United Liberty

John McCain has long had a more confrontational stance towards Russia than President Bush. While being hawkish in some areas and situations of the world is understandable, reckless rhetoric regarding the former Soviet Union is a little frightening to some, as political analyst Bill Ballinger noted to Bloomberg News:

“Anything that tends to focus on foreign policy has to help McCain a little bit,” said Ballenger, publisher of the Lansing-based Inside Michigan Politics newsletter. “That is viewed as his strong point. Polling indicates that’s where he has an edge on Obama.”

The one possible downside for McCain, Ballenger said, is that his “saber-rattling reaction to the Russian incursion may have made some voters’ hair stand on end” and convinced them that “maybe McCain is just a little too strong.”

Over at the National Post, there is an article on young evangelicals that are open to voting for Barack Obama. Writer Kelly McParland focusses on two Texan evangelicals, one who supports Obama and the other who doesn’t.

Let’s be frank. The Democratic Party will never get the pro-life vote. Pro-choice activism is huge in the Democratic Party, and as a result its nominee will always (absent a dramatic ideological shift in the party) follow the NARAL line. Obama is staunchly pro-choice, going so far as once referring to a baby as a punishment.

B/W of the Canadian National Post comes an interesting note by David Frum:

David Frum questions conventional wisdom, noting: “Most China experts — and almost all world leaders — have long predicted that the country’s economic advance would force its leaders to liberalize and democratize. That prediction is looking wrong. Indeed, the opposite seems to have happened: China today is a more politically repressive society than it was in the mid-1980s.”

Over the weekend Russia launched an invasion of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

The conflict has escalated out of a dispute over the South Ossetia region, in northern Georgia, which has sought independence from Georgia. Attacks from Georgia on South Ossetian seperatists led to Russian intervention.

Did Bush make a good decision when he decided to attend the Beijing Olympics? That’s what Nick Gillespie argues over at Reason Magazine:

For my first post I thought I would talk about the big media dustup right now, which is John Edwards’ admission to an affair with Rielle Hunter. I had heard rumors about this before the story finally blew up. Pajamas Media’s podcast, “PJM Political,” had a segment on July 30 that focussed on the lack of coverage of the affair. Almost two weeks later, the story has broke out and people are getting worried. Christopher Beam at Slate worried outloud that the scandal may have a Mark Foley effect on the election, and went on to point out that John McCain didn’t have a clean marital history.