The sudden departure of National Security Adviser James Jones indicates Mr. Obama soon may have as poisonous a relationship with the U.S. military as he has with business.

Mr. Jones was doomed after the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward reported the retired Marine general had described Mr. Axelrod and departed chief of staff Rahm Emanuel as “water bugs” who don’t understand foreign policy and are interested only in its short term effects on domestic politics.

But Mr. Jones’ departure three weeks before the midterm elections suggests a White House in disarray, and his replacement by Tom Donilon portends conflict with the Pentagon.

“We could be headed for one of the greatest civilian-military showdowns in decades,” said liberal commentator Peter Beinart.

The political news continues to be more than Half Full.  The most surprising news this week is a poll indicating that Rep. John Dingell – who has held his seat since Christ was a corporal – is trailing his GOP opponent.

Democrats are pursuing a base mobilization strategy to hold down their losses in the midterms.  This makes sense, because it’s about the only way to play the hand they’ve dealt themselves.

But it won’t work.  Ann Kim of the left of center group Third Way explains why.

But if base mobilization is the only card you have to play, play it with gusto.  But President Obama and his sidekick, the buffoon, are playing it oddly.  Zero thinks he can get the base to turn out by lecturing it and criticizing it.

Voters are used to being courted, not hectored.  It’ll be fascinating to see how this works out.

Last month the Department of Defense took the unusual -- and to me, disturbing -- step of buying up the entire initial press run of a book it doesn’t like, and destroying it.

The book is “Operation Dark Heart,” by retired Army Reserve LtCol. Anthony Shaffer, about an intelligence operation in Afghanistan in the early days of that war.

Mr. Shaffer had submitted his manuscript to the Army for security review, which approved it.  But the Defense Intelligence Agency weighed in late with objections.

A second edition is being printed, with the redactions the Pentagon insisted upon.  Thanks in large part to the publicity surrounding DoD’s effort at censorship, “Operation Dark Heart” is expected to debut at number 7 on the New York Times bestseller list.

At his farewell party last Friday (10/1) before leaving the White House to run for mayor of Chicago, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said to President Barack Obama: “I want to thank you for being the toughest leader any country could ask for in the toughest time any president has ever faced.”

We expect these days a certain amount of excess in the flattery members of his staff bestow upon a president.  But if there were a record for sycophancy, Rahm has shattered it.

Obsequiousness and historical ignorance are dangerous combinations in any senior presidential aide.  But they are especially harmful when the president has an exalted opinion of himself, but little real world experience.

There’s been too much good news in the Half Full Report of late, so we’ll begin this week’s HFR with bad.

* President Barack Obama drew a monster crowd – police estimated it at more than 26,000 – at a rally on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison Tuesday.  Even embattled Sen. Russ Feingold – who’d been avoiding Zero like the plague – showed up for it.

* Rasmussen indicates Zero’s job approval is rising, and the gap between Republicans and Democrats on his generic ballot is shrinking.

* A Survey USA poll indicated the senate race in Kentucky has fallen into a statistical dead heat.  A poll in California showed the Dems widening leads in the gubernatorial and senatorial contests.

* A Time-CNN poll indicates Lisa (it’s my job for life) Murkowski has pulled into a statistical tie with Joe Miller in the senate race in Alaska.

I bet you haven’t heard of Tim Scott, Allen West, or Ryan Frazier.  If they were Democrats, I might lose that bet.

But they’re not.  Mr. Scott, Mr. West, and Mr. Frazier are three of the 14 blacks who are running for Congress as Republicans this November.  Thirty two black Republicans ran in the primaries.

If all three win, that would be a post-Reconstruction record.  The largest number of black Republicans to serve together in the House in the last century is two, J.C. Watts (Oklahoma) and Gary Franks (Connecticut) between 1995 and 1997.  There haven’t been any since Mr. Watts retired in 2003.

One might think the resurgence of black Republicans, coming as it does at a time when a black Democrat is president, would rate a feature story or two in the national media.  But that would conflict with the liberal meme that Republicans are racist.

There were two noteworthy hearings last Friday (9/24) on what was otherwise a slow news day in Washington D.C.

Comedian Stephen Colbert testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on migrant farm workers as a character he plays on his television show.

A former head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that Justice is refusing to prosecute cases of intimidation of white voters, or of vote fraud.

Journalists flocked to cover Mr. Colbert’s testimony, but largely ignored that of the Justice Department whistleblower, Christopher Coates.

In a democracy, it is rarely good politics to describe those upon whose votes your power depends as religious bigots and racists. 

According to the Court party, those Americans -- more than two thirds of us, according to the polls -- who oppose construction of a mosque near Ground Zero are motivated chiefly by religious bigotry.

But if it’s religious bigotry that fuels opposition to the Ground Zero mosque, why do most Muslims worldwide object to its construction?

The Court party drips with disdain for less privileged countrymen.  According to New York Times columnist Frank Rich, Atlanta Journal Constitution editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker and other such worthies, disapproval of President Obama is motivated chiefly by racism.  It’s their opinion Americans didn’t notice Barack Obama was black until he proposed Obamacare.

    The Court party has a lot to say now, because it holds most political offices, and controls most media organizations.  The Country party will speak Nov. 2.

She’s mighty cute for a thousand pound gorilla.

Last Friday (9/18) Sarah Palin drew 1,400 people -- the largest crowd ever -- for the annual Reagan dinner in Des Moines, Iowa.  Her appearance in the state that holds the first presidential nominating contest followed by three days the stunning upset victory of Christine O’Donnell, the woman she’d endorsed in Delaware’s Republican senate primary. Ms. O’Donnell said it was Ms. Palin’s endorsement that made her victory possible.

Of the 36 candidates in contested primaries who Ms. Palin endorsed, 25 won.  That’s a winning percentage of 69 percent, rather better than that of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.  Eight senate candidates backed by the Washington establishment lost.

“I live in one of the most conservative counties in a conservative state (Hendricks County, Indiana),” wrote an emailer to Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review.  “Having attended many gatherings and fund-raisers for the local Republican Party, I noticed something odd: the attendees were mostly folks who were looking for favors... 

“The party apparatus was mostly dominated by people who didn’t believe in limited government or even a socially conservative agenda.  They were people who had hijacked the party apparatus to advance the ‘favor factor’ theory of government.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is that sort of Republican.

Let’s begin this week’s HFR with three cheers for Ovide Lamontagne.  He came from far behind to lose the GOP senate nomination in New Hampshire by a hair’s breadth to Kelly Ayotte.  He immediately eschewed a recount, and warmly endorsed Ms. Ayotte.

Whatever Mr. Lamontagne’s motivation for his classy behavior, I can think of a sore loser in Alaska, a guy in Delaware, and a jerk in Washington state who could profit from his example.

While we’re doing shout-outs, let’s give thanks for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

An explosive primary season was capped by a nuclear bomb: the upset victory of Christine O’Donnell over Delaware political fixture Rep. Mike Castle in the GOP senate primary.

But for me, the returns with the greatest import for November came in Wisconsin.  That front runners Scott Walker and Ron Johnson easily won the GOP gubernatorial and senatorial nods is not surprising.  What is is that so many more people (614,321) voted in the Republican gubernatorial primary than in the Democrat primary (233,119).

More votes were cast for Democrats than for Republicans in the seven primaries Tuesday (the others were in Maryland, Massachussetts and Rhode Island).  But overall, Republicans finished the primary season with upwards of three million votes more than Democrats received.

The last time Republicans received more primary votes than Democrats did was in 1930. In both 1994 (a terrific year for Republicans) and 1946 (a really terrific year) Democrats won more primary votes than Republicans did.  You don’t need to be a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing.

Last Wednesday in Cleveland (9/8) President Barack Obama criticized John Boehner eight times.  The Democratic National Committee has released an ad attacking him.

The New York Times published a hit piece on Mr. Boehner Sunday (9/12).  George Stephanopoulos of ABC and Bob Schieffer of CBS attacked him in interviews.

Who, you may ask, is John Boehner?

The attacks on Mr. Boehner are a tacit admission by Democrats their earlier strategy of blaming George W. Bush for just about everything isn’t working. 

When the president attacks a person who is as obscure as Mr. Boehner currently is, it elevates Mr. Boehner’s stature and reduces his own.  Americans like to have their presidents act presidential.  This is why vice presidents traditionally play the role of attack dog.

Vice President Joe Biden is a buffoon, which may in part explain why Mr. Obama is doing the growling and barking himself.  But this is not a president who can afford further dimunition of his status.  Wags say skiier Lindsey Vonn is thinking of giving Mr. Obama the gold medal she won at the Winter Olympics, because no one has gone downhill faster than he has.

The magic is gone. It wasn’t so long ago that Barack Obama could fill football stadiums.  In Cleveland Wednesday, he couldn’t fill a rec center at a college in a heavily Democrat town.

According to Time Magazine, the bloom is off the rose for the Obama campaign organization, “Organizing for America,” too.

The Washington Post had a story Wednesday on the closing this month, in Winchester, Va., of the last factory in the United States that manufactures incandescent light bulbs.  Two hundred workers will lose their jobs.

Those 200 jobs were among the first destroyed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.  Among their first acts after the Democrats took over Congress in 2007 was to pass a law which, essentially, bans the use of incandescent light bulbs by 2014.  The law favors compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), which are manufactured in China.

CFLs cost at least five times as much as incandescent bulbs, and give off less light than the higher wattage incandescents.  Prolonged exposure to fluorescent light can trigger migraine headaches.

But these are the least of the problems with CFLs, as Brandy Bridges discovered when she dropped one in her daughter's bedroom.

President Obama made a strange remark during his speech to a labor audience in Milwaukee Monday.

“They talk about me like a dog,” he said of Republicans.   Some think this was a reference to a song by Jimi Hendrix, the guitarist who died of apparent drug and alcohol overdose in 1970.   Others speculate it was a botched effort to emulate Franklin Roosevelt’s rejoinder when Republicans criticized him for sending a warship to pick up his dog, Fala, who had accidentally been left behind on a presidential visit to the Aleutians.   But it may simply have been recognition that their dog, Bo, polls better than Barack or Michelle.

In a week filled with bad news for Democrats, perhaps the worst was the announcement Tuesday by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley that he will not seek another term.

Being mayor of Chicago has been a lifelong dream for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He could be the boss, instead of just being the flak catcher for the boss.

Rahm Emanuel is a foul-mouthed jerk.  But he is the closest thing to an adult in President Barack Obama’s inner circle.  And, as a senior White House aide during the Clinton administration and a four term Congressman, he’s the only member of the inner circle to have extensive Washington experience.  The other two consiglieres -- Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod -- made their bones in Chicago politics. 

If Mr. Emanuel resigns to run for mayor of Chicago, and especially if he does so early, he is likely to be replaced -- in fact if not necessarily in name -- by Ms. Jarrett.

Even if Ms. Jarrett is not offered the chief of staff job, or chooses not to take it, her influence will increase, because the other names being bruited about -- the Webzine Politico mentioned Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and Ron Klain, Vice President Joe Biden’s chief of staff -- lack the close personal relationship with the president that Mr. Emanuel, Mrr. Axelrod, and, especially, Ms. Jarrett have enjoyed.

That’s bad news for Democrats, because Ms. Jarrett’s political judgment is terrible.

President Barack Obama is like a guy who sneaks onto a marathon race course a mile or so from the finish line and pretends he ran the whole thing.

In his speech Tuesday night commemorating the return to the United States of the last American combat brigade in Iraq, Mr. Obama patted himself lustily on the back for not screwing up the timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces that President Bush had worked out with the Iraqi government before Mr. Obama’s inauguration:

Talk show host Glenn Beck held an ecumenical revival meeting on the mall in Washington D.C.  Saturday (8/28). A lot of people came. The Rev. Al Sharpton held a counter demonstration in the same city the same day.  Not many participated. The turnout for Mr. Beck’s rally was comparable to the 200,000 or so who heard Martin Luther King Jr. make his “I have a dream” speech on the same spot on the same date. Mr. Beck is trying to “hijack” the civil rights movement, said the Rev. Al Sharpton. Mr. Sharpton played no role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.  Dr. Alveda King did.  She thinks her uncle would have been pleased to have 200,000 plus mostly white folks endorse his goal and cheer his name at the place where he made his “I Have a Dream” speech. “If Uncle Martin could be here today, he would surely commend us for giving honor where honor is due,” Ms. King said.  “He would encourage us to lay aside the divisive lies that cause us to think we are part of separate races.  We are one human family."

In Gallup's annual survey of confidence in institutions last month, Congress ranked dead last, with an all-time low of 11 percent of Americans expressing "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in our federal lawmakers.

A Rasmussen survey, also in mid-July, indicated only 23 percent of voters think the federal government today rules with the consent of the governed. Sixty-two percent said it does not.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Congress -- the House of Representatives especially -- represented the views of mainstream Americans. That time has clearly passed. How might we bring it back?

Who replaced Willie Mays in center field for the Giants?  I don’t know, either.  But I feel like that guy, whoever he is, filling in for Jack as he treks through the wilds of Tajikistan and some other places we haven’t heard of.  The Half Full Report won’t be the same without him, but I hope you’ll find it entertaining. Last week’s HFR would more accurately have been called the “Cup Runneth Over Report,” because the news was so good for our side.  It isn’t quite as good this week (how could it possibly be?) but this is still an MFR – Mostly Full Report.  Let’s start with the primary elections in Alaska, Arizona and Florida.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates raised eyebrows and ruffled feathers Aug. 9 when he announced plans to shut down Joint Forces Command, a headquarters in southeastern Virginia at which more than 6,000 military personnel, civilians and defense contractors work.

The closure will devastate the economies of the Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Hampton Roads area, so Mr. Gates’ announcement brought the predictable squeals from Virginia’s politicians.

There is something that doesn’t seem right about cutting defense spending when we’re in the midst of two wars.  But even though I look askance at how the administration circumvented the rules with regard to base closing, I can’t be critical of the decision itself.

Our military is, by far, the most efficient part of the federal government.  But that is, alas, damning with faint praise.  The Department of Defense, too, is bloated by bureaucracy.

Joint Forces Command does some useful things.  But it does them at considerable expense.  I suspect it exists more to provide billets for otherwise superfluous senior officers than to fulfill a vital defense need.  (Since 2001, flag officer positions in the military have increased by more than 100; senior civilian slots in the Department of Defense by 300.)

We’re in a fiscal emergency.  We have to watch what we spend even on vitally important things.  So the question isn’t: Why cut defense spending?  It’s why cut ONLY defense spending?  Why aren’t the other Cabinet secretaries scouring their departments for cuts?

After all, the Constitution requires the federal government to “provide for the common defense.”  Nothing in it requires the federal government to bankrupt farmers in California’s Central Valley on behalf of the delta smelt.

Why would someone as smart as President Barack Obama is reputed to be behave as stupidly as he has in the affair over the ground zero mosque?  Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson thinks she knows.

“He is so supremely confident in his intellect that he forgets, on his way to the correct decision, to slow down and pick up not-so-gifted stragglers,” Ms. Carlson wrote Aug. 18.

Yet Mr. Obama has said things -- that America has 57 states; that “Austrian” is a foreign language; that Arabic is spoken in Afghanistan; that Canada has a president -- which if George W. Bush said them, would have had journalists like Ms. Carlson chortling about what a dunce he was.

You can, I suppose, have a superior intellect without demonstrating it in any way.  But it could be the reason why Mr. Obama has made so many political mistakes, and has been so unpersuasive in his public speaking is because he isn’t nearly as smart as his admirers imagine him to be.

When the Pew Research Center released a poll with awkward results for the White House, the Associated Press raced to do what it could to help.

“Americans are increasingly convinced -- incorrectly -- that President Barack Obama is a Moslem, and a growing number are thoroughly confused about his religion,” the AP said.

According to Pew, 18 percent of Americans (up from 11 percent last year) think Mr. Obama is a Moslem; 34 percent think he is a Christian, and 43 percent say they don’t know.

On what basis does the AP declare the 18 percent are wrong?

Democrats in swing districts were hoping President Barack Hussein Obama would do something to distract attention from the souring economy.  But this isn't what they had in mind. On Friday the 13th (a remarkably appropriate date), the president waded into the controversy over plans to build a mosque and Moslem community center two blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood.  In prepared remarks, Mr. Obama gave what both supporters and opponents interpreted as a ringing endorsement of the project. Mr. Obama's "forceful" speech expressing strong support for Cordoba House "will go down as one of the finest moments of his presidency," predicted Greg Sargent of the Washington Post. The president displayed great courage, Mr. Sargent said, because most Americans oppose construction of a mosque at that site. Alas for Mr. Sargent, Mr. Obama's finest hour lasted for only a few hours.   Then it was quickly back to Amateur Hour for this increasingly pathetic president.

It's the sort of ad we expect to see many Republican challengers running variations of this fall.  In it, the candidate decries illegal immigration and -- showing photos of President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- declares his independence from "the Washington crowd." But it isn't a Republican who is running this particular ad.  It's an incumbent Democrat, Rep. Joe Donnelly of Indiana. Rep. Donnelly is in his second term.  He voted for Obamacare and for the failed stimulus.  He's a part of "the Washington crowd" he criticizes.  His ad is disingenuous, and smacks of desperation. "Can you imagine the polling this guy is seeing, to put out an ad like that in early August?" wondered an amazed poster at the Free Republic website.

In what he imagines is a flattering profile of the president and his aides,  Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair noted Barack Obama typically gets to the Oval Office about 9:30 a.m.  That is, about three hours later than did President Bush. His aides told Mr. Purdum the president works late into the evening.  But not all those hours are spent on affairs of state. "While President Obama's wife and younger daughter were conducting international relations in Majorca ... the commander in chief was at home hosting a fantasy camp for himself," wrote Dana Milbank of the Washington Post Tuesday (8/10). Mr. Obama is living well at our expense. But he's a piker compared to his wife. Some are calling her "Michelle Antoinette" after her vacation this month at a resort in Spain where room rates begin at $330 a night. Gossip in the National Enquirer about a "feud" between the first lady and second lady Jill Biden has fueled suspicion Michelle Obama has regal pretensions. "What's got her seething is that Jill doesn't seem to treat Michelle with the reverence the first lady expects," the Enquirer's source said.  Reverence?  Reverence that commoners must show to royalty?

The majority on the Supreme Court was reaching the "desirable" result in the landmark 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education, his clerk said to Justice Stanley Reed. This observation was irrelevant and dangerous, Justice Reed replied, because if judges voted for results merely because they privately struck the judges as desirable, the Court would overstep its jurisdiction and set the country on a path to krytocracy. Krytocracy is government by unelected judges who substitute their policy preferences for those of elected officials and citizens. Thomas Jefferson warned: "The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. Advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction until all shall be usurped from the States and the government be consolidated into one." Two recent federal court decisions are realizing Jefferson's fears.

Democrats may have more to fear this fall from disappointed liberals than from the Tea Party, thinks Robert Reich, who was Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration. "A friend whom I'll call David raised a ton of money for Democrats in 2008 and now tells me they can go to hell," Mr. Reich wrote Monday (8/2) on his blog at the liberal American Prospect, which he co-founded. He quoted David as saying of Democrats: "They're all lily-livered wimps, and Obama has the backbone of a worm." Democrats are enraged at Mr. Obama for not being socialist enough.  Thus the most interesting question arises:  are they mad enough to become birthers?

The Obama administration estimated July 23 that the budget deficit this year will be a whopping $1.47 trillion.  Unless spending is cut and more revenues found, catastrophe will ensue, CBO has warned. Popular programs will have to be trimmed if disaster is to be averted.  And because the deficit is so huge, we must proceed with caution with tax cuts, the tried and true method of getting out of recessions past.  So we must do all we can to spur economic activity and increase government revenues without increasing spending or cutting taxes. How can we do this?  With what could be called the GOOTW Solution.

Over this past weekend, the Web organization WikiLeaks made available to selected news organizations copies of nearly 92,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan. The vast majority, according to the accounts published Monday (7/26) in the New York Times, the British newspaper the Guardian, and the German magazine Der Spiegel (the Mirror), are reports, classified at the relatively low level of "Secret," from American junior officers and non-commissioned officers. The chief "revelation" is that Pakistan's CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence agency, has been providing massive assistance to the Taliban.  "The one good thing to come out of this latest leak...is that it could spell the end of Pakistan's repulsive double game," said former Wall Street Journal editor Tunku Varadarajan.  "This is a game in which that country takes billions of dollars of our aid money...and then blithely, devilishly, mendaciously stabs us in the back by arming, protecting, financing, hiding and advising the same forces against whom this country is at war.  We pay them money so they can help our enemies kill us." For readers of To the Point, this is not news, for you learned about this long ago.

In 2008, liberal journalists discussed using false charges of racism to discourage news coverage of Barack Obama's long time association with his hate-spewing pastor, Jeremiah Wright. "If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose," Spencer Ackerman, now of Wired magazine, said in an email to colleagues on Journolist.    "Instead, take one of them -- Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists." Journolist was a list-serve created by the Washington Post's Ezra Klein.  He shut it down this week after conservative journalists Tucker Carlson and Andrew Breitbart obtained emails members sent to each other. But when the race card is played clumsily, it can backfire, as the National Association of Colored People and the Obama administration learned also this week.  It is, as Drudge calls it, a "Racial Mess."  Who could possibly be surprised?

Founded in Dallas in 1989, the New Black Panther party is described by the Anti- Defamation League as "the largest organized anti-Semitic and racist black militant group in America," and the Southern Poverty Law Center as a "black Ku Klux Klan." In a National Geographic special, prominent NBP leader Samir Shabazz was filmed declaring, "I hate white people, all of them, every last iota of a cracker I hate him," and shouting at a black man with a white girlfriend: "You're gonna have to kill some crackers.  You're gonna have to kill some of their babies."  Here's the video, aired on Fox News. J. Christian Adams, in testimony to Congress, said he resigned as a career attorney with the Justice Department last month when he was told that cases of voter intimidation (such as that perpetrated by Mr. Shabazz and the NBP) will not be pursued if the victims are white, nor will laws be enforced against vote fraud. We now have a racist - anti-white racist - government in America.

The Race Card.  So useful to play when you're losing an argument.  Democrats don't leave home without it. The race card was played twice last week.  At its convention in Kansas City, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People adopted a resolution condemning the TeaParty as "a threat to the pursuit of human rights, justice and equality for all" because of "the racist elements" within it. The TeaParty rallies have been an outpouring of public concern about runaway government spending and mammoth budget deficits.  While Democrats could simply argue that such concern is overwrought, to claim that a racial motive underlies it is as preposterous as it is vile. The reasoning, such as it is, goes something like this:  TeaPartyers oppose President Barack Obama's policies.  Mr. Obama is (half) black.  Therefore, TeaPartyers oppose Mr. Obama's policies because he is black. This argument is so puerile people with an IQ above room temperature have difficulty believing those who make it are serious.

The transformative event in modern American politics was the Great Depression.  It made the Democrat party the majority party, and changed its nature. In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover was elected in a landslide, with 58.2 percent of the popular vote, and 444 electoral votes to 87 for Al Smith.  Democrat victories were confined to six states in the heart of Dixie, and Massachusetts. Republicans gained 7 seats in the Senate that year, to take control of that body, 56-42.  Republicans gained 32 seats in the House to control there, 270-164.  Such Democrats as there were in the House were mainly southern conservatives.  That all changed in 1930, when the Democrats won 52 seats and control in the House, and then in 1932 with FDR's landslide victory.  By 1936, the political world had been turned upside down. What of today?  We can't continue on the path we're on, so we'll either descend into socialism or fascism, or restore the constitutional government the Founding Fathers intended.  Another transformative event is at hand.

The political rationale for the lawsuit the Obama administation has filed to overturn Arizona's immigration law is clear.  According to Gallup, Mr. Obama's job approval rating this year has been pretty stable among whites (low) and blacks (high).  But it has declined from 69 percent to 57 percent among Hispanics. So the lawsuit likely is an effort to boost the president's standing among Hispanics. But whether or not it raises Mr. Obama's standing among Hispanics, "the administration's lawsuit...ensures that the immigration debate will be front and center for the next few months," wrote Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post. To the detriment of Democrats, which is why it is selfish of Mr. Obama to raise it.  He's not on the ballot again until 2012.  But the lawsuit all but dooms the re-election hopes of Arizona Democrat Reps. Gabrielle Giffords, Ann Kirkpatrick and Harry Mitchell, who were elected in 2006 and 2008 in districts which lean slightly Republican.  It isn't just in Arizona where Democrats will suffer.

The Canadian government spent more than $1 billion on the G-8/G-20 conferences last weekend in Toronto, epitomizing the wretched excess that's largely responsible for the worldwide economic crisis. Other than the rioting, nothing much usually happens at these annual confabs. "As predicted, it cost much and accomplished nothing," said Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations. "No decisions were taken, no minds were changed. Politicians had their pictures taken; the press hailed mushy communiques as breakthroughs and delusional protesters played silly ‘revolutionary' games." But this summit was noteworthy in that for the first time ever, nobody paid much attention to the president of the United States. Reuters published a list of "winners and losers" at the G-20. There were just two losers, according to the British news service. One was Brazil, because its president didn't show up. The other was America, whose president did.

We're losing in Afghanistan.  There are four reasons why.  Two are self-inflicted wounds which easily can be corrected.  But the two more important reasons are much harder to fix. Yet three out of the four can be laid to considerable extent at the feet of our now former commanding general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal.  When you add them up, you have to wonder which side was he on.  So let's add them up.