OTHER WOMEN? YOU’D THINK THEY’D BE USED TO THAT: Clinton Supporter Angered By ‘Other Women’ Obama VP Talk.

ROGER KIMBALL: When “acknowledgment” means “perpetuation,” or Obama, liberals, and the issue of race.

“PRINCESS CHUNK:” An apt name for a 44-pound cat. Photo at the link.

IN CANADA, B’NAI B’RITH IS NOW taking on Canada’s “Human Rights” Kangaroo Courts:

B’nai Brith Canada, an organization long concerned with the defence and improvement of Canada’s human rights system, is calling for “urgent reform” of human rights commissions. The Jewish human rights group has successfully brought cases before human rights commissions and tribunals, which it says “have historically played an important role in combating Nazism and neo-Nazi ideologies”. B’nai Brith Canada has called on the Canadian Human Rights Commission to seize the opportunity provided by the current review it has undertaken to “make real changes that will ensure its relevancy into the future”.

“We are calling for a much-needed overhaul of the protections offered by the human rights commission system,” said Frank Dimant, Executive Vice President of B’nai Brith Canada. “We have to ensure that commissions do not become abusers of the very human rights they are charged with protecting.

A little late for that, but I’m glad they’re taking the right position.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Why aren’t there hordes of economists studying meaningful alternatives to market capitalism? Because we’ve been experimenting with various other systems–both localism and extreme centralization–for over a century, and the experiment produces the same damn result every single time: human lives that are nasty, brutish, and short. . . . The idea that Chicago should scuttle the Milton Friedman Institute because it makes other professors unpopular with economic illiterates is shameful, and moreover, something that I presume few of these ‘scholars’ would tolerate if the ignorant were targeting their own fields. That this should be coming out of a university with Chicago’s reputation for intellectual rigor is mortifying.”

WOULD YOU BUY A CAR FROM GOOGLE OR DELL? “According to a new study by TechnoMetrica and Auto Futures Group, more than a third (34%) of Americans would consider buying a Google- or Dell-branded vehicle, assuming gas were to hit $6 per gallon and the vehicles were especially fuel-efficient.”

WELL, AT LEAST IF OBAMA’S ELECTED WE’LL BE SPARED THIS KIND OF IDIOCY:

The Bush Administration has ignited a furor with a proposed definition of pregnancy that has the effect of classifying some of the most widely used methods of contraception as abortion. A draft regulation, still being revised and debated, treats most birth-control pills and intrauterine devices as abortion because they can work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. The regulation considers that destroying “the life of a human being.”

Though it’s hard to imagine McCain getting behind this either. And hey, it’s no stupider than the District of Columbia classifying a Glock as a “machine gun.”

JIM LINDGREN SUGGESTS that the New York Times’ report that the University of Chicago offered Barack Obama a faculty position with tenure upon hiring is wrong: “I have now talked to four members of the University of Chicago law faculty, including at least one of Obama’s campaign donors, and all four of them say that they do not remember voting Barack Obama a tenured or tenure-track offer. When I asked whether they remembered the Faculty Appointments Committee in the 2000-2002 era sending out an appointments file recommending a tenured or tenure-track appointment, all said No. Nor do these members of the faculty remember their being part of any discussion whether to grant tenure to Obama. As some of them explained procedures at Chicago, the dean does not have the power to make an actual offer of tenure without a faculty vote.”

HMM: Women voters aren’t warming to ‘cool’ Obama.

BRAD TEMPLETON ON ROBOT CARS: “Or how computer geeks can enable the electric car, save the planet and millions of lives using near-term A.I. to make taxis and trucks deliver, park, recharge and drive themselves.”

IN THE MAIL: Jim Champy’s Outsmart!: How to Do What Your Competitors Can’t.

CONGRESS’S DUTY TO D.C. RESIDENTS: A good observation in the Washington Post:

Last month, the Supreme Court affirmed that Americans have an individual right under the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms.

Just as with the First Amendment, it matters not a whit whether we reside in the state of Indiana or the District of Columbia. We are protected by the same Bill of Rights.

Sadly, since the announcement of the Heller decision, we have seen the D.C. Council continue to thumb its nose at the Constitution and defy a clear Supreme Court order by largely maintaining its draconian handgun ban.

Moreover, when Congress chose to delegate home rule to the District in the 1970s, it specified that legislation enacted by the District must be “consistent with the Constitution of the United States,” and it “reserve[d] the right, at any time, to exercise its constitutional authority as legislature for the District, by enacting legislation for the District on any subject.”

Yes, Congress has a duty to step in and protect constitutional rights against a local government engaging in a campaign of “massive resistance” to a Supreme Court decision recognizing those rights.

DUDE, WHERE’S MY RECESSION? (CONT’D): GDP grew 1.9% last quarter. “Consumers boosted their spending at a 1.5 percent pace in the second quarter. That was up from a 0.9 percent growth rate in the first quarter and marked the best showing since the third quarter of 2007 when the economy was still performing strongly despite the severe housing slump.” On the other hand, the inflation picture isn’t so great.

HE’S THE BIGGEST CELEBRITY IN THE WORLD!

GAFFE-O-MATIC:

Democrat Barack Obama, the first black candidate with a shot at winning the White House, says John McCain and his Republican allies will try to scare them by saying Obama “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

Er, all those other presidents? Isn’t there just one President on the dollar bill?

And have you noticed that it’s always Obama who’s actually injecting race into the campaign, under the guise of warning about what those Evil Republicans will do? And is it really likely that John McCain would be out there saying “don’t vote for Obama, he’s black?”

I anticipate a lot of Photoshop fun with this quote, though.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Not only is there only 1 president on the $1.00 bill, but assuming he meant currency in general, he might want to look at the $10 and $100 which do not feature any U.S. President. Perhaps he spoke…”inartfully” again.

That keeps happening. And another reader emails: “Isn’t the gaffe ‘*other* presidents’; again he thinks he’s already president.” Heh. I’d missed that.

On the other hand, reader David Sette emails: “From the quote I read, it is clear he’s talking about bills, plural. As is the 1, 5, 20, 50 etc. Hardly a gaffe.” I don’t know, it seems quite comparable to the “Bushisms” that people have been pointing out for years as evidence that our current President isn’t very bright. Yes, those features are kind of lame, but sauce for the goose, etc. . . .

MORE: Okay, what’s really weird is that Obama just said the same thing about himself, in Berlin:

I know that I don’t look like the other Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.

So who’s the one raising these racial issues, again?

STILL MORE: Dave Price:

“My opponents are racists!” Ugh, that didn’t take long. Explain to me again how this guy is different than Jesse Jackson? What happened to being “the postracial candidate?”

I imagine that we’ll see a lot of this kind of thing if Obama is elected President. And perhaps the best reason to vote against Obama is to spare the country an administration that reflexively characterizes any criticism as racist.

MORE STILL: The gift that keeps giving. Reader Jack Moody writes:

“I know that I don’t look like the other Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.”

There’s another gaffe in that statement too.

Broadly, racially, speaking I would think the current and previous Sec State would count. Or is Obama limiting himself to just *other* presidents again?

When the press is in the tank for you, you get sloppy.

AND MORE: Jake Tapper has a different version of the quote that eliminates the dollar-bill gaffe. But Tapper also notes that the Obama campaign is consistently making bogus charges of racism and xenophobia:

There’s a lot of racist xenophobic crap out there. But not only has McCain not peddled any of it, he’s condemned it. . . . I’ve seen racism in campaigns before — I’ve seen it against Obama in this campaign (more from Democrats than Republicans, at this point, I might add) and I’ve seen it against McCain in South Carolina in 2000 . . . What I have not seen is it come from McCain or his campaign in such a way to merit the language Obama used today. Pretty inflammatory.

Just wait. It’ll get worse between now and November.

MICKEY KAUS on the MSM and the Edwards story: “It’s not merely the stench of liberal bias that bothers me but the unfortunate reality that we in the MSM are giving up a good story to the internet. And if we in the major media continue to cede such stories to the internet, we won’t be major much longer.”

Yes, it’s amazing the way the Legacy Media seem to be affirmatively engaged in ensuring their own decline.

UPDATE: Oops — that’s not Kaus, that’s Kaus quoting the Newark Star-Ledger. My mistake — sorry.

HERE’S THE TRAILER for the next Harry Potter movie.

CONN CARROLL: Why earmarks matter.

ROGER KIMBALL: Can Britain Survive Multiculturalism? British multiculturalism is symptomatic of a governing class that doesn’t really believe in the nation it governs. Can a nation survive that? It seems doubtful.

BURMESE RULERS SWINDLE U.N.:

So, while the U.S. Treasury is trying to tighten sanctions on Burma’s thug government, the United Nations has been busy funneling millions of dollars to the Burmese regime — thanks to a classic artificial foreign-exchange rate dodge, which the UN finally acknowledged in public only after weeks of questioning by Inner-City Press (see post below).

This latest in the long list of UN gifts to dictators came about as part of the relief mission launched in May to help Burmese victims of Cyclone Nargis.

Read the whole thing.

TIGERHAWK ON “Selective Greeniness.” Getting rid of fuel subsidies in places like Venezuela, Iran, and China would cut carbon emissions immensely. So where’s the call for that?

AUSTIN BAY ON THE MUSLIM WORLD’S CHALLENGES:

Oil and unemployed testosterone don’t mix, they collide — with war the likely result.

“Economics and demographics” lack the sizzle of oil and testosterone, which as eye-grabbers are an Oprah-notch below money and sex. But in the grand sense of geo-strategy and the intricate 21st century problems that produce wars, poverty and other forms of sustained misery, economics and demographics are the fire.

Read the whole thing.

QUESTIONING THE TIMING of the Ted Stevens indictment.

WATER ON MARS? Phoenix pics are in. “In a discovery that could qualify as one of the most important in the history of space exploration, NASA’s Phoenix Mission may have confirmed the presence of water ice on the planet, Popular Mechanics has learned. The scheduling of a press conference for Thursday at 2 p.m. Eastern by NASA and the University of Arizona has raised hopes in the space community that scientists will announce the breakthrough. When pressed for details, a spokesperson for the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory refused to elaborate beyond saying that the Phoenix team would unveil new findings from the ongoing robotic mission to Mars. If the rumor holds true, it would be the first direct confirmation of water ice beyond Earth.”

SAW AN EXCELLENT PANEL THIS EVENING ON THE DUKE LACROSSE RAPE HOAX, featuring K.C. Johnson (author of Until Proven Innocent, with Stuart Taylor), James Coleman, Mike Gerhardt, Lyrissa Lidsky, and Angela Davis (no, not that Angela Davis), author of Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor, which I bought on Kenneth Anderson’s recommendation and which is excellent, especially as a companion to K.C.’s book. The discussion was excellent and very fair. Lots of talk about what Nifong got wrong, plus the important point that the kind of misconduct for which Nifong was disbarred and punished is committed regularly by prosecutors who almost always get off scot-free even when it’s exposed. We really need a better mechanism for policing prosecutorial misconduct, and it’s not clear what that should be — independent audits of cases by a sort of inspector general? I’m not sure.

I disagree, though, with the idea that replacing elected prosecutors with appointed prosecutors would fix the problem. As with elected vs. appointed judges, it doesn’t get rid of the politics, just make it less transparent. And I suspect that situations like that obtaining in Britain, where burglars face little risk of prosecution while homeowners who defend their homes against burglars are targeted by authorities, couldn’t possibly prevail in a system of elected prosecutors.