ISM Seats

FAQ's
Read a review at Slowtwitch.com
ISM Seats

On an annual basis, bicycle riding involves several hundred million people worldwide. Studies have linked perineal pressure caused by straddling traditional bicycle seats to numbness, urinary tract and yeast infections, prostate inflammation and impotence. For male riders, in addition to the discomfort and numbness associated with a traditional saddle, there is an increased susceptibility to restricted blood flow, which can lead to arterial occlusion and permanent erectile dysfunction. For women, the restricted blood flow and hardening of the genital arteries can lead to an inability to reach orgasm. It has been found that as little as 11% of a person’s body weight can compress the genital artery!

In November 2004, Steve Toll took the ISM™ to Germany, to be tested by Dr. Frank Sommer at the University of Cologne. Dr. Sommer is a noted expert in the area of arterial occlusion resulting from bicycle saddles.

While normal testing involves a 15-minute ride on a saddle, the test using the ISM™ was discontinued after 12 minutes. Why? Dr. Sommer commented, “It doesn’t get any better than this.” In fact, blood flow in the perineum area remained at 100% throughout the test with the ISM™, a mark rarely seen in bicycle saddle testing.

In addition, Dr. Sommer’s prior research has indicated that some saddles restrict blood flow in the perineum area by as much as 95% within the first minute of a ride. Other studies indicate that such restriction over a long period can result in permanent erectile damage.

The ISM™ is a first-of-its-kind seat. If a family is in your future, or you’re simply tired of the pain and discomfort associated with a traditional saddle, rest your bones on the ISM™. It’s medically better for you.

Feminist Army Aims at Palin

McCain's War Injuries Keep Him From Using Keyboard

Mocks McCain as computer illiterate...

Ad...

Rebuttal...

From the Boston Globe (March 4, 2000):

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain's severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain's encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He's an avid fan - Ted Williams is his hero - but he can't raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.

Ironically, it's from one of the most pro-Obama journalists out there, Jacob Weisberg, in an article in Slate in 2000:

"Six months ago, no one would have pegged McCain as the most cybersavvy of this year's crop of candidates. At 63, he is the oldest of the bunch and because of his war injuries, he is limited in his ability to wield a keyboard."

On the other hand: I don't know what to make of this interview with the New York Times. He sounds awfully web savvy in it,

Indictments Are Not The Best Revenge, By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ

I don't agree with a lot of the Bush administration's policies in the war on terror, and I plan to vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden in November. But during a recent campaign rally Mr. Biden gave a wrong-headed, if well-intentioned, answer when asked whether he would "pursue the violations that have been made against our Constitution by the present administration?" This is how he responded: "We will not be stopped from pursuing any criminal offense that's occurred."

David Klein

After praising Democratically controlled congressional committees for investigating these matters -- "collecting data, subpoenaing records . . . building a file" -- Mr. Biden continued: "If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued -- not out of vengeance, not out of retribution, [but] out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president -- no one is above the law."

Mr. Biden's comments echoed what Mr. Obama had said in April when he pledged that, if elected, he would have his attorney general investigate the actions of his predecessor to distinguish between possible "genuine crimes" and "really bad policies." Mr. Obama moderated his statement by stating that he would not want his first term "consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt," because his administration would have many other problems "we've got to solve."

No reasonable person can disagree with the important principle underlying these statements by the democratic nominees that "no one is above the law." But there is a countervailing principle at play here that is equally important -- namely that the results of an election should not determine who is to be prosecuted. These principles inevitably clash when the winners of a presidential election investigate and prosecute the losers, even if the winners honestly believe that the losers committed "genuine crimes" rather than having pursued merely "bad policies."

Under our particular system of government, it is nearly impossible for a winning administration to prosecute those it defeated without it being perceived, quite understandably, as "a partisan witch hunt." This is because the attorney general of the United States, the official who a President Obama would ask to review his predecessors' actions, plays two roles simultaneously -- that of political adviser to the president, and that of chief law enforcement officer of the United States.

In many other countries, these conflicting roles are performed by different officials. For example, in England, the minister of justice is a political adviser to the prime minister, but he plays no role in investigating and prosecuting crimes. That sensitive job is left to the director of public prosecution, who is nonpartisan. The same is true in Israel, where the minister of justice is a political adviser to the prime minister and the attorney general is the nonpartisan chief law enforcement official. (The attorney general of Israel will soon decide whether to prosecute Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on alleged corruption charges.)

It is because our system allocates these two incompatible roles to a single public official -- the attorney general -- that we have, in the past, seen the need to appoint "independent counsel" or "special prosecutors" to investigate political crimes. In England, Israel and other nations that divide these responsibilities, there is no need for these troublesome contrivances, because the normal prosecutors are already "independent" of partisan pressures.

We simply cannot trust a politically appointed and partisan attorney general of either party to investigate his political predecessors in a manner that is both fair in fact and in appearance. Nor would the appointment of "independent" or "special" counsel solve the structural problems inherent in our system. These ersatz functionaries bring problems of their own to the criminal justice process, as evidenced by the questionable investigations that targeted President Bill Clinton, vice presidential chief-of-staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby (full disclosure: I consulted with both of them, without fee, about their cases) and others over the past decades.

The real question is whether investigating one's political opponents poses too great a risk of criminalizing policy differences -- especially when these differences are highly emotional and contentious, as they are with regard to Iraq, terrorism and the like. The fear of being criminally prosecuted by one's political adversaries has a chilling effect on creative policy making and implementation.

Noam Chomsky -- the MIT professor of linguistics who has become a sort of guru to hard-left America bashers -- typically overstated his point when he asserted that "if the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every postwar American president would have been hanged." Among the crimes committed by American presidents, according to Mr. Chomsky, were the counterinsurgency campaign in Greece (Truman), the overthrow of the Guatemala's government (Eisenhower), the Bay of Pigs (Kennedy), the Vietnam War (Johnson), the invasion of Cambodia (Nixon), the attack against East Timor (Ford), the increase in Indonesian atrocities (Carter), support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon (Reagan) and on and on to the current administration.

For those hard-left Democrats who have been pressing their candidates for a promise to prosecute, the list of crimes allegedly committed by the Bush-Cheney administration grows longer and thinner every day.

A politically appointed prosecutor, imbued with partisan zeal, could find technical violations of the criminal law in some of the envelope-pushing policies of virtually every administration. One does not have to be as ruthless as Laventri Beria -- who infamously assured his boss Joseph Stalin "show me the man and I'll find you the crime" -- to come up with "a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation" (as Mr. Biden put it).

Even the most well-intentioned and honorable partisans may see "genuine crimes" on the part of their political adversaries, where a more objective prosecutor would see nothing more than "really bad policies." Most "political" crimes are matters of degree, hinging on "mens rea," the mental state of the alleged perpetrator. The criminal law is a blunderbuss, not a scalpel, and in the hands of a partisan prosecutor it is too blunt an instrument to distinguish "genuine crimes" from "really bad policies" on the part of defeated political enemies.

Our constitutional system of checks and balances provides numerous mechanisms for dealing with "really bad policies," even those that may be seen by some as bordering on criminal. Congress may investigate, expose and legislate, but it has no authority to prosecute. In extreme cases, impeachment is available. Prosecution should be reserved for the extremely rare situation where the criminal act and mens rea are so apparent to everyone that no reasonable person would suspect partisanship. The best remedy in other cases is to campaign against and defeat those who supported the bad policies.

That is among the important reasons why I will vote for the Obama-Biden ticket, and that is also why I will try to persuade them, if they win, not to conduct criminal investigations of their defeated opponents.

Mr. Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of "The Case Against Israel's Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace" out this month by Wiley.

Vote Republican If You Want Equal Pay

Divided Government Is Best for the Market

Pelosi's Gang Feels the Pressure

M.E. Cohen

If You Like Michigan's Economy, You'll Love Obama's

Miles to Go

Martin Kozlowski

Original Mavericks

Fresh blood for the vampire: the charismatic Sarah Palin, a powerful new feminist -- yes, feminist!

I must admit that McCain is currently eating Obama's lunch. McCain's weirdly disconnected persona (beady glowers flashing to frozen grins and back again) has started to look more testosterone-rich than Obama's easy, lanky, reflective candor. What in the world possessed the Obama campaign to let their guy wander like a dazed lamb into a snake pit of religious inquisition like Rick Warren's public forum last month at his Saddleback Church in California? That shambles of a performance -- where a surprisingly unprepared Obama met the inevitable question about abortion with shockingly curt glibness -- began his alarming slide.

As I said in my last column, I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama's efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development and which are painfully wrong for the target audience of rural working-class whites that he has been trying to reach. Obama on the road and even in major interviews has been droppin' his g's like there's no tomorrow. It's analogous to the way stodgy, portly Al Gore (evidently misadvised by the women in his family and their feminist pals) tried to zap himself up on the campaign trail into the happening buff dude that he was not. Both Gore and Obama would have been better advised to pursue a calm, steady, authoritative persona. Forget the jokes -- be boring! That, alas, is what reads as masculine in the U.S.

The over-the-top publicity stunt of a mega-stadium for Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention two weeks ago was a huge risk that worried me sick -- there were too many things that could go wrong, from bad weather to crowd control to technical glitches on the overblown set. But everything went swimmingly. Obama delivered the speech nearly flawlessly -- though I was shocked and disappointed by how little there was about foreign policy, a major area where wavering voters have grave doubts about him. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary event with an overlong but strangely contemplative and spiritually uplifting finale. The music, amid the needlessly extravagant fireworks, morphed into "Star Wars" -- a New Age hymn to cosmic reconciliation and peace.

After that extravaganza, marking the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s epochal civil rights speech on the Washington Mall, I felt calmly confident that the Obama campaign was going to roll like a gorgeous juggernaut right over the puny, fossilized McCain. The next morning, it was as if the election were already over. No need to fret about American politics anymore this year. I had already turned with relief to other matters.

Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy -- one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama's triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football -- or one of the great light-saber duels in "Star Wars." (Here are the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, going at it with Darth Maul in "The Phantom Menace.") This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

In the U.S., the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women by the unique peculiarity that our president must also serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. Women have risen to the top in other countries by securing the leadership of their parties and then being routinely promoted to prime minister when that party won at the polls. But a woman candidate for president of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. Our president also symbolically represents the entire history of the nation -- a half-mystical role often filled elsewhere by a revered if politically powerless monarch.

As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances. I have repeatedly said that the politician who came closest in my view to the persona of the first woman president was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton, with her schizophrenic alteration of personae, has never seemed presidential to me -- and certainly not in her bland and overpraised farewell speech at the Democratic convention (which skittered from slow, pompous condescension to trademark stridency to unseemly haste).

Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. The gun-toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did -- which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.

Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics -- which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama's campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don't see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.

One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil). Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington occupy their own mental zones -- nice to visit but not a place to stay if you value independent thought these days. Ambitious professionals in those cities, if they want to preserve their social networks, are very vulnerable to received opinion. At receptions and parties (which I hate), they're sitting ducks. They have to go along to get along -- poor dears!

It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin's boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit.

Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was an all-American version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother's generation -- agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.

Here's one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, "Stop her!" as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, "Men!"

Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

Here's another example of the physical fortitude and indomitable spirit that Palin as an Alaskan sportswoman seems to represent right now. Last year, Toronto's Globe and Mail reprinted this remarkable obituary from 1905:

Abigail Becker
Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830
A tall, handsome woman "who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all," she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper's cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont.

Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today's pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.

But what of Palin's pro-life stand? Creationism taught in schools? Book banning? Gay conversions? The Iraq war as God's plan? Zionism as a prelude to the apocalypse? We'll see how these big issues shake out. Right now, I don't believe much of what I read or hear about Palin in the media. To automatically assume that she is a religious fanatic who has embraced the most extreme ideas of her local church is exactly the kind of careless reasoning that has been unjustly applied to Barack Obama, whom the right wing is still trying to tar with the fulminating anti-American sermons of his longtime preacher, Jeremiah Wright.

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.

Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement -- leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas (admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women -- an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship.

On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?

What I am getting at here is that not until the Democratic Party stringently reexamines its own implicit assumptions and rhetorical formulas will it be able to deal effectively with the enduring and now escalating challenge from the pro-life right wing. Because pro-choice Democrats have been arguing from cold expedience, they have thus far been unable to make an effective ethical case for the right to abortion.

The gigantic, instantaneous coast-to-coast rage directed at Sarah Palin when she was identified as pro-life was, I submit, a psychological response by loyal liberals who on some level do not want to open themselves to deep questioning about abortion and its human consequences. I have written about the eerie silence that fell over campus audiences in the early 1990s when I raised this issue on my book tours. At such moments, everyone in the hall seemed to feel the uneasy conscience of feminism. Naomi Wolf later bravely tried to address this same subject but seems to have given up in the face of the resistance she encountered.

If Sarah Palin tries to intrude her conservative Christian values into secular government, then she must be opposed and stopped. But she has every right to express her views and to argue for society's acceptance of the high principle of the sanctity of human life. If McCain wins the White House and then drops dead, a President Palin would have the power to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court, but she could not control their rulings.

It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism -- one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.

But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.

Obama Can't Win Against Palin

Of all the advantages Gov. Sarah Palin has brought to the GOP ticket, the most important may be that she has gotten into Barack Obama's head. How else to explain Sen. Obama's decision to go one-on-one against "Sarah Barracuda," captain of the Wasilla High state basketball champs?

It's a matchup he'll lose. If Mr. Obama wants to win, he needs to remember he's running against John McCain for president, not Mrs. Palin for vice president.

Michael Dukakis spent the last months of the 1988 campaign calling his opponent's running mate, Dan Quayle, a risky choice and even ran a TV ad blasting Mr. Quayle. The Bush/Quayle ticket carried 40 states.

Adlai Stevenson spent the fall of 1952 bashing Dwight Eisenhower's running mate, Richard Nixon, calling him "the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, and then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation." The Republican ticket carried 39 of 48 states.

If Mr. Obama keeps attacking Mrs. Palin, he could suffer the fate of his Democratic predecessors. These assaults highlight his own tissue-thin résumé, waste precious time better spent reassuring voters he is up for the job, and diminish him -- not her.

Consider Mr. Obama's response to CNN's Anderson Cooper, who asked him about Republican claims that Mrs. Palin beats him on executive experience. Mr. Obama responded by comparing Wasilla's 50 city workers with his campaign's 2,500 employees and dismissed its budget of about $12 million a year by saying "we have a budget of about three times that just for the month." He claimed his campaign "made clear" his "ability to manage large systems and to execute."

Of course, this ignores the fact that Mrs. Palin is now governor. She manages an $11 billion operating budget, a $1.7 billion capital expenditure budget, and nearly 29,000 full- and part-time state employees. In two years as governor, she's vetoed over $499 million from Alaska's capital budget -- more money than Mr. Obama is likely to spend on his entire campaign.

And Mr. Obama is not running his campaign's day-to-day operation. His manager, David Plouffe, assisted by others, makes the decisions about the $335 million the campaign has spent. Even if Mr. Obama is his own campaign manager, does that qualify him for president?

A debate between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Palin over executive experience also isn't smart politics for Democrats. As Mr. Obama talks down Mrs. Palin's record, voters may start comparing backgrounds. He won't come off well.

Then there was Mr. Obama's blast Saturday about Mrs. Palin's record on earmarks. He went at her personally, saying, "you been taking all these earmarks when it is convenient and then suddenly you are the champion anti-earmark person."

It's true. Mrs. Palin did seek earmarks as Wasilla's mayor. But as governor, she ratcheted down the state's requests for federal dollars, telling the legislature last year Alaska "cannot and must not rely so heavily on federal government earmarks." Her budget chief directed state agencies to reduce earmark requests to only "the most compelling needs" with "a strong national purpose," explaining to reporters "we really want to skinny it down."

Mr. Obama has again started a debate he can't win. As senator, he has requested nearly $936 million in earmarks, ratcheting up his requests each year he's been in the Senate. If voters dislike earmarks -- and they do -- they may conclude Mrs. Palin cut them, while Mr. Obama grabs for more each year.

Mr. Obama may also pay a price for his "lipstick on a pig" comment. The last time the word "lipstick" showed up in this campaign was during Mrs. Palin's memorable ad-lib in her acceptance speech. Mr. Obama says he didn't mean to aim the comment at Mrs. Palin, but he deserves all the negative flashback he gets from the snarky aside.

Sen. Joe Biden has now joined the attack on Mrs. Palin, saying this week that her views on issues show she's "obviously a backwards step for women." This is a mistake. Mr. Obama is already finding it difficult to win over independent women and Hillary Clinton voters. If it looks like he's going out of his way to attack Mrs. Palin, these voters may conclude it's because he has a problem with strong women.

In Denver two weeks ago, Mr. Obama said, "If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from." That's what he's trying to do, only the object of his painting is Sarah Palin, not John McCain.

In Mrs. Palin, Mr. Obama faces a political phenomenon who has altered the election's dynamics. Americans have rarely seen someone who immediately connects with large numbers of voters at such a visceral level. Mrs. Palin may be the first vice presidential candidate since Lyndon B. Johnson to change an election's outcome. If Mr. Obama keeps attacking her, the odds of Gov. Palin becoming Vice President Palin increase significantly.

DAVID FRUM: The Democrats’ Credibility Gap

Bob Shrum tells us that John McCain and Sarah Palin are falling short in their populism. Nobody has deployed the rhetoric of populism more ferociously and more often than Bob Shrum, so his assessment carries weight.

Yet populism carries risks too—and the Democrats are now encountering them.

Democratic-leaning pollster Stan Greenberg has just published a fascinating memo detailing one of the most dangerous of those risks:

Democratic populism is destroying Democratic credibility on national security.

Let's go to the numbers.

Republicans have owned the national security issue since the late 1960s. After 9/11, the Republican advantage on poll questions spread to an astounding 30 points.

But since 2005, the Republican advantage has dwindled. By the fall of 2007, the two parties had reached near parity on the issue, only 3 points apart—the best Democratic result since Barry Goldwater led the Republican party!

That parity did not last. Over the past year, Republican standing on the issue has revived while Democratic credibility has tumbled. In Greenberg's latest polling, the Republicans now hold a 14-point lead, 49-35, a return to the kind of advantage they held in the 1980s.

What's going on?

Greenberg advances three reasons, but here is the most important and provocative:

When asked to choose why they think Democrats are weak on security, the number one reason—picked by 33% of all respondents—is that Democrats" change positions depending on public opinion."

“Moreover, when we ask respondents to compare the two parties, likely voters choose Democrats over Republicans as the party "too focused on public opinion" by a 27-point margin. Even Democratic base voters agree: liberal Democrats point to their own party as the one "too focused on public opinion" by an 18-point margin, and moderate/ conservative Democrats say this by 25 points.

In 2001-2002, Democrats chased public opinion in a hawkish direction. In 2004-2007, they chased public opinion in a dovish direction. In 2006, when the war seemed hopeless, that reversal paid off for Democrats. But as conditions have improved in Iraq, Republicans have been vindicated—and Democrats look weak and opportunistic.

Now when Bob Shrum talks of "populism," he has something very specific and highly ideological in mind. But most Americans—and most working politicians—use the word "populism" in a more general sense. They use it to mean, "doing what is popular."

You might think that doing what is popular is always good politics. That would seem true almost by definition!

And in the very short term, it has been true for Democrats.

But there is a longer term too. Voters remember. They compare results. They recall who stayed firm in the moment of decision and who flinched. And if the person who stood firm is also proven right—voters reward it.

Don't misunderstand. There are prizes for the vacillating and the time-serving. John Kerry is still senator from Massachusetts after all. But there is a price to be paid too for too obvious vote-catching—and on national security, the Democrats have already begun to pay it. Just how high that price will go, we must wait until November to know.

Pop! Why the Obama Bubble Has Collapsed

The Obama campaign seems to have experienced a "Minsky Moment." That, as any financial bubblologist worth his weight in tulips knows, is the particular point in time when no more "greater fools" can be found to support a bubble and a Great Deflation finally begins. Sssssss. (The financial phenomenon is named after economist Hyman Minksy.)

Now Obama's Minsky Moment is morphing into the McCain Moment. The evidence? Here goes: 1) The final 10 national polls in June had Barack Obama up by an average of 7 percentage points. The past eight polls this month have John McCain up by a bit more than 2 points, according to RealClearPolitics. 2) Right around the same time that Obama's polling lead was entering landslide territory in June, his odds of victory over at the Intrade betting markets were hovering at a sky-high 70 percent. Today, Obama's chances are right around 50-50 vs. McCain. 3) And now, according to a New York Times story yesterday, the deluge of donations has started drying up: "Pushing a fundraiser later this month, a finance staff member sent a sharply worded note last week to Illinois members of its national finance committee, calling their recent efforts 'extremely anemic.'"

Speculative bubbles have come in many different varieties: flowers, railway shares, Florida property, Beanie Babies, comic books, technology stocks, exurb McMansions. Does Candidate Obama qualify? Well, the candidate does sound a bit like a lot of the hot Internet companies back in the late 1990s. Not much of a track record. Lots of media hype. Parabolic ascent. And now a stomach-dropping decline.

Maybe that's all a bit too cynical. But take a look at the following description of a bubblicious scenario from the preface of the 1841 classic Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay. Tell me it doesn't sound like Peak Obamamania, from celebrity-packed, will.i.am YouTube videos to weak-kneed supporters at rallies (bold is mine):

In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.... Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Two events firm the Obama-tech stock analogy in my mind. First is Obama's selection of Joe Biden as his running mate. (This may have been the exact Minsky Moment for Obama.) The logic behind the move was that Mr. Change needed to be balanced by Mr. Experience. New Economy Obama acquires Old Economy Biden. It reminds one of the January 2000 purchase of Time Warner by AOL, a combination which turned out to be a synergistic dud. The amateur explainers at Wikipedia got this one spot-on: "The acquisition thus became a symbol of the dot-coms' challenge to "old economy" companies and the old economy's ultimate survival. The revolutionary optimism of the boom faded, and analysts once again recognized the relevance of traditional business thinking."

Has the "revolutionary optimism" of Obamamania faded? Let's turn to a second event. I was recently chatting with a top Obama adviser who was explaining in detail the campaign's ambitious 50-state strategy, how legions of Obamamaniacs were turning up in the reddest counties of the red states. If that was all true, I asked him, how come the polls were so close? If Obama was surging in places where John Kerry and Al Gore got clobbered, shouldn't the Democratic nominee be ahead by a country mile? The only answer I got was something about how the structure of the American electorate is historically biased against Democrats.

Huh? I felt like a Wall Street analyst during the tech boom sitting through a glitzy PowerPoint presentation—filled with buzzwords like "stickiness" and "eyeballs" and, of course, "sticky eyeballs"—who finally had the temerity to ask: "So if things are so great, why aren't you making any money?" It's like the old joke, "Sure, we lose money on each sale, but we make up for it on volume!" (The adviser finally admitted that Obama hadn't closed the deal on national security.)

Is Obama doomed to go from hero to zero, bubble to complete bust? I don't think so. Politicians, unlike stocks, don't go to zero—though Howard Dean did come awfully close in the 2004 Democratic primaries. Obama is still neck-and-neck with McCain. And just as investors slowly drifted back to the survivors of the tech wreck—Yahoo, Amazon, eBay—so might former Obama supporters who moved to "undecided" or to McCain. But just as burned investors wanted to see hard sales and earnings before they jumped back in, potential Obama returnees may want to know in greater detail what Obama is going to do about high gas prices, the housing bust, Afghanistan, and budget reform. I will add, however, that back in the spring, a top GOP political analyst told me that while Hillary Clinton was a candidate who, if nominated, would win or lose by a narrow margin, Obama could win or lose by 10.

Plus, the GOP may be experiencing its own bubble right now in the rising popularity of McCain running mate Sarah Palin. Maybe "Sarah America" is an example of what Mackay meant by "some new folly more captivating than the first." Maybe American politics has become like the economy, one bubble seemingly leading to another. Maybe. But by the time this latest bubble begins to leak, the election may already be over.

Obama's woes have nothing to do with 'lipstick'

For two years, Obama played the golf course of presidential politics with the ice-cold self-assuredness of a Tiger Woods. But since securing the Democratic nomination, he’s made a series of strategic errors that could jeopardize his chances in November.

After traveling with him on the trail, watching him in Denver and talking to Democratic operatives and insiders, here’s my list of his errant shots:

Declining to take federal financing for the general election
This mistake is two-pronged. Obama stands accused of flip-flopping on the matter, saying in 2007 that he’d accept those funds and the cash limits that come along with it. In relying solely on private money, Obama appears to have ceded some higher ground to McCain, who, with his public funding, appears slightly more immune to interest groups. On a more practical level, Obama will have to leave the campaign trail more often to headline fundraising events. He’ll likely spend more time than he should in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles and less than he needs in Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Detroit.

Declining McCain’s offer to hold ten town hall debates
When Obama was leading the race in leaps and bounds, he blew off this GOP proposal. Too bad. Had Obama locked in that deal, he would now be able to confront McCain face-to-face about some of the Republicans’ more aggressive – if not to say cynically manipulative – recent television advertising claims. An Obama-McCain series would also have drawn attention away from Gov. Palin, the autumn cover girl.

Failing to go all the way with the Clintons
Yes, I know, Bill and Hillary got prime speaking roles in Denver. And yes, I know, the Clintons are difficult to deal with and probably hope Obama fails. Still, it’s Obama’s task to latch on to them, even against their will. But he was too proud. Although he’s going to see the former president this week, Obama should have broken bread with Bill months ago. Obama needs the Clintons to defend and work for him. They are not eager to do so, but it was still Obama’s task to trap them into displays of political enthusiasm. It’s just my guess, but I think Mr. Clinton would have been open to the wooing – if for no other reason than to recapture his reputation as an avatar of the civil rights cause. Obama also neglected to court Clinton fundraisers and supporters in places like Los Angeles. All they want from Obama is a phone call. They would swoon.

The 22-state strategy
For months, the Obama campaign invested advertising time and organizing money in an impressive array of red states that haven’t been on the Democrats’ radar in recent elections. This made for great press clippings. But, for the most part, it was a waste of assets. Except for perhaps Virginia, most out-of-the-way states do not seem likely to end up in Obama’s fold. He’d be more successful focusing on traditional battlegrounds.

Failing to state a sweeping, but concrete, policy idea
It is not enough to be for change – everybody is, or is trying to be. To make it stick, Obama needed, and needs, to put forth an easy-to-grasp grand proposal, one that would encapsulate what his central message. That tagline? That he is dedicated, body and soul, to advancing the economic interests of hard-working, average Americans. He has the makings of such a proposal – his tax cuts for low and middle-income families. But he has yet to package that, or anything else, in an easy-to-grasp, hard-number plan for voters. Instead, he’s got more of a laundry list than an actual rallying cry.

Remaining trapped in professor-observer speak
When you listen to Obama, it sometimes feels like you’re hearing a smart but distant analysis of the political scene. He sounds like a writer or teacher, but not the leader of a political crusade. Obama has been far too “meta” – a detached commentator on his own situation and his own country. Voters want an action plan, not an exegesis.

Failing to attack McCain early
Obama was wary of attacking a man who had suffered so much during the Vietnam War – an understandable emotion. But that wariness, combined with Obama’s natural inclination to be seen as the nice guy (one who lets others do the knifing) lead to an unfortunate result. It gave two free months for McCain to build up a head of steam as a war hero, as opposed to what Obama needed to paint him as publically: a man beholden to corporate interests and a likely clone of George W. Bush.

Does all of this mean that Obama is somehow doomed? Of course not. He is a quick study and a fast learner, and the team of McCain and Palin is capable of making their own set of mistakes.

But if I were an Obama partisan I would be worried that his mistakes have a common thread - pride.

Obama seems to want to do things on his own, and on his own terms. It’s understandable. Obama has his own crowd – from Chicago, from Harvard, and from a new cadre of wealthy, Ivy-educated movers and shakers.

“He’s an arrogant S.O.B.,” one of the latter told me today. “He wants to do it his way, and his way alone.” But politics doesn’t work that way. And has Obama should know, or is about to find out, that everyone needs a little help.

An Apostle of Alaska

Very different visions: why the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are still worlds apart.

Straining to reach money goal, Obama presses donors

After months of record-breaking fund-raising, a new sense of urgency in Senator Barack Obama's fund-raising team is palpable as the full weight of the campaign's decision to bypass public financing for the general election is suddenly upon it.

Pushing a fund-raiser later this month, a finance staff member sent a sharply worded note last week to Illinois members of its national finance committee, calling their recent efforts "extremely anemic."

...But the campaign is struggling to meet ambitious fund-raising goals it set for the campaign and the party. It collected in June and July far less from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's donors than originally projected. Moreover, McCain, unlike Obama, will have the luxury of concentrating almost entirely on campaigning instead of raising money, as Obama must do.

Anchormen: The legends of Annapolis.

Palin covers