HMM: Edwards’s Ex-Mistress Will Not Pursue Paternity Test.

TOP TOOLS FOR backyard grilling.

OVERDOING IT NOW doesn’t make up for under-covering it before.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Liberals wonder why they are parodied as out-of-touch secularists who mix near-total ignorance of traditional Christianity with a seething, idiotic attempt. Here’s why. “

ANNE APPLEBAUM on Russia and Georgia.

And read these thoughts from Roger Kimball, too. “When Russian tanks and troops poured into the separatist Georgian province of South Ossetia yesterday, it was not, as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said, part of a ‘peacekeeping mission.’ It was part of an imperialist mission whose undeclared goal is to reabsorb the whole of Georgia–West-leaning Georgia with its critical oil pipeline supplying energy to an increasingly thirsty Europe–into mother Russia.”

UPDATE: More on Georgia at Small Wars Journal. Plus, more at Foreign Policy. Also, Blackfive.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Is this a “3 A.M. moment?” Thoughts from Tom Maguire and TigerHawk.

MORE: McCain on Obama on Georgia. Though it should really be “toes the line,” not “tows the line” — that’s a pet peeve of mine.

STILL MORE: Here’s a backgrounder on South Ossetia that Michael Totten recommends.

WELL, YES: Reticence of Mainstream Media Becomes a Story Itself.

Meanwhile, the New York Times — where the above appears — showed no such reticence in running a front-page story on McCain — as the (London) Times noted: “The New York Times has not deigned to touch the story, although it recently ran thousands of words on a relationship between McCain and a female lobbyist, which appeared to be based more on innuendo than fact.” And the L.A. Times — where Tony Pierce cautioned in-house bloggers to avoid the Edwards story — had no problem publishing what Larry Lessig called “a baseless smear” against Judge Kozinski. And just this past week, the Washington Post ran a front-page story charging McCain with improper donations, but then had to publish a correction making clear that it was all wrong.

Readers will be forgiven for concluding that there are different standards for left and right. They will not be forgiven for concluding the opposite, since only an idiot would think that at this point . . . .

COOL: Mario Meets Mavis Beacon — New Uses for Old Game Technology.

MORE ON JOHN EDWARDS from LawHawk: “Parts of Edwards’ story don’t fit – namely why would he be slinking around to avoid being seen with Rielle at the Beverly Hilton this past month. If Elizabeth already knew about the affair in 2006, then why hide it? Why stretch things out and not simply admit the affair to the Enquirer then and there?”

DOES OLYMPIC ADVERTISING WORK? Sometimes. “Chevy ran a commerical promoting their new Chevy Volt car during the Olympics and on Google it skyrockets to the #11 search overall today in Google Trends.”

ROGER SIMON: Edwards, Elizabeth and the Comedy of Legacy Media. “The absurd see-no-evil reaction to the Edwards Affair will be seen as a benchmark in know-nothing journalism by the MSM and one of the last nails in their coffin. Too bad most of their soon-to-be unemployed reporters are not good enough to get jobs at the National Enquirer.”

THINGS GETTING WORSE IN THE C.A.R.:

The lights have gone out, literally. Over half a century of poor maintenance and neglect, the power grid of the Central African Republic has collapsed. The capital has gone dark. Two nearby hydroelectric power stations, which provide most of the nation’s electricity, have failed from years of neglect. The government is calling on foreign aid donors to fly in generators for hospitals and other essential services. Generators that have been brought in previously have not been maintained, and wear out quickly. This is not an exceptional event, for colonial era infrastructure, from roads to power plants, are collapsing from decades of post-independence neglect. This causes more unrest, as factions battle for a dwindling supply of resources.

In the West, people take the smooth functioning of infrastructure for granted. But it’s only through continuous hard work that things work well here. Slack on that, and they go down the tubes pretty fast. But politicians value shiny new things more than unglamorous maintenance here, too. Be warned.

PERHAPS IT IS ALL ABOUT PIPELINES: “Russian fighter jets targeted the the major Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline which carries oil to the West from Asia but missed, Georgia’s Economic Development Minister Ekaterina Sharashidze said on Saturday.”

UPDATE: More here. And a more pro-Russian take here. (But what’s the Discovery Institute connection?)

UH OH: Mistress’ Family Challenges Edwards to Take DNA Test.

THE OLYMPIC SPIRIT:

BEIJING — A 47-year-old Chinese man stabbed an American tourist to death, wounded his wife, then jumped to his death from an ancient downtown landmark, marring the first full day of competition at the Summer Olympic Games, U.S. sports and government officials confirmed Saturday.

The American couple are relatives of a U.S. men’s indoor volleyball coach,

Charming.

A NANOTECHNOLOGY PRIZE BILL: “Congressman Dan Lipinski (D-IL) , Vice Chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, and Congressman (R-MO) Todd Akin, have introduced H.R. 6661, the Nanotechnology Innovation and Prize Competition Act, which establishes an X-Prize competition for nanotechnology.”

IN THE MAIL: Greg Behrman’s The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe. Well, one of the times.

BOB ZUBRIN on T. Boone Pickens’ windmill energy plan.

OKAY, ANOTHER INSTAPUNDIT READER POLL:

UPDATE: From the comments: “If your stock broker withheld info re Enron from you, would you still use him? And yet, people still go to information brokers like the NYTs and CNN for their news…”

GENERAL PETRAEUS: Terror Connects to Crime in Iraq. Plus, video here.

BIG NUKE EXERCISE: “Exercise Diablo Bravo was held in Kitsap County in Washington state, and the scenario involved the response to a terrorist event involving a nuclear weapon.”

ASTON MARTIN speeds past the Veyron.

SO NOW THAT WE KNOW THAT THE PRESS COVERED FOR EDWARDS — just as, pre-invasion, they covered for Saddam — that raises a question: What else are they not telling us for fear it will hurt the Democrats’ prospects?

UPDATE: Once again, the lefty memory hole is revealed, with email like this:

That’s got to be one of the most insane and stupid things I’ve read in a long time.
“Covered for Saddam”? WTF are you talking about, what kind of drugs are you on? The only thing the media covered regarding Saddam was the administrations efforts to lie us into a war… something you were quite a part of.

Apparently these people have forgotten Eason Jordan and “The News We Kept to Ourselves.” I started to put a link to that in the original post, but I thought I’d see if there were any out there dumb enough to walk into the trap. And there were. Much more on the Eason Jordan story is rounded up here.

WHERE THE WOMEN ARE WOMEN AND THE MEN ARE TOO: A look at modern gender relations in Scandinavia.

UPDATE: Must’ve hit a nerve: some Swedish guy is threatening to complain to Blogspot about the post. Why is that the first response of so many lefties — to try to get someone in authority to silence a critic?

MORE ON RUSSIA’S WAR AGAINST GEORGIA, at Transatlantic Politics. Note the threat to gas and oil pipelines that pass through Georgia; Russian control of Georgia would give Russia far more control over Europe’s energy.

UPDATE: Here’s a big roundup from James Joyner. And here’s a followup post.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Mudville Gazette points out that this is an attack on a country currently fighting alongside the United States: “Georgia currently has a combat Brigade serving in Iraq, in Wasit province, not far from the border with Iran.”

It occurs to me that Russia’s own oil pipelines are probably vulnerable to Georgian attack or sabotage if things heat up too much. This could reverse the trend of falling oil prices.

WHEN YOU REALLY DON’T WANT TO REPORT IT AT ALL, SEND AN INTERN:

Finally, finally, after suffering nationwide media blog ridicule, the L.A. Times squeeezes out a story about how they didn’t tell the story, plus a “timeline”, bylined Kate Linthicum, of l’affaire Edwards and Hunter. And even then, they couldn’t quite manage to score the facts. . . . I hadn’t seen the byline Kate Linthicum before, so I looked her up. Yes, while they’re throwing all the experienced reporters out of the place, we’ve now got the intern (Barnard Class of 2008) writing the paper.

Plus, advice on how to tell if someone’s really a filmmaker or not.