John H. McFadden "deconstructs" the guilt by association tactics being used to implicate Obama in his Reverend's radicalism.

Chuck Keller, himself a vet, writes from his own experience on the horrors of PTSD, a stark reminder that our Veterans' care programs are one of the many vital institutions to have suffered under the Bush administration.

Naturally, there's a lot of talk about what's behind our current economic crisis. Reader ThurmanHart thinks that much of it may boil down to "ill-advised and immoral tax cuts for the wealthy."

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I guess the Wright story is passe. Daniel Pipes, the one-time academic and now full-time race warrior, is back to proving that Barack Obama is a Muslim.

If only Barack had just said so. If he's a Muslim, he obviously has no serious involvement with a Christian cleric who is, like so many Christians, really into Jesus Christ.

Of course, Pipes -- whose very lucrative business is convincing Jews that all Muslims are out to kill them -- probably hasn't paid any attention to the Wright controversy. Did the White Citizens Council devote attention to, I don't know, Hungarians?

Pipes' business (and I use the word carefully) is libeling Muslims, all Muslims (except those few Uncle Ahmeds he digs up who, for fat fees, go on lecture tours to reveal that all the world's problems are caused by...their fellow Muslims).

It's a nice racket.

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First up, Joe Pettit sees a much deeper problem lurking beneath all the Reverent Wright talk: "Barack Obama is being judged guilty until proven innocent on issue after issue. . . it is how we judge most every black person in the United States." Joe's piece is well-argued and provocative -- give it a read.

Next, reader NCSteve (for short) takes a look at the numbers on racially polarized voting patterns.

Resident satirist Genghis explains the symptoms of Hillaria.

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Does the Obama campaign have any idea how much damage this preening fool of a minister is doing to this campaign?

Pretty much everyone I know supports Obama, morally and financially. But, to a person, they are beginning to believe that Obama will not be the 44th President, no how, no way.

No, they don't think Hillary will be either. They think, and I'm beginning to think, that McCain is going to be sworn in on 1-20-09.

It is not Wright himself that bothers us. It is that Obama does not utterly and completely repudiate a man who is willfully and with malice aforethought doing him profound and possibly fatal damage.

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Until I saw the actual video of Jeremiah Wright at the National Press Club, just now, I was of the opinion that Obama should reply simply by taking the offensive, calling out John McCain for seeking out the endorsement of the wack-job Rev. John Hagee.

Wright on video, preening, smirking, reveling in his star turn, has spun my mind around. I found him convincing in this sense: He's convinced me that he's a clear and present danger to Obama's candidacy. The father has turned on the son--it's the Laius complex in action. Sure, sure, Wright offers a heap of clever and not-so-clever self-extenuations for his kind words about Louis Farrakhan, and absurdly claims to speak for the entire black church. But he makes it clear that he believes Obama is simply "a politician," meaning a shifty no-good. He's broken the parental contract.

Obama has to overthrow his surrogate father.

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Kishore Mahbubani and G. John Ikenberry may not know it -- but they are squaring off to be the new top tier rival powerhouse intellectual combatants.

They each basically stand at the forefront of rival intellectual movements about the relative relevance of American power in the world -- Mahbubani heading the school that the West is in self-denial about its plummeting significance and Ikenberry heading those who think American power remains palpably larger than any other player and is still the key factor in driving international behavior for all other countries.

Mahbubani, who now serves as Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and was previously Singapore's Ambassador to the United Nations, has authored the new book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.

There are many others engaged in this debate including this blogger -- but on the roster are Michael Lind, Parag Khanna, Fareed Zakaria, Richard Haass, Matthew Yglesias, Steven Weber, Bruce Jentleson, Charles Kupchan, Peter Trubowitz, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Anthony Lake, and a long list of others who either are thinking through the consequences of a "diminished America" and what that means for world affairs -- or a resurgent America who still stands out as the key sculptor of global trends and builder of international arrangements.

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John McCain is setting a remarkable record: he is the major party Presidential nominee with the skimpiest policy platform since Warren Harding or perhaps Calvin Coolidge. He's making George Bush's year 2000 policy work look encyclopedic by comparison.

Because it's my area, I've searched his campaign's web site for his view relating to the information and communications technology sector of the economy, about one-sixth of the whole American economy.

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On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, conservative commentator George Will can generally be counted on to offer a stoic, offshore perspective of the internecine Democratic battles. Today, he made the point that Barack Obama has not won a single 'major' political contest against Hillary Clinton since Wisconsin on February 19th. He noted what many other observers have: Barack Obama's campaign is losing steam.

All hats off to those who correctly say that 'mathematically', it's very hard to see how Hillary Clinton shifts enough superdelegates to win -- but there is something afoot really trying to make this happen. As Maureen Dowd just said on Stephanopoulos' show, "Hillary Clinton has successfully repainted Obama from being incandescent to ineffectual."

In my own view, Hillary Clinton has run a mostly terrible campaign and has lost a dramatic lead over her opponent, but what is beginning to happen very late in the process is that "gravity" is finally taking hold on the former gravity-defying campaign of Barack Obama.

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So Arenas loses another game for Wiz in his normal style: he leaves his man wide open for critical shot and he misses his own critical shot. I'm sure he's injured, but (1) why is he playing? and (2) he does this when he's healthy too. He surely is the dead albatross for this team, and when they re-sign him they condemn themselves to mediocrity for years, at least until he demands a trade.

The Nationals are so player-starved that they are giving baseball in their new, ugly stadium a bad name.

And the Redskins are managed, in terms of people and system, in a way that makes every other team delighted to laugh at. Three receivers for top three draft choices, when they had one spot to fill? It's a farce.

I blame the Administration. It has cast a pall of irrationality across the whole city.

If Martin Amis is the self-styled bad boy of English letters, Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, is the rabbinic scourge of "fine" writers who stray into public intellection. No surprise, then, that in the April 27 New York Times Book Review Wieseltier condemns Amis' The Second Plane, a collection of essays, reviews, and stories about September 11 written across six years and re-published in America now in a slim volume.

What is surprising is that Wieseltier's review is itself so preening and melodramatic, an opera bouffe of a literary attack, showing mainly that it takes one to know one. Anyone who's read Amis' book as well as the review will know that Wieseltier isn't as brave or honest as his often-stumbling target. And thereby hangs a tale.

The faults in Amis' book are manifold, but Wieseltier's puzzling envy and all-too-explicable bad faith are borne of bad conscience about his own continuously bad judgment about how to respond to September 11. Amis has gotten under his skin, as bad boys will, because his very badness embarrasses Wieseltier, who actually shares many of his views but loathes and envies Amis' brazenness in flaunting them.

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That's what all sports fans say. The top 8 college basketball teams in the tournament are in the Elite Eight.

We want elite doctors to treat us and elite judges to reason clearly and we should want the best of our best to lead our government.

But we don't want our national leaders not to understand us, not to "get" the core of the American Dream: the urge and opportunity to improve one's own life and the lives of the next generation.

I think Obama gets us. Read his words:

It's hard for me to figure that out, given that I was raised with far fewer advantages than any of my two remaining opponents. That my work started off on the streets of Chicago as a community organizer, that my wife, Michelle, grew up in that same neighborhood whose parents never went to college... that we financed all our education on student loans, that I was raised in a setting with my grandparents who grew up in small-town Kansas where, you know, the dinner table would have been familiar to anyone here in Indiana. A lot of pot roasts and potatoes and jello molds... People know me. People who've worked with me know that the reason I'm in this race is that my life history and my professional history working as a community organizer, as a civil rights lawyer, as a legislator, is to fight so people can take those same ladders of opportunity that I was able to take as a kid, and right now, this country is not providing those same ladders. That's why I'm in this race.

At least that is what Reuters claims. According to Reuters, Senator Clinton has joined John McCain in calling for the elimination of the gas tax over the summer months.

Given the quality of election reporting, this may sound like a populist measure to many voters. In reality, since refineries will already be running near flat out in the summer months, the benefit of the tax break will go almost entirely to the oil companies.

The point is simple. If refineries are at running at capacity then the supply of gas is effectively fixed. It is set at the levels that the refineries can produce. The price is then determined by demand. If the gas tax is reduced or eliminated, then the price will stay the same, you will just get money going to the oil companies instead of the government.

John McCain said: ""I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States. So apparently has Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare."

But I don't understand how McCain would be Hamas's worst nightmare. Would it be by sending American ground troops to hunt out and kill members of Hamas? That would be a bloody, miserable, and intractable conflict, in which notwithstanding large casualties on all sides, the ability of Hamas to recruit new volunteers from now until doomsday would be unbounded. Judicious American Presidents, such as Eisenhower and Reagan and Bush One, have always been reluctant to insert American troops as occupiers of strife-torn Middle Eastern countries.

Would McCain engage in a successful diplomatic effort or an economic redevelopment program of the whole region, so that the root causes of Hamas-like terrorism would be undermined?

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I often refer to the Israel lobby as the "status quo" lobby because, frankly, I view it as advocating very little beyond the status quo. Its entire raison d'être seems to be to ensure that everything stays just the way it is.

True, the lobby pays lip service to the two-state solution and Israeli-Palestinian peace, but no more than that. If you attend its conferences, you can watch the audience sit on its hands when ritualistic endorsements of peace are offered but jump to its feet hootin' and hollering when the Arab bashing begins.

Oh that status quo! Don't engage Hamas. Don't insist on a settlement freeze. Don't push on roadblocks. Don't promote negotiations.

Don't do anything, in fact, except bash Palestinians, and anyone who has a kind word for them, at every opportunity. And, above all, keep Congress and the Presidential candidates in line. That's it.

It doesn't pain me to point to the failures of the lobby. It is, after all, just a conglomerate of organizations.

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Hillary Clinton's most eloquent partisan, Paul Krugman says he's "confused by the Obama campaign. With Senator Clinton as the nominee, the coming election campaign is simple--"return with me now to the great days of the first Clinton Administration."

Democrats can justly portray themselves as the party of economic security, the party that created Social Security and Medicare and defended those programs against Republican attacks -- and the party that can bring assured health coverage to all Americans.

They can also portray themselves as the party of prosperity: the contrast between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy is the best free advertisement that Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover.

So is the election of 2008 about restoration or reform? Obama's whole campaign is based upon the notion that our politics have been corrupted and that only a reform agenda will clean them up. Writing about the start of the 20^th Century, Richard Hofstadter noted that the progressive reform movement "was the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine."

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While touring New Orleans yesterday, John McCain declared the government's response to the Katrina disaster "terrible and disgraceful" and pledged that it would never happen again. But McCain also demonstrated precisely the mindset that caused FEMA to revert from what both Republicans and Democrats in the 1990s had called a model agency back into the turkey farm it had been before the Clinton administration. He said: "Too often, government has its own peculiar way of doing things, following practices that in the private sector would invite financial ruin or worse." McCain reiterated the talking point of Newt Gingrich and every other purveyor of right-wing sound bites that UPS, FedEx, and Wal-Mart can tell you where packages are in real time, but FEMA couldn't even locate its own assets or people.

But it's the belief system that the private sector inherently does things better than government that impelled Bush's first FEMA head, Joseph Allbaugh, to dismantle the agency, notwithstanding its greatly improved performance in the 1990s, by farming out many of its activities to purportedly more efficient contractors.

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After each primary, the press and pundits go into a frenzy of over-analysis, pronouncing death for the candidate who lost the last primary. To be expected, I guess, in a 24/7 media system where writers have to generate new questions and columns every day. Now that Obama has been chewed over (following a primary in which his opponent netted only about a dozen delegates), it is time for the next round of tough questions -- which should go to Hillary Clinton's overtime campaign::

-- Senator Clinton, a new Harvard Institute of Politics poll shows that -- by a huge 70% to 30% margin -- young Democrats favor Senator Obama for the party's nomination. You consistently lose this group, which Obama has energized and drawn to the polls. Why should party leaders and superdelegates give up the party's future to throw the nomination to you?

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Dana Milbank offers us a good take down on Douglas Feith, one of the two or three principal architects of the Iraq war.

Feith, typical of the ideologues and seekers after profit, feels no guilt whatsoever about the role he played manipulating intelligence to help lie us into the war. But he will give proceeds from his self-justifying memoir to help the troops his actions helped maim or kill. (Big deal. Feith comes from a very wealthy family).

People like me who, in addition to hating this war, are involved in helping Israel and the Palestinians achieve peace, have extra problems with Feith. Long before he decided that a US attack on Iraq would help Israel secure the West Bank, Feith had been a leading Likud activist in the United States. He is no more a Republican than Ariel Sharon was. Feith is all about "securing the realm" (his term for defending the Israeli occupation).

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As the President prepared this morning to meet with Fatah leader Abu Mazen, The Washington Post exposed a secret agreement between Bush and Ariel Sharon to protect the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Reader San Fernando Curt takes a look at the implications.

Project Vote runs down the story behind the Bush administration's recent efforts to deny voter registration assistance to hospitalized vets.

Reader The Gipper bemoans America's gutter democracy.

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Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times is one of the best intelligence/national security journalists in the business -- and by the tone of this article, "North Korea 'Helped Syria Build N-Plant'", which will appear as the top, front page lead in tomorrow's FT, he sounds as if he is convinced that the North Koreans were helping Syria to build a nuclear reactor.

Last year, Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times -- also one of the best young investigative journalists in town -- also ran some pieces that argued this point compellingly. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, nuclear proliferation expert Joseph Cirincione, and Arms Control Wonk publisher Jeffrey Lewis have been in the skeptics camp.

I too have been hanging out with the skeptics -- but when this bombing raid occurred on 6 September 2007, I was amazed at the pace of flow of what might have been highly classified information from high level Israeli intelligence officials and compartments within the US intelligence community to people like John Bolton.

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Clinton did not make a dent in Obama's lead by her win in Pennsylvania but what has happened is that the republican attack machine has begun the swiftboating in the wake of her negative attacks rightly decried by the New York Times.

It is bootless to speculate about the self-destructive tactics of the Clinton camp. What matters is going on the offense against the author of the typically bizarre, distracting, and hideous rightwing attacks: John McCain.

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Ed Kilgore's fascinating and widely read post here at TPM examines Barack Obama's prospects after the Pennsylvania primary by comparing Obama in some ways to George McGovern and proposing, with commenters, a number of strategic alternatives.

The discussion is refreshing but also disconcerting, because, not once in the post or in the 15 astute comments I'd read by the time I wrote this is there any mention that Obama is black. (One commenter did note that Obama took 90% of the black Pennsylvania primary vote, but that's it.)

It's refreshing because Obama's self-understanding and his campaign give race its due while pointing beyond it. But it's also pretty strange to see no mention of race in a discussion of Obama's prospects just after Pennsylvania reminded us of racism's depth and obstinacy among working-class whites in industrial states -- an obstinacy I illustrated here shortly before the primary.

Nixon carried the industrial states against McGovern in 1972, except Massachusetts, not only because he was the incumbent but because too much was being made of race then, in the streets and in McGovernites' color-coding of the Democratic convention. Subtle appeals to racist backlash worked. And McGovern wasn't even black.

The Clintons have made a lot of race this year, too, reminding everyone that Obama is black -- from Bill's bringing up Jesse Jackson's past South Carolina victory when Obama won there, to Sean Wilentz's falsely accusing Obamaites of playing the race card, to Hillary's jumping into the Rev. Wright loop a week late, and so on.

But there's a way that Obama could turn what the Clintons and some Republicans consider a winning issue into a cornerstone of his own strong victory.

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It's not much but it's something. Georgetown University has decided not to renew Doug Feith's contract.

Word from campus is that both students and faculty had pretty much had it with the arch war criminal walking around campus although I also heard that he is such a goofy, pathetic guy that some students felt sorry for him. One told me, "he's like the nerdiest loser I ever saw. He cannot have done the things he's accused of. He's too obtuse."

I told her to read Arendt's "The Banality of Evil."

In any case, the Jesuits have done themselves proud by, at long last, giving Feith his walking papers. I wonder where we'll turn up next. In a McCain administration or in the dock at the Hague?