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I was watching last night's results with as much nailbitingness as anyone, but what can I say that the numbers don't put more eloquently? Hillary Clinton's slight edge in Indiana doesn't look like much compared to Barack Obama's huge double-digit victory in larger North Carolina. Obama picks up a net 200,000+ votes and a handful of delegates. Hillary might stay in through next Tuesday's West Virginia primary, where she's expected to do well, but she probably realizes that there's no point now.

What's more, Clinton has been loaning her campaign millions of dollars a month, and there's at least one way she can get it back: agree to drop out of the race if the Obama campaign pays off her campaign debt. Paying off Clinton's campaign debts would be an indirect bribe since most of the debt is to Clinton herself, but at this stage who's counting? Hillary won't have any leverage for this sort of concession if she drags her campaign on much longer.

Update:

But maybe a few million dollars isn't much to risk when you're so close to the Presidency.

Look, everyone knows that the "gas tax holiday" proposed by Hillary Clinton and John McCain is a stupid idea. I'm all for cutting taxes, but this is one of the few taxes that actually goes towards something that the government is supposed to do: maintain our infrastructure. Why not cut some of the taxes that go towards some of the multitude of unConstitutional activities our politicians pursue so vigorously as they try to buy our votes with our own money?

More than 200 economists, including four Nobel prize winners, signed a letter rejecting proposals by presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain to offer a summertime gas-tax holiday. ...

``Suspending the federal tax on gasoline this summer is a bad idea, and we oppose it,'' the letter says. Economist Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution is among those circulating the letter. Aaron said that while he supports Obama, the list includes Republicans and Clinton supporters. ...

The gas-tax suspension has become a flashpoint in the race for the Democrat presidential nomination between New York Senator Clinton and Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Clinton and Republican McCain tout the proposal as an example of their concern for struggling middle-class families. Obama, who estimated it would save the average driver less than $30, calls the idea a ``gimmick,'' rejecting it on similar grounds as the economists.

It is a gimmick, just like the stupid "stimulus" checks that are being paid out right now. I dream of a day when "average" Americans are wise enough to see through this crap.

Hillary Clinton's response to these denunciations is also noteworthy, because she explicitly states what most leftists must think when they hear economic objections to their idiot policies:

Clinton said yesterday on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos that ``I'm not going to put my lot in with economists'' because ``we would design it in such a way that it would be implemented effectively.''

Stupid economists! They haven't taken into account that the plan will be designed and implemented effectively! Well gosh, if that's suddenly with our politicians' capabilities then why don't they go back, redesign, and reimplement the rest of our bureaucracy so it works effectively too?

Aside from all the other nefarious goings-on in Pelosi's House, it's this bit that enrages me most personally:

Another motion to lower farm subsidies, by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, was pending Thursday afternoon when the House adjourned for its usual long weekend of fundraising, politicking and recreation. Unchanged in Nancy Pelosi's House is bipartisan devotion to the three-day week.

I work hard and I work a lot to support my family, to provide for our future retirement, to give my employer and my country an honest return for my wages, and to honor God with my labor.

Eh, maybe I should be grateful they work so little. Everything our Congress does seems designed to screw me over, so maybe the less they work the better off the rest of us are.

It looks like Newsweek has decided that Jeremiah Wright is intentionally hurting Barack Obama.

And while [Oprah] Winfrey, who has endorsed Obama and campaigned on his behalf, had long understood the perils of a close association with Wright, friends say she was blindsided by the pastor's personal assault on Obama. "She felt that Wright would never do anything to hurt a man who looked up to him as a father figure," said her [anonymous] close friend. "She also never thought he'd intentionally hurt someone trying to make history and change the lives of so many people.''

Unless I missed something, how has it been determined that Wright is intentionally hurting Obama, rather than only inadvertently hurting Obama while primarily focused on defending and aggrandizing himself? Seems like Newsweek is providing some helpful spin to the Obama campaign.

No doubt Barack Obama is poised to announce either a more diplomatic approach or a total withdrawal from his home city:

Fifty-four shootings in two weekends. Shot-up bodies recovered in groups of three and five. Is this Ramadi? Basra? No.

Welcome to Chicago.

After a recent outbreak of gun-related violence, Mayor Richard Daley is now pushed into supporting a plan by new Police Superintendent Jody Weis to arm 13,000 Chicago police officers with assault rifles. Depending on how many weapons are eventually deployed, this may develop into the largest militarization of police patrol officers in United States history. If the department arms 10,000 of their officers with M4s, the police will have 9,900 more assault rifles in Chicago than the U.S. Marines presently have in Fallujah, Iraq.

Advice to Senator Obama as he aspires to run a whole country: Physician, heal thyself.

(HT: Instapundit.)

First off, let me say that my wife and I have ardently disliked Hillary Clinton for almost two decades. We would never vote for her for anything. So imagine our surprise when Hillary did quite well during her appearance on The O'Reilly Factor. Bill O'Reilly asked some very good, very tough questions, and Hillary handled them well with a minimum of cast-iron talking-point repetition. I still don't agree with most of her policies and think she's incredibly dishonest, but she came across as poised, likable, and articulate.

To me, the highlight of the interview was when O'Reilly pointed out that her plan to raise taxes (and potentially eliminate the Social Security cap, though she denied it) would result in a 14% tax increase for him personally. She fielded it by saying that people as wealthy as he and her could afford it, middle-class taxpayers would benefit, etc. O'Reilly should have, but didn't, retort by telling her that he employs middle-class taxpayers, and he'd have to lay people off if her tax wishes are granted. But hey, this wasn't meant to be a debate, it was meant to be an interview.

Overall, the wife and I enjoyed watching quite a bit, and we're looking forward to tonight's installment. The questions were far tougher than any we've seen elsewhere, and we can't wait to see O'Reilly interview Barack Obama and John McCain. (Yeah, right.)

This stuff is child's play for an expert blogger such as myself, but I feel obligated to fan the flames as Barack Obama is hoisted by his own petard. Here's Obama in his "Lincolnesque" speech on race from March 18th, 2008.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.

And here's Obama disowning Jeremiah Wright yesterday, April 29th.

"At a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that's enough," Obama said.

"That's a show of disrespect to me. It is also, I think, an insult to what we've been trying to do in this campaign.''

"I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw.''

Perhaps it's fitting to let Jeremiah Wright have the last word:

We both know that, if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.”

Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever’s doing the polls. Preachers say what they say because they’re pastors. They have a different person to whom they’re accountable.

It's frustrating to me when people wrongly attribute substantial disagreements to a "failure to communicate". Here's Barack Obama speaking:

"I am confident that when you come to a general election, and we are having a debate about the future of this country -- how are we going to lower gas prices, how are we going to deal with job losses, how are we going to focus on energy independence -- that those are voters who I will be able to appeal to," he said.

"If I lose, it won't be because of race," Obama said. "It will be because ... I made mistakes on the campaign trail, I wasn't communicating effectively my plans in terms of helping them in their everyday lives."

No matter who wins the race for the presidency, the losing party should concede that they lost on substance, not merely on process. In the quote above, Obama basically asserts that voters cannot possibly reject him for the presidency once they understand his plans for America. In Obama's mind, if he loses it's because he just didn't articulate his ideas clearly enough, not because America both understood and disliked his ideas. An Obama loss would be due to process -- "mistakes on the campaign trail" -- not substance. He admits no possibility that his ideas are unappealing to voters. Anyone who doesn't vote for me doesn't really understand my positions.

I don't mean to pick on Obama, because this sort of phrasing is common among politicians and "commoners" alike. Sometimes it's legitimate. Most of my disagreements with my wife are due to miscommunication... but some are the result of real differences. Whether the dispute is domestic or international, it's important to recognize when it can be resolved by clearer communication and when there are substantial issues that need to be addressed through compromise, disengagement, violence, or whatever means are appropriate.

When conflict is wrongly attributed to a "failure to communicate" but there are actually substantial differences to be resolved, the conflict becomes harder to deal with from both sides. Unless you're willing to recognize that there's a substantial disagreement, how can there be resolution? Additional "clarification" is pointless when there's already both understanding and disagreement. Furthermore, the other party will be insulted by your continuing insistence that the disagreement is merely a product of their ignorance.

Part of the reason presidential campaigns drag go on for so long is to ensure that voters get all the information they need to cast their votes based on substance, not process. As Obama has pointed out, he and Hillary have debated each other 21 times -- by now voters have the measure of the man. If Obama loses to either Hillary or McCain, he would be wise to consider that his ideas, and not merely their delivery, may be to blame.

Despite being outspent 3-to-1 by her opponent Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton has won the Democrat's Pennsylvania primary by a convincing margin.

But for the second time in seven weeks, first in the Texas and Ohio primaries and now in Pennsylvania, Obama did not deliver a decisive blow against Clinton when he had an opportunity to bring the race to an end, despite heavily outspending her and waging an aggressive and negative campaign in the final days. His advisers had hoped to hold Clinton's victory margin to mid-single digits and appeared to have fallen short of that goal.

"He broke every spending record in this state trying to knock us out of this race," Clinton told her supporters in Philadelphia last night. "Well, the people of Pennsylvania had other ideas."

Obama's loss in Pennsylvania raised anew questions about his ability to win the big industrial states that will be critical to the Democrats' hopes of winning back the White House in November. In the coming days, Clinton's camp will try to play on those doubts with uncommitted superdelegates -- who have been moving toward Obama over the past two months -- urging them to remain neutral until the primaries are over.

As I wrote after Hillary's big wins on Super Tuesday, if the Democrats ran their primary as a winner-takes-all system like the Electoral College Obama would have lost a long time ago. Based on CNN's Democrat scorecard and 270toWin, my calculations give Hillary a hypothetical electoral vote lead of 284 to 202 for Obama, with 52 votes still undecided. Of course, it only takes 270 votes to win.

What's more, Obama hasn't won any of the critical battleground states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, New Mexico, and others all went to Clinton. Obama tends to win in states that are already guaranteed to one party or the other in the general election. If The Democrats' primary system reflected the electoral college, Obama would be seen for what he is: a popular regional candidate with narrow appeal and little chance of winning the presidency.

Even conservatives these days argue for tax cuts on the premise that revenues will increase if we cut rates. I personally think that if you cut tax rates and revenues go up, you haven't cut them far enough.

Anyway, Jerry Pournelle explains why taxes must always go up.

Clearly the government wants us to spend ourselves broke and throw ourselves on welfare. Then they will stop fining us every year. They fine us for speeding, for spitting in the streets, for doing things they don't want us to do: they also fine us for improving our property, investing money to grow the economy, saving money; the implications are pretty clear?

Actually, of course, it's just that government employees consider themselves entitled to annual raises whatever they may accomplish for us, and that means they consider themselves entitled to a share of any money that can be found anywhere in the world. It's not that they want to fine you for saving money: it's that you have saved money, and there's some out there, and government employees are entitled to have raises, Q.E.D. See the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. If money exists, government considers itself entitled to it, and if you ask why, they have no answer except blank stares: after all, it's obvious isn't it? Good grief!

Maybe we need term limits for bureaucrats.

(HT: Instapundit.)

In the first post in this series I wrote that the Obamas tax returns show that they're more generous with taxpayer money than with their own. Well Hillary gave a higher percentage of her income away over the last few years than did the Obamas, but... the Clintons mostly gave money away to themselves.

After earning more than $109 million over eight years, the Clintons took tax write-offs for $10.2 million in charitable contributions. In most of those years, that money was donated to the Clinton Family Foundation, and a portion was distributed to charitable causes. ...

In recent years, there were gifts that generated good will in ways that were potentially helpful to Hillary Clinton's presidential bid. Hillary Clinton, for instance, held a news conference to announce that the family foundation had given $100,000 to a South Carolina library last July, the day after she appeared at a presidential debate in the state. The library was named for Marian Wright Edelman, one of her longtime friends and mentors. South Carolina was host to an early primary contest.

The family foundation also gave $25,000 to support the McGovern Library and Center for Leadership and Public Service in Mitchell, S.D., in early 2007. Later in the year the center's eponym, the former Democratic presidential nominee George S. McGovern, said he would endorse Clinton for president. ...

The Clintons also gave $5,000 to the Jon Michael Moore Trauma Center at West Virginia University, which was named for the late grandson of Hillary Clinton's Senate colleague, Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.). Byrd, a superdelegate, has not yet endorsed a candidate for president.

So the Clintons take a tax write-off for donating money to a foundation that is essentially a proxy for Hillary's presidential campaign.

Examiner.com has a great twist on John Edwards' "two Americas" trope: tax payers and tax consumers.

Tuesday is the deadline for filing federal income taxes. Half of American taxpayers will pay 97 percent of the individual income taxes the government will collect for 2008, according to IRS data. The other half will pay little or nothing, yet receive billions in benefits in the form of cash, subsidies, “free” services and other benefits, and loans. There are indeed “Two Americas,” but the two aren’t the rich and poor, but taxpayers and tax consumers. It’s going to get even tougher for the taxpayers in the near future, thanks to legislation being readied by Democrats who control Congress.

(HT: Glenn Reynolds, who also thinks we should hold national elections on April 16th.)

Stick a fork in him, because Obama is done. While speaking to megarich leftist donors in San Francisco, Barack Obama tried to explain to them how us poor rubes in the flyover states think:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Having grown up in California among such leftists, yes, that's pretty much what they think of middle-America. To them, the only reason anyone believes in God, the Second Amendment, or controlling illegal immigration is because of bitterness and fear -- never genuine faith, well-reasoned economics, or carefully-considered philosophy. Anyone who doesn't agree with leftist orthodoxy is prima facie either evil, ignorant, or both.

The part about "clinging" to religion is particularly galling, considering that Obama and his family spent 20 years (still counting) in a church that sings "God Damn America" and believes that white people invented AIDS to kills blacks. His church is built around "antipathy toward people who aren't like them"! given his church background, it's no surprise that Obama thinks religious believers are equivalent to xenophobic racists.

Ace has the best roundup of reactions. Ed Morrissey explains that this is why rookies shouldn't run for president. Mayhill Fowler broke the story and has the audio. Glenn Reynolds has more links than I can count.

After recently firing chief strategist Mark Penn because of his work on behalf of Columbian free-traders, Hillary Clinton is now laughing off questions about Bill's involvement with the same people.

Hillary Clinton used her trademark laugh Thursday to deflect a question about the $800,000 her husband earned in 2005 giving speeches for a Bogota-based group that supports the Colombia free trade agreement — the same trade deal she currently opposes.

Asked by CNN if those earnings represented a conflict of interest given that she has dipped into her family's pocketbook to pay campaign bills, Clinton threw up her hands and laughed loudly for several seconds.

"How many angels dance on the head of the pin?," she responded, continuing to giggle. "I have really, uh, nothing to … I mean, how do you answer that?"

The reason she can't answer the question is because the truth is both self-evident and destructive to her campaign. What else is there to say about it?

Iain Murray has the best post I've seen so far about all the grounded flights and safety inspections: he says that the FAA is probably killing more people than it's saving.

With the FAA grounding flights in the name of safety, few people seem to have appreciated that the action may well kill people.

Bear with me. Not all those whose flights have been canceled will cancel their trips. Some will find slots on other airlines, but some will choose to go by car (there being no appreciable competition from rail in most markets). Automobile travel is more dangerous than commerical plane travel for long distance trips. With the number of cancellations in the thousands, we can expect very many people to have gone long distances by road who wouldn't have otherwise. There is a chance that some of these people will be involved in a fatal accident. It is plausible, therefore, that grounding the flights will have fatal consequences.

But, you see, the FAA and the airlines aren't responsible for road deaths! Why should they care if, percentage-wise, these plane groundings kill twice as many people as they save?

See also, "Does the FDA Save Lives?".

Universal, a writer at the Democrat site MyDD, has posted a hypothetical television ad that would completely annihilate any chance Obama has of winning the presidency. There's some very strong imagery, so if you decide to watch it be prepared.

Honestly, I don't see this ad as being particularly unfair.

(HT: Instapundit.)

Barack Obama gave his bigspeech on race, and as usual he was eloquent. Also as usual, he shied away from any practical policy proposals and displayed a disingenuous ignorance of how liberty and free markets could be applied to bridge the racial divide, if not so hampered by taxes and regulations. (Drudge had the text of the speech first, but I expect that link will expire.)

First, Obama appears to have a solid grasp on some of the concerns of whites that are rarely broached in public.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

The purpose of the speech seems to be to transform racial division into class division: all us poor people of every color need to fight against our common enemies, the rich! And the only solutions he can come up with involve the coercive use of government power:

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I think the bolded part is particularly insincere. Obama knows that the majority of Americans are shareholders in these evil corporations -- directly or indirectly through pension funds -- and those profits go straight into American pockets. What's more, the primary beneficiaries of lower prices are the poor.

And so forth. As you'd expect, I find the policies that Obama vaguely hints at to be antithetical to liberty and ruinous to our economy, facts that far outweigh the common eloquence of his words. I think this speech made a meaningful contribution to the discussion of race in our country, but the conclusions he'd have us draw are misguided and dangerous.

Barack Obama is struggling to catch up to a story which I predicted a year ago would sink his campaign: he's denouncing the "Reverend" Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s statements but doesn't seem to understand the big picture.

On Friday, Mr. Obama called a grab bag of statements by his longtime minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., “inflammatory and appalling.”

“I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue,” he wrote in a campaign statement that was his strongest in a series of public disavowals of his pastor’s views over the past year.

These words must have been chosen very carefully, so let's analyze them a bit. First, "inflammatory". Obama thinks the racist, insane rantings of his pastor might "arouse anger, hostility, passion, etc.", but the word doesn't carry any implication that Obama disagrees with Wright's views.