The Daily Dose

Nick Kristof suggests options by which President Bush can deploy America's soft power in lieu of hard(ware) power: "Why not impose a no-fly zone, why not hold an international conference on Darfur, why not invite survivors to the White House for a photo-op, why not give a prime-time speech about Darfur?"

Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president who died earlier this week, is one of those figures who chagrins me for not taking an interest in politics until my senior year in high school. David Boaz salutes him as "one of authentic heroes of the 20th century. . . . a man who freed a continental and helped end the Cold War."

Katherine Mangu-Ward has an excellent cover story in this month's Reason (not yet online) on Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Here's the take-away message: "People who don't 'get' Wikipedia, or who get it and recoil in horror, tend to be from an older generation. . . . People who get it are younger and hipper. . . . But the people who really matter are the [kids], who will never remember a time without Wikipedia (or perhaps Wikia), the people for whom open-source, self-governed, spontaneously ordered online community projects don't seem . . . particularly remarkable."

Bob Novak points out that even "[w]ithout announcing his candidacy, [Fred] Thompson has won straw polls at the Oklahoma Republican convention, the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, the California Republican Assembly and Georgia's 9th Congressional District party convention."