I had the welcome chance to speak at the convention of the Tea Party of the San Francisco Bay Area last weekend (yes there is one!). I wanted to share my impressions, because they are totally at odds with the image of the tea party in the media. Apparently, President Obama has given an interview to Rolling Stone where he has called the Tea party the tool of “very powerful, special-interest lobbies.” He also claims that it has members who are “a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the president.”

Obama could not be more wrong -- in fact, his thinking shows a lot more about his problems than the tea party's. If the Tea Party is being run by special interest lobbies, then our special interest lobbies are in a lot of trouble. The convention was held at the Mill Valley community center. There were about 500 people there; it was standing room only. They spent the whole day milling about between different tables that represented various groups, ranging from the NRA to the seller of a cookbook of "conservative recipes." I didn't look, but I assume it was full of recipes for meatloaf and mashed potatoes with nary a sprig of endive in sight. There were funny T-shirts, cut-outs where you can get your picture taken next to Lincoln, Reagan, or Palin, and lots of sugary foods from Costco.

It was all very unprofessional, by which I mean that it did not seem the least bit stage managed or fake, in the way that the events put on by professional political operatives usually are. It was all quite spontaneous. Here's an example. The speakers were unorganized, and had to speak in the hall in competition with all of the tables. So if people were not interested in a speaker, they would just go on buying and selling books and T-shirts or signing up for petitions, and eventually the speaker would be drowned out. If they were interested, the chatter would stop and eventually people would stop and listen. It was, in a charming way, the competition of the free market of ideas at work.

I talked to a lot of the people who organized it, out of academic curiosity, because I wanted to see how these folks fit into our theories of political mobilization. These folks were not out of central casting or the textbooks. The organizer of the event, Sally Zelikowsky, was a stay at home mom (with a law degree), who finally got fed up with Obama's nationalization of the economy and health care, and just started emailing people. She had the off-the-cuff idea to have a protest on tax day in downtown San Francisco of all places, followed by a march to Nancy Pelosi's office -- it drew more than a 1,000 people. Here's another example. There was no tea at the event, neither iced nor hot! A professional political operative wouldn't have forgotten the tea for a tea party event. But the nice lady in charge of refreshments was a retired flight attendant, and it just didn't occur to her. I talked with another organizer, who had a very interesting argument to make about a specific Anti-Federalist paper on patriotism. Most people have never heard of the Anti-Federalists, not to mention the Federalists -- luckily, I had read it. But not exactly what they teach in lobbying 101.

The idea that the attendees are anti-immigrant or racist or sexist is, I think, bizarre. It could only be made by journalists or Presidents who haven't been to one of these conventions. I saw people of different races (in fact, Ward Connerly spoke later after me), sexes, and ages. They were certainly not rich -- I met everyone from high school baseball coaches to lawyers and doctors. They seemed drawn together by three things. First, they are really interested in the Constitution. Second, they think that the federal government under this President has violated the Constitution's limits on federal power over the economy and society. Third, they are patriotic and believe that America is an exceptional country and worthy of the devotion of its citizens.

I think Obama foolishly and mistakenly attacks the tea party as the tool of special interests or as potential bigots. It says more about him that he attributes hateful motives to people who simply disagree with him as a matter of policy and of the Constitution. He has become so arrogant and out of touch with the American people that he sees disagreement as bad faith racial animus or class conflict. It is a sign that he thinks he has some kind of messianic mission and that he is a figure of world-historical significance, and that all opposition is somehow immoral. Luckily, the Framers designed our political system to remedy itself when confronted by demagogic leaders, and hopefully the November elections will be the first start.

The toy company Fisher-Price is recalling 11 million items, 7 million of which are Fisher-Price Trikes and Tough Trikes toddler tricycles. The company is being praised by the Consumer Product Safety Commission for its actions. There are reports that ten kids have been hurt, with six requiring medical attention. Ten. Not 10,000, but ten. I don't like seeing kids get hurt. I like kids. I have kids. Heck, I was a kid. But ten? Apparently these vehicles, according to the commission, have a protruding plastic ignition key near the seat that children can bump into or sit on or fall on, leading to injuries that have included genital bleeding. But ten? I'm guessing more than ten kids hurt themselves each year with plastic protractors. Well, at least the parents of these little victims can look forward to free health care, and all of us can look forward to getting these tiny deathtraps off the...well, off the playroom floor.

Quick: whose appointment to Chief of Staff would hand Obama's critics the knobbiest possible stick to clobber him with?

White House senior adviser and longtime Obama family friend Valerie Jarrett laughed off the possibility of a promotion to White House chief of staff this morning during an appearance on ABC's The View.

"Let's slow down a minute," she said, laughing, after being pressed as to whether she would accept the position if offered it. "I love my job... I would like to just do what I'm doing."

Jarrett, who currently serves as assistant to the president for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, is known to be one of President Obama's most trusted advisers.

Public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, eh? Who better to consult on Rahm's replacement? Yet Jarrett sure didn't say anything about admired workhorse and known quantity Pete Rouse, Rahm's immediate, probably interim, successor. Instead, continuing the pattern of strange ineptitude she has shown in her current position, she served up canned formula on national television. Empty prevarication! Deeee-licious! If the President asks you to be his Chief of Staff, you can't say no, but I suspect right about now Valerie Jarrett is seeing the world in Cheneyvision: she sounds like someone who believes the best person for Rahm's job is herself.

Obama ought to know better. Valerie Jarrett personifies everything distant, self-entitled, arrogant, and nontransparent about his administration. Only a fool or a mortal enemy would counsel him to phase her in after Rouse cleans up dutifully after Rahm Emanuel. And what of the President's own judgment? The whole political world is watching.

The four surviving leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge have been indicted for genocide by a UN-backed Cambodian tribunal.

City Journal's Guy Sorman makes a point that cannot be made often enough: The Khmer Rouge did not slaughter one and a half million of their countrymen because the United States provoked them to do it. They did not do it because of their distinct Khmer history. They did it because they were communists, and that's what communists do.

What the Khmer Rouge brought to Cambodia was in fact real Communism. There was no radical distinction, either conceptually or concretely, between the rule of the Khmer Rouge and that of Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, or the North Korean regime. All Communist regimes follow strangely similar trajectories, barely colored by local traditions. In every case, these regimes seek to make a blank slate of the past and to forge a new humanity. In every case, the “rich,” intellectuals, and skeptics wind up exterminated. The Khmer Rouge rounded up urban and rural populations in agricultural communities based on precedents both Russian (the Kolkhozy) and Chinese (the popular communes), and they acted for the same ideological reasons and with the same result: famine. There is no such thing as real Communism without massacre, torture, concentration camps, gulags, or laogai. And if there has never been any such thing, then we must conclude that there could be no other outcome: Communist ideology leads necessarily to mass violence, because the masses do not want real Communism. This is as true in the rice fields of Cambodia as in the plains of Ukraine or under Cuban palms.

Parentheticallly, note that for once the UN is playing an entirely appropriate and salutary role. Let's not forget this when we denounce them (rightly) for their more characteristic record of pusillanimity, profligacy and uselessness. This is what the UN should be doing.

Duane Oyen, writing on the Ricochet facebook page, says the RINO hunting has got to stop:

Nonsense like this is what may doom the Right....[W]hen the purges go this far, we are setting up to get a whopping 25% of the vote. No serious discussion of policy or alternatives, let alone the realities of governing; just bumper sticker slogans and invective.

Here's a little taste of the so-called nonsense:

The beltway buzz is all 'atwitter about Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty's possible run for the GOP Presidential nominee-nod in 2012. I believe and know Pawlenty to be in the big-spending GOP camp. He would be a terrible choice. Albeit he would predictably start to strut around his conservative ideals only to govern like another quasi-RINO in sheep's clothing...True-conservatives please stand up. Party activists please stand up. Reaganite conservative limited government believers please stand up. If this guy is the nominee, I am vying for a third party.

The call for party purity is dangerous and self-defeating. Without a broad coalition of support, the Right will be unable to garner the majorities it needs to effect policy change in the legislature. And yet, I all too often hear fellow conservatives express their preference for all or nothing. If we can't have a majority of principled leaders who won't stray from the limited-government, deficit-hawk, tax-cutting rubric of "real" conservatism, best just to let the Democrats have control of the government so that they're to blame when things go wrong. This is all well and good in theory, but it's simply not realistic.

Take for example my blue state of California. The best candidate we can hope to elect to the Senate is Carly Fiorina, and to the governorship, Meg Whitman. I've heard both women decried as RINOs countless times right here on Ricochet. But considering the electorate in this state at this point in history, these two candidates would be immeasurably better than their alternatives.

While I agree that now is the time for conservatives to rally around first principles -- and among those, cutting spending, tackling deficits, curtailing government growth -- we mustn't go so far as to alienate a broad swath of support by demanding ideological purity.

On Sunday, I drew attention to a survey done by Glenn Bolger of Public Opinion Strategies for the American Action Network, which showed that -- while the Republican advantage on the generic ballot was only 5% -- the party had an 18% advantage in the 66 House districts held by the Democrats and rated a toss-up by Charlie Cook at the time the poll was taken. I also noted that no pollster had foreseen Joe Miller’s defeat of Lisa Murkowski and Christine O’Donnell’s defeat of Mark Castle, and I suggested that the pollsters may be underestimating the conservative surge underway.

On Tuesday, I presented further evidence for the surge, noting that John Raese had opened up a modest lead in the West Virginia Senate race, and citing two polls – one showing Linda McMahon closing on Richard Blumenthal in the Connecticut Senate race, and another suggesting that Dino Rossi is about to overtake Patty Murray in the Senate race in the state of Washington.

This morning, Jay Cost provided even more evidence suggesting that things are not as they seem. In California, the CNN/Time poll has Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown up 9% in their races against Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. But the same poll has Fiorina up 14% among independents in a race in which 93% of Democrats and 92% of Republicans are inclined to stick with their respective party nominees. As Cost points out, in 2004, when John Kerry beat George W. Bush by 9%, he beat him among independents by 17%. What this suggests is that the CNN/Time poll is built on the presumption that the Democratic component of the California electorate in November will be considerably larger than it was in 2008, 2006, or 2004. If one recalculates that poll's data taking 2008 as a baseline, Boxer would be 6% ahead of Fiorina. If one uses 2006 as a baseline, she would be 1.5% ahead. If one bases one’s estimate on 2004, she would be only 1% ahead.

The line it is drawn/ The curse it is cast/ The slow one now/ Will later be fast/ As the present now/ Will later be past/ The order is/Rapidly fadin''/ And the first one now/ Will later be last/ For the times they are a-changin'.

It is too early to break out the champagne. But there is a case for laying some in.

Oh, Conrad, you're so crabby.

The U.S. was magnificent in the defeat of the Nazis, imperial Japanese, and Soviet Communists, and in the inducement of China into at least state capitalism. But — apart from the facilitation of NATO expansion through Bill Clinton’s bunk about a Partnership for Peace (via dismemberment of the Soviet bloc), and possibly the setting up of a post-Saddam power-sharing regime in Iraq — the U.S. has been completely ineffectual in the world since the original Gulf War and the end of the Cold War 20 years ago.

The U.S. shows no signs of being prepared to pay down its mountain of debt, and is every year forfeiting the natural respect it acquired in the 1940s and maintained to the end of the 20th century as the world’s undisputed leader. An American failure to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power will signal the end of American world leadership, whether Israel steps up to the task or not. The U.S. cannot afford to masquerade as a decisive influence where it does not have the will or judgment to assert such an influence. Unless new leadership arises in the next election to end the current-account deficit and unsustainable oil imports, reorient the country to physical production and less unproductive “services,” and redesign alliances to contemporary needs and real possibilities, it should continue the orderly withdrawal already in progress. It won the Cold War, disposed of Saddam, and can retire in good order, undefeated, to a defensible perimeter. It was the indispensable country to the West, in 1917–18, and 1939–90, but it is largely dispensable now, and is providing no discernibly useful leadership at all.

I'm mildly surprised that Ross Douthat didn't say what I'm about to in his recent post about Kwame Anthony Appiah's thought-provoking op-ed on what future generations will count against us morally. Appiah gives us three indications that a current moral sentiment is going to be overturned:

First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.

Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, “We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?”)

And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn’t think about what made those goods possible. That’s why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.

Appiah is very a learned fellow, which makes it all the more scandalous -- if seemingly inevitable -- that he has held forth on evil and moral argument without even once mentioning religion. Appiah's systematic blindness to religion is responsible for some major malfunctions. Appiah comes dangerously close, for instance, to allowing us to think that invocations of human tradition, human nature, and human limits are not components of moral arguments but alternatives to them. Even a cursory treatment of the role of religion in moral argument would quickly disabuse us of this notion.

Next, take Appiah's use of religious language. To be precise, consider his single, but pivotal, use of the word "evils" to describe moral wrongs and their consequences. You don't have to be religious to earn the right to say "evil," but you do -- if you're a noted professor of philosophy, at least -- have an obligation to address the way that religion proposes to help us understand evil, in contrast to, say, the ways of competing varieties of worldview. As the most insightful and entertaining liberal philosopher, Richard Rorty, has observed, agreeing with Judith Shlkar, for liberals cruelty is the worst thing we do. Shklar, in her book Ordinary Vices, calls moral cruelty "deliberate and persistent humiliation, so that the victim can eventually trust neither himself nor anyone else."

Any Christian, for instance, is apt to see the face of evil in Shklar's moral cruelty, but the point is not so much that liberal morality has Christian roots, or that liberal and Christian morality have some common root in (gasp) human nature or human limits. The point is Rorty's -- that Shklar's liberal morality is highly compatible with a worldview in which religion plays no role and is, in fact, something that human beings should labor to erase from our words, our deeds, and our thoughts. In the secular liberal worldview, evil, as (Biblical) religion understands it, is at best a useless concept, at worst a morally counterproductive one.

Editing this important point out of a discussion like Appiah's seems to me its own act of strategic ignorance. (I'll extend the benefit of the doubt that it's not also an evil one.) The teaching of Biblical religion is that evil is the worst thing we do, and that the eradication of human suffering is not our moral goal because that mission is at profound odds with the truth about what it is to be a human person. In the absence of the language of evil indebted to that religion, our talk of moral wrongs must rely on the language of harm. To move in that direction may seem today like progress. Will future generations recognize in it our own kind of barbarism?

People tend to see history in decade-shaped chunks. It helps to sort the events and trends if we can store them in boxes marked 70s = shag horror or 50s = conformity or whatever concept we ascribe to the mood of the time. The farther you go back, the more standardized the labels become, so the 40s = war, the 30s = everyone in a sepia-hued breadline, and 20s = Jazz Age, whatever that means. Beyond that, though, it gets indistinct. The teens of the previous century seem quite remote; they had a big dress rehearsal for World War Hitler, and then . . . well, people sat around waiting for the Charleston to be invented, I guess.

But everything from the previous century still affects us today, and sometimes you get little pieces of news that remind you how close Now is to Then. Such as:

This weekend, Germany will finally finish paying off its reparations from World War I. Following Germany’s defeat in the war, the Allied Powers hit it with a steep bill in the form of the Treaty of Versailles, which mandated that it pay £23.6 billion ($393.6 billion in today’s dollars). Reparations plunged postwar Germany deeply into debt, and came in the form of “coal, steel, intellectual property (eg. the trademark for Aspirin) and agricultural products” as well as money.

If there’s an old German soldier hiding in a trench, convinced the war is still going on, this might tell him it’s time to stand down and go on with his life.

This story so depressed me, so frightened me as a parent, that I couldn't even watch Part 2 of Ken Burns's baseball documentary, "The Tenth Inning," on PBS last night. (I'd watched Part 1 on Tuesday night and felt high on life. Isn't baseball grand? Weren't the 90s the best time for someone like me to be a sportswriter! I'm great! Life is great!)

Then, I read this story. I'm a mom. I imagine the moms and parents of each of these three young people. I wonder what they, if anything, could have done differently.

Is this a "social media is evil" story? Is this a simple bullying story? Is this a gay hate-crime story? It's probably a bit of each. How do we address these issues as a society? As parents?

Every school has implemented some sort of anti-bullying/tolerance campaign. They don't seem to be working. Is there another, more effective way?

The story just broke that in 2000 Meg Whitman hired an undocumented worker--an illegal immigrant--to be her housekeeper for $23 an hour.

Whitman alleges that she didn't know the housekeeper was in the United States illegally. According to Whitman, the housekeeper presented Whitman with documents that would indicate the housekeeper was in the country legally, including a social security card and a driver's license. When the housekeeper told Whitman, in 2009, that she was an undocumented worker, Whitman fired her. But the housekeeper charges that Whitman knew about her undocumented status all along. Apparently, in 2003, Whitman received a letter from the Social Security Administration saying that the housekeeper's Social Security number did not match the name on file.

According to the AP:

The Republican candidate for California governor Wednesday denied allegations that she knew for years her housekeeper was an illegal immigrant from Mexico, and that she ignored warnings from the government that her employee might have dubious legal status in the U.S.

Here's The Daily Beast's maudlin take:

It was a teary press conference: The housekeeper recounted how she’d asked her billionaire employer for help. But instead of helping her, the woman said, her well-known boss—a successful businesswoman and politician with aspirations—fired her, and cheated her out of owed wages.

But the presence of Gloria Allred at the housekeeper’s side, as the cameras rolled on Wednesday afternoon, suggested to some that the gubernatorial race in California is down to the wire, and now getting dirty.

Faced with the allegation that Meg Whitman had hired an undocumented worker and then fired her when she came for help with her legal status, the Republican candidate’s camp hit back hard, suggesting this wasn’t really a labor dispute but instead a political smear campaign, and that Democrats hired private investigators to find the housekeeper. Brown’s campaign said they had nothing to do with the press conference, and Allred said the housekeeper, Nicky Diaz Santillan, had been referred to her through another attorney.

Santillan worked for Whitman for nine years, before she said, she was thrown away “like a piece of garbage.”

Is this going to hurt Whitman? Not only has she promised to crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, but she's spent a lot of time and energy reaching out to California's Latino voters. Her outreach efforts include "Spanish-language radio and TV ads, a Spanish-language website, Spanish-language billboards — even Spanish-language posters at bus stops in Hispanic neighborhoods," according to the AP.

The Latino vote is a huge factor in the California gubernatorial election. In the last thirty years, according to The Daily Beast, "registered Latino voters have tripled to 21% of the electorate as white voters have declined from 83% to 65%, the Latino vote might determine this election."

Let's see how Whitman rebounds.

Peter asked me a few days ago what Margaret Thatcher would have made of Ed Miliband, the new leader of the British Labour Party. She would have thought him an abomination, of course, but I have to imagine any leader of the Conservative Party would be grateful to Labour for electing him: What more could you hope for in a political opponent than someone who inspires in voters such an overwhelming urge to change the channel? David Cameron is assuredly sleeping better these days.

The Economist's Bagehot was actually pretty funny about the leadership rally at which Miliband's victory was declared:

... the whole leadership rally was a long hymn of praise to the joys of the state, to great gobs of public spending, and above all to unionised public sector workers. The leadership announcement was preceded by a series of peppy Labour Party videos and a speech by Gordon Brown.

The longest video summed up Labour’s achievements in 13 years in power. It showed toddlers in state child care centres. It boasted of tens of thousands of extra police, nurses, doctors and teachers hired under Labour, over cheery pictures of NHS hospitals and state schools. It talked of laws passed by central government like the national minimum wage, laws establishing civil partnerships for gay couples, and welfare rules that lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of relative poverty. It showed nice things that Labour subsidised, like free fruit for schoolchildren and windfarms to produce renewable electricity and ended with the on-screen slogan: “Don’t let anyone say we didn’t make a difference”.

As thousands of party bigwigs and members in the hall cheered, clapped and stamped their feet, it occurred to me that the video precisely reversed an old line of Ronald Reagan’s. This was Labour saying that the ten most comforting words in the English language were: “I’m from the government and I am here to help.”

But here's the thing. Ed's ascent tells us that the unions are still capable of turning their guy into the leader of the Labour Party (and then, only during massive recessions and freakish planetary conjunctions). It does not say they can still make their guy into the prime minister. It does say that the Labour Party seems determined for now to stay out of power.

I know, I know, Pat Sajak is going to remember if I get this wrong (thankfully, no one else will), and just a few months ago the bookies had the odds against his getting this far at 10:1. Weird things can happen in democracies. Obama made it into office and all that. But I feel confident as confident as one can be about these things in saying Ed Miliband will never be prime minister. I say this not only because the man's red as the surface of Mars, but because he has the most hideous form of anti-charisma I've ever seen in a major political figure. I mean, watch this:

Did you get to the end? I thought not. You just couldn't watch all the way through, could you? He is so boring. His whole candidacy is straight to DVD. (On the other hand, the Made in Taiwan animated guide to the Labour Leadership contest is pretty amusing.)

Oh, one more Miliband family-fun fact: Their father was the celebrated Marxist Ralph Miliband, who was reportedly deeply disappointed that his sons joined the Labour Party, which he disdained as hopelessly compromised by its tepid truck with capitalism. As a friend of mine said, at least the Labour Party has a well-considered plan to achieve full employment for Britain's psychotherapists.*

*I'd give you credit for that line, friend, but you're not a real friend, you're a Facebook friend, and you used an alias so I don't know your name. Good line, though.

The news came in late last night from the Hill (via Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard).

Politics Daily reports:

Rep. Mike Castle, who lost Delaware's Republican Senate primary to Tea Party favorite Christine O'Donnell and won't endorse her, said Wednesday night that he will not run as a write-in candidate. The decision came two days after a Rasmussen poll showed a Castle write-in campaign likely would have helped O'Donnell and hurt Democratic nominee Chris Coons.

"I listened closely to many viewpoints and carefully considered the option of staying in the race. While I would have been honored to represent Delaware in the U.S. Senate, I do not believe that seeking office in this manner is in the best interest of all Delawareans," he said in a statement. He said he and his wife Jane were ready to move on to the next stage of their lives.

The latest RealClearPolitics polling average has Chris Coons, the Democrat, in the lead against Republican contender Christine O'Donnell for Joe Biden's old Senate seat by 15.7%. But, as RCP notes in its analysis of the race, O'Donnell has "raised around $2 million, so she can't be written off in the general election." Let the games begin!

Try to read the lede in E. J. Dionne's piece in today's Washington Post without laughing:

A couple of hours before President Obama offered a boffo revival of his 2008 campaign persona during a boisterous rally at the University of Wisconsin, Sen. Bernie Sanders was analyzing why the president was in a political pickle in the first place.

It's an almost perfect artifact from a deluded, cocooned, utterly in-the-tank mind. A "boffo" performance at the University of Wisconsin! Well there's a reasonable, centrist crowd. The political analysis of America's leading socialist! Well there's a guy who knows how to appeal to the middle. Dionne kicks off his essay with a couple of cheery items from the academic left and the socialist movement, two groups it would seem are the source of Obama's current difficulties, not the solution to them.

Not so, says Dionne. Obama's troubles started when he moved to the center. (Apparently, he moved to the center.) Put down your morning coffee before you continue:

[Sanders says:] "The most serious mistake the president made was not, in a sense, continuing the thrust of his campaign, and [in] forgetting all he accomplished."

Sanders does not discount what Obama and congressional Democrats achieved through the economic stimulus, health care and financial reform. But he argues that by replacing a mobilizing approach and clear progressive goals with an insider strategy aimed at compromising with a few moderate Republican senators, Obama deactivated his own enthusiasts. These are the very people the president was trying to motivate in Madison.

"While Obama and the Democrats have a large number of achievements, it was not enough," said Sanders. "We needed to be bolder."

He wasn't progressive enough, see. It was all that compromising that did him in. But luckily, E. J. Dionne sees the green shoots of an Obama recovery:

That's why liberal blogs are rallying behind scores of Democratic candidates. It's why the "enthusiasm gap" about this year's election is slowly closing. It's why labor and civil rights groups have organized their One Nation Working Together march this Saturday. (And, yes, it's another sign of Fox News' continuing ability to set the mainstream media agenda that you have heard far less about this rally than you did about Glenn Beck's.)

And it's why the polls have begun to show signs of a modest Democratic revival. Buried in the eighth paragraph of a Wednesday Wall Street Journal story on its survey with NBC News was this fact: When likely voters were asked which party they wanted to control Congress, Republicans led Democrats by three points, but that was down from a nine-point GOP lead just a month ago. Could the plates beneath this election be shifting?

These are spectacular delusions. This is straw-grasping as an Olympic sport. From a rally at America's most left-wing college to the activism of liberal bloggers to the ludicrous political analysis of America's lonely old socialist, it's almost painful -- and hilarious -- to read a major journalist so tone-deaf to his own cocooning, so unable to see and hear and feel a country turning resolutely away from the very things -- liberal bloggers, left wing universities, socialist politicians -- he cites as authorities.

Hard to read the whole thing without laughing. But then, I have to admit, a thought occurred:

What if he's right?

Last year, in the Citizens United ruling, the high court struck down certain campaign finance laws and ruled that corporations have free speech rights. This year, the Court will consider a case that asks: Do corporations have privacy rights? From the WSJ's law blog:

In its Citizens United opinion from last year, the Supreme Court shot down certain campaign-finance limits. In so doing, the court essentially ruled that U.S. corporations have First Amendment free-speech rights.

Might the court take another step toward imbuing corporations with all the rights guaranteed U.S. citizens?

It now has the vehicle to do so if it wants to: The high court agreed to hear a case involving AT&T to consider whether a corporation can challenge the release of government documents as an infringement of the company’s privacy rights. Click here for the Bloomberg story; here for the AP story.

The AT&T case revisits the question of whether corporations have the same rights as you and me, a question which the Supreme Court answered affirmatively with respect to free speech in the Citizens United case.

The punch line is this: How could we possibly run a society in which corporations did not have some rights of speech and of property?

In the case of property, consider what would happen: A and B are partners who decide to incorporate. Without the benefit of limited liability, no one could take the property of both by claiming that since it was held by a partnership, it should be treated as the property of neither.

So now what difference does it make that the new corporation has limited liability? I can't see why it should make any difference at all for the level of constitutional protection. But there are real social advantages to incorporation with limited liability. The chief of these is that it permits the aggregation of large sums of capital from individuals who would otherwise be reluctant to join a venture controlled by others, knowing that their entire personal fortunes could be made to answer for the misdeeds of the active partners.

If that corporate form is better than the partnership form (say because of a business expansion), why tax the transfer with a loss of property rights against any third person, including the government? So it is not possible to think that looting the corporation is limited only to the extent that the government takes a briefcase owned by one of its employees. The constitutional rights have to remain constant against this transfer for the system to work at all.

The same is true of speech. The great vice of the Justice Thurgood Marshall decision in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990)--which limited corporate speech and was overturned by the Citizens ruling--was that it made that bad move in connection with speech rights. Partners have them, but shareholders do not. The proper analysis ignores incorporation and treats the corporation on a par with other organizations and individuals for speech rights.

But what about voting, one might add? Well clearly that is reserved to citizens. Yet the aliens who cannot vote can also speak, for there is no reason, jingoism aside, why their speech is less protected than anyone else's.

And for corporate papers, the logic above applies. Of course they are protected in the name of all the shareholders in the venture. Clearly the corporation is not obliged to speak, for reasons too painful to state. So at that point, the testimonial privileges, be they large or small, inhere in the officers of the organization.

One sorry note in this affair is that too often prosecutors seek to make deals with corporations to abandon their employees on pain of an indictment that leads to a loss of license which leads to a business collapse. The abuse of the corporate form can run in both directions. State prosecutors should in most cases be curbed from using these ventures.

I hereby stop complaining--at least for today--about the left-wing bias in the mainstream media. I've no quarrel with this AP item, but you've got to admit, it could be an RNC press release:

WASHINGTON (AP) - A deeply unpopular Congress is bolting for the campaign trail without finishing its most basic job - approving a budget for the government year that begins on Friday. Lawmakers also are postponing a major fight over taxes, two embarrassing ethics cases and other political hot potatoes until angry and frustrated voters render their verdict in the Nov. 2 elections.

Pleased to see the vast right-wing conspiracy has at last captured the Associated Press. Next we take CNN and the Duke University English Department.

I'm in Prague for a few days -- I knew you all were wondering where I was, right? -- and spent last night with a collection of journalists, some ex-pat Americans, some British, some Czech -- trying to explain what the Tea Party movement was all about.

It's hard, I think, for Europeans to truly understand what this kind of movement means. After all, when Europeans march in the streets, it's to protest government austerity.

They did a lot of that yesterday, in fact.

That's what a lot of American politicians worry about, too: that when (if) a Republican Congress starts making real cuts -- things along the lines of Paul Ryan's Roadmap, which entails cuts in Medicare, Social Security, and a lot of other fat entitlements -- the Tea Party might just....evaporate, with everyone retreating to their various interest-group corners.

That's what a lot of Republican Party types worry about, is what I told the group. That when it comes down to it, the people demanding a smaller government just aren't serious.

Or maybe, one Czech guest suggested, what they're worried about is that the voters really are serious.

It's an amazing contrast, though, from where I am right now: People in Europe, taking to the streets, demanding their government entitlements. People in the United States, taking to the streets, demanding the opposite.

Funny you should ask that, Molly, I was just about to link to this. Once you start spinning hypotheses about that worm, it's hard to stop:

The Russians have sold much of the technology to the Iranians, in the face of weak and ineffectual protests on the part of our State Department. Is it possible that there is a quid pro quo where we let the Russians sell the technology (to get the hard currency), but the technology is actually sabotaged a la the Siberian Pipeline of the 1980s? The cover story now becomes a worm did the damage, to keep the Russian's hands "clean". If so, then it's possible that we created this. Absolutely we have people who know how to do this (I know some of them).

Or maybe the Russians did it - after all, it was a Russian antivirus company that "discovered" the worm. What the Russian's motivations would be are left as an exercise to people better at Realpolitik than I (perhaps our dread Czar?). Certainly the idea of nuclear proliferation into the 'Stans isn't something that the Kremlin looks to eagerly.

One thing that I'd bet cash money on, at long odds - the worm code itself will not provide clues that point back to its creators, at least not easy ones.

As for the last part, I agree. If the Israelis were behind it, I really doubt they'd have signed it, "Love, the Jews."

Anyway, here's my uninformed addition to the feverish speculation: Has anyone seen any actual evidence of this worm, firsthand? If I were dreaming up amusing little psy-ops to keep the Iranians off-balance, I might think of starting rumors about this worm, which would be easier and cheaper to do than actually devising it.

One more thought: Before everyone starts taking these stories too seriously and congratulating our intelligence services, or Israel's, or whoever else's is keen to take the credit, one comment I read in some chat room somewhere sticks in my mind: "No one ever says, 'It's a scheme so cunning, so devilishly inventive, that only civil servants could have devised it.'"

I wish I could remember where I saw that so I could credit it. Anyone know?

When I heard that a computer virus was slowing down Iran's nuclear capability, I assumed there was some fancy spycraft involved. This New York Times story has more:

Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the Book of Esther, the Old Testament tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them.

That use of the word “Myrtus” — which can be read as an allusion to Esther — to name a file inside the code is one of several murky clues that have emerged as computer experts try to trace the origin and purpose of the rogue Stuxnet program, which seeks out a specific kind of command module for industrial equipment.

If you're wondering how you get Myrtus from Esther . . . Esther's original Hebrew name was Hadassah, meaning Myrtle. Incidentally, the guava fruit is also part of the Myrtus family, and one of the code modules is identified as Guava.

So do you think it's Israel? The U.S.? Neither?

The Robinson/Berlinski interviews over at Uncommon Knowledge have been great so far, part two especially. To hear Claire articulate Thatcher's moral approach to free markets should be enough to make the scales fall from even a liberal's eyes - which, if nothing else, would be cheaper than plastic surgery.

But answer me this, Claire: what on earth is that you are wearing around your swan-like neck? I mean, inquiring minds want to know!

Earlier today I wrote a short piece just as my flight from L.A. was about to depart (thanks, Emily, for getting it edited and posted), and now that I'm on another coast, I wanted to elaborate on one portion of the piece. In it, I observed that this administration has been evaluating the performance of voters when it was supposed to be the other way around. They're busy ripping into the Right (ignorant bigots) and the Left (whiners who need to "buck up") while ignoring their own shortcomings. They seem to have forgotten that they were elected to represent all of us, no matter how distasteful that might be for them.

It got me thinking about the attitude some voters on the losing side of an election have expressed in past campaigns: "He's not my President!" Well, I've never subscribed to that mindset. In fact, every President is our President. That's why we're supposed to show respect for the office even as we criticize policies. But something disheartening and alarming is going on. For the first time, I'm beginning to feel as if this man is not my President, and that feeling is not coming from me. He really can't stand Tea Party people, and he really is exasperated with carping liberals. He appears suspicious of anyone who succeeds in the private sector and positively angered by anyone who had the temerity to become wealthy. He seems to like no one except those who continue to idolize him.

Politics is a rough game, and politicians are expected to have a thick skin. What they're not expected to do is to shut out, dismiss and demean those who criticize them. And as to the argument that this Commander in Chief's critics have been especially brutal, I remind everyone that not one of those critics is President of the United States.

Michael Bloomberg says he has no intention of challenging Obama for the presidency in 2012.

In other news, Jerry Brown says he'd certainly run for president again, if only he were younger.

Sorry for the disappointment this news may have caused any of you.

At the Corner, Kevin Williamson throws down the gauntlet:

set aside the legal questions for a second. The Awlaki case speaks to something even more fundamental than law: Decent nations do not permit their governments to assassinate their own citizens. I am willing to give the intelligence community, the covert-operations guys, and the military proper a pretty free hand when it comes to dealing with dispersed terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But citizenship, even when applied to a Grade-A certified rat like Awlaki, presents an important demarcation, a bright-line distinction in our politics.

If Awlaki were to be killed on a battlefield, I’d shed no tears. But ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in Yemen or Pakistan is no different from ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in New York or Washington or Topeka — American citizens are American citizens, wherever they go. I’m an old-fashioned limited-government guy, and I am not willing to grant Washington the power to assassinate U.S. citizens, even rotten ones. The three most powerful people in government at this moment are Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, a fact that should give pause even to the most hawkish conservative. I would hope that other conservatives see this at least as a matter of prudence, if not a burning moral question.

In theory, I think Williamson's judgment is a slam dunk. In practice, this whole controversy seems to me to augur a not very placid conversation about who should get -- or lose -- American citizenship, and how. Here, at any rate, is a political question that touches directly on a first principle. Should the federal government be granted the power to assassinate citizens? And to answer that, don't we need to ask: Can that power, even if granted, ever be legitimate?

Taking a few days of down time from the road, I notice more and more reports of the President, Vice President, and even Senator Kerry (D - France) scolding the liberal base for their restless impatience. I keep asking, what are they impatient about? What more do they want? Perhaps a few of the lurkers from the left will be kind enough to explain. The government has stimulated the economy into a virtual death spiral. They own a large part of the automobile and financial industries. Freedom is on the decline at home even as our enemies gather strength abroad. Sounds like a liberal nirvana to me, so why the long faces? What more do you want? How many more regulations and taxes do you require? How much more private property must you gobble up? How many businesses must you kill before you're satisfied? How high must the unemployment rate go to quench your thirst for government dependence? When do you stick a fork in this bloated government rump roast and call it done?

Forty-seven House Democrats have sent Nancy Pelosi a letter expressing their support for the Republican position of extending the Bush tax cuts on investment income:

"Raising taxes on capital gains and dividends could discourage individuals and businesses from saving and investing," said the letter, dated Friday and released Tuesday. "We urge you to maintain the current tax rate for both dividend and long-term capital gains taxes."

These 47 Democrats would provide more than enough votes to extend the tax cuts, notes Jennifer Rubin, but Pelosi is unlikely to allow the vote to come to the floor. This, Rubin argues, presents a lose-lose situation for Democrats who've expressed dissent toward Obama's tax plan.

Even though many Democrats now want to extend both these tax cuts on investment income as well as the rest of the Bush tax-cut plan, they have a serious problem with the voters. What’s their pitch? I’d vote for the tax breaks because it’s harmful to the economy to hike taxes during a recession, but my Democratic leadership won’t let me vote. The solution to that is simple: vote for their opponents, whose party would demand a vote and pass the extensions overwhelmingly.

What began as a trap for Republicans has devolved into an ideological and political dead end for liberals. Take the vote and lose, and infuriate the base. Don’t take the vote, and lose scores of House members. At this point, there is no good solution. It seems no one in the White House thought this through.

Just getting your attention. There are many fine Muslims in LA. I know quite a few.

However, this Yom Kippur I had to sit through my beloved Rabbi's (and I really do love this man) sermon, chastising 2,000 Westside Los Angelenos not to be afraid of the Ground Zero Mosque, which he said "is neither at Ground Zero, nor a Mosque." He was sending a sincere plea for people not to judge many by the acts of a few. (And by that he meant Muslims, not the over the top histrionics of some of the GZM opposition, by which we're all embarrassed.) Though well meaning, I believe he was astonishingly naive about the future of Islam in our lives and the murky intent behind Imam Rauf's refusal to relocate said non-Mosque.

Cutting to the chase, he is pursuing a series of panels with leaders of the Islamic faith for our Temple. In the interest of presenting a more balanced approach to this...i.e. not a total white wash of the threat of Islamic Sharia Law...I volunteered to help put the panels together.

If you have any suggestions for pithy (and by that I mean SHORT), well-thought out articles on this subject that will not scare off the average dyed-in-the-Koolaid Liberal, link me! But most important, if you know of any great panelists in the Los Angeles area, let me know. I know my position on the creeping worry of Fundamentalist Islam, but I need the back up. And I need people with the kind of credibility that even a Westside Liberal can't dismiss. If this guy spoke english and lived here, he'd be perfect.

Has there ever been a group in the White House so fundamentally, and I’m beginning to fear, genuinely confused about the relationship between the government and the governed? It seems they’ve spent most of their first two years in power whining. They’ve whined about the cards they’ve been dealt and the lack of cooperation from the Republicans, but, most of all, they’ve whined about the American people. Millions of Tea Party voters have been tarred as ignorant bigots, and now they’ve gone after their own, telling them to “buck up” and questioning their real commitment to change if they don’t.

Hello? Is anyone home? We’re supposed to be evaluating your performance, not the other way around. You work for us, remember? You were elected to represent all the people of this country, not just the ones who continue to believe in your infallibility. Happily, we'll have the chance to express our displeasure in November by voting instead of whining.

Meanwhile, more tea party news comes to us via Politics Daily.

Beau Biden, Joe's son, told CNN yesterday that Christine O'Donnell "should be taken seriously...my party is taking her seriously." O'Donnell is seeking Joe Biden's old Senate seat, a seat that many Democrats wanted Beau to go after, but he deferred, much to their chagrin.

Now the Democrats have Christopher Coons, the self-described Marxist, and not exactly what you would call the strongest candidate the Democrats could have hoped for. By way of example, days ago Coons ridiculously said that serving in the US Senate would be a "great way for me to apply the principles and values that were honed at YDS [Yale Divinity School]," where in 1994 he scored a Masters in Religion with a specialty in ethics.

Via The American Spectator, here is what appears on the YDS curriculum:

Yale Divinity School Courses and Required Reading

• Witchcraft and Witch Hunting: Specifically listed as REL 717: Witchcraft and Witch Hunting, the "REL" presumably stands for "Religion." Apparently Christine O'Donnell's main offense when it comes to dabbling in witchcraft in high school on a date is some sort of Ruling Class snobbery that she didn't go to Yale Divinity School, where witchcraft has been quite officially part of the school's curriculum. The very same school from which Chris Coons insists he has taken his values....

• Queer Worship. You read that right. The formal name for this course is REL 786, Liturgy and Gender (Queer Worship). Queer Worship, you see, stands for…stands for…well, let's just say the course description says in the wonderfully baroque style of academia that the course offers students like Mr. Coons once was "the opportunity to reflect critically on how ….queer theories and theologies are impacting how Christian worship is performed and reflected upon."....

• Feminist/Womanist/Gendered Theologies:This course is listed as "REL 749." It is designed, the course description says, "to formulate a robust theological understanding of today's theopolitical issues" by "using feminist, womanist, and ethnic gendered theologies." Womanist theology? That would be? A religious movement focusing on how exactly to liberate -- there's that pesky Marxist word again -- African women in America. Drawn from feminist and liberation theology, there appears to be not a word of Witchcraft 101 or Queer Worship in this course. ....

• Introduction to Christian Ethics II:Yet another opportunity here in "REL 715" for Coons to study up on his favorites. Black Liberation Theology guru James Cone is mandatory reading here. Values taught in the reading for a class on Christianity? In God of the Oppressed Cone salutes the values of Marx in a chapter called "Marx and the Sociology of Knowledge" while also musing about "Jesus is Black and the "Meaning of Liberation."

Good to know that all this training in ethics may be coming with Coons to Washington. No wonder Beau wants the Dems to take O'Donnell seriously. The crown of saying "nutty things" will be slowly passing from O'Donnell to Coons on this one.

A new Gallup poll shows that distrust of the media is at a record high. Half of Americans say the media are too liberal, a third say they're just about right and 15% say the media are too conservative. Andrew Malcolm at the Los Angeles Times has the best write-up thus far:

Really biased Gallup Poll claims most Americans don't trust their hardworking news media

According to that fringe polling outfit named Gallup, a record 57% of Americans profess little or no trust in this country's mass media to report the news fairly and accurately.

What a crock!

A new WSJ/NBC poll focuses on the elusive tea party movement. The numbers indicate that the tea party is a major source of enthusiasm among Republicans. Here is a snapshot of the findings:

1. 71% of Republicans support the tea party, have a favorable image of it, and want its candidates to do well on November 2.

2. Tea partiers constitute one third of those most likely to vote in November--meaning, they are not a trifle, but a major part of what will drive the election results in a few weeks. On a related note, thanks to the enthusiasm the tea partiers have drummed up, two thirds of Republican voters are "intensely interested" in the midterm elections (while only one half of Democrats are).

3. The GOP can boast a three point edge against Democrats. Of the likely voters polled, 46% to 43% would prefer the GOP to control Congress. But: "That is down from a nine-point Republican lead a month ago." What's changed in the past month? One bullet point, off the top of my head, is Christine O'Donnell's victory in Delaware. That may have energized the Republicans in this poll, but cooled the Independents. What else changed last month to sway these numbers?

4. The final figure I'll cite has to do with the important independent voters. One third of them have an affinity for the tea party, but 59% of them do not support the tea party, which could ultimately hurt Republican candidates in the general election. I wonder if independent voters are as "intensely" interested in this election as Republicans are. That would be a good figure to know in analyzing how the results will shake out in November.