JustOneMinute

What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits

Excitable Andy has decided to Swift Boat John McCain ["Swift Boat" as meant by the left; see UPDATE]:

I've now heard it countless times. McCain has used what appears to be an intensely personal moment in a prison camp as a reason to vote for him in a campaign ad. As he tells it today, it was the pivotal moment in his struggle to survive in the Hanoi Hilton. And yet, in his first thorough account of his time in captivity, in 1973, the story is absent. The story is also hauntingly like that recounted by Solzhenitsen, as told in Luke Veronis, "The Sign of the Cross":

...

I have one simple question: when was the first time that McCain told this story?

Uh huh.  Because the sign of the cross is a pretty well-kept secret, so how could prison guards invoke it twice in one century?  FWIW, the story appears in McCain's 1999 "Faith Of My Fathers", although I have no idea whether McCain told it earlier.  Lexis mavens?

The Kossacks are on this search for the truth, so we know it will be kept classy.  And speaking of classy, let's crack open the Time Vault and go all the way back to June 30 for a different perspective from a then Non-Excitable Andy:

This kind of personal attack was repulsive coming against Kerry from the far right. And it's repulsive the other way round. Both Kerry and McCain served their country honorably; and their records should be revered, period. You can make an argument against McCain's foreign policy experience and judgment on its merits. Do it and leave this crap out of it.

Well, that was almost two months ago.  Evidently the bell has rung and now its time to bring the crap.

And since we are bringing crap, let me help.  Andy links to McCain's first person account of his captivity as told to US News and World Report in May 1973.  McCain came home on March 15, 1973, so he had already had two months to recover from the physical and mental trauma of his captivity, gather his thoughts, and present every important detail.

Let's see - McCain mentions the prisoner tap with this introduction:

While I was in the prison we called "The Plantation" in October, 1968, there was a room behind me. I heard some noise in there so I started tapping on the wall. Our call-up sign was the old "shave and a haircut," and then the other guy would come back with the two taps, "six bits."

Well, that is a bald faced lie - everyone knows it is "Shave and a haircut - two bits."  What, was there a high incidence of inflation in Vietnam?  Or had McCain even been in Vietnam?  [Hmm, pushback in the comments here and from 2004].

And I have picked up another clear fabrication.  In the context of the interrogation debate McCain has frequently told the story of his own presentation of false information under torture; his tale is that he gave up the names of the Green Bay Packer offensive line rather than his fellow aviators.  Or maybe the Pittsburgh Steelers.  But no such story appears in his 1973 account, back when he was still groggy from captivity.  That pretty much proves the Packer/Steeler story is false, too. Right?

And people take McCain's Presidential qualifications seriously.

The context of Excitable's original question (and certainly the Kos conjecture) seems to be the suspicion that McCain has invented this story as a bone to throw to the religious right.  Well, McCain is a crafty planner, because here is what he wrote in 1973:

I was finding that prayer helped. It wasn't a question of asking for superhuman strength or for God to strike the North Vietnamese dead. It was asking for moral and physical courage, for guidance and wisdom to do the right thing. I asked for comfort when I was in pain, and sometimes I received relief. I was sustained in many times of trial.

I bet he meant it, but maybe he is lying and never really prayed while in captivity.  Or he prayed but never found any comfort in it.  Any takers?  Excitable?

If I may dare to play armchair psychologist - one point of the "cross in dirt" story is McCain's recognition of and reconciliation to the humanity of his often brutal captors.  My guess is that in May of 1973 he had not fully worked through his issues with the North Vietnamese.

UPDATE:  Good point by Sue in the comments and highlighted by Glenn - "Swift Boating" means different things to the right and left.  As a proud Swiftboater myself (in the political, 2004 sense) I should be more vigilant about maintaining that distinction.

PROPS:  Jane scores:

I say Andy and the kos kids should go for it.  I love the smell of backlash in the morning.

Smells like hilarity.

INSPIRED, NO DOUBT, BY SOLZHENITSEN:  Bill Clinton hits the beach at Omaha:

At the end of the day in Normandy, Bill Clinton walked down to the beach with three veterans of Omaha Beach -- Joe Dawson, Walter Ehlers and Robert Slaughter. The tableau was appealing: the young President enjoying the company of the aging heroes. But suddenly the President's aides began tugging the veterans away, mid-conversation, so that Clinton could walk off at sunset down the beach in his dress shoes and have a preplanned meditative moment, with the bluffs on one side and the sea dotted with warships on the other.

Originally, the White House told photographers they were considering a "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" moment, where Clinton and children would throw flowers into the sea.

But they settled on "a moment of solitude." The President knew he was supposed to look reflective for the three cameras and dozen photographers who joined him. But after looking soulfully out at the ocean for a moment, he seemed at a loss for what to do next, according to a photographer on the scene, who was scared that Clinton was about to mouth the words "What do I do now?" But then, spying the stones at his feet left by his advance staff to show him where his camera mark was, the President crouched down and began to arrange the stones into a cross. He gathered more stones to finish the cross, and then bent his head as though in silent prayer.

The White House aides were ecstatic. "Wasn't it great?" they asked reporters.

Hmm, maybe McCain was ripping off Clinton...

Dan Riehl has more.  Turns out the sign of the cross is somewhat well known.

STICKING TOGETHER:  Orson Swindle, a fellow POW who has been with the McCain campaign, vouches for McCain to Byron York, but I don't know - this old Swindle story makes me suspicious:

That's when he learned to lie, figuring he could give them just enough truth to make his lies believable. When the interrogators wanted Swindle to name the men in his squadron, he told them he couldn't think in such pain. They'd have to loosen the ropes to get anything out of him. When they started to loosen his bindings, he gave them the names of his high-school football coach and assistant coach, saying that was is squadron commander and executive officer.

When they loosened the ropes some more, he gave them the names of his entire high-school football team as his squadron's pilots. Swindle chuckled as he recalled a welcome-home gala several years later in his small south-Georgia hometown. "All those guys were in the audience," he said. "And I said, 'You better not ever go to North Vietnam, because they're looking for you.'"

Cmon, weren't any of these naval aviators baseball players or fans?  That's a mighty big coincidence that McCain and Swindle both picked football teams to baffle their captors.

ANOTHER CROSS STORY:  The Confederate Yankee recounts the cross story told by Sen. Denton.

Who's The VP? Who Cares!

Pejman doesn't think the VP pick matters.

The Politics Of Kilimanjaro

The TigerHawk spreads the news that Al Gore is probably wrong about the link between global warming and the disappearance of the glaciers on Kilimanjaro.

In related news, last night Al Gore shot a frozen leopard in his pajamas.  How it got in his pajamas we'll never know.

MORE:  I really ought to tell my leopard story.  Not only it it kind of exciting in a "had to be there" kind of way, but it has the added virtue of being true.  If/when time permits...

This Just In - There Is A "Moral And Ethical Element" To Abortion Debate

Mark Hemingway of The Corner pans Obama's preparation (none in evidence) and response ("craptacular") to the easily foreseen abortion question at last night's forum.  With lack of preparation as the topic, Mr. Hemingway also cites Obama's blow up when given a chance during a Democratic debate to re-spin his "bitterly clinging" comment.

Let me toss in my personal fave - Obama criticized Hillary for her position on issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, then filibustered when the obvious follow-up - what is his position - was asked.  For a smart guy, he can be pretty dumb sometimes.

OK, back to last night.  Ann Althouse was liveblogging so this answer from Obama got only a bit of the snark it deserved:

7:14: What tough decision has he had to make? He decided to oppose the war in Iraq. His critics can say he's never really had to make a tough decision. Certainly, there were no consequences (except to his own political future) of opposing the war, so this answer exposes his inexperience.

He opposed the war!  Let's cut to Ryan Lizza's profile of Obama in the New Yorker:

Obama’s now famous speech was notable for the absence of the traditional tropes of the antiwar left. In his biography of Obama, David Mendell, noting that Obama’s speech occurred a few months before the official declaration of his U.S. Senate candidacy, suggests that the decision to publicly oppose the war in Iraq was a calculated political move intended to win favor with Saltzman. The suggestion seems dubious; the politics were more in the framing of his opposition, not the decision itself. As Saltzman told me, “He was a Hyde Park state senator. He had to oppose the war!”

90% of the Congressional Black Caucus also opposed the war resolution; Obama did not exactly break out of the pack with this decision.  Obama was also planning a run for the Senate, depending on what Carol Mosely Braun, former Senator and current war opponent, decided to do.  Politically, Obama had no choice but to oppose the war.

And anyway, I have made some tough calls too; I voted for hope and change in the person of Jimmy Carter in 1976, despite his obvious lack of experience, and how did that work out?  Of course, my decision to vote for Carter had absolutely zero impact on the final outcome (look it up - Carter did not carry New Jersey by one vote).  So like Obama, my "tough" decision was free of consequences.

The same can not be said of my decision to back the New England Patriots in the recent Super Bowl.  There I actually experienced the consequence of losing a few bucks, although my decision is probably not what led to the final outcome.  Well, we make these tough calls regularly.

Let's elect Obama quickly so he can add to his resume and make a real decision or two.

What Does Michael Phelps Do For An Encore?

What will Michael Phelps do after winning eight gold medals in Beijing?  He plans on going to London - in 2012.  And why not?  He won six gold medals at age nineteen, another eight at age twenty-three, and there is no reason to think he won't be at a comparable level of ability  at age twenty-seven (His teammate Jason Lezak is anchoring relays at thirty-two).

Normally swimmers run out of either money or motivation.  Phelps is estimated to be pulling down $5 million a year in endorsements, which may help solve both problems.  More importantly, he seems to enjoy the sport and wants to raise its profile beyond one week every four years in the American consciousness. 

He does not seem to be targeting nine golds in London:

THE FUTURE
Phelps will drop most, if not all, of the events he has swum in Beijing. The first to go will be the 400m medley, a gruelling event, but he has other targets and has declared that he will race on until London 2012 in different events, including:

400m freestyle The world record has been held by Ian Thorpe at 3min 40.08sec since 2002. The nearest anyone has got is 3:41.86, with which Park Tae-Hwan, of Korea, became Olympic champion. Phelps has never raced a 400m fully rested, but he is the fifth-fastest American ever, at 3:46.73

100m and 200m backstroke Phelps is the third-fastest ever in the 200m, behind the men who took gold and silver here in Beijing, Ryan Lochte and Aaron Peirsol. In the 100m, Phelps is fifth-fastest ever, within half a second of the world record

100m freestyle Coming into these Games, the world record stood at 47.50sec. Phelps clocked 47.51 leading off the United States’ 4x100m relay in the midst of a monumental programme. The world record was lowered to 47.05 by Australia’s Eamon Sullivan and the Olympic title went to Alain Bernard in 47.21

Interesting - as runners age they move up in distance, but Phelps wants to move down to the 100 free (and we saw forty-one year old Dana Torres swim the 50 free, so go figure).

Well, if Phelps wants to contest the 100 and 400 free he may as well add the 200 so he can be the greatest free-styler of all time.  Toss in three relays and he collects six medals.  On the other hand, variety is the spice of life - working on more than one stroke may help keep his workouts interesting.

As to whether the public will have had enough of Phelps, and whether a pursuit of a mere six golds would provide a compelling story line, time will tell.

SINCE YOU ASK:  The great American swimmer Don Schollander won the 100 and 400 free in Tokyo back in 1964; the 200 was not added to the program until 1968.  Johnny Weismuller also managed the 100/400 double.

Closer to home, Phelps' rival and inspiration Ian Thorpe took bronze, gold and gold in the 100/200/400 triple at Athens in 2004. 

Sunday Open Thread

Away we go.

Buy American, Mock Obama

The Obama campaign pushes back against their own Excellent European Adventure with their latest "Buy American, Vote Obama" campaign.  How goofy is this?  TigerHawk says "transparently inauthentic".  Dan Riehl says "A very dumb idea".

I'll just settle for "Huh?  John McCain is not American?".

Chinese Gymnasts

Some of the Chinese female gymnasts are underage - surprise!  A powerful state-sponsored gymnastics program can get fake state-issued passports to document the eligibility of its athletes - who could have seen that coming?  But the whole Chinese internet scrubbing and Google-cache pushback is interesting.

Read His Lips - No New (Net) Taxes

Writing in today's WSJ, Obama's economic advisers tell us that the Obama tax plan includes tax cuts for the middle class, a tax "rollback" for the high-earners who had their taxes cut under Bush, and is on net a revenue-reducer:

Overall, Sen. Obama's middle-class tax cuts are larger than his partial rollbacks for families earning over $250,000, making the proposal as a whole a net tax cut and reducing revenues to less than 18.2% of GDP -- the level of taxes that prevailed under President Reagan.

Kind words for Reagan - troubling to Dems, none of whom read the Journal.  (But there might be something in the air - ironically, Krugman tips his hat to Reagan today as well, without naming him of course; see below).

The Scrivener wonders how Obama proposes to finance near-universal health care with a tax cut, since he seemed to lack the funds even when he was proposing tax hikes.

James Pethokoukis at USN&WR thinks Obama is a flip-flopper just playing politics. Smart politics, but where is the conviction, and why is this change rather than more of the same old Washington game?

My money?  Clinton lied about his middle class tax cut, and Obama is lying now.  Obama is offering tax cuts I can't believe in.

KRUGMAN ON REAGAN:  Krugman writes on the dangers facing the world:

And now comes “militarism and imperialism.” By itself, as I said, the war in Georgia isn’t that big a deal economically. But it does mark the end of the Pax Americana — the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force. And that raises some real questions about the future of globalization.

Most obviously, Europe’s dependence on Russian energy, especially natural gas, now looks very dangerous — more dangerous, arguably, than its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. After all, Russia has already used gas as a weapon: in 2006, it cut off supplies to Ukraine amid a dispute over prices.

Like Ron said.

They Went To J-School, Not B-School

Yesterday Powerline highlighted a NY Times story and correction demonstrating that Times writers and editors are a bit hazy on some basic business principles - the correction acknowledged that business taxes are paid on income, not gross revenue.

Today the Times runs a laugher demonstrating that they are also out to sea on the current state of the real estate market:

Business Day

An article on the Square Feet pages on Wednesday about the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in financing multifamily housing projects misstated the average price that buyers are paying for apartment buildings that are being sold by Archstone, a national apartment company. It is $200,000 per unit, not per square foot. Similarly, Tishman Speyer and Lehman Brothers paid $240,000 per unit, not per square foot, when they bought the company last October. (Go to Article)      

Well.  Even if they lack common business sense, that J-School training sure does help them promote a story.  Today, as part of an ongoing series (The Debt Trap - A series about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible) the Times looks at home equity lines of credit.  This scary stat (my emphasis) was featured on the A-1 front page before the jump back into the business section:

The portion of people who have home equity lines more than 30 days past due stands 55 percent above its average since the American Bankers Association began tracking it around 1990; delinquencies on home equity loans are 45 percent higher. Hundreds of thousands are delinquent, owing banks more than $10 billion on these loans, often on top of their first mortgages.

Oooh, 55 percent above the average!  First, do keep in mind that this is not a delinquency rate of 55%, a mistake I made with my initial quick glance.  Secondly, what is this average providing the baseline?  If delinquencies have moved from 2% to 3%, that would be a 50% increase, but maybe not so scary.  And since the reporter resolutely provides no other context, suspicion is warranted.

Ah, well - did I say 2%?  Not a bad guess - a bit of poking around reveals this July 2 2008 ABA news release:

WEAK ECONOMY PUSHES CONSUMER DELINQUENCIES HIGHER IN FIRST QUARTER 2008
HELOC and credit card delinquencies rise

WASHINGTON – Continued stress in the housing market combined with general weakness in the overall economy contributed to an increase in the delinquency rates for home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) and bank cards during the first quarter of 2008, according to the American Bankers Association's Consumer Credit Delinquency Bulletin.

The percentage of HELOC accounts that were more than 30 days past due rose 14 basis points to 1.10 percent during the first quarter (seasonally adjusted).  This was the highest recorded rate for this category since 1997, although the HELOC delinquency rate remains lower than all other consumer credit categories.
...Home equity loan delinquencies fell from 2.39 percent to 2.34 percent.

A HELOC is a revolving loan, somewhat like a credit card, where the homeowner can borrow at repay within a pre-set limit; a conventional home equity loan has a scheduled amount and repayments.  And these figures are troubling but not terrifying.

But the Times tells a more interesting story.

Unfit For The Truth

The Obama campaign has launched a 40 page response to Jerome Corsi's new book as well as a counter-smear campaign against Corsi and I am left with no doubt - thank heaven Corsi is not running for President!

But what about Obama?  Well, one of the points made in Corsi's book is that Obama has been lying by omission in discussing his relationship with unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers.  As we have noted before, Bill Ayers co-founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge dedicated to public school reform in 1995; Obama was the first chairman of the Challenge and the two worked together on this for several years thereafter (Cites: Ayer's resume, Russo Slate article, Russo history of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for starters; more here, and a strong hint that the Ayers/Obama collaboration on school reform started in 1987 here.)

Since Corsi is not running for anything, let's focus on Obama's lies and attempted cover-up of this relationship.  At the Philadelphia debate last April he was asked about Ayers and described him as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago...".  Close, but strangely incomplete, as was the Obama "Fact Check" produced the next day, which also made no mention of the longstanding ties between the two men [nor did Axelrod's chat with Ben Smith of Politico.]

Why the failed memory?  Corsi alleges that Obama has continued his marijuana use, so perhaps this is a useful data point.  KIDDING!  More probably, Obama considers it a distraction to discuss his ongoing relationship with a domestic terrorist which has led to not one but two failed attempts at public school reform.  Hmm, it's hard to believe that soccer moms will be thrilled to learn that when Obama works on schools he gets schooled.  That's change we had better not talk about!

And today, despite forty pages rebutting and refuting Corsi, this is all Team Obama can say about the relationship between Obama and Ayers:

LIE: “Sol Stern, a contributing editor of Chicago’s City Journal, has observed that while Ayers today ‘is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the city’s civic establishment, not an unrepentant domestic terrorist,’ the impression of Ayers’s good citizenship is incorrect.” [p 140]

REALITY: AYERS AND DOHRN ARE MEMBERS OF THE ESTABLISHMENT WITH TIES TO THE MAYOR

I have no doubt that is true.  In fact, when the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was kicked off the event was a huge photo-op at Washington Irving Elementary School with the Governor, the Mayor, the school commissioner and many of Chicago's leading lights in attendance (excerpts below).   Ambassador Annenberg's daughter presented a big cardboard check for $49.2 million and I have no doubt that someone has commemorated the smiling faces of the Mayor, Ms. Annenberg and Bill Ayers; Chairman Obama may well have been in the picture as well.

Which would confirm Obama's point that Ayers was a pillar of the school reform movement, although we should also note that Ayers has not abandoned his leftist ideology - as Ayers explained to Hugo Chavez (yes, that Hugo Chavez), the purpose of education reform is to get 'em while they are young - "La  educacion es revolucion!". 

And that leaves unanswered my point that maybe we can all do a better job of evaluating the Obama/Ayers relationship if Obama stops covering up the nature of the relationship.  Obama has a plausible story to tell in his own defense.  Stop the lies.

MORE:  The Chicago Annenberg Challenge - excerpts, my emphasis:

While In Merrie Old England

A full accounting of my time in England for a combined family reunion/vacation may yet be forthcoming, but let me sneak preview with this.  One of the highlights was the day we spent at Garlands Leisure up near Coventry and Leicester.  Our group went quad biking, although some of the kids also did some go-kart racing and there were many other adventurous and vigorous activities available.  The historically and geographically inclined will be intrigued to learn that the quad biking trail passed a key staging are of the Battle of Bosworth field, if I am remembering our guide's presentation; there was a lot of hooting and hollering and quad bikes revving but I am pretty sure I heard that correctly.

My impression is that Garlands Leisure does good business with corporate leisure, corporate recreation, corporate outings and corporate team building but they also host private parties.

The equipment was sparkling (when we went out...) and a good great time was had by all.

Minority-Majority Report - Whites In Denial

Per the Times, the Census Bureau projects that "whites" will be in a minority by 2042, but won't think so.  However, that caveat about self-reporting is not getting headlines anywhere but here, so I'll bury it as well.  Away we go:

In a Generation, Minorities May Be the U.S. Majority

By SAM ROBERTS

Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago.

The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050.

The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants. Another factor is the influx of foreigners, rising from about 1.3 million annually today to more than 2 million a year by midcentury, according to projections based on current immigration policies.

So, something for everyone - our current immigration "policy" tolerating illegal immigration shoulders part of the credit but demography favors the rise of certain minorities anyway.  By 2050 Hispanics rise  from 15 percent of the population to 30 percent, Asians more than double to 9 percent (off a small base) and blacks tread water, moving from 13 to 15 percent.

However, an interesting caveat in the Times story about self-reporting undermines the racial bean-counters:

All the projections are subject to changing cultural definitions. The share of Americans who identify themselves as white, regardless of their ethnicity, will remain largely unchanged, declining from less than 80 percent in 2010 to about 76 percent when the majority-minority benchmark is reached in 2042.

“The way people report race 20 or 30 years from now may be very different,” Dr. Waddington pointed out.

The Census Bureau’s projections are likely to fuel debates over immigration policy, overpopulation and the changing electorate, and recall earlier eras when the Irish, the Italians and Eastern European Jews were not universally considered as whites. As recently as the 1960s, Hispanic people were not counted separately by the census and Asian Indians were classified as white.

People can report more than one race for themselves on Census forms, so we have the high self-reporting of whites today, which may or may not continue going forward.  Conceptually I get that, but I would love to find the figures the Times reports (e.g., 80 percent self-reported white in 2010) in a real report).  And why might folks decide to report themselves as a different minority?  Oh, please - ask a hard one.  Reporting may reflect the affirmative action privileges available to certain favored groups.  And that self-reporting may vary on Census forms and, for example, college applications or civil service forms.  Eugene Volokh has a sidebar on this, and the "Roberto Eduardo Leon" chestnut from 1981 is in the Times archives.

The WaPo is more interesting on the demographics - since whites will be over-represented among the old and other minorities, especially Hispanics, will be overrepresented among the young, the nation may divide politically like a Florida retirement community:

William H. Frey, a researcher with the Brookings Institution, said the demographic changes could presage equally profound political cleavages.

"Politically, whites will be much more interested in issues like health care and pensions," he said. "At the same time, the growing minority population -- Hispanics, especially -- will be concerned about more youthful issues, like schools."

Interesting - one might infer that a political party that focuses on saving Social Security and Medicare while standing pat on school reform will have diminished non-white appeal.

[MORE:  The Sunday Week in Review follows up on this.]

Here is part of the Census Bureau version of the self-reporting caveat, after the break:

Circling Around The Mailbox

For folks who don't like the government case against anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins, this latest WaPo story provides more grist for the laugh track (that is a hoarse, grainy laugh there).

The mystery - is there evidence that actually places Bruce Ivins at the mailbox in Princeton, NJ from which the anthrax letters were mailed?  Today's lead - the FBI recovered hair samples from the mailbox, but they don't match Ivins.  Well, fine, any ordinary passerby could have left that hair, so getting a match was always a longshot.  But the Comedy Gold is buried at the bottom of their story.  Let's compare and contrast this passage with earlier WaPo coverage.  Timing is everything (my emphasis):

Meanwhile, government sources offered more detail about Ivins's movements on a critical day in the case: when letters were dropped into the postal box on Princeton's Nassau Street, across the street from the university campus.

Investigators now believe that Ivins waited until evening to make the drive to Princeton on Sept. 17, 2001. He showed up at work that day and stayed briefly, then took several hours of administrative leave from the lab, according to partial work logs. Based on information from receipts and interviews, authorities say Ivins filled up his car's gas tank, attended a meeting outside of the office in the late afternoon, and returned to the lab for a few minutes that evening before moving off the radar screen and presumably driving overnight to Princeton. The letters were postmarked Sept. 18.

Nearly seven years after the incidents, however, investigators have come up dry in their efforts to find direct evidence to place Ivins at the Nassau Street mailbox in September and October 2001.

Either the WaPo has found better experts or the current crop is reading their critics on the lefty blogs, because here is a WaPo headline from Aug 8:

New Details Show Anthrax Suspect Away On Key Day

By Carrie Johnson and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 8, 2008; A14

Anthrax attack suspect Bruce E. Ivins took several hours of administrative leave from his Fort Detrick, Md., laboratory on a critical day in September 2001 when the first batch of deadly letters was dropped in a New Jersey mailbox, government sources briefed on the case said yesterday.

The gap recorded on his time sheet offered investigators a key clue into how he could have pulled off an elaborate crime that involved carrying letters packed with lethal powder to a distant location for mailing, the sources said.

...

Meanwhile, bits of fresh information continued to come out. A partial log of Ivins's work hours shows that he worked late in the lab on the evening of Sunday, Sept. 16, signing out at 9:52 p.m. after two hours and 15 minutes. The next morning, the sources said, he showed up as usual but stayed only briefly before taking leave hours. Authorities assume that he drove to Princeton immediately after that, dropping the letters in a mailbox on a well-traveled street across from the university campus. Ivins would have had to have left quickly to return for an appointment in the early evening, about 4 or 5 p.m.

Ivins also had ample time to return to the same Nassau Street mailbox the following month, over the Columbus Day weekend, when a second group of letters was sent to Senate offices and media organizations, the sources said, offering new information that they said underscored Ivins's opportunity to commit the crime.

As explained by the EmptyWheel, an separate FBI affidavit explained that, based on the postmarking timetable, the letter must have been mailed after 5 PM on the 17th in order to have received the postmark on the 18th, so a mid-day mail run by Ivins made no sense.  But the WaPo has sure cleared that up and set my mind to ease.

Some thoughts:

(a) in their first story the WaPo cited "government sources briefed on the case", not the lead investigators.  One might presume that the briefees got muddled on one detail of a sprawling case and the obvious correction is now being printed, so in itself this is troubling but hardly fatal to the government case.

(b)  FULL DISCLOSURE - I have had roughly zero blog coverage of the Ivins story and do not foresee having the time to dive in or add anything original, but if enough people care maybe something can be worked out.  However, in a bit of eerie prescience I will claim without proof that the detail that struck me from about the only Times story I have bothered to read is that the Feds can't place Ivins at the fateful mailbox.  Consequently, I read with interest the denunciations of the WaPo effort last week, again sans blogging.

 

The Always-Insightful Karl Rove

Karl Rove sees four battleground states for the Presidential race - Colorado, Virginia, Michigan, and Ohio.

The rest of us can look forward to our regular fall programming for the television commercials.

I Know The Secrets That You Keep

Jerome Corsi, who co-authored the 2004 Swift Boat classic "Unfit for Command" that helped scuttle the SS Kerry is back for Barack.  The NY Times reviews the effort.  Shorter - there are a few mistakes, so ignore the whole thing.  How did that strategy work when the Times covered for Kerry?

Yes, surprisingly, the Times did cover for Kerry in 2004 (Hmm, if I quickly cite a couple of laughable Times errors and omissions will that invalidate their coverage the way a few errors invalidated Corsi's book?)

We know that the mainstream media covered for John Edwards in the fall of 2007.

So what are the odds that the Times will run down any of the charges against Obama from the new Corsi book?

Glenn Reynolds has been wondering what other secrets the media is sitting on and what other stories they are not pursuing that might damage Obama.  I have a nominee.

Just prior to the Pennsylvania primary Barack Obama was asked at a Democratic debate about his relationship with unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers.  Obama pretended that he was only casually acquainted with Ayers, describing him as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago...".  Hilary provided a bracing corrective, reminding people that the two men had served on a charitable board together, the Woods Fund of Chicago.

This exchange was newsworthy enough to provoke coverage in the Chicago Sun-Times, and the NY Times; earlier stories had sparked The "Fact Checker" at the Washington post.

And yet!  All of these hard-working professionals gave Obama a pass for a very casual relationship with Ayers, citing the charitable board, some joint panel appearances, and a fund-raiser hosted by Ayers.  The Barack Obama web site produced a classic of non-disclosure which confirmed these points but added nothing.

None of these sleuths discovered that there was quite a bit more to the story.  Barack Obama and Bil Ayers worked together for several years on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an educational reform group co-founded in 1995 by Bill Ayers and chaired by Barack Obama.  How did Obama forget this?  Possibly because the group's effort at public school reform were a failure.

And how did Ayers happen to tap Obama for the chairmanship of this group?  Probably because they became acquainted in 1987, before Obama headed off to Harvard, in an earlier go at Chicago school reform.

So Obama has a relationship with Ayers that can be documented from 1995 and almost surely came into being in 1987.  Jerome Corsi mentions the Annenberg Challenge in his book - any guesses as to whether Media Matters, the Times, or the WaPo will fact-check that?  Obama either lied (by ommisison) or had an absurdly hazy memory at the debate and in the web-site follow-up - any chance the media will wonder what he is hiding and why?

The truth will out - Steve Diamond of Global Labor owns this story and I am riding in his wake - but the Times will be the last to find this news that's fit to print.

Die Another Day

The Wilson civil suit dies again on appeal.  Jammie Wearing Guy has thoughts; here is a previous obit from the first dismissal, with links to earlier pooh-poohing.

Happy Birthday Julia

My son has worked out an Olympic-themed birthday salute to his big sister as a "b-day preasant".  Away we go.

Be Careful What You Wish For

If you are running short of things to worry about, try this - imagine that oil (down another dollar to $113.35) and gold collapse so quickly that a big hedge fund does down with them.  Weird, huh?  But not impossible, I guess.  Picture the Fed adding liquidity because the oil bubble popped too quickly.

My Big Theory covering the next few years- the financial markets will recycle bubbles.  We had the tech bubble of the late 90's, the housing bubble, the commodities bubble and now the fickle finger of fate will point back to tech.

This will provide a double boost to productivity - not only will the new technology enhance productivity but finance professionals can save time by simply recycling the analyses and evaluations of the late 90's (and we can save time by not reading them)  A Win-win!

METAPHOR MADNESS:

I liked this:

The sharp declines in metals prices were mostly "predicated on the sharp reversal in oil and on the turn upward in the greenback, but the underlying theme remains the rotation out of commodities by index and hedge funds," said Nadler.

"The party is at a point where the lone couple now dancing to the light of the mirrored ball is doing so without any musical accompaniment, and risks falling over from fatigue," he said.

MORE:  Higher oil prices lead to reduced consumption. 

Georgia Is Grenada

I will now draw on my previously unannounced ability to channel the thoughts of former KGB heads to explain the Georgia debacle.

1.  Georgia is Grenada.  After Afghanistan, the loss of Eastern Europe and empire, and the debacle in Chechnya, Putin's country and generals need a win.  Now they have one.

2.  Any serious Russian planner would be worried about the long term threat to Russia posed by China Resurgent and the restive Muslim states.  Could they really be worried about Old Europe?  Sure Germany invaded them twice in the 20th century, Napoleon had a go, and even Sweden scuffled with them back in the day.  But Old Europe is going to invade a shuffleboard court before they invade Russia.  However!  By establishing that The Bear Is Back, Russia can do what common sense suggests is inevitable - enter into a long term strategic partnership with the West - as a bit more of an equal and less of a beaten beggar.

3.  Russia will not attempt to occupy Georgia - they hated Afghanistan, we suffered in Iraq - why turn lemonade back into lemons by overstaying?

3.  Does Putin (shown here) scare anyone else?  I always thought that Bush v. Putin was a mismatch.  If Barack goes up against him, I seriously worry that Putin will slap Barry and make him cry.  And I seriously doubt that Putin will be impressed by Obama's lofty rhetoric, although since Putin is former KGB and Barack is a former and current Weather-buddy, maybe they can bond over bomb-making gambits.  Where's the crazy white-haired dude?  Send in the McCainiac!

Unready To Lead

This, from Joshua Green's obit of the Clinton campaign, is interesting:

Two things struck me right away. The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency. What follows is the inside account of how the campaign for the seemingly unstoppable Democratic nominee came into being, and then came apart.

That sounds nothing like The War Room documenting Wild Bill's 1992 campaign.  But it sounds a lot like Hillarity's side of the Clinton Administration - the health care task force or the swirling Travelgate debacle come immediately to mind.

That said, I am wondering about a normal "ex post" problem - every campaign makes a mix of good decisions and bad decisions, and every campaign either wins or loses.  Had Hillary won, perhaps we would be lauding the creative ferment she created by tolerating and encouraging the factional in-fighting, and we would be deriding Barack for, I don't know, having failed to anticipate the extent of his Jeremiah Wright problem.  Winners write the history; losers have it written about them.

MORE:  OK, Andrew Sullivan has the same excerpt - great minds.  But he double-lines skips prior to the excerpt, so you know there are huge content differences.

STILL MORE:  Follow-up at Salon.

And If You Score A 26?

A helpful quiz from Peter Kirsanow at The Corner.

Two More Reasons To Root For Phelps

George Vecsey of the Times covers the Olympic story.

Two reason to root for Phelps that may not have yet have ocurred to you:

1.  Winning 8 golds at the Olympics that opened on 8/8/08 ought to provide good luck to everyone in the world (or at least, China).

2.  As great as Mark Spitz's accomplishment was, there was a lot about the 1972 Olympic that I don't mind not remembering.  Let's move on.

And while moving on - where would 8 golds for Phelps rank among the great Olympic achievements?  My suggestions after the break.

UPDATE:  QUEL RELAY!

So the French 4x100 relay team told the press they we going to "smash" the US team.  Hmm, I guess that means something in French - or does every word in French mean "surrender"?

Edwards - Too Tawdry For The Times

NY Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt explains that "All The News That's Fit To Print" means certain stories are simply too tawdry:

Before Edwards’s admission, The Times never made a serious effort to investigate the story, even as the Enquirer wrote one sensational report after another: a 2:40 a.m. ambush by the tabloid’s reporters at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles after Edwards spent hours in a room with Hunter and her baby; an allegation of $15,000 a month in “hush money;” a grainy “spy photo” of him with a baby.

...I do not think liberal bias had anything to do with it [Cue laugh track].  But I think The Times — like The Washington Post, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, major networks and wire services — was far too squeamish about tackling the story. The Times did not want to regurgitate the Enquirer’s reporting without verifying it, which is responsible. But The Times did not try to verify it, beyond a few perfunctory efforts, which I think was wrong. Until the ABC report, only one mainstream news organization, McClatchy newspapers, seemed to be making headway with the story.

...It is also the kind of story that The Times seems instinctively to recoil from, just as it ignored such stories in its own backyard as A-Rod and Madonna and Christie Brinkley’s ugly divorce, and played down the “love child” scandal involving New York City’s only Republican congressman, Vito Fossella, earlier this year. But Edwards was different. When the Enquirer first published its allegations, he was a major presidential candidate with a compelling personal story that included a wife of 30 years with incurable breast cancer.

Hmm, a future baseball Hall of Famer, a Rock Hall of Famer, and a prospective President/Vice-President/Attorney General/Supreme Court nominee.  Kidding?

Good to see they have their focus on the news at the Times.

Why The Surge Worked

Peter Mansoor, Gen. Petraeus XO, writes about the surge in the WaPo.

The 4 AM Moment

Yesterday we had the 3 AM moment described by Ben Smith of The Politico when the McCain and Obama camps released their initial statements responding to the violence in Georgia.  Yesterday's theme as presented by Mr. Smith - Obama showed his statesmanship by offering the same mush as the White House and the Euros; McCain showed an unbecoming bellicosity by backing Georgia.  I was broadly sympathetic (unlike the TigerHawk) but noted that Condi Rice was on the same page as McCain.

Well now it is 4 AM and one camp is wondering whether we will still respect them in the morning.  In their latest emanation Team Obama has figured out which side we are on and rivals the bellicosity of McCain and Rice in backing Georgia and calling on Russia to withdraw its troops.  Geez, this is almost like watching "Follow The Leader".  Too bad it's not a game.

No worries.  Once we elect Obama I'm sure he'll be able to get stuff like this right the first time.  Hmm, my confidence is not shared by the PowerGuys.  Hope they enjoy the re-education camp!  (I know I did.)

James Traub of the Times has all you could hope to absorb about the Georgia-Russia-Ossetia backstory.  The Kosovo precedent is key.

Dare I sound-bite it?  Well, Georgia is an ethnically/culturally/religiously (and currently democratic and pro-Western) separate province that was incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1801 but always Kept Hope Alive and went its own way when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.  However, Georgia has a couple of restive provinces itself - Ossetia and Abkhazia are part of Georgia but have their own separatist aspirations.

So the analogy (setting aside the nastiness of the Milosevic) is that Georgia is Serbia trying to keep its grip on Ossetia, which is cast in the role of Kosovo.  The key wrinkle is that Russia is happy to foment Ossetian separatism in order to strengthen its own hand in the area; an immediate superpower analogy to Serbia/Kosovo eludes me (although the quick German recognition of breakaway Croatia and Slovenia springs to mind, at least in terms of big power meddling.)

Yuck It Up

The traditional Sunday joke fest.  Can we find some Obama humor?  Si, se puede!

My fave is not even about Obama:

Craig Ferguson: "Barack Obama was in Germany" today, and "he   did this speech and 100,000 people showed up. There were so many Germans   shouting and screaming that France...surrendered just in case."

Feedback Requested

I reinstalled the Sitemeter traffic counter based on their reassurance that all was well, and now I can barely get my site to load (using Firefox 3.0.1, not the fateful IE.)  That said, I have been having a lot of connectivity issues lately, or I may have scotched the code when re-installing it.

Is anyone else having a problem loading this page, as of about 7:30 Saturday night?

HMM:  I am loading other sites with no trouble, and when I un-install the Sitemeter counter my problem goes away.  Great.  And no doubt fascinating for the rest of you.

DOUBLE-HMM:  And now I have re-installed the code and have no trouble loading my page.  Baffling, yet unsurprising...

THANKS, ALL: The consensus seems to be that all is well.  Thanks.

The Left Discovers "Accountability"

Michelle Malkin covers the Stalinesque attempt to chill free speech.  Her most poignant bit:

What do PFAW, the NAACP, the ACLU, and the rest of the purported champions of political free speech and intimidation-free elections have to say about the anti-GOP donor warning letters? How about you, Barry O, self-appointed crusader against the politics of fear?

These guys have been holding their breath waiting for a Dem denunciation.  Or an aggrieved NY Times editorial.  As if.

One of the targeted groups is undaunted, per the Times:

Calls to Mr. Sembler and Mr. Adelson were not returned, but Ed Patru, a spokesman for Freedom’s Watch, scoffed at Mr. Matzzie’s plan.

“This idea sounds even more sloppily thought out than his last venture, which, of course, went belly-up for lack of financial support,” Mr. Patru said.

“I doubt anyone will be intimidated by him,” he said, “but if it gives anyone pause, they are always welcome to give to Freedom’s Watch — all of our donors are entitled to complete anonymity by law.”

Indeed, anonymity is a potential obstacle to the group’s efforts. Outside political groups organized as 501(c)4 entities, including Accountable America, do not have to disclose the names of their donors.

Chris LaCivita, a Republican strategist who helped organize the Swift Boat effort, said Mr. Matzzie’s group was likely to have the opposite effect on potential donors, firing them up instead of discouraging them.

“They’re not going to be intimidated by some pipsqueak on the kooky left,” Mr. LaCivita said.

The WSJ notes that turnabout would not be fair play:

It’s also worth noting that Accountable America operates under the same tax structure as Freedom’s Watch, a group on their watch list. As a non-profit “social welfare” group formed under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code, the group is not required to disclose the names and addresses of people who give money, unlike political groups that directly support or oppose federal candidates. Asked who was giving to his effort, Matzzie said, “We don’t have very many large donors because we haven’t raised large amounts of money.” The group will release the names of donors who agree to be identified, he said. “We expect most of the money to come over the Internet.”

Well, they can chill in private.  And let's do remember to thank John McCain, whose McCain-Feingold reform elevated the importance of the 501(c) groups.

MORE:  Yes, this is being taken pretty seriously.

Intermittent Wind Power

The problem with wind power is that the wind may not be blowing when and where you want it (with solar power, at least the sun is likely to be shining on hot, sunny afternoons when air conditioners create a peak load problem).

What is needed is a storage device that doesn't lose too much in efficiency as it stores and returns power.  Last week we noted the idea of highly efficient catalyzed eloctrolysis - electrictiy is stored chemically by creating hydrogen gas from water.

Here are two more idea - mechanical storage using flywheels and compressed air storage.  An obvious cousin to the compressed air model is to use a windmill as a water pump - pump water uphill when the wind is blowing and run the water downhill through a turbine as power is needed.  I'm probably too late to patent that (that is a different Tom posing the questions there, and the calculations of relevant scale are deflating).  And just off-hand, the areas in which T. Boone Pickens is planning his wind farms don't strike me as having easy access to lakes and dams.

The Times Covers The Media Non-Coverage Of The Edwards Story

Why was the media in the tank for Edwards, and what other secrets of likable Dems are they hiding?  The LA Times sent an intern into the breach; the NY Times handed the story to two grizzled veterans, Richard Pérez-Peña and Bill Carter.

A snippet:

The New York Times looked into the Enquirer reports last fall, though none too aggressively, editors said.

Bill Keller, the executive editor, said in an e-mail message that Mr. Edwards’s dark-horse status and the “added hold-your-nose quality about The Enquirer” contributed to the lack of interest by The Times and the mainstream media generally.

Like Mr. Downie, he said that the questions seemed irrelevant once Mr. Edwards was out of the race, but that recently, The Times had “tried to ascertain whether the cloud generated by The Enquirer’s reporting had influenced the Obama campaign in its thinking about a future role for Edwards.”

The former VP candidate who eventually came in second in Iowa was a "dark horse"?  By that standard, the only candidate they would have covered seriously last fall was Hillary.

MORE:  Glenn Reynolds contrasts the media discretion about Edwards' indiscretion with the coverage of McCain's "relationship" with a lobbyist.

I Am Not Normally A Towel-Tosser...

I don't normally throw in the towel with almost two month to go but the Yankees just don't have enough to make the playoffs or to do anything on the off-chance they get there.  last night listening to the late broadcast of the Angels rout (17 hits!) I thought I was hearing a tape of the Angels batting practice.

The Yankee offense is somewhat ordinary this season, with inuries and a couple of guys having down years (Jeter, Cano and Cabrera come to mind) - after leading the league in RBI's last year they are now sixth, trailing such legendary boppers as the Minnesota Twins.  And the pitching has collapsed, lacking Chin-Ming Wanf and Joba Chamberlain.

Oh, well - there is always Brett Favre to entertain me this October.  Grr.

MORE:  I knew I had another point!  C. C. Sabathia may as well be See, See Ya in Pinstripes.  I foresee a bit of a hostage drama when Sabathia goes free agent this fall - the Yankees will kidnap his family and demand to know how much they have to pay him to secure their release.

Yankee GM Brian Cashman also has his contract coming due.  If the Yanks miss the playoff (for the first time in my eleven year old's life) I think it will be see, See Ya Later.

My World Series pick is the Angels.  Forget the Cubbies, currently Number One in the ESPN Power Rankings.

Crime And Poverty

The Times catches up to Hannah Rosin of the Atlantic Monthly on the link between crime and Section 8 housing, but are much more PC about it.  The Times lead:

As Program Moves Poor to Suburbs, Tensions Follow

By SOLOMON MOORE

ANTIOCH, Calif. — From the tough streets of Oakland, where so many of Alice Payne’s relatives and friends had been shot to death, the newspaper advertisement for a federally assisted rental property in this Northern California suburb was like a bridge across the River Jordan.

Ms. Payne, a 42-year-old African-American mother of five, moved to Antioch in 2006. With the local real estate market slowing and a housing voucher covering two-thirds of the rent, she found she could afford a large, new home, with a pool, for $2,200 a month.

But old problems persisted. When her estranged husband was arrested, the local housing authority tried to cut off her subsidy, citing disturbances at her house. Then the police threatened to prosecute her landlord for any criminal activity or public nuisances caused by the family. The landlord forced the Paynes to leave when their lease was up.

Under the Section 8 federal housing voucher program, thousands of poor, urban and often African-American residents have left hardscrabble neighborhoods in the nation’s largest cities and resettled in the suburbs.

Law enforcement experts and housing researchers argue that rising crime rates follow Section 8 recipients to their new homes, while other experts discount any direct link. But there is little doubt that cultural shock waves have followed the migration. Social and racial tensions between newcomers and their neighbors have increased, forcing suburban communities like Antioch to re-evaluate their civic identities along with their methods of dealing with the new residents.

"But there is little doubt that cultural shock waves have followed the migration" - thank heavens for investigative journalists!

Ms. Rosin, whose article was cited in the Times piece, wrote about the work done by a husband-wife team that had access to both crime and housing records in Memphis, TN:

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

It was more than cultural shock waves in motion.  The Times gets up close and personal with some locals:

Several white women, all professionals who attend the same church and have lived in Antioch for 12 years or more, recently sat outside a Starbucks coffee shop and discussed how their declining home equity had trapped them in a city they no longer recognize.

“My father got held up at gunpoint while he was renting a car to a young African-American man,” said Rebecca Gustafson, 35, who owns a graphics and Web design company with her husband. Ms. Gustafson said her car had also been broken into three times before being stolen from her driveway.

Laura Reynolds, 36, an emergency room nurse, said that she often came home to her Country Hills development tract after working a late-shift to find young black teenagers strolling through her neighborhood.

“I know it sounds horrible, but they’re scary. I’m sorry,” said Ms. Reynolds, who like her two friends said she was conflicted about her newfound fear of black youths. “Sometimes I question myself, and I think, Would I feel this way if they were Mexican or white?”

Hmm - apparently Ms. Reynolds is Barack Obama's grandmother.  Or maybe she was just channeling her inner Jesse Jackson.

My guess - if a group of Beverly hillbillys had moved in, crime had gone up, and friends were talking about criminal encounters with the hillbillys, well, yes, she would have a newfound fear of recently arrived rural rednecks.  Or if a group of former Enron executives had moved in and suddenly ocn artists were operating on every street corner - well, I'm sure she would make the connection.

The Times does a great job of making it all the way through a story about neighborhood crime without mentioning community policing or New York City's famous success with zero tolerance.  Somehow, in their current telling, a constant police presence cracking down on minor violations has become harassment, with no explanation of an alternative view.

Georgia On My Mind

Times coverage of the war in Georgia.

Ben Smith at Politico finds a "3 AM" story, and maybe there is one.  Mr. Smith's argument is that McCain is notably more bellicose than Obama, which is interesting and which I find redundant.   McCain does not need to talk tough - he is John McCain.  However, I eventually cite the comparably bellicose Condoleeza Rice (who was inexplicably overlooked by Mr. Smith) and use that to spark the notion that she is on a VP short list.  Slow news Saturday - all we have are the Olympics, Edwards, the oil collapse, and a war.  From The Politico:

When the North Caucasus slid into war Thursday night, it presented Senators John McCain and Barack Obama with a true “3 a.m. moment,” and their responses to the crisis suggested dramatic differences in how each candidate, as president, would lead America in moments of international crisis.

While Obama offered a response largely in line with statements issued by democratically elected world leaders, including President Bush, first calling on both sides to negotiate, John McCain took a remarkably—and uniquely—more aggressive stance, siding clearly with Georgia’s pro-Western leaders and placing the blame for the conflict entirely on Russia.

...Both American candidates back Georgia’s sovereignty and its turn toward the West. But their first statements on the crisis revealed differences of substance and style.

Obama’s statement put him in line with the White House, the European Union, NATO, and a series of European powers, while McCain’s initial statement—which he delivered in Iowa and ran on a blog on his Web site under the title “McCain Statement on Russian Invasion of Georgia,”—put him more closely in line with the moral clarity and American exceptionalism projected by President Bush’s first term.

And a problem for McCain:

The conflict in Georgia also brought attention another complicating feature of McCain’s campaign: His ties to Republican operatives with extensive lobbying practices. Scheunemann was, until earlier this year, registered to lobby for the government of Georgia.

A public relations firm working for the Russian Federation pointed out Scheunemann’s lobbying past to reporters—a sign that McCain’s stance is not, for better or worse, being welcomed in Moscow—as did Obama’s campaign.

“John McCain’s top foreign policy advisor lobbied for, and has a vested interest in, the Republic of Georgia and McCain has mirrored the position advocated by the government,” said Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan, saying the “appearances of a conflict of interest” was a consequence of McCain’s too-close ties to lobbyists.

Scheunemann dismissed the criticism, saying he severed his ties to his firm and to his client on March 1, and noting that McCain has been a firm supporter of Georgia’s move toward the west, and away from Russia, since the Arizona senator’s first visit there in 1997.

For the moment I am taking Ben Smith's characterization of the other responses at face value, although I will note that the Times (different story) also mention Ms. Rice (Smith does not):

The United States and other Western nations, joined by NATO, condemned the violence and demanded a cease-fire. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went a step further, calling on Russia to withdraw its forces [State Dept link]. But the Russian soldiers remained, and Georgian officials reported at least one airstrike, on the Black Sea port of Poti, late on Friday night.

My gut reaction is that John McCain does not need to talk tough.  He is tough - he's John McCain!  There is also the reality that these conflicts are generally a time for a certain public mushiness - for example, the US is clearly on the side of Taiwan, but can't say so for fear of emboldening Taiwan's more ardent provacateurs.  A similar dynamic may be in play here.

Obama is probably playing this correctly.  His longer term problem is that we know he loves to talk but some day he needs to establish that there is something behind the mush.  However he already has one believer.

DIGGING IN: Here is McCain's statement after the break.  And do admire the vigorous McCain-bashing a The American Conservative (blog, article).

MORE:  The Tiger Hawk wonders whether the Obama statement was delivered with a French accent or a Jimmeh Carteresque Southern drawl.

What's Wrong With "All of The Above"?

Dean Barnett tackles Paul Krugman.

He Did Not Have Paternal Relations With That Woman

Folks sure will be quick to believe John Edwards new admission of semi-guilt to ABC News - he lied in denying an affair with Rielle Hunter, but the baby was born so late after the affair ended that he couldn't possibly be the father:

John Edwards repeatedly lied during his Presidential campaign about an extramarital affair with a novice filmmaker, the former Senator admitted to ABC News today.

...

Edwards also denied he was the father of Hunter's baby girl, Frances Quinn, although the one-time Democratic Presidential candidate said he has not taken a paternity test.

Edwards said he knew he was not the father based on timing of the baby's birth on February 27, 2008. He said his affair ended too soon for him to have been the father.

Oh, get Rielle.  So what is Edwards' motivation here?  Does this admission let enough air out of the balloon that the media go away (as if they had really even arrived - I can't wait to see the NY Times non-coverage of this.)  I doubt it.

Whatever.  I guess this means the LA Times is free to report on it. 

INSUFFERABILITY WATCH:  He'll always have a place in my heart, but will Mickey be unbearable for the rest of humanity?  Time will tell!

TIMING IS EVERYTHING:  Stephen Spruiell works the dates:

Elizabeth Edwards was diagnosed with incurable cancer in late March of 2007. Rielle Hunter's baby was born in late February of 2008. That means that if Edwards is the father, he was definitely still carrying on the affair with Hunter after he knew his wife's cancer was back.

So denying paternity, however implausibly, is important.

RIDICULOUS:  Christopher Beam of Slate sees an Edwards problem for the Dems but tries to pretend that the infidelity topic might also hurt McCain.  He accomplishes this self-delusion by pretending the only story is Edward's infidelity and ignoring the obvious press cover-up for a sympathetic Dem.  If the press won't dish dirt on Edwards when it is dropped in their lap, what are the odds that they will present a fair and balanced portrait of Obama?  His long-time partnership with unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers on education reform in Chicago will never be covered by a press that turned a blind eye to Edwards.

And this telling of the McCain bio is laughable:

Recall: John McCain returned to the United States from Vietnam in March 1973. His wife, Carol, had been in a near-fatal car accident while he was gone. She was overweight, on crutches, and 4 inches shorter than when McCain had left. McCain ended up divorcing Carol for Cindy Hensley, his current wife.

When Johnny came staggering home after more than five years of abuse and neglect at the hands of his Vietnamese captors he was a physical and emotional wreck unable to cope with his life or or wife's problems.  Go figure.  It was a long time ago, McCain was not lying about his fidelity while running for the Presidency, and I have no doubt Republicans would be thrilled to have the conversation shift to "What did you do during the war, Senators?".

But attack Dems being attack Dems, I expect this line will be trotted out and we will see for ourselves.  Ahh, the thunder on the right if a press that couldn't cover the Edwards affair in front of their face goes all Sam Spade about the break-up of McCain marriage several centuries ago.  That will energize the base!

I love the smell of thunder on the right in the morning...

OH, THAT EXPLAINS THE DEAFENING MEDIA SILENCE:  Katherine Seelye of the NY Times explains the media Cone of Silence:

An intense public relations effort by Mr. Edwards and his associates had kept the story from spreading beyond the tabloid for months.

D'oh!  Just mount an intensive public relations effort!  Why doesn't every other scandal-plagued pol think of that?  Some details:

When The Enquirer first reported the affair, a group of Edwards associates, including from past campaigns, assembled at his headquarters to try to stop the story from moving from the tabloid into major newspapers. They declined to respond to questions or issue any statements that might produce news reports, according to those involved in the effort. It was led by Jennifer Palmieri, a longtime associate of both Mr. and Mrs. Edwards.

But by this summer, the team had shrunk. Ms. Palmieri managed the crisis again, working mainly with Mr. Edwards and Harrison Hickman, Mr. Edwards’s longtime pollster. Initially Mr. Edwards argued that he could ride out the latest report, but several associates said that if they were not true, he should denounce them.

Stonewall and deny.  Pretty subtle.  Yet Edwards cracked like a jihadist at Gitmo under pressure from the unrelenting National Enquirer.  Pity a real news organization didn't push a bit.

Working For The Big "O"

Extreme Mortman is funny yet scary; the LA ad group that wants to promote the "O" symbol is just funny.

Well, if Obamanauts are daft enough to want their own special salute (isn't that a bit... exclusive?  And where do we learn the secret handshake that follows the Jihadist fist bump?), why should McCainiacs be left out?  I suggest the tried and true "V" for victory - it is both Churchillian and appropriate since McCain is committed to victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.

POST SCRIPT:  I will bet the big bucks that I have seen the "O" salute on one of the original Kirk-Spock Start Trek episodes, but I will need to check with my sister, who knew these things cold back in the day.

MORE:  Or, try the Internet!  With an tip of the hat to Glenn, Trekkies can head to paradise.  Eden, in fact.

WHO'S SPOOFING WHOM?  I smell a rat - someone here is pulling someone's leg.  That "Obama salute" looks like the work of some hipsters experiencing post-surge Obama fatigue (as predicted in February).  And can we find the Dahlia Lithwick piece from last February that is exactly on point?  Si, se puede!

Dear Barack:

I know it's kind of lame to break up with you on Valentine's Day. And on the Internet to boot. But it's also kind of ironic. And that's what I need to tell you. As an ironic, contrarian, so-hip-it-hurts Gen X-er, I just can't love you anymore. I can't like you because … because, well, everyone else does. And suddenly supporting you just seems soooo last week.

There's more.

And David Brooks pens Obama's obit, although only the discerning reader will see it that way.  His topic is the eternal quest for cool in the intellectual arena:

These tastemakers surf the obscure niches of the culture market bringing back fashion-forward nuggets of coolness for their throngs of grateful disciples.

Second, in order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of.

When you first come across some obscure cultural artifact — an unknown indie band, organic skate sneakers or wireless headphones from Finland — you will want to erupt with ecstatic enthusiasm. This will highlight the importance of your cultural discovery, the fineness of your discerning taste, and your early adopter insiderness for having found it before anyone else.

Then, a few weeks later, after the object is slightly better known, you will dismiss all the hype with a gesture of putrid disgust. This will demonstrate your lofty superiority to the sluggish masses. It will show how far ahead of the crowd you are and how distantly you have already ventured into the future.

If you can do this, becoming not only an early adopter, but an early discarder, you will realize greater status rewards than you ever imagined. Remember, cultural epochs come and go, but one-upsmanship is forever.

Early discarders may be circling Obama.

PILING ON:  Dave Niewert, writing at Firedoglake, denounces the "O" but leaves us with a headscratcher:

The wingnuts are having lots of fun kicking around an LA marketing company's dumbass idea for an "Obama salute" (you form an O with both hands). I have no idea why these geniuses thought authoritarian gestures would become a big thing with liberals and progressives, but what the hell.

Good question, which I'll answer with another - why do all "creative types" wear black as a display of independence and creativity?  (Possible answer - black mixes and matches well and these creators either haven't got two dimes or want to remain authentic by pretending they don't.  Or, it looks cool.  We duck these tough fashion calls every day.)

The Times Defies Atrios

John Broder of the Times writes on Obama and abortion.  Here is his Atrios/Begala defying lead:

WASHINGTON — Sixteen years ago, the Democratic Party refused to allow Robert P. Casey Sr., then the governor of Pennsylvania, to speak at its national convention because his anti-abortion views, stemming from his Roman Catholic faith, clashed with the party’s platform and powerful constituencies. Many Catholics, once a reliable Democratic voting bloc, never forgot what they considered a slight.

Sure, that seems like the Conventional Wisdom but Atrios went animal on this topic in 2005 (OK, he went "Wanker") and it re-surfaced in 2008.  I back the CW.

The article has an amusing headline:

Obama’s View on Abortion May Divide Catholics

His view?  His view seems to be that of a typical lefty abortion-rights extremist.  I'm not sure that "divides" Catholics; "defies" might be better.

Now, Obama may have appeal to Catholics on other grounds, such as his environmental posturing or oppositon to US involvement in Iraq (in his words, "ending" the war), or simply a typical Dem working class appeal.  So it may be fair to say that Catholics are divided on Obama's candidacy.  But the article does not (at a quick read) support the notion that Obama's view on abortion has in itself created controversy and sparked debate within the Cathiolic community.

MORE:  Hot Air on Obama and Catholics; Brendan Nyhan recycles the Begala/Carville/Atrios spin, with the part of Atrios played by Media Matters.

Our Ongoing Presence In Iraq

The NY Times interviews Iraqi Army officers who expect the US to maintain a troop presence in support of their efforts for years.  The Captain at Hot Air has more.  I will add that Obama's troop withdrawal is not really a full withdrawal; a significant presence would be left for training and support even by the guy who thinks pretends that "no US involvement" equals "end of the war".

Obama - Just Passing Through

David Brooks opines on Obama's unimpressive standing in the polls during what ought to be a strong Democratic year:

And the root of it is probably this: Obama has been a sojourner. He opened his book “Dreams From My Father” with a quotation from Chronicles: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers.”

There is a sense that because of his unique background and temperament, Obama lives apart. He put one foot in the institutions he rose through on his journey but never fully engaged. As a result, voters have trouble placing him in his context, understanding the roots and values in which he is ineluctably embedded.

It is well worth reading in full.  Brooks does not frame it this way, but one might ask, what are the core principles for which Obama would fight without surrender?  Not his opposition to offshore drilling (fair enough, it is a minor point but happens to be in the news); not his advocacy of publicly-funded election campaigns.  Not American victory in Iraq.  He did finally rouse himself top denounce Jeremiah Wright after Wright questioned Obama's credibility, so at least we can expect Obama to fight for his own reputation if nothing else.

I'll clip a bit more from Brooks in for the non-clickers out there:

His college years were spent on both coasts. He was a community organizer for three years but left before he could be truly effective. He became a state legislator, but he was in the Legislature, not of it. He had some accomplishments, but as Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote, he was famously bored by the institution and used it as a stepping stone to higher things.

He was in Trinity United Church of Christ, but not of it, not sharing the liberation theology that energized Jeremiah Wright Jr. He is in the United States Senate, but not of it. He has not had the time nor the inclination to throw himself into Senate mores, or really get to know more than a handful of his colleagues. His Democratic supporters there speak of him fondly, but vaguely.

And so it goes. He is a liberal, but not fully liberal. He has sometimes opposed the Chicago political establishment, but is also part of it. He spoke at a rally against the Iraq war, while distancing himself from many antiwar activists.

Just passing through on his way to the White House. 

MORE:  Alex Castellanos, writing at the Huffington Post, makes the same argument:

The Molten Core of Barack: Why Obama Can't Win.

...Despite the McCain campaign's effectiveness, however, the best campaign against Barack Obama is not being run by his opponent, but by Barack Obama. It is Obama's campaign that presents their candidate as an ever-changing work-in-progress. It is his own campaign that occludes our ability to know this man, depicting him as authentic as a pair of designer jeans.

...In the defining moment of his life, McCain was willing to give everything for one thing, and that one thing was his country. Contrast that with Obama, who has told America that he is "a proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world." Obama is the talented salesman who seduced one state after another saying "Iowa, this is our moment," "Virginia, this is our moment," "Texas, this is our moment," and then tells Europe, "people of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment." How many times can Barack Obama sell the same moment to everyone, before he becomes Mel Brooks in "The Producers"? Who is Barack Obama? His campaign, as it reupholsters him before our eyes, says we can never know -- perhaps because Barack Obama does not know himself.

We have no idea who this guy is or what he believes.  Let's elect him quick so we can find out!

The Time To Lead Is Later

Rachel Swarns of the Times delivers a comedy classic in trying to whitewash cover Obama's evolving views on affirmative action.  Over the past twenty years Obama has been all over the map, which is fair enough - people ought to be allowed to change their thinking as they accumulate new experiences and encounter new ideas.  However, as the Times reporting makes clear, most of Obama's new thinking seems to be about how best to position himself politically on this topic.

No matter - the biggest howler is in the fifth paragraph:

His ruminations about shifting the balance between race and class in some affirmative action programs raise the possibility that, if elected in November, he might foster a deeper national conversation about an issue that has been fiercely debated for decades. He declined to comment for this article.

I can hardly wait - Obama is so eager for a national conversation on affirmative action that he won't talk to the Times about it, but we can look to the day when he shines his light into the darkness of America's soul.  Please.

The Times appreciation (or anticipation) of Obama's nuance provides a nice companion piece to "Barack Obama's Lost Years" by Stanley Kurtz in the Weekly Standard.  There was a politician who favored minority set-asides!

MORE:  Obama has personal experience of the notion that affirmative action stigmatizes black achievement:

Mr. Obama was sympathetic to minority students who argued that affirmative action undermined them in the eyes of their white colleagues. But he said he never felt that way at Harvard.

“I have not personally felt stigmatized,” Mr. Obama wrote in his letter to the editor in 1990.

That changed after law school.

A federal judge once asked a friend of Mr. Obama’s whether he had been “elected on the merits” as law review president, Mr. Obama told The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education in 2001. He said the question came up again when he applied for a job as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Mr. Obama has not described how he felt then. But as a state senator, he spoke with empathy about accomplished minority students at elite universities who sometimes lived “under a cloud they could not erase.”

However, Ms. Swarns can't make the intellectual leap necessary to connect that stigma to this:

Studies suggest that employers often favor white job seekers over black applicants, even when their educational backgrounds and work experiences are nearly identical.

I can't dredge up any links [Yes We Can!] but I am certain this was kicked around here a few years back, when an economist wrote about discrimination against people with "black-sounding" names in resumes that were mailed to prospective employers.  One of my points was that if the two people have seemingly equal resumes but one has had a consistent opportunity to benefit from affirmative action, than the resumes are not really equal, now are they?

PILING ON:  Donald Douglas of American Power details the link to the Kurtz piece.  Don Surber asks a rhetorical question, so I'll answer it:

Question: Did Republican Sen. John McCain benefit from affirmative action?

Answer: Nope.

Not so fast - John McCain benefited from a legacy preference at the Naval Academy, if "legacy preference" is broadly defined to include being given additional opportunities to have your sorry ass shot at.  Tricky call - Obama can go on for half an hour about service to the United States without ever mentioning military service, so maybe getting shot at is not a real benefit.

The North Vietnamese also offered McCain an early release based on his legacy status, but McCain turned then down.

 

All The News That Fits The Narrative

Mark Leibovich of the Times goes on and on about McCain's computer illiteracy without mentioning that McCain has been much more accessible the The One Hothouse Flower on blogger conference calls.

MORE:  Ben Smith has the same "story", with this near the end:

He’s demonstrated a cultural affinity with one aspect of online campaigning: Bloggers are welcome on his conference calls, and have common ground with his combative, free-wheeling style. He’s hired a blogger of his own, Michael Goldfarb.

“Who's Web-Savvy Now?” asked a recent headline on McCain’s blog, after poking fun at the Obama campaign for editing the Iraq policy on its site.

So In The Tank They Don't Know They Are In The Tank

Michael Powell of the Times probably does not even realize how laughably tilted his first two paragraphs are in his story about Obama and race. 

Senator Barack Obama is a man of few rhetorical stumbles, but this week a few of his words opened a racial door his campaign would prefer not to step through. When Senator John McCain’s camp replied by accusing him of playing the race card from the bottom of the deck, the Obama campaign seemed at least momentarily off balance.

The instinctive urge to punch back was tempered by the fact that race is a fire that could singe both candidates. So on Friday the Obama campaign, a carefully controlled lot on the best of days, reacted most cautiously as it sought to tamp down any sense that it was at war with Mr. McCain over who was the first to inject race into the contest.

Let's see - Barack "57 States" Obama is a man of few rhetorical stumbles?  That would probably appear to be true if we relied on the Paper of Record to record his many gaffes.  But ABC, the Chicago Sun Times, and Michelle Malkin present an alternative reality (although none mention Jerusalem as an undivided city, or not.)

And what about the "instinctive urge to punch back" mentioned by Mr. Powell?  The lack of just that instinct has bedeviled former Dem candidates such as The Duke or John Kerry, and contributes to a general sense of Dem candidates as weak.  Eventually, Mr. Powell notes that the presence of such an instinct is still not proven in the Team Obama camp:

After two straight defeats in presidential elections, Democrats sometimes speak of hungering for a more aggressive standard-bearer to confront Republican attacks. Some wonder why, every time he speaks of the economy, Mr. Obama does not mention that Mr. McCain’s chief economic adviser referred to a “mental” recession rather than a real one.

“I am somewhat mystified that he isn’t attacking much harder on the policy front,” said Ronald Walters, a political scientist at the University of Maryland. “He needs to rev up his attacks, and his proposals.”

But this is to some extent Mr. Obama’s sleight of hand. He relies heavily on surrogates, and tends to back into his attacks. So he cues up Mr. McCain as “an honorable man” and a “war hero,” before skewering him as lacking in ideas.

Whatever - in Times world Obama is a smooth-talking instinctive fighter, and I'm sure they are happy there.

The MinuteMan Gets Results!

My goodness - was it only yesterday I was urging Team McCain to push his energy plan?  And now Obama is tossing in the towel on his opposition to off-shore drilling.

This may simply be another manifestation of an Obama campaign tactic - adopt every position held by McCain and then ask voters to choose their next President on the basis of youth, energy, and speaking skill.  Could work!

But while I am still feeling eerily prescient, let me suggest that McCain's campaign should focus on a domestic agenda.  Energy is a real problem requiring leadership from Washington on a number of fronts (trying building a nuclear plant without a Presidential wind at your back).   McCain should be able to make the national security and economic cases for increased production, conservation, and alternative energy without annoying his base by getting sucked into Al Gore's global warming fantasies.

As a second topic I would urge McCain to talk about education reform.  Yes, this takes us a long way from the days when Reagan promised to dismantle the department of Education, but...

Education is a high-impact mom-friendly issue that has a relatively low budget impact, so it can represent compassion and caring on the cheap.  That said, it also represents a slow-motion crisis (or opportunity!) as David Brooks explained recently.

Finally, I think the McCain camp might enjoy taking the national press on a voyage of discovery down the mysterious waters of Obama's forays into education reform in Chicago.  There was his failed effort as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in 1995-2001 [my post, Wikipedia].  And dare we mention that Obama was tapped as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge by unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers, with whom he subsequently worked for about five years?

Or a longer conversation about Obama and education would take us back to his first alliance with Bill Ayers back in 1987, an earlier failed stab at reform.

Obama's website offers a pleasing menu of high-minded platitudes on education.  Back in reality, Obama teamed up with Bill Ayers twice on education reform and accomplished nothing twice.  I wonder if voters will be more impressed by words (Just words?!?) or deeds?

I think McCain ought to find out.

The Next Big Thing

Have you worried that, with the prospect of global shortages, water would be the oil of the 21st century?  Have you worried that with the current energy crunch, oil would be the oil of the 21st century?

If, I say IF this new technology (see NY Times) can be scaled and commercialized at anything like a reasonable cost, your worries are over. [But feel free to keep worrying.]

The gist - in what reads to me like a twist on photo-voltaic cells, sunlight plus water (fresh or saline) is used to produce oxygen and hydrogen.  The yydrogen is then run through a fuel cell and recombined with oxygen to produce fresh water plus energy.  The net effect - Florida can convert its abundant salt water and sunlight to fresh water and electricity.  So can California, or Saudi Arabia.  Very cool.  Well, very cool unless this is this generation's cold fusion.

From the Times:

Splitting a water molecule is an experiment familiar to generations of high school chemistry students. In common industrial practice, it involves a container with water at a very high pH and a base like lye. The container is sealed to keep out contaminants like carbon dioxide, which is present in the atmosphere. But in one paper scheduled for publication in the journal Science on Friday, two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology describe a technique that works at ambient temperatures and pressures in ordinary water.

“Trees don’t grow in base; they grow in regular water,” said one of the researchers, Daniel G. Nocera, a professor of energy at the institute, who compared the process to photosynthesis, nature’s way of storing energy by separating hydrogen and oxygen.

Because the conditions are benign and the chemistry works at a small scale, Dr. Nocera said, this electrolyzer could be incorporated into a solar cell, which would turn out hydrogen rather than electricity.

Dr. Nocera worked with a postdoctoral fellow, Matthew W. Kanan.

The system could use saltwater. When the hydrogen and oxygen recombine in the fuel cell, the result is pure water, raising the possibility that the technology could be used for desalination.

The abstract is here.  A flavor:

In Situ Formation of an Oxygen-Evolving Catalyst in Neutral Water Containing Phosphate and Co²⁺

Matthew W. Kanan ¹ and  Daniel G. Nocera ^1*

The utilization of solar energy on a large scale requires its storage. In natural photosynthesis, energy from sunlight is used to rearrange the bonds of water to O₂ and H₂-equivalents. The realization of artificial systems that perform similar "water splitting" requires catalysts that produce O₂ from water without the need for excessive driving potentials. Here, we report such a catalyst that forms upon the oxidative polarization of an inert indium tin oxide electrode in phosphate-buffered water containing Co²⁺. A variety of analytical techniques indicates the presence of phosphate in an approximate 1:2 ratio with cobalt in this material. The pH dependence of the catalytic activity also implicates HPO₄^2– as the proton acceptor in the O₂-producing reaction. This catalyst not only forms in situ from earth-abundant materials but also operates in neutral water under ambient conditions.

Clear as mud.

A PLEA FOR ENGINEERING TALENT: Here is a problem that would be easily ball-parked by someone with the right background (this would take me back to high school chemistry and physics, when I worked to the rhythmic beating of pterodactyl wings): 

Obviously it varies by latitude, season, and time of day, but determine the solar energy per square meter striking, for example, Miami.

And even with perfect catalysts and no activation energy it takes a certain amount of energy to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen.  Presumably there will be some conversion loss when the elements are recombined to produce fresh water and electricty.

But given the solar energy input it should be possible to estimate the water and energy outputs.  And somewhere the water and power usage of Miami ought to be available (or use a per capita guess.) 

So, do we need to pave Florida with these conversion cells in order to save it?

HMM:  This description clarifies a point to which the Times summary merely alluded - a photovoltaic cell is the starting point providing the electricity to drive the electrolysis:

PORTLAND, Ore. — Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have combined a liquid catalyst with photovoltaic cells to achieve what they claim is a solar energy system that could generate electricity around the clock.

A liquid catalyst was added to water before electrolysis to achieve what the researchers claim is almost 100-percent efficiency. When combined with photovoltaic cells to store energy chemically, the resulting solar energy systems could generate electricity around the clock, the MIT team said.

...

Currently, MIT is working with photovoltaic cell manufacturers to incorporate electrolysis using their catalyst into solar energy systems. By combining the two, excess capacity during the day could be stored as hydrogen and oxygen, then used in fuel cells at night when needed.

"Solar cell makers can add super-cheap electrolyzers to their system so that they work 24/7 -- during the day making hydrogen and oxygen, then at night recombining it in fuel cells to generate electricity," Nocera predicted.

Even if they get 100% efficiency on the electrolysis, there is still a conversion loss when the fuel cell combines hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity.  And peak power demands occur during the day.  Still, this could be a great way to produce hydrogen in remote sunny (and wet) locations and transport it elsewhere.  And the same dodge could apply to wind power.

 

The Race Card, With Bill Clinton As The Joker In The Deck

The Times covers Obama's use (again) of the race card, and the penny drops as to the game being played by McCain:

ORLANDO, Fla. — Senator John McCain’s campaign accused Senator Barack Obama on Thursday of playing “the race card,” citing his remarks that Republicans would try to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

Team Obama went with the "Moi?" defense [later abandoned]:

The remarks put Mr. Obama’s campaign, which has tried to keep him from being pigeonholed or defined by race, in a delicate position. He did not address the matter himself on Thursday, and his campaign gingerly tried to tamp down the issue, saying he did not believe that Mr. McCain had tried to use race as an issue.

“This is a race about big challenges — a slumping economy, a broken foreign policy and an energy crisis for everyone but the oil companies,” said Robert Gibbs, a campaign spokesman. “Barack Obama in no way believes that the McCain campaign is using race as an issue, but he does believe they’re using the same old low-road politics to distract voters from the real issues in this campaign. And those are the issues he’ll continue to talk about.”

After a Big Skip the Times tacks up a no-sale sign:

Mr. Obama has been more explicit about the role of race in attacks against him in the past, but he is rarely specific about who is behind them. “We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run,” he said in June. “They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. ‘He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?’ ”

And it all comes clear with the Clinton Connection:

“The McCain campaign was compelled to respond to this outrageous attack because we will not allow John McCain to be smeared by Senator Obama as a racist for offering legitimate criticism,” he said. “We have waited for months with a sick feeling knowing this moment would come because we watched it incur with President Clinton. Say whatever you want about President Clinton, his record on this issue is above reproach.”

In the Democratic primary campaign, Mr. Obama’s supporters at several occasions accused the Clinton campaign of using racially charged tactics, particularly after Mr. Clinton equated Mr. Obama’s victory in the South Carolina primary with the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s victory in the nominating contest there in 1988. Mr. Clinton himself then complained in a radio interview in April that the Obama campaign had “played the race card on me.”

Well, well - it's a wedge issue meant to bolster McCain's appeal to aggrieved Hillary backers.  And is Wild Bill going to get on camera and defend Obama on this point?  My breath is unabated.

Newsbusters finds that with Chris Matthews away on vacation, even the Hardballers can recognize the race card when they see it.

And I find the Big Tent Dem, aka Armando appearing at TalkLeft, agreeing with me (or I with him) as to the hidden Hillary appeal.