for a while:

The Obama campaign Friday launched its own television ad in Texas, titled "Gulf."

The ad, which first aired before the Iowa caucuses, features retired Air Force Gen. Merrill McPeak, a former combat pilot who was the service's highest-ranking uniformed officer during the first Gulf War.

"As a combat pilot and Air Force chief during Desert Storm, lives depended on the judgments I made," McPeak says in the spot. "And judgment is what we need from our next commander in chief. Barack Obama opposed this war in Iraq from the start, showing insight and courage others did not."

McPeak backed John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race.

McPeak humiliated himself in early February with some stray comments about Hillary that were promptly repudiated and withdrawn.

And here we learn that McPeak "publicly opposed the current Iraq campaign from the start".  Gee, a retired member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed the war and the Times missed it.  But James Fallows of The Atlantic confirms it, as of Nov 2002 anyway.

This is from April 2006:

Though some retired senior officers are critical about the conduct of the war, that doesn't mean they want a quick pullout.

Gen. Merrill McPeak, retired Air Force chief of staff, says if anything the number of US troops there needs to be doubled - to around the figure Shinseki predicted would be needed three years ago - if Iraq is to become truly secure and democratic.

General McPeak lost friends when he started speaking out against the war several years ago. Now, he says, "everybody is sending me e-mails and cards and letters saying 'I wish I had seen it the way you saw it from the beginning,' and I've gotten some of those friends back."

McPeak participated in a pre-surge panel for Rolling Stone handicapping different scenarios (all grim).  Snippets:

The war in Iraq isn't over yet, but - surge or no surge - the United States has already lost. That's the grim consensus of a panel of experts assembled by Rolling Stone to assess the future of Iraq. "Even if we had a million men to go in, it's too late now," says retired four-star Gen. Tony McPeak, who served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War. "Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again."

...Best-Case Scenario: Civil War in Iraq and a Stronger al Qaeda

...Gen. Tony McPeak: It's not a question of whether we're going to leave Iraq - it's a question of when. And everybody in Iraq knows that. So they say, "Fine. We'll stock arms and wait for you guys to leave. And then we'll do what we want."

...Most Likely Scenario: Years of Ethnic Cleansing and War With Iran

McPeak: We're going to see a full-scale intercommunal war that may not burn out until one side is all dead, all gone. The Kurds would like to sit on the sidelines, but I don't see how they stay out, especially up in the Kirkuk area, where they sit on a lot of oil. This is going to be ethnic cleansing like we had in Kosovo or Bosnia - but written big, in capital letters. And we can't stop it.

...Worst-Case Scenario: World War III

...McPeak: The worst case? Iraq's Sunnis begin to be backed into a corner, then the Sunni governments - Jordan, Saudi Arabia - jump in. Israel sees that it's threatened by these developments. Once the Israelis get involved, then everybody piles on. And you've got nuclear events going off in the Middle East. That would be about as bad as it could get.

So McPeak was committed to defeat, as of March 2007 anyway.  He's got the right candidate.

It's Good To Be Rich

Here is an unsurprising Times story I expect to see promoted by every lefty blog:

Gap in Life Expectancy Widens for the Nation

By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — New government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades.

Life expectancy for the nation as a whole has increased, the researchers said, but affluent people have experienced greater gains, and this, in turn, has caused a widening gap.

Surely this is a clarion call for greater access to affordable health insurance.

As to possible explanations, if you pause, reflect, and indulge your common sense you will get many of them.  Cigarette smoking, for example, has become a largely working class phenomenon.  Violent crime is higher in poor neighborhoods.   A lifestyle commitment to alcohol or drug abuse generally leads to less income and a shorter life.  Someone well enough organized to earn lots of money is more likely to be well enough organized to learn how to protect their health.

Here is the Times report:

Hillarity Under Fire

Hillariy is under fire for possibly misoverestimating the hazards she faced on her character-building trip to Bosnia in 1996.  The WaPo gives her Four Pinocchios but Matt Yglesias has studied the video more carefully:

I don't recall that sniper incident, but I was only fifteen or so at the time, and now video has surfaced showing contemporary news coverage of the sniper attack on Clinton, and even capturing a portion of that harrowing dash -- including a moment when Clinton uses her body to shield a little girl from danger...

Very impressive.

And one of Matt's comenters reminds us that Obama has told some whoppers on the trail this year:

Military Historians Welcome

Matt Yglesias contemplates the anniversary analyses of Iraq and wonders, as have I - has the debacle in Iraq been a failure of conception or of execution, and how might one know?  Of course, if we hang on and win there, that answers the question. 

In any case, this bit caught my eye:

Suppose we were looking back on some military venture that was doomed to fail. Now suppose some supporter of that venture were arguing to us that, no, it wasn't doomed at all -- the trouble was the incompetence. The supporter can even find all these examples of incompetence -- why here are all these decisions that got made! And the decisions worked out poorly! How inept! How dare you say it was doomed to fail? I mean of course a group of people who set out to do something unreasonable are going to wind up implementing their agenda poorly. What would a flawlessly-executed but doomed-to-failure war look like?

Put another way, in a normal war both the winners and the losers make mistakes; the loser can always blame those mistakes, rather than a fundamental flaw in the plan.  Sort of like football.

Well, offhand I will nominate the Japanese war in the Pacific in WWII as well-executed but fundamentally hopeless.  The Pearl Harbor attack went well, as did the initial Japanese surge in the Pacific, but the rest of the plan relied on the US negotiating a peace, and that did not develop well.

Broadly, I suppose Hitler's attempt to take on Britain, France, Russia and the United States was fundamentally hopeless, but he came so close to succeeding that declaring it to have been hopeless seems absurd.  Clear?  Let's try a ghastly sports analogy - obviously, it would be ridiculous after the fact to insist that the NY Giants didn't have the talent to advance through the playoffs and win the 2008 Super Bowl (Note to non-fans - they did just that).  However, at the outset of the playoffs they were quite a longshot.

Somewhat similarly, in September 1939 a reasonable observer might have argued that the German-Russian alliance could not possibly hold, that the US would enter the war on the side of the Allies as in WWI, and hence Hitler was undertaking to battle all four countries, a seemingly hopeless task which ultimately failed.

But why take my word for it?  Comments are open.

Have I Mentioned Recently That Karl Rove Is A Genius?

I am going to be [even more] insufferable:

NB: Let's get some more media questions. So what's your media diet like nowadays?

ROVE: You mean on an ordinary day?

NB: Yeah.

ROVE: I get Mike Allen's overnight summary from Politico, I cruise RealClearPolitics.com, I get Taranto from the Wall Street Journal, I visit the Corner. I check Drudge, I check Fox News, I have a list of favorites that I sort of thumb through if I've got the time. I obviously read papers, the New York Times; the Wall Street Journal; when in Washington, the Washington Post if not, I get it online. I check out, most days, Instapundit, Power Line, Hugh Hewitt. Occasionally I'll dip into Just One Minute or visit the Captain's Quarters, I check out Michael Barone's blog, and I look forward to getting Opinion Journal, and I get the NCPA summary. And I also get a news summary, a news clip early in the morning of all the clips.

I am delighted to be judged by the company I am keeping here, and the readers that are stopping by.

     

Affirmative Action Campaigning

Check out this latest outrage on the Democratic trail - Bill Clinton is now "Joe McCarthy" because he praised his wife and John McCain but forgot to praise Obama as well.  Oh, dear -such selective praise might negatively impact Obama's self-esteem, and none of us want that, now do we?

Wild Bill's offensive, reprehensible comment is here:

"I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country," said Clinton, who was speaking to a group of veterans Friday in Charlotte, N.C. "And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics."

How dare he praise two candidates and not the third!  And this during a Presidential campaign!  [But why did Clinton single out "this" election year?  Is he really attacking John Kerry's patriotism?]  The Obama Camp's reaction was swift, measured, and thoughtful:

[Retired Air Force Gen. Merrill "Tony"] McPeak, a former chief of staff of the Air Force and currently a co- chair of Obama's presidential campaign, said that sounded like McCarthy.

"I grew up, I was going to college when Joe McCarthy was accusing good Americans of being traitors, so I've had enough of it," McPeak said.

Clearly it is time to extend the Obama Rules - any praise of Hillary for any quality she might posses that is not immediately coupled with similar praise of Barack equals criticism of Barack for a deficiency in that quality.  Perhaps the FCC can fold that into a revived Equal Time rule - whenever one of her surrogates praises Hillary they must devote equal time to praising Barack.

As an example of Compliant Campaigning, let's all look forward to Bill Clinton speaking on Mother's Day:

Hillary has been a wonderful wife and devoted mother for years.  And let me add that Barack has been a wonderful husband and devoted father, as far as I know.  No, strike that qualifier!  He has been Mr. Wonderful, and who could doubt it?

Do not scoff at me.  If Bill were to praise Hillary's marital and parenting skills while overlooking Barack's that would be the worst sort of racial pandering, playing on unspoken prejudices of black abandonment.  C'mon - when I'm right, I'm right.

Left unanswered - how will this work in the general election?  If Republicans praise John McCain as a hero and patriot without similarly praising Barack, will they also be accused of McCarthyism?  I think we know the answer.

MORE:  The Captain thinks this will dust-up will hurt the Obama people with their military surrogates.  I don't know - I think it hurts the Obama people with the three folks who were still watching this campaign with a straight face.

PILING ON:  Can we count on Oliver Willis?  Yes We Can!

(File this under "How Soon They, i.e,. We, i.e., I Forget" - was Oliver's site motto "Like Kryptonite to Logic"? Or perhaps "Like Magnetite to Stupid"?   Troubling...)

KEEP ST. PATRICK ALIVE!  Was it only five days ago we were all wearing the green?  And now this "McCarthy" attack introduces deplorable and divisive anti-Irish rhetoric into the campaign.

But McCarthy is part of the American story.   We can no more disown him than we can disown the Gimp...

Traditional Saturday Open Thread

Bill Clinton is McCarthy?  So does that mean Hillary is Bergen?  (I can see her lips moving...)

The Non-Conversation About Race

Ezra Klein claims that the Cone of Silence has dropped over any discussion of race:

...it's a tremendous indictment of our media that, given an opportunity, to push forward on that discussion, they made an affirmative decision to focus back in on the campaign. You wonder if Wolf Blitzer and Candy Crowley and all the rest got into journalism believing that, one day, they would decide to suppress a potentially historic and important conversation on race in order to talk about polling.

Well, then, it is a tremendous indictment of the Obama campaign as well - they made it clear on Wednesday that they had had their fill of this race talk; here is the NY Times:

Obama Works to Shift Campaign Back to Domestic Issues

By JEFF ZELENY

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Senator Barack Obama on Wednesday tried to steer his campaign from a focus on race that had threatened to envelop his candidacy and back to the economy, war and a host of other concerns.

One day after delivering a major address about the racial divide, Mr. Obama barely mentioned the topic on his first campaign visit to North Carolina. From a foreign policy address in Fayetteville to a public forum here, Mr. Obama made just a passing reference to race, after a voter broached the subject.

Dare we say it?  We are in or on the verge of a recession, folks are worried about keeping their jobs and their homes, and we are at war in Iraq.  Maybe voters who are not intent on a conversation about race do not have misplaced priorities:

In interviews, North Carolina voters and party officials across the country said they hoped that race would not stay at the forefront of the nominating contest with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. But they also said they were wary that the issue remained potent.

...By design, advisers said, Mr. Obama had no immediate plans to revisit the themes of the speech, which bluntly confronted divisions between black and white and urged both races to understand each other’s anger, resentment and division.

Party officials in states with coming primaries said Wednesday that race was not what most Democratic voters wanted to discuss.

“People in our state are worried about their jobs and their health care and their mortgage,” said Dan Parker, the Indiana Democratic chairman, who is preparing for the most competitive primary since 1968. “Race? We don’t really want to talk about that.”

Let's hold off on indicting the media for a moment.  Mr. Klein links to more laughs with this:

But read EJ Dionne today for some of the commentary that we should be hearing. He recalls that Martin Luther King Jr.'s preaching was also laced with anger towards White America, and towards much of American policy, but that these elements of his philosophy came out in black churches, not the public square.

Oh for heaven's sake - here is the inflammatory rhetoric presented by Mr. Dionne:

Listen to what King said about the Vietnam War at his own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Feb. 4, 1968: "God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place." King then predicted this response from the Almighty: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."

Martin Luther King was opposed to the Vietnam war, and thought the United States was engaging in war crimes and would lose.  My goodness, is that a race-based viewpoint?  Is it a viewpoint well out of the political mainstream?  Two years later Senator, Fool for Life and former Presidential nominee John Kerry would launch his political career on just such rhetoric.

For the sort of race-based hostility so over the top that it can only be found as a guest piece at the NY Times, try this, from the summer of 1967 - it is by Floyd McKissick, then head of the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the groups that organized the King "I Have A Dream" March on Washington.  The title is a giveaway - "Why The Negro Must Rebel".  McKissick calls for black rebellion and denounces the black leaders who speak out against rioting blacks:

Some so-called Negro leaders even have the audacity to join the man - by calling a liberation struggle a riot - his brothers hoodlums and criminals - and damning his brothers who seek to overthrow the yoke of oppression.

By comparison and in context, Martin Luther King sounds like a mainstream voice of moderation.  If McKissick was being given a platform in the Times, folks other than Messrs. Klein and Dionne may be left wondering what was being said in more polarized venues.

MORE:  The AIDS conspiracy theory has real, negative consequences, per these researchers and activists.  Trinity United Church is fortunate to have a United States Senator sitting in their pews (intermittently) and listening to the sermons (when they are not incendiary).

What are the prospects for racial reconciliation when thirty percent of blacks think the US government is trying to kill them?  So when does Barack take the lead on dispelling this myth?  That is a story Mr. Klein could report on as part of the conversation.

 

Agency Problems

The NY Times editorializes on the Bears Stearns situation and wonders why top financial executives aren't asked to give their bonuses back:

Bankers operate under a system that provides stellar rewards when the investment strategies do well yet puts a floor on their losses when they go bad. They might have to forgo a bonus if investments turn sour. They might even be fired. Their equity might become worthless — or not, if the Fed feels it must step in. But as a rule, they won’t have to return the money they made in the good days when they were making all the crazy bets that eventually took their banks down.

The costs of such a lopsided system of incentives are by now clear. Better regulation of mortgage markets would help avoid repeating current excesses. But more fundamental correctives are needed to curb financiers’ appetite for walking a tightrope. Some economists have suggested making their remuneration contingent on the performance of their investments over several years — releasing their compensation gradually.

That’s an idea worth studying. Certainly, trying to put specific limits on bankers’ salaries is a nonstarter. But until bankers face a real risk of losing their shirts, they will continue blithely ratcheting up the risks to collect the rewards while letting the rest of us carry the bag when their punts go bad.

I agree that they are describing a real problem, which is more accurately aligning the interests of the financial services "producers" with shareholders and risk regulators.  But why pick only on the top execs?  Somewhere in our glorious country is a mortgage broker who put lots of folks into crazy mortgages, flipped the mortgages to eager investment banks, and drove off in her Porsche, which she still has (with gas at $3.50/gallon - hah!).

On the other hand, the private market solution would be for investors to deal only very cautiously with investment firms whose salesman and deal originators do not have their own net worth tied up in the firms; as they promote various transactions such salesman would be inclined to mull the long term reputation of the firm and the long-term viability of specific deals, as well as their next commission check.

So is it back to partnerships?  Goldman Sachs (not a partnership, but sort of) has done well in this recent debacle, and the Goldman partners routinely have kept most of their net worth tied up in the firm, even after it went public (or so I believe; blame their great PR machine if I'm wrong).  That said, Bear Stearns employees also were encouraged to keep their money in the firm, and how did that work?

Oh, well - no politician ever lost votes for blaming Wall Street, but there were some very savvy investors who get suckered by this sub-prime mess, just as there were some very savvy investors who were suckered by the internet bubble, or the LTCM meltdown of 1998, or the high yield bust of the 80's, or the REIT bust of the 70's, and so on back through history.

Not many people on Wall Street are paid to say "no" to deals; not concidentally, it is hard to evaluate the bottom-line impact of deals denied.

Obama -"Typical White" Reacts Badly To Blacks

Obama was right about one thing - his attempt to end this conversation about race as quickly as possible was a good idea.

Instead, Mr. Smooth Talker managed to brand all white people as racists and implicitly equate them with Jeremiah Wright.  My goodness - tomorrow, he will be denouncing our cats and dogs.  Here we go:

610 WIP host Angelo Cataldi asked Obama about his Tuesday morning speech on race at the National Constitution Center in which he referenced his own white grandmother and her prejudice. Obama told Cataldi that "The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity, but that she is a typical white person. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know (pause) there's a reaction in her that doesn't go away and it comes out in the wrong way."

"[S]omebody on the street that she doesn't know"?  Kidding?  That special "somebody" was a black man in the original telling.  So where are we - the "typical" white person reacts the wrong way when they see a black person on the street?  Let's flash back to Obama's comment about this sort of thing from his own speech:

[W]hen [working- and middle-class white Americans are] told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

My resentment is building right now.

Let's round out the file with the faux-equivalence passage linking Wright to Obama's grandmother, and now the rest of us bigoted whites - Obama was not talking about "somebody on the street that she doesn't know" on Tuesday:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

NOSE FOR NEWS:  Noam Scheiber of TNR reprints the "typcial white" passage and repeats Ben Smith of Politico lauding Obama's ability to reach out to new audiences.  OK.  There are none so deaf as those who will not hear.

HIS SECRET LIFE:  Obama as blogger?  Incredible.

Take A Breath

These pollsters are excited to report that Clinton is "closing in on Obama" in North Carolina.  Hold on:

Clinton closing in on Obama in NC

Raleigh, N.C. – Hillary Clinton has cut Barack Obama’s lead in North Carolina to one
point, according to the newest survey from Public Policy Polling.
Obama leads 44-43 in the state, after leading by four points in a similar poll conducted by PPP two weeks ago.

Eventually we get this caveat:

PPP surveyed 521 likely Democratic primary voters on March 17th. The survey’s margin of error is +/- 4.3%. Other factors, such as refusal to be interviewed and weighting, may introduce additional error that is more difficult to quantify.

As a point estimate, the single best guess is that Hillary is in fact narrowing the gap in North Carolina.  However, based on the margins of error for the two polls we do not have a statistical basis for rejecting the alternative hypothesis that the gap has not changed.  True pedants will note that it is even a statistical possibility that the actual gap has widened. 

Plenty of other polls suggest hard times for Obama - here are Rasmussen and Gallup - and the idea that North Carolina is in play has got to be making the Obamites nervous.  Jim Geraghty:

Right after that 11 state winning streak, it's possible that Obama will have nearly as tough a slump as Hillary suffered, losing Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina (maybe), West Virginia, and Kentucky.

(Yes, yes, he won Wyoming and Mississippi in there.)

Is there any doubt why Obama is resisting the re-vote in Florida and Michigan?  Try to picture him losing those two states as well as those listed above and then trying to persuade the superdelegates of his inevitability.

Fauxbama - Kiss The Elderly White Women (Goodbye)

Although Obama's speech on race has been hailed as bold and courageous by his supporters, it will eventually be seen as the critical failure of his campaign.  Rather than a bold and honest talk on race Obama hid behind pandering parallels; this will prompt the not-yet-true believers to tune him out as just another grievance based black politician.

One absurd parallel was the equation of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, with his own grandmother:

I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

This parallel worked for Joe Klein, but my guess is that many mainstream whites will consider it ridiculous to link the private mutterings of an old woman with the weekly ravings of a very public pastor.

Getting somewhat less attention (but rallying!) was the linkage of Jeremiah Wright to Geraldine Ferraro:

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

Now, wait - either Wright is a crank and demagogue, or Obama had better be prepared to defend his "God damn America" tirade and the rest of his oeuvre.  But what did Geraldine Ferraro say to merit the suggestion that she harbors some deep-seated racial bias?  She made the widely defended comment that Obama's campaign has benefited from the fact that he is not white, and she made a similar observation about Jesse Jackson.

Obama or whoever edited his speech should have just stopped with the idea that Wright is a crank.  Finding elderly white woman to balance the scales won't exactly buttress his already weak appeal to that demographic, nor is it likely to help with anyone who has an elderly white wife, sister, mother, or grandmother. 

And what was the point  of the phony balancing act - to reassure Wright's apologists that there are mean-spirited whities out there, too?  Bad idea - cut Wright loose, don't pretend he has company.

GERALDINE HAS COMPANY:  "It would be such an affirmation of who we say are as a people" if we could elect a young African-American as President.  Or so says John Kerry.

But race doesn't matter!  And voters are not responding to Obama's race.

I deplore Kerry's deep-seated bigotry.

Thinking Out Loud About Bear And Bears

Suppose three months go by and, while we are not out of the financial thicket, the Fed magic is clearly working and the crisis atmosphere is past.  Bear shareholders then vote down the fire-sale $2 stock swap.  What next - Apocalypse Then?  Sure, maybe, but not necessarily, if Bear's currently illiquid assets are more liquid and more favorably priced.

I can see why Bear shares might be worth more than $2 today (the last trade Tuesday was at $5.91) - they certainly are a call option of sorts on a better tomorrow.

Imagining Barack Abroad

Our heroic world traveller is meeting with Ahmadinejad of Iran.  Outside, with cameras rolling, crowds are chanting "Death to the Great Satan!"  Cut to Barack:

"This hatred of America has a long history.  And it is part of Iran - I could no more expect Ahmadinejad to disown it than I could expect him to disown the Iranian community, or his blessed grandmother.  Besides, I heard this stuff all the time in my church back in America, and I recognize it is a distraction form the real issue of better health care for all Iranians..."

OK, maybe not.

New Barack Thread

Don't stop thinking about Barack's lack of tomorrows.

Michael Crowley of TNR has an otherwise good assessment of the speech which includes this howler of an aside:

One of Bill Clinton's greatest political assets (before this campaign) was his ability to be a Nixon-in-China when it came to race; his successful mid-90s defense of affirmative action is a perfect example.

A Democrat defending black interests generally and affirmative action specifically - gee whiz, who could have seen that coming?  Lest Mr. Crowley has forgotten, Nixon had a decades-old reputation as a bitter anti-Communist when he made his 'I will go to China' announcement.  Clinton's promise to end welfare as we know it was more of a Nixon-China thing, although it took a Republican Congress and the threat of an election to turn that promise into reality.

Well.  This from Mr. Crowley is good, or at least, I had a similar reaction in that I completely failed to hear this segment of Obama's speech:

The second way in which Obama's speech may have come up short was the scant attention it devoted to social failures within the black community. This, again, was a theme that Bill Clinton used masterfully to establish himself as both a student of black culture and someone unwilling to indulge its worst excesses. It's true that Obama did urge blacks to avoid "becoming victims of our past," and take "full responsibility for our own lives--by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them." But this was a small part of his speech and not at all its tonal emphasis. Yet it seems quite likely that millions of white voters still see black America as indulgent of criminality and insufficiently devoted to education and work. Obama's fleeting lines about victimhood and reading to children do little to address that audience. As an alternative, Obama might have benefitted from invoking the example of Bill Cosby, who has morphed from comedian to one of black America's sharpest internal critics. "Your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it's cursing and calling each other [the N-word] as they're walking up and down the street. They think they're hip. They can't read. They can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere," Cosby told a group of black activists in 2004 (who, it should be noted, cheered him on). There was nothing like that here from Obama.

C'mon, Obama didn't even take a shot at violent, misogynistic hip-hop - even Al Sharpton is on that bus.

"OUCH" FROM KAUS:

Troublesome Equivalence II

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street ...

The most disastrous sentence in the speech. If Obama's saying that those who fear young black men on the street are racists, the equivalents of Rev. Wright in offensiveness, then he's just insulted a whole lof ot people. If he loses the votes of everyone who fears young black men, he loses the election. People fear black men on the street--as even Jesse Jackson once momentarily admitted--because they cause a wildly disproportionate share of street crime. Does Obama want to be the candidate who says that thought is verboten?

Later he  says:

So when [whites] are told to ... that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Who would tell them such a thing? Obama, a dozen paragraphs earlier, dissing his own grandmother.

Someone is sure to mention the famous Jesse Jackson comment - may as well be me
NewsBusters:

There is nothing more painful to me ... than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. -- the Reverend Jesse Jackson, as quoted in US News, 3/10/96

As I recall Jackson later apologized for that remark, but the apology was for going off-message and providing ammo to, well, cranks like me.

What Did You Think?

OK, this speech will work for Barack.  I was with him for quite a while, but he lost me at the end (I want a transcript!).

I don't want to promise that this is what he said, but this is what I heard, in outline, after denunciation of Wright and a dubious linkage of Wright and Obama's grandmother with her stray racist comments.  [Hmm, did Obama choose his grandma?  Or, is his point that he didn't confront his grandmother when he was ten, so he couldn't confront Wright when he was forty?]

- Black people have reasons to be angry about slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing discrimination;

- Whites have reason to be unhappy with (pre-reform) welfare, affirmative action, busing, and being called a racist for worrying about black crime rates.

- Wright was wrong in both his racial divisiveness and his belief that American society was static, and progress was not occurring. [But is this a generational thing?  Moss, the new minister, is younger than Barack (and about as charismatic) but seemingly cut from the same divisive cloth as Wright.]
.
- whites needed to do more to raise up black schools and black communities.

Wait!  Did he lose a page here - what, if anything is the black community meant to do differently?  [Thank you Matt Drudge - see below]

Then his conclusion left me at sea - he seemed to be saying that, as in elections past, we could ignore race except as a distraction, but that he was committed to discussing it.  Huh?  His new-found commitment seems to be a direct response to this Wright controversy, not something he wanted to do.

And his discussion of healing race relations seemed to be disappear into a talk about health care, jobs, and everything else.  Baffling.

Still, this will slide him past the Dem primary voters.  For the general, time will tell.

OH, YEAH!  Obama does summon the Dem dream of working class whites and blacks (and browns and yellows) uniting against their oppressive corporate overlords.

FROM THE TRANSCRIPT (emphasis added):

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

Hmm, in the post-speech commentary I see that Pat Buchanan also missed that call to responsibility.  Let's guess that no one will fault Barack for over-emphasizing that point.

WERE MY QUESTIONS ANSWERED?  Developing...

IMAGINE MY DISAPPOINTMENT AND SURPRISE:  More Victims Studies as part of the path to racial reconciliation made a brief appearance over the weekend but seems to have been dropped.  And my suggested spin - Who better to speak to the Muslim youths emerging from their hate-filled mosques than a man coming from a hate-filled church - never arrived. 

 

Shelby Steele On Barack

Shelby Steele has a must-read on Barack:

Bracing For The Big Speech

Andrew Sullivan is all excited in anticipation of the Obama speech on race, so Team Protein smites him.  As does Mark Steyn.

But I can't resist taking my own shot at Sully's lead:

Today will be a crucial day. It will be a day when we will discover if America’s racial environment - and the emotions and feelings and anger and fears that it entails - can allow for a black man - with all that entails - to become president.

Stop, I'm begging you.  If Colin Powell were running on his national security credentials, would we be having this conversation about his hate-filled minister?  Of course not - we'd be talking (OK, groaning) about his UN presentation on Saddam's WMDs.

But since Obama is virtually unknown to most of us, and since he is running as an emblem of racial reconciliation, his long and close association with Wright is a legitimate issue.

What do I hope to hear in this speech?  Answers to a couple of questions:

1.  When Obama attempted to quell this on Saturday he warned us that "over the last several weeks that the forces of division have started to raise their ugly heads again."

Does Obama consider his own minister to be one of those "forces of division"?  How can he rationalize his twenty year association with this man, and how does he explain his minister's sermons to his daughters?

2.  Again, last Saturday Obama told us that "[Our country has] got a lot of pent-up anger and bitterness and misunderstanding. But what I continue to believe in is that this country wants to move beyond these kinds of divisions."

Does Obama really believe that Wright wants to move past these divisions?  Has Obama had much success moving Wright past his anger?  Or if not, is it only white people that are supposed to give up their anger and end their divisiveness?

ON MSNBC:  Brutal - MSNBC is presenting black ministers who insist that Wright is way out of the mainstream, and that most black churches preach a more traditional Christian message of love.  Ooops.

SWIFTBOAT WILLIE:  Bill Kristol is telling me that some Obama supporters are realizing this is a problem for Obama.  A problem?  It's Willie Horton driving a Swiftboat!

All The News That Fits The Storyline

Earnest libs relying on the Paper of Record to keep them up to speed on the Obama-Wright controversy must be scratching their heads today.  Here is the Times "coverage" of the background; don't blink or you'll miss it:

Faced with what his advisers acknowledged was a major test to his candidacy, Senator Barack Obama sought on Monday to contain the damage from incendiary comments made by his pastor and prepared to address the issue of race more directly than at any other moment of his presidential campaign.

hough he has faced questions about controversial statements by the pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., for more than a year, Mr. Obama is enduring intense new scrutiny now over Mr. Wright’s characterizations of the United States as fundamentally racist and the government as corrupt and murderous.

The WaPo was a bit bolder in challenging their reader's tender sensitivities:

More than a year ago, Wright warned Obama and Moss that a presidential campaign made criticism of Trinity inevitable, but none of them anticipated fallout like this. Web sites and television news shows recalled Wright's praise of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and played a greatest-hits compilation of Wright's most incendiary comments: that Sept. 11, 2001, meant "America's chickens are coming home to roost." That former president Bill Clinton "did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky." That "racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run."

Getting closer, although WaPo readers might be left wondering what all the fuss is about.  Let's cut back to last week's Wall Street Journal and bring some more reality to the reality based:

In a sermon delivered at Howard University, Barack Obama's longtime minister, friend and adviser blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs and creating a racist society that would never elect a black candidate president.

ABC News and Fox News had more last week:

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strikes law and then wants us to sing 'God bless America,' No, no, no, not 'God bless America,' God damn America -- that's in the Bible, you're killing innocent people, God damn America for treating us citizens as less than human."

After 9/11, Wright said, "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagaski and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye...America's chickens are coming home to roost."

And the classic, "Hillary ain't never been called a n****r".

To be fair to the Times, even though they won't tell their readers why Obama has a problem, they have some cogent commentary about the scope of the problem:

Mr. Obama is particularly vulnerable because voters are still getting to know him, said Democratic and Republican strategists — and a few voters as well. The Wright affair “makes me question other things. What else do we not know?” asked Karen Norton, 58, a computer saleswoman in North Carolina and a Republican who said that, until now, she had been stirred by Mr. Obama’s message of national reconciliation.

Mr. Wright’s statements, said strategists, threaten his greatest strength, his reputation as a unifying, uplifting figure, capable of moving the country past old labels and divisions.

“The problem is the complete contradiction between the message of the Obama campaign and the message of the minister who’s been his close friend and confidant for 20 years,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican consultant unaffiliated with any campaign.

Mr. Obama has also pitched himself as a candidate who can attract religious voters back to the Democratic Party, one who speaks the language of the Bible fluently and testifies about what he says is the impact of Christianity on his own life.

“What better way to try to undercut the way he integrates faith and political vision than to say we should all be secretly afraid of his church?” said Jim Wallis, a left-leaning evangelical who has had longstanding relationships with both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, and who says that Mr. Wright has been unfairly caricatured in recent portrayals.

So he is a cipher whose credibility as a racial and religious unifier is in jeopardy.  I agree.

The Politico Braces Us For Tuesday

John Harris and Jim Vandehei of The Politico appraise Obama's situation:

Democrats who worry that Barack Obama is untested can put their concerns to rest.

Nice to see a smiling face!  Hurray, he's being tested!

A successful address would go a long way toward answering Hillary Rodham Clinton’s complaint that Obama has never shown he can handle the rough-and-tumble nature of modern political combat.

A failure could leave many of the white independent voters — a key group behind Obama’s swift rise in national politics — doubting whether he is really the bridge-builder and healer he has portrayed himself to be.

Do or die. Live free or die hard.  Bring popcorn.

In the past, Obama has made racial issues, and his own precedent-shattering status, a minor note in his message. But Obama said Monday he recognizes that there is no way he is going to become the Democratic nominee without a forthright statement about the role of race in American life.

“I think it would have been naive for me to think I could run and end up with quasi-front-runner status in a presidential election as potentially the first African-American president, that issues [of] race wouldn’t come up, any more than Sen. Clinton could expect that gender issues might not come up,” Obama told interviewer Gwen Ifill on PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.”

He has "his own precedent-shattering status a minor note in his message"?  Kidding?  Have they read his 2004 keynote speech which catapulted him to fame?  Here is his intro, just as a reminder: 

On behalf of the great state of Illinois...   

(APPLAUSE)   

... crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deep gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention. Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.

My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin- roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.   

OBAMA: But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that's shown as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before him.   

(APPLAUSE)   

While studying here my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas.

Please - he has been running on his biography and, uhh, appearance ever since.  Or dare we ask, why is his campaign historic?

Here is Obama promoting himself to the Houston Chronicle just before the Texas primary:

In a conference call, Obama told the Chronicle editorial board that "more than any other candidate, I can bridge some of the partisan as well as racial and religious divides that have developed in this country that prevent us from getting things done."

Wright is important because Obama has made his image as a racial healer important.

 

 

Waiting For Godot... To Vote In Pennsylvania

My goodness - since the Texas-Ohio primaries two geologic eras ago we have lost Samantha Power, Eliot Spitzer, Geraldine Ferraro, and Bear Stearns, with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright poised near the front of the bus - the front wheels of the bus, that is.

And five more weeks to Pennsylvania!

Can't fault the Dems for failing to deliver a spectacle.

Now Its Ron Fournier...

Don't criticize Obama for being arrogant - libs know what you are really thinking.

OK, let's set the guilty white libs to one side and cut back to Mr. Fournier:

It may be that he has just the right mix of confidence and humility to lead the nation (Obama likes to say, "I'm reminded every day that I'm not a perfect man"). But if the young senator wins the nomination, even the smallest trace of arrogance will be an issue with voters who still consider him a blank slate.

That may seem unfair to a candidate who's running against Clinton, the former first lady who is the model of overbearing pride.

With respect to Hillary, that's as may be.  But if Obama manages to come off as smug and overbearing with an older war hero, good luck to him.  And good bye.

Yikes!

Whoa - if Ross Douthat ever gets irked with me, I am hiding. Under a new name.  New continent.  New planet!

BACKSTORY:  It's about elevation.

Maybe In The Next Spin Cycle...

Currently Obama is defending his twenty year association with Jeremiah Wright by explaining that he had no idea that Minister "God Damn America" had an angry and divisive side.  Uh huh.

But in our ongoing attempt to anticipate tomorrow's spin today, let's suggest a fallback defense for Team Obama.  I can see the press release...

Throughout the Muslim world America and the West are confronted by a generation of Muslim youth raised in hate-filled mosques preaching anti-Americanism and division.  And what candidate is better equipped to reach out to those angry youths than a man who was himself raised in a hate-filled and divisive church?

Bold!  Visionary!  (Improbable...)

TO BE FAIR:  Did Sully beat me to this?

BUT SERIOUSLY, VICTIMS STUDIES?:  In all the recent Wright coverage very little attention has been paid to a new underpinning to Barack's message of racial unity.  If America is about to come together,  why is he the man and this the moment?  Because, per the AP, Barack will push for expanded Victims Studies in the public schools:

He said schools should do a better job of teaching all students African-American history "because that's part of American history," as well as women's struggle for equality, the history of unions, the role of Hispanics in U.S. and other matters that he suggested aren't given enough attention.

"I want us to have a broad-based history" taught in schools, he said, even including more on "the Holocaust as well as other issues of oppression" around the world.

Right, because the schools have gotten the whole reading, writing and arithmetic thing pinned down.  Previous mockery here.

As best I can tell there is nothing about this new push for Victims Studies in Barack's Blueprint for Change.  The education section does mention improving math and science instruction, and the civil rights section covers other topics but not this.

My guess - this Victim Studies thing is more Politico "old news", which is to say, new to the rest of us.

I Don't Know What You Did Last Summer

Barack catches a break [but Ambinder and Sully need to give me a break - see below] - the NewsMax reporter who claimed Obama was in the church nodding in agreement during yet another of Jeremiah Wright's speeches has a space-time problem.  From NewsMax:

Contrary to Senator Barack Obama’s claim that he never heard his pastor Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. preach hatred of America, Obama was in the pews last July 22 when the minister blamed the “white arrogance” of America’s Caucasian majority for the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks.

However, Barack spoke that Sunday to a La Raza rally in Miami - here is video from his website, a Washington Times story, and the speaking schedule - Barack was due up at 1:30 PM.

This does not resolve Obama's central problem - he is telling the nation that

"We’ve got a lot of pent-up anger and bitterness and misunderstanding. But what I continue to believe in is that this country wants to move beyond these kinds of divisions."

but there is no evidence that, over the course of twenty years, he has moved his own minister past anger and bitterness.

However, if Obama was not attending church the specific day NewsMax claims he was, this gotcha is gone, and Obama's ludicrous claim that he was unaware of Wright's incendiary black separatism has not yet been disproven.

Props to Mickey Kaus for this.

MORE:  Planes, trains, and automobiles?  From Chicago to Miami for a 1:30 scheduled speech?  I could believe Obama flew in Sunday morning, but to have time to go to church first?  Per NewsMax, it was a Sunday morning sermon.  And there is a one hour time difference between Chicago, so even the 7AM service would be a tight schedule.  Hmm, in by 8 AM (Eastern time), out by 9 (C'mon, don't tell an old Catholic that the early service isn't the quick one), private plane for three hours to Miami - EZ!  Or at least, not utterly implausible.  Pretty high level of energy and commitment from Obama, though.  Show us some plane ticket receipts!

[Or don't - Obama was in Chicago Sunday AM and did have an event scheduled, but that event was not a church appearance.  Or so the Obama people say.]

FWIW, Obama spoke to a rally in Manchester, NH on Friday, July 20.  Chicago is an air hub, so he may have gone home that night.  But geez, playing "Where's Obama?" is absurd - Wright delivered twenty years of this stuff.

GIVE ME A BREAK:  Marc Ambinder and Andrew Sullivan go off on William Kristol, who recited the NewsMax reporting in his own column.  Ambinder:

Bill Kristol's New York Times column about Barack Obama this morning contains a major, prejudicial error.

Paragraph five:

But Ronald Kessler, a journalist who has written about Wright’s ministry, claims that Obama was in fact in the pews at Trinity last July 22. That’s when Wright blamed the “arrogance” of the “United States of White America” for much of the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks. In any case, given the apparent frequency of such statements in Wright’s preaching and their centrality to his worldview, the pretense that over all these years Obama had no idea that Wright was saying such things is hard to sustain.

Let give some praise to Ambinder, who has the honor to present the Kristol's NewsMax cite in context.  Reading the full paragraph (my emphasis added), it is clear that Kristol quite reasonably believes that one swallow does not a springtime make, and that trying to demonstrate whether Obama was in attendance for specific inflamatory sermon is a mug's game.

Did Kristol bow it?  Apparently.  Was it a "major" error?  He could have easily submitted the column with the NewsMax cite omitted and changed almost nothing else.

This is what Kristol makes of the Wright connection:

This doesn’t mean that Obama agrees with Wright’s thoroughgoing and conspiracy-heavy anti-Americanism. Rather, Obama seems to have seen, early in his career, the utility of joining a prominent church that would help him establish political roots in the community in which he lives. Now he sees the utility of distancing himself from that church. Obama’s behavior in dealing with Wright is consistent with that of a politician who often voted “present” in the Illinois State Legislature for the sake of his future political viability.

That is essentially the Matt Yglesias "defense"; if Ambinder has offered an interpretation I can't find it.

THE NEWSMAX NON-DEFENSE:  Groan - NewsMax has a clarification:

...Our writer, Jim Davis, says he attended several services at Senator Obama's church during the month of July, including July 22. The church holds services three times every Sunday at 7:30 and 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. Central time. While both the early morning and evening service allowed Sen. Obama to attend the service and still give a speech in Miami, Mr. Davis stands by his story that during one of the services he attended during the month of July, Senator Obama was present and sat through the sermon given by Rev. Wright as described in the story. Mr. Davis said Secret Service were also present in the church during Senator Obama's attendance.

First, the original story is written as though the writer attended just one service.  But more importantly, if the best the Mr. Davis could come up with after attending "several" services was one "United States of White America" moment, maybe Obama really did sleep through or miss the worst of Wright.

Now, maybe he went to a service, saw Obama wasn't there, and skipped out.  And on the other side, both church service tapes I sat through have objectionable moments.

Well, I have an idea for NewsMax - get it right the first time, 'kay?  We want drip, drip, drip from Obama, but thanks for sharing.

WHO IS THIS REPORTER?  NewsMax's Jim Davis has three bylines in his career there (1, 2, 3), one of them shared, if I can trust their own site Google search.

All of this is a helpful reminder of why I use NewsMax for transcripts and not much else.