"Hillary has a strange, unnerving effect on Obama, and whenever he is around her, he’s unable to do his best. Probably, it’s because she’s furious, always shaking his hand off her arm, ignoring him, giving him the evil eye and emasculating him, and the Golden One is not used to such rough treatment.

...

Obama will never be at his best around Hillary; she drains him of his magical powers. She’s Jane Jinx to him. It’s a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn’s star athlete and her supercilious fianc? have in 'Pat and Mike.”

"Ending the tax subsidy should be easy. Ending the mandate will be tougher, though some members of Congress are showing buyer’s remorse. One reason is the worldwide spike in food prices. That has been driven largely by a huge increase in demand and rising energy costs. The diversion of American corn from food to fuel — about one-fourth of the crop — has not helped."

Life is lovely here outside L.A., but one of the downsides (aside from the fact that it takes an hour to get across town to a TV studio!) is that too often, you miss wonderful occasions like the 20th anniversary celebration for Elayne Bennett's Best Friends Foundation.

Luckily, the Corner's Kathryn Jean Lopez has covered it here.

The success of Best Friends has played a significant role in proving that young people thrive when they are offered "abstinence education" that is at once deeper and more transcendant than "don't do it or you'll get pregnant or contract an STD."  When sex education becomes about something more than putting condoms on bananas -- and treated as a part of overall character education -- the results are amazing.

President and founder Elayne Bennett's motto for the Best Friends Foundation is: We must offer our children our best.  If we do, they will surely respond with their best.

She is so right.  We get what we expect from our children. 

God bless Elayne Bennett for her hard work and high expectations.  They have made a great difference in the lives of so many.

One of Barack Obama’s Middle East policy advisers disclosed yesterday that he had held meetings with the militant Palestinian group Hamas – prompting the likely Democratic nominee to sever all links with him. Robert Malley told The Times that he had been in regular contact with Hamas, which controls Gaza and is listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organisation.

Michael Barone has a column out on Douglas Feith's War and Decision in which Barone makes the important point that we are just now beginning to understand the decisions that followed 9/11 and led to the successes and the setbacks since, and that Feith's book is an important insider account of those years.

I will be visiting the Hoover Institution as a Media Fellow next week, and am watching Peter Robinson's magnificent interview with Thomas Wolfe as prep.  I will dragoon Peter to co-host as much of the show as he can be persuaded to do next week.  Howard Mortman and Victor Davis Hanson will also be about, so a fine week of broadcasts ahead.

It will be the week of decision on the polar bear listing, one of those controversies of which the MSM is barely aware but which has far reaching consequences for American industry and economic growth.  Like the civil war raging in Lebanon (Michael Totten has the best coverage of course) or the heparin not-quite-effective-recall or the Rezko trial, the MSM doesn't understand the many moving parts of a complicated story like the push to list the polar bear as threatened, and is staffed by folks of truncated curiosity which combines with contempt for their audience to produce hours and hours of nonsense.  FNC works to bring panels of smart people of differing opinions together to discuss complicated subjects for decent stretches of time, as does CNN occasionally, but generally it is a wasteland on cable and worse on the big 3.  Talk radio and C-SPAN are pretty much alone in allowing someone like Jindal to appear and discuss many subjects for a half hour or more, which is why radio is the most powerful form of serious media left. (C-SPAN doesn't make much of an effort to add pacing, but it is still valuable beyond belief, as when it airs the full Michelle Obama speech.)

How can the world's most advanced economy blessed with an explosion of technology produce such genuinely mediocre broadcast news day after day?

Why doesn't Peter Robinson's interview with Tom Wolfe air on some channel?  Why isn't there a fast-paced but comprehensive program covering the polar bear debate, or featuring Totten or Michael Yon explaining what they saw going on in Lebanon or Iraq?

The answer of course is that broadcast execs don't believe such programming is possible or that it would bring them ratings (and that PBS is so institutionally left-wing as to have no clue about building an audience of other than Bill Moyers groupies.)

Oh, and here's the first online anti-Obama superstore.