Globe and Mail | Rex Murphy

There are two great political speakers in the America today. Sarah Palin is the other one.

Barack Obama’s speaking skills are his signature talent. He’s a platform performer, a speechmaker in the great tradition, a kind of teleprompter Cicero. The campaign to become President owed more to Mr. Obama’s oratorical mastery than to any other element. His speech on race in America, necessitated by revelations of the ugly thoughts and sentiments of his hometown preacher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was the most important event of his campaign. If it had failed, his candidacy would have been doomed. Under pressure – the great test of the real speechmaker – he delivered.

Real Clear Politics | by Charles Krauthammer

September 11, 2001 had to speak for itself. A decade later, the deed will be given voice. KSM has gratuitously been presented with the greatest propaganda platform imaginable — a civilian trial in the media capital of the world — from which to proclaim the glory of jihad and the criminality of infidel America.

American Thinker | Bruce Walker

The pattern over the last several years has been clear in the old major democracies of Europe and North America: the left simply ceases to appeal to voters anymore. The right — whatever that is supposed to be these days — resembles the Republican Party in America. It has yet to clearly carve out what it is for, and it instead represents an anti-left vote.

The Times Picayune | Editorial Staff

Former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson was sentenced to 13 years in prison Friday for the 11 counts of corruption for which he was found guilty in U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III’s courtroom last summer.
That’s a fitting punishment for a disgraced former official whose conduct the judge described as “a cancer on the body politic.”

NewsWeek | Jacob Weisberg

Politicians, like generals, suffer from a tendency to fight the last war. Having meticulously studied the mistakes of their predecessors, they take care to avoid repeating them and make the opposite ones. They fortify Maginot Lines. They overcompensate for past errors. They overcorrect.

It is difficult to think of a contemporary president who has not fallen prey to this temptation. Jimmy Carter reacted against Richard Nixon’s ruthlessness and Lyndon B. Johnson’s horse trading by becoming both too nice and too disdainful of congressional politics. Carter’s micromanagement encouraged Ronald Reagan’s propensity for detachment. Bill Clinton came to Washington intent on reversing George H.W. Bush’s excessive focus on foreign policy—and proceeded to neglect foreign policy for his first few years. George W. Bush reversed his father’s lack of vision and Clinton’s indiscipline with his own excesses of grandiosity and punctuality. Even vice presidents do it: blathering, peripheral Joe Biden is the excessive response to silent, all-powerful Dick Cheney.

The Globe and Mail | Rex Murphy

We’ve had the Beer Summit and its teachable moment. If nothing else it put an end (save on Larry King Live and the outer reaches of the cable channels) to the Michael Jackson coverage. Well if it was, in the Oprahesque formulation, a teachable moment – what was being taught? And what has been learned?

Well, among other things, we’ve learned once again what a smooth politician Barack Obama is. This confrontation between a Harvard professor and a policeman became a nationwide concern when the President, speaking as a friend of the professor, inserted himself – unwisely – into it. He amplified the issues and dug a big hole for himself. The “teachable moment” was his dexterous exit from that hole.

National Review Online | Larry Kudlow

Are Republicans too pessimistic about the economy? I put this question to Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) this week, and it would be hard to describe his response as optimistic. The senator trash-talked Vice President Joe Biden’s recent defense of the stimulus in the New York Times, and he warned that any economic rebound will be short-lived because of the runaway spending-and-borrowing plans of the Obama administration.

Truth be told, respected economists like Donald Marron, Keith Hennessey, Bruce Bartlett, and Kevin Hassett have all carefully chronicled the fact that the Obama stimulus package does not feature any real fiscal multipliers. They say the bulk of the package consists of transfer payments to individuals and states, along with tax credits that will produce no real incentive effects to spur economic growth.

Real Clear Politics | Thomas Sowell

Many people hoped that the election of a black President of the United States would mark our entering a “post-racial” era, when we could finally put some ugly aspects of our history behind us.

That is quite understandable. But it takes two to tango. Those of us who want to see racism on its way out need to realize that others benefit greatly from crying racism. They benefit politically, financially, and socially.

Barack Obama has been allied with such people for decades. He found it expedient to appeal to a wider electorate as a post-racial candidate, just as he has found it expedient to say a lot of other popular
things– about campaign finance, about transparency in government, about not rushing legislation through Congress without having it first posted on the Internet long enough to be studied– all of which turned to be the direct opposite of what he actually did after getting elected.

Wall Street Journal | Jake Sherman

WASHINGTON — A House panel approved a big Pentagon spending bill this week that included nearly 150 items tucked in by lawmakers on behalf of companies and other entities whose employees donated to their campaigns.

The Democratic Congress and President Barack Obama swept into power on a promise to reform the process of lawmakers trying to dictate in detail how funds are spent, known as “earmarks.” When Mr. Obama signed a spending bill for the current fiscal year in March, he said the earmark-laden legislation should be an “end to the old way of doing business, and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability.”

MSNBC | Dr. Boyce Watkins

I might be kicked out of “The Black scholars club” for saying this, but the truth is that I don’t feel sorry for Henry Louis Gates. America is far more capitalist than it is racist, so a distinguished Harvard University Professor like Gates is likely to get more respect than the average White American. The idea that he is somehow the victim of the same racism that sends poor Black men to prison simply doesn’t fly with me, and Gates should be careful about appearing to exploit the plight of Black men across America to win his battle of egos with the Cambridge Police Department. At worst, Gates has been a victim of racial profiling by the woman who called the police, as well as the officer who may have interpreted his protests as being more belligerent than they actually were. The same thing happens to Black boys in the school system, who are suspended at astronomical rates for bad behavior. The fact that the charges have now been dropped against Gates shows that a mistake has clearly been made.