Barack Obama could learn market capitalism from the Europeans?

I know conservatives love Phil Gramm and hate capitulating to a feeding frenzy, but did McCain really need a cranky, older Washington insider as a surrogate?

Stressing “soft power” is probably not going to help Barack Obama win over Israelis. Although the latter don’t vote, they have friends and relatives who do.

This is goofier than the “strike force.”

Count me as unshocked that the liberal elites at the Aspen Ideas Festival don’t give a fig about the hostages freed from FARC terrorists. (“Tellingly, the dramatic rescue of three American military contractors from a five-and-a-half-year-long captivity in the Colombian jungles, as prisoners of the narco-terrorist group, FARC, elicited little or no chatter among the conference participants – even though the rescue in and of itself dealt a major strategic blow to the anti-American left throughout South America.”) Well, I could have told you that dealing a major strategic blow to the anti-American left anywhere is not high on the Aspen attendees’ priority list.

You tell ’em, Senator Feinstein. Don’t let them budge one inch on offshore drilling. Not once inch.

A not well-kept secret getting more ink: the NRA wasn’t thrilled for some time about pursuing DC v. Heller. Sometimes it really is worth the risk to vindicate the Bill of Rights.

David Brooks really wants Obama to be better than he is: “In my view he’d open eyes if he admitted he was wrong about the surge not being able to reduce violence and halfway wrong when he said the surge wouldn’t produce political gains. It might cause heartburn among some die-hard surge haters, but most of the country would see a guy who can respond to obvious facts and learn from them. That’s what normal people do.” Alas, that’s not the Obama we have.

This New York Times headline (“Bush, in Shift, Accepts Idea of Iraq Timeline”) is replete with irony. President Bush is the flexible one, able to adjust to the real world now. But Obama? Not so much.

Of all the reasons to drop the exclusionary rule (“the constable stumbles, the criminal goes free”), the law in foreign countries is not likely to rank high with conservative jurists. On the other hand, Justice Kennedy is very fond of foreign law.