Must read by Michelle Malkin:

Snob-ama Is Not Alone

Beltway contempt for the common man is a bipartisan acheivement.

The odor of elitism is like onion breath: It’s quick to acquire, hard to mask. Try as he might, Barack Obama cannot camouflage the political stink he exhaled when he dissed small-town Americans as “bitter” Neanderthals “clinging” to their guns, faith, and belief in strict immigration enforcement. It wasn’t the first time the effete Snob-ama revealed himself.

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But Republicans are just as susceptible to the Democrats’ do-as-I-say virus.

Take Obama’s GOP presidential rival, John McCain. The New York Times–endorsed media darling got a standing ovation from the nation’s newspaper editors at a big journalism powwow in Washington this week. Some maverick. While McCain eagerly criticized Obama as an “elitist” for his derisive comments about small-town Pennsylvanians, Obama’s got nothing on McCain when it comes to insulting average Americans who oppose illegal immigration.

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Memo to the Beltway GOP: If you are looking to repair your image with your conservative base, this is not the kind of press you want. Makes for great cable-TV greenroom small talk. Not so good for your beleaguered fundraising efforts. And not so helpful if you plan to convince voters in the general election that you are materially different from Snob-ama and his Democratic colleagues who traffic in contempt for the common man. It’s going to take more than rhetorical Altoids to dispel the smell.

Take a second and read the whole thing. 

Her conclusion is right on the mark.  Rather than take the Obama Elite scandal and chortle over it, conservative politicians need to show they can overcome the same fault without paying lip service to it.

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No wonder the middle class is bitter.  Not only are politicians out of touch and elite, but the act of pointing out their elitism, in Obama’s case at least, makes you a racist.

According to the LA Times, if you call Obama an elitist, you are really calling him an uppity Ni***r:

LA Times op-ed reveals new racist code word: “Elitist”

A new breakthrough towards the left’s unified field theory of how all criticism of Obama is essentially racist. The last great advance came from Harvard prof Orlando Patterson, scanning Hillary’s pedestrian 3 a.m. ad on Obama’s inexperience and finding the lost sequel to “Birth of a Nation.” Now comes David Shipler, thesaurus in hand, following a trail of synonyms that leads straight to the darkest heart of racist AmeriKKKa:

[W]hen his opponents branded him an elitist and an outsider, his race made it easier to drive a wedge between him and the white, rural voters he has courted. As an African American, he was supposedly looking down from a place he didn’t belong and looking in from a distance he could not cross.

This could not happen as dramatically were it not for embedded racial attitudes. “Elitist” is another word for “arrogant,” which is another word for “uppity,” that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves…

Furthermore, casting Obama as “out of touch” plays harmoniously with the traditional notion of blacks as “others” at the edge of the mainstream, separate from the whole.

If you take this tool seriously, there’s quite literally no good-faith way to accuse a member of a minority group of being snobbish or condescending.

Which meets the standard many claim, (Wright perhaps) which implies that blacks cannot be racist, because only whites can.

Here lately, the governments of many cities, counties, states and even countries. have taken a lot of steps to do “their part” to combat Global Warming.

The problem is that they are attacking the problem from a feel good emotional nature, and like so many other responses, they often have unexpected consequences.

Take a minor example:

A glitch in the compost ditch

Hold the foam for that latte: Newer packaging may not end up recycled

There’s a potential glitch in Seattle politicians’ plan to ban foam in favor of eco-friendly, compostable or recyclable food packaging:

As it stands now, Seattleites cannot put the boxes and cups that would carry their to-go orders home in city yard and food-waste bins.

Such alternative packages — such as corn- and sugar cane-based products — are not currently allowed along with other compostables in Seattle yard-waste bins, according to the city’s contractor, Cedar Grove Composting Inc.

Whoops.

But the consequences have much more serious effects.  Take for example the demand to cease the use of petroleum fuel in favor of corn based bio diesel:

 Global warming rage lets global hunger grow

We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.

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The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted “massacres” unless the biofuel policy is halted.

And:

Fuel Choices, Food Crises and Finger-Pointing

The idea of turning farms into fuel plants seemed, for a time, like one of the answers to high global oil prices and supply worries. That strategy seemed to reach a high point last year when Congress mandated a fivefold increase in the use of biofuels.