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I usually just send interesting tidbits I come across to Steve, but since he is so busy, he told me to do it myself. OK, here goes:

Andrew Sullivan asks us to vote on the best and worst music videos of the 80s. Sullivan particularly hates "One Night in Bangkok". Personally, the best worst one for me has to be the enchanting duet by Frank Stallone and John Travolta, "Far From Over."

Keeping with Sullivan, he has an article in the most recent Atlantic that declares that Obama is the best democratic candidate because he is not of the Baby Boomer generation. As a 'non-Boomer', Sullivan believes, Obama is not afraid of conservatives and doesn't have a chip on his shoulder due to Vietnam, Nixon, and so on. The article is interesting, but he loses me when he makes statements like this:

"What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it's central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West's advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It's November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America's soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama's face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."

This just seems to me to be tantamount to, "Muslim terrorists want to destroy us. If we elect a president with Muslim roots, maybe they'll think we're not so bad after all and leave us alone."

Next, more and more reports are coming out that Baghdad is getting less violent and more normal.

RealClearPolitics has a sports blog now, called, what else? RealClearSports.

And finally, Mike Huckabee's new political ad speaks for itself: