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CNN:

At a time when gas prices are at an all-time high, Americans have curtailed their driving at a historic rate. Americans are not driving as much as they did a year ago as gas prices skyrocket. The Department of Transportation said figures from March show the steepest decrease in driving ever recorded.

Compared with March a year earlier, Americans drove an estimated 4.3 percent less — that's 11 billion fewer miles, the DOT's Federal Highway Administration said Monday, calling it "the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history." Records have been kept since 1942. [...]

Some Americans have turned to public transportation. Ridership increased by 2.1 percent in 2007, in part because of rising gas prices, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Columnist Leonard Pitts on Appalachian whites and their Obama problem. According to exit polls, 1 out of every 5 voters in the West Virginia Democratic primary (which Obama lost 67%–26%) said that race was a "major factor" in how they cast their ballots. (And that's just the ones who admitted it.)

[R]ace has often been used as a means of distracting and diverting the white poor. They had little in life, nor any realistic expectation of having more.

But the one thing they did have — or so the con went — was whiteness itself. Which meant they had someone to be better than. Someone to look down upon.

This, even though they did menial work under menial conditions, earned menial pay, sent their kids to menial schools, were subject to menial indignities, made do with menial health care and lived menial lives hemmed in by want, ignorance and hunger.

Exactly like those they had been taught they were better than. Exactly like those they had been taught to look down upon.

There are those in positions of political power who can and should be held to answer for the meanness and narrowness of poor people's lives. But they can't and won't so long as those who should be standing together to demand those answers are kept busy fighting one another over superficialities of color and culture.

... is the subtitle of U.S. Versus Them by J. Peter Scoblic, executive editor of The New Republic. He argues that plain old conservatism — as opposed to neo-conservatism — is what landed us in the mess in Iraq and the Middle East. The bad ideas that mark the Bushies' foreign policy are classic conservative policy ideas.

In foreign policy, "conservative" describes a distinct attitude in which the world is conceived in terms of "us vs. them" or "good vs. evil," with the United States assuming the role of a righteous protagonist facing a monolithic enemy. It is often an explicitly religious vision, with frequent allusions...to God, Satan and Armageddon. Characterizing the Soviet Union as an earthly manifestation of evil, rather than...

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