Victor Davis Hanson has these thoughts on why the Obama speech was a failure...

Over the past four days, I asked seven or eight random (Asian, Mexican-American, and working-class white) Americans in southern California what they thought of Obama’s candidacy — and framed the question with, “Don’t you think that was a good speech?” The answers, without exception, were essentially: “Forget the speech. I would never vote for Obama after listening to Wright.” In some cases, the reaction was not mild disappointment, but unprintable outrage.

Hanson outlines the problem...

Where are we now? At the most fascinating juncture in the last 50 years of primary-election history. Superdelegates can’t “steal” the election from Obama’s lock on the delegate count. And they can’t easily debase themselves by abandoning Obama after their recent televised confessionals about abandoning Hillary.

But they can count and compute — and must try to deal with these facts:

(1) Obama is crashing in all the polls, especially against McCain, against whom he doesn’t stack up well, given McCain’s heroic narrative, the upswing in Iraq, and the past distance between McCain and the Bush administration;

(2) Hillary may not just win, but win big in Pennsylvania (and maybe the other states as well), buttressing her suddenly not-so-tired argument about her success in the mega-, in-play purple states. Michigan and Florida that once would have been lost by Hillary in a fair election, now would be fairly won — and Clinton is as willing to replay both as Obama suddenly is not; and

(3) The sure thing of Democrats winning big in the House and Senate is now in danger of a scenario in which a would-be Senator or Representative explains all autumn long that the party masthead really does not like Rev. Wright, whose massive corpus of buffoonery no doubt is still to be mined. (The problem was never “snippets,” but entire speeches devoted to hatred and anger, often carefully outlined in a point-by-point format).

Read the whole thing. The problem for Obama was never that the nation's intelligentsia and media elites would not forgive him for attending a church led by a Black radical, but that the white, working class voter would not buy any explanation other than a complete break from Reverend Wright, and even then it would still be damaging as many would wonder if the break was only for political purposes.

Mark Steyn illustrates the devastating logic that is eating away at the Obama campaign...

I’m sure,” said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries, and strawberry shake sound profound, “many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”

Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests, or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose legions of “spiritual advisers” at the height of his Monica troubles outnumbered the U.S. diplomatic corps, Senator Obama has had just one spiritual adviser his entire adult life: the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, two-decade pastor to the president presumptive. The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years.

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

Read the whole thing. The logic is simple. To believe that the U.S. Government created the AIDS virus in a plot to commit genocide against the Black race is to believe in something that is racist lunacy. Therefore, Reverend Wright is a racist lunatic. For Barack Obama to associate himself with Reverend Wright and, even now, maintain that association, is evidence that Obama either excuses Wright's racist lunacy, or agrees with it. Checkmate.

Bob Novak says the Wright controversy is deepening the Democratic dilemma.

This story in The Washington Post illustrates the racial divide in Pennsylvania which has only been exacerbated by the Wright controversy.

Bill Kristol thinks that Obama is wrong in calling for a national conversation on race. He believes we should not have such a conversation, but say we did.

On a different subject, here is a story about a study that links how the media reports the Iraq War here in America to actions by the enemy in the field.

As newspapers continue to decline, I have often wondered how the news will be disseminated when there are no longer any reporters to do the work. Here is one man's view on how it will happen, and he is quite pleased with the trend.