Here’s one of those news analysis pieces that expose the shallowness of the political-media mindset.

The war in Iraq seems to have taken a turn for the better and the opposition at home has failed in all efforts to impose its own strategy. North Korea is dismantling its nuclear program. The budget deficit is falling. A new attorney general has been confirmed despite objections from the left.

After more than two years of being buffeted by one political disaster after another, President Bush and his strategists think they may finally be getting back at least a bit of their footing. While still facing enormous challenges, from the crisis in Pakistan to the backlash over children’s health care, they hope Bush has arrested his downward spiral and established a better foundation for the remainder of his time in office.

…Yet none of this has particularly impressed the public at large, which remains skeptical that anything meaningful has changed and still gives Bush record-low approval ratings. The disconnect highlights his dilemma heading into the last year of his administration: Can anything short of a profound event repair an unpopular president’s public standing so late in his tenure? Can tactical victories in Washington salvage a wounded presidency?

Who cares about “public standing?” Well, Bill Clinton — that’s all he cares about. But Bush can leave office knowing his administration:

• negotiated an end to a civil war in Sudan that had claimed 2.4 million lives
• ended the Taliban’s reign of terror
• ended Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror
• took a bold step to drain the swamp where terror breeds
• dealt countless defeats to Al Qaeda
• had the guts to attempt Social Security reform — this will resonate in 20 years

“The law of averages is finally turning our way,” said Mark McKinnon, a Bush adviser. “Iraq’s a big part of it.” But it will have to be sustained over months to come to turn around public opinion, he added. “The fact that there’s not substantial movement is not surprising. We have to get through the next part of next year and the [public] will start to look at the presidency through a different prism.”

Some Democrats agree that Bush seems to be doing better politically, but said the White House is fooling itself to think it amounts to much of a recovery. Even though security has improved in Iraq, political reconciliation remains elusive. Economic signs at home appear increasingly worrisome. And, they said, the public has largely made up its mind on Bush.

For now, thanks in part to Big Baloney and in part to Bush’s inability to articulate his positions effectively.

“Look, they’ve stopped the bleeding, but they’re not getting well,” said William Galston, a former aide to Bill Clinton and a sometime adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). “While people are pleased that the war is going better, I think the American people have closed the book on the war. They don’t think it was worth entering, they don’t think it was worth fighting. So tactical victories on the ground that might have made a difference two years ago aren’t moving the needle right now.”

Of course, that’s all the matters. Polls and partisan advantage.

No, it wasn’t Michael Vick.

A man out hunting in Iowa was shot in the leg after a hunting dog stepped on his gun, authorities said.

The accident happened after James Harris, 37, put his gun on the ground to retrieve a fallen pheasant.

One of a pack of hunting dogs following behind stepped on the trigger, and up to 120 birdshot pellets hit Mr Harris in the left calf at short range.

Good news:

Death rates from cancer have been dropping by an average of 2.1 percent a year recently in the United States, a near doubling of decreases that began in 1993, researchers are reporting.

Why?

Much of the progress comes not from miracle cures, but from more mundane improvements in prevention, early detection and treatment of some of the leading causes of cancer death - lung, colorectal, breast and prostate tumors. Years of nagging and pleading by health officials are finally beginning to pay off, experts say, in smoking cessation and increased use of mammograms, colonoscopies and other screening tests for colorectal and prostate cancer.

But: 

American Indians and Alaska Natives in some regions are not benefiting from the same improvements as the rest of the population, and have higher rates of preventable cancers and late-stage tumors that would have had a better prognosis had they been detected sooner. Some groups within those populations have high rates of smoking. Researchers attribute the problems to poverty, lower education levels, and lack of insurance and access to medical care.

Cigarette smoking is higher among those groups, yet researchers attribute their problems to poverty. Well, at $5.00 a pack quitting smoking will kill two birds with one stone.

by J.C. Phillips 

It was midnight and I was looking at a two-hour drive. The theatre where I was working had given me keys to a condominium so I wouldn’t have to make the long trip, but something was calling me home.

Traveling is hard and I miss my family. When I am away, I think of nothing but kissing my sons’ chubby cheeks, of watching them dress up in costumes and run and laugh through the house. My heart pines for my wife’s smile and the sway of her hips, of waking in the morning and seeing the tuft of red hair lying beside me. When I hear that dulcet call, there is no amount of highway that will keep me from getting home.

As I sped down the highway, I thought of the last time I made this drive so late at night. 

The last leg of a 10-day business trip left me only a two-hour drive from my home. At about 11 p.m., I called my wife from my hotel to say goodnight. What was it Percy Sledge sang about what a man would do for a woman? A few soft words from my wife and my bags were packed, and I was flying down the dark highway towards her loving arms.

As I once more raced along the same stretch of road, I couldn’t help but smile at the memory. A man discovers himself in the arms of his wife. He grows in the arms of his children. Family demands he put away childish things, that the values he espouses be given life.

Percy of course sang the truth. But whomever it was that said absence makes the heart grow fonder was certainly no liar. Amidst all the romantic notions I have of chubby cheeked little boys frolicking in the yard and a wife whispering sweetly in my ear there are precious few visions of the reality that awaits me.

My midnight run was followed by the chaos of getting three children ready for school in the morning. There was whining and crying. Shoes were lost, teeth were not brushed and homework was missing. With milk and cereal all over the floor, the house looked like a tornado had just blown through. 

That evening, I decided we should take a family walk through the neighborhood. Now that the evenings are longer, there is no better way to savor the family time. Not two steps past our house, the mood is shattered with more whining and crying. I must referee a fight because someone was pushed down too hard when someone karate kicked someone else in the head.

Why is it, I wondered, that when I am away I do not think of the bickering and arguing about who is the boss of whom or toys that seem to be strategically placed so that I will step on them with bare feet in the middle of the night. Nor for some reason do I wistfully hold in my heart the wife that wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, sucks her teeth when the laundry has not been done as was promised and gets too tired and irritable to drop a coin in the love machine.

The answer is that it may not be what I focus on, but I do miss it. I miss it all, the hustle and chaos, the sweet talk and the teeth sucking, the bickering and the laughter. This is family. It is what grounds me. Without it I am lost, rudderless, adrift and unconnected.

The following morning, I woke and saw the tuft of red hair lying next to me. I heard my boys stir in their bedroom and begin to laugh and play with each other. The morning sun streamed into the room and I thought to myself, “It’s good to be home.”

Some Saturday morning fun. Comedian Victor Borge was an original. Here is a favorite bit where he reads aloud — and pronounces – all the punctuation. 

Click here to watch.

When Bill Clinton received an award at a gala dinner honoring the late Robert F. Kennedy last year, the former president expressed his thanks before an audience that included a Nobel Prize winner and a glittering array of show business celebrities and Wall Street titans. Yet the second sentence of his remarks expressed special gratitude to a man almost no one there had heard of: “our friend Norman Hsu.”

Same old, same old.

In The Know: Are Our Children Learning Enough About Whales?

HT:/ Maggie’s Farm

Fresh after complaining that Bush “politicized” the Department of Justice, the Dem Cong now threaten to block any new Supreme Court nominations by Bush because they don’t like the court’s decisions of late.

Senator Chuckie Schumer (D-Unctuous) complains:

Senators were too quick to accept the nominees’ word that they would respect legal precedents, and “too easily impressed with the charm of Roberts and the erudition of Alito,” Schumer said.

“There is no doubt that we were hoodwinked,” said Schumer, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee and heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Hoodwinked on the justices. Hoodwinked on Iraq. What whiners.

Don Surber:

Democratic Senator Barack Obama of Illinois proved he’s no Lincoln. Obama told the AP that he opposes keeping U.S. forces in Iraq to stop a genocide.

“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done. We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.”

Typical lefty shell game. When they cannot win an argument they try to switch subjects.

Our troops already are in Iraq, not the Congo. If it were the other way around, we would stay and fight in the Congo.

Using Obama’s attemt at logic, why did we help remove Slobodan Milosevic under Democrat Bill Clinton? What was that about? Using Obama-logic, we should never have stopped Hitler because Stalin was worse.

It is the same old tired argument that since the world isn’t perfect we should do nothing. Liberals used this to serve as cover for the communist takeover of South Vietnam.

Now they protect jihadists.

OpinionJournal:

This week’s prize for honest liberalism goes to Michigan’s John Dingell, who is having fun with his fellow Democrats while also making a useful point about the politics of global warming. The venerable Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee–first elected in 1955–has announced that he plans to introduce as early as this week a new tax on carbon emissions.

Now, that’s the way to clear a Capitol Hill hearing room. Americans are already miffed at paying $3 a gallon for gasoline, a fact that has the Members assailing oil companies on a daily basis. So the last thing Democrats seeking re-election want to do is pile on another dollar or two a gallon in taxes–especially in the name of “saving the planet” from the speculative danger of global warming 50 or 100 years from now. Their voters have to deal with the more immediate danger of missing the mortgage payment.

Mr. Dingell knows all this. His point is to force his colleagues–and the voters–to be more honest about the cost of their global-warming posturing. It’s one thing to pay 100 bucks to hear Madonna at the “Live Earth” concert, or impress your girlfriend by wearing an “I reduced my carbon footprint” T-shirt. It’s quite another to accept that energy prices would have to rise by many multiples to make even a degree’s worth of difference to the world’s climate. “I sincerely doubt that the American people will be willing to pay what this is really going to cost them,” Mr. Dingell said on C-SPAN last week.

That’s why most politicians prefer policy artifice that disguises the cost of raising energy prices. These policy tricks include higher automobile mileage standards and a “cap and trade” regime for swapping “credits” for carbon emissions. These schemes shift the direct costs onto businesses, which then pass them along indirectly to unwitting consumers. These policies still amount to taxes on energy use, but they allow politicians and green lobbyists to pretend that you can “save the world” for the price of a concert ticket.

They also impose more costs on some industries than others–the most notable losers being U.S. auto companies and their workers around Detroit. Mr. Dingell is sore, and rightly so, that the cost of indulging Nancy Pelosi’s well-to-do San Francisco environmentalists on global warming would fall disproportionately on his blue-collar constituents.

Flags at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, CA.

A first person account in the Economist.