Harry Reid and Howard Dean had their reasons for coming out against the Park51 project in lower Manhattan last week. Well, at least Reid, who is locked in a tight reelection campaign in Nevada, did. Dean's motives are a little harder to discern.

Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he's headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility.

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Michael Enright, the raging drunk who nearly killed a Muslim cab-driver in Manhattan this week, is being held without bail following his arraignment on hate crime charges. Enright, a film student, is finishing a documentary about Marines serving in Afghanistan, where he was embedded earlier this year for 35 days.

Now that President Obama has been in office for over a year and a half -- during which time he’s governed in more or less exactly the fashion his 2008 campaign promised -- you might think it would be difficult to fill column inches with yet another article rehashing the campaign narrative of Obama as an inscrutable man of mystery. God bless Politico, then, for making it look so easy.

"These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith, and it's important for my fellow Americans to understand that."
-- President George W. Bush, at the Islamic Center of Washington, Sept. 17, 2001

Glenn Beck is having a little Lincoln Memorial confab on Saturday, Aug. 28, the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic "I have a dream" speech -- but he didn't know it was the King anniversary, he says. He's invited Sarah Palin to headline the event -- but the gathering isn't "political," he says.

Former head of the Republican National Committee and Bush '04 campaign manager Ken Mehlman has finally come out as a gay man. Mehlman broke the "news" to The Atlantic's Mark Ambinder.

There is much speculation today that Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was apparently defeated in Alaska's GOP Senate primary, might now opt to run as an independent in the fall campaign.

Bombers and gunmen killed at least 56 Iraqis in more than two dozen attacks across the country Wednesday, mostly targeting security forces and rekindling memories of the days when insurgents ruled the streets.

The Empire State Building's owner has lost his bid to stop a new skyscraper from rising in the neighborhood.

William Whitman "Will" Harsh -- the younger, more racist, but less violent son of California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman -- was apparently a bullying jerk a couple weeks ago.

Now that Rick Scott is the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Florida, perhaps voters there will start to ask the same question posed by reporters during the primary: Why won't he disclose the secret legal settlements between his corporate medical clinic chain and a dozen or so former employees?

Bombers and gunmen killed 55 Iraqis in nearly two dozen attacks spanning the country Wednesday, mostly targeting security forces in seemingly coordinated strikes the day after the number of U.S. troops fell below 50,000 for the first time since the start of the war.

[Updated] The man who allegedly stabbed a cab driver after learning that the driver was a Muslim is Michael Enright, a 21-year-old filmmaker from upstate New York. Enright -- who shoots video for a New York-based peace group that counts Cordoba Initiative as one of its partners -- has been charged with attempted murder as a hate crime, and police say he was "very, very intoxicated" when he got in the cab at 6 p.m. last night.

Christina Bellantoni at TPM has a useful look at Scott McAdams, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Alaska who, pending the GOP primary vote count, may face tea partier Joe Miller in the general election.

A four-term Arizona Senator handily won his primary election last night, and all he had to do was continue to embarrass and debase himself on the national stage. Now the 73-year-old veteran is one more grinding general election away from returning to his home in Virginia for six more years in order to serve bitterly in what will most likely remain a Senate minority, under a Democratic president whom McCain clearly despises.

Bombers and gunmen launched an apparently coordinated string of attacks against Iraqi government forces on Wednesday, killing at least 50 people a day after the number of U.S. troops fell below 50,000 for the first time since the start of the war.

Not for the first time this year, I woke up today -- the morning after several more states held Republican primaries -- and found myself thinking of Oliver North. It's been 16 years since the former Iran-Contra figure was rejected by Virginia's electorate, but the example of his failed U.S. Senate campaign is more pertinent than ever.

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