Juan Cole tells us what a successful surge means:

A crucial element in the fall of violence from the catastrophic levels of summer,2006, was the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad of its Sunnis. I wrote in mid-July:

"As best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65% Shiite to at least 75% Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge).

Think Progress did a word analysis of the prepared remarks for the Republican National Convention, looking at the number of times individual words were mentioned (obviously, these numbers would change a bit in an analysis of the actual speeches). Here are some of my favorites:

Bush 1
Cheney 0
Rumsfeld 0
Gonzales 0

McCain is distancing himself from Bush this election.

Torture (McCain's) 3
Torture (Not McCain's) 0

It doesn't count if it's not on our guys.

Technology 13
Internet 1
Science 1

Technology = fast cars, things that go boom, and rocket ships. Also, I won't quote it here, but the environment word count is very interesting.

McCain is clearly a populist man-of-the-people. That's why his wife wears $250,000 earrings.

Good cop/bad cop at the conventions works a little differently from in the streets movies. Robert Reich details "public affairs" and "government affairs" representatives at the Denver (and moving on to the Minnesota) Convention:

The two types often work for the same big companies but they seem to operate at cross purposes. For example, I met a public affairs person who talked about the great strides his company was making in green technologies. But the government affairs people from the same company have been actively lobbying against environmental laws and regulations.

Another public affairs person was touting her companies' dedication to its communities – gifts to local schools and playgrounds, for example. But in the sky boxes were lobbyists from the same firm that have been demanding tax abatements from those same communities, as a condition for keeping jobs there. And those tax abatements have meant less revenues for local schools and playgrounds.

The Daily Show gives us Karl Rove telling us why Sarah Palin shouldn't be Vice President:

Sandy Levison at Balkinization has an interesting post on secession and the double standard of the right:

Imagine that Bill Richardson (who, by the way, has far more executive experience than all of the rest of the candidates put together, should we really believe that such experience is the most important single attribute in choosing a President) gave a cordial greeting to a gathering of La Raza Unida, which, altogether plausibly, claims that the United States basically stole what is now New Mexico from Mexico by precipitating a totally indefensible "war of choice" in order to expand American territory, and has called in the past, I believe, for either independence or returning the land to the "mother country." Or imagine that his wife was actually a member of La Raza Unida. I literally cannot imagine that the bloviators in the right wing would refrain from trying to drum the good Governor out of "respectable" politics.

This post is interesting, not only because it points out that the Right is all-too-ready to pull the "anti-American" card and will not tolerate it being brought against their own side, but also because, further down, it argues that secessionist politics are not a bad thing:

The Constitution is stunningly silent about the possibility of secession, and if one buys the "state compact" theory of the Constitution articulated by Madison and Jefferson in '98, then I (unlike Madison) don't think it's much of a stretch to go down the Calhounian route. At the very least, I think that the Confederate arguments for secession were certainly plausible; the defense of Lincoln's actions in refusing to let them go peacefully depend on one's views of slavery rather than Lincoln's "Union mysticism." And, of course, I have suggested, only half kiddingly, that there is no real reason for California (or the other Pacific rim states) to remain in the United States given a Constitution that systematically works against their interests--led by the Senate and the perverse importance of "battleground" states in the way we elect our presidents.

While I agree with the poster who disagrees with secession but clarifies that "a negotiated departure with the consent of everyone is a different story," I think the argument is one that we should take into consideration. In any case, I have little doubt that, as the election wears on, we will see the question put to to Sarah Palin more than once: "Do you believe in a unified country?"

Famous voice, Don Lafontaine died today. He did the voiceover for pretty much every movie trailer that you can imagine. Notably, in the trailer for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he parodied himself.