The Gallup tracking poll bumps along, “with no sign yet of a significant ‘bounce’ from [Barack] Obama’s high-visibility world tour.”  The weighted average of recent polls at Pollster.com shows the presidential contest tightening, with Obama holding a mere 2% lead over John McCain. At the New York Times, Alessandra Staley cannot stop fawning over the fabulous “optics” of the Obama tour, though she wonders if some will find his supremely confident pose presumptuous. 

Come and join the fastest growing sector of niche information marketing! History, Inc., is the last and bestest manufacturing industry for all those of a certain “progressive” political bent — though, in keeping with our policy of “inclusiveness,” applications are also being accepted for motivated Marxists and tinpot despots with practical, “real world” experience and a desire to perfect their craft. Devotees of Enlightenment principles need not apply. It’s not

I call this one podcast2. You may call it whatever you’d like. Because, you know, I’m a giver.

Not even a 66-year-old pedestrian: Syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak was cited by police after he hit a pedestrian with his black Corvette in downtown Washington, D.C., on Wednesday morning. *** “I didn’t know I hit him. I feel terrible,” a shaken Novak told reporters from Politico and WJLA as he was returning to his car. That’s not how the bicyclist who stopped Novak from driving away sees it: In an

“Did asteroids really wipe out the dinosaurs? Scientists* now think rising sea-levels were to blame – and they could threaten our survival too.” So what led to the rise and fall in sea levels? One explanation is the shift in the Earth’s tectonic plates. The other is climate change. Over the past 500 million years, ice sheets have been forming, advancing, melting and retreating. These vast perturbations in climate change

Michelle Obama hardest hit: We’ve watched with a mixture of pride and trepidation as the wife of the first serious African American presidential contender has weathered recent campaign travails — being called unpatriotic for a single offhand remark, dubbed a black radical because of something she wrote more than 20 years ago and plastered with the crowning stereotype: “angry black woman.” And then being forced to undergo a politically mandated

it was a very heaven: Now, we already hear of scores of thousands of people in the City of London being fired, with the service industries that have replaced manufacturing as the bedrock of our workforce having to make serious savings. If there is any justice and common sense – the proverbial big “if” – scores of thousands of white-collar workers from an overmanned bureaucracy in the public sector would

Rich Lowry & Ramnesh Ponnuru of National Review have co-authored an article arguing that John McCain’s current campaign is likely to fail (a fair assessment, given the state of McCain’s campaign) and offering some free advice on strategery for Maverick. Their thesis is that McCain should target whites (and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics) without college degrees, who were unreceptive to Obama in the primaries, but important to winning swing states

“It is not going to be a political speech,” said a senior foreign policy adviser, who spoke to reporters on background.* The German flyers bear Obama’s campaign logo and say “Paid for by Obama for America.” (h/t Patrick Ruffini.)