Blue Crab Boulevard

One hundred grand here, one million there, pretty soon you're talking real wasted money. The New York Times hits again at a recurring theme: just how much money Hillary Clinton can waste on a campaign.

Nearly $100,000 went for party platters and groceries before the Iowa caucuses, even though the partying mood evaporated quickly. Rooms at the Bellagio luxury hotel in Las Vegas consumed more than $25,000; the Four Seasons, another $5,000. And top consultants collected about $5 million in January, a month of crucial expenses and tough fund-raising.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s latest campaign finance report, published Wednesday night, appeared even to her most stalwart supporters and donors to be a road map of her political and management failings. Several of them, echoing political analysts, expressed concerns that Mrs. Clinton’s spending priorities amounted to costly errors in judgment that have hamstrung her competitiveness against Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

“We didn’t raise all of this money to keep paying consultants who have pursued basically the wrong strategy for a year now,” said a prominent New York donor. “So much about her campaign needs to change — but it may be too late.”

The high-priced senior consultants to Mrs. Clinton, of New York, have emerged as particular targets of complaints, given that they conceived and executed a political strategy that has thus far proved unsuccessful.

The firm that includes Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, and his team collected $3.8 million for fees and expenses in January; in total, including what the campaign still owes, the firm has billed more than $10 million for consulting, direct mail and other services, an amount other Democratic strategists who are not affiliated with either campaign called stunning.

Her last Senate campaign managed to burn more than $30 million on a virtually uncontested race. Her donors are apparently beginning to realize that she may have spent their money for nothing at all. Spent it rather lavishly, in fact. 

The paddlewheel steamboat Delta Queen is about to be scuttled, in a figurative sense, by government regulations and a Democratic party chairman of a House committee. The Delta Queen is the last operational steamboat with a wooden superstructure. It has been exempted by act of Congress from regulations banning wooden superstructures for some 42 years - but  the chairman of the House Committee on Transportation, Rep. James Oberstar Democrat from Minnesota, has blocked every attempt at renewing the exemption. 

The effort to save the Delta Queen steamboat is getting a boost from Congressman Steve Chabot of Ohio, who plans some legislative hijinks next week on the boat's behalf.

Chabot plans to introduce a "Save the Delta Queen" amendment to a Coast Guard Reauthorization Bill coming to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The amendment will call for the continuation of the historic steamboat's long-standing exemption from fire safety rules. The exemption expires in November, and without it, the boat will have to stop sailing.

Congress has granted the Delta Queen an exemption from the 42-year-old safety rules nine times in the past, nearly always by close-to-unanimous margins. But the chairman of the House Committee on Transportation, Rep. James Oberstar of Minnesota, has been blocking a further exemption, calling the boat a fire hazard.

Built in 1926, the 174-passenger Delta Queen is the last operational river steam paddlewheeler with overnight accommodations in the United States, and it has a strong following among riverboat lovers. The four-deck, white-washed confection, which resembles a giant wedding cake, harkens back to a bygone era with its stately wooden cabins; cozy, hardwood-paneled public rooms; and rare Siamese ironwood floors. But it is precisely these historic charms that are causing the downfall of the paddlewheeler, since they do not meet modern fire safety standards that forbid wooden superstructures on boats that carry more than 50 passengers on overnight trips.

Last October, Congressman Chabot introduced a stand-alone bill, H.R. 3852, that would extend the Delta Queen's exemption from the fire safety rules until 2018. But that bill remains stuck in the House Committee on Transportation because Oberstar refuses to release it for a vote by the full House.

Some years ago, before my wife's father died, we sent my in-laws on a cruise on the Delta Queen. I just went and looked at the copy of their boarding photo that they sent us after the trip. I can almost hear Jack's voice raving about the fabulous time they had on the cruise as I write this. It was not all that long after the trip that fulfilled a lifelong dream for him that he died.

I'm glad we sent them. And sorry that others will not be able to do the same unless something changes. 

A third round of sanctions on Iran and its nuclear program - mostly very watered down and probably of no real value - appears to be heading for approval by the UN Security Council.

UNITED NATIONS - Britain and France formally introduced a Security Council resolution Thursday calling for a third round of sanctions against Iran over its failure to suspend uranium enrichment.

The United States pushed hardest for the sanctions, but China and Russia, as the remaining permanent members of the 15-nation council — along with Germany have been in general agreement on them.

The six nations circulated a draft earlier calling for bans on travel and equipment that can be used in civilian and nuclear programs, more monitoring of Iran's financial institutions and inspection of air and sea cargo heading to or from Iran.

Iran says it will only deal with the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, which found last November that Tehran was generally truthful about aspects of its nuclear history. But the new resolution, elaborating on the earlier draft, encourages European Union to continue working with Iran on finding "a negotiated solution … with a view to create necessary conditions for resuming talks" on its nuclear program.

The latest revision also makes some minor changes. "The text that we've circulated today reflects some of the comments we've had back from delegations," said John Sawers, Britain's U.N. ambassador. "This is as part of our twin-track approach of requiring Iran to suspend their most sensitive nuclear activities, and to abide by the requests of the IAEA for full transparency."

In other words, not really much of a burden on Iran - or likely no real impact at all. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been escalating his rhetoric against Israel - yet again. This time the diminutive (and reportedly hygienically challenged) president of Iran has called Israel "filthy bacteria."

"The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast," the Iranian president told supporters at a rally in southern Iran.

"[Israel] won support [from the other nations] which created it as a scarecrow, so as to keep the people of this area under control," Ahmadinejad said.

Referring to the assassination of Hizbullah terror chief Imad Mughniyeh, the Iranian leader said that Israel "uses terror as a threat every day, and afterwards is happy and joyful." 

Yeah, there's a guy you want with nuclear weapons.  

Victor Davis Hanson on the weirdly deformed populism being preached by both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Calling it reminiscent of John Edwards campaign rhetoric, he points out the absurdity of that rhetoric - and the completely misguided assumptions that guide that talk.

The rhetoric of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton about the sad state of America is reminiscent of the suspect populism of John Edwards, the millionaire lawyer who recently dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.

Barack Obama may have gone to exclusive private schools. He and his wife may both be lawyers who between them have earned four expensive Ivy League degrees. They may make about a million dollars a year, live in an expensive home and send their kids to prep school. But they are still apparently first-hand witnesses to how the American dream has gone sour. Two other Ivy League lawyers, Hillary and Bill, are multimillionaires who have found America to be a land of riches beyond most people's imaginations. But Hillary also talks of the tragic lost dream of America.

In these gloom-and-doom narratives by the well off, we less fortunate Americans are doing almost everything right, but still are not living as well as we deserve to be. And the common culprit is a government that is not doing enough good for us, and corporations that do too much bad to us.

In the new pessimistic indictment, the home mortgage meltdown has not occurred because too many speculative buyers were hoping to flip houses for quick profits. It had nothing to do with misguided attempts of government and lending institutions to put first-time buyers in homes through zero-down payments, interest-only loans, and subprime but adjustable mortgage rates - as part of liberal efforts to increase home ownership rates.

And there apparently are few Americans who unwisely borrowed against their homes a second and third time to remodel or purchase big-ticket consumer items - on the belief that their equity would always be rising faster than their debts. Nor are we to look at this downturn as part of a historical boom-and-bust cycle in the housing industry - the present low prices and non-performing loans the natural counter-response to the overpriced real estate of the last five years.

There is quite a lot more. There is something a bit crazy about the extremely well-off slamming the system they were able to work quite successfully to get ahead. In a way it is climbing to a high spot then pulling the ladder up behind you. You cannot tax your way to prosperity any more than you can drink yourself into sobriety. Yet that is precisely what is being offered by the preppy populists. They are proposing bigger, more lavish government spending when we are already running a deficit. 

I'm not in favor of the already high spending levels and sure don't want even more government intervention in everyday life.  

Senior members of the John McCain campaign have openly declared that they are going to war with the New York Times over the paper's smear story about McCain. 

The McCain campaign is using a two-pronged attack to push back against the story. First, they’ll argue it was a thinly sourced piece of innuendo journalism. But McCain aides will also strike at the source, using the Times’ liberal reputation as a means of self-defense to draw sympathy from the GOP’s conservative base.

To this end, a top McCain adviser accused the paper of practicing tabloid journalism.

“It’s not every night I stay up to read the National Enquirer,” said Charlie Black, who was with other top McCain aides at the senator’s Arlington, Va., headquarters to mount the counterattack.

Black noted he had taken heat from some of his “conservative friends’ after McCain won the paper’s endorsement in January. “We’re going to go to war with them now,” Black said. “We’ll see if that hurts or helps.”

As part of their pushback, McCain’s campaign issued the detailed response they sent to the paper in December when the story was being prepared. McCain campaign officials said the paper did not sufficiently include these explanations in their story.

The publication of the Times story has pushed the issue into the media today and many other media outlets are reporting the innuendo that was layered into that hit piece. But McCain's spokesmen are pounding right back on the morning news shows. They are hitting very hard, too. Oddly enough, this incident is quite likely to get many conservatives to rally around McCain. In that respect, the story is a massive backfire.

When George Will hears Hillary Clinton using that word - "Fair" - he believes it is a bit obscene. 

Judging from complaints by her minions, Hillary Clinton considers it unfair that Barack Obama has been wafted close to the pinnacle of politics by an updraft from the continent-wide swoon of millions of Democrats and much of the media brought on by his Delphic utterances such as "we are the change." But disquisitions on fairness are unpersuasive coming from someone from Illinois or Arkansas whose marriage enabled her to treat New York as her home and the Senate as an entry-level electoral office (only 12 of today's senators have been elected to no other office) and a steppingstone to the presidency.

The four-letter F-word that is central to Democrats' rhetoric and to discord everywhere — "fair" — is being bandied about. Clinton would be ahead in the delegate count if Obama had not won about twice as many delegates as she in caucuses, so Clinton implies that it is not quite fair to consider delegates accumulated in caucuses as significant as those won in primaries. Obama says it would not be fair for "superdelegates," or delegates chosen by Michigan's and Florida's renegade primaries, to decide the nomination.

Clinton has a small piece of a point but misses the important point. Caucuses are, indeed, less purely "democratic" than primaries. That is their virtue. They are inconvenient, requiring commitments of time and energy that are more apt to be made by especially interested voters. Thus caucuses filter out, disproportionately, the lightly committed and least informed, which is not cause for dismay.  

Sure, the caucus format is not all that democratic, as I have written before. That does not mean it is a bad thing. All politicians are prone to defining "fair" as what is best for them personally. Clinton is just being more blatant about it. She's trying to change the rules in the middle of the game regarding Florida and Michigan delegates and is counting on securing the votes of superdelegates to win. That isn't exactly "fair" by any reasonable standard.

Stupid, but interesting. Hillary Clinton apparently believes that insulting voters who have chosen to back Barack Obama as unrealistic is a winning strategy. She said it was time for Democrats to "get real" in picking their candidate.

NEW YORK, Feb. 20 — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton launched a tough new offensive against Sen. Barack Obama on Wednesday, asserting flatly that her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination is not prepared to serve as commander in chief.

"It is time to get real — to get real about how we actually win this election, and get real about the challenges facing America," the senator from New York told a cheering crowd at Hunter College in Manhattan.

Resounding Obama victories on Tuesday in Wisconsin and Hawaii pushed the senator from Illinois further ahead in the delegate count and have turned the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4 into do-or-die battles for Clinton. After 10 straight defeats, she now trails Obama in overall delegates 1,351 to 1,262, according to an Associated Press tally, and faces a dwindling number of opportunities to slow her rival's pursuit of the 2,025 delegates needed to claim the party's nomination. The first chance will come Thursday night in Austin, where the two will debate.

Clinton's 17-percentage-point loss in Wisconsin was especially crushing, a sign that her criticisms of Obama — which were most intense during the Badger State showdown — did little to sway voters to her camp.

But instead of shifting course, Clinton redoubled her attempt to undermine his change-oriented message. "One of us is ready to be commander in chief," she told the crowd in New York. "Let's get real. Let's get real about this election, let's get real about our future, let's get real about what it is we can do together." Obama has had a "good couple of weeks," she allowed, but said his victories had come in states that he was expected to win. Clinton predicted that when voters in Ohio and Texas have the opportunity to take his measure, his run of success will end.

Obama waved off Clinton's latest broadside, declaring before a crowd of 17,000 gathered in Dallas on Wednesday afternoon: "Today, Senator Clinton told us there is a choice in this race, and I couldn't agree with her more. But contrary to what she was saying, it's not a choice between speeches and solutions. It's a choice between the politics of divisions and distractions that did not work in South Carolina, that did not work in Wisconsin and that will not work in Texas."

I have long said that Hillary Clinton has a tin ear and simply does not understand how her words will sound to voters. I think that is on display here. Insulting a huge chunk of the Democratic base is not going to unify the party. If she manages to pull out of the tailspin she is in and win the nomination, she would go into the general election with a serious handicap.

I no longer think that she will be going to the general election as the Democratic candidate, however, so the point is moot. 

The USS Lake Erie launched a single, modified SM-3 missile late last night, hitting a disabled American satellite. The Navy says that they believe they scored a "pretty solid" direct hit on the satellite with the missile's kinetic warhead. 

A missile fired from a Navy cruiser in the Pacific Ocean hit an out-of-control spy satellite falling toward Earth last night, Pentagon officials said.

They said that a single SM-3 missile fired from the USS Lake Erie hit the satellite at 10:26 p.m. Eastern time. The missile struck the dead satellite about 150 miles above Earth as it traveled in orbit at more than 17,000 mph.

Military officials had hoped to rupture the satellite's fuel tank to prevent 1,000 pounds of hydrazine from crashing to Earth, a situation they depicted as potentially hazardous for people on the ground. It was unclear last night whether the missile hit was able to break up the fuel tank, but Pentagon officials said they hope to determine that within 24 hours.

A news conference is scheduled for 7 a.m.

A defense official said last night that the military believes it got a "pretty solid" direct hit on the satellite.

Before last night's intercept, some experts had expressed doubts about the seriousness of the risk and questioned whether the shot was an excuse to perform an anti-satellite test that many people around the world found controversial. Skeptics in the arms-control community have speculated that the administration chose to undertake the shoot-down partly to test missile defense technology.

Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and satellite tracker, said after the shoot-down that he had not heard any reports of debris spotting but that "I know people are on the lookout." He said that around midnight the debris was probably over Australia, but that it would be over Canada 30 minutes later.

"Due to the relatively low altitude of the satellite at the time of the engagement, debris will begin to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere immediately," the Pentagon said in a statement. "Nearly all of the debris will burn up on reentry within 24-48 hours and the remaining debris should re-enter within 40 days." 

China is whining about the shootdown, as expected. The Pentagon insists they did this out of concern for the large amount of hydrazine on the satellite. Regardless, the Navy did a great job, hitting a relatively small target traveling at a very high rate of speed.