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Contentions posts on the Olympics.

… Isn’t it time we take an adult view of the grotesquerie that is the Beijing Olympics? Americans–most notably, the American President–applaud while teens tumble for prizes and in the shadows aged ladies get a year’s hard labor for attempting civil protest. I’m sympathetic to arguments about not punishing athletes who’ve trained to compete–but not that sympathetic. Dreams are compromised for a lot worse reasons than keeping innocents out of jail and saving lives. By any reckoning, this year’s Olympics resulted in a steep net loss of humanity, justice, and freedom. (This is to say nothing of the fact that Moscow used the events as a global diversion to attempt a takeover of its neighbor.)

And this is to say nothing of the sheer hell required of those who competed for China. When free countries try to make common cause with non-free countries (particularly in the area of individual achievement) the dissonance is bound to overwhelm. American athletes are free to train or not train as they see fit. Chinese athletes: not so much. Any argument about giving American talent its chance to shine has to be weighed against the compulsory servitude instituted by Olympic committees in non-free countries. Sure, Michael Phelps spent years doing laps in preparation for Beijing, but isn’t it worth considering how those years were spent by his Chinese counterparts? …

Slate’s Daniel Gross says don’t worry about a new cold war.

Russia’s occupation of Georgia and the U.S. signing of a missile-defense deal with Poland have grizzled Cold Warriors partying like it’s 1979. Once again, hard-liners are ratcheting up rhetoric and threatening sanctions because the Russian bear has stomped on one of its freedom-loving neighbors. But don’t go dusting off your copies of George Kennan’s “X” Foreign Affairs article and NSC 68 just yet. It’s going to be a lot harder to have a Cold War between Russia and the West in 2008 than it was in 1948.

During the Cold War (this is for all the under-40 set), the world was to a large degree divided between the Communist world—the Soviet Bloc and China—and the free world. And while there were exchanges and a limited amount of trade (in the 1970s, Pepsi began bartering Pepsi-Cola for Stolichnaya vodka, and the United States exported grain to the Soviet Union), commercial ties between the Eastern Bloc and the West were extremely limited.

Today, nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia may not be a free-market paradise. But it has evolved into an important part of the global trading system and has built deep, enduring, and significant economic ties to the West. As a result, the implications of increasing tensions are as much economic as they are geopolitical. And a renewed chill between Moscow and Washington will trouble the sleep of CEOs as much as it will agitate peaceniks. On the other hand, the close economic ties make it less likely that political tensions will erupt into actual warfare since the executives in Moscow and New York (and London, and Frankfurt, and Milan …) will be lobbying for peace. …

Some people complain this congress has done very little. “Au contraire” say the WSJ Editors.

As the 110th Congress continues its August recess, the big legislative news is that it has passed fewer laws than any Congress in the last two decades. An outfit known as Taxpayers for Common Sense reports that the fighting 110th has passed a mere 294 laws, while nonetheless finding time to consider 1,932 resolutions favoring such causes as National Watermelon Month. This is apparently supposed to be a matter of public consternation because Congress should be accomplishing more.

Sorry, but that’s the best thing we’ve heard about this Congress. …

David Harsanyi says this election is just like any other in this divided country.

There is a palpable unease within the Democratic Party. After all, why hasn’t Barack Obama pulled away from John McCain in the polls?

Here we are with a struggling economy, an unpopular war, high gas prices, mortgage meltdown and an old coot with a wicked temper running for the Republicans. Shouldn’t the urbane and unflappable Obama be ahead by at least 14 points? What is wrong with Americans?

Obama himself has questioned the wisdom of voters, wondering at a gathering in San Francisco why, with all our tribulations, voters do not cry, “Toss the bums out, we’re starting from scratch, we’re starting over.”

If only it were so simple.

It’s often said that loathing of an opposing candidate is not enough for victory. And aversion to George Bush is not, on its own, enough reason to spur a realignment of the electorate. This election, in fact, despite the fruitless attempts of Obama, is a traditional battle between the left and the right. It’s about policy and, the worst distraction of all, politics. …

Karl Rove has a history lesson on political conventions.

… How will we know if the candidates achieve their goals? Perhaps by observing the convention bounces — the jump each receives in polls the week after their conventions. Professor Tom Holbrook of UW-Milwaukee says history suggests the candidate thought to be running ahead of where he should be (Mr. McCain) will get a smaller bounce, while the candidate generally thought to be running behind expectations (Mr. Obama) will get a larger one. Mr. Holbrook also finds the earlier convention gets the bigger bump, another Obama advantage.

Even then, the size of the bounce alone isn’t determinative. Barry Goldwater and Al Gore got large bumps and lost, while Presidents Reagan and Bush in their re-elections received small bounces and won. The real question is durability. Are there lasting changes in how a candidate is perceived?

The day is long past when conventions were spontaneous and dramatic. It’s hard to envision anything today like the riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention or the Dixiecrat walkout in 1948. It’s unlikely we’ll see again dramatic floor fights as at the 1964 GOP convention at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, or the 103 ballots it took Democrats to nominate John W. Davis in 1920. But conventions still shape voters’ understanding of the men who want to be president. And because they do, conventions can still shape, and maybe even alter, an election.

Ed Morrissey noticed some slimy DNC tactics.

How many times can the DNC mention that Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) is a Jew?  In their pre-emptive attack website on every potential candidate for John McCain’s running mate, they manage to work it into their text five times in six paragraphs.  They even helpfully note that disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff is also Jewish, just in case Democrats missed that key point about his guilt:

Cantor Was Actually Around a Lot of Suspicious Abramoff Events

Cantor Co-Hosted Improper Signatures Fundraiser With Abramoff. Jack Abramoff and House Deputy Republican Whip Eric Cantor co-hosted a fundraiser for then Rep. David Vitter at Abramoff’s Signatures restaurant. In April 2005, Vitter admitted to the Federal Elections Commission that he failed to pay for the expenses for the fundraiser. According to the Times Picayune, Rep. Eric Cantor was “the marquee guest” at the event which sought to raise money from the Jewish community. Both Abramoff and Cantor are Jewish [emphasis mine -- Ed]. [New Orleans Times Picayune, 4/16/05, NRCC Events List, www.nrcc.org]

They’re both … Jewish?? Must be a cabal!  Next thing you know, they’ll be conspiring to change good-old American white bread with that Hebrew egg bread, because it gives them special powers or something.  Hey, wait a minute …

Sally Quinn had an interesting reaction to the show at Saddleback.

… I want to live in a world where Gen. David Petraeus and Meg Whitman, former chief executive of eBay, are the wisest people I know, where offshore drilling will help ease our energy crisis, where a guy stays in a Vietnamese prison camp even when told he could get out, and has great stories to tell. I want to live in a world where I was absolutely certain that life begins at conception, where a man is a maverick and stands up against his Senate colleagues when he disagrees with them, where the only thing to do with evil is defeat it, where a guy will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell to capture him.

I want to believe that our biggest enemy is radical Islamist terrorists. I want to be part of a world that doesn’t have to raise taxes; where America is a beacon, a shining city on a hill; where our values are simply Judeo-Christian values; and where a man always puts his country first. I want to be one of “my friends.”

By the time McCain finished his interview with pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, Saturday night, part of a forum that also featured Barack Obama, I was curled up in a fetal position in my chair, wrapped in a mohair throw, practically sucking my thumb.

McCain did a great job of making me feel confident. He was clearly in his element at Saddleback, among supportive evangelical Christians, and he went a long way toward alleviating their fears about his inability to communicate with them in their own language. …

Thomas Sowell points out areas where amateurs outdo professionals. Hint: Good old golden rule days.

When amateurs outperform professionals, there is something wrong with that profession.

If ordinary people, with no medical training, could perform surgery in their kitchens with steak knives, and get results that were better than those of surgeons in hospital operating rooms, the whole medical profession would be discredited.

Yet it is common for ordinary parents, with no training in education, to homeschool their children and consistently produce better academic results than those of children educated by teachers with Master’s degrees and in schools spending upwards of $10,000 a year per student– which is to say, more than a million dollars to educate ten kids from K through 12.

Nevertheless, we continue to take seriously the pretensions of educators who fail to educate, but who put on airs of having “professional” expertise beyond the understanding of mere parents. …

The Onion reports Johnson & Johnson introduced a shampoo to toughen up kids named Nothing But Tears.

After decades of coddling young children, Johnson & Johnson unveiled its new “Nothing But Tears” shampoo this week, an aggressive bath-time product the company says will help to prepare meek and fragile newborns for the real world.

A radical departure for the health goods manufacturer, the new shampoo features an all-alcohol-based formula, has never once been approved by leading dermatologists, and is as gentle on a baby’s skin as “having to grow up and fend for your goddamn self.”

“We at Johnson & Johnson have been making bath time a safe and soothing experience for far too long,” company CEO William C. Weldon said. “Years of pampering have left our newborns helpless, feeble, and ill-equipped for the arduous road ahead.”

“It’s time our children got the wake-up call that’s been coming to them,” Weldon continued. “It’s time they cried their precious little eyes out.”

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David Warren reports on Canada’s new “human rights” wrinkle.

… Canada’s taxpayer-supported “human rights” apparatchiks have decided that it is not yet time to directly challenge freedom of the press. They will bide their time, and return to the routine business of staging quasi-legal proceedings against defenceless victims, with no resources for lawyers, and no access to media publicity, until they have acquired more power.

That power is on the way. For instance, Dalton McGuinty’s government has recently committed many millions to a huge expansion of the Ontario kangaroo-court system, opening new star chamber facilities across the province, and providing a fresh supply of publicly funded lawyers and activists to assist the enemies of freedom in making their prosecutions. The argument behind all such “public investments” is the same: that complainants need a “resolution process” that is less “formal” than the one in our legitimate court system. In other words, they need kangaroo courts in which their victims are stripped of due process.

But a much more significant advance has now been proposed by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, to bring the tyranny of “political correction” to bear on its own membership. As usual, the process was being advanced in the dark, away from the possibility of public discussion, and was only pried open in the course of the last week when a large number of physicians, surgeons, and even politicians found out about it.

As I’ve written before, the “human rights” revolution that has been sweeping through Canada’s law schools and legal establishment depends on an Orwellian inversion of the term, “human rights.” For human rights were traditionally conceived as the individual’s legal and moral resort against the arbitrary power of unaccountable organizations. In the new definition, “human rights” become a device by which unaccountable organizations may crush that individual. …

Russia’s Pravda has a columnist as unhinged as Keith Olbermann. This Condi Rice rant was over the top.

… The constant arrogance and hypocrisy of this failed female makes it that much more apparent that here is a person way out of her depth. Instead of regarding sensitive issues from a balanced viewpoint as she is supposed to do, this incompetent loud-mouthed, bad-mannered, bullshit-mongering bimbo takes one side, ignores the other and then speaks down from a holier-than-thou platform as if she were on a lecture dias.

This is not a classroom, Condoleeza Rice, and you are not a diplomat. You are a liar, a cheap, shallow, failed, wannabe actress on the diplomatic stage. This is the real world and out here, you have to be prepared to face up to your responsibilities.

For a start, you have failed to mention one single time the Georgian war crimes against 2.000 Russian civilians on the night of 7/8 August. Why have you systematically refused to admit they happened? Why have you not mentioned the devastation of Tskhinvali by your allies’ forces? Why do you continue to support the Saakashvili regime? …

Pickerhead has been looking for a clear concise explanation of Obama’s votes on protections for children born subsequent to a failed abortion. It is beginning to look like Obama has a real problem with his votes on this subject when a state legislator. And, he has been lying about it. Follow the thread here as we visit various blog and websites that feature many of our favorites writers.

John Fund is first.

… “Senator Obama got caught in the twisting of the truth,” says Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council. “His campaign was later forced to put out a clarifying statement that it was the Senator himself who was actually wrong on the facts. He did indeed vote against a bill in the Illinois State Senate that was identical to the federal legislation that sought to protect babies who survive abortions.”

Mr. Obama’s stand on the issue is significant. The federal “Born Alive Infant Protection Act” sailed through the Senate in 2001 on a vote of 98 to 0. The bill was supported by Senator Barbara Boxer, the body’s leading pro-choice spokeswoman, and was not opposed by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. By getting his facts wrong, Mr. Obama is now in the difficult position of trying to explain why he voted against a bill that the legislative record shows addressed infanticide rather than abortion. …

Jennifer Rubin.

You would think the mainstream media might get interested if a presidential nominee got caught lying–as Barack Obama did–on an issue of intense controversy, which the Born Alive Infant Protection Act certainly is. Still (I know you’re stunned) the mainstream media isn’t much interested, although the reversal combines all the key elements of a good political story: lying, a hot-button issue, and a major candidate gaffe. But it is about Barack Obama. So . . . I guess we get virtually noting from the mainstream media.

Rich Lowry has a helpful summary and cogent take here. He concludes: “Here’s one of the central dilemmas of Obama’s candidacy. Nothing in his career supports his contention that he’s a post-partisan healer. …

Peter Wehner.

… this issue has now traversed into the matter of public character. Obama accused the National Right to Life Committee of lying because it said that he voted to kill legislation that included a “neutrality clause” he now claims was the sine qua non for his support for pro-life legislation. If the neutrality clause was in the legislation, Obama now says, he would have supported legislation protecting the life of newly born children who had survived an abortion. But National Right to Life has, in Rich’s words, “unearthed documents showing that the Illinois bill was amended to include such a clause, and Obama voted to kill it anyway.” So Obama was, at best, wrong in recalling his own past position. At worst, Obama himself is misrepresenting his position and, in accusing the National Right to Life Committee of lying, is doing so himself. …

Rubin again.

As Dean Barnett points out, the only people who had a worse summer than Barack Obama were the Obamaphiles and media pundits (okay, there is an big overlap between those two groups). The latter seemed to have misread utterly the candidates’ performances during the summer. While the Obama’s fans cooed and kvelled, the public slowly but surely seemed to have tired or soured on The One. Could Obama’s shortcomings (”preening narcissism, a fondness for platitudes, a tendency to whine and a potentially fatal lack of substance”) have gone undetected by the media mavens, while ordinary folks — those religion-clinging, gun-hugging, drilling-happy voters — caught on? …

Peter Kirsanow.

… Therefore, even if we accept any one of Obama’s explanations regarding his vote against Born-Alive, we’re holding him to an incredibly low standard for someone who intends to lead the nation. If he supports the principle of Born-Alive, the question isn’t why he voted against it — the question should be, “Sen. Obama, given your education, skills and background why didn’t you take the relatively simple step of amending the draft so that the bill would work?”  Isn’t that what we expect from a leader?

Obama voted “present” more than 100 times in the Illinois state legislature. Why did he rouse himself to vote “No” on this one?

Obama has found time to ponder the habeas rights of foreign terrorists but no time to ponder the rights of babies born alive? Is it that far above his pay grade?

Wehner again.

… It doesn’t help matters, of course, that Obama’s story is falling apart. Obama has been insisting that if the wording of the Illinois Born-Alive Infant Protection legislation had been similar to the wording of federal legislation, he would have voted for the legislation. But as the Washington Post reports today, “Obama aides acknowledged yesterday that the wording of the state and federal bills was virtually identical.”

Oops.

It’s worth noting as well that the effort by the New York Times to provide a political life-raft to Obama on this issue has been taken apart by my colleague Yuval Levin here.

While a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama cast the most extreme vote imaginable on abortion, worse even than supporting partial-birth abortion. Children who had been targeted for abortion but were born alive were still not safe; in Barack Obama’s America, they still do not possess rights or the protection of the law. Obama’s effort to explain his vote away is in the process of collapsing. And the gap between him and McCain continues to close. For the first time in this campaign, Obama is on the defensive, a bit rattled, and worried. He has reason to be.

Yuval Levin.

Along with the Washington Post item Seth mentions below, the New York Times also has a “Check Point” piece on Obama and the Born-Alive controversy this morning. It tries in every imaginable way to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and to accept or excuse every one of the contradictory stories the Obama campaign offers to explain his inexplicable vote, but it still cannot avoid the simple fact that, as the article puts it, “The statute Congress passed in 2002 and the one the Illinois committee rejected a year later are virtually identical.” Indeed, they do not differ in substance at all. …

While most on the right are celebrating McCain’s performance Saturday night at the Saddleback Church, Kathleen Parker has another take.

At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister — no matter how beloved — is supremely wrong.

It is also un-American.

For the past several days, since mega-pastor Rick Warren interviewed Barack Obama and John McCain at his Saddleback Church, most political debate has focused on who won.

Was it the nuanced, thoughtful Obama, who may have convinced a few more skeptics that he isn’t a Muslim? Or was it the direct, confident McCain, who breezes through town hall-style meetings the way Obama sinks three-pointers from the back court.

Suffice it to say, each of the candidates’ usual supporters felt validated in their choices. McCain convinced and comforted with characteristic certitude those most at ease with certitude; Obama convinced and comforted with his characteristic intellectual ambivalence those most at ease with ambivalence.

The winner, of course, was Warren, who has managed to position himself as political arbiter in a nation founded on the separation of church and state.

The loser was America. …

John Stossel on energy independence.

It’s amazing how ideas with no merit become popular merely because they sound good.

Most every politician and pundit says “energy independence” is a great idea. Presidents have promised it for 35 years. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were self-sufficient, protected from high prices, supply disruptions and political machinations?

The hitch is that even if the United States were energy independent, it would be protected from none of those things. To think otherwise is to misunderstand basic economics and the global marketplace.

To be for “energy independence” is to be against trade. But trade makes us as safe. Crop destruction from this summer’s floods in the Midwest should remind us of the folly of depending only on ourselves. Achieving “energy independence” would expose us to unnecessary risks — such as storms that knock out oil refineries or droughts that create corn — and ethanol — shortages. …

A couple of important medical breakthroughs reported. London Times reports researchers have discovered how to manufacture blood from stem cells.

Vials of human blood have been grown from embryonic stem cells for the first time during research that promises to provide an almost limitless supply suitable for transfusion into any patient.

The achievement by scientists in the United States could lead to trials of the blood within two years, and ultimately to an alternative to donations that would transform medicine.

If such blood was made from stem cells of the O negative blood type, which is compatible with every blood group but is often in short supply, it could be given safely to anybody who needs a transfusion.

Stem-cell-derived blood would also eliminate the risk of transmitting the pathogens that cause hepatitis, HIV and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) through transfusions. …

The Economist on a new lease on life for the internal combustion engine.

SMALL cars sometimes struggle to climb steep hills. But a converted Chevrolet Lacetti has something special to help it along. Instead of having to keep changing down and revving harder to ascend a winding Alpine-type test track, the engine can cruise almost to the summit in top gear. This is because the car benefits from one of the developments that in these more economical and greener times promises to give the petrol engine a new lease of life.

Old technologies have a habit of fighting back when new ones come along. This is not surprising because they often have an enormous amount of design, engineering and production knowledge invested in them—especially so in the case of car engines. So new hybrid systems, fuel cells and electric motors will be chasing a moving target. The internal combustion engine will be getting better too.

The Lacetti is just one example. It gets its extra oomph from a supercharger forcing more air into the combustion chambers of its engine. This is an old idea that used to speed up 1920s racing cars, like “blower” Bentleys. But their engines tended not to last very long. With stronger engines, superchargers have been staging a comeback in big cars. The one in the Lacetti is different: it is a dual-speed supercharger that provides its highest boost at low speeds. This gives the car a huge 40% increase in torque, or pulling power. …

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David Warren has more thoughts on Russia.

It is years since I hauled out my favourite Josef Stalin quote. Time to carry it up from the basement, dust it off, and put it back on display. “Nuclear weapons are only a problem for people with bad nerves.” That the quote may be apocryphal, does not disturb me. So many of the best quotes are apocryphal, and only a puritan could wish to eliminate them from the quotation books on that account alone. One need only put the asterisk on it, the way the artist’s colourmen do on rose madder, or the Homeric scholars on passages where they suspect interpolation.

But why do I quote it, apparently with approval? It is not from any fondness for the late Soviet tyrant and mass-murderer, let me assure the gentle reader. Nor should he assume, as some readers have in the past, that I favour the casual and reckless use of weapons of mass destruction. For as a more careful meditation upon that quote will establish, not even Stalin was that crazy.

The point is that nuclear weapons, and everything else in that genre, have the power to scare people. And once they are frightened, they will do stupid things. It is important, therefore, to keep one’s nerve; and the paradox in quoting Stalin to make the point, is that one must keep one’s nerve especially in facing down tyrants like him. …

Jeff Jacoby says Iraq hindsight is not always 20/20.

… The prevailing wisdom 18 months or so ago was that invading Iraq had been, in retrospect, a disastrous blunder. It had led to appalling sectarian fratricide and an ever-climbing body count. Iraqi democracy was deemed a naive pipe dream. Worst of all, it was said, the fighting in Iraq wasn’t advancing the global struggle against Islamist terrorism; by rallying a new generation of jihadists, it was actually impeding it. Opponents of the war clamored loudly for pulling the plug – even if that meant, as The New York Times acknowledged in a bring-the-troops-home-now editorial last July, “that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave.”

But what if we had known then what we know now?

We know now that the overhauled counterinsurgency strategy devised by General David Petraeus – the “surge” – would prove spectacularly successful, driving Al Qaeda in Iraq from its strongholds, and killing thousands of its fighters, supporters, and leaders.

We know now that US losses in Iraq would plummet to the lowest levels of the war, with just five Americans killed in combat in July 2008, compared with 66 fatalities in the same month a year ago – and with 137 in November 2004. …

Dick Morris says if the Clintons can roll Obama, he won’t be able to stand up to Putin.

Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia’s invasion of Georgia.

This two-dimensional portrait of weakness underscores fears that Obama might, indeed, be a latter-day Jimmy Carter.

Consider first the domestic and political. Bill and Hillary Clinton have no leverage over Obama. Hillary can’t win the nomination. She doesn’t control any committees. If she or her supporters tried to disrupt the convention or demonstrate outside, she would pay a huge price among the party faithful. If Obama lost – after Hillary made a fuss at the convention – they would blame her for all eternity (just like Democrats blame Ted Kennedy for Carter’s defeat).

But, without having any leverage or a decent hand to play, the Clintons bluffed Obama into amazing concessions. …

Bill Kristol liked what he saw at Saddleback.

While normal people were out having fun Saturday night, I was home in front of the TV. But I wasn’t enjoying the Olympics. Your diligent columnist was dutifully watching Barack Obama and John McCain answer the Rev. Rick Warren’s questions at Saddleback Church. Virtue is sometimes rewarded. The event was worth watching — and for me yielded three conclusions.

First, Rick Warren should moderate one of the fall presidential debates.

Warren’s queries were simple but probing. He was fair to both candidates, his manner was relaxed but serious, and he neither went for “gotcha” questions nor pulled his punches. And his procedure of asking virtually identical questions to each candidate during his turn on stage paid off. It allowed us to see the two giving revealingly different answers to the same question.

So, I say, with all due respect to Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw and Bob Schieffer — the somewhat nondiverse group selected by the debates commission as the three presidential debate moderators — one of them should step aside for Warren.

Second, it was McCain’s night. …

Michael Gerson too.

It is now clear why Barack Obama has refused John McCain’s offer of joint town hall appearances during the fall campaign. McCain is obviously better at them.

Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency — two hours on Saturday night evenly divided between the relaxed, tieless candidates — was expected to be a sideshow. McCain and Obama would make their specialized appeals to evangelicals as if they were an interest group such as organized labor or the National Rifle Association. Evangelicals would demonstrate, in turn, that they are not rubes and know-nothings. And Americans would turn en masse to watch the Olympics.

What took place instead under Warren’s precise and revealing questioning was the most important event so far of the 2008 campaign — a performance every voter should seek out on the Internet and watch. …

Power Line and Corner posts on the race.

David Brooks on the education of John McCain.

On Tuesdays, Senate Republicans hold a weekly policy lunch. The party leaders often hand out a Message of the Week that the senators are supposed to repeat at every opportunity. Sometimes there will be a pollster offering data that supposedly demonstrates the brilliance of the message and why it will lead to political nirvana.

John McCain generally spends the lunches at a table with a gang of fellow ne’er-do-wells. He cracks jokes, razzes the speaker and generally ridicules the whole proceeding. Then he takes the paper with the Message of the Week back to his office. He tosses it on the desk of some staffer with a sarcastic comment like: “Here’s your message. Learn it. Love it. Live it.”

This sort of behavior has been part of McCain’s long-running rebellion against the stupidity of modern partisanship. In a thousand ways, he has tried to preserve some sense of self-respect in a sea of pandering pomposity. He’s done it through self-mockery, by talking endlessly about his own embarrassing lapses and by keeping up a running patter on the absurdity all around. He’s done it by breaking frequently from his own party to cut serious deals with people like Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold. He’s done it with his own frantic and freewheeling style, which was unpredictable, untamed and, at some level, unprofessional.

When McCain and his team set out to win the presidency in 2008, they hoped to run a campaign with this sort of spirit. McCain would venture forth on the back of his bus, going places other Republicans don’t go, saying things politicians don’t say, offering the country the vision of a different kind of politics — free of circus antics — in which serious people sacrifice for serious things.

It hasn’t turned out that way. …

Live Science on how cooking strengthened the human brain.

… In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.

Instead of growing even larger (which would have made birth even more problematic), the human brain most likely used the additional calories to grease the wheels of its internal functioning.

Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and burn 20-25 percent of their calories running their brains. For comparison, other vertebrate brains use as little as 2 percent of the animal’s caloric intake.

Does this mean renewing our subscriptions to Bon Appetit will make our brains more efficient? No, but we probably should avoid diving into the raw food movement. Devoted followers end up, said Khaitovich, “with very severe health problems.” …

Strong humor section with a News Biscuit piece on BBC camera crews who gave beer to meerkats.

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MEMRI reports a Saudi columnist has called for the bombing of Iran’s nukes.

… “In my estimation, confronting this country, which is trying to gain the time necessary to acquire nuclear weapons, is unavoidable. The possession of nuclear weapons by a state like Iran, which is ideological to the core, is more or less like Osama bin Laden having a nuclear bomb. They are two of a kind. Despite the difference in their turbans and in their religious beliefs, the end result is the same.

“Perhaps it is our bad luck that we [i.e. Saudi Arabia] and the Gulf states would be the first to suffer from a military confrontation with Iran and from its response, and the problem would become even more grave if Iran succeeded in closing the Straits of Hormuz, as the IRGC commander threatened. But our situation with Iran is like that of the sick man who refuses to have his illness treated with cauterization. Yes, the pain of the burning is horrible, but this malady can only be treated through this military confrontation -cauterization.

“History has taught us that ideological countries only pay heed to victory over their ideology… They never accept any halfway situation, even when they find themselves on the brink of disaster.” …

David Warren is following events in Georgia.

As I write this, I have just read a short account — an admirable piece by a BBC correspondent in the Black Sea port of Poti, Georgia, writing under their noses — of the Russians “in control and on the move.” Together with many other short reports from around Georgia, it is very clear that the Russians have not honoured the ceasefire that President Sarkozy of France brought to Moscow, and also induced the president of Georgia to sign.

In Poti, the Russians have been systematically destroying port facilities, and sinking all Georgian naval and patrol vessels. From other reports we can know that they continue operations well inside Georgia, and well outside the agreed buffer zones around the disputed regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

In Gori, as well as directly intimidating local people with gratuitous displays of force and firepower, it would appear that they have also encouraged ethnic Ossetians and others travelling with them to smash, torch, and loot property around town, and behave murderously towards its defenceless inhabitants — most of whom were induced to flee.

These things are happening on undisputed Georgian territory, after a formal agreement to cease hostilities. They confirm that the word of the Russian government is worthless. …

Byron York reports on events at Pastor Rick’s megachurch.

… The idea was for Warren to question Obama for an hour — they tossed a coin to see who would go first — and then ask the same questions of McCain, who was not allowed to hear what Obama had answered before him. Not a few people in the press thought it was a bad idea. Asking each man the same questions meant Warren couldn’t tailor his queries to each man; sure, he could ask Obama about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but what sense would it make to ask McCain, too? It seemed like a recipe for nothing much at all.

But Pastor Rick hasn’t built a huge church and sold more than 25 million copies of The Purpose-Driven Life for nothing. By the time Warren finished questioning Obama, people were eager to hear how McCain would handle the same subjects. In a debate, candidates are often asked the same question, but the second guy has always heard what the first guy said and tailors his answer accordingly. At Saddleback, there was something much different — and more revealing — going on.

The contrast was striking throughout each man’s one-hour time on stage. When Warren asked Obama, “What’s the most gut-wrenching decision you’ve ever had to make?” Obama answered that opposing the war in Iraq was “as tough a decision that I’ve had to make, not only because there were political consequences but also because Saddam Hussein was a bad person and there was no doubt he meant America ill.” But Obama was a state senator in Illinois when Congress authorized the president to use force in Iraq. He didn’t have to make a decision on the war. That fact was a recurring issue in the Democratic primaries, when candidates Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, Christopher Dodd, and John Edwards argued that they, as senators, had to make a choice Obama didn’t have to make. And now he says it’s his toughest call.

When McCain got the question, he was able to tell an old story with a sense of gravity and poignancy that he seldom shows in public. He described his time as a prisoner of war, when he was offered a chance for early release because his father was a top naval officer. “I was in rather bad physical shape,” McCain told Warren, but “we had a code of conduct that said you only leave by order of capture.” So McCain refused to go. He made the telling even more forceful when he added that, “in the spirit of full disclosure, I’m very happy I didn’t know the war was going to last for another three years or so.” In one moment, he showed a sense of pride and a hint of regret, too; he came across as a man who did the right thing but not without the temptation to take an easy out. In any event, the message was very clear: John McCain has had to make bigger, more momentous decisions in his life than has Barack Obama. …

WSJ editors react to Obama’s smear of Clarence Thomas saying, by all means, let’s compare the background of the two.

… Even more troubling is what the Illinois Democrat’s answer betrays about his political habits of mind. Asked a question he didn’t expect at a rare unscripted event, the rookie candidate didn’t merely say he disagreed with Justice Thomas. Instead, he instinctively reverted to the leftwing cliché that the Court’s black conservative isn’t up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are.

So much for civility in politics and bringing people together. And no wonder Mr. Obama’s advisers have refused invitations for more such open forums, preferring to keep him in front of a teleprompter, where he won’t let slip what he really believes.

And now Part II of the Atlantic article on the chaos in Hillary’s campaign.

In the hours after she finished third in Iowa, on January 3, Clinton seized control of her campaign, even as her advisers continued fighting about whether to go negative. The next morning’s conference call began with awkward silence, and then Penn recapped the damage and mumbled something about how badly they’d been hurt by young voters.

Mustering enthusiasm, Clinton declared that the campaign was mistaken not to have competed harder for the youth vote and that—overruling her New Hampshire staff—she would take questions at town-hall meetings designed to draw comparative,” but not negative, contrasts with Obama. Hearing little response, Clinton began to grow angry, according to a participant’s notes. She complained of being outmaneuvered in Iowa and being painted as the establishment candidate. The race, she insisted, now had “three front-runners.” More silence ensued. “This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself,” she snapped, and hung up.

In the days leading up to her stunning New Hampshire comeback, on January 8, Clinton’s retail politicking, at last on full display, seemed to make the most difference. But any hope of renewal was short-lived. Not long after New Hampshire, in a senior-staff meeting that both Clintons attended at the campaign’s Arlington headquarters, Ickes announced to his stunned colleagues, “The cupboard is empty.” The campaign had burned through its money just getting past Iowa. And the news got worse: despite spending $100 million, it had somehow failed to establish ground operations in all but a handful of upcoming states. Now, urgently needing them, it lacked the money. …

Writing for the WSJ, Stephen Moore on the totalitarians in the green movements.

Earlier this month, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, I almost spilled my latte in my lap when I read this on the front page of the Chronicle: “S.F. Mayor Proposes Fines for Unsorted Trash.”

The story began: “Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents’ trash to make sure pizza crusts aren’t mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom.” Isn’t that what homeless people do — rooting around in other people’s garbage? If Bay Area residents are caught failing to separate the plastic bottles from the newspapers, according to the newspaper story, they could face fines of up to $1,000.

“We don’t want to fine people,” the mayor is quoted saying reassuringly. “We want to change behavior.” Translation: Do exactly as we say and no one gets hurt. And San Francisco considers itself one of the most progressive cities in America!

When I was a kid, the environmentalists promoted their clean skies and antilittering agenda mostly through moral suasion — with pictures of an Indian under a smoggy sky with a tear rolling down his cheek or the owl who chanted on TV: “Give a hoot, don’t pollute.” Such messages made you feel guilty about callously throwing a candy bar wrapper on the ground or feeling indifferent toward car fumes. Back then I was a devoted recycler, but not for sentimental reasons. It was the financial incentive: You got up to a nickel for every bottle you brought back to the grocery store. So I would scavenge the landscape to find unredeemed bottles to buy baseball cards and candy.

But now the environmental movement has morphed into the most authoritarian philosophy in America. …

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WSJ Editors on how to make Russia pay.

Vladimir Putin proved last weekend that Russia’s army can push over Georgia’s army. In the past 48 hours, the West has begun to push back. If its leaders stay the course, they may yet turn Mr. Putin’s meager military success into a significant political defeat. …

Andrei Illarionov says Russia lost much in the exchange.

… Russia is now in nearly complete international isolation. Russia’s intervention in Georgia was backed only by Cuba. Neither Iran, nor Venezuela, nor Uzbekistan, nor even Belarus has said anything in support of Russia.

The political Group of Eight has de facto been transformed into a G7. The series of political defeats suffered by the Russian leadership, starting with the Rose Revolution in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and continuing through the NATO summit in Bucharest in April, has been extended by a new failure.

The main achievement of the Russian leadership — which the modern world could not (or did not want to) believe — is the resurrection of fear of the “Russian bear.” The world will long remember its fear and (albeit temporary) helplessness. …

Jonah Goldberg introduces us to an article in The Atlantic on the chaos in the Clinton campaign. The folks that burned through a quarter of a billion dollars.

… reporter Joshua Green picks through the internal e-mail viscera of the Clinton campaign and finds that the destructive nature of the Clintons is not always aimed at their enemies.

Indeed, shocking as this may be to people naive enough to believe that a woman with no executive experience, no security clearance, no significant successes under her belt, who was catapulted to presidential prominence solely because her husband treated her like a cautionary tale in a country-music song, was nonetheless a co-president for eight years: It turns out that the Bride of Clintonstein was an awful chief executive. Infected by her husband’s passive-aggressiveness, she stood paralyzed as the HMS Hillary took on more and more water, until even the string quartet on the deck was leaping for the flotation devices.

As Green pulls memo after memo from the great white’s carcass like so many Florida license plates, we discover that the Clintons knew long, long ago that they couldn’t beat Barack Obama to the nomination. But winning was secondary, carnage was king. You might even say of her decision to stay in the race: This was no polling accident. …

Craig Crawford comments on the article also.

… But giving so many campaign documents to the press? That suggests a certain hostility between candidate and underlings that should give pause to those who believed that Clinton was ready “on day one” to take command of the White House.

Beyond this mutiny, the behind-the-scenes paperwork shows how Clinton horribly mismanaged her own people. Postponing critical decisions until the roof caved in, and then forcing her staff to manage the damage control. Not a pretty picture for running the country.

Here is Part I from The Atlantic.

For all that has been written and said about Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the Democratic primaries, one issue still nags. Everybody knows what happened. But we still don’t have a clear picture of how it happened, or why.

The after-battle assessments in the major newspapers and newsweeklies generally agreed on the big picture: the campaign was not prepared for a lengthy fight; it had an insufficient delegate operation; it squandered vast sums of money; and the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia—one day a shots-’n’-beers brawler, the next a Hallmark Channel mom. Through it all, her staff feuded and bickered, while her husband distracted. But as a journalistic exercise, the “campaign obit” is inherently flawed, reflecting the viewpoints of those closest to the press rather than empirical truth.

How did things look on the inside, as they unraveled?

To find out, I approached a number of current and former Clinton staffers and outside consultants and asked them to share memos, e-mails, meeting minutes, diaries—anything that would offer a contemporaneous account. The result demonstrates that paranoid dysfunction breeds the impulse to hoard. Everything from major strategic plans to bitchy staff e-mail feuds was handed over. (See for yourself: much of it is posted online at www.theatlantic.com/clinton.)

Two things struck me right away. The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency. What follows is the inside account of how the campaign for the seemingly unstoppable Democratic nominee came into being, and then came apart.

Wondering what to make of Corsi’s Obama Nation? Peter Wehner has a cautionary note.

There has been a lot of attention given in the last few days to Jerome Corsi’s new book, The Obama Nation, which will debut at #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. It seems pretty clear, I think, that conservatives should not hitch their hopes to it.

Corsi himself, based on press accounts, is a leading advocate of the North American Union conspiracy. The NAU, for those who believe in it, is, according to a Boston Globe story, “a supranational organization that will soon fuse Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a single economic and political unit.” In an interview, Corsi said he believes in the existence of the NAU because, according to Corsi, President Bush was not securing the Southern border.

According to reports, Corsi has suggested that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lesbian, called John Kerry “anti-Christian, anti-American” and called Pope John Paul II “senile,” and said pedophilia “is OK with the Pope as long as it isn’t reported by the liberal press.”

As for the book: it seems to be riddled with factual errors–some relatively minor  … and some significant …

John Podhoretz watched Saddleback.

… Obama talked around most issues; perhaps most oddly, he said Clarence Thomas was the one Supreme Court justice he would not have selected because he hadn’t had enough experience (Thomas had been on the federal bench for a year and a half before he was nominated, which is about as long as Obama was in the Senate before he began seriously considering a run for the presidency). …

Roger Simon too.

And a Corner post from Mark Hemingway.

I don’t want to get to overheated about what occurred last night, but I do think McCain had a clear and decisive victory over Obama. It all comes down to something that Phil Bredesen, the Democratic governor of Tennessee recently said about Obama: “Instead of giving big speeches at big stadiums, he needs to give straight-up 10-word answers to people at Wal-Mart about how he would improve their lives.”

By that standard, McCain did extremely well and Obama did very poorly. McCain’s answers were direct, confident and, most importantly, serious. When asked about what leaders he would consult as president, he first suggested Gen. Petraeus, architect of the surge, who he correctly praised as one of America’s all-time great military leaders. By way of contrast, Obama suggested he would seek out the advice of a typical white person, er, his grandmother and his wife Michelle, who’s still trying to decide whether she’s proud of her country. …

Daily Mail piece says the Sahara was lush and green 5,000 years ago. Then the climate changed, without SUV’s.

Borowitz and Scrappleface have Olympic reports.

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Picli has stunning moon pic.

Victor Davis Hanson says it looks like a “Brave Old World.”

Russia invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at levels previously unimaginable. Gulf monarchies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing. Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch — all in a globalized world that tunes into the Olympics each night from Beijing.

“Citizens of the world” were supposed to share, in relative harmony, our new “Planet Earth,” which was to have followed from an interconnected system of free trade, instantaneous electronic communications, civilized diplomacy and shared consumer capitalism.

But was that ever quite true? …

David Warren looks at Russia.

Russia has long been a very pedagogical country. She likes to teach lessons to her neighbours. The smaller the neighbours, the more lessons they can expect to receive.

Through most of the 20th century, Russia was at her most expansive. Thanks to the Yalta settlements, and the miracle of nuclear weapons technology, the whole world became Russia’s “near abroad,” and various little countries of eastern and central Europe became her disciplined pupils. She taught us all lessons in dialectical materialism and scientific socialism, until she collapsed under the strain of it.

Vladimir Putin — the strongman of Russia, regardless of passing titles — is, in addition to being an old KGB officer thoroughly schooled in the ruthless barbarism of Communist power politics, also tsar from an older school of Russian imperialism. The notion that Russia — whose land area makes her by far the planet’s largest single state — could be threatened by a neighbour 1/245th her size, should not be confused with paranoia.

We need no more believe that, than believe that the large, fully-organized Russian military force that invaded Georgian sovereign territory over the weekend, while the world was watching the Olympics, was responding to a “provocation” by Georgia’s elected president, Mikheil Saakashvili. Unquestionably the latter has exercised poor practical judgment in dealing with the bear pawing at his little realm, but that is beside the point. …

Tony Blankley too.

Charles Krauthammer says we have ways of stopping Russia’s new Putintate.

… We are not without resources. There are a range of measures to be deployed if Russia does not live up to its cease-fire commitments:

1. Suspend the NATO-Russia Council established in 2002 to help bring Russia closer to the West. Make clear that dissolution will follow suspension. The council gives Russia a seat at the NATO table. Message: Invading neighboring democracies forfeits the seat.

2. Bar Russian entry to the World Trade Organization.

3. Dissolve the G-8. Putin’s dictatorship long made Russia’s presence in this group of industrial democracies a farce, but no one wanted to upset the bear by expelling it. No need to. The seven democracies simply withdraw. (And if Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, who has been sympathetic to Putin’s Georgia adventure, wants to stay, he can have an annual G-2 dinner with Putin.) Then immediately announce the reconstitution of the original G-7.

4. Announce a U.S.-European boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. To do otherwise would be obscene. Sochi is 15 miles from Abkhazia, the other Georgian province just invaded by Russia. The Games will become a riveting contest between the Russian, Belarusan and Jamaican bobsled teams.

All of these steps (except dissolution of the G-8, which should be irreversible) would be subject to reconsideration depending upon Russian action — most importantly and minimally, its withdrawal of troops from Georgia proper to South Ossetia and Abkhazia. …

Slate tells us why Georgia and Georgia have the same names.

The execrable Barbara Boxer goes after Tom Coburn, one of the few Senators who represent our interests. Debra Saunders has the story.

Karl Rove sees four key battleground states.

Presidential campaigns ultimately come down to who can win 270 Electoral College votes. With most states favoring one candidate or the other, this year’s contest could come down to a few battleground states.

Based on visits this past week with party leaders and old pros, it’s clear that Barack Obama will focus on Colorado and Virginia. Both have large concentrations of white, college-educated voters with whom Mr. Obama is popular. And both have seen Democrats surge recently. …

… If Mr. McCain lost Colorado and Virginia, he would likely have 264 electoral votes (assuming he carried the other states President Bush won in 2004). To win, he would have to pick up a state Democrats are counting on winning, such as Michigan. …

… Then there is Ohio. Ground zero in ’04, its 20 electoral votes will be hotly contested again this year. No Republican has won the White House without winning the Buckeye State. …

The Economist continues it’s series on bellwether states. This time North Carolina. Pickerhead thinks anyone who thinks Obama has a chance in NC must have scored some good dope.

THE past few years have been difficult for Mark Paylor, a pig, cattle and grain farmer. On a sunny summer morning in Greensboro he complains that rising petrol and feed prices have driven up his costs so far that it is impossible to compete with cheap imports. He is disgusted by trade agreements that let Mexico send America jalapeños riddled with salmonella, when American farmers have to play by stricter rules. Mr Paylor is a black and a Democrat, and he clearly wants change. He will not vote for John McCain. But he does not have much faith in Barack Obama, either: “He might put on a show to win, but he don’t understand.”

That comment suggests why Mr Obama faces an uphill climb in North Carolina. As swing states go, North Carolina is an unlikely prospect for the Democrats. It is a culturally conservative southern state that has voted for the Republican in every presidential election since 1976. In 2004 George Bush clobbered John Kerry here by a 12-point margin, even though Mr Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards, was North Carolina’s senator at the time. …

Walter Williams looks at what made some achieving black schools.

Most people know the tragic state of black education today. We know that billions of dollars are spent on federal government programs such as No Child Left Behind and the billions spent by state and local governments. If you were to ask an education “expert” to explain the tragedy, you’d get answers such as racial discrimination and underfunding.

My colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell has written volumes on black education and an article worth reading is one he wrote some years ago in The Public Interest (Spring 1976) and reprinted in his book “Education: Assumptions Versus History.”  …

Ever wonder why so many Olympic records are being broken? Slate has answers.

Can we please stop fussing over every new Olympic record?

A new record means that an athlete using today’s equipment outperformed an athlete using yesterday’s equipment. It’s not a fair fight.

In swimming alone, today’s advantages include:

1. LZR Racer suit. It reduces friction (compared with skin) and is structurally designed to compress and streamline the body for maximum speed. Estimated drag reduction: 5 percent to 10 percent. Estimated average improvement in top swimmers’ best times: 2 percent. Designed by NASA scientists and computers, among others. Cost: $500.

2. Pool depth. This is the deepest pool ever used in the Olympics. Depth disperses turbulence, reducing resistance. …

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Victor Davis Hanson says Russia’s move was six wins for them.

Lost amid all the controversies surrounding the Georgian tragedy is the sheer diabolic brilliance of the long-planned Russia invasion. Let us count the ways in which it is a win/win situation for Russia.

The Home Front
The long-suffering Russian people resent the loss of global influence and empire, but not necessarily the Soviet Union and its gulags that once ensured such stature. The invasion restores a sense of Russian nationalism and power to its populace without the stink of Stalinism, and is indeed cloaked as a sort of humanitarian intervention on behalf of beleaguered Ossetians.

There will be no Russian demonstrations about an “illegal war,” much less nonsense about “blood for oil,” but instead rejoicing at the payback of an uppity former province that felt its Western credentials somehow trumped Russian tanks. How ironic that the Western heartthrob, the old Marxist Mikhail Gorbachev, is now both lamenting Western encouragement of Georgian “aggression,” while simultaneously gloating over the return of Russian military daring. …

Can Hillary find a way to ruin Obama’s convention? “Yes she can,” says Maureen Dowd.

While Obama was spending three hours watching “The Dark Knight” five time zones away, and going to a fund-raiser featuring “Aloha attire” and Hawaiian pupus, Hillary was busy planning her convention.

You can almost hear her mind whirring: She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.

Now they’ve made Barry’s convention all about them — their dissatisfaction and revisionism and barely disguised desire to see him fail. Whatever insincere words of support the Clintons muster, their primal scream gets louder: He can’t win! He can’t close the deal! We told you so!

Hillary’s orchestrating a play within the play in Denver. Just as Hamlet used the device to show that his stepfather murdered his father, Hillary will try to show the Democrats they chose the wrong savior.

Her former aide Howard Wolfson fanned the divisive flames Monday on ABC News, arguing that Hillary would have beaten Obama in Iowa and become the nominee if John Edwards’s affair had come out last year — an assertion contradicted by a University of Iowa survey showing that far more Edwards supporters had Obama as their second choice.

Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama’s big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds of being the nominee in 2012. …

Contemplating the Clintons, Michael Goodwin says, “They’re baaaccckk!”

… Rested and ready, the Clinton crew is busy stirring the pot again.

Fresh from a nearly six-week layoff, Hillary and her team are picking up where they left off in June. Her pledges of unity and wholehearted acceptance of Barack Obama as the Democratic Party‘s nominee seem to be, well, halfhearted.

One day she’s on a YouTube video talking about the need for a “catharsis” at the Democratic convention, which sounds suspiciously like a demand to have her name put in nomination for a roll call. Then an interview surfaces of Bubba refusing to say Obama is ready to be President. And close aide Howard Wolfson rips the scab off the primary wounds by saying Hillary would have won if the media had exposed John Edwards‘ affair earlier.

This is definitely not the vacation Obama had in mind. From the headlines about Edwards’ sordid romps to the Russians’ brutal reminder of their Evil Empire days, his downtime before the convention begins Aug. 25 hasn’t been stress-free. …

Almost every disgusting thing our country has done with race has been the policy of Democrats. American Spectator on their record.

As Democrats prepare to nominate Senator Barack Obama to be the first black president, the Democratic National Committee and its chairman Howard Dean have whitewashed the party’s horrific and lengthy record of racism. The omission is in the section of the DNC website that describes the party’s history. The missing history raises the obvious question of whether the Democrats, unable or simply unwilling to put their party on record as taking direct responsibility for one of the worst racial crimes of the ages, will be able to run a campaign free of the racial animosities it has regularly brought both to American presidential campaigns and American political and social life in general.

What else to make of the official party history as presented by the DNC on its website? It is a history so sanitized of historical reality it makes Stalin look like historian David McCullough.

The DNC website section labeled “Party History,” linked here, is in fact scrubbed clean of the not-so-little dirty secret that fueled Democrats’ political successes for over a century and a half and made American life a hell on earth for black Americans. Literally, the DNC official history, which begins with the creation of the party in 1800, gets to the creation of the DNC itself in 1848 and then…poof!…the next sentence says: “As the 19th Century came to a close, the American electorate changed more and more rapidly.” It quickly heads into a riff on poor immigrants coming to America.

In a stroke, 52 years of Democrat history vanishes. Disappeared faster than the truth in the Clinton administration. Why would this be? Allow me to sketch in a few facts from those missing 52 years. For that matter, lets add in the facts from the party history before and after those 52 years, since they aren’t mentioned by the Democrats’ National Committee either.

So what’s missing? …

… * Last, but certainly not least, there is no reference to the fact that Birmingham, Alabama Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, who infamously unleashed dogs and fire hoses on civil rights protestors, was in fact — yes indeed — both a member of the Democratic National Committee and the Ku Klux Klan. …

Seattle Post -Intelligencer compares the offices of McCain and Obama. Obama fails the test. He is one of those sick people with a neat desk and office.

By their offices ye shall know them.

The personalities and personal histories of John McCain and Barack Obama are as evident in the artwork, books and mementoes in their Senate offices as in any words they may utter.

McCain’s office oozes comfy clutter and informality: random piles of books, a fortune-cookie message taped to the desk, an abundance of tchotchkes and bric-a-brac.

Obama’s office feels more like a gallery of modern art: precisely placed objects, sparsely adorned surfaces, clean lines, choreographed displays.

Both offices show their occupants’ sentimental streak: McCain has a picture of his favorite high school teacher, and a 1904 Navy register that lists his grandfather as a midshipman. Obama has a photo of the cliff in Hawaii where his mother’s ashes were scattered into the Pacific, and a tiger-beating stick from his grandmother’s village in Kenya.

A walking tour of the Senate offices of the two presidential candidates tells a tale of their occupants: …

Charles Murray says for most people, college is a waste of time. He proposes a series of certification exams.

… Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.

Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough — four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you’re a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school. …

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The Georgian mess allows John Podhoretz to continue his theme of the end of the vacation from history.

Quick show of hands: Who among us expected that, in the course of the convention acceptance speeches by John McCain and Barack Obama and throughout the three debates in which they face each other in the fall, the words “South Ossetia” might be mentioned again and again? Or that the nation of Georgia might loom larger over the November election than the state of Georgia?

This is the thing about presidential elections — they can turn on a dime. This one has already. The success of the surge is playing a complex role in the calculations of both camps, with the possibility of a clear victory in sight in Iraq before anyone actually casts a vote in November. For a time, it appeared the surge victory might, in an odd and unexpected way, help Barack Obama by taking Iraq off the table as a source of anxiety and allowing him to focus the election more specifically on the economy. But Obama’s own uncertainty about how to address the surge suggests otherwise. …

National Review editors on Russia’s invasion of Georgia.

… A massive Russian response, quite manifestly ready to go, was launched. Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia. Another pro-Russian force attacked Georgia in that part of the second breakaway province of Abkhazia that Tbilisi still controls. Georgia’s well-trained but modest army was forced to withdraw. Russian planes continued to bomb central Georgia, seeking to degrade both military and economic targets. When Saakashvili proposed a cease-fire, the Russians at first refused to talk to him, then started multiplying conditions for their acceptance; those conditions now include Saakashvili’s resignation.

Throughout this calculated aggression, the Russian media has played an inglorious but technically brilliant role. They have used the most modern techniques of journalism and marketing to broadcast the worst lies of the Kremlin. Those lies themselves have been cleverly designed to imitate the West’s own justifications for the Kosovo intervention: “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Doubtless the Georgian forces committed crimes in their incursion into South Ossetia. There are plausible reports that they shelled villages. But they were overwhelmed so quickly that they simply could not have committed crimes of the scale alleged by the Kremlin. Besides, Russia’s long patronage of South Ossetian attacks, its invasion across internationally recognized borders, and its relentless bombing of a country that has retreated and offered a cease-fire deprives it of any right to make such accusations. Russian policy is a war crime in itself.

None of this is or should be about Russia or the Russian people. All of it stinks of Soviet propaganda, Soviet brutality, Soviet morality, and Soviet nostalgia. It is the handiwork of the siloviki clique that currently monopolizes power in Russia through authoritarian politics, kleptocratic economics, and media manipulation. This clique must be shown that war crimes do not pay. The Russian people, too, need to learn that nostalgia for Soviet imperialism is a dead end for Russia. …

Corner posts on the subject.

… We are limited in how we can help our Georgian ally, but Putin’s brazen attack on Georgia should be a warning to the United States and our allies on Russia’s border and elsewhere in the area that they need to be prepared for more of this.

George Will is brilliant.

Asked in 1957 what would determine his government’s course, Harold Macmillan, Britain’s new prime minister, replied, “Events, dear boy, events.” Now, into America’s trivializing presidential campaign, a pesky event has intruded — a European war. Russian tanks, heavy artillery, strategic bombers, ballistic missiles and a naval blockade batter a European nation. We are not past such things after all. The end of history will be postponed, again. …

… What is it about August? The First World War began in August 1914. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact effectively announced the Second World War in August 1939. Iraq, a fragment of the collapse of empires precipitated by August 1914, invaded Kuwait in August 1990. (The August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev)

This year’s August upheaval coincides, probably not coincidentally, with the world’s preoccupation with that charade of international comity, the Olympics. For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi’s 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film “Triumph of the Will,” has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.

A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.

As for Iraq, Chris Hitchens wonders why it’s so hard for some people to accept and celebrate good news.

One day I will publish my entire collection of upside-down Iraq headlines, where the true purport of the story is the inverse of the intended one. (Top billing thus far would go to the greatest downer of them all: the tale of Iraq’s unemployed gravediggers, their always-insecure standard of living newly imperiled by the falling murder rate. You don’t believe me? Wait for the forthcoming anthology.) While you wait, you might consider last week’s astonishing report about the Iraqi budget surplus and the way in which the report was reported. …

… It is in no spirit of revenge that I remind you that, as little as a year ago, the whole of smart liberal opinion believed that the dissolution of Baathism and militarism had been a mistake, that Iraq itself was a bottomless pit of wasted dollars and pointless casualties, and that the only option was to withdraw as fast as possible and let the inevitable civil war burn itself out. To the left of that liberal consensus, people of the caliber and quality of Michael Moore were describing the nihilist “insurgents” as the moral equivalent of the Minutemen, and to the right of the same consensus, people like Pat Buchanan were hinting that we had been cheated into the whole enterprise by a certain minority whose collective name began with the letter J.

Had any of this sinister nonsense been heeded, it wouldn’t even be Saddam’s goons who were getting their hands on that fantastic wealth in such a strategic country. It would have been the gruesome militias who answer either to fanatical Wahhabism on one wing or to fanatical Shiism on another, and who are the instruments of tyrannical forces in neighboring countries. Hardly a prospect to be viewed with indifference. I still reel when I remember how many supposedly responsible people advocated surrendering Iraq without a fight. …

The Politico points out seven worrisome items for Barack.

A few weeks back, Time magazine was musing that John McCain was in danger of sliding from “a long shot” to a “no-shot.” Around the same time, a hard-nosed former Hillary Clinton insider declared the race “effectively over” thanks to the McCain campaign’s ineptitude, the tanking U.S. economy and Obama’s advantages in cash, charisma and hope. And Obama, up by three to six points nationally, was about to leverage a much-anticipated trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and Europe into a pre-convention poll surge.

Instead, his supporters are now suffering a pre-Denver panic attack, watching as John McCain draws incrementally closer in state and national polls – with Rasmussen’s most recent daily national tracker showing a statistical dead heat.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been privately enumerating her doubts about Obama to supporters, according to people who have spoken with her. Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn recently unveiled a PowerPoint presentation red-flagging Obama’s lukewarm leads among white female voters and Hispanics – while predicting a five-point swing could turn a presumed Obama win into a McCain landslide.

“It’s not that people think McCain will win – it’s that they are realizing that McCain could win,” says Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown, whose surveys show tight races in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. …

Thomas Sowell thinks there is little substance to Obama.

Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, Professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation.

Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But, instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures.

Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real substance.

Senator Barack Obama’s campaign this year reminds me very much of that course from Professor Galbraith. Many people were ecstatic during the early primaries, as each state’s voters heard his glittering generalities for the first time.

The media loved the novelty of a black candidate with a real chance to become president, and his left-wing vision of the world was largely their vision as well. There was a veritable media honeymoon for Obama. …

Debra Saunders has Edwards thoughts.

… The pretty-boy candidate always was the biggest phony at any Democratic debate. He was the $400-haircut poster boy for poverty. The 28,000-square-foot mansion owner, who preached about global warming. The candidate who demanded that other Democrats swear off accepting contributions from Fox News baron Rupert Murdoch, after he pocketed a $500,000 advance – with an extra $300,000 for expenses – from Murdoch’s Harper Collins. The man who ran as the doting husband of the cancer-battling Elizabeth Edwards while he was boffing an overpaid campaign aide.

If I were a Democrat, I would be spittin’ mad. If Edwards had won his party’s nomination for president, news of the affair most surely would have gotten out and the Democratic Party’s chances of winning the White House would have evaporated instantly, as would-be supporters would have realized they can’t believe a word the man says.

Edwards had asserted that National Enquirer reports of an affair with Rielle Hunter were “completely untrue.” In admitting to the affair – but not the lovechild, if you care to believe him – Edwards explained in a statement, that he relied on inaccuracies in the story to deny it, “But being 99 percent honest is no longer enough.”

99 percent honest? Even when he is coming clean, he’s a snake. …

David Harsanyi says, when it comes to politicians, low expectations would be our wisest course.

… Incredibly, despite our low opinion of elected officials and countless examples, this election season millions of otherwise reasonable Americans will once again dutifully plaster their cars with bumper stickers or plant yard signs bearing the name of some lifelong bureaucrat who has promised them the world.

Are these men and women running for office so special that they deserve near-religious adoration?

Is government so important in your life that you offer it?

Politicians exist to implement public policy. They lean left or they lean right.

Do they possess an extraordinary ability to magically “fix” the economy, or “create” jobs or change the world? Hardly.

Let’s keep expectations for politicians where they belong: Stay out of jail. Everything else is gravy.

What’s it like to challenge the globalony greens in England? The documentarian Martin Durkin has some answers.

… In the year that has passed since the film was broadcast, I have discovered what that “chilling effect” is. It is when a programme maker needs to risk his career in order to make a particular film. It is when a commissioning editor or a broadcaster is genuinely fearful of straying into certain areas.

The main Ofcom complainant noted: “This is Not an Attack on Free Speech”. So rather than try to shut me up, bully and vilify, why don’t they engage in an honest discussion about the science?

I’ll tell you why. Because the theory of global warming is crumbling round their ears. For the past decade now, world temperatures have been static or slightly declining – and that’s according to the IPCC. I don’t remember their silly models predicting that 10 years ago.

I no longer give a stuff whether left-liberal types agree with my views on global warming. However, I do expect every last one of them who claims to value the freedom to speak one’s mind, to defend my right to air them.

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George Friedman of Stratfor on Solzhenitsyn and the struggle for Russia’s soul.

… Solzhenitsyn served Western purposes when he undermined the Soviet state. But that was not his purpose. His purpose was to destroy the Soviet state so that his vision of Russia could re-emerge. When his interests and the West’s coincided, he won the Nobel Prize. When they diverged, he became a joke. But Solzhenitsyn never really cared what Americans or the French thought of him and his ideas. He wasn’t speaking to them and had no interest or hope of remaking them. Solzhenitsyn was totally alien to American culture. He was speaking to Russia and the vision he had was a resurrection of Mother Russia, if not with the czar, then certainly with the church and state. That did not mean liberalism; Mother Russia was dramatically oppressive. But it was neither a country of mass murder nor of vulgar materialism.

It must also be remembered that when Solzhenitsyn spoke of Russia, he meant imperial Russia at its height, and imperial Russia’s borders at its height looked more like the Soviet Union than they looked like Russia today. “August 1914” is a book that addresses geopolitics. Russian greatness did not have to express itself via empire, but logically it should — something to which Solzhenitsyn would not have objected.

Solzhenitsyn could not teach Americans, whose intellectual genes were incompatible with his. But it is hard to think of anyone who spoke to the Russian soul as deeply as he did. He first ripped Russia apart with his indictment. He was later ignored by a Russia out of control under former President Boris Yeltsin. But today’s Russia is very slowly moving in the direction that Solzhenitsyn wanted. And that could make Russia extraordinarily powerful. Imagine a Soviet Union not ruled by thugs and incompetents. Imagine Russia ruled by people resembling Solzhenitsyn’s vision of a decent man.

Solzhenitsyn was far more prophetic about the future of the Soviet Union than almost all of the Ph.D.s in Russian studies. Entertain the possibility that the rest of Solzhenitsyn’s vision will come to pass. It is an idea that ought to cause the world to be very thoughtful.

Peter Mansoor in WaPo writes on how the surge worked in Iraq.

Given the divisive debate over the Iraq war, perhaps it was inevitable that the accomplishments of the recently concluded “surge” would become shrouded in the fog of 30-second sound bites. Too often we hear that the dramatic security improvement in Iraq is due not to the surge but to other, unrelated factors and that the positive developments of the past 18 months have been merely a coincidence.

To realize how misleading these assertions are, one must understand that the “surge” was more than an infusion of reinforcements into Iraq. Of greater importance was the change in the way U.S. forces were employed starting in February 2007, when Gen. David Petraeus ordered them to position themselves with Iraqi forces out in neighborhoods. This repositioning was based on newly published counterinsurgency doctrine that emphasized the protection of the population and recognized that the only way to secure people is to live among them. …

The Economist on Obama fatigue.

… The junior senator from Illinois is strikingly self-obsessed even by the standards of politicians. He has already written two autobiographies. He seems to be happiest as a politician addressing huge crowds of adoring fans. His convention speech at Denver was always going to be an extraordinary moment, given that he will be delivering it on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. But Mr Obama decided to move it to a local sports stadium that has room for 75,000.

There are worrying signs, for the Democrats, that Obama fatigue is beginning to set in. A Pew poll this week showed that 76% of respondents named Mr Obama as the candidate they had heard most about compared with 11% who named Mr McCain. But close to half (48%) of Pew’s interviewees said that they had been hearing too much about Mr Obama—and 22% said that they have formed a less favourable opinion of him recently.

Mr Obama is undoubtedly an enormously talented public speaker. But his rhetorical tropes can begin to pall, particularly in a campaign that has already gone on for 18 months. How many more times can Americans hear the phrase “Yes we can” without wondering whether they really want to? …

George McGovern says his party should respect the union “secret” ballot.

… Voting is an immense privilege.

That is why I am concerned about a new development that could deny this freedom to many Americans. As a longtime friend of labor unions, I must raise my voice against pending legislation I see as a disturbing and undemocratic overreach not in the interest of either management or labor.

The legislation is called the Employee Free Choice Act, and I am sad to say it runs counter to ideals that were once at the core of the labor movement. Instead of providing a voice for the unheard, EFCA risks silencing those who would speak. …

Fascinating Michael Barone piece about the origins of voting habits.

To understand changes in the political map, we naturally tend to look for contemporary explanations. But American political alignments are not written on an empty slate. Beginnings matter, and the civic personalities of states tend to reflect the cultural folkways of their first settlers.

So I was not startled when I compared state poll results in this election with the results of the 2004 election and found patterns that reflect the surges of historic internal migration. For this year’s polls, I used the results from FiveThirtyEight.com, which discounts results based on its estimates of pollsters’ accuracy and the recentness of the polls. Thus, they don’t fully reflect the recent tightening of the national polls.

In two broad swaths of the country, John McCain is running about as well as George W. Bush did or better. One is the route of the westward surge of New England Yankees across upstate New York, northern Ohio, southern Michigan and into northern Illinois. McCain is running ahead of Bush in Massachusetts and just 1 percent behind in New York and (despite its economic problems) Michigan. Historically, this Yankee-settled region has been turned off by Southern accents, such as Bush’s Texas twang, and McCain evidently is less off-putting to its cultural liberals.

The other area in which McCain is running even with or better than Bush is the set of states settled by the Scotch-Irish stock, who thronged to the Appalachians in Colonial days and whose descendants followed the southwest path pioneered by their hero, Andrew Jackson. …

More on the Neanderthal murder mystery from The Independent, UK.

Neanderthals first appeared in Europe at least 300,000 years ago but they disappeared after the arrival of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, who first arrived in Europe 50,000 years ago. This has led to speculation about whether the Neanderthals interbred with the new arrivals to form a hybrid population that became submerged in the human gene pool, or were instead wiped out by them, either through competition for resources or by violence.

The latest evidence, an analysis of DNA recovered from a 38,000-year-old fossilised thigh bone, suggests the Neanderthals did not interbreed with modern humans but were eradicated by them.

DNA extracted from an adult Neanderthal man who lived near caves in what is now Croatia also revealed that the Neanderthals in Europe probably never numbered more than 10,000 individuals at any one time – a precariously small population size.

The new evidence about the demise of the Neanderthals comes from the complete sequence of DNA within tiny cellular structures known as mitochondria. This mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited and is easier to isolate from ancient bones than the conventional DNA found within the cell nucleus. …

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Last week Pickerhead kept hoping Robert Conquest would write something on Solzhenitsyn. It finally appeared Friday in the WSJ. Conquest includes an excerpt from a poem Solzhenitsyn asked him to translate. The poem mentions Studebakers, Dodges, and Chevrolets. These are references to some of the 400,000 trucks our country send to the Soviets during the war. The Studebaker was the third edition of the 2 1/2 ton 6 wheel drive GMC truck produced during the war. GM couldn’t build enough, so International had a version, and then Studebaker built the ones that were most common in the Soviet Union. Red Army soldiers loved the truck. When they wished to say a woman was well built, they would say, “she was built like a Studebaker.”

Those of us who had long been concerned to expose and resist Stalinism, in the West as in the USSR, learned much from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I met him in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1974, soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union — the result of his novel, “The Gulag Archipelago,” being published in Paris. He was personally pleasant; I have a photograph of the two of us, he holding a Russian edition of my book, “The Great Terror,” with evident approbation. He asked if I would translate a “little” poem of his. Of course I agreed.

The little poem, “Prussian Nights,” turned out to be 2,000 lines! …

Anne Applebaum on the war in Georgia.

For the best possible illustration of why Islamic terrorism may one day be considered the least of our problems, look no farther than the BBC’s split-screen coverage of yesterday’s Olympic opening ceremonies. On one side, fireworks sparkled, and thousands of exotically dressed Chinese dancers bent their bodies into the shape of doves, the cosmos and more. On the other side, gray Russian tanks were shown rolling into South Ossetia, a rebel province of Georgia. The effect was striking: Two of the world’s rising powers were strutting their stuff.

The difference, of course, is that one event has been rehearsed for years, while the other, if not a total surprise, was not actually scheduled to take place this week. That, too, is significant: The Chinese challenge to Western power has been a long time coming, and it is in a certain sense predictable. As a rule, the Chinese do not make sudden moves and do not try to provoke crises.

Russia, by contrast, is an unpredictable power, which makes responding to Moscow more difficult. …

WSJ Editors too.

… Western leaders should have seen this coming. Russia has baited the hot-tempered Georgian leader with trade and travel embargoes as well as saber-rattling. Georgia has had to tolerate a few thousand Russian troops on its soil — only Moscow recognizes the self-declared independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And in April, Russia downed a Georgian drone over Abkhaz — that is, Georgian — air space. Russia in recent years has also granted citizenship to the separatists. That looks like premeditation now: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledged yesterday to “protect the lives and dignity of Russian citizens, no matter where they are located.”

Perhaps Mr. Saakashvili finally snapped and acted first here, as the Kremlin insists. If so, it was a huge mistake, as he has picked a fight with a much larger opponent and damaged his country’s chances of joining NATO. The West may support Georgia’s territorial integrity, but no one wants war with Russia.

Now it’s up to NATO and especially the U.S. to persuade both sides to stand down. President Bush discussed the hostilities with Mr. Putin yesterday in Beijing, where they are attending the Olympics. The prime minister needs to hear that using Ossetia as a pretext for imperialism will have consequences for Russia’s relationship with the West.

George Will’s column on the last 100 years of race in our country has a welcome and appropriate note of optimism.

The Economist writes on another bellwether state. This time Colorado.

IN ONE episode of “South Park”, a potty-mouthed cartoon set in Colorado, a film festival comes to town. At first the locals are delighted. The visitors boost the economy and the films, which feature gay cowboys eating pudding, are better than expected. But the festival turns out to be a dastardly scheme, devised by Californians, to ruin pretty mountain towns and turn them into versions of Los Angeles. The natives must fight back.

This is pretty much how Coloradoans view their state. Not so long ago, the natives will tell you, it was a beautiful place filled with hardy individualists—“a leave-me-alone kind of state”, according to Jon Caldara of the conservative Independence Institute. It was also solidly Republican. Since the 1960s Colorado has voted for a Democratic president only once, in 1992, when Ross Perot and George Bush senior split the Republican vote. Then the Californians and other newcomers arrived, sprinkling their monstrous houses over the hills and upending the state’s politics.

These days Colorado’s Democrats are on a roll. Since 2004 they have taken control of the governor’s office, both chambers of the legislature and two congressional seats. John Hickenlooper, Denver’s Democratic mayor, is enormously popular across the state. In the caucuses on February 5th more people came out for Barack Obama, who carried the state, than for all the Republican candidates put together. …

Roger Simon picks the best political ad of the season, so far.

Kathryn Jean Lopez captures the essence of a Noonan column.

And Maureen Dowd captures the essence of John Edwards.

… The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.

So narcissist walks into a New York bar and meets a legendarily wacky former Gotham party girl — whose ’80s exploits were chronicled in a novel by her former boyfriend Jay McInerney because the behavior of her and her friends “intrigued and appalled me.” When you appall Jay McInerney, you know you’re in trouble.

The president manqué gives Rielle Hunter, formerly Lisa Druck, more than $114,000 to shoot vain little videos for his Web site (even though she’s a neophyte), one of which is scored with the song “True Reflections” about the Narcissus pool, which goes: “When you look into a mirror, do you like what’s looking at you? Now that you’ve seen your true reflections, what on earth are you gonna do?”

He has an affair with Hunter, while he’s honing his speech on the imperative to “live in a moral, honest, just America.” A married former aide says he’s the father when she gets pregnant, even though she’s telling people Edwards is the dad. And one of his campaign donors pays off Hunter to get her resettled with the baby out of North Carolina.

But the Breck Girl wants a gold star for the fact that he sent his marriage into remission when his wife was in remission. That’s special. …

Martin Peretz notes a new tactic by the fascist left.

Richmond Times-Dispatch on race in the race.

… Rightly or wrongly and largely unspoken, race is a deep-running factor in American culture — infusing much that it should not but does. Barack Obama is the first African-American with a genuine prospect of becoming president of an electorate that is 11 percent black and 77 percent white. Because of that percentage discrepancy, Obama’s chances of winning depend greatly on the extent to which — in commentator Juan Williams’ words — he can “assure undecided white voters that he shares their [conservative social] values and is worthy of their trust.”

SO HOW seemingly odd that Obama should inject race into the campaign. Possibly he did it to build a force field around himself to deflect every criticism of every kind.

During the primaries, he blasted Bill Clinton for allegedly making race an issue in the Carolinas — implying Clinton was doing it to gin up white turnout for Hillary. Obama also perceived subtle racial undertones in John McCain’s first general-election ad — i.e., its description of McCain as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”

In late June, Obama began mentioning his race (as he frequently had) in combination with dark implications that McCain would deploy race against Obama (as McCain never has): They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. “He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

Finally on July 31, in Springfield, Mo., Obama dealt down and dirty:

“Nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know — he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills. You know. He’s risky. That’s essentially the argument they’re making.” …

Drudge reports on Pelosi’s book’s flop.