THE ARMY, THE MARINES, and “uniform envy.”

HEH: Gun-toting 85-year-old stops thief.

ROGER SIMON: Obama, Me and Guilt-by-Association.

OBAMA’S LOST LAW REVIEW NOTE, FOUND.

CONTRA ROSIE O’DONNELL, apparently fire can melt steel. The new NIST report on the World Trade Center is out, and while it won’t silence the yammerheads (apparently, nothing does) it’s worth noting.

Of course, the Popular Mechanics folks have been on this case for a while, and their chief reward has been hatemail from nuts. Here’s a podcast on the subject, too.

JULES CRITTENDEN: People Who Live in Glass Houses. “It might behoove the McCain camp to point out their candidate belongs to the party that wants all Americans to have a chance at living in a mansion.”

TOM MAGUIRE ON the Surge and its critics. “Let’s also be clear that Obama’s judgment was that the surge would not succeed and, as of a month ago, was not meeting our strategic goals.”

VACCINE UPDATE: “Measles cases in the U.S. are at the highest level in more than a decade, with nearly half of those involving children whose parents rejected vaccination.” Gee, go figure. I had a column on the subject earlier this month.

UPDATE: Reader Cheryl Drury emails: “Your PM column about vaccinations and your earlier post on making traffic safer have me thinking…How does the perception of danger affect our behavior? When people knew the danger of measles, they jumped on the vaccine eagerly. When the roads and intersections looked dangerous, people drove more cautiously. How does this affect our behavior in other ways? I’m thinking the higher drinking age and defense spending. Also, what about the flip side…where you perceive too much danger and don’t let your kids outside to play in the front yard? There is a huge thread to put together there.” Yes.

MICKEY KAUS on Joe Biden:

There’s a bit of C-SPAN tape that should surface quickly if he’s named. … Remember, it wasn’t Biden’s plagiarism that knocked him out of the 1988 race. It was “‘I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do”–a bizarre videotaped putdown that Biden immediately called into question with five (5) boasts about his academic record, four (4) of which turned out to be easily disproved B.S.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, I think the plagiarism thing was overblown.

MAYOR DALEY smears Obama!

CAPTAIN’S JOURNAL: Why We Are Losing Afghanistan.

Plus, more from Strategypage: “The Taliban are taking advantage of the unwillingness of many NATO contingents to fight.”

HMM: Periodic North American Drought Due To Lower Solar Radiation.

BEWARE THE “Hillary Harridan!”

WELL, THIS IS ENCOURAGING: “A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.” There’s an obvious solution, of course.

BECAUSE WE’VE HAD ENOUGH POLITICAL VIDEOS: Let My People Go-Go by The Rainmakers.

GAFFE-O-MATIC! OBAMA FALLS INTO THE MORAL EQUIVALENCE TRAP in comparing the United States and Russia.

NORM GERAS ON Causes, beliefs and choices in terrorist activity. Read the whole thing.

“A LEADER THAT GOD HAS BLESSED US WITH.” Heh.

SEX AND the Olympic city.

IT DOESN’T SAY GOOD THINGS FOR VISTA that Amazon is bragging that it still has XP for sale.

THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE RE-ELECTED, politically inconvenient videos would vanish down the memory hole. And they were right!

L.A. WEEKLY: Obama vs. Baldilocks. I know where the smart money’s going . . . .

RASMUSSEN: 69% Now Say Controlling the Border More Important than Legalizing Aliens. Not a whole lot to choose from between McCain and Obama here, but this may affect some Congressional races. And isn’t it funny that 69% of Americans don’t have a Presidential candidate who agrees with them on this issue? Plus this: “Only 14% think the government is doing enough to secure the borders.”

BUD DAY ON THE CROSS STORY: “He said he hadn’t heard of any controversy. So I asked: When was the first time you heard McCain tell this story? His response: ‘I heard that story in 1970, 1971—back in that time frame. Anybody who says it’s not true is full of…’ Here he used some salty language.”

SOME AVUNCULAR ADVICE FOR THE YOUNG, from Professor Bainbridge.