NEW YORK’S New Yorkiest.

TOM MAGUIRE: A TYPICAL SORT OF FLARE-UP: “Hmm, how typical is it for a candidate to characterize a huge swath of his target voters as bigoted, gun waving religious fanatics?” And a big roundup from James Joyner, who observes: “Class bias works both ways. Urban elites tend to view rural America, especially Southerners, as a bunch of yahoos. Rural Americans, meanwhile, think big city types are elitist snobs who don’t love America. There are similar resentments between rich and poor, educated and not, and even Ivy League -State College. In private gatherings, where people think they are among the like-minded, one hears shocking bigotry along those lines.”

And sometimes it’s recorded and circulated on the Internet.

INVISIBLE HOMOPHOBIA: “It’s not just homophobia from conservatives we have to worry about. Liberals can be just as baldly antigay — often without reproach.”

CAPITALIZING ON THE ENEMY’S ERRORS:

ABC News’ Sarah Amos reports that at North Carolina Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount, N.C., Clinton campaign North Carolina chieftain Tom Hendrickson, a former state party chair, made much hay out of the “small town” comments made by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

Hendrickson was introducing former President Bill Clinton.

“I normally just come and talk about President Clinton and Senator Clinton at these, but today Senator Obama was out at a fundraiser at I guess a brie and chardonnay crowd in San Francisco,” Hendrickson said. “But his quote talking about small towns in Pennsylvania — and which applies to small towns across eastern North Carolina — which is why it is relevant to this tour we are doing today. And his quote is ‘and it is not surprising that they cling to guns and religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant or anti-trade as a way to explain their frustration.’

“I listened to that quote and I got mad,” Hendrickson said, “and I wanted to reach out to Senator Obama and say senator, we are from the rural part of eastern North Carolina. We are very proud of our heritage, we are proud of who we are. We are not frustrated. We are not bitter. We turn to our faith because we believe, and we hunt and fish because it is part of our culture and we enjoy it.

Expect a lot more of this.

LOOKING FOR more oil.

Complaints about the drilling bans in ANWR and offshore are a staple of right-wing talk radio. But I remember Malcolm S. Forbes, back in the 1970s, saying that we should drill as little domestic oil as possible. Pump the Arabs’ oil as long as it lasts, then — when oil has become really scarce and valuable — we’ll be the only ones with any left!

TOUCHING LIVES IN THE KEYSTONE STATE: “By cracky, it’s like the man sees into my soul!”

COMPOUNDING THE ERROR? “Sen. Obama’s explanation and pushback are actually worse than his original offense.” He certainly hasn’t helped himself, so far.

UPDATE: The Washington Post put the biggest political story in weeks on page 4. “This may be what makes Pennsylvanians so bitter: Even when they are insulted, the elites don’t think it is newsworthy.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Obama’s Elitism, Careerism Now Campaign Issues.

MORE: Heh. Hicks nix clique’s shticks. “If you’re running as a glamorous blank slate on which people project their own utopian fantasies, you’ve got to be very careful not to give the game away – especially when the game turns out to be the usual cliched elite disdain for the great unwashed.”

Plus, the McGovernization of Obama. “And pundits keep wondering why Hillary won’t give up?”

More at Talkleft: “Is he digging himself into a deeper hole? Clinging to anti-immigrant sentiment isn’t a bad thing? Isn’t he still saying PA voters harbor anti-immigrant sentiment that have been passed down to them through generations?”

STILL MORE: A.P.: “Obama scrambled Saturday to quell the furor.”

BILL ROGGIO: Fighting in Sadr City. Meanwhile, InstaPundit correspondent John Tammes sends this: “Just a quick follow up – it is game on down here, and the early results are good. A high ranking Iraqi officer said to me that they ‘struck some gold.'”

Stay tuned.

AN “EXISTENTIAL THREAT” to Canada’s blogosphere.

ANOTHER BLOGGER BOOK: Ferocious Flirting: Making Marriage Wonderful, by Matt Smith.

THE WORLD’S FIRST all-dwarf soccer team.

ENDLESS WINTER: We’re supposed to get snow, in the mountains anyway, tomorrow night. If that’s any comfort . . . .

CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT blocks San Francisco gun ban.

DEEP BACKGROUND: Austin Bay and I talk about Iraq, with Jules Crittenden, Bill Roggio, and Michael Totten.

ANN ALTHOUSE: “How odd that Pennsylvania got set apart in time from all the other primaries. What luck for Clinton. All this time for something to go wrong for Obama and for exploiting it — like that awful quote everyone’s talking about. . . . I must say that the original statement sounded like a typical law-school-liberal remark. I think it was quite sincere, and I’m rather sure he believed he was being admirably intellectual and raising politics to a new, higher level. Within a liberal law school environment, that statement would be heard as a thoughtful, compassionate insight. Some of your colleagues might think you were excessively, squishily tolerant of what they see as ignorant, bigoted people, but I don’t think they’d push you to be more understanding of the alien culture you were observing.”

Actually, Obama was just following in Al Gore’s footsteps!

UPDATE: Among the snakehandlers.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: “Moreover, even assuming for the sake of argument that some voters do vote values over economics, Obama may want to explain to such voters why they should do otherwise, given that he has spent the last 20 years in a church known for disavowing ‘the pursuit of middleclassness.’ . . . In addition, if Obama thinks these voters are clinging to anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment because of US economic policy, he ought to explain why he is exploiting anti-trade sentiment on the campaign trail, but advocating lax policies on illegal immigration, including (but not limited to) providing government benefits like drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens and allowing criminals to become citizens. Once he does that, Obama can explain how he squares his stated position on trade with the advice of his top economic adviser. And when he does that, Obama can explain how his stated position on immigration squares with his labor-induced vote that killed the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill last summer.”

Yeah, it’s like a perfect storm of phoniness.

EVERYTHING THAT’S WRONG WITH THE G.O.P. IN TWO WORDS: Trent Lott. “I haven’t paid for lunch in 30 years.”

CONGRATULATIONS: Michael Yon’s book is currently up to #470 on Amazon, and it’s not even officially out yet, though it has started to ship. I hope it’s widely read. Buy a copy for each of your Senators!

ANN WOOLNER:

So now, Duke University wants to keep certain people from saying certain things about the disproven rape allegations against the school’s lacrosse players.

Now that lawsuits accuse Duke of having helped inflame campus sentiment against the team, this is a good time to be quiet about the whole thing, it seems.

Well, that is a turn of events.

This is the same school where faculty and students loudly demanded jailing — and worse — for the young men; where administrators canceled the team’s season and fired the coach to try to quell the mob. That same school is now trying to punish players’ lawyers for inviting the news media to write about what the school allegedly did wrong.

In response to a suit filed by 38 current and former lacrosse players at Duke, lawyers for the university accuse the players’ attorneys of ethics violations in speaking publicly about their case.

Merely insuring, of course, that we’re all reminded of how badly Duke behaved. Hey, it’s good for Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson.

“A PROVOCATIVE MASKED BALL SET IN THE RUINS OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER:” They do this because they know we won’t behead them. Such is the bravery of artists. (Possibly NSFW, though not in any sort of appealing way).

UPDATE: Bryon Scott emails: “The irony of this play isn’t that it uses World Trade Center imagery. It’s that the point of it is to expose the cruel disparity between the rich and poor in America. This coming from a country who’s unemployment rate has been close to double that of the US for the last fifteen years.”

The real irony is that if you staged a similarly nasty opera about modern German in America, nobody would care, because Germany doesn’t matter that much. And they hate that.

SOUNDS LIKE YOU’VE HIT THE NAIL ON THE HEAD: “The Olympics are a vulgar, ruinous hullabaloo the chief functions of which are to facilitate graft on a spectacular scale and to act as a vehicle for the promotion of despotic values. They are, at best, unedifying and, at worst, intolerable.”

And, from the comments: “I think you’re being entirely too kind.”

I TOLD YOU I COULD CALL FDR from the vasty deeps.

HEH: SKYY® Vodka, Made in the USA, Proudly Supports Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

MORE ON OBAMA’S SMALL-TOWN SCREWUP, from Tom Maguire.

Plus this: “Obama To Rural Pennsylvanians: Vote For Me, You Corncob-Smokin’, Banjo-Strokin’ Chicken-Chokin’ Cousin-Pokin’ Inbred Hillbilly Racist Morons.” That’ll sell. Can’t anybody play this game?

UPDATE: Still more:

Barack Obama has done what Democratic candidates for president invariably do — he has revealed the profound sense of unearned superiority that is the sad and persistent hallmark of contemporary liberalism. Obama’s statement today that small-town folk “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” may be the most distilled example of this train of thought I’ve ever seen.

I still think that knocking the anti-trade stuff is pretty hypocritical given Barack’s own position. And wasn’t it just the other day he was telling us he’s the pro-gun candidate?

I once saw Alan Dershowitz argue an appeal back when I was a law clerk. He made clear from the beginning that he thought he was the smartest guy in the room — which, as one of the other clerks remarked later, proved that he wasn’t. He lost. Must be a Harvard Law thing . . . .

MORE STILL: Heh: Obama Reaches Out to Bitter Religious Pennsylvanians.

Mickey Kaus:

I used to think working class voters had conservative values because they were bitter about their economic circumstances–welfare and immigrants were “scapegoats,” part of the false consciousness that would disappear when everyone was guaranteed a good job at good wages. Then I left college. …

And follow the link for Michael Lind’s comment: “Hunting is part of working-class American culture. Does Obama really think that working-class whites in Pennsylvania were gun control liberals until their industries were downsized?” How would he know otherwise?

Plus, “Let’s have a national dialogue about egghead condescension!” It’s got to work better for Obama than the dialogue about race has . . . .

DISGRACE IN DETROIT:

If you respect the NAACP’s heritage, you will be disgusted to learn that the organization’s Detroit chapter plans to honor a man who says that AIDS is a U.S. government plot to kill black people and that the Sept. 11 attacks were “America’s chickens . . . coming home to roost,” and who declares: “God damn America.” . . .

This appears to be a case of circling the wagons: Wright, a black man, is under attack, so the NAACP, an organization that seeks the advancement of black people, is defending him. In doing so, the NAACP is committing an analytical and moral error. Wright is under attack not for the color of his skin, but for the content of his ideas. To defend him is to countenance those ideas. Through its actions, the NAACP is in effect arguing that anti-Americanism is acceptable, so long as its source is black. The association is sanctioning both invidious ideas and an invidious racial double standard.

Read the whole thing.

ROBOPHOBIA: Matthew Yglesias is being busted for anti-android prejudice. I wish to join in saying that robophobia and hatred directed at our cybernetic friends has no place in a civilized polity, and that someone should report Matt to the ASPCR.

Somewhat related items here and here.

UPDATE: Brendan Loy slaps me for “Robot Dhimmitude:” “Glenn Reynolds’s hyperactive sense of political correctness is blinding him to the threat robots pose!”