It’s not often that Democratic congressmen turn to the Wall Street Journal to defend their stance on taxes. But as one of the first, and certainly the most outspoken, members of his party to come out in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts, even for the wealthiest Americans, freshman Rep. Gerry E. Connolly (D., Va.) is not a typical Democrat.

Connolly began to voice his concern as early as January 2010, when White House officials were preparing the ten-year budget plan. Now, with a number of Democratic candidates in tough races coming out in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts, Connolly appears something of a trendsetter. Senate candidates Jack Conway in Kentucky and Robin Carnahan in Missouri, as well as Rep. Bobby Bright (D., Ala.), are among the Democrats echoing Connolly’s line on taxes.

#ad#Isaac Wood, House-race editor for Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball newsletter, says the Bush tax cuts will continue to be an issue heading into November, especially for Democrats looking to paint themselves as moderate candidates. “Democrats who support extending [the tax cuts] will tout that as a concrete example of independence from the national party line,” Wood says.

Connolly was a reliable vote for Democrats in his first term, supporting all of the Obama administration’s key policy initiatives, such as the federal stimulus package, health-care reform, cap-and-trade legislation, and financial reform.

However, this is not the first time he has bucked the party establishment on economic issues. In December 2009, Connolly and 13 other first-term Democrats sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that called for using a “substantial portion” of unspent TARP funds to reduce the federal deficit.

The growing unease among Democrats about the economy could undermine President Obama’s ability to push for any kind of tax increase after the midterms, even if the results aren’t as bad as many Democrats fear.

Connolly’s Republican opponent, Keith Fimian, a business owner who ran against Connolly is 2008, isn’t buying Connolly’s line on taxes. Fimian’s campaign manager, Tim Edson, says it is little more than an election-year ploy.

“This is a clear case of Gerry Connolly looking at the polls, knowing he’s in trouble with voters in this district, and knowing that if he votes for tax increases it’s going to seriously jeopardize his chances of reelection,” Edson says. “Anyone who think he’s not going to flip after the election and suddenly be against extending [the tax cuts], does so at their own peril,” he added.

Fimian’s campaign released the results of a poll by McLaughin & Associates in March 2010 that showed Fimian leading Connolly 40–35 percent with 25 percent undecided. Among independent voters, Fimian led 43–28 percent, according to the poll. Connolly beat Fimian by 12 points in 2008, a year when Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Virginia since 1964.

Wood says that without Obama on the ticket, or even a Senate or governor’s race to drive turnout in the state, Connolly’s seat is definitely up for grabs in 2010.

Connolly represents the wealthiest congressional district in the country; VA-11 has a median household income of more than $100,000. So his position on taxes may not seem all that surprising.

“[Connolly] is not shooting for Democratic votes, he knows he has to win over independents and even some Republicans who might be turned off by Fimian, and that’s what this policy stance could do for him,” Wood says.

#page#However, Connolly has indicated that his position on tax cuts goes beyond simply looking out for his wealthy constituents.

Connolly told the Richmond Times-Dispatch he’s making “purely an economic argument” that raising taxes, especially on high-income earners, would be harmful in a weak economy.

#ad#“The top 5 percent income-earners in this country generate 30 percent of consumer spending. If you let the top bracket expire right now, you could shave as much as half a point off GDP growth. We can’t afford to do that right now,” Connolly said.

It is certainly a message the Obama administration can’t afford to ignore.

-- Andrew Stiles writes for National Review Online's Battle ’10 blog.

How do you know your vacation has been too short? You leave behind one charlatan, whose concept of “building bridges” is a patently offensive project to build a giant Islamic center on a site where the remains of the thousands killed by Islamist terrorists are still being found, and then return to deal with another charlatan, one whose idea of nurturing a Christian community is to rally it to the gratuitously offensive gesture of burning Korans.

It’s a shame that we need to waste time condemning minister Terry Jones. He’s obviously a nincompoop. But I suppose the fact that he’s being universally condemned for this useless provocation is an improvement. Remember the classified prisoner-abuse photos that the Obama administration was hot to disclose last year, until a groundswell of protest from the military and the public finally impelled Congress to act responsibly when the president wouldn’t? That, too, was a gratuitous provocation that would have served no purpose other than to pull the hair-trigger of Muslim rage. Yet the Left -- including the Justice Department -- was indifferent to the threat posed to our troops by that action. The pictures simply had to be disclosed because they may have made the United States and the Bush administration look bad, and anything that can make the United States and the Bush administration look bad is worth doing, no matter the cost.

We were able to stop that, and let’s hope someone is able to talk some sense into the Rev. Jones. But as we reflect on what a moron he is, it is worth examining this episode through the prism of moronic rationalizations offered by Ground Zero mosque proponents to justify their enterprise -- and, in Imam Feisal Rauf’s case, to excuse terrorism.

#ad#For instance, I’m wondering whether President Obama, after his always clarifying “Let me be clear,” has yet been heard to say,

I believe that Christian ministers have the same right to free expression as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to torch a Koran on private property in Florida, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to free expression must be unshakeable. The writ of the Founders must endure.

The president can always come back the next day and explain that he wasn’t talking about the wisdom of burning Korans, only the irrelevant fact that a jackass has a right to be a jackass.

And what of Imam Rauf? Strangely, he has not yet explained that “in the most direct sense, the Rev. Jones was made in the K.S.A. -- the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Given its Wahhabist breeding and its financial backing of jihadists, coupled with sharia measures that (along with subjugating women and executing apostates) mandate the burning of Bibles, crucifixes, and Stars of David, you could easily see why the Rev. Jones feels he’s been “humiliated” and had his passionate feelings “ignored” by Saudi Arabia and other purveyors of Islamist ideology. Maybe he just “feels the need to conflagrate.”

Here’s an interesting thing about the man behind the mosque. A few months back, a controversial court ruling in Malaysia held that “Allah,” the Arabic word for God, was not the exclusive property of Muslims. A Christian monthly, the Herald, had decided it would use “Allah” to refer to God -- as Imam Rauf is fond of saying, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all Abrahamic faiths whose adherents worship the same deity, right? So why not use the same name?

#page#It turns out that tolerant, moderate Malaysian Muslims didn’t see things quite that way. They took the Christians’ ecumenical gesture as an affront -- an effort to proselytize for Christianity or, as Imam Rauf himself put it, “to manipulate the word [“Allah”] to win converts.” So the tolerant, moderate Muslims did their usual Terry-Jackass-Jones-on-steroids routine: They didn’t just burn Bibles, they fire-bombed churches. Non-Islamic proselytism is prohibited by sharia, as Imam Rauf, who wants the United States to be more sharia-compliant, could tell you.

#ad#And what did Rauf do? Did he condemn this blatant Christianophobia? Did he lecture Malaysians that the Herald was perfectly within its legal rights to invoke “Allah” in the service of Christianity, and that living in a tolerant, pluralistic society that ensures free expression means accepting the Herald’s actions even if they make Muslims uncomfortable?

Are you kidding?

Instead, Imam Rauf took to the newspapers to admonish Christians on the need to show more sensitivity to Muslims’ feelings. “My message to the Christian community in Malaysia,” he proclaimed, “is that using the word Allah to mean the Christian God may be theologically and legally correct, but in the context of Malaysia, it is socially provocative. If you want to have influence with people in Malaysia, you must find a way to convey your message without provoking this kind of response.”

You know what else might be “socially provocative”? A giant mosque at Ground Zero.

-- Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Nine years ago this week, I began a series of discussions about terrorism with Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and a small group of concerned philanthropists. Since Saturday is the ninth anniversary of the 9/11/01 atrocities, that won’t surprise you. What might: Our first conversation took place before, not after, terrorists hijacked passengers jets and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Those with whom I met grasped this: While America was happily cashing in the post–Cold War “peace dividend,” terrorists were bombing the World Trade Center (for what turned out to be the first time), slaughtering American troops at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, bombing two American embassies in Africa, and driving an explosive-laden boat into the USS Cole. Most political leaders, intelligence analysts, academics, and journalists did not see much significance in this pattern.

#ad#In the weeks that followed, we organized the Foundation for Defense of Democracies to undertake research to better understand terrorism and the forces driving it, develop useful policy options, and help educate the public.

Among the most significant lesson I’ve learned: Terrorism is not the core of the problem. It is merely the weapon of choice for some of the regimes, movements, and ideologies that are waging a war against the U.S. and other democratic societies.

The terrorists regard themselves as “jihadis” -- heroic Islamic warriors and conquerors. They see their enemies as “infidels” -- enemies of Allah who deserve death and would be better off dead.  

Yes, the jihadis and those who support them have grievances against America, Europe, India, and, of course, Israel. But resolving policy differences is not their goal. Their goal is to humiliate, defeat, and subdue the West, and to restore to Muslims the power and glory they enjoyed in the distant past and which, they are confident, they are destined to enjoy again in the not-too-distant future.

Not all those who seek this restoration engage in acts of terrorism or even support them. There are those -- call them “Islamists” -- who are not militants. They believe non-violent strategies can more effectively hasten the transition from the rule of law as constructed by men to the rule of law as ordained by Allah, along with the transfer of global dominance from Judeo-Christian and secular societies to “the Muslim world.”

It should go without saying but probably does not: Most of the world’s Muslims are not participating in this struggle, are not eager for bloodshed, and do not want to live under clerical dictatorships. But if, as has been conservatively estimated, only 7 percent of the world’s Muslims support Jihadism and/or Islamism, that’s more than 80 million people -- a formidable force backed by enormous Middle Eastern oil wealth. By contrast, Islamic reformers and peacemakers are isolated, targeted, and without substantial resources.

After 9/11, the Bush administration conceived this conflict as a “Global War on Terrorism.” The link with Islam as preached by fiery clerics was acknowledged but not examined. The Obama administration has backed away from even that incomplete analysis. Government spokesmen now talk only of “violent extremism” and “overseas contingency operations.” The first term ignores the ideologies motivating those battling us. The second term denies that it’s a serious global conflict. President Obama has conceded that al-Qaeda is at war with the U.S. -- as though that’s all there was to it; as though that explained something.

#page#In his address on Iraq last week, President Obama added that “open-ended war” does not “serve” American interests. That’s true but irrelevant, since wars are not theatrical productions -- you can’t just bring down the curtain at a time certain. Wars generally continue until one side wins and the other loses.

The U.S. and the West are not prepared to escalate the conflict in order to defeat our enemies any time soon. Nor are we likely to accept defeat in the near term. So what we’re left with is indeed an “open-ended war,” a long war, a low-intensity war, on a variety of fronts.

#ad#Afghanistan is one of them. It is instructive to note that the Sunday Times of London reported last weekend that Iranians are paying members of the Taliban to kill American soldiers there. Think about that: Iran’s rulers are collaborating with the Taliban, an affiliate of al-Qaeda -- evidence, hardly the first, that while Shia jihadis and Sunni jihadis may be rivals, they can and do find common causes: slaughtering Americans, for one.

Political leaders and the intelligence community ought to be seriously contemplating what this means --- and what it will mean if Tehran succeeds in acquiring nuclear weapons. Based on past performance, we cannot be confident they are engaging in such contemplation.

According to the Times, Iran is financing the Taliban using aid money from the West that is being paid to Iranian firms involved in the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. In other words: NATO countries are funding the slaughter of NATO troops. Will President Obama hold Iran responsible and take steps to end this practice? Will he even speak clearly of Iranian culpability?

More likely, he will repeat that our goal must be to avoid “open-ended war.” How encouraging that will be to the jihadis and Islamists in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen, Gaza, and other fronts. It will reassure them that, nine years after the 9/11 attacks, they are thinking strategically -- while their infidel enemies are not.

-- Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.

If this were simply a battle of ideas, then, perhaps, the conservative insurgent would be galloping ahead, with the washed-out moderate left choking on tea-party dust. Delaware’s Republican Senate primary, however, has devolved into anything but an ideological scrap. Instead, strange gaffes and party infighting have turned the race into a must-watch mud-fest.

Christine O’Donnell, a former GOP operative, is the tea party’s crusader du jour. With her easy charm and big-dollar backing from the Tea Party Express, O’Donnell presents real trouble for Rep. Mike Castle, the nine-term congressman known for hugging the colorless center of American politics. Yet Castle has been able to blunt her challenge in recent weeks, by throwing salt on her self-inflicted wounds.

#ad#Unlike Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who played nice en route to primary defeat last month, Castle has gone full-Atwater, airing scalding ads about O’Donnell’s foibles. “We’re not just going to sit by and let her destroy Mike Castle,” explained a Castle campaign source to the National Journal.

With a tea-party wave potentially heading toward Rehoboth, Castle is doing what he can to stack sandbags around his campaign. In Castle’s latest spot, a baritone-voiced narrator zings O’Donnell for her back taxes, college bills, and campaign debt. The ad’s tone — gloomy and suspicious — is reminiscent of Harry Reid’s line of attack against Sharron Angle in Nevada, except this time, of course, it is Republican versus Republican. There is no mention of any policy position held by Castle, who owns a lowly 52.49 lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union.

Castle’s ads have gotten buzz, leaving O’Donnell, the party’s nominee against Sen. Joe Biden in 2008, on the defensive. Castle, who has avoided debates and kept a low profile on the trail, has ridden the rumblings about O’Donnell’s viability to a lead in the polls. With less than a week until Republicans head to the ballot box, a Rasmussen poll shows Castle in a far stronger position to defeat Democrat Chris Coons, a county executive, in the general election. Castle leads Coons by 11 points, while O’Donnell trails Coons by the same margin. For O’Donnell, the tumble has been devastating: In July, Rasmussen had her leading Coons by two.

Still, O’Donnell is far from finished. A survey by NSON Opinion Research, commissioned by the Tea Party Express last week, shows her trailing Castle by just two points among likely GOP voters. To gain momentum, however, O’Donnell will have to shake off Team Castle’s depiction of her campaign as “delusional.”

Shifting the spotlight back to the issues of Washington will be tough. According to the Wall Street Journal, O’Donnell reported less than $6,000 in income last year and still owes her 2008 campaign nearly $10,000. Questions about her finances bubble up daily. To make matters worse, O’Donnell appears to have let Castle’s sharp questions rattle her.

#page# In an odd interview with The Weekly Standard last week, O’Donnell claimed, without proof or a police report in hand, that her home and office were vandalized by Castle apparatchiks. “They’re following me,” she told reporter John McCormack. “They follow me home at night. I make sure that I come back to the townhouse and then we have our team come out and check all the bushes and check all the cars to make sure that -- they follow me.”

Indeed, as her campaign has gained national attention, O’Donnell clearly has become spooked, to the chagrin of her enthusiastic supporters. She has accused a conservative talk-radio host, who previously had endorsed her, of being “paid off,” and questioned the integrity of Rasmussen’s latest poll because, well, its numbers show her losing. A former senior aide for her campaign has also muddied the field with an unseemly web video that asks whether Castle has been unfaithful to his wife. O’Donnell, for her part, quickly distanced herself from the video, but the taint remains.

#ad#O’Donnell’s complicated résumé has also done her few favors. It was reported by Politico last week that she received her bachelor’s degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University this summer — after previously claiming that she was already a graduate. Her past explanation for the lack of a diploma — her unpaid loans — was also debunked by the political website, which discovered that unfulfilled coursework also played a part. To add to the hurt, it was discovered that O’Donnell was previously mired in an uncomfortable gender-discrimination lawsuit with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative organization in Wilmington.

All of these distractions have left O’Donnell flailing for a narrative. Conservative superstars like Sarah Palin, whose endorsement was critical in helping Joe Miller upset Murkowski, have stayed on the sidelines — though Palin did highlight a supportive Twitter message about O’Donnell from conservative talk-radio host Tammy Bruce on Wednesday. (The Hill called it a “tacit endorsement” from Palin.) Other GOP leaders, like Dick Armey, the chairman of the grassroots group FreedomWorks, have refused to get involved. Even Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who loves to tangle in GOP primaries, has sat on his hands. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, the Right’s newest hero, has come out for Castle.

To fight back, O’Donnell and the Tea Party Express will take to the local-radio airwaves on Thursday to sponsor a two-hour O’Donnell-a-thon. “This is a year where citizen activists are getting behind citizen politicians,” O’Donnell tells us. “This is about principles and the heart and soul of the party.”

“Like so many people around the country, I have struggled at times,” O’Donnell says. “But many Americans have been in similar situations and are sympathetic.” Castle’s votes for the bank bailouts and for cap-and-trade legislation, she hopes, will matter more than how she has handled her checkbook and campus credits.

“I’m very hopeful that we can win,” O’Donnell says. “In races across the country — Rand Paul, Sharron Angle — you see people getting behind constitutional conservatives.” We’ll know next Tuesday whether Delaware is ready to take a chance.

-- Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.

In less than 60 days, the Democrats will probably suffer historic losses in both the House and the Senate. The eleventh-hour campaigning of the now-unpopular Barack Obama on behalf of endangered congressional candidates will not change much. In fact, most embattled Democratic candidates don’t want the president to even set foot in their districts.

The public knows that the stimulus packages are played out. Unemployment rose, instead of falling as promised. All that is left are the higher taxes due next year to pay back the borrowed money that was squandered.

#ad#Those in Congress who went along with the Obama borrowing agenda now find themselves on the wrong side of the American people on almost every issue -- from federalized health care, higher taxes, and bailouts to proposed cap-and-trade and amnesty.

Could things still turn around before November?

The Democrats’ best hope is a major crisis overseas that would rally the American public around their commander-in-chief. Usually, cynical journalists refer to an unexpected autumn bombing run, missile launch, or presidential announcement of a cease-fire or needed escalation as an “October surprise.”

These are the “wag the dog” moments that might turn angry Americans’ thoughts elsewhere. And they have a checkered history that began long before August 1998, when critics alleged that Bill Clinton, before the midterm elections, had ordered bombing missions in Afghanistan and Sudan to distract public attention from his embarrassing dalliance with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. He looked decisive and presidential; his Republican opponents looked nitpicking and petty.

Abraham Lincoln could have lost the 1864 election to peace candidate Gen. George McClellan, given that over the summer Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had almost ruined the Army of the Potomac without taking the Confederate capital of Richmond. Then, suddenly, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman captured Atlanta on Sept. 2. Overnight, Lincoln went from an inept bumbler to a winning commander-in-chief. An exasperated McClellan never recovered.

Less than two weeks before the 1972 election, national security advisor Henry Kissinger, without warning, announced that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam (it was not). Democratic nominee George McGovern would have lost anyway to Richard Nixon, but his peace candidacy abruptly appeared redundant.

Suspicious liberals were convinced that in 2004 George W. Bush would pull off some sort of surprise to distract voters from the bad news in Iraq. A year before the election, a paranoid Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, floated a crazy suggestion: “Do you suppose that the Bush administration has Osama bin Laden hidden away somewhere and will bring him out before the election?”

In panic over the depressing polls, Obama is now scrambling to find any good news overseas that he can, to turn voter attention away from near-10 percent unemployment and record debt.

He has just addressed the nation about the long-scheduled troop reductions in Iraq. And suddenly, all Mideast leaders are now equally welcome at the White House in hopes of reaching a dramatic Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough that would showcase his presidential leadership before the midterm elections.

Neither of these events is likely to change things in November. Only a headline crisis could rally Americans around their now-unpopular commander-in-chief and his beleaguered supporters in Congress. What would that entail?

Most probably something like a showdown with soon-to-be-nuclear and widely despised Iran.

As a candidate, Obama criticized the Bush administration for not reaching out and talking with Iran’s theocratic leadership. As president, Obama has done that. He even muted his criticism of the brutal Iranian crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations after the 2009 election. But Obama soon found that the Iranians saw his outreach as appeasement, and so only increased their breakneck efforts to get a bomb.

Now everyone from the Israelis to the Sunni Arab nations is pressuring the United States to do something before a radical and nuclear Iran changes the complexion of the entire Middle East. If the erstwhile peace candidate Barack Obama were to confront Iran, conservatives might well support his resolve. Then Democratic candidates would find a more united nation that was suddenly far more worried about Mideast armageddon than unemployment and record deficits. Unlike past October surprises, in this one the pro-Obama media would probably be far less cynical in its coverage of presidential motives.

But Iran won’t go nuclear in the next two months. So let us hope that the current unpopular administration waits for a while before deciding between the rotten choice of using military force against Tehran and the even worse alternative of a nuclear Iran.

-- NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

This week began with several big-name polls showcasing dire news for Democratic incumbents. But the results weren’t all that surprising to those who have been following the much-discussed surveys of Scott Rasmussen. By 10:00 a.m. most mornings, the fantastically prolific firm has already brought news that will probably ruin some candidate’s day. Rasmussen took a few moments to talk with National Review Online about polling in the current environment.


JIM GERAGHTY: For much of this cycle, your polls have seen things a little bit better for Republicans than those of a lot of other pollsters. This seems to stem in part from your polling likely voters; many other pollsters survey registered voters and some, simply adults. Do you feel vindicated by the fact that seemingly every pollster has now come out with ever-worsening doomsday scenarios for Democrats?

SCOTT RASMUSSEN: I reject the notion that we have seen things more favorably for Republicans. It’s just that if you were to take a poll of registered voters and compare it to a poll of likely voters, the raw numbers of the registered-voter poll would look better for Democrats. Now that they’re all switching to a likely-voter model, sure, they’re going to end up pretty much in the same place. A great example of that was this morning’s Washington Post poll. I think it showed Republicans plus two on the generic ballot among adults, but plus 13 among likely voters. And that’s the kind of gap we have been seeing all through the year.


#ad#GERAGHTY: Are pollsters wasting people’s time when they give the registered-voter numbers and let people think they’re getting a good sense of how the electorate’s going to look on Election Day?

RASMUSSEN: There are valid reasons to poll different samples. I think what needs to be clear is just what it is you’re doing. We poll all adults for our consumer- and investor-finances polls, because whether you’re a voter or not, you have an impact on economic trends. There are people who would argue that you can’t do a likely-voter poll until after Labor Day, because you don’t really know what the turnout is going to be, so a registered-voter model is preferred in their mind. That’s not a bad argument, except that it implies too much precision. We didn’t know earlier in the year precisely what turnout would be; we still don’t know precisely what turnout will be. We knew that a likely-voter model would be more favorable to Republicans than a registered-voter model -- partly because it’s a midterm. I would think that anybody covering those races would acknowledge that as part of the coverage of a poll.


GERAGHTY: In the coverage of these numbers, certainly in the cases of the two big polls out this morning [ABC News/Washington Post and NBC/Wall Street Journal], there seems to be a tone of shock. Is the sense of shock so intense because some people spent much of the year looking at polls of registered voters and getting an erroneous sense of where the electorate is?

RASMUSSEN: I think there’s been shock because people can never really believe that things are going to turn out differently than they have in the past. In 2006, Republicans looking at the polls that were coming out had a hard time believing that they really were going to be in that much trouble. They could look at their team and say, You know, I know that George Allen shouldn’t have said “macaca,” but here’s why he could pull it out. They would have all of these reasons. But at some point, there begins to be a change.

You’ve got to remember, if you go all the way back to the beginning of this year, we had a shock factor in the Massachusetts Senate race. People just couldn’t believe that. In the middle of 2009, Talking Points Memo did a story saying it was inappropriate for us to measure the strongly approve and disapprove numbers of the president rather than just his overall approval. My response was that it measured the intensity, it gave you an indicator of what was going to happen. And it worked out to be that way.

#page#GERAGHTY: When a politician criticizes your polls, and your poll ends up being pretty close to the final result, do you ever feel like calling him up and saying, “Neener-neener-neener”? It seems that no matter how closely you track to the actual election results, every year it’s back to square one, ”Oh, we can’t trust that guy.”

RASMUSSEN: You have to have a thick skin to be in this business. You have to realize it’s nothing personal. In 2006, [then-senator] Conrad Burns [of Montana, a Republican] attacked our credibility because we showed him in trouble in January. He just didn’t believe it. Then, of course, it turned out to be right. We had the same thing happen with [North Carolina Republican senator] Elizabeth Dole in 2008.

#ad#It is part of the process, and you have to understand that people don’t care about polls, they care about what we poll about. The politicians are not truly commenting on the credibility of the poll; they’re trying to spin their version of the story any way they can. If attacking the pollster helps them out, well, that’s what they’ll do.


GERAGHTY: Pollsters weight by age, race, and gender, and sometimes by geography. How important is it to weight by party?

RASMUSSEN: There is a legitimate industry discussion on that. We all know that if you can tell what the partisan makeup [of the electorate] is going to be, it is a great indicator of how the results will turn out. What most pollsters struggle with is, what are the appropriate targets?#...#We do a lot more polling than just about anybody else, so we have enough data that we can provide some ongoing estimates of where the party trends are.

Whether or not you weight by party, it is certainly reasonable for an analyst to look at the results and say, “You know, I just don’t believe that there will be more Democrats turning out in 2010 than in 2008, and I ought to look at that when I consider the results.”


GERAGHTY: Have you ever re-polled a race after getting results that didn’t sit well with your gut?

RASMUSSEN: We release the data and then we go poll it again if something is going on. There are two races right now where I am very curious about what our next polls will show, one in West Virginia and one in Alaska. In both cases, I can come up with a logical argument as to why the numbers are the way they are; I can also come up with a logical argument as to why they show the race as closer than it really is. But we want to get the information out there and let other people engage in that discussion, and we’ll poll again and see where it ends up.

#page#GERAGHTY: What result has surprised you the most this cycle?

RASMUSSEN: When we did the Scott Brown poll in early January and it showed a nine-point race and a two-point race among the most likely voters, I thought, “Boy, we’re going to be way out there on a limb!” That was not where the expectations were, so that was a shock in the early part of the cycle.

#ad#Another race that surprised me -- right from the start -- was Russ Feingold’s. He wasn’t in the Harry Reid position, he didn’t have big-name opposition once Tommy Thompson dropped out, and yet here he is in a toss-up race. I had expected that once Thompson dropped out, we wouldn’t be seeing that.

The other race that has been a real shock to me this year is Barbara Boxer’s in California. I’ve said a million times -- I know she always polls poorly, but it’s still California -- and I was saying early in the year, if we’re still talking about this race in September and October, it means things really are going to be bad for Democrats. Well, here we are, and she’s still tied.


GERAGHTY: Can Republicans blow it in the last two months?

RASMUSSEN: It depends on how you define “blow it.” Is it possible that they will blow it to such extent that this ends up being just a “normal” midterm, with the Democrats losing 15 to 20 seats? No, I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t think that they’re going to have only minimal gains in the Senate. But how close they get to gaining control of the Senate and whether or not they gain control of the House, that’s still up in the air. But that ultimately has less to do with Republicans than with Democrats, because this election is all about the party in power.

This election is a referendum on the Democrats -- it’s not a referendum on incumbents as much as on the Democratic party. We put out a poll last week that I think captures some of the basic mood. Most Americans believe, as they have for decades, that cutting government spending and cutting taxes is good for the economy. That’s just sort of a bedrock belief of the American people. At the same time, they believe that the Democrats in Congress want to increase spending and increase taxes. That creates a tough road when you’re the party in power, when you’ve got that kind of perception out there.


GERAGHTY: In 2006, voters seemed to tune out GOP incumbents’ criticism of their Democratic challengers. In a year when one party has clear momentum, like this year, do voters disregard criticism of the party they’re not angry at? In other words, does the tie go to the challenger in a race like Sharron Angle vs. Harry Reid?

RASMUSSEN: The things that scare people about Sharron Angle aren’t at any risk of becoming law right now, but the things Harry Reid is boasting about -- passing the health-care law, for example -- are very real. So yes, the tie goes to the challenger at this point in time.

That Nevada race is the mud-wresting match of this year. Both candidates are growing so unpopular that if voters go into the booth thinking about Harry Reid, then Sharron Angle will win. If voters go into the booth thinking about Sharron Angle, then Harry Reid will win.

#page#GERAGHTY: Rasmussen doesn’t poll primaries or non-statewide House races very often. Is there a reason for that?

RASMUSSEN: The reason we don’t do most House races is simply that we’ve committed to polling every Senate and governor’s race in this cycle, and that’s where our focus has been. We’ve been pretty consistent over the years. We may have done a couple of House races in 2004, I can’t remember, but I don’t think we did anything in the 2006 or 2008 cycles, other than the statewide races. But remember, we are a media polling organization, not a political organization.

#ad#There are two different audiences that read our material. One audience is political junkies -- an audience we share with you -- and they have one view on things. The other is local and state media coverage. You know, we actually get more people introduced to Rasmussen Reports through our state polls than through any of our national data. A state poll about a general election gets a tremendous amount of interest generated. It also lets us poll on other issues: If we’re polling statewide on a general-election race, we can ask what people think of health care, the economy, or whatever else the issue of the day is, and it gives reporters in that state lots of things to write about.


GERAGHTY: Is it easier to get a clear reading on the percentages of a close, hard-fought race than on a blowout?

RASMUSSEN: One of the reasons that the margins are different in lopsided races is that they’re not polled as frequently. It’s also harder to determine turnout, because you have to allow for people who end up saying, “Our guy’s going to win by 50 points, so why bother showing up?” You tend to do a lot of polling in tighter races. You want to make sure you get the partisan mix right. So, generally, the more competitive races are easier to call, or easier to get results closer to the final levels of support.

Still, it looks a whole lot different if you’re projecting a candidate to win by two points and he loses by a point, than if you have an 18-point race in your poll and it turns out to be a 27-point race.


GERAGHTY: What do you see happening between now and November? Volatility? Swings? “October surprises” that could change all this?

RASMUSSEN: When you talk about an “October surprise,” it would have to be something on a really significant scale. I can’t imagine what it would be. We know from lots of polling that when the American people get bad news about the economy, their confidence drops right away. If they get good news, it takes five or six months of good economic news to make up for that one bit of bad economic news. What that tells me is that if there is a really bad unemployment report at the end of September, that could be really bad for the Democrats. If there’s a moderately good report, it probably won’t change things all that much.

The question is going to be how individual campaigns play in the larger environment, which is friendly to Republicans. The environment is going to continue to change, become a bit more or less friendly than it is today, but still stay generally friendly to Republicans. Democratic candidates are going to try to find ways to localize those races and get away from that trend, and how successful they are at doing that will determine the final numbers.


GERAGHTY: Any under-the-radar race you’re keeping your eye on? Any upset special?

RASMUSSEN: The race that I would potentially put in that category right now is the West Virginia Senate race. We have one poll out showing it a very competitive race. It’s clear that President Obama is not a welcome figure in West Virginia politics. But [Democratic nominee] Joe Manchin is so popular as governor that it was thought to be a safe seat. So that’s a potential upset special.

The one thing that’s being underreported in this election cycle is not a race but something about the economy. It goes like this: People today are less pessimistic about the economy in general, far less pessimistic than they were a year ago. However, they have not seen any improvement in their own personal finances. People are feeling worse about their personal finances than they felt a year ago and worse than they felt two years ago, and they continue to believe that their own finances are getting worse. Only half of homeowners believe their home is worth more than the mortgage. We can talk all we want about grand issues and economic indicators, but when people aren’t feeling good about their own personal finances, it creates a sour mood for all politicians.

— Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot on NRO.

The scattershot nature of President Obama’s latest economic proposals is a sign that the administration is starting to panic -- and panic it should: The GOP’s advantage in generic-ballot polling is approaching historic proportions. But the composition of the proposals also tells us something else: The administration knows it is losing its fight to let certain of the Bush tax cuts expire -- even though it now has explicitly ruled out a compromise on extending them -- and it is making one last push to buy leverage for its position by offering “targeted” tax cuts to the business community.

“Targeted” is one of this administration’s favorite words, second only to “inherited,” as in, “To address the severe crisis he inherited, President Obama pushed for a stimulus that was timely, targeted, and temporary.” But what we have learned from the stimulus is that Congress has exceptionally bad aim, and that temporary measures to boost the economy do little more than steal demand from the future. The Cash for Clunkers program boosted car sales for the two-month window of its existence, but it was followed by a steep drop a few months later: Average the two time periods together and you get no noticeable change in demand. The temporary Homebuyers Tax Credit had a similar effect on home sales, with transactions spiking the month before the credit expired and then plummeting in the months after.

Having spent the last 18 months binging on stimulus sugar and enduring the consequent crashes, Obama suggests we return to the cookie jar with a temporary credit that would allow businesses to take an immediate 100 percent deduction for new capital and equipment expenditures made between now and the end of 2011. (Under current law, businesses must spread the deduction out over seven years.) A permanent credit of this sort might make sense as an option for businesses, but a temporary credit is a bad idea. Just as Cash for Clunkers and the Homebuyers Tax Credit distorted demand for cars and homes without really stimulating it, a temporary deduction for capital expenditures would encourage firms that were already planning on building new plants or buying new equipment at some point to make those investments in 2011 rather than 2012, but it probably wouldn’t be enough to persuade them to invest in the absence of such plans.

#ad#Obama also proposes to expand and make permanent a tax credit for research-and-development expenditures. This would be an improvement over the status quo, under which this tax credit has been “temporary” for government accounting purposes but consistently reauthorized since its creation in 1981. By itself, the policy isn’t objectionable, but it’s being offered in exchange for a worse overall tax climate: The administration has almost certainly oversold the benefits of expanding the credit, which would be small compared to the costs of raising tax rates in a weak economy. Increasing tax rates on income, dividends, and capital gains, even if those hikes were confined to the top two brackets, would weaken incentives for some of the country’s most productive individuals and profitable small businesses to work, invest, hire, and grow. A slightly bigger write-off for R&D isn’t sufficient to cushion that blow, and business owners know it. 

No list of proposals from this president would be complete without new spending, so the president has also asked for $50 billion to fund a new “infrastructure bank” that would make loans for transportation projects. It’s important to keep in mind that the government can’t pay for the transportation projects it already has. The Highway Trust Fund is insolvent, and the Democrats aren’t willing to raise the gas tax that funds it, even though they’ve tried every other way they can think of to make fossil fuels more expensive.

It isn’t clear where the administration would get the money to fund the government’s share in this new bank, though its spokesmen have suggested, as they have with regard to every other new spending request, that raising taxes on oil-and-gas companies and “closing loopholes” might cover part of the cost. Nor is it clear how the bank would attract private capital. Toll roads and other revenue-generating projects might be attractive to investors, but these kinds of projects aren’t exactly political winners. The worst-case scenario, which we can easily imagine, would involve giving private investors an incentive to bring their money to the table by insuring them against losses and letting them keep most of the profits while making taxpayers shoulder all of the risk. Haven’t we seen this movie before? Remind us: How did it end?   

If this summer’s employment and housing numbers heralded the death of the latest Keynesian revival, then Obama’s latest raft of stimulus proposals indicates that he has reached the bargaining stage of grief. He is tacitly acknowledging that tax relief is the best medicine for an ailing economy, but he is trying to hold on to the idea that government still knows best where that relief should be “targeted,” and he’s asking for just $50 billion more in new spending in exchange. He still thinks we should let the Bush tax cuts expire, even as key senators in his party and his own former OMB director have abandoned that view. The sooner Obama gets over the denial stage, reaches the acceptance stage, and embraces a pro-growth tax policy, the sooner we’ll exit the depression stage and get on the road to recovery. 

When Obamacare finally passed the House, 34 Democrats voted no. Thirty-one of those Democrats are now running for reelection, and, not surprisingly, many of them are highlighting their opposition to the bill.

Some, such as Jason Altmire in Pennsylvania, Bobby Bright in Alabama, Glenn Nye in Virginia, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin in South Dakota, Frank Kratovil in Maryland, and Glenn Nye in Virginia are actually running television ads touting their “no” votes. The bill “cost too much,” says a Nye spot. It was a “massive government takeover of health care,” according to Bright. It “wasn’t right for South Dakota,” argues Herseth Sandlin.

All of which is true. Still, one might ask: Are these Democrats really serious about opposing Obamacare, or are they just seeking political cover?

#ad#There are currently two discharge petitions in the House that would force a floor vote on repealing Obamacare. The first, sponsored by Rep. Stephen King (R., Iowa) is the most straightforward, simply repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in its entirety. A second, from Rep. Wally Herger (R., Calif.) would both repeal Obamacare and replace it with a collection of alternative proposals. All but six Republicans have signed one or the other of the petitions.

Not a single one of those 31 Democrats has signed either of those petitions.

Why not?

Nothing that has come out since the bill passed back in March has made it look better. If Glenn Nye voted against it because he thought it cost too much back when it was scored as costing $950 billion, what does he think now that independent estimates suggest it may cost as much as $2.7 trillion over its first ten years of full implementation? Obamacare certainly isn’t less of a government takeover now that we know fewer and fewer Americans will be able to keep their current insurance plans. And the bill didn’t get any better for South Dakota now that we can see insurance premiums shooting through the roof.

Of course, signing a discharge petition is considered something akin to treason by the party leadership. Nancy Pelosi would be displeased. But these are candidates who are claiming to be “independent” and “standing up to Washington.” Shouldn’t they be asked to put their signatures where their mouths are?

Republicans are not completely off the hook, either. Among the six Republicans who have not signed either discharge petition are senatorial candidates Mark Kirk in Illinois and Mike Castle in Delaware. This is particularly surprising in the case of Kirk, who once vowed to “lead the effort” to repeal the health-care law.

Meanwhile, over in the Senate, a bill by Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) to repeal Obamacare has attracted only 21 cosponsors, meaning that 19 Republican senators have not yet committed to repeal. Among the scofflaws are Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Republican conference chairman Lamar Alexander.

#page#Nor has repeal of Obamacare been a national Republican theme. Individual candidates have, of course, made it an issue. But national Republican spokesmen have not invested the issue with a sense of urgency.

Obviously, given the Democrats’ ability to mount a Senate filibuster -- even if Republicans take control of the chamber -- and a certain presidential veto, outright repeal of the health-care law remains a long-shot at best in the next couple of years. Still, a willingness to support -- and force a vote on -- repeal can be seen as a proxy for how vigorously a legislator will support other measures to kill it, such as defunding implementation, or repealing some of the most unpopular aspects of the law, such as the individual mandate.

#ad#And if a representative or senator is not willing to stand up against a bad law when 56 percent of likely voters favor repeal (and 45 percent strongly favor it) according to the latest Rasmussen poll, how will he behave when public opinion is not so clearly on his side? Are these candidates just about casting the relatively easy vote, or are they willing to take on the heavy lifting?

Obamacare was one of the truly defining votes of recent history. But how Republicans -- and anti-Obamacare Democrats -- behave now will be equally defining. It’s time to stand up and be counted.

— Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.

A tectonic shift is in motion: How fitting that its focal point is Ground Zero, the inevitable fault line between Islam and the West.

Only the blink of an eye ago, uttering the unpleasant truth that in terms of doctrine there is no such thing as “moderate Islam” resulted in one’s banishment from what our opinion elites like to call the “mainstream,” by which they mean the narrow-minded, viciously defended circle of their own pieties and fictions. You could say it, but your skin had better have an extra coat or two of thick: You were in for a fusillade of rage, the likes of which our candor-phobic elites would never dream of unleashing at our Islamist enemies -- no matter how clearly those enemies announced their intention to destroy us.

The fusillade still comes, but now its blows only glance. The elites and their mainstream have been exposed as frauds: Being on the wrong side of enough 70-30 issues will do that to you.

It should never have gotten this far. Sponsors of the Ground Zero mosque neither own the property in question nor possess the means to build and operate the palatial Islamic center they envision. The more light that shines on their record of murky real-estate dealings and the dubious circumstances of their limited stake in the Ground Zero property, the more questions arise. In a more sensible world, those questions would get answered before we plunged into a rancorous public debate. That hasn’t happened, though. In spite of the implacable determination of the mayor (and the attorney general who would be governor) to look the other way, the issue has galvanized the public. What has long bubbled beneath the surface did not need much more heat to boil over.

For the better part of two decades, Americans have been murdered by Islamists and then lectured that they are to blame for what has befallen them. We have been instructed in the need for special sensitivity to the unceasing demands of Islamic culture and falsely accused of intolerance by the people who wrote the book on intolerance. Americans have sacrificed blood and bottomless treasure for Islamic peoples who despise Americans -- and despise us even more as our sacrifices and gestures of self-loathing intensify. Americans have watched as apologists for terrorists and sharia were made the face of an American Muslim community that we were simultaneously assured was the very picture of pro-American moderation.

Americans have had our fill. We are willing to live many lies. This one, though, strikes too close to home, arousing our heretofore dormant sense of decency. Americans have now heard Barack Obama’s shtick enough times to know that when he talks about “our values,” he’s really talking about his values, which most of us don’t share. And after ten years of CAIR’s tired tirades, we’re immune to Feisal Rauf, too.

We look around us and we see our country unrivaled by anything in the history of human tolerance. We see thousands of thriving mosques, permitted to operate freely even though we know for a fact that mosques have been used against us, repeatedly, to urge terrorism, recruit terrorists, raise money for terrorists, store and transfer firearms, and inflame Muslims against America and the West. As Islamists rage against us, we see Islam celebrated in official Washington. As we reach out for the umpty-umpth time, we find Muslim leaders taking what we offer, but always with complaint and never with reciprocation. We’re weary, and we don’t really care if that means that Time magazine, Michael Bloomberg, Katie Couric, Fareed Zakaria, and the rest think we’re bad people -- they think we’re bad people, anyway.

#page#So finally we’re asking: Where is this “moderate Islam” you’ve been telling us about? Why would a self-proclaimed bridge-builder insist on something so patently provocative and divisive? How can we be sure that if imam Rauf builds his monument on our graveyard, it won’t become what other purportedly “moderate” Islamic centers have become: a cauldron of anti-American vitriol?

It turns out that there are no satisfactory answers. When finally pressed on the taxonomy of moderate Islam, the best our elites can do -- besides shouting “Islamophobia!” -- is debate whether there ever was a “golden age” of Islamic tolerance. They have to confess that the Islamists -- whom they’d like us to see as a handful of “extremists” but who are in truth a mass movement -- are in the ascendancy. It is embarrassingly obvious that while some of us have been working to defeat Islamism in our midst, our elites are of the incorrigibly progressive mindset that counsels accommodating them -- in the delusion that they will be appeased rather than encouraged to become more aggressive. That is precisely the mindset that makes an Islamist think: Maybe now is the time for a $100 million mosque at Ground Zero.

#ad#“Moderate Islam” is a dream, not a reality. It is a dream with potential, because there are millions of Muslims who are moderate people, and because there are dedicated Muslims working to transform their faith into something that is institutionally moderate. But they work against great odds. They confront Islamists whose dedication to theocratic principles is deeply and undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture. And they confront American opinion elites who, wittingly or not, serve as the lifeline of the Islamists.

The reformers’ slim chance at prevailing hinges on the American people’s will to say “no” to our self-anointed betters. Ground Zero, once again the site of epic Islamist overreach, may be remembered as the place where we started to say “no.”

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Jeffrey Anderson, Weekly Standard
Well, it's good to see that the Democrats have finally, belatedly, come around to our thesis:  that those who voted against Obamacare will be on far safer ground in November than those who voted for it. Politico now reports that at least five congressional Democrats who voted against what one of them calls "massive government health care" are running ads touting that fact.  Meanwhile, Politico writes, "[I]t appears that no Democratic incumbent "“ in the House or in the Senate "“ has run a pro-reform...

I know you heard Harry Reid’s infamous statement. Which one, you ask? The one he made recently before a group of his Hispanic supporters. He said, “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, okay? Do I need to say more?”

No. In a way, I don’t know how Harry Reid could be majority leader of the United States Senate, okay? Do I need to say more?

#ad#It is high time for this spectacularly crude and offensive man to go. Of all the things I want in November, I want nothing more than that Sharron Angle beat him. Oh, people’s heads would explode. Democrats’ heads would explode, of course. (Can you imagine the media coverage?) And so would those of anti-Tea Party Republicans. I think I want Sharron Angle to beat Harry Reid even more than I want Marco Rubio to beat Charlie Crist, which is saying something.

Hey, isn’t Rubio a “Hispanic Republican”? In truth, he’s an American and a human being. That’s a concept, of course, that many people have difficulty with.

Consider another of our majority leader’s greatest hits: the statement that Obama is a “light-skinned” black “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” I fear there is nothing that Harry Reid can’t survive. Maybe Angle’s challenge will be what at last upends him.

She has shown shakiness as a candidate, to be sure. I imagine she’s an underdog. But I think she has a basic integrity -- a sincerity, a spirit of goodwill -- that is missing in her opponent. (For a write-up I did about Angle, recording early impressions, go here.)

A final comment about Reid, before I stop huffing. (I have many more topics to huff about.) Actually, this is more a comment about his party: Did any Senate Democrats take offense at their leader’s wonderment that any Hispanic could be a Republican? Did any prominent Democrats at large take offense? Did any wince inside? I hope so, but I can’t be sure of it. You?

#*#I’ll tell you what a hot race is: the one for Maryland governor between Martin O’Malley, the Democrat and incumbent, and Robert Ehrlich, the Republican and challenger. Ehrlich used to be the governor, until O’Malley beat him. Now Ehrlich is trying to turn the tables. And he is one of the most interesting and impressive Republicans -- and interesting and impressive libertarian-conservatives -- in the country.

For a piece I did on him in a June National Review, go here. That piece is called “Back in the Game.” It was the third piece I had written about him -- I could be accused of stalking. I first wrote about him while he was governor, in 2005. That piece was called “All-American.” (Ehrlich was a football standout.) Then, when he lost to O’Malley, I did a sort of thanks-and-goodbye piece: “Exit of a Champion.”

Well, not so fast . . .

#*#Another candidate to keep an eye on? This one’s running for the U.S. House, down in Florida. (“Down” for most everybody, right? For most every American, that is.) He is Allen West, a former military man and absolutely fearless: a nice combination of thoughtful and fearless. He is a rock-ribbed Reagan Republican. And, for those keeping racial score -- and what do Americans like to do more? -- he is black. I wrote about West for a May NR. Go here, if you’re interested.

He has the habit of signing himself “Steadfast and Loyal” -- I believe it is true, too. And steadfastness and loyalty are among the most precious human qualities.

#*#What do Americans like to do more than keep racial score? I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what they like to do as much: sue. I think it long ago passed baseball as our national pastime.

#*#A few months ago in New York, I was talking with some diplomats from East Asia. These people had been in America for several years; I had known them a little. I said, “Let’s talk turkey. No need to be diplomatic. What do you dislike about America? What do you think is unattractive about this country?” To break the ice, I gave a little list (racial hang-ups, litigiousness, extreme political correctness in language, etc.). One woman, somewhat hesitantly, said, “Americans don’t save anything. Everything is thrown away, quickly. And things are made not to last.”

Ah, “the disposable society.” We used to talk a fair amount about that one. I had sort of forgotten about it.

#*#A friend of mine sent me an e-mail headed, “An Illustration of Good and Evil.” Well, he must be a terribly simpleminded friend, right? Because there is no such thing as good and evil. Only Manichean blockheads can think so.

Dunno. My friend sent me two pictures; they can be found accompanying a column by the magnificent Jeff Jacoby, here. Here is the caption to one picture: “Hodaya Ames, 9, cries at her parents’ funeral after they were killed by Hamas terrorists last week. Hodaya’s mother was nine months pregnant with her seventh child.” Here is the caption to the other: “Palestinian children in Gaza, waving green Islamic flags and making a victory sign, participate in a rally to celebrate the terrorist attack that killed four Israeli Jews near Hebron on Aug. 31, 2010.” Those “four Israeli Jews” included Hodaya’s parents.

There is a world of commentary -- not to mention Commentary -- in this, but I have commented for many years, and will move on . . .

But not before saying this: Have you ever seen a picture of Israeli kids celebrating the murder, or even the deaths, of Palestinians? Even of Palestinian terrorists and mass-murderers? Let me know if you spot one.

And just one more comment: It is very, very hard to make peace with people who teach their children to celebrate the murder of your own people. Very, very hard. Which is why, many years ago, I learned to cut the Israelis slack -- miles of it.

#page##*#By now, you may well have seen, or heard about, an article by Peter Baker in the New York Times. It was about Obama as commander-in-chief. And it contained a quotation made famous by Charles Krauthammer, in a column of his. For the Times article, go here; for the K’hammer column, go here.

That quotation comes from an adviser to Obama, and it goes like this: “Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics. [Obama] would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”

#ad#Chew on those words a bit: Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics. No Republican foe said that -- a presidential adviser did. Why doesn’t the world stop until this is sorted out? Do you know what I mean? Why doesn’t the Staten Island Ferry stop running, Halladay stop pitching, and water stop pouring over Niagara?

It’s just one line in a newspaper, I know, but . . . holy Moses, what a statement, from such a source.

#*#So, there was the guy who drank in Al Gore and took hostages at the Discovery Channel building, threatening to kill them and to blow the joint up. He was shot by the police before he could kill anyone.

A little Memory Lane -- dark alley. I remember distinctly when Rabin was assassinated in Israel: The Left said that the Likud party had “created the climate” -- that was the buzzphrase, “created the climate” -- in which this could take place.

Some months before that, McVeigh and his helpers had blown up the Oklahoma City building. President Clinton strongly suggested that Rush Limbaugh, and conservative talk radio, was responsible. I thought this was just about as despicable a thing as a president could do. Do you remember his commencement address at Michigan State University? Vile.

Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans. I wrote a piece called “All the Uglier: What Katrina whipped up.” It was about the reaction to the disaster, especially the blaming of George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and anyone else who ever looked askance at the Sierra Club. I recently re-read that piece. I am not easily shocked, I promise you, but I was shocked all over again at what people said, and got away with: RFK Jr., for one. Anyway, that piece is here.

Did I have a point, in this little impromptu? Oh, yeah. When people commit horrid crimes, or natural disaster strikes, we ought to be a little careful -- sober -- about holding politicians we dislike responsible. As far as I’m aware, Gore has not received the treatment meted out to Netanyahu, Rush, and other conservatives.

Although I do remember some snarky remarks that the Unabomber’s manifesto resembled Gore’s book Earth in the Balance. There were side-by-side comparisons and so on.

#*#Did you hear Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, reacting to Glenn Beck’s rally on the Mall? He said, “It’s a free country. I wish it weren’t, but it’s a free country, and you gotta respect that freedom.”

I thought of President Obama in China last year, talking to students. One of them asked him -- this is almost a heartbreaking question -- “Should we be able to use Twitter freely?” An easy question -- right? -- especially for the leader of the country that stands for freedom in the world. Our president began, “Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.” Uh-huh. Then he continued, “I should be honest: As president of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time.”

Eventually, he got around to a defense of freedom, in this unfree country, China -- took a while, though.

Weird times. Weird high-office holders.

#*#You have heard Mark Thompson, the director general of the BBC. He said, “In the BBC I joined 30 years ago, there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of people’s personal politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the left.” He claimed, of course, that things are different now. But bless him for acknowledging the massive bias of the past!

Would that there were an American figure -- our equivalent of Mark Thompson, or a near-equivalent -- who would do something like the same. Now, if Thompson could get the BBC’s Middle East coverage to be as fair as, say, al-Jazeera’s, that would be icing on the cake. (Seriously speaking, I know a media expert, who studies these things minutely, who says that al-Jazeera’s coverage is considerably fairer than the Beeb’s.)

#*#Did you get a load of Karel De Gucht? Name sounds Flemish, right? Right you are. He is Belgium’s former foreign minister, and he is now the European Union’s trade commissioner. Here’s our guy on Belgian radio:

Don’t underestimate the opinion . . . of the average Jew outside Israel. There is indeed a belief -- it’s difficult to describe it otherwise -- among most Jews that they are right. And a belief is something that’s difficult to counter with rational arguments. And it’s not so much whether these are religious Jews or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East.

Yeah, I know, that’s such a drag. You know what other people think they’re always right, in my experience? EU officials. Very hard to have conversations with.

Our guy continued, “Do not underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill. That is the best-organized lobby. You shouldn’t underestimate the grip it has on American politics -- no matter whether it’s Republicans or Democrats.”

For sure, that lobby always sends a shiver up my spine, too. And I recall the words of Archbishop Tutu, that great moral leader: “People are scared in this country [America] to say wrong is wrong, because the Jewish lobby is powerful -- very powerful.” Shiver shiver shiver.

I think that the likes of Karel De Gucht and Desmond Tutu can’t conceive of a country where the people actually support Israel -- where they admire and even love it. Therefore, if the country’s government is pro-Israel, it must be the result of a nefarious lobby, thwarting the popular will.

Never before, until this era, have people said that a Jewish minority is frustrating the majority will and destiny. Never before have people said that a Jewish tail is wagging a great national dog. Right? And never before has this assertion been a prelude to strikes on Jews. Right?

#page##*#I noticed the cover of The National Interest. Bearing a photo of Neville Chamberlain, it says, “Appeaser!” Then it says, “Paul Kennedy on the Most Abused Word in History.” Munich gave appeasement a very bad name, it is true. (That was a lesson taught to me by a history professor of mine, who otherwise wasn’t worth much.)

But I believe that, quite possibly, the most abused word in history -- where politics and world affairs are concerned -- is “peace.” And then, possibly, “fascism.” Of course, the most abused word of all time -- any sphere -- is “love.”

#ad##*#A little language? I saw a headline I liked very much -- I’m not used to hearing the Minnesota Vikings referred to as the “Vikes.” So I just smiled over, “Harvin Out of Hospital, Back with Vikes.” I will try to work the term into my own writing. (But how? The Vikings don’t come up much, in my work. Maybe a reflection on Fran Tarkenton? Hey, I have an idea: a piece or note on Alan Page’s jurisprudence?)

#*#I was doing a little Googling about Whitman’s Chocolates -- because I was mentioning them in a piece -- and I saw an ad from 1918. I think it is my favorite ad of all time now. “In peace times a pleasant luxury. In war times a fighting food.”

#*#A little memory of James Jackson Kilpatrick -- Kilpo -- who died recently. A memory of him and his wife, Marianne Means. They were both newspaper columnists. Kilpo was a righty, Means a lefty. They were a Carville-and-Matalin couple, though not nearly as well known for that. They married quite late -- second marriages, I assume. In their seventies (I believe). When we lived in Georgetown -- back in Washington days (obviously) -- I would see them kind of toddling on the sidewalk, and I found this sight rather touching. Here was an elderly couple much enjoying each other’s company, or so it seemed.

I bet Kilpatrick had not struck most people as the kind of conservative who would marry a liberal -- and a professional, public liberal at that.

#*#Spent a few days in Toronto recently. A few observations? The people seemed exceptionally nice -- but maybe not exceptionally nice for Canada. On the street, a man bumped into me and said, “Excuse me.” I thought, “Baby, you ain’t in Manhattan no mo’.” (I jest -- Manhattan is a perfectly friendly place. In a way.)

Thought of a song lyric: “I had the time, the time of my life. I saw a man who danced with his wife, in Chicago . . .” I was bumped into by a man who said, “Excuse me,” in Toronto . . .

#*#The ushers in the ballpark were very, very nice. “Thank you for coming. May I help you find your seat?” Holy mackerel -- it wasn’t like this in Tiger Stadium when I was growing up, I can tell you.

#*#Back in Michigan, back then, the Canadian dollar was kind of worthless. It wasn’t a real dollar; it was a toy dollar, worth 75 cents or something. I worked at golf courses, and sometimes Canucks would come in and try to pay their greens fees with Canadian dollars. We would just laugh. Hey, hoser, might as well offer up beads, eh?

Well, who’s the joke on now? I found, in Toronto, that the American dollar is worth less than the Canadian. Great, just frickin’ great.

#*#On one of the Canadian bills, I saw a picture of Queen Elizabeth. It was good to see her -- a “beautiful old lady,” as Charles Moore called her, correctly, in a recent column. And I had forgotten about Canada’s connection to the British crown. One can do that.

On the flip side of that bill was the legend, “Would we know each other the slightest without the arts?” Oh, for heaven’s sake. I like music and painting and all, but let’s not get carried away.

#*#A beggar held a sign the likes of which I’d never seen before: “Broke and Ugly.” Was funny. Strange thing was, the man wasn’t ugly. Broke, I’m pretty sure.

#*#Liked a billboard, by the side of the road: “Hey texty, pay attention!”

#*#Would you like some music? Because you know, without it, we wouldn’t know each other in the slightest. For my “New York Chronicle,” in the current New Criterion, go here. And that whole issue, of course, is stuffed with arts-and-letters goodness.

#*#A little more music? At the Toronto-Detroit game, they played the William Tell Overture, and I loved the thing all over again. Perfectly crafted, clearly inspired -- touched with a really intelligent spirit. I wish Rossini could know the enduring popularity of it. Wonder if he does.

I have often quoted one of his statements -- a statement he made about his posterity. He said (something like), “I hope to be survived by Act III of Otello, Act II of William Tell -- and all of The Barber” (of Seville).

Memo to itchy-fingers: Please don’t write me to say that Verdi, not Rossini, wrote Otello. Rossini wrote one too. Thank you!

I went with a friend, a couple of years ago, to a concert that included Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2. My friend said, “An old joke has it that an intellectual is someone who can hear the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger. Well, I can’t hear that concerto without thinking of Bill Buckley.” The concerto’s third movement -- a trumpet showpiece -- was the theme music of Firing Line.

But you know that, glorious NR-niks and Buckleyites! (Nixon used that term, in the 1960s, and not kindly: “Buckleyites.”) Thanks for joining me today, and us every day.
 

#JAYBOOK#

Who is trapped in a deeper, more inaccessible bunker? The 33 Chilean miners getting food, water, and messages from the outside world through a tiny borehole, or Rahm Emanuel and the fellas at the White House who have apparently not yet received word that the American public is summoning itself for a shattering rejection of the administration’s spending?

Pres. Barack Obama floated another $50 billion in infrastructure spending in a Labor Day speech in Milwaukee to union supporters as part of his highly touted, long-delayed “pivot to jobs.” But this is not a pivot, let alone to jobs, and makes you wonder if the Obama team realizes it’s not February 2009 anymore.

#ad#The administration already lavished more than $100 billion on infrastructure in its first stimulus bill. This new round of proposed spending is supposedly different because it will be “fully paid for,” in Obama’s words, but Congress has been struggling to reauthorize the transportation bill that expired more than a year ago precisely because it’s so hard to cover its costs. As for jobs, only the handful of believers in the “summer of recovery” will think that another shot of infrastructure spending will do anything for the job market soon, if ever.

During the past week, the entire political-media establishment awakened to the catastrophe awaiting Democrats in the fall. A CNN poll found that among voters who dislike both parties -- one in five voters -- Republicans now lead by 38 points. That’s a landslide, among voters who don’t even like them!

Among independents, according to CNN, Republicans lead by an outlandish 62 to 30. Polls are routinely picking up unheard-of GOP leads of roughly ten points in the generic ballot. To give you an idea of the scale of that advantage, if Republicans lead the generic ballot by “just” five points, Alan Abramowitz of Emory University forecasts a Republican pickup of 49 House seats, ten more than what’s needed to take the majority.

To beat back the coming wave, Obama is resorting to tactics and arguments that will only augment it. He wants to write George W. Bush’s name onto the 2010 ballot, even though he’s been safely retired back to Texas for two years. In a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, 58 percent think Republicans will pursue different policies from Bush. Obama’s insistence otherwise smacks of backward-looking blame-shifting.

The other day, Obama congratulated himself on his campaigning ability. But his signature strength on the stump is derision. He doesn’t just say that Republicans drove the proverbial car into the ditch; he says they’re sipping a proverbial Slurpee while Democrats work to get it out. In Milwaukee, he said his opponents have been talking about him “like a dog,” a line that both demeaned the arguments of the opposition and revealed an unflattering flash of self-pity.

Obama is not even pretending anymore to represent a different kind of politics. On anything not involving foreign policy, it’s slashing partisanship all the time. For the first time in the Washington Post/ABC News poll, a majority says he has not brought needed change to Washington, once his trademark promise. The White House counts on Obama’s fired-up and contemptuous riffs playing to the base. What about the rest of the country?

Obama’s domestic program has become one enormous wedge issue, the classic definition of which is anything that drives a “wedge” between the bulk of the electorate and a politician’s core supporters. While most people want less of Obama’s program, his base wants more. Obama could ease off his spending to try to take the edge off the brewing backlash, but that would anger his supporters. Instead, he promises his union-member allies yet more infrastructure projects. His new proposals for business-tax breaks are paid for not with spending cuts, but with countervailing business-tax increases, lest the Left throw a fit.

Amidst a potentially historic revolt against the status quo, the former agent of change offers only more of the same.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail, comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2010 by King FeaturesSyndicate.

Pastor Terry Jones’s atrocious plan to burn Korans at his Florida church on September 11 is perceived by Muslims not only as offensive, but also as a deliberate act of blasphemy. Such blasphemy is punished by imprisonment or even execution today by the governments of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and many other key members of the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic States (OIC). The definition of the crime is amorphous, often depending on the sensibilities of the particular group holding religious or political power. It usually proscribes far more than disrespectful treatment of God, the Koran, or the prophet Mohammad, and varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Since Feb. 14, 1989, when Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced Salman Rushdie a blasphemer and ordered his murder, the OIC lobbied Western governments to repress ridicule and critique of Islam, and dissent within Islam, in ways analogous to the repression already existing in many of its own countries. For example, in the United Nations, the OIC has for over a decade successfully sponsored annual resolutions calling for the creation of an international crime against “defamation” of Islam. This demand that Western governments use state power to coerce compliance by their own citizens with Islamic blasphemy strictures is therefore relatively new.

The campaign has already made significant inroads through lawsuits, diplomacy, economic boycotts, and, at times, lethal force and intimidation -- all of which are contributing to a broad chilling effect on speech concerning Islam. Western Europe, Canada, and Australia have reacted to this demand largely ad hoc; they are beginning to deploy racial and religious hate-speech bans to serve as proxies for Muslim blasphemy laws.

Politician Geert Wilders is now on trial in the Netherlands for his statements, and for his film Fitna, in which he sharply critiques the Koran and calls on Muslims to destroy it. In Germany, a man was recently convicted for the sacrilegious treatment of the word “Koran,” not the Islamic sacred text itself. Since the mid-1990s, prosecutors in Finland, Canada, and the Netherlands have trawled the websites of anti-immigration advocates looking for anti-Islamic comments.

In France, Canada, Norway, and Italy, publishers, editors, and authors -- such as NRO contributor Mark Steyn -- have been tried for inciting religious hostility and insulting religious sensibilities with their critiques of Islam and Muslim immigration. Despite France’s laïcité system of strict separation of religion and politics, animal-rights activist and national icon Brigitte Bardot has been convicted and fined five times under hate-speech laws for denouncing Islamic slaughter practices and making other derogatory statements concerning Islamic practices. Austria is currently prosecuting a criminal case against a citizen who, after living in Iran and Libya, gave a lecture to a political party in Vienna on “jihad” that was harshly critical.

In this regard, the United States is an exception, with its strong protections of free speech under the First Amendment. In the United States, neither blasphemy nor hate speech are violations of the law. (“Hate crimes” simply provide for enhanced penalties when traditional crimes are directed against certain protected groups.)

As applied in OIC states, blasphemy rules can touch on every area of human endeavor. At stake are the freedoms of religion and expression that lie at the heart of our liberal democracy.

Furthermore, within Islam itself, compliance with these demands would tip the balance in favor of fundamentalists and extremists, since reformers would be attacked for their views even in the relative safe haven of the West. The late Indonesian president Abdurrhaman Wahid warned that such efforts “play directly into the hands of fundamentalists, who wish to avoid all criticism of their attempts to narrow the scope of discourse regarding Islam, and to inter 1.3 billion Muslims in a narrow, suffocating chamber of dogmatism.”

If Islam, and Islam alone, were to be protected by the state from critique, an illiberal interpretation of Islam would attain a de facto privileged status in the United States. Conversely, should Christianity, Judaism, and other religions also benefit from such state protection, fundamental individual freedoms would be essentially negated.

Pastor Terry Jones’s Koran-burning spectacle potentially holds the danger of hurting the war effort, General Petraeus has warned. Jones should be criticized, denounced, and urged -- but not coerced -- to give up his insensitive publicity stunt.

— Nina Shea and Paul Marshall are senior fellows with Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and co-authors of the forthcoming book Silenced (Oxford University Press) on contemporary blasphemy rules.

Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
When Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, clashed with Niall Ferguson, a famous historian (and FT contributing editor), over how best to respond to the economic crisis, Prof Ferguson’s response was humorously humble. “A cat may look at a king,” he wrote, “and sometimes a historian can challenge an economist.”

Politico - “He keeps treating this country like a fire hydrant,” says the former presidential candidate.

Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast
Just over three years ago, acclaimed author and campaign adviser Samantha Power published a memo outlining the foreign policy Barack Obama would pursue if elected president. It was called “Conventional Washington versus the Change We Need.” Power’s argument—aimed straight at then-candidate Hillary Clinton—was that merely replacing George W. Bush with a Democrat would not truly change American foreign policy. It would not truly change American foreign policy because many of Bush’s policies had been supported by “the...

John Judis, The New Republic
The terms “recession” and “depression” were once used to suggest that a downturn was not as bad as a “panic” or “crisis.” In fact, for the first years of his presidency, Herbert Hoover chose to refer to the downturn as a “depression” in an effort to convey that what the country was experiencing was just a temporary indentation. Only in 1931 did Hoover begin to speak of a “Great Depression.”Our current downturn has also been plagued by word games. Faced with the fear that the...

After toppling Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska’s GOP Senate primary, Joe Miller is in no mood to compromise. Nor, he says, are fellow tea-party favorites who have won primaries across the country. “The people being elected outside of the establishment, like me, are not going to be co-opted,” he predicts in an interview with National Review Online.

Miller, a Fairbanks attorney and Yale Law grad, touts his primary win as the latest example of Americans’ expressing their frustration with Washington. He urges Republican leaders to “catch the wave.” If they don’t, he warns, “they will not be able to bring the new faces into line.” His reasoning is simple: “We are being elected for a purpose: to transform the federal government, to get us away from the brink of bankruptcy. The leadership has to embrace that message or else there will be real problems.”

#ad#Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), the Senate GOP leader, cannot bank on Miller’s support. “I’m taking a wait-and-see approach,” Miller says. Miller’s hesitation to embrace Washington, however, has not stopped Washington Republicans from embracing their party’s newest star.

Since he secured the GOP nomination last week, following a nerve-wracking count of absentee ballots, a handful of senators have reached out to him, Miller says, including John Cornyn (R., Texas), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee; Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.), the GOP whip; Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), the chairman of the Senate Conservatives Fund; and John McCain (R., Ariz.), with whom he hopes to work on national-security issues. Miller says that if he makes it to the upper chamber, DeMint will be a key ally.

Still, not everyone is scrambling to assist the insurgent. Murkowski, for her part, has yet to endorse Miller. “We’re giving her some space,” he says. “She’ll come around in her own time. We certainly would like to have her support. We want all Republicans behind this candidacy.”

Regardless of when or if Murkowski comes onboard, Miller knows that he already has another high-profile Alaska Republican on his side: former governor Sarah Palin. Palin endorsed Miller early in the primary, a move he calls “critical” to his success. “I think the world of [the Palin family],” he says. “Their involvement in this race will remain up to them.” On September 11, Palin is reportedly joining Glenn Beck of Fox News in Anchorage for a rally. Will Miller join the pair? “There has been some contact [between camps],” he says, but he tells us that for the moment, he is unsure whether he will attend.

As much as he appreciates Palin’s support, Miller hopes that his campaign will be about more than tea-party buzz. “I want to go after federal dependency,” he says. Bringing that message to the 49th state, long reliant on federal dollars for infrastructure projects, is like ripping the bottle out of an overgrown baby’s hands. “We need leaders with the courage to confront the entitlement state,” he says. Though Alaskans have been recipients of federal handouts for decades, he reckons they “are attracted to the idea of becoming more independent and using their resource base to create jobs.”

Come November, Miller will face Democrat Scott McAdams, a little-known mayor from southern Alaska. “It’s going to be a hard-fought battle,” he says. “The liberal Left will pull out all the stops.” For now, polls show Miller holding onto an early lead: Rasmussen puts him up by six points and Public Policy Polling has him up by eight. “My message — increased power to Alaska and less dependency on the federal government — is not going to be watered down for the general election,” he pledges.

Indeed, even Miller’s whiskers will stay untouched. “I’ve had my beard ever since I got out of the military,” he says. “It’s not something that I grew for politics. It’s me, so like it or leave it, it’s going to stay.”

-- Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.

The great tragedy of American education is not that the system fails so many children, but that we know why and yet do very little about it.

The statistics still shock, but they no longer surprise.

The United States today spends more money on education per pupil ($11,000) than almost any other country, and yet it routinely finishes near the bottom of international math, science, and literacy surveys. On average, our fourth-graders do pretty well, but by the time those children get to eighth grade they begin to slide, and by twelfth grade they can no longer keep up with many of their peers in other countries.

#ad#The situation for our minority students is even worse. According to a recent study, black and Latino students trail white students of the same age by the equivalent of two to three years of learning. And according to the Wall Street Journal, 10 percent of America’s high schools produce 50 percent of America’s dropouts, and African-American children have a 50-50 chance of attending one of them.

My state of Minnesota tells the story. We boast the nation’s highest ACT scores, and at least 70 percent of Minnesota kids graduate from high school. Sounds pretty good, right? But if you look deeper into the statistics, it turns out that fewer than half of Minnesota’s minority students graduate from high school. That pattern repeats itself across the nation.

And yet for decades, a cartel of teachers’ unions, bureaucrats, and politicians has stood in the way of innovation, reform, and results.

In Minnesota, we’ve made more progress than most. My administration created the nation’s first statewide performance-pay program, linking teacher compensation to classroom and student achievement rather than just seniority. We imposed rigorous math and science graduation standards. We established school report cards, so parents could follow the performance of their children’s schools.

We wanted to do so much more, and could have. But the teachers’ unions blocked us at every turn.

In eight years, the only major piece of my education agenda the unions supported was an $800 million increase in K–12 spending in the 2005–06 budget; nearly every other reform was rejected. For all their rhetoric about “the children,” when push comes to shove, what the teachers’ unions really want is raises, every year, for jobs they can never lose at schools that need never compete.

That entitlement mentality just won’t cut it any more. America’s education cartel is an indulgence we can no longer afford, either as citizens paying taxes to dysfunctional governments or as competitors in a global economic market.

That’s why the tide may finally be turning. Strapped by the recession and appalled by the status quo, the forces of reform are standing up to the schoolyard bullies in the education cartel, and winning. Teachers’ unions want money, and more of it. But the rest of America wants better education, and teachers’ unions are in the way.

#page#In Florida, the state legislature finally passed landmark education reforms first championed by Gov. Jeb Bush; unfortunately, Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed the legislation. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie fought to bring spiraling education costs under control, and he won voters’ support. In liberal cities like Washington, D.C., and New York City, schools chiefs have fired teachers who can’t teach and embraced charter schools.

Even President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are encouraging reform. Yes, the president killed school choice for poor kids in Washington, D.C., and he recently bailed out teachers’ unions with $31 billion we don’t have. But to the administration’s credit, Obama and Duncan have stuck to their guns on their Race to the Top initiative, which at least ties federal education dollars to structural changes in state education policies.

#ad#Private or religious schools should be an option for all Americans, not just the privileged few. Public schools should be forced to compete in a field where they will be judged by who has the best teachers and the best outcomes. Schools, districts, and states should embrace market-based reforms that reward good teachers and principals, while removing bad ones. And alternative formats like home schooling, vocational apprenticeships, and online learning should be supported and further integrated into our public systems.

At the federal level, we should create “charter states,” freeing states from the regulations tied to federal education dollars in exchange for transparency and, most important, results.

As schoolchildren return to class across the country this week, the forces for reform are closer than ever to guaranteeing every child a high-quality education. The era of education policy written for and by teachers’ unions is drawing to a close.

-- Tim Pawlenty is finishing his second term as governor of Minnesota.

The furor over the Islamic center, variously called the Ground Zero mosque, Cordoba House, and Park51, has large implications for the future of Islam in the United States and perhaps beyond.

The debate is as unexpected as it is extraordinary. One would have thought that the event to touch a nerve within the American body politic, making Islam a national issue, would be an act of terrorism. Or discovery that Islamists had penetrated U.S. security services. Or the dismaying results of survey research. Or an apologetic presidential speech.

#ad#But no, something more symbolic roiled the body politic -- the prospect of a mosque in close proximity to the World Trade Center’s former location. What began as a local zoning matter morphed over the months into a national debate with potential foreign-policy repercussions. Its symbolic quality fit a pattern established in other Western countries. Islamic coverings on females have spurred repeated national debates in France since 1989. The Swiss banned the building of minarets. The murder of Theo van Gogh profoundly affected the Netherlands, as did the publication of Mohammad cartoons in Denmark.

Oddly, only after the Islamic center’s location had generated weeks of controversy did the issue of individuals, organizations, and funding behind the project finally come to the fore -- although these obviously have more significance than does location. Personally, I do not object to a truly moderate Muslim institution in proximity to Ground Zero; conversely, I object to an Islamist institution being constructed anywhere. Ironically, building the center in such close proximity to Ground Zero, given the intense emotions it aroused, will likely redound against the long-term interests of Muslims in the United States.

This new emotionalism marks the start of a difficult stage for Islamists in the United States. Although their origins as an organized force go back to the founding of the Muslim Student Association in 1963, they came of age politically in the mid-1990s, when they emerged as a force in U.S. public life.

I was fighting Islamists back then, and things went badly. It was, in practical terms, just Steven Emerson and me versus hundreds of thousands of Islamists. He and I could not find adequate intellectual support, money, media interest, or political backing. Our cause felt quite hopeless.

My lowest point came in 1999, when a retired U.S. career foreign service officer named Richard Curtiss spoke on Capitol Hill about “the potential of the American Muslim community” and compared its advances to Mohammad’s battles in seventh-century Arabia. He flat-out predicted that, just as Mohammad once had prevailed, so too would American Muslims. While Curtiss spoke only about changing policy toward Israel, his themes implied a broader Islamist takeover of the United States. His prediction seemed unarguable.

September 11 provided a wake-up call, ending this sense of hopelessness. Americans reacted badly not just to that day’s horrifying violence but also to the Islamists’ outrageous insistence on blaming the attacks on U.S. foreign policy and, later, the election of Barack Obama, or their blatant denial that the perpetrators were Muslims or of intense Muslim support for the attacks.

American scholars, columnists, bloggers, media personalities, and activists became knowledgeable about Islam, developing into a community, a community that now feels like a movement. The Islamic-center controversy represents its emergence as a political force, offering an angry, potent reaction inconceivable just a decade earlier.

The energetic push-back of recent months finds me partially elated: Those who reject Islamism and all its works now constitute a majority and are on the march. For the first time in fifteen years, I feel I may be on the winning team.

But I have one concern: the team’s increasing anti-Islamic tone. Misled by the Islamists’ insistence that there can be no such thing as “moderate Islam,” my allies often fail to distinguish between Islam (a faith) and Islamism (a radical utopian ideology aiming to implement Islamic laws in their totality). This amounts to not just an intellectual error but a policy dead end. Targeting all Muslims is contrary to basic Western notions, lumps friends with foes, and ignores the inescapable fact that Muslims alone can offer an antidote to Islamism. As I often note, radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution.

Once this lesson is learned, the new energy will bring the defeat of Islamism dimly into sight.

— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. ©2010 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

The giveaway regarding presidential candidate Barack Obama’s plans for America was his repeated use of the words “fundamentally transform.”

Some of us instinctively reacted negatively -- in fact, with horror -- at the thought of fundamentally transforming America.

#ad#The “us” are conservatives.

One unbridgeable divide between Left and Right is how each views alternatives to present-day America.

Those on the Left imagine an ideal society that has never existed, and therefore seek to “fundamentally transform” America. When liberals imagine an America fundamentally transformed, they envision it becoming a nearly utopian society in which there is no greed, no racism, no sexism, no inequality, no poverty, and ultimately no unhappiness.

Conservatives, on the other hand, look around at other societies and look at history and are certain that if America were fundamentally transformed, it would become just like those other societies. America would become a society of far less liberty, of ethically and morally inferior citizens, and of much more unhappiness. Moreover, cruelty would increase exponentially around the world.

Conservatives believe that America is an aberration in human history; that, with all the problems that a society made up of flawed human beings will inevitably have, America has been and remains a uniquely decent society. Therefore, conservatives worry that fundamentally transforming America -- making America less exceptional -- will mean that America gets much worse.

Liberals, on the other hand, worry over the opposite possibility -- that America will remain more or less as it is.

Two famous statements encapsulate the operative liberal worldview.

The first was attributed to Robert F. Kennedy by his brother Edward M. Kennedy:

“There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

The other is one of the most popular songs of the last 50 years, John Lennon’s “Imagine”:

Imagine there’s no Heaven 
It’s easy if you try 
No hell below us 
Above us only sky 
Imagine all the people 
Living for today 

Imagine there’s no countries 
It isn’t hard to do 
Nothing to kill or die for 
And no religion too 
Imagine all the people 
Living life in peace 

You may say that I’m a dreamer 
But I’m not the only one 
I hope someday you’ll join us 
And the world will be as one 

Imagine no possessions 
I wonder if you can 
No need for greed or hunger 
A brotherhood of man 
Imagine all the people 
Sharing all the world 

You may say I’m a dreamer 
But I’m not the only one 
I hope someday you’ll join us 
And the world will live as one 

#page#Regarding the Kennedy quote, a conservative would respond something like this:

We conservatives look at America and ask, How did something so decent, so different from other societies, ever get created and last over 200 years? Of course, we always seek to improve it. But more than anything else, we seek to preserve it and its core values. We do not “dream of things that never were.” We dream the same dream as our American forefathers did -- to maintain a society committed to the values of E Pluribus Unum, Liberty, and In God We Trust. As for utopian dreams, we believe they are more likely to result in nightmares -- horrors that would engulf America and the world if America were to be transformed.

#ad#To John Lennon’s song, a conservative would respond:

Lennon’s utopia is our dystopia. A world without God to give people some certitude that all their suffering is not meaningless is a nightmare. A world without religion means a world without any systematic way of ennobling people. A world without countries is a world without the United States of America; a world governed by the ruthless tyrannies and by the morally imbecilic United Nations, where mass murderers sit on its “human rights” councils. A world without heaven or hell is a world without any ultimate justice, where torturers and their victims have identical fates -- oblivion. A world without possessions is a world in which some enormous state possesses everything and the individual is reduced to the status of a serf.

Liberals frequently criticize conservatives for fearing change. That is not correct. We fear transforming that which is already good. The moral record of humanity does not fill us with optimism about “fundamentally transforming” something as rare as America. Evil is normal. America is not.

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.

Newly returned from a week in Paris and well sated with delicious cheeses, magnificent art, and glorious (inexpensive!) wines, one is disinclined to reflect upon the decline of Europe. But the demographic reality so scathingly limned in Mark Steyn’s America Alone cannot be long avoided. Those adorable French babies are not quite as scarce as, say, Lithuanian ones (a 2.1 total fertility rate is required for a society to maintain itself -- Lithuania’s rate is 1.2), but the number of French tots is not quite adequate (1.9). As for Europe as a whole, it’s disappearing -- the average fertility rate is 1.53.

Many explanations for this civilizational decline have been proffered -- socialism, prosperity, selfishness, secularism. But an essay by Pascal Bruckner in City Journal, though addressing a different topic, is probably closest to the truth.

#ad#Bruckner, a Paris-born intellectual with a gift for aphorism, takes deadly aim at Europe’s self-hatred -- the spirit that pervades the continent.

“Europe sees its history as a series of murders and depredations that culminated in two global conflicts,” he writes. Europe, according to Pascal, has since World War II been “tormented by a need to repent.#...#Those born after World War II are endowed with the certainty of belonging to the dregs of humanity, an execrable civilization that has dominated and pillaged most of the world for centuries in the name of the superiority of the white man.”

Do Europeans have reason to be remorseful? While denying that guilt can be transmitted from generation to generation -- “As there is no hereditary transmission of victim status, so there is no transmission of oppressor status” -- Bruckner acknowledges that European history is pockmarked with crimes: slavery, feudal oppression, colonialism, fascism, and Communism.

But then, which continent’s civilization is not? Even colonialism, the marquee European crime, is hardly a European monopoly, far less a European innovation. The Romans, Persians, Mongols, Egyptians, Turks, Inca, Japanese, Arabs, Sosso, Chinese, and Sioux, among countless others, have conquered and dominated other peoples. Conquest and exploitation are the rule in human history rather than the exception.

Bruckner suggests that Europeans have lost sight of that perspective and wallow in their own self-disgust. “We now live on self-denunciation, as if permanently indebted to the poor, the destitute, to immigrants -- as if our only duty were expiation, endless expiation, restoring without limit what we had taken from humanity from the beginning.” But, of course, attempting neatly to divide whole swaths of humanity into “innocent victim” and “cruel oppressor” categories leads to mental and moral confusion. “Since 9/11#...#a majority of Europeans have felt, despite our sympathy for the victims, that the Americans got what they deserved. The same reasoning prevailed with respect to the terrorist attacks on Madrid in 2004 and on London in 2005, when many good souls, on both the right and the left, portrayed the attackers as unfortunate people protesting Europe’s insolent wealth, its aggression in Iraq or Afghanistan, or its way of life.”

In fact, Bruckner argues, while Europe was certainly guilty of racism, colonialism, fascism, and the rest of the endlessly recited catalogue of culpabilities, Europe also transcended those sins and provided the intellectual ammunition with which to defeat them. Europe conquered others, but also developed the discipline of anthropology, which “is a way of seeing through others’ eyes.” Yes, they sent armies to foreign capitals, but “the colonial adventure died of this fundamental contradiction: the subjection of continents to the laws of the mother country that at the same time taught its subjects the idea of a nation’s right to govern itself. In demanding independence, the colonies were applying to their masters the very rules that they had learned from them.”

Europe, Bruckner adds, “has vanquished its most horrible monsters. Slavery was abolished, colonialism abandoned, fascism defeated, and communism brought to its knees. What other continent can claim more?”

Europe’s collective guilt complex has produced passivity in the face of contemporary challenges. “If the Old World invariably prefers guilt to responsibility, it is because the first is less burdensome; so one puts up with a guilty conscience.” And the nub is this: “Our lazy despair leads us not to fight injustice but to coexist with it.#...#Repentance makes of us a people who apologize for old crimes in order to ignore present ones.”

And that becomes a new crime. Bruckner’s indictment is a sharp corrective to the indolence that has come to characterize the birthplace of Western civilization. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate.

Pres. Barack Obama boldly proclaims, “The buck stops here!” But whenever his policies are criticized, he acts as if the buck stopped with George W. Bush.

The party line that we are likely to be hearing from now until the November elections is that Obama “inherited” the big federal budget deficits and that he has to “clean up the mess” left in the economy by the Republicans. This may convince those who want to be convinced, but it will not stand up under scrutiny.

#ad#No president of the United States can create either a budget deficit or a budget surplus. All spending bills originate in the House of Representatives and all taxes are voted into law by Congress.

Democrats controlled both houses of Congress before Barack Obama became president. The deficit he inherited was created by the congressional Democrats, including Sen. Barack Obama, who did absolutely nothing to oppose the runaway spending. He was one of the biggest of the big spenders.

The last time the federal government had a budget surplus, Bill Clinton was president, so it was called “the Clinton surplus.” But Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, where all spending bills originate, for the first time in 40 years. It was also the first budget surplus in more than a quarter of a century.

The only direct power that any president has that can affect deficits and surpluses is the power to veto spending bills. President Bush did not veto enough spending bills, but Senator Obama and his fellow Democrats in control of Congress were the ones who passed the spending bills.

Today, with Barack Obama in the White House, allied with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in charge in Congress, the national debt is a bigger fraction of the annual national output than it has been in more than half a century. And that fraction is projected to continue going up for years to come, becoming larger than national output in 2012.

Having created this scary situation, President Obama now says, “Don’t give in to fear. Let’s reach for hope.” The voters reached for hope when they elected Obama. The fear comes from what he has done since taking office.

“The worst thing we could do is to go back to the very same policies that created this mess in the first place,” he said recently. “In November, you’re going to have that choice.”

Another political fable is that the current economic downturn is due to not enough government regulation of the housing and financial markets. But it was precisely the government regulators, under pressure from politicians, who forced banks and other lending institutions to lower their standards for making mortgage loans.

These risky loans, and the defaults that followed, were what set off a chain reaction of massive financial losses that brought down the whole economy.

Was this due to George W. Bush and the Republicans? Only partly. Most of those who pushed the lowering of mortgage-lending standards were Democrats -- notably Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Christopher Dodd -- though too many Republicans went along.

At the heart of these policies were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which bought huge amounts of risky mortgages, passing the risk on from the banks that lent the money (and made the profits) to the taxpayers that were not even aware that they would end up paying in the end.

When President Bush said in 2004 that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be reined in, 76 members of the House of Representatives issued a statement to the contrary. These included Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Charles Rangel.

If we are going to talk about “the policies that created this mess in the first place,” let’s at least get the facts straight and the names right.

The current policies of the Obama administration are a continuation of the same reckless policies that brought on the current economic problems -- all in the name of “change.” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still sacred cows in Washington, even though they have already required the biggest bailouts of all.

Why? Because they allow politicians to direct vast sums of money where it will do politicians the most good, either personally or in terms of buying votes in the next election.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Ross Douthat, New York Times
Last Wednesday, a man named James Lee entered the headquarters of the Discovery Channel with explosives strapped to his body, took three hostages at gunpoint, and waited for his demands to be met.A foe of population growth, Lee had apparently decided that shows like “Kate Plus Eight” and “19 Kids and Counting” were pushing the planet toward destruction. “All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants,” he decreed, before moving on to demand solutions for “global...