TOLEDO UPDATE: Blowback for the Clinton campaign: “Mrs. Clinton has named Mr. Finkbeiner to her Ohio Leadership Council of more than 100 elected and community leaders who will mobilize grassroots support for the former first lady. But that was before the recent controversy in which Mr. Finkbeiner sent home a company of Michigan Marines who had come to downtown Toledo to train.”

REIHAN SALAM ON Rep. Lawrence Lessig (D-CA). I stand by my original take.

JONATHAN FOREMAN: “The results of the Pakistani legislative elections are as yet far from clear. What does seem to be clear is that the predictions of massive vote rigging by the Musharraf government were unfounded.”

EZRA LEVANT’S INQUISITOR QUITS: “The human rights commission advised my lawyer that McGovern quit because of the public backlash against the commission — and against her in particular. In other words, she didn’t like being called a censor in the blogosphere. I’m not sympathetic. I believe that any government bureaucrat who makes a living interrogating citizens about their political beliefs ought to be held in public contempt.”

I agree. Plus, thoughts on denormalization.

THOUGHTS ON romantic love and neurology.

NEARLY-NAKED HOTTIES for Ron Paul.

BARACK OBAMA AND SAUL ALINSKY: But I think that Alinsky was an influence on Hillary, too, wasn’t he?

A FORECAST ON AMERICAN POLITICS, from an Al Jazeera employee.

“SECOND-CLASS DELEGATES.”

VIDEO: Highlights from the Power Line Book of the Year ceremony. Henry Kissinger, Norman Podhoretz, Mark Steyn, and more.

NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE: Electronics are obese.

I DID NOT THINK THE GIRL COULD BE SO CRUEL. Suddenly, Steely Dan references are everywhere. I think it all started with this Bad Sneakers post.

UPDATE: Ouch: “I would have thought that two Ivy-League degrees, a joint income of about a million dollars, exclusive private schools for the kids, and a nice home in the suburbs were not so bad and might suggest that hope had made a comeback well before Barack’s presidential run. Were Democrats fleeing the self-absorption of the Billary power couple of two Yale-educated lawyers — only to embrace the self-absorption of a power-couple of two Harvard-educated lawyers?”

Related thoughts here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Still more. “It suggests, first, that the pseudo-messianic nature of the Obama candidacy is very much a part of the way the Obamas themselves are feeling about it these days. . . . Second, it suggests the Obama campaign really does have its roots in New Class leftism, according to which patriotism is not only the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the first refuge as well — that America is not fundamentally good but flawed, but rather fundamentally flawed and only occasionally good. There’s something for John McCain to work with here.”

Don’t tell me words don’t matter.

MORE: “I think she’ll make a first-rate First Lady.”

But Mickey Kaus comments: “Her comment is also of a piece with the cavalier Obamaesque dismissal of the achievements of the Clinton years and her church’s focus on ‘this racist United States of America.’ But is the explanation necessarily political? Even Dennis Kucinich would probably have no problem finding something to be proud of in the past two decades. If Michelle Obama’s default position is set to ‘Aggrieved,’ it also suggests something personal, no? ”

Meanwhile, reader Joe Sill seems to think it’s very important to point out that Obama doesn’t live in the suburbs, but in Hyde Park. Okay.

FINALLY: Reader Vic Sapphire emails:

Joe Sill’s nitpick about Hyde Park is the equivalent of saying “O.J. Simpson didn’t live in the suburbs, he lived in Brentwood.” Hyde Park is a neighborhood of mansions populated by no shortage of old-money types and others of considerable means. Houses there are rather pricier than, say, Schaumburg or other suburbs. Methinks Mr. Sill missed the point but, yeah, he got to show everyone how much he knows about Chicagoland’s geography!

Whatever. He was a bit, er, intense on the question. I’ve noticed that Obama’s online supporters are starting to come across like Ron Paul supporters, which isn’t a good thing.

THE L.A. TIMES ON IRAQ: No Progress? Withdraw! Progress? Withdraw!!

WHY DEMOCRATS SHOULD read Kipling.

WHEN IS PARTICIPATING NOT PARTICIPATING? “Obama outspent Clinton in Florida. Let the rationalizations begin.”

WIKILEAKS UNDER FIRE: More or less literally.

INVESTMENT LESSONS FROM WORLD WAR II VICTORS AND VANQUISHED: These apparently go well beyond the usual: “Insure yourself against war and disaster by buying a remote farm or ranch and stocking it with ‘seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc.'” I guess that’s part of the “mainstreaming of survivalism” I’ve discussed before.

(Via The Grapevine). More here.

DOG BITES MAN: Disgrace at the BBC.

MICHAEL WEISS: The end of the Obama Honeymoon.

MORE LIKE MUGABE EVERY DAY: “President Hugo Chavez threatened on Sunday to seize control of businesses caught hoarding products, and set his sights on Empresas Polar — Venezuela’s largest food producer and distributor. . . . The Venezuelan leader’s threats came as the country struggles with sporadic shortages of some basic foods, including sugar, cooking oil, milk, black beans, eggs and chicken.”

THE MASON-CONFUSION LINE.

UPDATE: TigerHawk: “The New York Times has imagined ‘southern’ Republican Senators who never existed, an error so fundamental that one is forced to wonder whether the Times has any actual editors. Or are they merely all under the age of 45 and entirely unschooled in political history?”

REMEMBER THOSE IRAQ BENCHMARKS?

OBAMA ON POLICY: A roundup.

HOW EVANGELICAL LEADERS blew it.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Who needs a state censor when the press bites its own tongue so effectively?