A couple days back I ran an online story about McCain’s town hall campaign strategy. The idea was that Obama is great in front of big auditoriums, reading speeches off a teleprompter. McCain is not. But McCain is as energetic and engaging as any candidate I have seen this cycle if you take away the script and let him interact with the …

The number of people who think that drilling for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge will help solve our immediate oil crisis (or even our long term one) is high enough that if they all stopped driving, we’d be fine. One of the helpful myths that keeps that idea alive irks me to distraction: The idea that it’s okay to drill in …

Colleague James Poniewozik has an interesting telecentric take on Michelle Obama’s “View” debut this morning. I was pleased to find out that the Obama’s are “bacon people” and, you know what? If I had arms as toned as hers I’d stick to sleeveless, too.

• “[S]ome might argue that save for a few cosmetic details, the ‘candidates’ are essentially identical.” Ha ha, it’s funny because they’re talking about soda! [Slashfood]

• The guy who said this: “Gay sex is ‘intuitively’ unnatural and can lead to ‘lacerations, perforations and deaths.'” Is not someone you’d really want overseeing

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Last winter, one of the reporters assigned to cover McCain was, by training, largely an environmental writer. As with having someone from Iraq on board, or someone from a financial publication, her depth of knowledge in a specific subject allowed her to ask McCain questions — and to make points — we generalists didn’t have at our …

Over at Politico.com. Jeanne Cummings has an interesting look at the array of big players lining up on both sides of the battle to turn back the law on ethanol subsidies. As consumers are squeezed between paying for their groceries or filling their tanks (the role that biofuels play in that tradeoff was ably explained by our colleague …

Not one.

Like millions of Americans living in New York City at the time, I depended on Rudy Giuliani in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. With the city still smoldering, President Bush in an apparent state of shock, and Vice President Cheney absconded to an undisclosed location, Giuliani was the only leader who seemed able to take …

“Change” doesn’t have quite the same resonance in Romania, where one village last weekend re-elected a dead man as mayor:

“I know he died, but I don’t want change,” a pro-Ivascu villager told Romanian television.

Obama putting former Clinton campaign chief Patti Solis-Doyle in a leadership position is a significant move, and it is a message about Hillary Clinton’s role in Obama’s campaign. The message is this: “*&$@# you.” And Clinton supporters understand it that way.

The Note rounded up a sampling of the bitter clinginess (clinging …

The New York Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller does the voting public a great service today by taking a shot at evaluating the similarities and differences between President Bush and John McCain on the major issues of the day. Her conclusions:

They Mostly Agree On: Abortion and Judges, Education, Diplomacy with Iran and Syria, Immigration, Iraq …