Via Patterico's Pontifications, we have this:

As Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., avoids any real campaigning in West Virginia, the former president of the United States is out there ginning up resentments.

Bill Clinton has the right to say whatever he wants, of course. But he's a smart man. Brilliant, even.

He can do the math. He must know that it's quite improbable that his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., will be the Democratic presidential nominee.

So what purpose does it serve for him to barnstorm a state like West Virginia and tell rural voters that Obama and his elitist political/media cabal allies are mocking Appalachia?

He's using the kind of language Democrats typically use against Republicans -- as in, stuff you say when you don't want voters to vote for the other guy under any circumstance.

This is tough stuff to walk back from.

As if the Clintons want to walk back from it. Now that they realize the nomination is likely not theirs, they will do whatever is necessary to ensure that Barack Obama will not win in the fall. Then Hillary Clinton will run again in 2012, gambling that by that time, the Democrats will have become so hungry for a Presidential win that they will forgive her and her husband for the efforts they are currently undertaking to destroy the Democratic Party.

And don't think that a few of the Clintons' supporters won't take what they are doing to heart and heed the implicit message not to vote for Barack Obama under any circumstances this fall.

Once again, the Clintons have ensured their place in history as the Patron Saints of Popcorn. The entertainment they provide political observers is nothing short of amazing.

While the slightest Republican critique of a Democrat is decried as the greatest threat to democracy since I-don't-know-what, stuff like the following just gets laughed off:

Speaking before Clinton, Gov. Steve Beshear had some fighting words of his own. He tied the plight of the national Democrats to local ones, having reclaimed the office from a Republican incumbent last year. He said Democrats were "problem solvers."

"I can think of only one Republican that could be a problem solver," he added. "And that is Vice President Cheney, if he would just take George on a hunting trip."

I won't hold my breath waiting for denunciations of so despicable a comment. But of course, if a Republican said something like this about a pair of Democrats, you could just imagine the outrage and fury.

By now, we should be used to stories like this one, in which mainstream media journalists warn us with ever so much tut-tutting that Republicans win Presidential elections by planning "onslaughts" against Democrats and "scaring" voters--thus fostering and furthering a narrative that states that Democratic victories are triumphs of Light and Truth while Republican victories are illegitimate and only come about because the sheeple are too terrified to vote the other way. Added to this narrative is an epic poem to the wonderfulness of Senator Obama. I am sure that Senator Obama is a very nice and charming guy, but good grief, no one is perfect and there are plenty of things that could be pointed about about Senator Obama's personality and character that would conflict with the hagiography that has been drawn up concerning him.

All of this is fatuous nonsense and I would call it various other things as well if this was not a family blog. Don't tell me that Democrats don't run fear campaigns; on a regular basis, the desperate need to reform entitlements like Social Security and Medicare is sidetracked because of Democratic fear-mongering that Republicans are out to take away the pensions of seniors or the health care of old people. Free trade in general and pacts like NAFTA in particular have been dazzlingly successful in bringing about greater prosperity, but you wouldn't know if from listening to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and others in the Democratic Party link the implementation of free trade policies to widespread job losses and economic downturns (with no evidence or substantiation whatsoever, mind you). The economy has thus far avoided contracting, unemployment is at a very low 5% with the employment picture actually picking up and 95% of homeowners are still able to pay their mortgages, but the facts are ignored you would think that we are in the throes of yet another Great Depression. The surge and the implementation of the counterinsurgency strategy have stabilized the situation in Iraq but we are regularly told that we are "losing" or have "lost" there. And on and on and on.

So you can understand the frustration of people like me who watch demagoguery get raised to an art form on the other side of the partisan divide while at the same time, the mainstream media piously tries to convince us that Democrats are fighting by Marquis of Queensbury rules while Republicans are punching below the belt. The facts don't support this at all and while I have come to recognize that this lack of evidence is never an obstacle for the "reality-based community" and its natural allies in the mainstream media, I nevertheless don't have to like being lied to. And neither do the rest of you.

I love and adore my home city, but let us face it: Clean politics has never quite been a Chicago forte. That's why it is valuable to have John Kass ask how precisely it came to be that Barack Obama was seen as a cleaner, fresher product of Chicago politics when, in fact, he has done nothing to challenge the traditional nature of politics in my beloved hometown. The following passage is a key one:

As a candidate, Obama will do what he has to do to win. My argument is not with him--but with the national political media pack that refuses to look closely at what Chicago is. They're fixated on what it was, and they think it's clean now.

And they've spent years crafting, then cleaving to their eager and trembling Obama narrative, a tale of great yearning, almost mythic and ardently adolescent, a tale in which Obama is portrayed as a reformer, a dynamic change agent about to do away with the old thuggish politics.

It's as if Axelrod channeled it, wearing a peaked Merlin hat. Obama is a South Sider and does not hail from Camelot or Mt. Olympus or the lush forests of mythical Narnia.

I've joked that reporters feel compelled to hug him, in their copy, as if he were the cuddly faun, the Mr. Tumnus of American politics. But I was only kidding. The real Mr. Tumnus never had Billy Daley or Ted Kennedy carving up Cabinet appointments.

So why the disconnect? Why is Obama allowed to campaign as a reformer, virtually unchallenged by the media, though he's a product of Chicago politics and has never condemned the wholesale political corruption in his home town the way he condemns those darn Washington lobbyists.

For an answer as to when pundits will ever put Illinois corruption in context, I called on Tom Bevan, executive director of the popular political Web site Real Clear Politics (which directs readers to my column on occasion) and a Chicagoan.

"To a large degree, the media has accepted much of the Obama narrative thus far," Bevan told me. "He's risen so quickly, but his history hasn't been bogged down with an association of Chicago politics and I can't tell you why exactly, except perhaps that some may have bought into the established narrative and can't separate themselves from it."

"And I don't know if the country understands just how corrupt the system is in Illinois. People don't see it. They're flying over us, cruising at 30,000 feet," Bevan said.

Treating any part of America as flyover country constitutes a lack of respect to that part of America. Treating Chicago--a significant metropolitan center--like a political flyover zone is especially bizarre, so I invite pundits and observers to stop cruising at 30,000 feet and touch down to examine Chicago in careful and exacting fashion.

They'll find that you come and stay in my hometown for a whole host of perfectly wonderful reasons, but while the political system is interesting and amusing from an anthropological perspective, it's not exactly something to admire.

And Barack Obama has done nothing--nothing whatsoever--to change that. I think that's an important issue to cover in this Presidential election. Don't you?

(Thanks to Mark Hemingway for the link.)

Refusing to go gently into that good night, Clinton supporter Jerome Armstrong stubbornly sticks to the message that Hillary Clinton can win the Democratic Presidential nomination. He points to West Virginia as a state that serves as a good indicator of what Armstrong believes to be Barack Obama's general election problems. Sensitive to charges that fretting about Obama's general election appeal in West Virginia could be tantamount to giving credence to the views of racists, Armstrong spends a goodly amount of time denouncing anyone who would dismiss as racists anti-Obama voters in West Virginia.

This isn't particularly interesting save for two observations:

1. The Clinton folks actually believe that their candidate might yet pull off some sort of miracle and capture the nomination.

2. Despite all of the talk that Obama's nomination is now inevitable and that with said inevitability will come newfound party unity, seething anger and resentment continues to define the mood of Clinton supporters. This is, perhaps, somewhat understandable; at the beginning of the nomination contest, I don't imagine that people like Armstrong really ever thought that Obama would be able to wrest the nomination away from Clinton when they consulted the stars. Nevertheless, one would have thought that the various pro-Clinton factions in the netroots would have begun to reconcile themselves to an Obama nomination and then line up to support him against John McCain and the Republicans.

Well, perhaps eventually, they will. But for now, there remains seething anger and resentment and since it is almost the middle of May already, one could easily see the resentment continuing through the summer--especially if Hillary Clinton decides to push through the rest of the primary schedule and goes to the Democratic National Convention without having fallen on her sword. Ted Kennedy kept on fighting up to and during the convention in New York in 1980 even though he had significantly less support then than Clinton does and will have during this electoral contest. I am sure that this information will not be lost on the Clintons, I would not be surprised if they continued to play every trick in the book--and some that may not be in the book--to try to win the nomination at the last moment during a knife fight in Denver and while I have not recently checked the stock prices for popcorn companies, I don't imagine that they have gone down all that much.

Shall we engage in some gently mockery?

Yes, we shall:

And to paraphrase Vader, my high school civics teacher has failed me for the last time. Fifty states? I scoff! We have far more than fifty:

Of course, if John McCain said this, we would have heard about how old he is he has "lost his bearings."

Happy Birthday to Friedrich Hayek.

How true. How true. How true. How true. How true.

Andrew Biggs reveals that when it comes to tax policy, Barack Obama has got some 'splainin' to do:

As the presidential campaign heats up, a key issue is whether to extend the 2001 and 2003 income tax cuts, which expire in 2011. John McCain wants to make the tax cuts permanent. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want to let the rates rise.

Opponents of the tax cuts point to spending programs that could be financed by the extra revenues. Chief among these is Social Security. Sen. Obama's Web site, for example, argues that "extending the Bush tax cuts will cost three times as much as what is needed to fix Social Security's solvency over the next 75 years."

Such statements imply that if we return to the seemingly modest tax rates of the 1990s, we could fund the $4.3 trillion Social Security deficit, and so much more. As Mr. Obama recently told Fox News, "I would roll back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans back to the level they were under Bill Clinton, when I don't remember rich people feeling oppressed."

This argument seems compelling, but it is misguided. In reality, repealing the tax cuts would raise taxes far above Clinton-era levels. Due to quirks in the tax code, average taxes would be almost 25% higher than during the 1990s.

The culprit is "bracket creep." Income tax brackets have not adjusted for the growth in earnings, which means that if the Bush tax cuts are indeed rolled back,

. . . income-tax revenues by 2018 will rise to 10.8% of the total economy from 8.7% today - an increase of 24%. Compared to the average over the last 50 years, allowing the rates to rise would increase tax revenues by 32%.

The economy is not recessionary yet. Perhaps we can get by on weak growth for a while before the economy finally picks up and avoid actual contractions. But if taxes are raised so dramatically, the economic pinch we have sought to avoid will finally arrive.

I should emphasize another portion of Biggs's editorial: Even if the current tax cuts remain in place, bracket creep will cause taxes to rise. Anti-tax cutters like to deride small-government/free market advocates for championing tax cuts at what the anti-tax cutters believe is a Pavlovian level. If they actually understood anything about bracket creep, however, they'd quit with the derision.

My RedState colleagues and I had a roundtable regarding how John McCain should go about choosing a running mate. You can find the discussion here. Check it out.

So let me be the latest to link to this P.J. O'Rourke commencement-speech-you-will-never-actually-hear-given-at-a-college. It's utterly fantastic. I may not agree with all of it, but I agree with lots of it and find the following especially worth quoting:

Here we are living in the world's most prosperous country, surrounded by all the comforts, conveniences and security that money can provide. Yet no American political, intellectual or cultural leader ever says to young people, "Go out and make a bunch of money." Instead, they tell you that money can't buy happiness. Maybe, but money can rent it.

There's nothing the matter with honest moneymaking. Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box. In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich.

The man's got a point.

Whether or not the Democratic nominating contest drags on until August, people are increasingly acting like it is over. Karl Rove has a good and balanced view of what one might expect in a general election fight between Obama and McCain; I would love to find out what kind of electoral map he is looking at and how it shows that McCain is beating Obama in the Electoral College. [UPDATE: Here they are!]

Also, George Will gets snarky. Hilarity ensues.

Will Wilkinson, while criticizing "unreflective anti-gubmint reactions of libertarians to the FLDS imbroglio", still prefers to limit his justification to the specific evils of the FLDS, and to maintain a defense of polygamy in the abstract:

The libertarian point is that the illegality and attendant marginalization of polygamy pushes it into isolated, authoritarian, quasi-state cult compounds where these kinds of crimes are most likely to take place.

But this is one case where the libertarian point is simply wrong. Tyler Cowen hints at the reasons:

Maybe the goals of the perpetrators are rape, abuse, and power-mad intimidation, rather than polygamy per se ("polygamy: merely a means to an end.") In that case polygamy legalization won't limit their ability to set up isolated, authoritarian, quasi-state cult compounds for their nefarious purposes.

Consider the demand pattern resulting from polygamy (i.e., from polygyny). The potential demand for women immediately and irreversibly exceeds any potential supply; thus there is steady pressure to expand the supply by including marginal cases. For example, 15-year-olds.

The definition of "marginal" is not fixed by the Mr. Wilkinson's norms, of course. It changes; in fact, fairly rapidly. Megan McArdle has a long discussion of this, with some striking examples.

C'mon said the activists. That's just silly. I just can't imagine anyone deciding to get pregnant out of wedlock simply because there are welfare benefits available.

Oooops.

Of course, change didn't happen overnight. But the marginal cases did have children out of wedlock, which made it more acceptable for the next marginal case to do so.

Once the 15-year olds are no longer "marginal", demand is focused downward, and downward again.

Meanwhile this intrinsically unfair system of living can only be sustained if the exit is blocked. Thus the other symptoms observed in the FLDS case -- the brainwashing, abuse and too-ready excommunication -- are not pathologies at all: they are the natural and inevitable ramification of a system in which polygamy is permitted.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail -- but some things really are nails, and polygamy really is an intrinsically abusive institution which merits destruction by Leviathan. If society has any uses at all, this is one of them.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are the most protectionist major Presidential candidates to come down the pike in recent memory. I say "recent" because, of course there is one particular President who was in the same league with both Clinton and Obama when it came to promulgating lousy trade policy and making the country suffer for it. I know that Charlie Black works for the McCain campaign and gets paid to throw elbows, but he is right to go where he goes verbally:

The growing shopping list of promises has also served further to sharpen the contrast with John McCain, the Republican nominee, who has staked out a robustly free-trade stance for the general election.

"The last time we had a protectionist president was Herbert Hoover [in office from 1929 to 1933] and look how that worked out," says Charlie Black, a senior adviser to Mr McCain. "We think we can win this debate in a general election."

The ghost of Hoover may be smiling now. The ghosts of Hawley and Smoot most certainly are. The rest of us have every reason to feel grim.

Or not.

At least not if this story is to be believed. And yes, much of what is found in that story in terms of anti-Obama sentiments is ugly beyond measure. But that ugliness may not serve as much of a deterrent against Clinton staying in.

Time to get cracking:

(Via The Foundry.)

So Obama has won North Carolina big and may very well win Indiana (it's very close as I write this and the networks have refused to call it for anyone the last I checked the television). A whole host of commentators are declaring the race over Obama has been all-but-anointed as the nominee.

Which he likely will be. But Hillary Clinton will fight on if her speech this evening was any indication and given the demographic patterns that have emerged during this fight for the Democratic Presidential nomination, the Clinton people probably have good grounds for believing that they will do well in the upcoming contests in West Virginia and Kentucky. Meanwhile, they will point out to superdelegates what E.J. Dionne and Ramesh Ponnuru observe concerning Obama's ability--or lack thereof--to draw votes from all parts of the political spectrum. And as pointed out by Michael Barone (link via Brother Erick), coming into tonight, Clinton has actually gotten more popular votes than has Obama. I haven't done the math to see whether that is still the case and it may not be, given Obama's huge win in North Carolina. But the point is that when it comes to the popular vote, Clinton is hanging in there and she may well use the popular vote to push for the argument that come general election time, she will be more electable than will Obama.

Is it possible that Hillary Clinton will drop out after this evening--especially if Indiana goes Obama's way? Sure. But I'm not betting on it. People named "Clinton" don't give up claims to power that easily.

It is generally agreed by those who are actually in the know when it comes to the specifics of trade policy and how free trade genuinely benefits America that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are moving Heaven and Earth to pander to protectionists for votes. But as Daniel Ikenson points out, in the runup to tonight's primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, both pandering to free traders is the smart thing to do:

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Indiana's producers shipped $26 billion worth of goods to foreign customers in 2007 -- 14 percent more than the year before, and 80 percent more than in 2001. In fact, since 2001, the state's exports have grown at a rate one-third faster than U.S. exports overall. In North Carolina, producers shipped $23 billion worth of goods to foreign customers in 2007 -- 10 percent more than the year before, and 59 percent more than five years ago.

In 2007, exports accounted for 20 percent of U.S. manufacturers' total sales revenues -- the highest percentage in modern history. And nowhere in America is manufacturing more important to the economy than in Indiana, where the sector accounts for over 30 percent of the state's gross domestic product. Manufacturing is also more important to North Carolina's economy than it is to most other states, accounting for 22 percent of the state's gross domestic product, ranking it fifth among states in that measure.

In China, Canada, and Mexico -- the primary villains in the candidates' anti-trade narratives -- Indiana's producers are building relationships that are yielding extraordinary returns. Exports from Indiana to China increased by a whopping 36 percent between 2006 and 2007 -- twice the rate of total U.S. export growth to China, and nearly four times Indiana's exports to China in 2001.

Likewise, Indiana's exports to Canada and Mexico have grown 9 percent from 2006 and 67 percent from 2001, eclipsing overall U.S. export growth to the NAFTA countries in both periods. North Carolina's exports to NAFTA have grown 46 percent over the past five years -- to $7.4 billion.

There is a lot more good news (which we wouldn't have around if protectionists had their way) when you click on the link. And lo and behold, it would seem that Ikenson's advice was taken:

Weeks after slamming the North American Free Trade Agreement in Ohio, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have retooled their messages for Indiana and North Carolina, states that have made gains from free trade amid losses elsewhere.

[. . .]

In the steel-producing region of northwest Indiana, the Democratic presidential candidates blamed China for the erosion of manufacturing jobs. But other parts of the state have witnessed an uptick in foreign investment and have positioned themselves as hubs for major distribution centers.

"We may not be able to bring back all the jobs we've lost because of trade, but we can create tomorrow's jobs in this country," Sen. Obama said last week at a high school in Indianapolis. At a steel factory in Munster, Ind., he told the crowd, "We're going to have to trade."

Nice to see that Clinton and Obama are part-time free traders, at least. But the problem is that they can just as easily be called part-time protectionists as well. And full-time free traders are needed to implement prosperity-inducing policies. I have no idea whether the free trade or protectionist versions of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would inhabit the Oval Office and make decisions when it comes to trade policy. I do know, however, that John McCain has an impeccable trade record and that I have heard much too much protectionist talk from Clinton and Obama--not to mention a whole host of others in the Democratic Party--to be comfortable entrusting trade policy to them.

"Don't worry too much about Hillary Clinton getting things completely and utterly wrong on the gas tax since economists are the only ones who are really obsessed about this issue."

I had no idea, of course, that we were supposed to excuse a policy error of tremendous proportions merely because if we failed to do so, we would be paying undue attention to the pet peeves of economists. Alarm bells should go off when a lousy gas tax policy is forwarded by a major Presidential candidate and when said Presidential candidate also says that she won't listen to the economics community and its consensus opinion that said Presidential candidate's gas tax policy is almost cataclysmically wrong.

Then again, perhaps Krugman just feels the need to get back into Senator Clinton's graces. She thinks he is The Enemy now:

She peddled her sham gas-tax holiday and repeated her attempt to blame Indiana's job losses on outsourcing and Nafta. Stephanopoulos asked her to name a single economist who thinks a tax-holiday plan would work, and the daughter of Wellesley and Yale took the chance to shove the geeks into their lockers: "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists."

When Stephanopoulos pointed out that Paul Krugman, a Times columnist, has raised doubts about the plan, Clinton lumped Krugman in with the Bush administration and said she wasn't going to listen to the people responsible for the last seven years.

Insert your own joke here.