MORE STORM AND HURRICANE NEWS, from Brendan Loy.

MAKING HYDROGEN FUEL with nanotechnology.

MEGAN MCARDLE FIGHTS ASTHMA to weigh in on last night’s Sarah Palin speech.

UPDATE: I think Megan is exaggerating Sarah Palin’s feminine domesticity. I mean, this is more Sarah Connor than June Cleaver. . . .

MOVING FROM BOOKS TO MULTIMEDIA: Video On Demand from Amazon.

ANN ALTHOUSE on criticism of Palin for being sarcastic. “When a man agonizes that a woman is ‘brutally cutting,’ I reach for my Freud text.”

Her criticisms seemed much milder than Rudy Giuliani’s, to me. Related item here.

Plus, “hit by a cruise missile from Middle America.”

UPDATE: Busting the no-teleprompter myth.

PROGRESS ON THE ZUBRIN PLAN: “A bipartisan group of senators has drafted a new energy bill that includes a mandate that all vehicles sold in the United States would have to be flex-fuel capable by 2020. During the GM BioFuels summit last Friday in Detroit, one of the subjects that came up was the use of flex-fuel vs. dedicated ethanol vehicles. When Brazil first started moving to ethanol in the 1970s, manufacturers built cars that only ran on ethanol. Due some volatility in fuel prices these proved to be unpopular. It was only when everyone started to make flex-fuel vehicles so that drivers could select the fuel that was most affordable that such cars and use ethanol really took off. Now more than 90 percent of new cars in Brazil are FFVs.”

GREAT SPEECH, KID! DON’T GET COCKY. Rove: Palin’s Toughest Days Are Still Ahead.

“She had a test last Friday and she nailed it,” Rove told a crowd gathered for a breakfast panel discussion in St. Paul, Minneapolis. “She had a test last night and she nailed it. But being the newest player on the stage, she will also be the most tested and the most judged on the stage. Everyone is going to ask: ‘When is she going to appear on a Sunday talk show program?’ ‘When is she doing to do an interview?’ ‘When is she going to give an unscripted speech?’ ‘When will she do a townhall meeting?’ ‘When will she answer questions on foreign policy?’ ‘How will she perform in a debate?'”

“And we’re going to hear more questions about her performance than about any of the other candidates,” said Rove. “The media is going to wonder, ‘How can we make this an easy storyline and the easy storyline is, ‘Can she do it?'”

Indeed.

SOME NEW ELECTRIC CAR DESIGNS from Chrysler. They’re pretty.

AN UNFAIR HIT ON OBAMA’S RECORD: Alex Knapp is right to point out that Obama actually does have some legislative accomplishments, particularly the Coburn-Obama Transparency Act, which John McCain also cosponsored. Meanwhile, here’s a roundup of other critical Palin speech reactions from his co-blogger James Joyner.

FIGHTING CHOLERA via satellite.

REPUBLICANS FOR OBAMA.

SMALL IN NUMBERS BUT MORE SOPHISTICATED: A look at U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, from Joe Pappalardo.

“I LIED UNDER OATH:” Kwame Kilpatrick resigns. And the story provides another chance to play Name That Party!

UPDATE: Thoughts on the guilty plea from Prof. Ellen Podgor at the White Collar Crime blog.

IN THE MAIL: Randall Stross’s Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know.

INSTA-POLL:

JOAN HEMINWAY: Is The “Reasonable Investor” a Woman?

KINDA EXPENSIVE: “As much as $25 billion in foreign capital may have left Russia since the Georgia conflict started, they said: while their growth forecasts were little changed at 7.5 percent, the crisis sharply cut the liquidity of the banking system.”

MAJOR JOHN TAMMES: Some Parting Thoughts from Major Thomas Sadiq.

PHYLLIS CHESLER agonizes over Obama, McCain and abortion rights. I’d worry about that, except that we’re certain to have a two-house Democratic majority anyway, insuring that the legislative stasis on this subject that has prevailed for decades will continue.

OKAY, SURVEYING ALL THE REACTIONS TO PALIN’S SPEECH, I see a problem for McCain — whatever he says tonight is likely to come across as an anticlimax, unless he gives a better speech than he’s ever given before. See for example, this:

From now on, when a Democrat says “But what if McCain drops dead on his first day in office?!?!?!” I’m going to say “dude — don’t tease me like that.”

That’s kind of a mixed blessing . . . .

UPDATE: Just heard, via Tenn. State Sen. Jamie Woodson (a former student — yes, I’ve been teaching that long) and Hallerin Hill that they’re changing the stage around for McCain’s speech. Is this a subliminal effort to discourage comparisons?

MORE: A strong review from Tom Shales of all people. “If the Republicans win the presidential election in November, it may well be said that they won it last night — the night that John McCain’s brilliantly screwy choice for a running mate changed from laughingstock to national star.” I don’t remember the 1980s as a time when Reagan was universally loved, though. I seem to recall a fair number of people who thought he was a senile warmonger. Shales’ impressions of Giuliani’s speech match my own.

Plus, Ouch.

TOM MAGUIRE: “Obama was wrong about the surge while McCain was right, but by and large I think the case could be made (but not by me!) that Obama is by far the more thoughtful and reflective of the two candidates and far more disposed to listen to a range of advice. My guess is that he would have a broader and arguably better decision making proess than McCain. It’s only at the moment of decision that he worries me – I don’t know if he was trapped by lefty advisers, lefty instincts, or lefty pandering but he was wrong, wrong, wrong on the surge.”

MICKEY KAUS: “What we’re witnessing, I think, is the death of a media paradigm that we lived with comfortably for, oh, the last year or two. And John Edwards is to blame!”

POLITICO: Clinton aides: Palin treatment sexist. ” Sarah Palin found some unlikely allies Wednesday as leading academics and even former top aides to Hillary Rodham Clinton endorsed the Republican charge that John McCain’s running mate has been subject to a sexist double standard by the news media and Democrats.”

A LOOK AT TVA’S wind power program.

ERIC POSNER on the European Court’s elevation of E.U. law over international law: “Nothing remarkable here for an American lawyer, who is accustomed to the idea that constitutional rules take precedence over international law. The European Court is a creature of the European treaty system, not the UN; what else is it to do when European law and international law conflict? However, Europeans have long complained of the American practice of declaring that all U.S. treaty obligations are limited by the U.S. Constitution. And it takes a bit of legerdemain to convert regional treaty obligations into a “constitution,” but this is an old story. It turns out that Europeans, too, will not allow international law to supersede their fundamental values. Good for them!”