MCCLATCHY: Iraqis no longer ask, ‘Are you Sunni or Shiite?’

DAMON ROOT ON HERBERT SPENCER: How a libertarian individualist was recast as a social Darwinist.

R.I.P., Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

RASMUSSEN: Only 22% Say McCain Ad Racist, But Over Half (53%) See Obama Dollar-bill Comment That Way.

IN THE LONDON TIMES: Strong praise for Kathleen Parker’s Save the Males. “Let’s dance. The arrival of Kathleen Parker’s book marks one of those sensational moments of seismic cultural shift that seem unthinkable, unimaginable.” Our podcast interview with Parker is here.

OUCH: “I think the Iraqi government is more functional than our domestic airlines right now…”

TROPICAL STORM EDOUARD FORMS, and may hit land in Texas and/or Louisiana as a hurricane. More at Weather Nerd.

WHY IT’S PROBABLY SMARTER TO keep your gas-guzzling S.U.V. instead of trading it in on a hybrid. Of course, to some degree this depends on where you think gas prices are going over the next few years.

FORMER QUEEN GUITARIST BRIAN MAY, PH.D. has now published his thesis in astrophysics. You can even buy a copy via Amazon, and while I doubt many people will do so, I imagine he’ll sell a lot more copies of his dissertation than most people do. The author bio on Amazon is amusing, too.

WELL, IT’S ABOUT TIME:

TransCanada Corp., Canada’s largest pipeline company, won state approval and a $500 million subsidy to proceed with plans to build an estimated $27 billion pipeline that will carry natural gas from Alaska’s Arctic region to U.S. markets.

The Alaska Senate voted today in favor of the proposal by Calgary-based TransCanada, following approval last month by the House. The company will get a state license to begin studies and early work on the pipeline.

“We’ve been trying to get this pipeline for 30 years,” Alaska State Senator Hollis French said today. “This piece of legislation gets us there.”

The project was born out of an effort by Governor Sarah Palin to exploit gas deposits on Alaska’s North Slope that were discovered decades ago and stranded by the inability to get the heating and power-plant fuel to users. Palin solicited pipeline proposals last year and chose TransCanada’s after saying competing plans didn’t meet the state’s requirements.

We need it.

WHY PEOPLE ARE GETTING FATTER — Eating more! “In 1970, the average American ate about 16.4 pounds of food a week, or 2.3 pounds daily. By 2006, the average intake grew by an additional 1.8 pounds a week.”

ANOTHER TERRI SCHIAVO AFFAIR IN THE MAKING? I don’t know how this will develop, but my observation at the time that the Terri Schiavo affair marked the high-water point for GOP power, and the beginning of its decline, seems to have been borne out by subsequent events.

IRS GOES BACK TO THE FUTURE WITH CELLPHONES. Wait, wrong movie. Love the Gordon Gekko picture, though.

WHAT TO DO WITH the “Sons of Iraq.” What’s the Iraqi equivalent of the G.I. Bill?

BUY TEXTBOOKS, get a free three-month trial of Amazon Prime. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve found the free 2-day shipping to be a good deal for me.

EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONS: A test-drive of Chrysler’s new Aspen hybrid.

WASHINGTON POST: Obama as George W.? “Yet in Democratic circles, another, potentially less welcome, parallel is being made: to the tight-knit and tight-lipped organization eight years ago of George W. Bush. . . . Democrats privately expressed concerns that Obama has become too Chicago-centric, relying on his inner circle rather than a broader group that encourages input from Washington and elsewhere.” Hey, that approach has worked for Bush!

UPDATE: Oops — link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

MARY GRABAR on what’s wrong with language mandates.

NEUTRALIZING SECURITY CAMERAS with helium balloons. Obviously, we must start licensing and registering helium.

YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED: ” Say I’m Inside the Large Hadron Collider and It’s Revving Up. Should I Be Concerned?”

If you have any piercings, definitely . . . .

IS THE SEX CARD the new race card? Well, possibly.

WHAT IS THE COAST GUARD doing in Africa?

IN THE MAIL: Dirk Wittenborn’s novel, Pharmakon.

DEFLECTING ASTEROIDS with a gravity tractor.

BILL QUICK FINDS fun on the Internet.

A LOOK AT The 10 Best Planes from the Oshkosh Air Show.

MAUREEN DOWD gets romantic with Obama.

THE BELMONT CLUB looks at the anthrax investigation. “But when the anthrax attack did come the remarkable thing was that it was never spun as a WMD attack on America, an assertion which in the heated atmosphere following the attacks, might actually have gained currency. Instead the FBI went almost direct to the ‘lone American’ theory rather than impute the attacks on al-Qaeda. If the Bush administration had in fact planned to use the anthrax attacks to frame someone, the ‘lone American’ theory was precisely the wrong way to go about it.”

DALE AMON LIVEBLOGGED the SpaceX Falcon launch. Bottom line is in this statement from Elon Musk: “It was obviously a big disappointment not to reach orbit on this flight. On the plus side, the flight of our first stage, with the new Merlin 1C engine that will be used in Falcon 9, was picture perfect. Unfortunately, a problem occurred with stage separation, causing the stages to be held together. This is under investigation and I will send out a note as soon as we understand exactly what happened.”

It’s okay, as long as they learn from it. So often, it’s not the big high-profile parts that fail, but things like frozen oxygen valves or failed stage-separations.

Mission timeline here. Full story here.

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY GREENHOUSE TALK FROM OBAMA as long as he’s flying this airplane:

Barack Obama’s new campaign plane is nothing short of grand. Well, for the candidate that is.

Obama’s section of the plane rivals that of any first class. Recently the front cabin of the Boeing 757 was retrofitted to install four individual chairs that resemble La-Z-Boys. They are free-standing and made of plush leather with pockets on the sides. There is also a booth which seats four for a meeting or a meal.

His chair has his name and campaign logo embroidered on the back top — “Obama ‘08” on one line and “President” underneath. To one side is a small table stacked with newspapers ready for the candidate’s arrival. The table of the booth is always covered in snacks and cheese and is where Obama spends most of his time during flights meeting with staff and sitting for the occasional interview.

“Typically the candidate’s cabin is like business class — roomier and less chaotic than the staff and press areas, but still short of the accoutrements of a pro team’s charter,” says Politico’s Mike Allen, a frequent campaign flier.

After looking at a few photos of Obama’s cabin, Allen quipped, “Air Force One may seem a tad claustrophobic.”

Also no complaints about corporate fatcats.

ACCIDENT? SO TAKE ME TO THE BODY SHOP, PLEASE: Is Aging an Accident of Evolution? Stanford Scientists Say “Yes”.

A BLAST FROM THE PAST: “Obama says that he will not run for anything in 2008. He is quick to temper high expectations and scrying [sic] about his lofty political future with quips about how he doesn’t yet know where the Senate bathrooms are, and how he’ll be ‘sharpening pencils and scrubbing floors’ for the first few years. ‘He says that the first thing is for him to learn to be a first-rate senator,’ says Jarrett, the finance committee chair. If that leads to something else one day, fabulous. But first things first.’”

I don’t think Obama was lying in 2005. I’ve always thought that he didn’t expect his campaign to take off the way it did; I think he figured he’d run a good attention-getting primary campaign, drop out after South Carolina, and set himself up for the future. I think that the coalescence of the anti-Hillary Democrats around his campaign surprised him as much as it did Hillary, and that he’s been running a brilliant piece of improvisation ever since.

CLAUDIA ROSETT says that Bush is rewriting history regarding Iran and North Korea.

T. BOONE PICKENS talks about his wind power plans.

RAND SIMBERG: Water on Mars? Big deal. Tell us something we don’t already know.

BECAUSE THEY HAVEN’T DONE ENOUGH TO MAKE TRAVEL UNAPPEALING: Feds now arrest your laptops at border:

Not content with taking your shoes and confiscating your water, now the Department of Homeland Security is gunning for your laptops.

As the Washington Post reported yesterday, Border Patrol and Customs agents can now “detain” laptops “for a reasonable period of time” to “review and analyze information.”

They don’t need probable cause under the new policy. Doesn’t matter if you’re a U.S. citizen or foreign visitor. Officials can hold the laptops indefinitely. Or hard drives, flash drives, cellphones, iPods, pagers, beepers, video and audio tapes. Ditto papers, documents, books, pamphlets, even litter.

The litter they can have. But screw with my laptop and you’ll regret it.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Smith questions the timing:

This laptop story is old news.

There could be no *possible* reason why it should come out now, as a big revelation, just when Obama’s lead in the polls is basically non-existent?

I predict no improvement in this department regardless of who’s elected in November.

BRENDAN LOY photoblogs early voting in Knox County.

SITEMETER IS FIXED, and I’ve put the code back on my page. Seems to be working fine.

A HEROIC HISTORIAN: The first to hit the Unitarian Church gunman in Knoxville was my University of Tennessee colleague John Bohstedt: “Frankly, I’m not terribly surprised that he helped stop the attack. Heck… he’s an expert on riots and mobs, so he probably knows a thing or two about how to act in a seemingly chaotic environment.”

A LIST: Essential movies of the 2000s.

Plus, the trailer for Lord of the Rings Online: The Mines of Moria.

JOE DAVIS WRITES THAT THE SATURDAY NEW YORK TIMES IS ALWAYS INTERESTING:

I used to particularly like the sat edition back in the old ‘paper’ days…they would often bury stories they really didn’t want to promote but felt they had to acknowledge there…so I was really interested to see how they would play yesterdays drama in congress which is hard to do without making the DEM leadership look bad but I can’t find anything on the web site…

Now they bury stories that they don’t want to promote in the Times political blogs! This shortstops the critics in the blogosphere, without exposing the Times’ subscribers to uncomfortable information.

UPDATE: Reader Christopher Fountain sends this story and writes: “It was on the last page of the 1st section in today’s paper version and a search online turned it up there,too. Notice the reporter doesn’t say who turned off the lights, cameras and mikes. For all Times readers would know, it was some kind of natural phenomenon.”

Huh. I searched “Pelosi” on the site and found the blog entry but not this story.

OBAMA AGAINST REPARATIONS: “Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama opposes offering reparations to the descendants of slaves, putting him at odds with some black groups and leaders.”

DRILLING FOR OIL IN SUBURBAN BACKYARDS: If you can drill safely here, you can drill safely anywhere.,

JOHN TIERNEY: Worriers vs. Nonworriers.

JOHN SCALZI: “I’d just like to say that, yes, my arms really are that buff.”

TALKLEFT: “Barack Obama is having a press conference this morning and it is being dominated by questions about the ‘race card.’ That makes it a good press conference for McCain. The big hook for McCain is the fact that Obama supporters disgracefully smeared Bill and Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries. The McCain riposte to pushback from Obama supporters is ‘that’s what you said about Bill and Hillary Clinton.’ . . . The fairy tale has come home to roost. All the dirty work these folks did during the primaries to slime Bill and Hillary Clinton is now fodder for John McCain.” Yes, it kind of suggests that anyone who dares to oppose Obama will be called a racist.

HEH: “We all know that politics is a con some of the time. It has begun to feel like politics is a con almost all of the time.”

BEACH READING: Read Greg Egan’s Incandescence and it was good — though a bit cerebral even for Egan.. Started the new Naomi Novik book and it’s good so far, but I haven’t gotten too far into it.

TOM MAGUIRE: So In The Tank They Don’t Know They Are In The Tank. From the comments: “At some point shouldn’t all of these articles be reported to the FEC as inkind contributions?”

Plus, Extreme Mortman on Washington Post photo choices.

UPDATE: “Few rhetorical stumbles?”

ADVICE FOR OBAMA: “He can’t use his race as a factor and disqualify it simultaneously. Pick a position and stick to it. Obviously, the better position for Obama is transcending race, and obviously, if he thinks he can dip gracefully into the subject whenever it works for him, he’s wrong.”

BETTER MRI IMAGING, with nanotechnology.

A POSITIVE REVIEW OF SWING VOTE, from John Hinderaker.

IN THE MAIL: John Zogby’s The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream.

MICHAEL BARONE on the election and the polls:

Mainstream media provided lavish coverage of Barack Obama’s trip abroad the week of July 21-25 and predicted he would get a bounce in the polls. Some of his supporters believe he has put the election away. Other observers employ the hackneyed and meaningless phrase, “It’s his to lose.”

The poll numbers tell a different and more nuanced story. The two national tracking polls showed Obama getting a bounce while he was in Europe, especially after his speech before 200,000 or so Berliners in the Tiergarten. Gallup showed him rising from a 46 percent-42 percent lead on July 22 to a 49 percent-40 percent lead on July 26. The Rasmussen tracking poll showed him rising from a 47 percent-45 percent lead on July 23 (reflecting the previous days’ polling) to 49 percent to 43 percent on July 26.

But over the next several days, Obama bounced back down. Gallup showed him leading by a statistically insignificant 45 percent to 44 percent as of July 31. That’s the closest the race has been in Gallup all that month. Rasmussen had him down to 48 percent to 46 percent on the same day. The world tour bounce has begun to look like a bubble.

But read the whole thing, as it’s not exactly jolly news for McCain, either. I wonder how “none of the above” would poll?

MICKEY KAUS: “Jay Leno Beats NBC News.” Which makes somebody a joke, and it’s not Leno.

EXTREME MORTMAN on why control of Congress matters.

MORE ON CANADA’S “HUMAN RIGHTS” KANGAROO COURTS: When all else fails, change the subject. “I think the battle for freedom of speech is going pretty well, even though it’s summertime. Human rights commissions are being ridiculed on an almost daily basis in the media; their coalition is starting to fracture under the stress, as evidenced by the defection of the B’nai Brith; and the ‘lawfare’ being waged against me and other critics of the HRCs hasn’t worked, largely because of the broad public support expressed through the Internet (thank you, again).”

RANDALL PARKER: “The CO2 that dissolves into the ocean continues to worry me more than global warming. . . . We have lots of ways available to cool the planet with cheap affordable climate engineering. So global warming seems reversible if it becomes a problem. But how to deacidify the ocean if high atmospheric CO2 causes lots of CO2 to dissolve into the ocean?” All the more reason to switch to a nuclear-electric economy as soon and as much as possible.

MIT’S “SOLAR BREAKTHROUGH:” All Hype or a New Hope?

MEGAN MCARDLE ON GDP DISTRIBUTION: “When you see the map, it becomes radically apparent just how firmly Britain was the root of the Industrial revolution. With the lone exception of Japan, the darkest places on the map are either next to Britain, or former British colonies. And aside from Saudi Arabia and Chile, all the growth seems to spread outward from those Anglosphere points of infection. Nowhere, not even Saudi Arabia, has the income density of Western Europe and North America.”

BLOGGER PROBLEM FIXED: At least, the Insta-Wife can post again.

JIM LINDGREN: “I have never understood where Congress acquired the power to order people to enter into contracts that they don’t want to sign.”

SOME COOL COMMERCIAL SPACE NEWS: “SpaceX has just test fired nine engines at full thrust in the full Falcon 9 configuration, a test I was not expecting to see until this fall at the earliest.”

Plus, Rocket Racer photos from XCor.

HMM: Obama shifts, says he may back offshore drilling. On closer reading it looks more like a waffle — or maybe a straddle — than a full-blown flipflop. But there’s still hope.

UPDATE: It’s not playing too well on the left: “Add off shore drilling to that list of Democratic principles Barack Obama does not stand for. I hope Obama gets some votes from Republicans come November because the Bush Enabler sure is on board with many of their core values. Off shore drilling, Church and State, gun control, war funding, death penalty, FISA . . . and the list grows.”

BRIDGET JOHNSON: Requiem For the Los Angeles Newspaper Industry.

ERIC SCHEIE ON Obama and inflation.

TOOK SITEMETER OFF THE PAGE: here’s why.

THIS IS NEWS, BUT NOT SURPRISING NEWS:

American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials. The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.

The American officials also said there was new information showing that members of the Pakistani intelligence service were increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Obviously, we need to start feeding them disinformation at a crucial moment.

IS THIS THE KIND OF JUDGE ThinkProgress hopes Obama will appoint?

THOUGHTS ON FREE SPEECH AND THE INTERNET: Plus, who to beware of: “People who want the most freedom for themselves and the least for you.”

MICHAEL SILENCE on the polls:

I’m surprised to find some people puzzled over the fact Obama didn’t get a boost in his poll numbers following his nine-day trip to Europe. Hello! He spent more than a week kowtowing to the people we got the hell away from more than 230 years. Seems to me McCain goaded him into a sure-fire momentum stopper.

Heh. Maybe he’s running a shrewder campaign than we think.

MEGAN MCARDLE ON G.M.’S STAGGERING LOSSES:

GM’s historical pension and healthcare obligations, and the vast difficulties they have in permanently laying off workers, mean that the company had to maximize cash flow as best they could. Indeed, I find it interesting that I spent so many years listening to europhile economists assure me that the Germans were going to kick our ass because their cooperative management style, with labor having a seat on the board, allowed them to engage in long-term planning. The industries in America where labor has the most power are the ones that have the hardest time making strategic choices to lower profits now in order to raise them in the future.

It does look that way.

THE MAKING AND UNMAKING of the American hovercraft.

PORKBUSTERS ON PATROL GETS FEATURED IN A FOXNEWS STORY:

USED PRIUSES going for more than new?

STRATEGYPAGE ON CHINESE SPYING DURING THE BEIJING OLYMPICS:

In preparation for the August Olympic Games in Beijing, China has installed hardware and software in all hotels, to make it easier for state security to monitor foreign visitors that use the Internet. Some foreign owned hotels leaked the documents (orders from the Chinese government to install the systems) to U.S. government officials, who made it public. The foreign owned hotels in Beijing were threatened with closure if they did not comply.

Years ago, the Chinese government promised there would be open access to the Internet during the games. This despite the fact that the Chinese Internet is designed to be easily monitored by a huge (over 30,000 people) bureaucracy that does nothing but monitor Internet use (and imprisons those who say anything the state does not approve of.)

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has apologized to member nations for China’s failure to allow free access to the Internet during the games.

I won’t be going, and I don’t plan to watch. The Olympics are a fount of corruption and chicanery anyway, upholding no ideals and promoting no good ends anyway. Plus, they’re boring.

J.K. ROWLING’S The Tales of Beadle the Bard will be on sale this Fall.

POLITICO: “Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the Democrats adjourned the House and turned off the lights and killed the microphones, but Republicans are still on the floor talking gas prices. Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other GOP leaders opposed the motion to adjourn the House, arguing that Pelosi’s refusal to schedule a vote allowing offshore drilling is hurting the American economy. They have refused to leave the floor after the adjournment motion passed at 11:23 a.m. and are busy bashing Pelosi and her fellow Democrats for leaving town for the August recess. . . . Democratic aides were furious at the GOP stunt, and reporters were kicked out of the Speaker’s Lobby, the space next to the House floor where they normally interview lawmakers. ‘You’re not covering this, are you?’ complained one senior Democratic aide.”

Related video:

UPDATE: Reader Arthur Barie emails: “They told me that if George Bush was elected President, the ability of Congressmen to debate important policy matters would be taken away, and they were right.”

TODAY’S GALLUP DAILY POLL: Race Tied at 44%. Yesterday was Obama 45, McCain 44. Mostly statistical noise, but surely not encouraging to the Obama campaign. I’d advise the McCain campaign not to get too excited either, though.

24/7 SOLAR POWER by combining cheap electrolysis with solar power? Hope it pans out.

TOM MAGUIRE:

So who said this this back in late 2005?

“I don’t think I have a place in history yet. I got elected to the U.S. Senate. I haven’t done anything yet.”

That was the humble, grounded Barack Obama, newly elected to the US Senate. And what has he done in the Senate? Well his proposal to surrender to Al Qaeda in Iraq in January of 2007 was shot down. Otherwise, not much.

McCain could run a positive campaign emphasizing experience and his energy plan. Don’t ask Hillary how the experience thing went – she had a bad experience with experience because she lacked experience.

But on energy, McCain has something to please (or irk) everyone. Offshore drilling polls better than might have been expected in California, Obama can’t pronounce “nuclear”, and enviros know McCain has been a Senate leader on carbon cap and trade schemes (don’t tell righties).

Plus, all about the Benjamins: “Well, let’s see -the people on US currency are older, whiter, deader, and had a record of accomplishment, so there are a lot of differences here.”

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Pelosi: Save the Planet, Let Someone Else Drill.

UPDATE: Plus, why you need to be poor.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader points out that if Nancy Pelosi wants to “save the planet,” she should probably take the train home instead of flying in a greenhouse-spewing executive jet.

DON SURBER fact-checks the L.A. Times. Apparently those vaunted layers of editors and fact-checkers didn’t do much editing or fact-checking. Again. I think it’s mostly the editors, though, because the article doesn’t clearly distinguish between McCain supporters in 2000 and today. Plenty of people who supported him then don’t support him now, and vice versa.

GIVE THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES A REST, PLEASE: I mentioned earlier that the Insta-Wife has been locked out of her blog by Blogger. That’s happened to a lot of other people, and it’s given rise to various theories that it’s an anti-left, anti-right, even anti-catholic blog campaign. I think, though, that it’s just a Google glitch, and that people think that blogs like theirs are disproportionately affected because those are the blogs they read. Anyway, I’d advise not getting carried away.

UPDATE: This email from Miriam MIdkiff further undercuts the conspiracy theory approach:

You mentioned in your post that “quite a few other bloggers” are getting locked out of their Blogger accounts. Try hundreds, if not thousands. The Blogger help board is full of frustrated folks like myself.

I am a “genea-blogger”; a genealogy blogger. I had three of my six public blogs (I have eight total on Blogger) get locked out yesterday afternoon. Immediately, I submitted all three for review. My main one (http://ancestories1.blogspot.com) is an award-winning blog that I’ve had for a year and a half on Blogger with nearly 700 posts. It is one of the main genealogy blogs read in the blogosphere. My second one (http://ancestories2.blogspot.com) is a blog with journal prompts to help people write about their own lives for future generations. I don’t blog much there, and after a couple of hours, it was unlocked. The last is a blog I co-author with members of the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society (http://ewgs-spokane.blogspot.com). I was hoping to start our media releases this weekend for the upcoming 2009 Washington State Genealogical Society’s statewide conference to be held in Spokane. Currently there are 111 posts at that site.

I’ve heard from a couple of other genea-bloggers who also got locked out very recently. One who got locked several months ago still has a “warning” notice as a potential malicisous site posted when you access it using Mozilla Firefox as a browser, even though she has carefully followed all directions to “scrub” her site which supposedly had malicious software on it.

Many of us are ready to switch to WordPress. I wonder how long it will take before Blogger gets their act together and fixes the problem!

I don’t think that genealogy-bloggers have much of a political slant. [You naive fool! It's to stop people from looking into Obama's birth certificate! -- ed. Ah, it's all becoming clear now -- a conspiracy so vast . . . .]

ANOTHER UPDATE: More good sense from Randy Neal.

PREVENTING FALLS with sensor-equipped electronic pants.

MEN IN SHORTS: Plus a response from the ultimate men-in-shorts critic, Ann Althouse. “I consider it a very poorly thought out article — shocking proof that the NYT passively observes fashion and lacks critical faculties. . . . If you’re not going to be an arbiter of taste, why are you writing fashion articles? Or is the truth that fashion criticism in the New York Times has devolved into pop culture reportage. Sad!“

RICK MORAN: Republicans Behind Bars: A Serio-Comic Parade of GOP Hooligans.

IN THE MAIL: Stephen Hunter’s new novel, Night of Thunder.

HMM: Gallup Daily: Obama 45%, McCain 44%.

HMM: “One of the nation’s top biodefense researchers has apparently taken his own life, just as the FBI zeroed in on him as a suspect in the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks.”

THANKS, GOOGLE: The Insta-Wife’s blog has been “locked” as a potential spam blog. She did the little challenge/response thing, so I guess it’ll be unlocked sooner or later, but it’s still irritating. To be fair, though, spam-blogs on Blogspot are a real problem.

UPDATE: I’m getting email reporting that this has happened to quite a few other bloggers.

ROGER SIMON: Is McCain peaking too early? “I expected McCain to be squeaking up behind Obama in mid-October at the best, not before August 1. This is supposed to be a Democratic year par excellence with the economy tanking (semi, anyway) and the Iraq War dragging on longer than the Peloponessian. (Okay, that baby ran 27 years, but you know what I mean.) Democrats also historically lap the field over the summer. Even such certified loxes as Dukakis and Mondale were ahead on Aug. 1. What’s going on here?”

UPDATE: Reader Steve Waite emails: “I don’t think MCCain is peaking – rather, Obama is sagging!” Well, he’s even getting criticism from the Hardball crowd. That can’t be good.

ERIC EGLAND in The New York Times: Allies Obama Overlooked. “We already have a counterterrorism partnership with the European Union. And it works. . . . In 2004, J. Cofer Black, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, testified about the success of these partnerships before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s subcommittee on European affairs. Had Senator Obama, who now heads that subcommittee, read the transcripts from the meeting, which took place before he came to office, or had he held a similar hearing, he might have known that the partnerships he called for last week already exist.”

FASTER, PLEASE:

For all who have wondered if they could enjoy the benefits of exercise without the pain of exertion, the answer may one day be yes — just take a pill that tricks the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously. Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported that they had found two drugs that did wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice. One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice’s endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment.

A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

“It’s a little bit like a free lunch without the calories,” said Dr. Ronald M. Evans, leader of the Salk group.

I work out regularly, and more-or-less enjoy it, but I’d replace it with a pill if I could.

LA SHAWN BARBER: Is Climate Change… Racist?

DROPPING THE BALL at The Huffington Post.

DAMSELS OF DEATH.

ABUSIVE LAB TEST: Four portable hard drives. Only one survivor.

URBAN AMERICA: A political monoculture:

Today, America’s urban areas have evolved into a political monoculture that increasingly resembles the “solid South” that provided a base for Democrats from the late 19th century to the 1960s. Since 1972, the year of the Nixon landslide, the Democratic share has grown 20 percent or more in most of the largest urban counties. . . .

Race and income levels do not explain the emerging urban mono­culture, because the cause lies elsewhere: in the evolution of cities over the past four decades. The shift began in the late 1960s, when urban regions, from financial centers such as New York and Chicago to old industrial cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, began to suffer a massive exodus of predominantly white, middle-class residents.

Read the whole thing. (Via Newsalert).

ANDREW MALCOLM: Where did Obama’s Mojo Go?

Something’s going on. Or some things.

A new CNN/Opinion Research poll out Wednesday shows that despite nine solid days of blanket media coverage from overseas with Barack Obama cheered by adoring throngs of Germans and parlez-vousing with the French, making a three-point shot in the Middle East and standing outside No. 10 Downing Street, the freshman Illinois Democratic presidential nominee to be Senator Barack Obama of Illinois stayed static in the polls despite his well-covered long foreign tripsenator is stuck right where he was in the polls before he left.

Read the whole thing.