TIGERHAWK: “Obama’s official pronouncements on Iraq reflect a denial about the very much changed situation there that would provoke contemptuous jeers (or at least tough questions) from the press if it were the McCain campaign that was so out of touch.”

ANOTHER GRIM MILESTONE: Thirty years ago Jimmy Carter established the Department of Energy. And all our energy problems were solved . . . .

BILL CLINTON INSISTS, “I am not a racist!”

Nonsense. He opposed Obama, and it’s been clearly established that the only reason to oppose Obama is racism.

UPDATE: No, really, there’s a whole feature in Newsweek explaining that. Sorry, Bill.

ARNOLD KLING ASKS AN INCONVENIENT QUESTION:

Go through a mental list of major government programs, and ask how many of them you would enact today in their current formats.

Social Security? Even if you like the concept, if you had it to do over again you would make it less susceptible to demographic imbalances.

Medicare? Agriculture policy? Energy policy?

If you step back and look at it, the problem of fragile by design that I wrote about concerning Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is widespread in top-down solutions. And yet, like Charlie Brown getting ready to kick a football, we seem to have an infinite capacity to believe that it will be different this time. We think that the next top-down design introduced by government will work fine, it will never degrade, and we won’t find ourselves ten or twenty years down the road wondering how such a mess was created.

Plus, related thoughts on the American welfare state: “Each program was designed. But together they add up to something than no one would have intended–a hodgepodge of subsidies and credits that allow some poor people to fall through the cracks and provide many subsidies to the affluent.”

DON SURBER: The good and bad of George W. Bush.

WEIGHING THE health benefits of birth control. There are a lot of risk to the Pill — birth control pills quite possibly caused the Insta-Wife’s freak heart attack — but it’s true that there are benefits, too.

JOEL ACHENBACH: Global Warming Did It! Well, Maybe Not. “We’re stuck on the notion that climate change is the culprit every time a natural disaster strikes. But that’s just muddying the waters. . . . The message that needs to be communicated to these people is: ‘Your problem is not global warming. Your problem is that you’re nuts.'”