Baltimore Pictures

I've been posting pictures taken in Pennsylvania for the past few weeks. For a change today I'm going to do some taken down in Baltimore.


First the secular. This is the ceiling over the bar at "Gertrude's" restaurant in the Baltimore Museum of Art.


Now the divine. The image of John the Baptist in bas relief on display at the Peabody.



Still on the theme of St. John the Baptist, who needs to go to Florence when you can view Ghiberti's magnificent bronzes [in replica] for the Baptistry of St. John at the Peabody? Ghiberti started the originals when he was twenty-one years old. He was forty-two when he finished. Among the artists he beat out for the contract were Brunelleschi and Donatello.

["She Who Must Not Be Named" complains that the full-scale image is a bit blurry. That's because the ancient camera I was using only has a couple of megapixels and can't handle this level of detail.]

Castro's Socialist Workers' Paradise

Mark Milke evaluates Cuba's half century long experience with state socialism.

In 1958, the year before Fidel Castro came to power in a revolution and promised prosperity, democracy and the restoration of Cuba's 1940 constitution, the Caribbean island, while troubled by poverty, a corrupt dictator and the American Mafia, was also better off than most developing nations.

While poor compared to the United States, Cuba in 1958 had a per capita GDP of $3,170 according to the OECD. (Canada's was $8,947.). But Cuba outranked all other Latin American countries except four: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Tellingly, in 1958, the island nation's per person wealth was higher than any East Asian country or colony, save Japan, which barely beat Cuba at only $3,290. Hong Kong had a per capita GDP of $2,924, Singapore's was $2,294, the Philippines' was $1,447, Taiwan's per person GDP stood at $1,387 and South Korea's was $1,112.

Thus in 1958, Cuba was almost as rich as Japan, one and half times as wealthy as Singapore, richer than Hong Kong, and three times as prosperous as South Korea.

Fifty years later, Cuba is one of the poorest countries in Latin America.

Meanwhile, jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan (the latter two also had dictators and problems similar to Cuba in the 1950s) have long eclipsed Cuba. They've done so not only in per capita wealth, but in measurements Castro's defenders point to when they assert the Marxist revolution "worked," such as in health care and education.

There's more. While the economy has deteriorated the institutions of state repression have flourished.

Read the whole thing here.

Megan McArdle on Market Myths

Excellent piece by Megan McCardle on the things that the economic pundits are getting wrong about our current crisis. She argues:

1. The Iraq War did not cause this problem.
2. The Bush tax cuts also did not cause this
3. Being on the gold standard would not have prevented this
4. Among the many other things that did not cause the current crisis was the repeal of Glass-Steagall
5. The collapse of Bretton Woods was also not a cause of the current crisis
6. The long twilight of American might is not yet upon us

Read it here.

Whoops, He Did It Again

The most disturbing part of Obama's "big speech" on race was his willingness to brand his white grandmother, who raised him, as a racist, simply because she admitted, after being mugged, to being afraid when a young black man approached her on the street. Didn't Jesse Jackson say something similar? Why, yes he did! Guess that makes him biased against blacks too. And, of course, the kinds of occasional private utterances Obama might have heard from the woman who loved and raised him are in no means equivalent to the venomous tirades of Reverend Wright.

Obama has been getting a lot of heat for this [here] and has been trying to explain himself in interviews.

Well, it ain't over yet.

Today in an interview with Philly's sports radio station, WIP, Barak Obama kicked his grandmother once again, saying she's no more racist than other white folk. He seems to think that there's such a thing as a "typical white person" and that person is at core a racist.

Ouch! That's gotta hurt. That Ivy League educated young man isn't handling this stuff very well at all.

Listen to the interview here.

RELATED:

Geraldine Ferraro hits back at Obama for his false moral equivalence between her and the odious Rev. Wright [here].

A Perfect Evening

A few days ago “She Who Must Not Be Named” and I ventured up to Hopkins to hear Pierre-Laurent Aimard perform at Shriver Hall. Aimard is a wonderful artist; possibly, according to the Los Angeles Times, “France’s finest pianist of a generation or two (or ever)”. High praise, indeed, and he lived up to it. The program spanned three centuries of Western music, from Bach to Schoenberg, and Aimard was fully at home in each era. He presented a marvelous display of technical virtuosity and interpretive sensitivity.

The program began with eleven counterpoints from Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”. This is one of the most famous works in the Western canon and rightly so. In it the greatest practitioner of the form exhaustively and rigorously explores its possibilities. Fugues start simply, with the statement of a single “idea” which is gradually elaborated into a marvelously complex pattern. Aimard’s approach was forthright; deliberate, precise, and at first almost ponderous. But as the fugue began to develop his artistry asserted itself and he proceeded surely through the complexities that emerged.

After the intermission Aimard shifted gears radically and performed 5 Klavierstucke by Arnold Schoenberg, a twentieth century modernist famous for his explorations of atonality. The shift in styles and techniques was stunning and emphasized Aimard’s famous ability to perform brilliantly in a variety of modes. The evening concluded with a performance of Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano No. 31 in A-flat Major, another radical shift in technique and mood. This is Beethoven at his most lyrical, the first movement requiring a delicate, flowing approach that stood in sharp contrast to everything we had heard before. Then, in the third movement, the piece ended with a fugue, returning us to something like our starting point for the evening and allowing us to hear the different approaches taken by two of the greatest figures in the Western musical tradition toward that rigorously defined form.

After the concert we joined some friends and headed down to “Gertrudes” at the BMA for dinner. A superb and instructive evening of great music performed by a magnificent artist, good food and stimulating conversation with friends – not bad…, not bad.

Here's Aimard performing Messiaen's Regard X "Regard de l'Esprit de Joie" Enjoy!

Another Problem for Global Warming Hysterics

Whoops! Another problem for the global warming true believers:

NPR reports

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

Read the whole thing here.

Could it be that the scientists don't have quite as strong a grasp on this whole subject as they seem to think they do?

Bush on Iraq

President Bush's address on the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war.

The battle in Iraq is noble, it is necessary, and it is just. And with your courage, the battle in Iraq will end in victory.

....

The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around. It has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror.

For the terrorists, Iraq was supposed to be a place where Al Qaida rallied Arab masses to drive America out. Instead, Iraq has become the place where Arabs join with Americans to drive Al Qaida out.

BUSH: In Iraq, we're witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden, his grim ideology and his murderous network. And the significance of this development cannot be overstated. The terrorist movement feeds on a sense of inevitability and claims to rise on the tide of history.

The accomplishments of the surge in Iraq are exposing this myth and discrediting the extremists. When Iraqi and American forces finish the job, the effects will reverberate far beyond Iraq's borders.

Osama bin Laden once said, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will take the strong horse." By defeating Al Qaida in Iraq, we will show the world that Al Qaida is the weak horse.

We will show that men and women who love liberty can defeat the terrorists.

And we will show that the future of the Middle East does not belong to terror; the future of the Middle East belongs to freedom.

Here's a link to the full transcript.

Gordon Wood and the Ideologues

Gordon Wood is stirring up a quite heated controversy among historians. His latest book, a series of essays, in the form of book reviews but actually a series of meditations on the writing of history, lambastes the profession for being irrelevant. The reason for this, Wood argues, is that with few exceptions professional academic historians, influenced by postmodernist literary theory, have focussed almost obsessively on abstruse arguments informed by left-wing ideology and questions of race, class, and gender. He writes:

The result of all this postmodern history, with its talk of 'deconstruction,' 'decentering,' 'textuality,' and 'essentialism,' has been to make academic history writing almost as esoteric and inward directed as the writing of literary scholars. This is too bad, since history is an endeavor that needs a wide readership to justify itself.

And that is the essential point. Without a wide readership, history is trivial -- it is only in its popular form that historical writing gains significant meaning. But today's academic scholars have perversely raised barriers to popular understanding of their product, adopting

the special language that literary critics now use to separate themselves from the power structure as well as the common herd of us ordinary readers: 'interpellation,' 'exfoliation,' 'ambiguation,' 'valorized,' 'intellection,' 'narrativized,' and 'meta' this and 'meta' that.

And perhaps most damning is the fact that today's academic historians are willing, indeed eager, to shape their understanding of the past to currently popular ideological stances. In today's historiography ideology and political utility stand triumphant over experience and the past is placed on the procrustean bed of present concerns. The result is a failure to appreciate the past on its own terms and to see it instead as a distant reflection of the present, and not the present as it is lived, but the present as seen through the refracting lenses of left-wing ideology.

It is ironic that the same forces that have subordinated history to ideology and theory have also induced practitioners of the craft to render their product almost unreadable. Academic historians are turning out immense quantities of crap, but it is so poorly written and conceived that hardly anybody reads the stuff. In their perversity the ideologues have made themselves and their profession increasingly irrelevant and that, considering the current state of historical understanding, is probably a good thing.

You can order Prof. Wood's excellent book by clicking on the Amazon banner at the top of this web-page.

For an overview of Wood's writings see this piece in the Claremont Review of Books.

Watching Rev. Wright

Slate magazine reproduces a Frank Luntz type audience response to Rev. Wright's "God Damn America" address. It charts the immediate reactions of Blacks, Democrats, Republicans and Independents while they watched segments of Wright's taped sermons. Check it out here.

A few things stand out. First, whenever Wright disses Hillary, dials turned up across the board. Whatever their race or party, the test subjects tended to dislike Hillary. Secondly, black viewers as well as whites responded negatively to Wright's most extreme statements. That being said, the graphs are also striking evidence that Blacks and Whites view matters quite differently. Right at the beginning, the Black viewers' responses diverged from those of the White viewers, and though the lines tended to dip and rise at roughly the same points in the address, the disparity remained throughout.

Interesting.

Arthur C Clark Passes

Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90. He, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein were the "big three" -- the giants who dominated mid-twentieth century Science Fiction. Few men of my generation are unaware of their work and many were strongly influenced by it. All are gone now, but they linger on in our culture. A film version of my favorite Clarke novel, "Rendezvous With Rama", is currently in pre-production and is scheduled to be released in 2009 [here]. David Fincher is scheduled to direct it.

Read the Times obit here.

Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

For free samples of his work go here. In my youth I loved the "Nine Billion Names of God" and was haunted by "A Walk In the Dark".

Lileks Words of Wisdom

He's been to Disneyland and that got him thinking about the repeated failure of planned communities. I've lived in some bad places, He writes:

And the worst of them all was a planned community, in fact: the brutal Cedar Square West hive-o-humans, a concrete nightmare based on the pack ‘em-and-stack-‘em theory of community. Twenty floors of humans and cockroaches with a community center off the lobby! Come for the urine-soaked stairwells, stay for the ping-pong table whose net was stolen 2 years ago and probably used to garrote a rival.

He concludes, rightly I think:

Perhaps Utopias don’t work because they’re so bloody earnest and sincere.

Read the whole thing here.

Anthony Minghella Dies

AP reports:

LONDON - Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella, who turned such literary works as "The English Patient," "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Cold Mountain" into acclaimed movies, died Tuesday of a hemorrhage following surgery. He was 54.

Minghella's publicist, Jonathan Rutter, said the filmmaker died at London's Charing Cross Hospital. He said Minghella was operated on last week for a growth in his neck, "and the operation seemed to have gone well. At 5 a.m. today he had a fatal hemorrhage."

Read it here.

I didn't always like his work product -- "Cold Mountain" was uneven, spoiled by the eccentricity of some..., well, all of its stars; "Mr Ripley" was doomed by the fact that its star, Matt Damon, can't act; but on two occasions Minghella worked with first rate talent and the result was magic. "Truly, Madly, Deeply" is a charming riff on the conceit of true, undying love, brilliantly acted by Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman -- "The English Patient" is a gorgeous reprise of and response to "Casablanca". It won nine academy awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Who knows what other wonders Minghella might have produced. Too bad he was taken so young.

Tonight I think I'll load up "English Patient" and watch it again.

Tis the Day

Happy Hunting!

And a special holiday greetings to all the little Breslins out there. Hee, Hee, Hee.

Angry Old Folk

Hillary! and her horrid hubby, Gloria, Geraldine, now Rev. Wright -- sure seems to be a lot of angry old folk mouthing off these days. Could it be that we are beginning to see, in Obama's campaign, a generational shift not unlike that of the mid-1960's in the Democrat ranks?

This campaign, despite all the MSM blather about the injection of race and gender into the mix, is more than anything else a generational struggle on the Democrat side. A new generation of young people are flocking to Obama based on nothing more than a rejection of the sleaze and group-think that has characterized Democrat politics in recent decades. If Obama wins the nomination it will mark nothing less than a revolution in Democrat politics. That will open the way for a fair test of progressive principles. With both Obama and Big Mac running clean and above-board campaigns, with the major issues of contention well-defined, American voters will have a clear-cut, honest choice between two admirable and candidates each advancing a principled agenda.

If Hillary! and her increasingly shrill and desperate-sounding cohort of nasty old haters manage to pull this thing out, it will be a very long and dispiriting summer and fall and the election will, like ever other one in recent memory, be characterized by sleaze and slime and unfair personal attacks.

Just saying....

War? What War?

The Iraq war has faded into the deep background as far as the broadcast media are concerned. Once again the American journalistic community is failing to keep the public informed on important issues.

Remember the war in Iraq?

The question isn't entirely facetious. The war has nearly vanished from TV screens over the past few months, replaced by stories about the fascinating presidential campaign and faltering economy.

Yet Americans continue to fight and die there, five years after the war started in March 200

...

Statistics clearly illustrate the diminished attention. For the first 10 weeks of the year, the war accounted for 3 percent of television, newspaper and Internet stories in the Project for Excellence in Journalism's survey of news coverage. During the same period in 2007, Iraq filled 23 percent of the news hole.

The difference is even more stark on cable news networks: 24 percent of the time spent on Iraq last year, just 1 percent this year.

Read the whole thing here.

Screeching Inversion

I missed this when it appeared about a month ago, but already it seems to have entered political parlance. The term is "screeching inversion". It was coined by Plumb Bob who writes:

The short version of the screeching inversion is that the most immature among us get to pretend that they’re moral paragons, while the most mature are treated as moral pariahs, simply because the immature screech louder and a lot more often. Thus, in a morally deteriorating society, evil gets tagged as good, and good, evil.

Read the rest of his post here.

The Subversives

Michael Barone makes a point that I have been emphasizing here for some time -- a significant portion of the federal bureaucracy, both military and civilian, is subversive in the sense that they resist and try to undermine political leaders.

Civilian and military, those who have been undercutting administration policy do so in the belief that their views are more in the nation's interests than the conclusion of the Texas cowboy whom the voters somehow elected president. State and CIA are filled with professionals educated in elite universities dominated by the left and, while not as wacky as their professors, have come away with the default assumption that liberals are always right.

Many military officers, who increasingly have graduate degrees from such universities, seem to have imbibed similar habits of mind.

In addition, officers assigned to regional commands seem, like diplomats assigned to one area, inclined to go native.

This is the trouble with bureaucrats imbued with the cult of expertise. They think that they are the government. Administrative "professionals" and area "experts" tend to see the political process as an impediment to effective government -- something to be evaded or overcome. But it is through that democratic process that the government itself is legitimized. When they seek to evade or ignore the demands of political authorities, these "experts" are subverting not just the administration but the government itself. The professionals, not the politicians, are the real enemies of the American people and it is they, not our elected figures, who should bear the brunt of our frustration and anger.

Hot, Hot, Hot

That's Colleen Moore in "Flaming Youth", the film that made her famous. Want to know more about her? Check out Robert J. Averich's blog Seraphic Secret. He's got her whole story, and a lot more [here].

Averich is in the business, knows a lot about the history of film, and is a wonderful source of information on the silent stars and their times. Check him out -- you won't be sorry you did.

Note to the Dictator

Hey Julius,

Beware the Ides of March.

More Pennsylvania Pictures

Well, whaddaya know? It's the weekend again. Time for a couple more Pennsylvania pictures.

"Villagers"

I had just come out of a dental appointment and decided to wander around the village for a while. It was a few days after Halloween and a local shopkeeper had put these guys on sale. I hope someone gave them a home -- they were a bargain at $10 apiece.

"Flying High"

This was a lucky catch. I was walking through Fairmont Park near the Philadelphia Art Museum when I saw this statue. As I got set to take a picture of it a red tailed hawk flew over. Combining the gesturing statue with the hawk in flight makes for a nice composition. At least "She Who Must Not Be Named" thinks so.

The Magic Flute at the Peabody

Went to the opera last night. Saw Mozart's "Magic Flute" at the Peabody. Had a good time. "She Who Must Not Be Named" was greatly amused [she likes slapstick comedy].

It was a top-flight student production [well, that's what you expect from the Peabody] and it featured some outstanding talent. I was particularly impressed by Kathryn Guthrie as the Queen of the Night [she nailed the second aria] and Jihee Kim as Pamina [started weak but got stronger as the night progressed, by the end she completely overshadowed Tamino]. Jason Buckwater, who has a natural flair for slapstick, was very good as Papageno and got a lot of laughs, especially from SWMNBN. The stage design was superb, making full use of dramatic and exotic lighting effects. It even impressed a friend of ours who worked for years in New York theater and TV as a stage and set designer/dresser. And of course the concert orchestra under the direction of Hajime Teri Murai was excellent. All in all a terrific production, a visual and auditory feast.

Of course, you have to shut your mind off and ignore the racism and misogyny, the masonic mystery hoo ha, and a lot of enlightenment nonsense about universal fraternal love, perfect virtue and such silliness. But, what the hey, it's Mozart and you should never let mere rationality get in the way of a good time.

The Wright Stuff

Reverend Jeremiah Wright might well have scuttled Barak Obama's presidential hopes. No, I take that back. Senator Obama's refusal to out and out denounce his minister's racism and overt message of hate may sink his campaign. The normally well-spoken young senator from Illinois is facing an important challenge -- one that will define him for all time.

Obama's response has been to denounce the specific statements at issue, but not the man who made them. He avers that he never heard such sentiments at any time from Rev. Wright, that Wright does a lot of good, and that because Rev. Wright was approaching retirement he saw no need to leave the congregation. [Read his statement here.] Will this be enough? Many in the MSM seem to think so, but I'm not so sure. Obama is trying desperately to preserve as many ties as possible to the radical Black community that supported his rise to power.

Power Line explains the "double game" Obama is seeking to play here.

The fault is not just with Obama. Democrats as a whole have indulged such paranoid fantasies as Rev. Wright mouths for far too long. The irresponsible willingness of party leaders, the Clintons included, to stand up to this poisonous and corrosive insanity has allowed it to flower within the Black community and some of the sillier precincts of academia. This stuff should have been exposed and denounced decades ago. One salubrious consequence of the Dems internecine conflict is that deep corruption, long concealed and ignored, is being brought to light. I suspect and hope that the Democrat Party that emerges from the current controversies will be a far better, and more honest institution than it has been heretofore.

RELATED:

Bloomberg reports that the superdelegates are breaking for Obama [here]. He has pulled almost even with Hillary.

UPDATE:

Rasmussen's latest figures show a seven percent drop in Obama's national ratings, bringing him even with Hillary, but the biggest winner seems to be John McCain, who saw sizable upticks in his ratings. What this whole rhubarb has done is to remind the nation of the nastiness that accompanies identity politics whenever it rears its ugly head, and just how very committed Democrats of all stripes seem to be to that seamy stew of bigotry and self-pity.

Read Rasmussen here.

Un-reality TV

You watch the news to stay informed on what is going on in the world. Trouble is, the broadcast media aren't a very good source of information. Steve Salerno explains just how bad the problem is.

He writes:

[T]oday’s system of news delivery is an enterprise whose procedures, protocols, and underlying assumptions all but guarantee that it cannot succeed at its self described mission. Broadcast journalism in particular is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for illuminating life, let alone interpreting it, is almost nil.

Excellent eye-opening article. Read it here.

Ends of the Earth

The Military Dad points me to this piece in which Spiked carries the anti-humanist themes of modern environmentalism to their logical conclusion.

"Ethan Greenhart", green-living guru, received a letter asking his advice:

After careful consideration I have decided to end my life. Things haven’t been going very well for me lately, but more importantly I am keen to reduce my carbon impact on the planet. Like the average Briton I probably produce around 9.3 tonnes of carbon each year. I am 26 years old, and reckon I could live for another 60 years; if I end things now I will save a total of 558 tonnes of carbon, for which I believe future generations should be grateful. But I have a question: what is the most ethical way to commit suicide? I don’t want my self-destruction to be destructive to the planet!

Read "Greenhart's" reply here. It, of course, is satire, but it embodies a deep truth -- modern environmentalism is fundamentally anti-human and as such quite dangerous. There are eco-warriors who come close to thinking this way.

Waking Up

David Mamet, lifelong liberal and famous playwright, has finally realized that his life has been a lie.

He sensed that the liberal vision of America did not match what he saw around him and began to question. Then he began to read.

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

And he began to realize that liberals believed in

...a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; [while] the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And eventually he opened his eyes and realized that he had become..., a conservative.

Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE:

Jonah Goldberg's take on Mamet's conversion and on his critics is worth reading. Check it out here.

Resolution

I am not, repeat NOT, going to comment on the whole Spitzer thing!!!!! The Lileks post said it all.

Lileks Tries to Translate Spitzer

James explains what New York's Democrat guv meant to say -- at least I hope that's what he meant to say. If not, he inhabits the same bizarre self-referential sphere as the Hildebeast and her horrid hubby.

I don’t understand this Spitzer quote: “"I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself.” I don’t know if his standards involved not getting caught, or if he’s having some weird moment in which his overarching sense of himself has just been reminded of the libidinous self he put back in the strongbox after every episode of satiation. It’s difficult to arrange a prostie romp in advance with complex details about the finances, the room key, transportation, etc., without realizing that this is, indeed, Standard Self. He could come out and say "this is my truth; I am a Trick American" and it would sound more honest.

I think the phrase he's looking for is "I did not live up to the standards I set for others."

Read it here.

Latest from Yon

Michael Yon takes you up close and personal with the "Guitar Heroes" in his latest report from Iraq. For anyone who is paying attention the blogosphere is providing the best, most comprehensive and detailed, battlefield reporting ever and Michael's reports are among the best.

Read his post here.

Percussion

"She Who Must Not Be Named" and I spent an interesting afternoon at the Baltimore Museum of Art. First we and some friends had brunch at "Gertrude's" cafe, then we all wandered through the exhibits. That was fascinating because our friends were both artists and had a practitioner's understanding of what we were seeing. Then we attended the latest concert in the Shriver series. It was a blast.

The first half of the concert featured a solo percussionist, Ji Hyu Jung [pictured above], playing the marimba. She was great, performing works by Eric Ewazen, John Serry, J. S. Bach, and a wonderful, evocative short piece by Olivier Messiaen titled "O Sacrum Convivium".

Percussion is probably the most physically demanding of all forms of musical expression because it involves the entire body --watching a first rate percussionist like Ji is like watching a dancer -- everything is in motion. And her marimba is a big instrument, about eight feet long, which on some pieces involves a lot of stretching for notes.

Here's a short video of one of Ji's performances at the Peabody.



After the intermission she was joined by three other percussionists. Together they performed Paul Lansky's "Threads". When I got home I went online and found a Yale Percussion Group performance of this piece here. To find the performance scroll about halfway down the page. It's in two parts. Take a few minutes to watch it, you'll be glad you did. The same site also has a few more performances by Ji. Check them out -- she's an amazing talent.

Tree Hugging

Once again it is the weekend -- time for a couple more pictures of Pennsylvania's natural beauty.

Whenever I have the time and the weather permits I like to walk through the fields and forests with a camera. You never know what you will stumble upon. A few months ago I climbed a hill and started down the other side, then glanced back and saw this. Just an ordinary tree, branches bare and silhouetted against the sky.


Nice, ain't it? I'm a sucker for trees -- especially free-standing ones. It doesn't matter whether they have leaves or not.


And whether those leaves are green or turning.


Although I must admit that my favorite time of year is those few weeks in the Fall when I can wander through "realms of gold" [apologies to John Keats]. I actually prefer the muted golds and greens and browns of Penn's Woods to New England's more spectacular foliage (although my wife and I do like to take one weekend each Fall to travel north to New Hampshire for some "leaf peeking").

UPDATE:

It appears that Rick Lee shares my passion for trees. Read it here.

Another Manufactured Crisis

It appears that a growing number of health professionals are coming to the conclusion that the "obesity epidemic" is largely a case of media hype instigated by naive reporters, government bureaucrats, and unscrupulous health care professionals who sense the opportunity to make lots of bucks.

Read Don Surber's piece on "The Epidemic that Wasn't" here.

They're Baaaaaaack!

You know what they say about age and guile -- it beats youth and enthusiasm every time.

I am starting to feel sorry for young Mr. Obama. He actually thought he would win. And once the brash young Senator from Chicago is disposed of there's poor old John McCain.

It's not gonna be pretty.

And that is probably for the good.

Obama seems to be a nice young man, but his rhetoric has never made much sense and his campaign has attracted all sorts of really scary types. He would be a disaster as president.

Bill and Hill may be evil and corrupt and ruthless and all that, but they aren't going to be stupid.

Evil genius is always preferable to well intentioned naivete -- it does less damage.

The Kool-Aid Drinkers -- Pod People For O-ba-ma

Neo-Neo Con pointed me toward this video. It's really scary, cultish stuff -- she describes it as "creepy". Mindless pieties mouthed over a hypnotic, monotonous chant of Oh-Bam-Ahh. That this monstrosity features many of Hollywood and the recording industry's young stars is doubly disturbing.

It put Neo in mind of the award winning song "I Believe in You" from "How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" [here]. In that song Robert Morse sings to his reflection in the mirror, "You have the cool, clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth/Yet with that upturned chin and the grin of impetuous youth/Oh I believe in you….” And in a very real sense Obama's calculated vagueness allows his followers to invest him with whatever qualities they desire, making the candidate an idealized reflection of themselves.

But there is another, darker association -- one that I make hesitantly because it is so common and inappropriately applied, but in this case I think it is apt.

One of Neo's readers was reminded of this:

The Death of the Heroes

David Harsanyi asks, "Where Have All the Superheroes Gone?".

[M]oral absolutism is frowned upon these days. Our nation seems unable to serve up fictional characters without weighing them down with moral ambiguity and layers of complex emotional baggage. Our cinematic heroes are most often tortured, imperfect souls, even when they do good. We've become so cynical, in fact, that we can't even imagine ourselves as unconditionally in the right. Sure, we still have Rambo, but at 60 and with a questionable grasp of his mental facilities, no one is overly confident.

Read it here.

Lileks agrees:

If they’d made the original Star Wars in the current day Luke would have found out that the Rebellion was a false-flag operation set up by the Empire, and he would have renounced the Force, moved back home and sold pots. I fear the next Indiana Jones movie, in a way; it’s possible he will spend the fourth movie apologizing for the first three, and do his best to battle the forces of English imperialism as he seeks to return the Elgin Marbles.

Read it here.

In the old days we understood -- absolute evil exists, and it must be fought. And the hero was the man who knew just what had to be done, and did it. Captain America fought Nazis and Commies; Superman fought criminal masterminds; Dirty Harry fought sadistic predators.

Now, it's different. I date the beginnings of the change to John Ford's revisionist western, "The Searchers", that came out in 1956. There John Wayne portrayed the traditional rugged individualist western hero as a borderline psychopath. Then came all those "adult" westerns with flawed heroes, then Clint Eastwood decided that there was no moral difference between his heroes and his villains, and the rest was a quick descent into the slough of todays masochistic relativism.

Yet today, in the wake of 9/11, we are beginning to return to the idea that absolute evil exists. Three films this year took up the theme. In Rambo we saw a return to the old days. Rambo tried to stay aloof and ignored the evil spreading just down the river, but in the end he couldn't maintain his indifference. He took up his guns and soon chunks of flesh were flying everywhere. Of course the critics panned the film. Not so two other films, judged to be "great" by the critical community. In the Oscar winning film "No Country For Old Men" the resourceful individual, played by Josh Brolin, proves incapable of opposing implacable evil. He dies a meaningless death and the film's moral arbiter, Tommy Lee Jones, simply gives up the struggle. Evil is triumphant. Then in "There Will Be Blood" the question of evil is taken a step further. Daniel Day Lewis' character, the modern equivalent of Duke Wayne's rugged individualist is no longer a borderline psychopath -- he is a full-blown embodiment of evil. And, rather than being a frontier loner, he embodies the evil spirit that animates capitalism. The moral of the film is not just that evil is triumphant and pervasive and cannot be effectively opposed, but that it is us.

Faugh!

Climate Skeptics Meet in Secret

Well, not actually in secret. Several hundred scientists and world leaders who have real doubts about the Gorey party line on global warming are meeting in New York. But it might as well be a clandestine cabal for all the attention it has been getting in the MSM.

Here's a report from Reuters that was published in the Times of India.

NEW YORK: Al Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his environmental advocacy, was the main target at a conference of dissident scientists skeptical of his views on global warming.

Several speakers at the conference on climate change whose theme was "Global warming is not a crisis," took pot-shots at the ex-vice president and his film, "An Inconvenient Truth," which won last year's Academy Award for best documentary.

"Whether we like it or not, it was extremely effective propaganda," said Timothy Ball, an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. "It was appropriate that he got an Oscar from the land of make-believe," he joked.

Read it here.

So far the story hasn't been picked up by any of the New York hometown media.

Wonder why.

UPDATE:

I wrote too soon. The WaPo has a report on the conference. Of course the account is hostile and seeks to discredit the attendees or to portray their efforts as inconsequential.

Read it here.

Bluecrab Boulevard agrees that the WaPo article is a "hatchet job". [here]

Summer Will Return

For a while I feared that Summer would not return next year.

No, I'm not talking about global cooling, but about American pop culture. Last night was the end of the first season of the Sarah Connor Chronicles featuring Summer Glau, who previously starred in "Firefly" and "Serenity", as a teenaged terminator.

Well, good news! Summer will be back next year.

CNS reports:

Sarah Connor Chronicles ends its strike-shortened first season Monday, March 3 with back-to-back episodes, but it will be back in the fall. In a season with more misses (Bionic Woman, Big Shots, Cane, etc.) than hits, the show is a bona fide contender. It has pulled down 24-size numbers in 24's original time period, and like Arnold Schwarzenegger's titular character in the original Terminator film, it will be back.

Read the whole thing here.

HT to Instapundit.

Rust Belt Beauty

For those who appreciate the beauty of the rust-belt let me recommend a spectacular exhibit that is opening in Grafton, West Virginia this week. The photographer is Kevin Scanlon and he has the eye. Wonderful images, many of them of Western Pennsylvania. Here's a sample.

The Point and the Mon from Mt. Washington.

And another:

J&L's Aliquippa works at night.

Check out the whole exhibit online here. And if you get a chance drop down to Grafton and see it in person.

Harry's Back in the U.K.

Prince Harry is back in the UK and is not very happy about it. "I don't like England that much," he declared and directed some sharp criticisms at the British press. During the interview he proudly wore a hat sporting an American flag.

Hmmm.

Seems like a fine young man. I'm starting to warm to the monarchy.

Read it here.

Beasties

My how time flies. It's another weekend and time for a few more pictures of our gorgeous commonwealth.



First, a picture to warm the cockles of any central Pennsylvanian's heart -- the gun counter at Cabelas. This one is located just outside Hamburg along Rte #78 in Berks County. Lots and lots of firepower. Aaaaaaaah!


And check out the store's centerpiece.


And if, like me, you'd rather have your beasties living and breathing you can always visit Lake Tobias' wildlife park in Halifax north of Harrisburg [here]. There you can get up close and actually touch the critters [well, some of them -- stay away from the big cats..., and the gators..., and the bears and, ...well, any of the carnivores].

Hot for Teacher

CoEd opines:

"[F]emale school teachers are the new male Catholic priests."

Read the whole thing here.

HT 2blowhards.

Palin for Veep Update

Thomas Cheplik over at the American Spectator has climbed on the Sarah Palin for Vice President bandwagon. He writes:

Mrs. Palin is one of conservatism's own, and would be the first female vice president. She's young being only 44 (two years behind Senator Obama), she is widely known to despise government corruption. She defeated a horribly entrenched and corrupt Republican political machine in Alaska. She has a son in the U.S. military. She's strongly pro-life, belonging, in fact, to Feminists for Life. Gov. Palin could become the Republican Party's Segolene Royal, the French Socialist Party's glamorous leader known for her heels and political bite. She is the perfect antidote to Sen. Obama's cheap thrills, and would help rejuvenate conservatism.

Can't disagree with that. Read the whole thing here.

David Freddeso over at the Corner agrees. [here]

Bill Shaw, over at Writemarsh, chimes in.

I'd like to take this opportunity to formally throw my support behind Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska to be named John McCain's running mate for the fall election. Why Sarah Palin?-She's a hunter and an NRA member, for starters. She's attractive, and oh, yeah...if McCain picks her, we get to mess up the democrat's argument that they are going to make history when (heh) they win! We get to make history first, if and when we elect McCain for President and Palin for Vice President. How sweet it would be to be the first to have a Republican woman elected to the only office that is literally a heartbeat away from being president!

Read the whole thing here.

Here's an earlier post of mine on Sarah.

Here's a link to the "Draft Sarah Palin for Vice Presisdent website".

Fred Barnes is impressed, too. Read it here.

Patrick Ruffini agrees here. He points out that Sarah singlehandedly killed the "Bridge to Nowhere" over determined opposition from entrenched interests.

She has Don Surber's endorsement here. He likes her porkbusting credentials [here].

Gunboat Diplomacy

This is one to keep your eyes on.

CNN reports:

The U.S. Navy has moved the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole and other ships to the eastern Mediterranean Sea off Lebanon, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

The deployment comes amid a political standoff over Lebanon's presidency, but the Navy would not say whether the events are linked.

"It's a group of ships that will operate in the vicinity for a while and as the ships in our Navy do, the presence is important," Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday.

"It isn't meant to send any stronger signal than that," he said. "But it does signal that we're engaged and we are going to be in the vicinity, and that's a very important part of the world."

....

The destroyer and two support ships are close to Lebanon but out of visual range of the coast, Pentagon officials said. Another six vessels, led by the amphibious assault ship USS Nassau, are close to Italy and steaming toward the other three, the officials said.

....

[A] Bush administration official told CNN the decision to move ships to the region was a message to neighboring Syria that "the U.S. is concerned about the situation in Lebanon, and we want to see the situation resolved."

"We are sending a clear message for the need for stability," said the official, who was not authorized to speak for publication. The ships "should be there a while," the official added.

Read it here.

This is an encouraging sign. The willingness of the US [with French support] to deploy significant military resources outside Iraq and Afghanistan is a good indication that [despite election year rhetoric to the contrary] the conflicts in those places are winding down.

Snows Of Kilamanjaro Return

Al Gore's environmental screed, "An Inconvenient Truth" was on TV recently, and I watched it as I always do, in bits and snatches . That's the only way I can avoid screaming at the set. Once again I was struck by how much the whole thing was "just about Al" -- the long sections where he reminisces about the death of his son, his boyhood visits to his father's farm, etc. I was also impressed by just how much of the "science" portrayed in the film has been discredited.

There is, for instance, the long bit on Katrina that flatly asserts that the number and force of hurricanes in recent years was due to global warming and predicts a continual increase in storm damage to America.

Well, forget that. Here's NOAA's take:

A team of scientists have found that the economic damages from hurricanes have increased in the U.S. over time due to greater population, infrastructure, and wealth on the U.S. coastlines, and not to any spike in the number or intensity of hurricanes.

Here's the press release; here's the paper.

Oh well, back to the drawing board. Meanwhile, as "Watt's Up With That?" points out, this study has been completely ignored by the MSM.

And then there's this:


Remember those dramatic sequences regarding the disappearance of the "Snows of Kilamanjaro" which Gore flatly stated was due to global warming? Of course you do.

Well, forget about that too. The melting of the snow cap has now been shown to be due to deforestation, not global warming, and it was a temporary thing. These pictures [also from Watts website] show quite clearly that the mountain's snow cap has returned. Once again the MSM generally ignored the story (the NYT reported the phenomenon in its "Travel" section). Once again the public has been uninformed or misinformed on an issue of great import.

And so it goes, and so it goes.

New Abu Ghraib Pictures

Wired magazine has published more pictures from Abu Ghraib. Check them out here.

Warning: This is really bad stuff.

I don't for a second agree with those who say that what happened in this hellhole delegitimizes the Iraq war or the Bush administration, but you gotta admit this is..., well..., really bad stuff.

WFB -- RIP

One of the great ones has passed. I never met William F. Buckley, but for many years his TV image was a frequent guest in my living room. I was an avid fan of "Firing Line" and reader of his magazine, National Review. Those who knew him best -- his friends and colleagues -- have expressed their and the nation's loss far better than I ever could.

Read about him here.

Global Cooling? Sure Looks Like It

The Reactionary Redneck refers me to this piece from the CNS National Anxiety Center. Alan Caruba writes:

If you have been paying attention to global weather reports, you know that China has had the heaviest snowfall in at least three decades. David Deming, a geophysicist, in a December 19, 2007 article in The Washington Times, noted that, "South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918." This occurred across the entire Southern Hemisphere. "Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever."

It must be said that one big blizzard does not an Ice Age make, but a whole series of events that suggest a cooling cycle may well be the warning that is being ignored in the midst of the vast global warming hoax.

Of course this is cherry-picking and a one-year set of occurrences does not a trend make, but a growing number of scientists have begun worry about variations in solar output that will have immense effects on global climate.

The MSM is slowly beginning to wake to this fact, [see, for instance, this article in the National Post] but at present concerns about solar output and the possibility of global cooling are almost completely drowned out by global warming hype.

We really don't know what the future holds, only that change will take place. That being the case, it makes sense to follow Bjorn Lonborg's advice and focus on global economic development and better science that will enable our children to better cope with whatever changes and challenges they face.

Pakistan Update

Richard Fernandez, over at Pajamas Media, has a perceptive overview of recent developments in Pakistan and what they might portend.

President Musharraf’s political party (PML-Q) has been heavily defeated at the polls by a coalition led by two major opposition parties. The opposition has probably won enough seats to form a new government. The Telegraph reports Musharraf’s exit is now days, not months away. And the man with the power to determine the shape of the new government is a man with close ties to AQ Khan, presided over the development of Pakistan’s nuclear program and has just returned from exile in Saudi Arabia.

That in a nutshell is the perfect storm in which US policy in Pakistan is embroiled.

Read it here.

Basically there are two very dangerous developments going on here. First, the winners in the recent elections are bound to seek to establish civilian control over the military. So far the military has been the stabilizing influence in Pakistan and most importantly has maintained control over that nation's nuclear arsenal. If that control is compromised the possibility of nuclear proliferation or irresponsible use of the weapons is greatly increased. Secondly, both of the winning parties are giving strong indications that they will seek an accommodation with regions currently in revolt. That will provide the Taliban with a safe haven.

Scary stuff.

Stay tuned.

More on Kosovo

Xinhua reports:

BELGRADE, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica Sunday called on the United States to annul its decision to recognize the independence of Kosovo.

"The United States of America must annul the decision to recognize a false state on the territory of Serbia, and create conditions for the United Nations Security Council to confirm the validity of Resolution 1244, which guarantees Serbia's sovereignty and territorial integrity," Kostunica was quoted by local media assaying.

"Otherwise, a continued policy of force will only deepen this crisis that undermines the foundations of the entire world order and threatens peace and stability, not only in the Balkans," Kostunica warned.

Read it here.

And in an utterly predictable move, the EU has bugged out.

The Telegraph reports:

Hopes for a peaceful conclusion to the declaration of Kosovo's independence were fading as the European Union announced it had withdrawn its staff from the north of the fledgling country in the face of increasingly angry Serb protests.

And so are the stalwart functionaries of the US Department of State.

The announcement of the withdrawal came as the United States - which backed Kosovo's drive for independence - began to evacuate its American staff and their families from Serbia, offering US citizens the chance to join a convoy of 40 cars leaving Belgrade for Croatia.

"We are not sufficiently confident that they are safe here," said US ambassador Cameron Munter.

And NATO's KFOR troops sealed the border between Serbia and Kosovo. That, however, is not going to stop Serbs from crossing it for protest rallies or worse.

Read about it here.

Stay tuned.

The Crimes of the Left -- The Voices of Stalin's Victims

Terry Teachout reviews an important new book over at Commentary. Its title is Voices of the Dead, it was written by Hiroaki Kuromiya, and it utilizes secret police files from Kiev to chart the fate of victims of Stalin's terror. It is an utterly horrifying account of the impact of Stalin's regime on ordinary citizens.

The people we meet in The Voices of the Dead are indeed “utterly unknown, ‘ordinary’ Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas, beggars.” All they had in common was that they ran afoul of Stalin’s killing machine. Many appear to have been tortured before being sent to the execution chamber. Some confessed to crimes that they may or may not have committed, while others went to their graves swearing that they had done nothing wrong. To read about them is a jolting experience, no matter how much you may already know about the regime that sentenced them to die.

And that's the problem -- far too few people appreciate the utter malignancy of many leftist regimes; the evil they are willing to perpetrate in the service of their twisted ideologies. Teachout quite rightly attributes this ignorance to the efforts of left wingers in academia and the information media to deliberately downplay the sins of leftist regimes. But there is another, unspoken factor -- the determination of many to portray the Holocaust as a crime much worse than anything perpetrated elsewhere. Even Teachout's mild suggestion that we should pay as much attention to the victims of Stalin's terror as we do to the victims of the Holocaust evokes charges in the comments section that he is a "holocaust relativist" [perhaps even a dread "neocon" or "John Bircher"] who does not fully appreciate that Hitler's crime "stands alone as the single most intense expression of human malice."

This insistence on the unique evil of the German genocide, however justified, does a grave disservice to history and to our understanding of the world in which we live. It obscures the significance of other horrific crimes against humanity, and these, as Teachout ably notes, deserve our full attention.

Read Teachout's review here.

You can purchase a copy of Voices of the Dead from Amazon by clicking on the advertisements at the top of this page.

Cockburn on the Environmentalists

Lefty writer Alexander Cockburn has butted heads with the environmentalists and lived to tell about it. Here is the nugget of truth he has found:

[T]he environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle.

This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice.

This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact it already has, play into the hands of sinister-as-always corporate interests.

Read it here.

Cockburn's anti-corporate bias is, of course, nonsense, but he is quite right to note that the strongest supporters of Al Gore's apocalyptic absurdities are left-wingers who are operating under the delusion that this sort of scare-mongering will bring them to power and enable them to impose fundamental changes on Western society.

Feel the Love

American soldiers deplaning in Shannon, Ireland.

Crossing the Susquehanna

It's the weekend so once again it's time to post some pictures of our gorgeous commonwealth. Today's theme is "Crossing the Susquehanna". The pictures are not as sharp as they might be, they were all taken from a moving car. Before you ask, I wasn't driving.


This was taken along Rte #81 north of Harrisburg, looking north towards Marysville and Fort Hunter. That structure is the Norfolk Southern railroad bridge.



And this shot was taken from Rte. #30, the Lincoln Highway, looking south toward Wrightsville. The structure is State Rte. #462 between Wrightsville and Columbia.



Finally, here's a picture of the bridge from which I took the previous shot, looking east toward Columbia.

Occasionally in the grip of winter's damp and chill I like to look back and remember that not so long ago the days were warm and the trees were green and soon they will be so again.

Cthulhu for President!

Looking over the remnants of this year's presidential field, I am forced to conclude that there is only one viable candidate left:

The Kosovo Crisis Widens

This is disturbing -- Russia seems determined to use Serbian resentment of Kosovo's declaration of independence as a means of extending its influence in the Balkans. And, being Russia, that means armed intervention.

BBC reports:

Russia's ambassador to Nato, Dmitry Rogozin, has warned that Russia could use military force if the Kosovo independence dispute escalates.

"If the EU develops a unified position or if Nato exceeds its mandate set by the UN, then these organisations will be in conflict with the UN," he said.

In that case Russia would "proceed on the basis that in order to be respected we need to use brute force", he said.

Read it here.

That's right, he said "brute force". Russia is serving notice that if the EU or NATO opposes Serbian actions against Kosovo, it will intervene to protect the Serbs.

Now there are two basic questions:

1. What will the Serbs do? Paramilitary groups have already destroyed border checkpoints. Will there be incursions into Kosovo proper? And what about Serbs already living in Kosovo? What mischief will they be up to?

2. How will the EU respond to Serb provocation? Right now the EU is divided with most of its members refusing to recognize Kosovo's independence. The UN will take no action -- Russia and China would block that. Is is possible for NATO to respond without American leadership? Probably not. Would the US public support an American intervention and a showdown with Russia? Not likely in an election year.

Will there again be war in the Balkans? Time will tell. Stay tuned.

UPDATE:

Things are getting worse. Now mobs are attacking UN police.

KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Kosovo (AP) — Violent protests rocked Serb-dominated northern Kosovo on Friday, as mobs chanting "Kosovo is ours!" hurled stones, bottles and firecrackers at U.N. police guarding a bridge that divides Serbs from ethnic Albanians.

The scenes evoked memories of the carnage unleashed by former Serb autocrat Slobodan Milosevic the last time Kosovo tried to break away from Serbia, which considers the territory its ancestral homeland.

There were disturbing signs the riots in Belgrade, Serbia, and in Mitrovica have the blessing of nationalists in the Serbian government. The government hopes somehow to undo the loss of the beloved province, the site of an epic battle between Serbs and Turks in 1389.

Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica's authorities have repeatedly vowed to reclaim the land, despite U.S. and other Western recognition of Kosovo's statehood. Some hard-line government ministers have praised the violent protests as "legitimate" — and in line with government policies of retaining control over Serb-populated areas.

Read it here.

UPDATE:

And now Bosnia Serbs are threatening to secede from Bosnia and to reunite with their homeland.
Read it here.

UPDATE:

And, true to form the EU forces charged with protecting the Kosovars have decided to bug out until things settle down. Way to go guys!

The European Union has withdrawn staff from a divided Kosovo city following violent protests by the Serb minority, an EU envoy said Saturday as Russia warned Kosovo's independence could increase terrorism.

The EU staff in the northern city of Mitrovica have been preparing a 2,000 strong EU police-judicial mission in Kosovo after its declaration of independence, which has been rejected by the Serbian government and Kosovo Serbs.

"We have temporarily brought back our personnel, but we will maintain our office in the north," EU envoy Peter Feith told reporters in the southern Kosovo town of Prizren.

He did not give details on the numbers involved but added: "We hope that conditions will soon allow us to resume our activities" in northern Kosovo.

Read it here.

Hypocrisy On the Left: Obama's Ties to Lobbyists

Sister Toldjah has the goods here.

The Gloves are Coming Off

The contours of the coming presidential contest are beginning to come into focus. John McCain is a shoo-in for the Republican nomination and it is almost certain that Barak Obama will head the Democrat ticket. The Democrats, led by the New York Times and other gutter media, will try to poke holes in McCain's reputation for moderation and rectitude while Republicans, strongly aided by the candidate's wife, will try to portray Obama as a far-left radical.

The first shots have been fired. The Times of New York has as much as charged Sen. McCain with sexual improprieties and corruption and the networks have run with the story. It remains to be seen whether McCain or the Times will take serious damage in this exchange. Meanwhile the Times of London has weighed in with charges that Obama is a dangerous radical. Gerald Baker writes:

There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France. They wish it had much higher levels of taxation and government intervention, that it had much higher levels of welfare, that it did not have such a “militaristic” approach to foreign policy. Above all, that its national goals were dictated, not by the dreadful halfwits who inhabit godforsaken places like Kansas and Mississippi, but by the counsels of the United Nations.

Though Mr Obama has done a good job, as all recent serious Democrats have done, of emphasising his belief in American virtues, his record and his programme suggest he is firmly in line with this wing of his party.

Read it here.

These, of course, are only the opening strategies and no battle plan survives the first volleys.

Will McCain survive the scurrilous attacks on his character and turn the opprobrium on his assailants? If so the Dems have a secondary theme waiting -- that a McCain presidency will be a mere extension of the Bush regime. Will Michelle Obama learn when to shut her mouth and quit injecting radical and resentful themes into her husband's campaign? If so, the Republicans will trot out national defense themes, charging that Obama is too naive and inexperienced to be trusted. Beyond that things get fuzzy on both sides.

Clearly both sides are pitching their early appeals to a moderate middle that fears radicalism and longs for good government. What turns the campaign will take in future months are hard to discern.

As Hillary said, "now the fun part begins."