I have been holding off posting this one-hour interview with C-Span’s Brian Lamb for several reasons: one, I already had enough emails about the window-pane suit and didn’t need a few thousand more and it seemed to be of little interest beyond my circle of friends and family.Boy, was I wrong about the last one.I’ve gotten almost two dozen emails from people, mostly total strangers, asking if I was going to post the interview. So here is a link to watch the video or read the transcript. (I should warn you that the transcript continues some funny typos, like “Christian levels” instead of “Christian rebels.”)Also, you can listen to a podcast of it here.Anyway, it was an unusual interview for me. I am used to talking about al Qaeda, not myself.So I would be interested in your thoughts.Just don’t tell me about the suit. I love it in all of its 1940s splendor and won’t toss it to win some kind of popularity award.

The mullahs, who rule say that we have no reason to fear their atomic program, are now worried about the threat posed by Barbie.

Yes, the blonde, plastic doll that delights eight-year old girls and enrages sixty-year old feminists, is now officially a threat to the Islamic Republic.

Some things are beyond parody.

Read this, from the Guardian:

In a letter to the Iranian vice-president, published in the Mardom Salari daily newspaper, the prosecutor general, Dori Najafabadi, wrote: “The appearance of personalities such as Barbie, Batman, Spiderman and Harry Potter and … computer games and movies are all a danger warning to the officials in the cultural arena,” Reuters reported.

“The unrestrained entry of this sort of imported toys … will bring destructive cultural and social consequences in their wake,” he wrote.

It is better to keep silent and have the whole world think you a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.–Folk wisdomRev. Wright’s speech to the NAACP last night, which is available on video here, reveals a seemingly intelligent and godly man who addled by ideas he cannot see the evil in.Before the NAACP speech, he was known mainly by soundbites and youtube.com clips. He was the minister who damns God. He was the Obama adviser who consorts with Louis Farrakhan and contends that AIDS was manufactured by the CIA to kill black people. He was the man who said America deserved the 9-11 attacks.Then he was offered a prime speaking role at an NAACP convention. This was a chance to confound his critics and rescue his friends–by presenting himself as the measured, thoughtful, faithful man that the Obama campaign said he was.Instead, he appeared in his natural plummage; a seemingly educated man who traffics in bizarre theories.In the NAACP speech, he calls for reaching out to all faiths “including the Nation of Islam”–a sect that believes that white people are evil beings created a mad alien scientist underneath a volcano.Also in the NAACP speech, he weirdly claims that no one in Detroit speaks English. “They speak American.” He puts on a phony Boston accent to impersonate JFK. Than switches to a bad Texas drawl to channel LBJ. Then back to a fake Boston accent to imitate a senator he calls “Ed Kennedy.” Finally, the good reverend reveals his point: Why does no one fault these presidential and senatorial accents when they condemn black speech? That it is the grammar, not the pronunciation, never seems to occur to him. Nor does it occur to him that millions of blacks–from Tiger Woods and Bill Cosby to your doctor and your stock broker–speak standard English. The patois of the streets, so beloved by rappers, is spoken only a small minority. Why does Rev. Wright think the most uneducated are the most authentic?He believes that music in 4:4 time (a traditional waltz) is heard differently by blacks and whites. (Nevermind that most of the memorable waltz music of the 20th century was performed by black Americans and much of it was written by black Americans, too.) CORRECTION: As many wise commentors have pointed out, 4:4 time is not a waltz. Sorry.He says that blacks and whites love God differently. He then shifts into a mock “white” accent and says, with no feeling, “I love Jesus.” Meanwhile, he continues, blacks are passionate. And he bursts forth with praise music. Why ridicule other people’s faith if his point is religious tolerance?In short, he is ridiculing any standard as racist. In his world, everything is different but equal. The words of a poet and street rambler, the music of Cole Porter and the banging of empty paint cans near the subway platform, the preacher who counsels his flock to resist temptations and the rabble-rouser who feeds the mob’s throaty roar.And there is one more thing. Rev. Wright is a racist. He sees people as inherently different in musical ability, speech patterns and nearly everything else based solely on something as inconsequential as their skin. This is racism, in its full, undiluted essence.Why would the NAACP give a man like this a forum?Why would Obama sit in this man’s pews for almost 20 years?Why would the media describe the NAACP speech as “inconsequential”?Has political correctness crippled our ability to stand up to racists when they appear?

While The New York Times and others are impatiently asking when Hillary will take the hint and get out of the race, Stanley Kurtz, over at National Review, asks an interesting question: Why isn’t Obama the one in trouble?After all, he outspent Clinton two-to-one in Pennsylvania and lost by almost 10 percentage points. In the past two months, Obama has been plagued by gaffes and unseemly associations.On the other hand, why is Clinton still in? That finely embroided fabrication about running from sniper fire in Tuzla would kill any normal candidate’s chances.Kurtz’s answer is identity politics, i.e. tribal groups inside the Democratic party that simply will not desert a candidate who shares their race or gender–no matter what he or she says or does.Nearly one out of five of the supporters of Obama and like number of Hillary supporters say that they would vote for McCain if their man or woman doesn’t get the nomination. In short, they are putting identity politics ahead of party politics.Is identity politics good for the Democratic party? There was a time when it was. In the 1970s and 1980s, Democratic leaders could tell black candidates to “wait their turn” and their voting bloc would still support the party’s nominee. Now the patience of black political leaders is coming to an end. The 2006 Democratic nomination fight in Maryland was something to behold, a bruising battle that led to the defeat of the former head of the NAACP. (Yes, the Democrats went on to win in November, but Maryland is a heavily Democratic state and 2006 was a bad year for Republicans nation-wide.) Some Maryland Democrats are still sore about it.Identity politics may is now hurting the Democrats. One of the strengths of the Obama candidacy is a whole class of middle-class black leaders who are tired of playing their grandfather’s game of waiting for a chance that never seems to come. What will they say if the super-delegates choose Hillary?

Tonight the media will analyze every element of the Pennsylvania primary but one: how “Operation Chaos” benefited Hillary Clinton.

Talk Radio titan Rush Limbaugh enlisted his roughly 12 million listeners (per day) in “Operation Chaos” some time ago. The plan was for Republicans in swing states to register as Democrats (if necessary) and vote for Hillary. Rush’s hope was to sow chaos by prolonging the Democratic nomination fight.

But has Rush succeeded? If only 10,000 voters switched and voted for Hillary, Clinton could be winning on the backs of Republican votes–which would have enormous implications for her claims to the superdelegates about her “electability.”

Or are Operation Chaos voters simply droplets in the Monongahela?

Why doesn’t the media investigate?

UPDATE: The folks over at Powerline shrewdly noted: “There might have been a surprise winner in last night’s primary results. Pennsylvania runs a primary closed to registered party members. The AP reports that 10 percent of those voting Tuesday had changed party registration since the start of 2008 so they would be eligible to vote in the Democratic race. About half the party-switchers had been registered Republicans, while the rest had been unaffiliated with either party or were voting for the first time in Pennsylvania.

The AP story doesn’t provide the breakdown of the 10 percent of voters who changed their party registration to vote yesterday, but I wonder if Rush Limbaugh might have been the surprise winner in Pennsylvania. The results of the Pennsylvania primary appear to represent another triumph of Rush’s Operation Chaos.”

Meeting in Qatar, a group of Muslim clerics and scholars proposed replacing Greenwhich Mean Time (GMT) with Mecca Time, according to this BBC report.

So the Prime Meridian and the central reference points for global coordination (the military certainly knows what it is like to operate in a GMT+5 battle space) would shift from the United Kingdom to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. (HT: Tanguy Veys)

Why? The reasons given are an admixture of pseudo-science and grievance history. The meridian that runs through Mecca perfectly aligns with the magnetic North Pole, or true north. This may be true for now, but it is meaningless. The magnetic North Pole is constantly moving. What happens when it perfectly aligns with the Gagnes–move the Prime Meridian to India and recalculate all the time zones?

The second argument is relies on a dangerously false reading of history. The British “had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power…”.

Actually, no. British and French scientists were racing to map and understand the globe and time in the 19th century. The French contribution was the kilometer, supposedly equal to one forty-thousandth of the distance between the pole and the equator. The base-10 measurement system (a fascination of French revolutionaries and those they influenced) was eventually voluntarily adopted by all but two countries in the world (the United States and Myanmar).

The British contribution was the Prime Meridian, a baseline that enabled a unified global system of time zones. Every nation has voluntarily accepted it, including dozens of powerful states that Britain never ruled. Of course, one could have put a prime meridian anywhere. The Brits simply picked the meridian closest to London. It is telling that they were practical enough to pick a city that a meridian actually passed through rather than drawing a line on a map through Buckingham Palace and forcing all the time zones to be based on some weird fractions.

And, yes, there have always been some politics to time zones. Spain was in the same time zone as the U.K. until Franco joined the “continental” time zone out of “solidarity.” But most such political changes have been minor and practical (tiny island governments that did not want to their people divided into two time zones and so on).

So should the Mecca Time proposal be adopted? Here are some good reasons for staying with the status quo:

The Cost of Change is Greater Than the Benefits. For most people, the change would have no cost at all. The alarm still rings at 7:30 and happy hour still starts at six. But computer programmers, telephone network managers, satellite operators and military officers would have to make a lot of costly adjustments to get right back where they are now.

The “benefit” is purely ideological. There is a movement among some Arab scholars called “Ijaz al-Koran”–using science to support what the Koran says. Yes, they might be jazzed if all of the world’s clocks were based on the same place the world’s one billion Muslims pray toward. But what of the planet’s other four billion? They might be nonplussed in same, small immeasureable way that the Muslims were pleased. (And millions in all religions simply would not care.)

Mixing Religion and Time is a bad idea. The British, at the height of their power and the apex of their belief in the Anglican Church, did not make the Prime Meridian run through Canterbury. They realized, if they considered it at all, that it is best to have a neutral system, not one seemingly allied with one confession over another.

Mecca Times would violate a long standing tradition–the right of the discoverer to name his discovery. The British discovered and developed the system and gave it to the world. They named it, just like they named Halley’s Comet. We still refer to our numbers as “Arabic numerals” because they were developed by the Arabs, who incidentally have abandoned them for Hindi numerals. When the Arabs present the world with a useful discovery, they can name that one too. Shouldn’t the English be given the same right to name discoveries as the Arabs?

Amy Chozick’s report in today’s Wall Street Journal is a fascinating example of the subtle media bias that favors Obama in the Democratic Party nomination fight.

First, she buys the media pack’s analysis that Clinton is all-but-defeated, a dead woman walking. (In Chozick’s dispatch, Hillary’s latest setback is losing the “expectations game.”) There are a couple of basic facts that make that media consensus dubious:

Delegate Counts. Chozick writes, near the bottom of her piece: “Sen. Obama leads in the national race for delegates with 1,645 to 1,504 for Sen. Clinton, according to the Associated Press; roughly 2,025 are needed to secure the nomination.” So, assuming that AP’s count is correct, Clinton needs 141 delegates to pull even with Obama. At stake in Pennsylvania are 158 delegates. A strong showing by Hillary in the rural areas of the state, where many delegate races will be decided, could narrow the gap. Instead, the 141 delegate gap is treated like some insuperable barrier… In reality, the race is neck-and-neck.

Delegate Counts (part two): Just how reliable are the AP delegate counts, anyway? Nobody knows. Still, it is noteworthy that AP refers to the counts as “estimates.”

Momentum Matters too. The political headwinds are actually against Obama. The flag pin flap, “bitter gate,” Tony Rezko, Rev. Wright. We all know the shorthand by now–and that’s bad news for Obama. He is increasingly being treated as an ordinary politician, rather than a hero-king awaiting coronation. This week’s democratic debate actually showed a press corps willing to ask Obama hard questions…

In fact, the shallow media consensus could easily be reversed. Why not ask: If Obama can’t win Pennsylvania during the Democratic primary, how can he win the key swing state in November? With that question, super-delegates shift to Hillary and Obama becomes the dead man walking. In reality, isn’t it just too soon to tell who the winner will be?

As the paragraph above illustrates, the idea that either candidate is inevitable is fragile. As for the press, why play it down the middle? Let the voters decide about the future, while reporters simply report?

Does my plea sound naive? Doesn’t that illustrate how far-advanced the problem of media bias is?

It is a clear, sunny, perfect day in Washington D.C. and while I am stopped at a red light, a middle-aged woman pushing a deformed man in a wheelchair smiles at me and asks: “How do you like living in the Pope’s weather?”

I take my cigar out of my mouth and say that “if he brings weather like this we should build a mini-Vatican in D.C. and invite him to move in.”

She laughs. The light changes and we part.

I keep thinking about her funny question. Clearly she didn’t mean it literally. The Pope gets rained on like any one else. She meant spiritual weather, I think. She was happy and maybe the man in the wheelchair was too. Maybe it had been a long while since they felt hope and the relief, and the sunny day that seemed to embody it, felt good. They were wearing Pope t-shirts (yes, the Chinese think of everything) and probably came from some mass gathering.

One of the gigantic and simple things that the media missed in the coverage of the Pope’s visit is this simple transfer of hope. Christianity is hopeful because it is about the future–your life after death and the fate of the world at the end of time. The future is inherently hopeful because it is unformed yet and therefore changeable. The past is frozen and done. Those who focus on it become depressed, even if the past was glorious.

Too many though felt not hope, but hate.

Always desperate for attention, HBO host Bill Maher linked a Texas cult to the world’s largest branch of Christianity, the world’s largest religion.

“In fact, whenever a cult leader sets himself up as God’s infallible wingman here on Earth, lock away the kids. Which is why I’d like to tip off law enforcement to an even larger child-abusing religious cult. Its leader also has a compound, and this guy not only operates outside the bounds of the law, but he used to be a Nazi and he wears funny hats. That’s right, the Pope is coming to America this week and ladies, he’s single!”

Naturally, the Huffington Post has the video.

As for dismissing Catholicism as a child-abusing religious cult, I wonder if Maher would say this about the Dalai Lama or about Palestinian suicide-cults that indoctrinate children. Of course, offending the Dalai Lama might make large swaths of Beverly Hills angry at him and attacking Palestinian death cults might lead to a bomb under his Prius… It is safer to attack the rubes, whose only response will be to pray for his soul. (Sean Hannity urged his listeners not to boycott Maher or HBO on the sound grounds that attacks on any particular free speech act easily become attacks on all free speech and America has already lost too much of its respect for the free-speech rights of those we disagree with. A far wiser position than Maher’s and I don’t mean to damn Hannity with faint praise!)

For what is worth, the Pope is not a former Nazi, as this Associated Press dispatch makes clear (Hat tip: Newsbusters). Yes, he was required by law to join the Hitler Youth and was drafted into the German Army. Hardly, voluntary acts in a totalitarian state. As for the acts within his control, numerous sources show his resistance to Nazi ideology. And the Catholic Church was an anti-Nazi force, but that is a story for another time.

Soon other haters piled on. Take the Huffington Post, which went out of its way to feature a piece pairing the Pope’s American tour with the launch of a film about a defrocked priest who wonders why the cross is a symbol of hate and why religion inspires murder. Oh, such deep thoughts from the 1960s. Why not also ask why ideologies allied with atheism (such as communism and Nazism) killed hundreds of millions in the 20th century alone? Oh, right. The point not to examine the sources of humanity’s dark nature, but to blame Christianity in a sophomoric way.

And if we are going to look at the evil done in the name of good, why not also examine Christianity’s incredible record of establishing schools, orphanages and hospitals? Why not examine the Christian calls for helping the poor and establishing peace? Oh, right. The point is not to examine the benefits and costs of organized Christianity in a rational manner, but to blame Christianity in a sophomoric way.

Why isn’t anti-Catholic sentiment understood as the bigotry that it is? And why do so many people living wealthy and comfortable lives hate the small amount of hope that others, less fortunate than they, may receive?

The Senate Armed Services committee hearing, featuring General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, is just wrapping up.

Unlike Britain or Bangladesh, it is clear that in this country we don’t train our lawmakers, generals or ambassadors to speak well. Still, the ambition behind the performances was palpable. So let’s see who improved themselves and who disgraced themselves in today’s hearings.

Sen. McCain failed to appear presidential. He spoke haltingly with an uncontrollable eye-blink. Worse, he seems to think al Qaeda is composed of Shiites. Think Progress has the video.

The Huffington Post relays some other verbal gaffes, some of them shocking in their intemperateness.

Sen. Webb sounded equally foolish. He said that the Anbar Awakening began before the surge was announced, which is true, but added, he knows this for a fact because his son in a “rifleman in the Marine Corps.” Huh? Should the Senate just dispense with hearings of four-star generals and simply interview the parents of enlisted soldiers? Webb looks as dumb as President Carter consulting his eight-year old daughter. A fact is a fact. Webb’s sourcing looks either like a politician desperately trying to shoehorn in a reference to his son’s service or a paranoid who doesn’t trust leaders, only grunts or relatives. Instead, he had a serious question that he didn’t quite ask: why does the surge get credit for success in Anbar when the Awakening began before it did? A deeper, unasked question: This Awakening (uprising against al Qaeda) is actually the fifth such uprising. Why did we fail to work with the first four?

Sen. Clinton looked schoolmarmish with her glasses on the end of her nose and sounded churlish with a series small-bore questions.

The winner? Sen. Bill Nelson, the Nebraska Democrat. He took the classic anti-war talking point (the war is costing too much), which sounded stingy and shrill when by Sen. Collins and many others, and Nelson made it sound reasonable and hard-headed. Rather than whining about the money the war is costing (which would sound more credible if the senators were pushing for cuts in federal spending on its way to their home states), Nelson asked a more limited question: When oil is at $111/barrel, can’t the Iraqis pay for their own infrastructure?

Amb. Crocker’s point was that the day of the U.S. funding major reconstruction projects in Iraq is over. Fair enough, but their are millions of minor ones.

Besides, Nelson insisted, every other nation is loaning the Iraqis money. Why are we giving it to them?

He’s got a good, serious point. The Bush Administration would be wise to heed it.

So Absolut vodka, an outfit subsidized and owned by the Swedish government, decided to run ads in Mexico featuring a map of North America…with California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas back in Mexican hands.

The slogan? “In an Absolut world…”

Digging an even deeper hole, Absolut executives tell an L.A. Times blogger that they were trying to appeal to Mexican nationalism.

The ads are running only in Mexico, but thanks to the Internet, we can see them here. And here it runs counter to American nationalism.

Already some are talking about boycotting Absolut. But there is no need for such formalities. The average American individualist might find it easier to simply say “pass the Grey Goose…”

The sum of many small acts is never small. Just ask the French: How many years did it take for French wine sales to recover from their 2002 anti-American tirade at the U.N.?