A few nights ago, well, maybe a few more than that, I turned the tv on to catch the 10 pm news - not that I like the local news station as their ‘reporters’ act like they’ve won emmy awards or even oscars - and I just love to see them screw up every 5 minutes or so and then I make fun of them (some things amuse me) - anyway..

The opening story was about this 23 year old man who had pimped this 17 year old girl out for sex.  (I thought geez what an asshole.)

The next scene was this fortish year old woman who was her mother (there was no mention of a father) who had no clue that her daughter even knew this 23 year old shithead, or that her daughter was engaging in doing the do.

The reporter then told us that this 23 year old had befriended this 17 year old, and without using drugs, coercion, threats, beatings, money, gifts, blackmail, etc. had convinced this girl to have sex with whomever might be able to pay the bill.   The reporter did not know any other details, such as was protection used, or what may have you.  The 23 year old is in custody.

His closing line hit me like a corkscrew going straight through my heart - this very pretty 17 year old girl had the mind of a 10 year old.

I  have no more words.

- A masked gunman enters an Indianapolis bank, jumps over the counter and shoots teller Katherin Shuffield, who was five months pregnant. She survives the wound to the abdomen. Her twin girls do not.

The suspected triggerman has been charged and faces four to 16 years in prison if convicted on two counts of killing a fetus — a penalty a prosecutor and some state lawmakers say is not enough.

“We’ve got two innocent babies whose lives were abruptly terminated, five months old, and all we can do is charge this individual with a C felony feticide for each life that was taken because of the way the law’s written,” Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi said after the June 20 arrest of Brian Kendrick. Kendrick also faces other charges in the April 22 shooting that carry longer sentences.

Some legislators agree with Brizzi that the possible prison sentence for killing a fetus is too short and are looking to change the law. It could make Indiana the newest battleground for the debate that has been waged in other states.

Conservative groups say such legislation is needed to protect human life and to recognize that a crime against a pregnant woman has more than one victim. But abortion rights activists say fetal homicide laws are often a backdoor way to determine that life legally begins at conception and can pit a mother’s rights against those of her unborn child.

In Indiana, the law allows prosecutors to file murder charges in cases where a fetus dies, but only if the mother is at least seven months pregnant.

“The expectation of a child is a remarkable feeling — to have that stolen from you is just tragic,” said state Sen. Jim Merritt, a Republican from Indianapolis who plans to sponsor a bill that would amend the murder statute to cover a fetus at any stage of development.

More than 35 states have fetal homicide laws, including 23 that define a fetus starting with conception or fertilization, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that focuses on abortion and reproductive health issues.

In Kansas, lawmakers changed the state’s law last year to allow prosecutors to charge an assailant with murder, manslaughter or battery for intentionally harming a fetus.

A leader in the fight was Terri Brooks, who was looking forward to becoming a first-time grandmother when her pregnant teenage daughter was murdered in 2006, just three weeks before she was expected to give birth.

Brooks went from picking out baby clothes to planning two funerals.

“It’s like your whole life as you expected it to be is now gone,” she said.

Merritt and other supporters hope to change the feticide law during next year’s legislative session.

“Any time someone commits a crime and an unborn child dies, that ought to be a separate crime,” said Eric Miller, founder of the Indiana-based conservative group Advance America. “The laws should be amended to begin at the time that life begins, at conception. It shouldn’t be tied to viability.”

Such laws are often approved after disturbing cases of violence against pregnant women.

Kansas lawmakers called their bill “Alexa’s Law” after the child 14-year-old Chelsea Ann Brooks was carrying. The law had strong backing from abortion opponents but specifically excluded abortion. Brooks said she was disappointed that much of the debate focused on the issue.

“This isn’t about abortion, this is about justice,” she said.

Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant when she was killed in 2002 in California. Two years later, President Bush cited the highly publicized case when he signed a federal law making it a separate crime to harm a fetus during an assault on the mother.

That law applies only when a federal crime is being committed against the mother. That could include a bank robbery, which would cover the Indianapolis case. Kendrick has not yet hired an attorney and was being held on $250,000 bond.

But that is just one case, and some say Indiana should change its law to cover others.

However, such laws meant to protect a fetus can be used to prosecute pregnant women, said Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

“What happens in legislation like this is that the pregnant woman is treated as collateral damage,” Paltrow said. “They create precedent through these laws that has all over the country been used not to protect pregnant women but to justify the arrest of pregnant women themselves.”

An Oklahoma City woman, for example, was sentenced last year to 15 years in prison for delivering a stillborn boy in 2004 after using methamphetamine during her pregnancy.

Theresa Lee Hernandez pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. She was originally charged with first-degree murder after her stillbirth at eight months. State law considers a fetus viable at 24 weeks.

Prosecutors said they were compelled to prosecute Hernandez because evidence showed she was responsible for the death of her child. But experts and public health groups said there is no medical evidence that meth use causes stillbirth. They argued that the prosecution will discourage pregnant women with drug-abuse problems from obtaining the care needed for themselves and their babies.

Indiana lawmakers may be able to avoid the controversy by simply expanding penalties for existing offenses. If feticide was a more serious class of felony, it could carry a prison sentence of 20 to 50 years.

“This is not a reproductive rights issue,” said Brizzi, the Marion County prosecutor. “This is protecting unborn children at conception.”

How can this be. There should be unity in all 50 states that if you kill a yet to be born child, regardless of the age of the fetus, you’re convicted of murder – no ifs ands or buts!

Enough sniping. Barack Obama should accept John McCain’s offer on town hall meetings.

“WE’VE HAD about as positive a presidential campaign that we’ve seen in maybe a generation,” Barack Obama told Fox Business Network yesterday. Perhaps, but that’s not saying much. The gravity of the issues — war and terrorism abroad, an economy struggling with soaring energy prices and mounting foreclosures at home — is belied by the triviality of the campaign debate. The political discourse is dominated by misleading sound bites and blistering e-mail accusations. Each campaign pounces on a misstep — or alleged misstep — by the other, or someone loosely associated with the other, and seeks to inflate it into the telling faux pas of the day, or at least the hour. In this, the campaigns are aided and abetted by a 24-7 news mentality that needs fresh, and easily digestible, material to keep the audience entertained without taxing its attention span.

This is not, as Mr. Obama’s comments suggest, a new development, yet the velocity, ferocity and constancy of the assaults have intensified in this cycle. The uproar over Obama vetter James A. Johnson gives way to the uproar over John McCain adviser Charles R. Black Jr. Neither faux scandal offers particular insight into how either candidate would handle the weighty issues facing the next president. Little matter. No shot remains untaken, no derogatory adjective goes unused. Why debate health-care policy when you can attack a surrogate? The theory seems to be that the victor is whichever campaign can yell “flip-flop” the loudest.

The sad part is that the country will be choosing between two presidential candidates who can do better — and who, as Post reporter Dan Balz correctly noted the other day, have said they want to run a different, more civil and more substantive campaign. Indeed, underneath the volleys of vicious triviality, the candidates are engaged in serious discussion, and serious disagreement, about important issues, from tax policy to treatment of detainees to health care. On energy, for instance, Mr. McCain wants to lift the ban on offshore drilling; Mr. Obama does not. Mr. McCain pushes for an expansion of nuclear power; Mr. Obama is more skeptical of nuclear energy and attacks Mr. McCain’s support for a storage facility at Yucca Mountain. Both men support a cap-and-trade regime to address climate change, but there are important differences between their approaches.

The sooner the sniping stops and the serious discussion starts, the better off the country will be — and the best way to achieve that would be for the candidates to meet, one-on-one, as often as possible. Mr. McCain’s proposal to hold weekly town hall meetings was — as the Obama campaign said — “appealing.” That was more than three weeks ago. Since then, the Obama campaign has countered with the offer of a single town hall meeting, on nobody-will-be-watching July 4, and a second debate on foreign policy — this in addition to the three traditional fall debates. Mr. Obama has written that “one of my favorite tasks of being a senator is hosting town hall meetings.” He launched his campaign decrying “the ease with which we’re distracted by the petty and trivial.” Now, he should seize the opportunity to practice the change he preaches.

I can’t believe that I’m having to post this piece, as you would think that the cast of Democrats, mainly liberal, and Republicans, as well as any learned journalist should know the definition of the term ‘windfall profits.’

So, for those of you who are ignorant, and I know that many of you just might be, here is what ‘windfall profits’ mean.

Profit that occurs unexpectedly as a consequence of some event not controlled by those who profit from it, in other words - an unexpected profit arising from causes not controlled by the recipient.

So, in regards to the oil companies, windfall profit would be described as - A profit that occurs through no action of a company but is produced by an external event.  For instance, oil companies reap windfall profits when oil prices rise due to a system-wide shortage.  Electric utilities and traders that have spare generating capacity to sell also may reap windfall profits if prices rise substantially because of higher-than-normal temperatures lead to a higher demand for air-conditioning, for example.

P.S. The big oil companies earn about 3-4% net profit on their oil sales. I dare you to tell me another retailer who could possibly stay in business at that rate of return on their investment.  Yes, I know that 3-4% of what the oil companies make is a huge number, but that’s before dividends are paid to share holders.

Liberals dismiss studies that show a link between abortion and breast cancer, claiming they are biased because the people promoting the studies are “anti-choice.”

For the same reason, no one should believe the Democrats’ “energy” policies.

Democrats couldn’t care less about high gas prices. The consistent policy of the Democratic Party, going back at least to Jimmy Carter, has been to jack up gas prices so we can all start pedaling around on tricycles.

Environmentalists are constantly clamoring for higher gas taxes as the cure-all to their insane global warming theory. Clinton proposed a 26-cent tax on gas. John Kerry said it should be 50 cents. Gore endorsed the Malthusian proposal of Paul and Anne Ehrlich in “The Population Explosion” that gas taxes be raised gradually to match prices in Europe and Japan.

The result is consumers now pay about 46 cents per gallon in gasoline taxes. That’s not including taxes paid directly to the government by the oil companies and passed onto consumers. As the inestimable economist John Lott has pointed out, in the past 25 years oil companies have paid more than three times in taxes what they have made in profits.

B. Hussein Obama’s response to soaring gas prices is to have the oil companies collect even more money from us at the pump, proposing a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies. “Corporate taxes” sound like taxes on rich people, but all they do is force corporations to collect taxes on behalf of the government.

Democrats have worked hard to ensure that Americans pay as much for gas as Europeans do. After a quarter-century of gas tax hikes, a ban on drilling for oil and a complete destruction of the nuclear power industry in America, I guess liberals can declare: Mission accomplished!

In response to skyrocketing gas prices, liberals say, practically in unison, “We can’t drill our way out of this crisis.”

What does that mean? This is like telling a starving man, “You can’t eat your way out of being hungry!” “You can’t water your way out of drought!” “You can’t sleep your way out of tiredness!” “You can’t drink yourself out of dehydration!”

Seriously, what does it mean? Finding more oil isn’t going to increase the supply of oil?

It is the typical Democratic strategy to babble meaningless slogans, as if they have a plan. Their plan is: the permanent twilight of the human race. It’s the only solution they can think of to deal with the beastly traffic on the LIE (Long Island Expressway).

How do liberals propose we acquire the energy required for the economic activity and production that results in light appearing when they flick a switch? The larger enterprise involved in producing that little miracle eludes them.

Liberals complain that — as B. Hussein Obama put it — there’s “no way that allowing offshore drilling would lower gas prices right now. At best you are looking at five years or more down the road.”

This is as opposed to airplanes that run on woodchips, which should be up and running any moment now.

Moreover, what was going on five years ago? Why didn’t anyone propose drilling back then?

Say, you know what we need? We need a class of people paid to anticipate national crises and plan solutions in advance. It would be such an important job, the taxpayers would pay them salaries so they wouldn’t have to worry about making a living and could just sit around anticipating crises.

If only we had had such a group — let’s call them “elected representatives” — they could have proposed drilling five years ago!

But of course we do pay people to anticipate national problems and propose solutions. Some of them — we’ll call them Republicans — did anticipate high gas prices and propose solutions.

Six long years ago President Bush had the foresight to demand that Congress allow drilling in a minuscule portion of the Alaska’s barren, uninhabitable Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). In 2002, Bush, Tom DeLay and the entire Republican Party were screaming from the rooftops: Drill! Drill! Drill!

We’d be gushing oil now — except the Democrats stopped us from drilling.

Drilling on only 0.01 percent of ANWR’s 19 million acres was projected to produce about 10 billion barrels of oil. From all domestic sources combined, we currently produce about 1.8 billion barrels of oil per year. To a layperson like myself, 10 billion barrels seems like a lot of oil.

The other party — plus John McCain — ferociously opposed drilling in ANWR, drilling offshore or drilling anyplace else. Instead of Drill! Drill! Drill!, their motto could be: Kill! Kill! Kill!

They refuse to believe our abortion studies? I refuse to believe they care about Americans having to pay high gas prices.

MUNICH - Visiting tourists can’t get enough of Adolf Hitler tours in Munich, the southern German city where the dictator nurtured his Nazi Party and, 10 years before he was elected German chancellor, mounted the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

The guided walking tours take visitors to city sites with Adolf Hitler significance which most Munich natives today are no longer aware of, such as the fact that Hitler gave his first public speech upstairs at the world-famous Hofbraeuhaus beer hall in 1918.

Close by, in the Schwabing district, is a pub, the Schellingsalon, where Hitler liked to drink and often did not pay the bill.

Though he was born in Braunau, Austria, Hitler made Munich his home in 1913, before World War I. The trail follows him from his beginnings and his rise to Fuehrer of the Third Reich.

Eric Loerke, 57, a U.S. national and longtime Munich resident, conducts the walks in English for a local guides firm, Munichwalktours, with a maximum of 25 paying visitors on each Third Reich Tour.

“We wanted to find out some more about Hitler,” said one holidaymaker, a lawyer from Dublin, Ireland.

She and her husband were on a weekend break in Munich. Others on the walk were a family with two teenage daughters from Alabama, several U.S. teenagers and three older women from Puerto Rico.

Bo Williams, 22, a Washington, D.C. history student, said, “It’s pretty interesting to see all the places where Hitler was.”

Most of the visitors have also visited the Dachau concentration camp memorial on the outskirts of Munich.

“After that, a lot of them are curious to know how Hitler came to power,”
Munichwalktours co-owner Ralph Lluenstroth said.

Wilma, 60, from Puerto Rico, said: “I’ve read so much about this, and I just could not comprehend how the Germans could follow a guy like that. After seeing the place, I can understand it better.”

Loerke, whose previous job was tending golf courses, has lived in Germany for more than 30 years and is able to explain the German mindset, as well as why modern Germans do not enjoy Hitler walking tours.

He starts the tour by holding up photos of Hitler as a baby and as a mediocre artist in 1913 drawing pictures for postcards. He describes Hitler’s enthusiasm for the operas of Richard Wagner.

The tour begins at the heart of the city, the Marienplatz, and continues to Koenigsplatz, site of the old Nazi Party headquarters and a rally site, taking in the Hofbraeuhaus, where Hitler honed his rhetoric and founded the Nazi party in 1920.

In 1923, Hitler gathered his supporters at a public meeting at another beer hall, the Buergerbraeukeller, and marched to the city’s landmark Feldherrnhalle, in an unsuccessful attempt to seize power, the Putsch.

That beer hall was torn down decades ago, but the tourists can see where the Nazi Party affixed a plaque on the Feldherrnhalle to commemorate the Nazi men killed when police put the coup down.

Older Munich residents remember when the plaque was there, because they were required to do a Heil Hitler salute when passing it.

Those who hated the Nazis preferred to pass the site by a back lane, Viscardi Gasse, nicknamed “Evaders’ Alley,” so that they would not have to salute.

The Nazi period rouses such agony among modern Germans that few would care to do a Nazi-sites walk as part of a happy holiday.

Loerke tells the visitors that he sees a certain ambivalence about how to deal with the Nazi past among the Germans.

They face up the past, but often only after long-running reluctance, he says, pointing to a program only begun in 2000 to compensate Europeans drafted by the Nazis into forced labor.

Inside a palace built for Hitler overlooking the Koenigsplatz, the tourists looked stunned at the imposing red-marble staircase.

The palace is one of the few Nazi-style buildings still standing in the city. It is now a college of music and theater.

A choral performance, sung by students born long after World War II, wafts out of a great hall in the palace as Loerke describes to the tourists the Nazi campaign to enslave Europe.

“Where is Germany today?” Loerke says. “The answer now is simple: it’s part of the European Union. But defining the answer back then cost millions of people’s lives.”

What exactly are we teaching in school nowadays – how to text message, play video games, make pregnancy pacts, smoke dope snort coke, lie, cheat and steal?

Malik Obama confirms his half-brother Barack grew up a Muslim

By Israel Insider staff  June 13, 2008

Apparently the Obamas of Kenya have been reading those scurrilous emails to which Barack likes to refer, because they have no doubt — contrary to the claims of the Obama campaign, that the presidential candidate was raised a Moslem. They take that as a given.

As the Jerusalem Post reports, “Barack Obama’s half brother Malik said Thursday that if elected his brother will be a good president for the Jewish people, despite his Muslim background. In an interview with Army Radio he expressed a special salutation from the Obamas of Kenya.”

The Obama brothers’ father, a senior economist for the Kenyan government who studied at Harvard University, died in car crash in 1982. He left six sons and a daughter. All of his children - except Malik — live in Britain or the United States. Malik and Barack met in 1985.

In a remarkable denial issued last November that still stands on the official campaign website, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs issued a statement explaining that “Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised as a Muslim, and is a committed Christian.”

Apparently Malik Obama, himself a Muslim, had not read the press release.

Melanie Phillips is the most recent commentator to draw attention to the massive body of evidence that leaves no doubt that Barak Hussein Obama was born a Muslim (Islam is patrilineal) and raised a Muslim (so registered in school, acknowledging attending Islamic classes, reported accompanying his step-father to the mosque, and able to recite the Koran in the original Arabic).

Reuven Koret, Aaron Klein and Daniel Pipes have previously pointed to the attempts by Obama and his campaign to conceal the candidate’s Muslim background. The well documented evidence draws upon the on-the-ground interviews by researchers in Indonesia and Kenya, published quotations of Obama’s childhood friends and his school records, as well as the candidate’s own autobiography.

It is not clear whether Barack Obama will now disown his half-brother Malik, or throw him under the campaign bus, for acknowledging that shared family background. In any case, some one should notify “Fight the Smear” tout de suite. Perhaps they can get him with the program.

Sorry, but this story is nonsense. And it does not do Mr. Obama’s opponents any credit to dwell on it.

After all, what is the point of the Israel Insider article? Its claim is taken from the Jerusalem Post’s very brief characterization of an interview, presented here in its entirety:

Malik Obama says his brother will be good president for the Jews

Jun. 12, 2008
JPost.com Staff, THE JERUSALEM POST

Barack Obama’s half brother Malik said Thursday that if elected his brother will be a good president for the Jewish people, despite his Muslim background.

In an interview with Army Radio he expressed a special salutation from the Obamas of Kenya.

That is it. And it is a mighty slim reed upon which to base such a breathless headline and article.

The interview has reportedly published in Hebrew, but so far no transcript has yet surfaced.

Meanwhile, elsewhere (here and here) Malik Obama’s remarks were reported without any mention of the “despite his Muslim background” codicil.

Lest we forget, it was S&L that first unearthed the photo that is featured in the Israel Insider piece. In fact, the photograph is from an October 26, 2004 Associated Press article.

In that very article this selfsame Malik Obama is reported as saying that, unlike the rest of the family, Barack is a Christian:

Their paternal grandfather, Onyango Hussein Obama, was one of the first Muslim converts in Nyangoma-Kogelo, Malik said. However, not all of his descendants are Muslim, Malik added. Barack is Christian.

Of course there is no doubt that Mr. Obama lived in a Muslim country, Indonesia, nor that he went to a madrassa — which is also the Arabic word for “school” — whether secular or otherwise.

Nor is there any doubt that as a boy he had to study the Koran. As the article notes, this fact is mentioned several times in his first autobiography, “Dreams From My Father” and elsewhere.

But none of this proves that Barack was actually raised as a Muslim or that he is not now a Christian. (Even though we have our own thoughts on Mr. Obama’s brand of Christianity.)

Moreover, as the aforementioned AP article notes, Malik Obama never met Barack Obama until 1985, so he himself would have no way of knowing how he was raised.

But articles like these, based on the flimsiest of premises are apparently becoming de rigeur on many websites. (Cf. Larry Sinclair, the spammed phony Obama book quotes, the “whitey” tape, the Obama’s birth certificate controversy…)

Dear Reader’s - what’s your take?

Here are some things we can look forward to learning about Barack Obama:

· That he was mentored in high school by a member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party.

· That he launched his Illinois state Senate campaign in the home of a terrorist and a killer.

· That while serving as a state senator, he was a member of a socialist front group.

· That his affiliations are so dodgy that he would have trouble getting a government security clearance.

· That there is reason to doubt his “loyalty to the United States.”

These and many other implausible accusations were offered by a group of conservatives yesterday — including a living relic from the House Committee on Un-American Activities — in a Capitol Hill basement. The charges ranged from the absurd to the merely questionable, but anybody who watched the Swift Boat campaign of 2004 make John Kerry look like a war criminal knows that’s not the point.

The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy took a blow with Hillary Clinton’s collapse. But it is regrouping, and finding plenty of sinister things to say about Obama — even if he didn’t trade cattle futures.

The group, assembled by something called America’s Survival Inc., gathered in the basement of Ebenezer Coffee House at Second and F streets NE. They shared the stage with a big drum set, and posters documenting items they would seek to tie to Obama: an SDS newsletter from 1969 (when he was 7), and a police killing from 1970 (when he was 8).

“We believe that any public figure with links to foreign and hostile interests should be asked to explain those associations,” the organizer, Cliff Kincaid, told about two dozen conservatives and a few reporters. “In the case of Obama, a relatively new figure on the national scene, we submit the facts suggest that he would have serious difficulty getting a security clearance in the United States government. An FBI background check was once used to examine one’s character, loyalty to the United States, and associations.”

“He’s a member of an organization [that is] openly a front for two socialist groups,” reported another participant, Trevor Loudon.

“Obama was raised and educated in a very Marxist-rich environment, which often would limit his worldview,” reported a third, Max Friedman.

But the star of the show was the ancient Herbert Romerstein, who once plied his trade for the Un-American Activities committee. “We decided to start going back and seeing what things influenced him even before he was born,” Romerstein announced without a trace of irony, before tying Obama to the Communist Party of the 1930s in Hawaii and Soviet spies on the island. “This is the atmosphere that young Barack Obama grew up in.”

The smoking gun? Obama’s “mentor” during his teens, according to Kincaid, was “a key member of a Soviet-controlled network that was sponsored by Moscow and active in Hawaii.”

These accusations fall somewhere between guilt by association and guilt by invention, but the accusers were just getting started.

In college, Obama “admits selecting Marxist professors among his friends and attending socialist conferences,” Kincaid went on. In Chicago, he said, “Obama launched his political career back in 1995 at the home of communist-terrorist Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn,” the two Weather Underground figures who have already made a cameo in the campaign. Kincaid then made the unilateral decision to accuse Dohrn of the 1970 killing of a policeman, a charge no prosecutor has made.

“The Weather Underground terrorists,” Romerstein added, “were instrumental in getting him to office in the first place.”

Those charges were relatively benign compared with the questions. One inquired about the link between “the American left and Islamofascists.” Another asked about nefarious influences on Michelle Obama. A third raised the possibility that Obama’s “change” slogan is based on the 1961 communist “Movement for Change.”

“It’s clear that the communists and the socialists are backing him,” Kincaid confirmed.

The questions continued: “The Obama-Muslim connection . . . the background of Michelle Obama . . . How he gave $23,000 to this church . . . Was it connected with Tony Rezko . . . the results from Gary, Indiana, which were so late in being released.”

It was beginning to sound like a UFO convention. But the panelists took it seriously, firing questions back at the audience. “Was Barack Obama working for Bill Ayers?” Kincaid wondered aloud. Romerstein demanded: “How come for 20 years he sat in the pews and listened to a raving anti-American racist? How did he bring his two young children to this church to hear Wright rave on?”

The evidence was compelling enough for participant Friedman. For him, the Rosetta Stone was Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who Friedman alleged was the protege of a man with “a Communist Party-front record” in Chicago. “The more I look at this, I’m seeing there are a lot of red-diaper babies around here,” he deduced. “By putting these pieces of the puzzle together, I’m beginning to see something much bigger.”

Every year, White House officials describe the US counterdrug policies in the same glowing terms used to describe the Emperor’s new clothes: We’re snuffing out coca crops and cracking down on those who grow them. But they leave out two important facts: More cocaine is coming out of South America than ever before and more young Americans are using than when the Bush administration took office.

Officials tell us they’ve made progress in eradicating tens of thousands of acres of coca by spraying chemical weed-killer from airplanes protected by heavily armed helicopter gunships.

They tell success stories about hundreds of tons of coca paste and cocaine they’ve seized on Colombian roads and on the high seas. They speak proudly of the coffee, beans, and vegetables harvested under Colombian and US alternative development projects.

But there are key facts missing in their description of the Emperor’s counterdrug-policy wardrobe. When Plan Colombia (the multibillion dollar US assistance program targeted at curbing drug smuggling and supporting Colombia against armed guerrillas) started, coca was cultivated in 12 of Colombia’s 34 provinces. Today it is grown in 23 of those provinces.

In 2006, after five years of Plan Colombia, four years of the regional Andean Counterdrug Initiative, and after spending $5.5 billion, some 1,000 metric tons of cocaine were produced between Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. That’s about the same amount that was produced in 2002 when President Álvaro Uribe took office.

The head of the White House Office of Narcotics and Drug Control Program, John Walters, admitted at a press conference in Haiti recently that last year that cocaine production had risen to 1,400 metric tons in 2007 – a whopping 40 percent hike. Not surprisingly, his staff is scrambling to rephrase that.

Washington is focusing on the most easily replaceable link of the cocaine production chain – the impoverished campesino – through aerial spraying and forced eradication. These poor farmers feel unfairly singled out, since too many at the top of the chain – drug traffickers and illegal armed combatants – survive or are quickly replaced by equally brutal traffickers. This administration’s policy of targeting the poorest is wrong.

Law enforcement and interdiction are essential to control drug trafficking, but not sufficient. A massive increase in rural development would provide a far better chance of reducing the drug supply flowing from the Andean ridge countries than eradication alone.

Colombia is faced with a continuing insurgency, which finances itself from drug revenues, and the Peruvian and Bolivian coca growers are among the continent’s most impoverished indigenous communities. That’s why it’s so important for Washington to support a massive increase in rural infrastructure investment, rural governance, and public service extension into those communities now.

Congress made a good start last year by voting to shift Plan Colombia funding away from military to economic development and rule of law.

Unfortunately, the administration opposed it. Now Congress needs to go one step further and push this administration, and the next one, to rethink a counterdrug policy that has not achieved its goals. Fundamental changes are needed in both supply and demand policies if there is going to be a decline in cocaine trafficking into the US.

In 2002, just under 9 percent of the US population from 12 to 25 years of age admitted to using cocaine the previous year. In 2006, the same percentage said they snorted cocaine. Since the population has grown, simple math shows that in absolute terms many more used cocaine.

A one-size-fits-all demand reduction policy essentially aims to put everyone who touches cocaine in jail – whether they are one-time or weekend users, addicts or traffickers.

Certainly for traffickers, the only option is more effective law enforcement that works closely with other nations to go after their money, their assets, and their structures.

For cocaine users, it is time to build on the best models of dealing with addicts through a public health lens, with hospitals, clinics, and treatment replacing jails. And a massive public service effort should be launched to target recreational users that equates cocaine use with drunken driving – unacceptable destructive behavior. Their weekend fun kills young people in Colombia and Los Angeles and Miami. It has to stop.

Producers and consumers in the Andes, the US, Europe, and the Southern Cone must come together and admit that the Emperor’s counterdrug wardrobe is threadbare. It needs new fabric and a new design – a top to bottom overhaul of counternarcotics thinking.

Maybe it was the proximity of Mount Rushmore and Deadwood, but something caused Hillary’s inner Eve Harrington to leap out in South Dakota.

Venturing into Daschle-Obama territory, she inadvertently and inelegantly illuminated her thinking on why she wants to keep running as long as she can: stuff happens.

In politics, there are many unpredictable and unsavory twists and turns. That’s why she’s hanging around, and that’s why she and Bill want to force Barack Obama to take her as his vice president, even if he doesn’t want her, even if Michelle can’t stand her, even if she has to stir the sexist pot, and even if she tarnishes his silvery change message.

In an interview with The Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, Hillary disagreed that she’s hurting party unity: “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

She was talking about the timeline for June, not wishing physical harm upon her rival. But many Democrats were upset. Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina called her words “beyond the pale.”

Maybe a tired, stressed Hillary was giving an unfiltered version of a blunt conversation that she’s had with her husband and advisers about staying in the race, using R.F.K. as an anything-can-happen example, in the same way she fantasizes about Sean Hannity breaking a story that would demolish Obama.

She’s made the tasteless assassination comment before, including in a March interview with Time.

But coming right after the anniversary of the King assassination, right before the anniversary of the Bobby Kennedy assassination, right in the midst of the wrenching news about Teddy Kennedy’s brain tumor, and right in the middle of Billary’s hostile takeover attempt on the vice president’s mansion, the image was jarring.

Senator Clinton apologized and, in a fairly inspired reach, suggested that it was the awful diagnosis for Teddy that had put the dark thought in her head.

Standing incongruously in front of the salad-dressing section of a Sunshine Foods, she said, “The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy” and pointed out that she holds Bobby Kennedy’s Senate seat.

Teddy Kennedy decided to endorse Obama in part because he was upset that Hillary sat silently when Francine Torge introduced the New York senator at a New Hampshire event saying: “Some people compare one of the other candidates to John F. Kennedy. But he was assassinated. And Lyndon Baines Johnson was the one who actually” signed the civil rights bill into law.

Hillary knows that in politics, bimbos erupt. Tapes leak. Husbands disappoint. Friends commit suicide. Rivals get sick. Her Senate race against Rudy Giuliani suddenly turned in her favor when he got prostate cancer and dropped out.

The macabre story of 2008 is that the vice presidential picks are important. On the Republican side, it’s because of John McCain’s age and history of skin cancer, and that’s openly discussed.

But on the Democratic side, it is, as The Times’s Obama reporter Jeff Zeleny has written, a “hushed worry.” Barack Obama has fused two of the most powerful narratives in American history — those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Camelot — and that makes him both magical and vulnerable.

He was only 6 years old in the spring of 1968, when Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. But the unspoken fear that he is in some danger as their spiritual heir hovers over his race. He got a Secret Service cordon last May, the earliest a candidate has ever been given it.

Alma Powell’s worries about assassination helped influence Colin Powell not to run. Michelle Obama expressed concern before her husband’s election to the Senate but said on “60 Minutes,” “I don’t lose sleep over it, because the realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station.”

Mike Huckabee had to apologize after making a joke at the National Rifle Association convention about a noise, saying it was Obama tripping off a chair when “somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.”

Obama now has the perfect excuse not to pick Hillary as his running mate. She has been too unseemly in her desire to be on the scene if he trips, or gets hit with a devastating story. She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.

That’s where the runners-up can be found, prettily lurking, in case it turns out the girl with the crown has some naked pictures in her past.