This is nonsense:

Sen. Barack Obama ripped into a Republican ad today that targets comments made by his wife, Michelle, and called the GOP tactic "low class" and "detestable."

[. . .]

Obama was careful not to act as if he had already clinched the nomination, but he also tried to present himself as the candidate who will be taking on Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona in the fall.

Arnold Schwarzenegger jumps on the "Let's rebrand the Republican Party" bandwagon:

The answer for GOP presidential candidate John McCain: take a page out of the Schwarzenegger playbook and sell a product that is "counter" to the current GOP brand on issues like global warming, spending and even immigration reform.

I missed the big "Welcome Home, Vietnam Vets" service in Indianapolis on Saturday, and I do like a good pity party:

For many veterans, there were no welcome-home parades or other celebrations. Hahn, instead, remembers getting off a plane in Chicago after spending two years in Vietnam and being spat upon by a woman protesting the unpopular war.

While following a couple of threads about the California gay-marriage decision, I ran across this two month-old post by Jim Manzi at the corner. It's about "subsidiarity" (the principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest competent authority) and what conservatives and libertarians could learn from each other:

Poor Jeff Wiehe. He's a perfectly nice young man who writes news stories for The News-Sentinel. He did a story recently about two people who died in a motorcycle accident, making the perfectly reasonable observation that the two were not wearing helmet. That's the first thing people wonder when there's a motorcycle fatality -- was the victim wearing a helmet? -- and if that detail isn't there, we're likely to get calls. But it was too much for one reader, who fired off this rant:

Oh, those brave TV journalists, risking life, limb and being caught outside the hospitality tent without an umbrella in order to understand the plight of the homeless:

Local media stars are sleeping under the stars this week as part of a campaign to raise awareness and funds for homeless Hoosiers.

Good lord. If anybody has any doubts about the lack of a real conservative in the White House for the last eight years, let Michael Gerson remove them. He was a speechwriter for President Bush and now says this in a column:

For all of conservatism's evident virtues, it can have one furtive, seedy vice: A justified suspicion of government can degenerate into an anti-government ideology -- rigid, stingy and indifferent to human suffering.

The trend of connecting to people rather than places continues:

For nearly three in 10 households, don't even bother trying to call them on a landline phone. They either only have a cell phone or seldom if ever take calls on their traditional phone.

Here we go again -- zero-tolerance taken to absurd lengths:

Smacking a female classmate's behind has garnered a one-day suspension for a 6-year-old Hoagland Elementary student on grounds of sexual harassment, raising the ire of the boy's mother who is questioning the school's labeling of the incident.