Democrat Barack Obama, the first black candidate with a shot at winning the White House, says John McCain and his Republican allies will try to scare them by saying Obama “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

What a sneak: Obama plays victim while unjustly calling John McCain racist. The self-proclaimed “post racial” candidate never stops reminding people that he’s black.  In Berlin:

“I know that I don’t look like the other Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.”

What does Barack mean, he’s only half black, unlike Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice?

UPDATE:

James Taranto at Best of the Web offers this analysis:

Then things got interesting. Obama responded by suggesting McCain was, of all things, racist. The Associated Press reports:

Stumping in an economically challenged battleground state, Obama argued Wednesday that President Bush and McCain will resort to scare tactics to maintain their hold on the White House because they have little else to offer voters.

“Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama said. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name, you know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

Pro-Obama writers were more explicit in accusing the McCain camp of racism, laughably suggesting that the ad’s producers had chosen Hilton and Spears because they were slatterns of pallor. “I note with interest today, John McCain’s new tactic of associating Barack Obama with oversexed and/or promiscuous young white women,” wrote Josh Marshall on TalkingPointsMemo.com. “In juxtaposing Barack Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, the McCain campaign is simply trying to plant the old racist seed of black man hitting on young white woman,” echoed Bill Press on the Puffington Host.

Or maybe that Paris Hilton became famous for being, uh, famous?

In any case, the McCain campaign “accused Barack Obama . . . of playing racial politics,” reports the Associated Press:

Obama “played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said in a statement. He called Obama’s remarks “divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”

The Obama campaign in turn claimed it was all a big misunderstanding, according to another AP dispatch:

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday that the senator was not referring to race.

“What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington,” Gibbs said. “There is nothing more to this than the fact that he was describing that he was new to the political scene. He was referring to the fact that he didn’t come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race.”

There is a lot of silliness on both sides here. First of all, the notion that the McCain ad plays to stereotypes of black men as sexual predators is far-fetched. The invidious old stereotype has to do with black men as a threat to white feminine innocence, and it is hard to imagine two less innocent symbols than Hilton and Spears.

The notion that Obama was not making a racial appeal is preposterous as well. Are we to believe that when he said he doesn’t “look like” the presidents on money, he meant that he lacks a wig and a beard? That’s certainly not what President Clinton had in mind when he said he wanted a cabinet that “looks like America.” Besides, Obama has made essentially the same appeal in the past in an explicitly racial way.

At the same time, it was foolish of McCain’s campaign to lash out at Obama for playing the “race card.” Each campaign is better off talking as little about race as possible.

Much of Obama’s salvific appeal to white voters has to do with race, which has been called America’s original sin. To those whites who feel guilty about America’s racial history, he offers a degree of absolution. To those who do not, he offers an opportunity to prove that America is not irredeemably racist, hopefully diminishing tiresome demands for race-consciousness.

If Obama seems to have a racial chip on his shoulder–as he does when he makes baseless charges of Republican racism–that diminishes this transracial appeal. If Republicans actually do seem preoccupied by race–as they do when they get defensive about Obama’s playing the “race card”–that enhances Obama’s appeal.

Each campaign has an interest in provoking the other to make race an issue, while studiously avoiding doing the same thing. So far both campaigns seem to be succeeding in the former and failing in the latter.

For four-plus decades, Hollywood has cranked out films and TV shows decrying the victims of the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklist: writers and actors believed to be Communists at one time or another who were refused work by a fearful film industry.

Each of those productions bears the stench of moral vanity, suggesting that the enlightened entertainment industry of today could never behave so badly. Who, moi?

Andrew Breitbart writes:

“There is no such thing as a blacklist anymore,” George Clooney declared in 2005 while promoting his black-and-white hagiography of Edward R. Murrow, “Good Night, And Good Luck.”

…”For anybody who would blacklist you,” party spokesman Clooney said, elaborating on Hollywood’s clean bill of health, “there are 50 people that would hire you now.”

Even while Mr. Clooney contradicts his bold statement that there is no blacklist in Hollywood (apparently because only a small minority practices it), he basically gets it right.

For ignoring the crimes of brutal dictators while ripping our democratically elected president during a time of war, Mr. Clooney probably wouldn’t be hired by one Hollywood producer - and I think I know him. And he wouldn’t hire Vanessa Redgrave, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Woody Harrelson, Jessica Lange, John Cusack or Danny Glover, either. Bias happens.

The problem occurs when the 50-to-1 ratio is flipped and Mr. Clooney and his allegedly egalitarian allies are doing most of the hiring. Remember his pal Julia Roberts’ slurs against Republicans? “Repugnant” Reaganites and “reptilian” Bushies planning to work on the “Ocean’s 14″ set have mastered a code of conduct: silence.

Whoops. Jon Voight broke the silence with an oped in the Washington Times and dared criticize Barack Obama. Now he’s on a list.

Jeffrey Wells writes:

My honest deep-down reaction is that I now have a reason to feel negatively about the guy. I’m not saying Voight is on the HE shit list (although the idea certainly feels good — just as it felt good to imagine the same thing last spring about Tina Fey when she became a rabid Hillary person on SNL), and I certainly don’t think a symbolic condemnation along these lines would matter much to anyone. Nonetheless, it’s going to be hard henceforth not to think of Voight as some kind of diseased wingnut.

I’ll always admire and respect Voight’s better performances (Luke in Coming Home, Reynolds in Enemy of the State, Ed in Deliverance, Howard Cosell in Ali, Manny in Runaway Train, FDR in Pearl Harbor, Jack in Desert Bloom, Paul Serone in Anaconda). And he’s obviously entitled to say and write whatever he wants. But it’s only natural that industry-based Obama supporters will henceforth regard him askance. Honestly? If I were a producer and I had to make a casting decision about hiring Voight or some older actor who hadn’t pissed me off with an idiotic Washington Times op-ed piece, I might very well say to myself, “Voight? Let him eat cake.”

Sen. Barack Obama, speaking to a gathering of minority journalists yesterday, stopped short of endorsing an official U.S. apology to American Indians but said the country should acknowledge its history of poor treatment of certain ethnic groups.

Our mistreatment of Native Americans is, of course, a closely held secret.

That is why virtually every film or television episode about Indians made from 1965 on has depicted the Indians as noble, peaceful protectors of the earth slaughtered by genocidal, double-dealing white men.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is just the latest. Before that there was Little Big Man and Dances with Wolves.

Obama promised to unite America. He can begin by acknowledging the truth. That would be “change we can all believe in.”

Michelle Malkin:

You couldn’t pass a grocery store line this weekend without seeing the picture-perfect smiles of the Obama family. There were Barack Obama’s young daughters (whose privacy their parents so sanctimoniously claim to want to protect) flashing their pearly whites on the cover of People. Malia and Sasha competed for attention right next to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s toddler daughter, Shiloh, whose cherubic face was splashed on the cover of another celebrity tabloid. Next to them beamed basket-case starlet Lindsay Lohan and her new lesbian lover — oh, and that formerly pregnant “man” who just gave birth to a baby girl.

The Obamas blended seamlessly into this Hollyweird pop-culture galaxy.

The spread in People, which earlier this year fawned over a photo of the bare-chested Obama in his swimsuit, was supposed to be an “exclusive” first and last look at life at home with the Obamas. Knowing what we know about the Obama we know now, it probably won’t be the last.

They’ve hawked the kids to TV gossip show Access Hollywood, blabbed about their romance to Us Weekly, and plopped Michelle O — the purported “civilian” whom the Obamessiah declares immune from public criticism — in front of the cameras to schmooze effortlessly for The Colbert Report and The View demographics. They believe their two-faced tabloid strategy (show their true elitist colors behind closed doors, but play the Every Family for the Obamedia sycophants) is working. Given our dumbed-down, celebrity-obsessed culture, they are probably right.

Who cares about Barack’s perilous lack of foreign-policy experience, his longtime associations with left-wing radicals and domestic terrorists, and his business dealings with Chicago corruptocrats? People brings you the scoop on what really matters in this critical presidential campaign: Michelle hula-hoops with her daughters. They’re just like you and me! The kids have slumber parties. They’re just like you and me! Barack does laundry, but he doesn’t fold it. They’re just like you and me! The kids get small allowances. They’re just like you and me! The Obamas wear normal clothes while doing normal things.

IBD: 

We are citizens of the world, Sen. Obama told thousands of nonvoting Germans during his recent tour of the Middle East and Europe. And if the Global Poverty Act (S. 2433) he has sponsored becomes law, which is almost certain if he wins in November, we’re also going to be taxpayers of the world.

Speaking in Berlin, Obama said: “While the 20th century taught us that we share a common destiny, the 21st has revealed a world more intertwined than at any time in human history.”

What the 20th century really showed was a series of totalitarian threats — from fascism to Nazism to communism — defeated by the U.S. military. Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Tojo’s Japan and the Soviet Union offered destinies we did not share.

Our destiny of peace and freedom through strength was not achieved by a transnationalist fantasy of buying the world a Coke and singing “Kumbaya.”

Obama’s Global Poverty Act offers us a global socialist destiny we do not want, one that challenges America’s very sovereignty. The former “post-racial” candidate obviously intends to be a post-national president.

A statement from Obama’s office says: “With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world, global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the international community faces. It must be a priority of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter and clean drinking water.”

These are worthy goals, but note there’s no mention of spreading democracy, expanding free trade, promoting entrepreneurial capitalism or ridding the world of despots who rule and ravage countries such as Zimbabwe and Sudan.

Obama would give them all a fish without teaching them how to fish. Pledging to cut global poverty in half on the backs of U.S. taxpayers is a ridiculous and impossible goal.

His legislation refers to the “millennium development goal,” a phrase from a declaration adopted by the United Nations Millennium Assembly in 2000 and supported by President Clinton.

It calls for the “eradication of poverty” in part through the “redistribution (of) wealth of land” and “a fair distribution of the earth’s resources.” In other words: American resources.

It’s a mantra of liberals that the U.S. is only a small portion of the world’s population yet consumes an unseemly portion of the planet’s supposedly finite resources. Never mentioned is the fact that America’s population, just 5% of the world’s total, also produces a stunning 27% of the world’s GDP — to the enormous benefit of other countries. Nonetheless, their solution is to siphon off the product of our free democracy and distribute it.

We already transfer too much national wealth to the United Nations and its busybody agencies. Obama’s bill would force U.S. taxpayers to fork over 0.7% of our gross domestic product every year to fund a global war on poverty, spending well above the $16.3 billion in global poverty aid the U.S. already spends.

LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s one true gift is not intelligence, moral character or common sense. But he does have an acute sense of how to get on TV, with a nose for news cameras that would make Jesse Jackson turn green with envy.

For proof consider that Antonio had the misfortune of being on vacation in London during yesterday’s earthquake. Did that stop him?

“At this point, it doesn’t look like there are any injuries or damage in Los Angeles,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told CNN as he monitored the situation from London while on vacation with his son.

John Tierney:

For most of the year, it is the duty of the press to scour the known universe looking for ways to ruin your day. The more fear, guilt or angst a news story induces, the better. But with August upon us, perhaps you’re in the mood for a break, so I’ve rounded up a list of 10 things not to worry about on your vacation.

Now, I can’t guarantee you that any of these worries is groundless, because I can’t guarantee you that anything is absolutely safe, including the act of reading a newspaper. With enough money, an enterprising researcher could surely identify a chemical in newsprint or keyboards that is dangerously carcinogenic for any rat that reads a trillion science columns every day.

What I can guarantee is that I wouldn’t spend a nanosecond of my vacation worrying about any of these 10 things:

1. Killer hot dogs. What is it about frankfurters? There was the nitrite scare. Then the grilling-creates-carcinogens alarm. And then, when those menaces ebbed, the weenie warriors fell back on that old reliable villain: saturated fat.

But now even saturated fat isn’t looking so bad, thanks to a rigorous experiment in Israel reported this month. The people on a low-carb, unrestricted-calorie diet consumed more saturated fat than another group forced to cut back on both fat and calories, but those fatophiles lost more weight and ended up with a better cholesterol profile. And this was just the latest in a series of studies contradicting the medical establishment’s predictions about saturated fat.

If you must worry, focus on the carbs in the bun. But when it comes to the fatty frank — or the fatty anything else on vacation — I’d relax.

2. Your car’s planet-destroying A/C. No matter how guilty you feel about your carbon footprint, you don’t have to swelter on the highway to the beach. After doing tests at 65 miles per hour, the mileage experts at edmunds.com report that the aerodynamic drag from opening the windows cancels out any fuel savings from turning off the air-conditioner.

Read it all. But especially this:

5. Evil plastic bags. Take it from the Environmental Protection Agency : paper bags are not better for the environment than plastic bags. If anything, the evidence from life-cycle analyses favors plastic bags. They require much less energy — and greenhouse emissions — to manufacture, ship and recycle. They generate less air and water pollution. And they take up much less space in landfills.

You still have to worry about idiot politicians. LA just voted to ban plastic bags for environmental reasons.

Victor Davis Hanson:

So supposedly sophisticated Europeans, who constantly dissect American politics and culture, seem suddenly to like us now, because a younger, more mellifluous figure repackaged the standard American trans-Atlantic rah-rah speech, dressed up with a little Obama messianic sermonizing: “People of Berlin — people of the world — this is our moment. This is our time!” along with some throwaway lines about global warming and Darfur?

That’s all it took?

A few minutes of Obama’s Elvis-like hope and change? And now the Europeans will pour troops into Afghanistan, match our AIDs-relief dollars, stand up to Iran, be balanced in the Middle East, get off our backs about Iraq, and stiffen their spines with the Russians, because the days of Bushitler are by fiat over with?

Besides the usual rock-star stuff that he excels at, Obama still does not do history well. He started, as is now usual, almost immediately by mentioning his race (“I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.”) But that simply was not true, given the fact that for the last seven years both American Secretaries of State — who have been the faces of American foreign policy in Europe — were African-American.

His reference to why Berlin did not starve in 1948 (“But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up. And on one fall day, hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city’s mayor implore the world not to give up on freedom.”) seems somewhat misleading: the city was kept alive not by “the world” or even the courage of the hungry Berliners, but by skill and courage of the U.S. Air Force.

Obama would do well to remind some Germans of the real history. As one German noted three years ago.

At the base of the walkway that leads to the top there is a photographic exhibit on the history of the building, beginning with its construction as the Reichstag and ending with its reconstruction as the Bundestag. Naturally much of the exhibit is devoted to the post-war period, the division of Berlin, and reunification.

To my amazement, there was not one mention in either the photographs or the accompanying narrative of the United States and the role it played in bringing down the wall and reunifying the city.

Without the United States the Bundestag would still be meeting in Bonn but here were busloads of German and international school children reading a history that would have made the East German Communist Party proud. The experience reminded me of those photos of the Politburo where the faces of party members who had fallen out of favor had been cropped out.

…imagine what this satirical video might do.

Chinese artist Li Wei from Beijing started off his performance series ‘Mirroring’ and later on took off attention with his ‘Falls’ series which shows the artist with his head and chest embedded into the ground. His work is a mixture of performance art and photography that creates illusions of a sometimes dangerous reality.

Much more here.

VIDEO HERE

by J.C. Phillips 

Prior to the recent Supreme Court decision rolling back the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, the punishment for possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine was a minimum 5 year prison sentence. ”Simple possession of any quantity of any other substance by a first-time offender-including powder cocaine- was a misdemeanor offense punishable by a maximum of one year in prison.”

I think it important to recall that in the mid 1980’s when these sentencing guidelines came into effect America was experiencing a surge in violent crime much of it fueled by the introduction of a new and extremely profitable (to say nothing of addictive) form of cocaine – Crack. There was tremendous violence associated with the crack cocaine trade as drug gangs fought over territory. There was a rise in gang activity and the front pages of our daily newspapers were filled with drive by shootings and turf wars between men that wore blue bandannas and men that wore red ones. We were also reading about the toll crack addiction was taking on families. 

The media told us that our neighborhoods were filling with crack babies – children born addicted to cocaine because their mothers smoked the deadly toxin while being pregnant. Americans were rightly concerned and took action to address what at that time was a cultural and law enforcement crisis. There were studies at the time indicating that the introduction of crack raised the level of crime in our communities by 10% so our representatives in congress decided to take a tough stance and introduced harsh sentencing guidelines for selling crack cocaine. The guidelines were passed with bipartisan support and this particular issue was of particular interest of the congressional black caucus as Crack cocaine was having a particular negative impact on Black communities. 

I am as in favor of strong law enforcement as anyone. I have little sympathy for men and women that prey on the innocent hard working members of the community, wrecking lives, planting the seeds of anguish and despair. I am particularly critical of men that are guilty of criminal behavior as this runs counter to what I see as one of the primary duties of men: to be guardians of the home and of the community not parasites on that community. I am, however, uncertain that society gains very much by sentencing thousands of young Black men to prison for non violent drug offenses. The sentences introduce them into a system from which it is difficult to extricate themselves and begins the downward path to joblessness, absentee fatherhood and more criminal behavior. In short creating more of the very behavior we are trying to discourage. 

The few thousand Black men in prison for non violent drug offenses are not career criminals – yet – and their incarceration does not represent the best our justice system has to offer. In fact I would argue that it undermines faith in that very system especially among Black folk. I therefore greeted the recent decision by congress and our Supreme Court to eliminate these sentencing disparities gladly. It represented to me a step—a small step in the direction of bringing healing and more importantly restoring opportunity to so many in our community. Yet it is only part of the solution.

Studies show that 50% of inmates have drug and alcohol problems. A large number used drugs immediately prior to their offense and many grew up with addicts as parents. When we are discussing non violent offenders I think it may be prudent to spend a bit more time with rehabilitation as opposed to tossing folk under the jail. We have tried for many years to attack the supply side of this equation; it is in my humble opinion time to begin addressing the demand side. There are folks a lot smarter than I am encouraging the government to begin to approach the drug war as a health issue as opposed to strictly a law enforcement issue. Do we have enough rehabilitation centers? How can we reduce the time men must wait to enter a rehab facility? Do we have enough counselors? And what do we do once these men (and women) have completed their punishment? These are some of the questions we need to begin asking.

We also need to get a handle on single parenthood and absentee fathers.

I can not–and responsible members of our community can not–stress enough the effects single parenthood has on the development of children and how that development translates into criminal behavior in the community. 

A few numbers to consider: A study that looked at the relation between divorce rates and out-of-wedlock birthrates and violent crime between 1973 and 1995 found that nearly 90% of the change in violent crime rates can be accounted for by the change in percentages of out-of-wedlock births. A child growing up in a single-parent home (usually female-headed) is seven times as likely to be a delinquent. Even controlling for race, parents income and education adolescents from a single parent home were twice as likely to have pulled a gun or knife on someone in the past year. 70% of kids – and 93% of girls! — in juvenile facilities came from non-intact homes. Children from fatherless homes are

• 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders.
• 14 times more likely to commit rape
• 9 times more likely to drop out of high school.
• 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances.
• 9 times more likely to end up in a state-operated institution.
• 20 times more likely to end up in prison.

These are sobering statistics. A change in the sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine will have very little effect if we do not begin to commit this community to raising our children in two parent homes. There is nothing partisan in that, nothing conservative or liberal. It is simply a fact. 

Finally there must be a corresponding responsibility on the part of citizens to avoid drugs and alcohol, obey the law and to borrow from the title of a Spike Lee joint: “Do the Right Thing.” There must also be a continued demand by the rest of us that our fellow citizens engage in moral and ethical behavior. We must insist that concepts like nobility, duty and honor are not sacrificed on the alter of relativism. 

Nothing distresses me more than the emails I receive attempting to explain away the anti-social and criminal behavior of some of our neighbors as the result of poverty and or racism. (Left unanswered of course is why they who have also been targets of racism and poverty are not engaged in criminal behavior.) There is much pathology one can lay at the feet of racism, but destroying the lives of our children and turning our communities into thugocracies is not one of them. I dare say those emails have not come from folks that actually live near a crack den or who fear allowing their children out of the home lest they fall prey to some act of violence directly or indirectly tied to drugs or gangs. Let us be absolutely clear that ones moral and ethical obligations do not cease to exist because of poor circumstances nor are they altered because of the existence of (pick your favorite)-ism.

To suggest that people attempt to live lives of virtue is not simplistic. It is in fact wisdom that reaches back to antiquity. It is the same philosophy preached in our houses of worship each and every Sabbath day. Neither is the suggestion that men have power to change their own lives unsympathetic. Without question there are ways each of us can contribute to the uplift of our communities. However, no amount of volunteering will replace the difficult work each individual must make. 

Whether it concerns sexual behavior, decisions concerning our education or how we conceive of civil behavior, when it comes to creating lives of purpose and fulfillment nothing will replace the individual accessing the wisdom that has been passed down through the generations in order to make good decisions. In the words of the poet William Ernest Henley, “It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll. I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul.” 

Byron York:

Just a few weeks ago, it seemed nobody could make a joke about Barack Obama.  The New York Times published a front-page story declaring that “there has been little humor” about Obama because “there is no comedic ‘take’ on him, nothing easy to turn to for an easy laugh.” Television comedy writers fretted that audiences didn’t want to hear anything even slightly negative about the Democratic nominee. The political press corps went nuts over a satirical New Yorker cover that wasn’t even directed at Obama.

And this was about a man who made up his own pretend presidential seal and motto, Vero Possumus; a man who, upon securing the Democratic nomination, said, “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”; a man who has on a number of occasions seemed to forget that he is not, or at least not yet, the President of the United States, who has misstated the number of states in his own country, who has forgotten on which committees he serves in the U.S. Senate. Professional comedians — and their audiences — couldn’t find anything funny about any of that?

Now, after Obama’s world tour, there are already cracks in the Times-imposed conventional wisdom.  Confronted with something of an official ban on Obama humor, there is emerging a new strain of Obama humor — zings at the candidate’s hauteur, his presumptuousness, and, especially, his most zealous admirers in the press.

Last week, Jon Stewart on The Daily Show got an enthusiastic reception from his audience with a routine about Obama’s media entourage. Stewart tossed to the team of reporters who were said to be traveling with the Obama campaign, some of whom had abandoned John McCain to cover the more exciting Democrat.  They were positively giddy about Obama.

“The commander-in-chief,” said one.

“Did you see when the president hit that three-pointer?” asked another.

“Nothing but net,” said a third.

Stewart interrupted. “He’s not the president.” Pause.“Barack Obama’s not the president.”

A confused silence. “Are you sure?” the reporters asked.

Stewart wondered whether the reporters were “nervous that this maybe plays into the idea of the press being a little Obama-centric, a little sycophantic.” Not at all, they said, exchanging stories of this or that treasured contact with the Great One. A moment later, Stewart asked what they learned during the trip.

“I’ll tell you something, Jon,” said one. “Barack Obama kinda gives me a boner.”

Stewart dutifully faked embarrassment and exasperation. “Anything else?” he asked. All the others raised their hands. They, too, were, well, thrilled to be in Obama’s presence.

“I’m not talking about boners,” Stewart said.

“Seriously,” said one last reporter. “They should call this guy Barack O-Boner.”

The audience loved it. And this was the same program on which, a few weeks earlier, a frustrated Stewart said, “You’re allowed to laugh at him” after the audience sat on its hands during a bit on Obama’s flip-flop on campaign finance. To be fair, in that same routine, Stewart had made fun of Vero Possumus, and the audience laughed. But Stewart’s jokes had the feel of a sympathetic voice telling Obama he had made a mistake, not a voice of biting ridicule. The lesson from all that is that, with his pro-Obama audiences, Stewart can’t make a joke that says, “This guy thinks he’s God.” But he can make a joke that says, “Look at these idiots who think Obama’s God.”

Who knows? From there, perhaps, it might be just a short hop to the man himself.

James Fallows of The Atlantic has been living in Beijing for two years. Air pollution there is horrendous, but the government has pledged to clear the air by the time the Olympics start. This involves shuttering factories for the duration and implementing traffic controls.

Fallows has been taking a photograph each day to monitor progress. This image is from today. For his full chronicle, go here.

First, the video.

What you see below debuted April 15 on a Chinese website. In its first week, it drew one million hits. The English spelling is awful and its message confused, but it’s a window into how some young Chinese think.

The New Yorker writes about the creator of the video and his generation.

Tang spends most of his time working on his dissertation, which is on Western philosophy. He specializes in phenomenology; specifically, in the concept of “intersubjectivity,” as theorized by Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher who influenced Sartre, among others. In addition to Chinese, Tang reads English and German easily, but he speaks them infrequently, so at times he swerves, apologetically, among languages.

He is working on his Latin and Ancient Greek. He is so self-effacing and soft-spoken that his voice may drop to a whisper. He laughs sparingly, as if he were conserving energy. For fun, he listens to classical Chinese music, though he also enjoys screwball comedies by the Hong Kong star Stephen Chow. He is proudly unhip. The screen name CTGZ is an adaptation of two obscure terms from classical poetry: changting and gongzi, which together translate as “the noble son of the pavilion.” Unlike some élite Chinese students, Tang has never joined the Communist Party, for fear that it would impugn his objectivity as a scholar.

Tang had invited some friends to join us for lunch, at Fat Brothers Sichuan Restaurant, and afterward we all climbed the stairs to his room. He lives alone in a sixth-floor walkup, a studio of less than seventy-five square feet, which could be mistaken for a library storage room occupied by a fastidious squatter. Books cover every surface, and great mounds list from the shelves above his desk. His collections encompass, more or less, the span of human thought: Plato leans against Lao-tzu, Wittgenstein, Bacon, Fustel de Coulanges, Heidegger, the Koran. When Tang wanted to widen his bed by a few inches, he laid plywood across the frame and propped up the edges with piles of books. Eventually, volumes overflowed the room, and they now stand outside his front door in a wall of cardboard boxes.

Tang slumped into his desk chair. We talked for a while, and I asked if he had any idea that his video would be so popular. He smiled. “It appears I have expressed a common feeling, a shared view,” he said.

So it seems.

“China was backward throughout its modern history, so we were always seeking the reasons for why the West grew strong,” Liu said. “We learned from the West. All of us who are educated have this dream: Grow strong by learning from the West.”

Well, we didn’t have Mao to kill off 40 million of us, as he did in China. And if we did, we wouldn’t be quoting him on patriotic videos.

Tang and his friends were so gracious, so thankful that I’d come to listen to them, that I began to wonder if China’s anger of last spring should be viewed as an aberration. They implored me not to make that mistake.

“We’ve been studying Western history for so long, we understand it well,” Zeng said. “We think our love for China, our support for the government and the benefits of this country, is not a spontaneous reaction. It has developed after giving the matter much thought.”

In fact, their view of China’s direction, if not their vitriol, is consistent with the Chinese mainstream. Almost nine out of ten Chinese approve of the way things are going in the country—the highest share of any of the twenty-four countries surveyed this spring by the Pew Research Center. (In the United States, by comparison, just two out of ten voiced approval.)

As for the more assertive strain of patriotism, scholars point to a Chinese petition against Japan’s membership in the U.N. Security Council. At last count, it had attracted more than forty million signatures, roughly the population of Spain. I asked Tang to show me how he made his film. He turned to face the screen of his Lenovo desktop P.C., which has a Pentium 4 Processor and one gigabyte of memory.

Lenovo is the Chinese company that bought IBM’s personal computer division – those imperialists!

“Do you know Movie Maker?” he said, referring to a video-editing program. I pleaded ignorance and asked if he’d learned from a book. He glanced at me pityingly. He’d learned it on the fly from the help menu. “We must thank Bill Gates,” he said.

When people began rioting in Lhasa in March, Tang followed the news closely. As usual, he was receiving his information from American and European news sites, in addition to China’s official media. Like others his age, he has no hesitation about tunnelling under the government firewall, a vast infrastructure of digital filters and human censors which blocks politically objectionable content from reaching computers in China. Younger Chinese friends of mine regard the firewall as they would an officious lifeguard at a swimming pool—an occasional, largely irrelevant, intrusion.

To get around it, Tang detours through a proxy server—a digital way station overseas that connects a user with a blocked Web site. He watches television exclusively online, because he doesn’t have a TV in his room. Tang also receives foreign news clips from Chinese students abroad. (According to the Institute of International Education, the number of Chinese students in the United States—some sixty-seven thousand—has grown by nearly two-thirds in the past decade.) He’s baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship.

“Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

Tang is right: millions of Americans swallow the ideas of Big Baloney without ever realizing how one-sided it is.

Don Surber has a new, Obamafied version of My Country Tis of Thee:

Thy country,’ tis of me,
Sweet land that gave you me
Of me I sing;
Land that my father tried,
Went home to Kenyan bride,
From every mountainside
My praises ring! 

My native country, me,
Home of the Ivy League,
My name I love.
ANWR we must not drill,
To me a temple build,
Up Matthews leg a thrill,
I am above.

Praise my humility,
That’s hard when you are me,
I’m never wrong.
Let mortal tongues be still,
Let me eat my waffle,
Their drabby lives I fill.
Look at the throng.

Al Gore and John Kerry,
Had not my dignity,
To me, they sing.
Change and hope and progress,
Did nothing in Congress,
All I have’s arrogance:
I’ll be your king.

Pelican eats a pigeon (no audio).

Shrinkwrapped looks at Obama as an intellectual. That Obama regards himself as such, and has convinced others, is astonishing.

…In the past the over-valuing of words compared to actions could be understood to exist within certain reasonably clear constraints. 

The intellectuals have been the gate keepers of news and memory. An intellectual could explain almost anything to fit his ideology and sanitize any excesses that the ideology facilitated.  Thus, for example, The New York Times’s Walter Duranty could win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism for his laudatory series on Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s, while neglecting to mention the millions of deaths Stalin was responsible for by his engineered famine or offer a critical view of Stalin’s show trials.  History was not only written by the victors but they could rely upon the useful idiots of the MSM to control the present news as well.

The world has changed but Barack Obama, emerging as he does from the hallways of academic excellence, sees the world through the eyes of an intellectual and apparently has ingested an unhealthy mix of intellectual arrogance and the over-valuation of language that is part of the academic culture.  This may well sabotage his campaign; in the event he is elected President, it bodes poorly for his administration.

When Barack Obama expressly contradicts himself within minutes of making a comment, there are several possible explanations for his facility with the language:

1) It is possible, perhaps likely, that Obama simply does not believe it is wise or necessary for him to admit an error.  This is an accusation that has been made about President Bush on a regular basis, and has contributed to the tribulations of the Bush Presidency.

2) Obama may well be able to convince himself, probably post facto, that his words mean just what he wants them to mean, a la Humpty Dumpty, and therefore doesn’t consider the contradictions to be significant.

3) He may believe that he still lives in a world dominated by the MSM, that they will continue to cover for him as they have done since the beginning of his campaign, and that  there is no need for him to maintain any consistency or explain any contradictions. 

4)  In the worst case scenario, he may well be an opportunistic sociopath who lies because he thinks he can get away with it.

I suspect that his behavior represents a combination of these possibilities, plus some other possibilities I am probably neglecting.  Since an intellectual educated in a post-modernist university starts from the premise that reality is constructed by those who have power, he assumes that his words, mellifluous and powerful, are enough to determine reality. 

This would fit with Obama’s history; after all his most common vote while a State Senator was “present” suggesting that taking responsibility for actions was considered a liability rather than an asset. 

Now that the seat of greatest power lies within reach he is already behaving as if he has attained his goal.  He acts as if once President, his descriptions of reality would trump reality.  This is also in line with the world of George Lakoff who is very influential within the Democratic party for his theory that the problem of liberalism lies in the words and framing of their arguments rather than in the content of their ideas.

Read it all.

Dick Meyer: 

Thirty-five years ago, in 1973, I spent much of the summer after my freshman year in high school watching the greatest show in the history of American politics: the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. That committee was better known as the Ervin committee, and it was investigating Watergate.

The Watergate hearings began on May 17 and were televised gavel-to-gavel until they ended on Aug. 7. On some senses, however, the final gavel still hasn’t sounded. The Watergate effect still haunts not just American politics, but the American mood.

At the beginning of the summer of 2008, three and a half decades after the Watergate hearings, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll came out. It found that 82 percent of those polled believed the country was seriously on the wrong track. They were the gloomiest results in 15 years. But they are not out of whack with the basic trends of public attitudes since the 1960s.

Watergate was something of a symbolical tipping point in how Americans perceived their public institutions and public life. What’s striking is that the country hasn’t bounced back yet.

The Harris Poll has long and regularly measured what Americans think of their institutions. In 1966, for example, 42 percent had confidence in Congress; in 2007, that number had dropped to 10 percent. The White House fell from 41 percent to 22 percent; the military from 61 to 46 percent.

It isn’t just government that Americans have grown to disrespect. Major companies had the confidence of 55 percent of those polled in 1966, but just 16 percent in 2007. Organized religion fell from 41 to 27 percent.

There is no major institution or aspect of our public culture that is held in higher esteem now than before the 1960s.

And all of this because of a “two-bit burglary,” as Richard Nixon called it? Well, no.

On the civic plane, Watergate followed the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, racial and political riots, and Vietnam. Since then, government has become dominated by political campaigning and campaigning by marketing. This has been a formula for increasing civic disenchantment.

On the social plane, the 1960s marked a change in how Americans inherited the worlds and values of their parents and ancestors. Nothing was to be automatic anymore; nothing was taken on faith. Traditional (or just habitual) approaches to religion, sexual relations, work, citizenship and morality were widely rejected.

Increasingly, Americans chose not to live in their hometowns or near their families. Many fundamental things in life became matters of choice; like omnivorous lifestyle consumers, Americans grew accustomed to deciding everything — how to be religious, whether to marry or have children, whether to retire to a golf or tennis community, and even whether to get new breasts, eyelids or chins.

As with politics, this hasn’t worked out too well.

Read on.

Andrew Klavan:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society — in which people sometimes make the wrong choices — and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

“The Dark Knight,” then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,” “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

Conversely, time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror — films like “In The Valley of Elah,” “Rendition” and “Redacted” — which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense — values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right — only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like “300,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Narnia,” “Spiderman 3″ and now “The Dark Knight”?

The moment filmmakers take on the problem of Islamic terrorism in realistic films, suddenly those values vanish. The good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us. Why should this be?

The answers to these questions seem to me to be embedded in the story of “The Dark Knight” itself: Doing what’s right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified.

The LA Times is mum, but not the London Times: 

SCRATCH John Edwards off the list of potential vice-presidential candidates. The former White House contender, who had been hoping to get the nod from Barack Obama, is in the midst of a full-blown sex scandal.

Every supermarket shopper knows that the preternaturally youthful former senator for North Carolina may have fathered a love child with a film-maker while Elizabeth, his saintly wife, is dying of cancer. There are sensational new details on the National Enquirer website, although most of the media have done their best to ignore them.

…Tony Pierce, editor of the Los Angeles Times, issued an edict to the paper’s own bloggers to stay off the subject. “Because the only source has been the National Enquirer, we have decided not to cover the rumours or salacious speculations,” he wrote.

Mickey Kaus, a blogger for Slate magazine, leaked the memo. He noted: “This was a sensational scandal that the Los Angeles Times and other mainstream papers passionately did not want to uncover when Edwards was a formal candidate and now that the Enquirer seems to have done the job for them it looks like they want everyone to shut up while they fail to uncover it again.”

The New York Times has not deigned to touch the story, although it recently ran thousands of words on a relationship between McCain and a female lobbyist, which appeared to be based more on innuendo than fact.

Obama:

Now the world will watch and remember what we do here – what we do with this moment. Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time?

McCain (via Gateway Pundit):

In 1991, John and Cindy McCain adopted a beautiful young girl from Bangladesh.
The Wall Street Journal reported:

(I)n 1991 Cindy McCain was visiting Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh when a dying infant was thrust into her hands. The orphanage could not provide the medical care needed to save her life, so Mrs. McCain brought the child home to America with her. She was met at the airport by her husband, who asked what all this was about.

Mrs. McCain replied that the child desperately needed surgery and years of rehabilitation. “I hope she can stay with us,” she told her husband. Mr. McCain agreed. Today that child is their teenage daughter Bridget.

…(T)here was a second infant Mrs. McCain brought back. She ended up being adopted by a young McCain aide and his wife.

“We were called at midnight by Cindy,” Wes Gullett remembers, and “five days later we met our new daughter Nicki at the L.A. airport wearing the only clothing Cindy could find on the trip back, a 7-Up T-shirt she bought in the Bangkok airport.” Today, Nicki is a high school sophomore. Mr. Gullett told me, “I never saw a hospital bill” for her care.

Yesterday a caller to Michael Medved’s radio show said that after voting for Bush twice, he planned to vote for Obama.

Why? Because Obama seemed down to earth and cared more about working people like him and would oppose such things as NAFTA.

Medved replied that Obama would undoubtedly raise taxes on businesses, and that small businesses were the engine of job creation etc. (paraphrasing from memory)

“How do you think increased taxes will affect employers?” he asked the caller.

“They’ll just write them off. They write taxes off.”

This recalled a moment from Seinfeld when Kramer argued that ripping off a corporation caused no harm because, “They just write it off.”

Jerry: “You don’t even know what a write-off is.’

Kramer: “Do you?”

Jerry:  “No I don’t.”

Kramer:  “Well they do…and they’re the ones writing it off.”

Alas, the fate of the free world hinges on such muddled thinking. Increased taxes don’t kill jobs or stifle wealth creation because … magically … they just get written off.

A few months ago I suggested to someone that, if you controlled for the number of people walking the earth today, we are living in peaceful times. Which isn’t to say there are not wars going on, but they are small and local compared with centuries past.

I was too busy/lazy to do the research to back up my hunch, so fortunately someone else did. StrategyPage writes:

While the mass media continues to feature wars and terrorism, the overall trend continues away from such unpleasantness. Such stories are anathema to the mass media, because they do not attract eyeballs, and revenue. That’s the way people are, and the result is a distorted view of trends in global violence.

Worldwide, violence continues to decline, as it has for the last few years. Violence has also greatly diminished,  or disappeared completely, in places like  Iraq,  Nepal,  Chechnya,  Congo, Indonesia and Burundi. Even Afghanistan, touted as the new war zone, is seeing less violence this year than last.

All this continues a trend that began when the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union no longer subsidized terrorist and rebel groups everywhere. The current wars are basically uprisings against police states or feudal societies, which are seen as out-of-step with the modern world. Many are led by radicals preaching failed dogmas (Islamic conservatism, Maoism), that still resonate among people who don’t know about the dismal track records of these movements. 

 Caitrin Nicol

In storage at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is the secret to what one professor calls “the first Down Syndrome Association in the history of the world.” In 1982, Dr. Brian Stratford, a specialist in developmental disabilities at the University of Nottingham, suggested in the journal Maternal and Child Health that the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna used a little boy with Down syndrome as the model for his Christ child. Stratford made a “clear characteristic diagnosis” of the baby based on his distinctive facial features and the shape of his hands and toes.

The curator at the MFA dismissed this theory, attributing the work to an unknown, less technically astute follower of Mantegna, and calling the resemblance to a child with Down syndrome accidental. In the meantime, however, Stratford heard from a history professor in Rome. The Gonzaga family of Mantua, Mantegna’s sponsor, had a boy with an unidentified “sickness,” she said, and one of the artist’s own fourteen children shared this condition—a not insignificant factor in Ludovico Gonzaga’s choice of Andrea Mantegna as his court painter.

Gonzaga and Mantegna appreciated the humanity of these children whom some might have preferred to hide away or let die, and that shared sensitivity gave them a “sense of purpose” with respect to disability which Stratford regrets has been all but forgotten by our society: “Perhaps Mantegna saw in this child something beyond the deficiencies which now so occupy our attention and perhaps then, the qualities of love, forgiveness, gentleness, and innocence were more readily recognized. Maybe Mantegna saw these qualities as more representative of Christ than others we now regard so highly.”

Down syndrome is a developmental disability resulting from an extra copy of the twenty-first chromosome. It is the most common single cause of human birth defects, occurring in about one in eight hundred births. Symptoms include mild to moderate mental retardation, lower muscle tone, an approximately forty percent chance of a congenital heart defect, and lesser but significant risks of gastrointestinal disorders and leukemia.

Individuals with Down syndrome generally have outstanding social skills and in a supportive setting can be fairly high-functioning. Due to improving medical care, the life expectancy for someone born with Down syndrome has increased from twenty-five in the early 1980s to more than fifty today. In many other ways as well, a child born with Down syndrome today has brighter prospects than at any other point in history. Early intervention therapies, more inclusive educational support, legal protections in the workplace, and programs for assisted independent living offer a full, active future in the community. Adoption agencies report a high demand for children with Down syndrome.

However, the abortion rate for fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome tops ninety percent. The alphafetoprotein maternal blood-serum test followed by amniocentesis are standard practice in prenatal care for women over thirty-five, who have an elevated risk of conceiving a baby with Down syndrome. Eighty percent of babies with Down syndrome are born to younger women, however, due to their higher overall fertility rate, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommended in 2007 that all pregnant women be offered screening for Down syndrome. While ACOG insists on its neutrality with regard to abortion, it is not difficult to interpret this move as an effort to reduce the number of individuals with Down syndrome who are carried to term.

Read on.

It’s time to revisit media bias.

True to form, journalists are defending their bias by saying that one candidate, Obama, is more newsworthy than the other. In other words, there is no media bias. It is we, the hoi polloi, who reveal our bias by questioning the neutrality of these learned professionals in their ivory-towered newsrooms.

Big Media applies this rationalization to every argument used to point out bias. “It’s not a result of bias,” they say. “It’s a matter of news judgment.”

And, like the man who knows his wallet was pickpocketed but can’t prove it, the public is left to futilely rage against the injustice of it all.

The “newsworthy” argument can be applied to every metric — one-sided imbalances in airtime, story placement, column inches, number of stories, etc. — save one.

An analysis of federal records shows that the amount of money journalists contributed so far this election cycle favors Democrats by a 15:1 ratio over Republicans, with $225,563 going to Democrats, only $16,298 to Republicans .