Also Obama never wrote a law review article and was made editor of the Harvard Law Review because he was black. I was on Law Review. Everyone else had to write articles.

Somehow I'm doubting that anybody with grammatical issues like this was ever on the Harvard Law Review.

"I was on Law Review."

Yeah, and I was "on Law Review" too!

If you're going to pretend to be a lawyer, you're going to have to write a little bit better.

Just a word of advice, troll.

when the neocons decided that "regime change" was a legitimate foreign policy option for the US to pursue in Iraq, that they opened the door for Russia to do exactly the same thing in Georgia.

Furthermore, the fact that hundreds of billions (trillions?) of dollars have been spent on the war, and that the military is suffering from overextension necessarily implies that the US has no practical foreign policy options when it comes to any response to Russia's actions.

So, really, there are two problems with pursuing a foreign policy based on naked aggression. (Or semi-naked aggression in the case of Iraq, but the only people who don't view it as aggression are naive Kool-aid drinkers in the US, and every war has such a cadre of fools.) One problem is that the aggressor nation loses any moral standing in the international community. And moral standing is not merely something that makes feel good about themselves. It is a necessary prerequisite to peaceful resolutions of disputes.

And the second problem is that pursuing wars of aggression tends to tie up valuable resources that make it difficult for the nation to respond to new situations.

Right now, the US has little course to pursue other than scolding Russia. I realize that is impolitic for pundits to admit, though, so we'll have to find some what to deal with the Kristols of the world.

As to that problem, I have no clue what to do.

You sit down a "round table" of pundits and they are great at spinning stories, but whether any of them has any validity or not is not going to be determined by this kind of navel-gazing.

This discussion is just so much bloviating. It is substance-free, both on who the candidates are and on what the public is looking for.

What you might want to do is provide some historical perspective. For starters, what were poll numbers like at similar points in past Presidential races?

I'm also wondering whether this is going to be another exercise in pondering over meaningless polls. Throughout the primary season, we were repeatedly treated to the meaningless comparison in the "national vote" between Obama and Clinton. I know it's a bit tougher to do, but seeing as the only meaningful election is in the Electoral College, shouldn't that be a point of interest a bit more often?

It seems to me that we should always be suspicious when the FBI, or indeed any other law enforcement agency, positively affirms that a major crime has been perpetrated by exactly one person, who received no help from anybody else, and furthermore just died.

If the FBI were to allow the possibility of an accomplice, then there wouldn't be a need to torture the realms of possibility with Dr. Ivins driving to New Jersey and back in the course of a work day, solely to mail some letters.

We are clearly looking at a situation where the investigators are not inferring the most likely scenario, but rather demanding that the only admissible scenario must somehow have been possible. They refuse to admit that the "Ivins working alone" scenario is deeply flawed.

Given how long the FBI and DoJ tried to pin the exact same case on Steven Hatfill, it should be clear to everybody by now that they are simply looking for a story to match with a fall guy. And Ivins, unlike Hatfill, is not around to defend himself.

The absurdity of the story should be apparent. Why, if Ivins wanted to mail the letters from an untraceable mailbox, would he drive from Frederick, MD to Princeton, NJ and back again in one day, when that trip would take at least 7 hours? This is hardly what a scientist would call the most parsimonious explanation. Indeed, what possible benefit would such a stunt have, when the anthrax alone would lead any law enforcement personnel to immediately start considering Fort Detrick?

The simplest explanation as to why the letters were mailed from Princeton is that the person who mailed them was in Princeton. This explanation has the implication that clearly the story being sold to us by the FBI is just so much baloney.

The fact that the FBI is trying to sell the public on an obviously flimsy case should in itself be troubling. What would motivate them to try to indict Ivins after his death, when they had ample opportunity to do so while he was alive? Is it so embarrassing for them to have failed so utterly on this case that they feel the necessity to put forward an explanation that doesn't bear up under the slightest bit of scrutiny? Or is somebody directing them to put forward an explanation that could justify no further investigation?

It's hard to know what the truth of the matter here is, but one thing that seems for certain, and that's the "Ivins worked alone" theory has to be jettisoned.

they shouldn't have used racist tactics. Did or did not Hillary Clinton equate "hard-working Americans" with "white Americans"?

I don't care if it's not a sincerely-held belief. She was willing to throw that out into the public sphere.