THURSDAY,  FEBRUARY 7,  2008

•   We begin on a cautionary note.  This story appeared on the well-run website, The Politico, on Monday, under the headline, POLLS SHOW OBAMA SURGE IN CALIFORNIA.  The lead:

ST. LOUIS –Sen. Barack Obama has surged in California and substantially narrowed or erased the double-digit lead once held there by Sen. Hillary Clinton, according to three polls released this weekend. Obama leads Clinton 45 percent to 41 percent among California Democrats in a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll of 1,141 likely voters with a 2.9 percent margin of error. The poll was conducted from January 31 to February 2.

A California Field Poll also showed strong movement toward Obama. After trailing Clinton 39 percent to 27 percent as recently as mid-January—and after trailing her by 30 points in an August Field Poll—Obama has pulled into a statistical tie with Clinton. Clinton was favored by 36 percent to Obama’s 34 percent. A sizable portion of voters, 18 percent, remain undecided.

The poll was based on a survey of 511 likely voters in the Democratic primary and was conducted between Jan. 25 and Feb. 1. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

A bright spot for Clinton was a McClatchy-MSNBC poll that had her leading Obama by nine percentage points, 45 percent to 36 percent. The poll of 400 likely Democratic voters had a 5 point margin of error.

The actual vote on Super Tuesday?  Clinton carried California 52 to 42 percent. 

It's important to point this out, not to embarrass anyone, but to emphasize that we've been depending on polls that have turned out to be wildly inaccurate.  Why are they this inaccurate?  I'd love to see a well-researched story on that. 

•   The hype continues.  The delegate count may be about equal in the Democratic race, but where delegates are obtained does give some hint about a candidate's real power with the party base.  I'm no Clinton lover, to put it mildly, but she did win California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Tennessee.  Those were voting primaries.  Obama did better in caucus states, which tend to bring out the true believers, the activists.  Obama's result didn't match the pre-vote buildup, which had become a kind of hysteria.  Adam Nagourney, of The New York Times, gives a good analysis.  The quote:

But one of the most intriguing finding in the surveys of voters leaving the polls across the nation on Tuesday was when they arrived at their final decision. Throughout a week when Mr. Obama was campaigning with members of the Kennedy family, when there was a sense that he was creating a movement that cut across racial and generational lines, there was a steady movement of Democrats toward Mr. Obama, the survey suggested. But those who reported making their decision on the last day bucked the trend, tending to vote for Mrs. Clinton, of New York.

And this:

But once again — as in New Hampshire — the result on Tuesday did not match the fervor that had been signaled by Mr. Obama’s dramatic march of rallies across the nation leading up to the vote. In that dynamic rests one of the central questions about the Obama candidacy, which may well go the heart of whether he can win the presidency. Is this campaign a series of surges of enthusiasm, often powered by the younger voters who form long lines waiting to hear Mr. Obama speak, that set expectations that are not met at the voting booth? 

Read the well-reported story.

•   Elsewhere.  The New York Philharmonic is going to North Korea.  That's questionable enough, but its conductor has now managed to make a fool of himself and give the enemy some good propaganda.  On the eve of the trip, Loren Maazel opened his mouth:

Mr. Maazel, in a remark brought to our attention by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal, responded to objections to the trip by saying, "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw bricks, should they? Is our standing as a country — the United States — is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example that should be emulated all over the world? If we can answer that question honestly, I think we can then stop being judgmental about the errors made by others."

The New York Sun, in its editorial, gets it right:

It's quite a contrast with 1984, when the Philharmonic had been scheduled to play in Kuala Lumpur but wound up canceling its appearance when the Malaysians asked the musicians not to play "Schelomo, A Hebrew Rhapsody" by Ernest Bloch. Imagine how people would have reacted had the Philharmonic shrugged and said, "Hey, there are plenty of anti-Semites in America; who are we to judge?" The fact is that not even the worst abuses in the isolated cases where there have been abuses of prisoners in American custody come anywhere near the routine mistreatment of prisoners by the North Korean communists. In the American case, the abusers — at Abu Ghraib, for example — have been investigated, tried, and punished by our own government. The investigations were initiated by our own government.

Well said.  But not enough writers in the press are saying it.

•  The New York Sun, a journalistic gem, also gets it right on something else.  The most important story this week was the admission by our director of national intelligence that the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program was misleading.  (You'll notice how much attention that admission received.)  The quote:

What a difference two months make. On December 3, when the director of national intelligence released an estimate of Iran's nuclear program that said the Mullahs had suspended its bomb making in 2003, the left could barely contain its glee. The New York Times featured a front page analysis that said, "Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here." 

And this:

It turns out that on Tuesday, as our Eli Lake reported on page one of yesterday's Sun, the director of national intelligence, Mr. McConnell says he now regrets the phrasing of the unclassified estimate that so stirred America's enthusiasts of diplomacy.

And this:

For the unelected intelligence bureaucrats who pushed through December's distortion and the newspapers that cheered them on, the walk back from the director is a serious blow. It's hard to recall a situation quite like it. Only a few lines about Mr. McConnell's testimony on this point appeared in yesterday's New York Times, and that was buried in a story that focused on the improvements Al Qaeda has been making in its ability to strike the home front. Yet for a brief moment the unclassified assessment about which Mr. McConnell now has regrets ended political debate about the urgency of stopping the world's leading sponsor of Islamic terror from obtaining an apocalyptic arsenal.

Someone should tell Barack Obama, but no one will.

•   Remarkably, even the Russians are now showing signs of concern about Iran's intentions.  While we rest, and ponder all the delights about the nation's first (check one) black president or female president, history refuses to stop.  Please note:

A senior Russian diplomat on Wednesday voiced concern about Iran's launch of a rocket, saying it has raised suspicions about its nuclear program, Russian news reports said.

Russian news agencies quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov as saying that Monday's launch of an Iranian research rocket has raised questions about the direction of Iran's nuclear program.

The statement appeared to indicate that Moscow, which in the past has been skeptical about Iran's missile capability, increasingly shares Western concerns about Teheran's course.

Our diplomacy is already faltering, infiltrated by the geniuses of the Bush 41 era.  What will it be a year from now, if the other party wins?  Maybe the Russians will be told to stop their warmongering about Iran and come to Mr. Obama's proposed international conference, where Muslim dictators can air their grievances. 

Pathetic.

•   Speaking of Iran, let's not forget the nature of the regime we're dealing with, as reported in London's Telegraph:

Two Iranian sisters convicted of adultery face being stoned to death after the supreme court upheld death sentences against them, Iranian media have reported.

The two sisters were found guilty of adultery - a capital crime in Iran - after the husband of one of the pair presented a video showing them in the company of other men while he was away.

Now, class, repeat after me:  "Who are we to judge these people by our own decadent cultural standards?  Theirs is another narrative, equally valid.  Maybe they could teach us a thing or two about justice, if we can only get rid of the Second Amendment crowd running our government, and their neo-con front men." 

Did you get that?  Please write it down.

Oh, notice how much outrage there is among "feminist leaders."

Maybe they'll name that Iranian husband "man of the year."  He could do a tour here and appear on Oprah, who'll embrace him as he calls for dialogue.

•   Finally, our Canadian friends show that they're no slouches in the delusions department.  They have now hauled two Canadian authors, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant before so-called "human rights commissions" of Canadian provinces.  Their crimes?  They offended Muslims.  Now, they must answer for their horrors.  But both are defiant.  Ezra Levant made a statement before the Alberta Human Rights and Citizen Commission that was run on YouTube and electrified the blogosphere.  The Weekly Standard's story notes:

Of one thing we can have no doubt: Short of a firing squad, there is nothing that the Canadian government can do that will have any effect on what Ezra Levant or Mark Steyn will say and write in the future. You couldn't have picked worse people to try to cow. But unfortunately, it is the nature of the nanny state to bring up citizens who have been trained not to rock the boat. Under a nanny regime, the good citizen is one who is reluctant to speak his mind merely out of fear of what other people might think. For people already this cowed, even the threat of a minor bureaucratic hassle would be a powerful argument for keeping one's mouth shut, and for standing by while our hard-won liberty of discussion is steadily eroded. Canada still has uncowable men like Levant and Steyn; but where will such men come from a generation hence?

As the story notes, the American press, so sensitive to questions about itself, has shown no interest in this story.  We'll follow it on this site.

Be back later.

Posted on February 7, 2008.