Our president came bearing a basketful of mea culpas. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.

And what did he get for this obsessive denigration of his own country? He wanted more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan to match the surge of 17,000 Americans. He was rudely rebuffed.

He wanted more stimulus spending from Europe. He got nothing.

From Russia, he got no help on Iran. From China, he got the blocking of any action on North Korea.

And what did he get for Guantanamo? France, pop. 64 million, will take one prisoner. One!

So far, this year's public multiple shootings were committed by:

-- Richard Poplawski, 23, product of a broken family, expelled from high school and dishonorably discharged from the Marines, who killed three policemen in Pittsburgh.

-- Former crack addict Jiverly Wong, 41, who told co-workers "America sucks" yet somehow was not offered a job as a speechwriter for Barack Obama, who blockaded his victims in a civic center in Binghamton, N.Y., and shot as many people as he could, before killing himself.

-- Robert Stewart, 45, a three-time divorcee and high school dropout with "violent tendencies" -- according to one of his ex-wives -- who shot up the nursing home in Carthage, N.C., where his newly estranged wife worked.

-- Lovelle Mixon, 26, a paroled felon, struggling to get his life back on track by pimping, who shot four cops in Oakland, Calif. -- before eventually being shot himself.

-- Twenty-eight-year-old Michael McLendon, child of divorce, living with his mother and boycotting family funerals because he hated his relatives, who killed 10 of those relatives and their neighbors in Samson, Ala.

It might make more sense to outlaw men than guns. Or divorce. Or crack. Or to prohibit felons from having guns. Except we already outlaw crack and felons owning guns and yet still, somehow, Wong got crack and Mixon got a gun.

"This is the dawning of a new day,'' exclaimed Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill. "In my household I told Castro he is known as the ultimate survivor."

Funny how easy it is to survive when you don't hold elections. And when all of your opponents wind up in prison or dead. And when even those who dare to whisper a word of dissent to your absolute rule find themselves harassed, beaten, humiliated, and imprisoned.

Above every other health-care goal, Democrats this year want to institute a "public option" -- an insurance program financed by taxpayers, managed by government and open to everyone, much like Medicare. This new middle-class entitlement is the most important debate in Congress this year, because it really is the last stand for anything resembling private health insurance.

This public option will supposedly "compete" with private alternatives. As President Obama likes to put it, those who are happy with the insurance they have now can keep it -- and if they happen to prefer the government offering, well, gee whiz, that's the free market at work. The reality is far different. Not only will the new program become the default coverage for the uninsured, but Democrats intend to game the system to precipitate -- or if need be, coerce -- an exodus to government from private insurance. Soon enough, that will be the only "option" left.

Fully 119 million people will shift out of -- or lose -- private coverage. Everything depends on the payment levels that Congress adopts, as well as the size of the eligible pool. But even if a public option available to all takes the highly improbable step of paying at some midpoint between private and Medicare rates, nearly 68 million people will still be crowded out of private insurance. The nearby table summarizes Lewin's eye-popping findings.

Soon I was in the second row behind Cuba’s dugout. Suddenly, I caught a glimpse of Fidel Castro’s son, Antonio Castro, standing about 15 feet from me. For his blogging efforts, my buddy Val was honored with a visit to the White House to meet the president, while my reward was to be able to sit within spitting distance of Fidel Castro’s son.

I didn’t spit at him, though. I heckled him. I said that Dashiell, an ex-girlfriend of his, sent her regards (not true) and that she’s now acting in porno films (true). I yelled that this is a great country because even Fidel’s son can visit. To the team I yelled that it’s a free country. I yelled “Let them stay, let them stay,” referring to the ballplayers who might be thinking of defecting. Then I yelled “Major Leagues, Major Leagues” to tempt them. Then Ichiro Suzuki hit a triple and I proclaimed that he makes millions in the major leagues. I shouted the names of Cuban major league players like Livan Hernandez and Jose Contreras. I repeated all these things many times in Spanish.

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.

Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, who took over as head of state in February, for years have been calling for an end to the U.S. embargo, which they say is starving Cuba. But Cuba can already buy from U.S. producers all the food and medicine it can pay cash for. What the totalitarian tag-team really wants is an end to the ban on private-sector credit to the Cuban government.

Their demand has gone nowhere in Washington, both because of moral objections to doing business with tyrants, and because the Castro brothers are world-class deadbeats. They have defaulted on billions of dollars in debt to the rest of the world, and want credit from the "empire" (i.e., the U.S.) only because their options for borrowing elsewhere have narrowed significantly.

Indeed, from my informal conversations at two very different gas stations, I would go even further: The wealthy, particularly those who are politically liberal, also like that high-priced gas translates into less burning of fossil fuels by others and will help accelerate research into alternative energies.

But what these elites don't seem to realize is that the energy policies they tend to advocate are for the present paralyzing almost everyone else in the country -- and that the truly ethical and environmental solution would require embracing positions long considered anathema to traditional liberalism.

I generally don't write columns about the manifestly obvious, but, yes, the man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents.
...
The sheer repetition of lies about Bush is wearing people down. There is not a liberal in this country worthy of kissing Bush's rear end, but the weakest members of the herd run from Bush. Compared to the lickspittles denying and attacking him, Bush is a moral giant -- if that's not damning with faint praise. John McCain should be so lucky as to be running for Bush's third term. Then he might have a chance.

As national security adviser to Romanian president Nicolae Ceauçescu, I dealt with many tyrants, and I learned that being nice to them never succeeds in making them nice to you. On April 12, 1978, I was in the car with Ceauçescu as he drove away from a meeting in the White House. He took a bottle of alcohol and splashed it all over his face, after having been affectionately kissed by President Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office. “Peanut-head,” my boss whispered disgustedly. Afterwards, two other American presidents went to Bucharest to pay Ceauçescu respect. None was ever able to twist his arm — or charm him.
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In August 1991, the Soviet Communist Party was disbanded, and nobody within Mother Russia really missed it. But somehow, the KGB survived — as secret police often do. Today, some 6,000 former KGB officers are running Russia’s federal and local governments, and 70 percent of Russia’s leading political figures have some connection to the intelligence services of the old regime. Vladimir Putin proves how difficult it is to teach an old dog new tricks — particularly when that old dog is rolling in oil dollars.

Obama rejects the Bush my-way-or-the-highway "cowboy" foreign policy. Obama repeatedly said he wishes to meet with enemy/thug leaders without preconditions. But wait!

He now says only if he decides to meet in the first place. And if he decides -- to which he may not -- he'll do so without preconditions. And if he decides not to, his decision will have been made without preconditions, unless, of course, he decides to meet after all -- but only without preconditions. And if he decides not to meet, he'll make that decision without any preconditions, just as he would make the decision to meet without the precondition of no preconditions. But if he decides to meet, without preconditions, he'll do so solely when, where and if he decides to -- without preconditions.

That's change.

Barack Obama may have come up with a creative way to solve the housing recession: Let everyone buy property at a discount the way he did from Tony Rezko, and give everyone in America a discount mortgage the way Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide did for Fannie Mae's Jim Johnson. Team Obama's real estate and mortgage transactions are certainly a change from business as usual. They suggest old-fashioned back-scratching below even current Beltway standards.

A former CEO of mortgage financing giant Fannie Mae, Mr. Johnson is now vetting Vice Presidential candidates for Mr. Obama. But he is also a textbook case for poor disclosure as regulators sifted through the wreckage of Fannie's $10 billion accounting scandal. Despite an exhaustive federal inquiry, Mr. Johnson managed to avoid disclosing one very special perk: below-market interest-rate mortgages from Countrywide Financial, arranged by Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo.
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Since Fannie was buying Countrywide's loans, under terms set by Mr. Johnson and later Mr. Raines – or by people in their employ – the fact that Fannie's CEO had a separate personal financial relationship with Countrywide was an obvious conflict of interest. The company's code of conduct required prior approval of such arrangements. Neither Mr. Johnson nor Mr. Raines sought such approval, according to Fannie.
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The irony here is that Mr. Obama has denounced Mr. Mozilo as part of his populist case against corporate excess, calling Mr. Mozilo and a colleague in March "the folks who are responsible for infecting the economy and helping to create a home foreclosure crisis." Obama campaign manager David Plouffe also said in March that "If we're really going to crack down on the practices that caused the credit and housing crises, we're going to need a leader who doesn't owe these industries any favors." But now this protector of the working class has entrusted his first big task as Presidential nominee to the very man who received "favors" in return for enriching Mr. Mozilo.

As for Mr. Obama, Mr. Johnson now joins an intriguing and growing list of Mr. Obama's ex-associates that includes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, and former terrorist bomber William Ayers. We might call this list eclectic, except that there is a consistent pattern of bad judgment followed by an initial defense, then followed by rapid disassociation and regret that none of them were the men Mr. Obama "knew."

By supporting race preferences, Mr. Obama is unmistakably attaching himself to despicable ideas like Rev. Wright's. And, if he believes in those precepts, how does he reconcile his impressive political success and that of Mrs. Clinton with this perspective? Thirty-six million Americans didn't vote for the two of them because the majority of the American people are racist and sexist.

If Mr. Obama wants to be the candidate of "change," why doesn't he change the idiotic racial classification system that burdens millions of Americans? Why doesn't he call attention to the barbaric "one-drop" (of hereditary blood) rule that continues to haunt our nation, and which drives him to identify with the "black community" at the expense of his white ancestry? If he wants to unite the American people, how does he propose to do that by asking some Americans to accept preferential treatment for others and discrimination against themselves?

Fidel Castro, who died in 2006 (give or take three years), "said on Tuesday that he will not return to lead the country as president," Reuters reports.

What kind of leader was Castro exactly? Reuters doesn't say, but it offers us some clues:

[Castro is] retiring as head of state 49 years after he seized power in an armed revolution.
Seized power in an armed revolution, check. Then there's this:

"To my dear compatriots, who gave me the immense honor in recent days of electing me a member of parliament . . . I communicate to you that I will not aspire to or accept--I repeat not aspire to or accept--the positions of President of Council of State and Commander in Chief," Castro said in the statement published on the Web site of the Communist Party's Granma newspaper.
Hmm, Communist Party. That may be relevant. The story goes on:

A charismatic leader famous for his long speeches delivered in his green military fatigues, Castro is admired in the Third World for standing up to the United States but considered by his opponents a tyrant who suppressed freedom.
So he was a "charismatic leader" and was considered "a tyrant who suppressed freedom"--but only by his opponents. In contrast:

The bearded leader who took power in an armed uprising against a U.S.-backed dictator in 1959 had temporarily ceded power to his younger brother after he underwent emergency surgery to stop intestinal bleeding in mid-2006.
So the fellow Castro replaced was definitely a dictator. As for Castro himself, who knows?

And it isn't even just Reuters. The Associated Press calls Castro an "unchallenged leader," while the New York Times characterizes him as "one of the most all-powerful communist heads of state in the world." (That fellow in North Korea--he's all-powerful, but not as all-powerful as Castro.)

The free press in the free world is bending over backward not to call Castro what he really was: a communist dictator. Why? Perhaps this is an artifact of the Watergate-era notion of the "adversarial press." Journalists see themselves as standing in opposition to their own government, and since Castro was an enemy of the U.S. that put him on the same side. The enemy of my country is my friend, or at least my "unchallenged leader."

But the man is desperate. He cannot put the whole island in jail, and with food and milk shortages growing, it may become increasingly difficult to keep the lid on things. As Armando Valladares, a former political prisoner who spent 22 years in Castro gulags told me in an interview last month, terror as a way to control people has its limits. In Mr. Valladares's view, the Cuban people are very near if not over that limit, suggesting that even a small spark could ignite a massive rebellion -- not unlike what happened in Romania.

AP July 31, 2007 - "Employment Costs Rise in 2nd Quarter"
James: If Clinton were President, they'd be called 'Wages'