Good Line
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin is just back from Baghdad, and while she doesn’t explicitly state she spent time elsewhere than her hotel lobby, she strongly implies she did, and she clearly thinks little of the recent aspersions to the effect cast upon the media by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: “When the secretary leaves his security bubble and visits the mosques and markets of Baghdad and beyond -- as journalists do daily -- he might finally learn something. But that won’t relieve him of responsibility for the needless deaths of Iraqis and Americans.” (“Iraq Chaos a Result of Blinkered Arrogance,” June 27.)

Playing with Marbles
It looks like Ralph Nader’s going to take all his marbles and go home. Oh, wait, sorry, the Green Party didn’t even ask him to play.

Your Money Matters
If you’re hesitating to make that $10 or $25 donation to the Kerry campaign (or the Hoeffel for Senate campaign) because you think your modest contribution won’t make a difference, think again. “In Politics, the Rise of Small Donors,” by Linda Feldmann, The Christian Science Monitor, makes clear how important your money really is: “The Bush campaign has more than a million donors, compared with 345,000 in 2000. In the last election, Democratic nominee Al Gore had 155,000 donors. Last month, the Kerry campaign marked its millionth online donor.”

Lawnmower Man, Carpool Woman
The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign sees its salvation in suburban sprawl (“Bush Sees Fertile Soil in ‘Exurbia’,” by Peter Wallsten, the Los Angeles Times):

Bush has visited many of these new boomtowns -- he was in Lebanon on May 4 -- and campaign officials say he will likely see more of them before November’s election.

Each visit is designed to spur more for the campaign than a one-day burst of publicity. Playing off the excitement of a presidential appearance, strategists use it to recruit volunteers for phone banks, canvassing and voter registration efforts -- building what they hope will be an enduring GOP machine.

Karl Rove is so taken with the potential in the exurbs that he can quickly rattle off the names of otherwise obscure counties in swing states across the nation, along with the percentages of people who have not registered to vote in each one.

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