Yesterday, somewhere between “tens of thousands” and “two million” people flooded the nation’s capital to protest somethingoranother.

Thousands Rally in Capital to Protest Big Government (Jeff Zeleny, NYT)

Amanda Lucidon for The New York Times

A sea of protesters filled the west lawn of the Capitol and spilled onto the National Mall on Saturday in the largest rally against President Obama since he took office, a culmination of a summer-long season of protests that began with opposition to a health care overhaul and grew into a broader dissatisfaction with government.

On a cloudy and cool day, the demonstrators came from all corners of the country, waving American flags and handwritten signs explaining the root of their frustrations. Their anger stretched well beyond the health care legislation moving through Congress, with shouts of support for gun rights, lower taxes and a smaller government.

But as they sang verse after verse of patriotic hymns like “God Bless America,” sharp words of profane and political criticism were aimed at Mr. Obama and Congress.

Dick Armey, a former House Republican leader whose group Freedomworks helped organize the protest, stood before the crowd and led the rallying cries in nearly the same spot where Mr. Obama took his oath of office eight months ago. “He pledged a commitment of fidelity to the United States Constitution,” Mr. Armey said, suggesting that Mr. Obama was in violation of what the founding fathers intended the size and scope of the government to be.

“Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar!” the crowd shouted back, echoing the accusation that Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, hurled at the president three days earlier during his address to Congress.

The demonstrators numbered well into the tens of thousands, though the police declined to estimate the size of the crowd. Many came on their own and were not part of an organization or group. But the magnitude of the rally took the authorities by surprise, with throngs of people streaming from the White House to Capitol Hill for more than three hours.

Lashing Out at the Capitol – Tens of Thousands Protest Obama Initiatives and Government Spending (Emma Brown, James Hohmann and Perry Bacon Jr. – WaPo)

Tens of thousands of conservative protesters, many complaining that the nation is racing toward socialism, massed outside the U.S. Capitol on Saturday, angrily denouncing President Obama’s health-care plan and other initiatives as threats to the Constitution.

The crowd — loud, animated and sprawling — gathered at the West Front of the Capitol after a march along Pennsylvania Avenue NW from Freedom Plaza. Invocations of God and former president Ronald Reagan by an array of speakers drew loud cheers that echoed across the Mall. On a windy, overcast afternoon, hundreds of yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags flapped in the breeze.

“Hell hath no fury like a taxpayer ignored,” declared Andrew Moylan, head of government affairs for the National Taxpayers Union, urging protesters to call their representatives. The demonstrators roared their approval. “We own the dome!” they chanted, pointing at the Capitol.

The demonstrators are part of a loose-knit movement that is galvanizing anti-Obama sentiment across the country, stoking a populist dimension to the Republican Party, which has struggled to find its voice since the 2008 elections.

Tea Party Protesters March on Washington – Thousands March to U.S. Capitol to Protest Government Spending, Health Care; Many Chanted ‘You Lie’ (Russell Goldman, ABC)

Thousands of conservative protesters from across the country converged on the Capitol Saturday morning to demonstrate against President Obama’s proposals for health care reform and voicing opposition to big government, what they say is over-the-top spending.

Carrying signs depicting President Obama as Adolf Hitler and the Joker, and chanting slogans such as “‘No big government” and “Obamacare makes me sick,” approximately 60,000 to 70,000 people flooded Pennsylvania Ave, according to the Washington DC Fire Department.

Organized by FreedomWorks, a conservative activist group led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, many of the protestors were affiliated with the Tea Party movement, grassroots demonstrations that began across the country last spring to protest Democratic tax policies, and government bailouts of the banking and auto industries.

The big blogospheric debate seems to be over crowd size. FreedomWorks apparently quoted ABC News as reporting the crowd size at “1 million to 1.5 million” and others claimed as much as 2 million. ABC issued a report denying that it ever said anything of the sort: “At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as “tens of thousands.” The fact of the matter is that nobody ever has a very good idea how many people attended these things and, since the fiasco of the “Million Man March,” the Capitol Police have wisely stopped providing estimates.

Suffice it to say: A whole lot of people showed up. Michelle Malkin has crowd photos and there’s no refuting that the turnout was simply massive.

What’s more interesting to me is not how many but Why? Matt Yglesias does what pretty much everybody does when there’s a big protest from the other side: Point to the yahoos.

I wouldn’t want to tell you that the majority of the people I saw at this morning’s tea party were such hard-core patriots that they felt the need to walk around waving flags of treason and slavery:

Still it did strike me as noteworthy that your basic tea party crowd isn’t the sort of crowd in which a Confederate flag is unwelcome. I feel like if you’d tried to bring this to a health care rally, folks would have gotten upset. But the tea parties, like a lot of big time conservative events, are a very racism friendly environment. This guy, for example, clearly isn’t so much the type to march with a racist shirt on as he is the kind of guy who’d march with a shirt ridiculing the idea of anti-racism:

As was the case with the bulk of the protesters, there was very little sense that anyone had any actual specific complaint with Obama’s health care proposals. That one woman loves the confederacy. This guy thinks guns are great and diversity is stupid. Many protesters feel that abortion is murder and/or that Barack Obama is in league with terrorists. But nobody had a sign urging the president to adopt more stringent cost control measures, or slamming the concept of regulations to require insurers to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Now, as a Southerner, I tend to have a more benign view of people waving Confederate flags or wearing pro-gun T-shirts. Some of them are racist yahoos, to be sure, but most of them are just decent folks taking pride in a way of life they feel is under assault.

Regardless, however, Matt’s right about the last part:  There’s not one single thing motivating all these people.  They likely have vastly different policy preferences even on the central issue that supposedly ties them together: opposition to Big Government, whose era is not in fact over.  I would simply add that this is true of all mass protest movements.

We on the Right have always made fun of these protestors — which have, until now, been almost exclusively the province of the Left — because, frankly, there are always a lot of yahoos in the crowd.   There are always plenty of signs and t-shirts and epithets shouted that would make the organizers cringe because they take away from the intended message and make the protest seem less serious.  (Matt Welch, who is very sympathetic to the Tea Party cause, points to a man carrying a sign saying “Stop spending our tacos. I love tacos.”  I have no idea what inspired that but it’s epic.)

On the Left, there seem to be a solid cohort who will show up to protest anything; they’re damned near professional protesters.    With the Tea Party protests, we may finally be seeing their analog on the Right.

It’s unfair, regardless of the loose cause that motivates them to show up, to criticize the “movement” because individual protesters seem unable to articulate why they’re there.  Most people really can’t do that.  And people who show up to protest are usually motivated by emotion rather than cold logic.  They’re simply angry at the direction they think they’re country’s going and want to vent their frustrations and show that they’re not alone.  Welch nails it:

Political rallies are no place to seek the subtle truth, nor feel particularly glowing about your countrymen, and today was no different in that regard for me. But the meta-fact about a huge anti-Obamanomics protest eight months into his term is certainly significant, and very little of what I saw made me fear that Alex Pareene will be blown to smithereens by a suicide hijacker from Arkansas.

Malkin’s got my favorite photo:

Not only is the sign defiantly funny — and decidedly not Astroturfed — but it’s a great crowd shot of a bunch of regular Americans getting together to express their displeasure with their government in a civilized manner.  Protest rallies aren’t, so to speak, my cup of tea.  But there are worse outlet valves for the inevitable frustrations of a huge and incredibly diverse country.

Usually, when Chuck Norris speaks, the world listens.  But this apparently does not hold true for when he writes columns for WorldNetDaily and goes on the Glenn Beck show — in which it takes a couple days for anyone to notice.

Ron Moore, for the DC Examiner:

The call by some right wing leaders for rebellion and for the military to refuse the commander in chief’s orders is joined by Chuck Norris who claims that thousands of right wing cell groups have organized and are ready for a second American Revolution. During an appearance on the Glen Beck radio show he promised that if things get any worse from his point of view he may “run for president of Texas.” The martial artist/actor/activist claims that Texas was never formally a part of the United States in the first place and that if rebellion is to come through secession Texas would lead the way.

Today in his syndicated column on WorldNetDaily Norris reiterates the point: “That need may be a reality sooner than we think. If not me, someone someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star state, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state.”

If Chuck’s not a citizen of the United States, by virtue of having been born in Texas, wouldn’t that give him something in common with Obama, who, as everyone knows, is actually a citizen of Kenya or Indonesia or Hawaii or someplace not American?

Also, he seems to be violating several of the tenets of Chun Kuk Do here, notably numbers 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9.

4. I will look for the good in all people and make them feel worthwhile.
5. If I have nothing good to say about a person, I will say nothing.
7. I will maintain an attitude of open-mindedness.
8. I will maintain respect for those in authority and demonstrate this respect at all times.
9. I will always remain loyal to God, my country, family and my friends.

He’s doing well, though, on number 10:

10. I will remain highly goal-oriented throughout my life because that positive attitude helps my family, my country and myself.

Philadelphia Daily News columnist Will Bunch apparently thinks Norris is a great source of intelligence and is taking this quite seriously:

[L]ess than two months into the Obama administration, right-wingers are stocking the basement pantry, piling up the shotguns and organizing “cells,” all with the help of a talk-show host who coincidentially became unhinged after he drove down the ratings at CNN Headline News, something that most people didn’t think was possible. There’s a lot to hash out in this country over the next few years but it’s becoming more and more clear who respects the Constitution, and who does not.

Or, maybe, this is just a frustrated martial artist and action movie star with some unusual thoughts running around his head?

Story via memeorandum.  Image:  PlatypusComix.

A shooting spree at a German high school has killed at least 10 people and wounded untold others.

This tragedy will come as a shock to most in the United States, as our media treat rampages by gunmen as a uniquely American phenomenon made possible only by our lax firearms laws.

AP’s timeline, though, reveals only nine incidents in thirteen years, including this morning’s — all tragic, of course, but hardly an epidemic. Of those three each were in Germany and the United States, two in Finland, and one in Scotland.

Two people were killed by gunplay at a California Toys R Us yesterday, joining the trampled Wal-Mart worker in New York.   Naturally, this is bringing out condemnations of America’s crazy appetite for stuff.

Mark Silva:

Lay a little blame at the feet of the government, for exhorting Americans to spend more money and shake off that recession gripping the nation. Lay some blame on the media, for stoking the hype surrounding one day of retailing which is, in fact, nothing more than the first of 28 shopping days left until Christmas, with cable news hawking footage of ravenous shoppers storming the doors of stores opening at 4 am.

And in Palm Desert, California, where police say an argument preceded the shooting at a Toys “R” Us, lay some blame on a gun-happy culture which encourages the resolution of simple domestic disputes with the pulling of a trigger.

Kathy Kattenburg:

But I’ve been thinking (being the analytical, rather than the pragmatic, sort) that there is deeper meaning behind this kind of unhinged response to coveted big-ticket “stuff” that normally costs thousands of dollars and for one day only can be had for only a few hundred. People have such a desperate need to have what everyone else has (or what they imagine everyone else has); that seems to be how we measure psychic belonging and emotional safety in our society.

Nor is it just the bleeding heart lefties.  The Anchoress:

Materialism CAN corrupt the soul, of course – as can capitalism untempered by compassion – but as I’ve matured, I’ve come to reject the easy and cynical course that finds “America” and its values to be at the core of every negative situation I encounter. Instead, I have decided to think of the aggression of the battling shoppers to be rooted in vulnerability. They’ve decided they want to purchase a particular item for someone they love. Perhaps this is how they express love. Perhaps they believe, subconsciously, that this is the only way they can be loved back. Perhaps this is a budgeted item and the only way they can afford to purchase it is at a heavily reduced price and – because they love – they’re willing to fight for it.

Looked at in this way, the “crassness” of all of this consumer excess seems less clear, and one finds oneself – as one does all too often, if one is paying attention – in the middle of yet another Holy Mystery. Love is the highest human aspiration, but when it lacks anchoring in something bigger than itself, it tends to drift a bit and take on some detritus (doubt, hurt, anger, self-hate) that gets into the workings and distorts the navigation, a little; in that case, suddenly love can lead us away from, and not toward, our best selves.

Ed Morrissey:

Hundreds of people trampled others to death so that they could get to cheap retail goods the fastest — presumably to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

At some point, that horrible irony should cause people to pause and think about what motivates them in this holiday season.  Everyone likes a good deal, but few of us would choose to die for one — and therefore we shouldn’t want to kill for one, either.  Retailers won’t like to hear this, but maybe we need to spend a little less and recover our humanity just a little more.

Or, maybe this was just a crowd that got out of hand?

The Toys “R” Us incident, apparently, was not a dispute over the last Tickle Me Elmo.  LAT:

The shooting occurred in a crowded toy store on the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, but authorities say it wasn’t related to the bargain-hunting frenzy. [...] Riverside County sheriff’s Sgt. Dennis Gutierrez said the fight was not over a toy and that handguns were found by the men’s bodies. He refused to say whether the shooting was gang-related.

That’s police-speak for “It was gang related.”

(Ironic aside:  Yesterday’s NYT featured a Stephen Roach op-ed hailing the end of the consumer-driven economy.)

Look, I like material possessions and bargains as much as the next guy.  We’ve got a big wall-hanging plasma HDTV, a Blu-Ray, a Wii, and various other goodies.  We shop online when we can to avoid the aggravation but we’re “members” at Costco and shop there with some frequency, putting up with the hordes in order to get good deals; indeed, we bought the TV there.  I tend to wait for sales to buy clothes and have been known to go to T.J. Maxx and outlet malls to look for good deals.

We avoid Black Friday shopping like the plague, though, unwilling to fight like animals to save a few bucks. I don’t understand the mentality of people who are willing to line up outside a Big Box Store at 4 a.m. in order to scramble over cut-price merchandise.  Even when I was young and thin of wallet, that just didn’t appeal to me.  Lots of people, though, find the experience thrilling.  Reasonably affluent people who could afford to pay the extra $19.99 for the item make a sport of shopping.

Retailers have clearly determined over the years that hype is a way of attracting customers.  Otherwise, why force people to get up at the crack of dawn to get good deals?  Why not just open the damn store at 9 a.m., like usual?

The problem with hype and frenzy, though, is that it sometimes gets out of control.  More people than expected show up, the crowds are too big, and the stocks are too low to accomodate them.  Madness ensues.  People hopped up on adrenaline do dumb things, especially in the anonymity of crowds.  Store management has a duty to be aware of this — that’s doubly so for giant enterprises like Wal-Mart, which have huge amounts of institutional experience to draw from — and take appropriate precautions.

I don’t let society totally off the hook, though.  The problem, however, isn’t so much eagerness to acquire crap at a good price as a solipsistic disregard for one’s fellow man.  Anyone who’s been in an airport, a movie theater, or a restaurant — much less driven their car — with any frequency knows that people can be incredibly rude without the lure of cheap crap.  Far too many people seemingly have no clue that there are other people in the world; certainly, they don’t care.   Unfortunately, a small number of such people can ruin the experience for everyone else.

The Mahdi Army might soon be the Iraqi equivalent of the Salvation Army, Gina Chon reports for the Wall Street Journal.

Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — long a thorn in the side of the U.S. military and Iraqi government — intends to disarm his once-dominant Mahdi Army militia and remake it as a social-services organization.

The transformation would represent a significant turnabout for a group that, as recently as earlier this year, was seen as one of the most destabilizing anti-American forces in Iraq. For much of the past several years, the Mahdi Army, headed by Mr. Sadr, a Shiite cleric, controlled sizable chunks of Baghdad and other cities. Its brand of pro-Shiite activism had the side effect of pitting Iraqis against each other, helping to stir worries of civil war.

Recently, however, the group has been hit by a largely successful Iraqi military crackdown against militia members operating as criminal gangs. At the same time, Mr. Sadr’s popular support is dwindling: Residents who once viewed the Mahdi Army as champions of the poor became alienated by what they saw as its thuggish behavior.

A new brochure, obtained by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by Mr. Sadr’s chief spokesman, Sheik Salah al-Obeidi, states that the Mahdi Army will now be guided by Shiite spirituality instead of anti-American militancy. The group will focus on education, religion and social justice, according to the brochure, which is aimed at Mr. Sadr’s followers. The brochure also states that it “is not allowed to use arms at all.”

This would be a wonderful development if true.  I fear, however, that this will be merely one arm of a larger organization, following a model successfully pioneered by the likes of Hamas.

Spencer Ackerman agrees. Noting that we’ve seen predictions of Sadr’s demise before, he writes, “An alternative explanation would hold that Sadr is making yet another of his endless tactical retrenchments and is embedding his movement ever deeper within the fiber of Shiite Iraqi society, establishing an alternative infrastructure to Maliki’s failed governance, and retaining his military option for future use.”

AllahPundit is skeptical too, asking, “[W]hat’s a jihadi to do when he can’t wage jihad? Simple. Wage inner jihad.”  He continues, “Sounds like they’re playing nice for now and rebuilding their popular/religious legitimacy while they build a Hezbollah off-premises, presumably for a surge of their own when conditions allow.”

Could well be.  Or, just perhaps, he’s decided that he doesn’t need violent means to achieve his political aims at this stage.  Maybe he figures he can run as a candidate in the next election — whenever it turns out to be — and win the thing.

And, as Ackerman notes, he wouldn’t have to give up anything. So long as he’s got followers, he can pull out the guns whenever he wants.

AP Photo/Alaa al-Marjani

Dick Heller, the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned Washington, D.C.’s 32-year-old ban on handguns and established that the 2nd Amendment provided an individual right to own guns, was denied a handgun permit by the District yesterday.

He was among the first in line Thursday morning to apply for a handgun permit. But when he tried to register his semi-automatic weapon, he says he was rejected. He says his gun has seven bullet clip. Heller says the City Council legislation allows weapons with fewer than eleven bullets in the clip. A spokesman for the DC Police says the gun was a bottom-loading weapon, and according to their interpretation, all bottom-loading guns are outlawed because they are grouped with machine guns.

Sheesh.  Glenn Reynolds writes, “It’s obviously a campaign of ‘massive resistance.’ Gun prohibition now, gun prohibition tomorrow, gun prohibition forever!” Don’t discount the possibility, however, that these people simply aren’t very bright.

Reynolds and Brannon P. Denning have an interesting colloquy on “Heller’s Future in the Lower Courts” in the Northwestern University Law Review.  The intro:

The Supreme Court has released its long-awaited opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, and the buzz has been considerable.  Though much has been made of the majority’s historic ruling and of the narrowness of that majority, many commentators have missed an important point.  What Heller is most notable for is its complete and unanimous rejection of the “collective rights” interpretation that for nearly seventy years held sway with pundits, academics, and—most significantly—lower courts.

The repudiation of this extensive body of case law  suggests that the real test of Heller will occur once the lower courts, traditionally hostile to an individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, face the inevitable follow-up cases challenging other restrictive gun laws.  Experience with other seemingly groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions in recent years, such as United States v. Lopez, suggests that lower-court foot-dragging may limit Heller’s reach, though this time around there will likely be considerably more scrutiny and more vigorous litigation efforts.

If the lower courts present a challenge to the implementation of Heller, they also provide litigants with an opportunity.  Given the fact that the Heller majority declined to give a detailed accounting of the proper standard of review to be used in subsequent Second Amendment cases, litigants have a rare opportunity to write on a tabula much more rasa than is ordinarily the case in constitutional litigation, making use of recent scholarship on the crafting of constitutional decision rules that implement constitutional provisions.

Arguably, it would have been preferable if the Supremes had simply spelled out their ruling a bit more clearly.  As Reynolds and Denning note in their conclusion, however, that’s rarely the case.

Photo credit: KEL-TEC

The District of Columbia has made it legal for residents to own a handgun after being so ordered by the United States Supreme Court.  But they’re not making it easy.

The plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that overturned Washington’s strict 32-year-old handgun ban was among the first to arrive as the city started registering firearms.  Dick Heller showed up early Thursday at the police department, but he’s still upset with the city even after winning his case.  He says its strict new rules for handguns still violate the spirit of the court’s ruling defending the constitutional right to bear arms.

They allow handguns to be kept in the home if they’re used only for self-defense and carry fewer than 12 rounds of ammunition.

Gun owners can only register one weapon in the first 90 days. Police say the permitting process could take weeks or months.

Months?  How so?  Well, there are some not-so-minor bureaucratic hurdles to clear.   There are no gun shops in the District and, as previously reported, zoning regulations preclude gun shops.  But there’s a workaround:  Residents can buy their guns in another state, so long as they have the proper DC paperwork and have the guns shipped to an authorized DC location.   Or, should I say, the authorized location:

Charles Sykes is that licensed dealer, and he’s told WTOP he’s willing to handle the transfer of handguns for residents, just has he has for security companies since 1994. “On a low key basis,” Sykes says. “By appointment.”

Inconvenient, no?  You don’t know the half of it.

But Sykes has a problem. He lost his lease and has had to relocate, and the District has refused to issue him the necessary permit to open his new office. Sykes told the Washington CityPaper he thinks the city is withholding his Certificate of Occupancy for “political” reasons. He may be right.

A spokesperson for the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, which issues the permit, could not say what the status of his application is, or why it was being withheld in time for this report.  Vince Gray (D-At-Large), chairman of the D.C. Council, says he wants to make it as hard as possible for gun stores to open. “First of all, I don’t want them anywhere,” Gray says, “but if we’re going to have them, we’ll look at things, like keeping them away from schools and churches.”

No worries, though:  They’ve made provisions for illegal guns, just not legal ones:

At 7 a.m. Thursday, the Metropolitan Police Department will open its doors at Headquarters and begin taking applications for permits. If you already own an illegal handgun, you’re in luck. Because of the 90 day amnesty program, you can bring your gun (unloaded and wrapped up) to the police and apply for a permit. If, like most people, you don’t have a gun, you can begin the permit process, but good luck getting a gun. Without a gun store, or someone to transfer the gun, it won’t happen legally.

So, what’s an honest citizen to do?  Go back to court, of course.  But not on the above issues, oddly.

Under terms of the emergency law, passed earlier this week by the D.C. Council, residents must obtain a city-issued handgun permit and may keep handguns only in their homes for self-defense purposes. The permits require every gun owner to pass a written test and vision exam, submit the weapons for ballistic testing and offer proof of residency.

The provisions still rank as some of the toughest in the nation. But perhaps the most controversial aspect of the law, gun rights advocates say, mandates that gun owners keep their weapons unloaded, disassembled or secured with trigger locks, unless they face a “threat of immediate harm.”

The National Rifle Association has signaled it also will challenge the new D.C. regulation, describing the law as extreme and in “complete defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision.” “The current D.C. proposal requires the complete cooperation of the criminal,” NRA spokesman Andrew Akulanandum. “It would require the criminal to call and tell you when they plan to come and attack you.”

Statehood now!

Photo:  Jason Reed, Reuters via USA Today.

Barack Obama has taken things off his campaign site that might be used by opponents to embarrass him, James Gordon Meek reports in the NY Daily News under the headline “Obama Purges Web Critique of Surge.”  Why, it’s our Outrage of the Day!

Barack Obama’s campaign scrubbed his presidential Web site over the weekend to remove criticism of the U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq, the Daily News has learned.

The presumed Democratic nominee replaced his Iraq issue Web page, which had described the surge as a “problem” that had barely reduced violence. “The surge is not working,” Obama’s old plan stated, citing a lack of Iraqi political cooperation but crediting Sunni sheiks – not U.S. military muscle – for quelling violence in Anbar Province.

The News reported Sunday that insurgent attacks have fallen to the fewest since March 2004.

Obama’s campaign posted a new Iraq plan Sunday night, which cites an “improved security situation” paid for with the blood of U.S. troops since the surge began in February 2007. It praises G.I.s’ “hard work, improved counterinsurgency tactics and enormous sacrifice.”

Campaign aide Wendy Morigi said Obama is “not softening his criticism of the surge. We regularly update the Web site to reflect changes in current events.”

I question the timing. It’s awfully convenient that the Daily News published something on Sunday and the Obama campaign just happened to take that into account in a speech he gave on Monday, let alone that he just so happened to put that speech up on his Iraq page over the weekend!

Jim Hoft has screen caps proving the perfidy.  He also gets in a perfectly clever CHANGE you can believe in… quip.

Ed Morrissey believes that “the Obama campaign has yet to acknowledge that the changes came from a strategy he opposed and that he predicted would fail. “   Obama’s Monday NYT op-ed, “My Plan for Iraq,” does that, though:

In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge,  our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.

But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true.

One can reasonably disagree with his plan; indeed, I do.  But he acknowledges the successes of the Surge while still arguing that it’s time to start drawing down our forces.

Scott Johnson says it’s 1984 and this is Obama’s version of the Ministry of Truth.  Matt Lewis thinks it’s “sinister” and “secretive.” But campaign websites are marketing vehicles, not permanent document repositories.  Nor do they operate on the ethical premises of the blogosphere, where purging old posts is considered unsporting.

Pamela Geller thinks that, “when he denies with a straight face that he’s changing anything, Obama gives new meaning to chutzpah.”  But he’s not changing anything!  He still supports withdrawal 16 months after he takes office, albeit with some caveats that he didn’t emphasize during the primaries.  And he says right there in the NYT op-ed — published yesterday — that he opposed the Surge.  If he’s trying to hide that fact, he’s going to need to be a mite more clever about it.

Dan Riehl gets to a much more productive debating point: “Obama claims to have judgment you can trust. I have to assume he’s talking to our enemies in the Middle-East given the judgment he displayed on the surge.”

More reactions at memeorandum: American Power, Blue Girl, Red State, www.redstate.com, American Spectator, JustOneMinute, Media Blog, The New Republic, TalkLeft, Marc Ambinder, Think Progress, The Swamp, Matthew Yglesias, The Strata-Sphere, democracyarsenal.org, Lawyers, Guns and Money, TPM Election Central, Behind the Numbers, Buck Naked Politics, Political Machine, Raw Story, On Deadline, American Power, Booman Tribune and The Fix

Matt Yglesias points out that, the Supreme Court’s historic ruling in Heller notwithstanding, DC residents still have no effective 2nd Amendment rights.

As Rob Goodspeed explains it’s all in the zoning. You can’t legally buy a gun in DC because there are no gun stores here. And to sell a gun to an out-of-state resident, a gun shop needs to actually ship the weapon to an in-state store that accepts responsibility for background checks, etc. And, again, there are no gun stores in DC. And there never will be gun stores in DC unless some part of the city is zoned so as to allow a gun store. And the city has no intention of doing any such thing.

I’m unable to load Goodspeed’s site at the moment but this is a very interesting point, indeed.

The Supreme Court has approved so-called “time, place, and manner” restrictions on various of the Bill of Rights.  For example, the state can require large groups wishing to assemble to obtain a permit to do so and can even restrict them to certain locations or otherwise take reasonable steps to minimize disruption of the rights of other citizens.

Certainly, though, a locality that effectively banned peacable assembly through zoning rules would find themselves sanctioned in court.  Can DC get away with simply declaring its entire area a “Second Amendment Free Zone”?

Newsweek has released a new poll and is excited by the huge change: “Glow Fading? The latest NEWSWEEK Poll shows Barack Obama leading John McCain by only 3 points. What a difference a few weeks can make.” This is quite amusing in that pretty much everyone agreed that the June 20th Newsweek poll was an outlier.

No matter. In a Newsweek Web Exclusive, Jonathan Darman explains,

Obama’s rapid drop comes at a strategically challenging moment for the Democratic candidate. Having vanquished Hillary Clinton in early June, Obama quickly went about repositioning himself for a general-election audience–an unpleasant task for any nominee emerging from the pander-heavy primary contests and particularly for a candidate who’d slogged through a vigorous primary challenge in most every contest from January until June. Obama’s reversal on FISA legislation, his support of faith-based initiatives and his decision to opt out of the campaign public-financing system left him open to charges he was a flip-flopper. In the new poll, 53 percent of voters (and 50 percent of former Hillary Clinton supporters) believe that Obama has changed his position on key issues in order to gain political advantage.

More seriously, some Obama supporters worry that the spectacle of their candidate eagerly embracing his old rival, Hillary Clinton, and traveling the country courting big donors at lavish fund-raisers, may have done lasting damage to his image as an arbiter of a new kind of politics. This is a major concern since Obama’s outsider credentials, have, in the past, played a large part in his appeal to moderate, swing voters. In the new poll, McCain leads Obama among independents 41 percent to 34 percent, with 25 percent favoring neither candidate. In June’s NEWSWEEK Poll, Obama bested McCain among independent voters, 48 percent to 36 percent.

He makes a nod toward reality with this:

Obama’s overall decline from the last NEWSWEEK Poll, published June 20, is hard to explain. Many critics questioned whether the Democrat’s advantage over McCain was actually as great as the poll suggested, even though a survey taken during a similar time frame by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg showed a similarly large margin. Princeton Survey Research Associates, which conducted the poll for NEWSWEEK, says some of the discrepancy between the two most recent polls may be explained by sampling error.

This is followed by a blithe return to pretending that both Newsweek (or is that NEWSWEEK?) polls are accurate and must reflect real movement. As OTB readers know, the previous poll showed an Obama advantage that was 14.5 percent higher than a RealClearPolitics average that included the outlier poll. How about now?

Well, surprise, surprise! It’s now perfectly in line with what the other polls — only 1.8 percent off the average but right in the flow of the other July polls.

Is the “glow” off of Obama? I’d love to see it. The data, unfortunately, don’t seem to support that conclusion. Here’s a graph of RCP’s McCain-Obama numbers since January:

McCain’s numbers are down slightly since Hillary Clinton’s concession while Obama’s are up a smidgen. (Note: The scale makes the variation look more substantial than it is.) McCain’s numbers have been as high as 47 and as low as 40 whereas Obama’s have fluctuated between 43 and 49. The gap between the two has never exceeded 4 points. So, we’ve got a very close race with very little movement that Obama has been leading, with brief exceptions, for months.

Beyond that, the usual caveats apply: We don’t elect presidents by national vote but state-by-state. We vote in November, not July. Registered voter polls such as Newsweek’s and CNN’s are less reliable than likely voter polls like Rasmussen’s. There’s a possibility that Obama’s numbers are somewhat inflated because people don’t like to admit that they don’t support the black candidate (although recent evidence for that phenomenon is scant).

Elsewhere:

• Ed Morrissey notes that the difference is likely that the previous poll grossly oversampled Democrats.

• Stacy McCain’s reaction mirrors mine: “The ‘rapid drop’ never happened, because Obama’s purported 15-point June lead never existed.”

• Digby believes Obama’s drop is real and offers this analysis:

Many people assumed those values were their own, and without a detailed analysis of his policies and his books, they were unlikely to think they were anything but orthodox liberal. This was, after all, a Democratic primary. So, when Obama did the predictable (although surprisingly clumsy) turn to the right and began to speak in somewhat unprogressive terms on things like the death penalty and faith based programs and FISA and abortion, they felt betrayed. The campaign had actually encouraged them not to know but rather to place their faith in Obama on a personal level.

I’ve been predicting that would happen for, oh, eighteen months now.  But I just don’t see any evidence for it.

Memeorandum has many more reactions: Chicago Tribune, Real Clear Politics,  NO QUARTER, American Power, Bucks Right, TalkLeft, Open Left, PoliGazette, Flopping Aces, THE GUN TOTING LIBERAL™, Wake up America, The Jed Report, Power Line, Hullabaloo, Eunomia, Lawyers, Guns and Money, TPM Election Central, THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS, Gateway Pundit, Hotline On Call, Comedy Central, MyDD, Newshoggers.com, Blue Girl, Red State, Taylor Marsh, Macsmind, TIME.com, and Donklephant

Apropos our value of foreign languages discussion earlier, Andrew Krepinevich, a highly regarded military analyst, says the Pentagon needs to commit far more resources to just that.

“If the experience of the last seventeen years tells us anything, it is that we are likely to continue to find our armed forces deployed… in operations among the indigenous populations, rather than around them,” he argues. “This in turn suggests that the military must be prepared to operate ‘among the people’ much more than in the past. Language training and cultural awareness will therefore be critical enabling capabilities.” In a stand-off war, you might be able to afford to understanding the enemy you’re bombing from on high. But when that enemy is mixed in with the people you’re trying to secure, you can’t afford to be monolingual and culturally deaf.

Therefore, Krepinvech suggests, we should reduce “the military’s continuing relatively high emphasis on conventional operations… in order to support language and cultural training, as well as other ’soft’ skills that are particularly useful in irregular warfare.”

I’m a much less renowned military analyst than Krepinevich and I’ve been saying this since 1992.

UPDATE:  Bernard Finel counters that maybe we’d be better off not engaging in the kind of conflicts that need these skill sets to begin with:

What we forgot since the Vietnam War was not so much how to wage counter-insurgency, but rather the tremendous costs and small benefits that accrue from engaging in these sorts of conflicts at all.

I fully agree. The problem, though, which I reconciled myself to in the 1990s, was that we’re going to do it anyway. Because we define our interests globally, we seemingly can’t not intervene in crises that either have a plausible security domino effect (Republicans, mostly) or offend our humanitarian sensibilities (Democrats, especially, but also neocons and “national greatness” Republicans).

Steve Tuttle takes to the pages of Newsweek to proclaim the ascendency of Appalachia as the decider of the next president.

“Hick.” “Hillbilly.” “Redneck.” “Inbred.” “Cracker.” “Ridge Runner.” I heard and self-effacingly used them all when I left the mountains of Appalachia to attend college in the great metropolis of Williamsburg, Va., in the ’80s. I was mercilessly ribbed as a rube when I brought along my sky-blue JCPenney suit—with reversible vest—and my stack of Willie and Waylon albums, and entered a world that was as foreign to me as I must have seemed to my fancy William & Mary roommates from the private schools. Imagine my surprise at their surprise when, thinking nothing of it, I casually mentioned that I missed my mom’s home-cooked squirrel.

Well, look who’s laughing now. In this strangest of political seasons, Appalachia, the last forgotten place in America, suddenly matters. Never mind Florida and Michigan. In a close election come November, the difference between President McCain and President Obama could come down to me and my people: a bunch of ornery, racist, coal-minin’, banjo-pickin’, Scots-Irish hillbillies clinging to our guns and religion on the side of some Godforsaken, moonshine-soaked ridge in West Virginia. The Democrats comically pandered to all these stereotypes during this spring’s primaries, when the 23 million people of Appalachia—that 1,000-mile mountainous stretch from southern New York to the middle of Alabama—briefly hijacked the presidential race. Scrounging for every last vote, the candidates went out of their way to look country. Hillary got all twangy. Barack tasted beer.

West Virginian Don Surber figures this is old news, noting that, “If Al Gore, boy genius, had taken Arkansas or Tennessee or West Virginia, Florida would not have mattered.”  Tennessean Glenn Reynolds adds, “Apparently, the vote for me, you ignorant rednecks approach isn’t working that well.”

Of course, as Clark Stooksbury points out, “I’m not sure how dumb hillbillies decided the 2000 race when every single state mattered–had George Bush lost one more state anywhere, he would not have been president. If you compare the 1996 and 2000 electoral maps, you see that Gore lost a lot of states, with more than 100 electoral votes, that Clinton carried in 1996.”

True that. A lot of states are likely to be in play this go-round.  All of them matter.  Indeed, for all we know, it could come down to Georgia and how many votes Bob Barr siphons off from John McCain.

Under the provocative headline “The Thugs Win the Case,” WaPo columnist Colbert King sniffs of the Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday in Heller,

There’s one group of District residents absolutely unfazed by today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling shooting down the District’s strict handgun ban: the dudes who have been blowing away their fellow citizens with abandon since the law was put on the books 32 years ago.

But, surely, these dudes were not in fact doing any such thing, what with it being illegal to have guns and all? Not to mention it being illegal to blow away one’s fellow citizens, which I understand was not affected by yesterday’s ruling?

Otherwise, it’s hard to see how yesterday’s ruling affected anyone but the targets of said thugs, law-abiding fellow citizens of the District who were unable to own handguns and had to keep rifles and shotguns in a state that rendered them completely useless if their homes were invaded.

Megan McArdle has some interesting thoughts on the Supreme Court’s decision today overturning DC’s handgun ban. As she readily admits, you can get better legal analysis elsewhere. This, however, is a unique contribution to the debate:

There is a distressing lack of attention to the female market in gun companies. I want something with accuracy and stopping power, but also, an attractive exterior casing that easily integrates with my other accessories. This doesn’t seem unreasonable.

If it works for shoes and handbags, why not guns?

It’s well documented that most men need just two guns, a handgun for protection and close combat, and a rifle or shotgun for longer range defense and hunting. A woman, though, would need one of every variety, including several black handguns that, to an untrained male eye, look exactly the same.

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has overturned the D.C. handgun ban, thwarting the democratic process.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the District of Columbia cannot ban a citizen from keeping a handgun at home, throwing out one of the nation’s strictest gun control laws.

The Supreme Court has overturned Washington, D.C.’s strict gun ban.The 5-4 decision marks first time the court has ever definitively addressed the issue, which had been one of the great unresolved constitutional questions as experts debated whether the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and carry a gun, or only a state’s right to arm a militia.

The opinion isn’t up on the Supreme Court’s website as of the time of this writing, but I’m sure that conservatives will be quick to excoriate the flagrant judicial activism of the court in this case, while liberals will be defending the Court for upholding an individual right enshrined in the constitution.

Right?

Update: SCOTUSBlog has the opinion here. I haven’t time to do much but skim the summary, but it seems on first glance to be a good decision. The most interesting thing to me so far is that the Court declined to overturn U.S. v. Miller.

Update (James Joyner): I had planned to write something similar when the decision came down, since this was the expected result. Snark aside, while I think this is exactly the right interpretation of the 2nd Amendment — one can’t imagine that the Framers, so soon after gaining their independence in a war initially fought by people supplying their own weapons from their private cache meant merely to protect state-owned arms — it’s not a “conservative” decision in two senses. First, stare decisis would seem to have indicated the contrary ruling. Most recent precedent has been in favor of states and municipalities restricting firearms; the 2nd Amendment had previously been construed very narrowly. Second, as Alex suggests, it overturns the will of the people of DC as expressed through their elected representatives.

Update (Alex Knapp): I’ve now read the entire decision, and I think it provides a fair reading of the Second Amendment. The way I understand it, though, it doesn’t appear that most gun control laws are going to be at risk as a consequence of this ruling–just particularly onerous ones or outright bans of commonly used guns. And, as Dodd points out below, this opinion does not overturn Miller because Scalia does not find Miller to be incompatible with the Second Amendment, which is the view of a number of legal scholars as well.

It’s also worth pointing out that James is absolutely correct that this isn’t a “conservative” opinion, because the democratic process was, in fact, thwarted. Which goes to show the value of a republic over a democracy. We’re supposed to be living in the former.