James Galbraith, at the TPMCafe Book Club, on Thomas Sowell’s attack yesterday on Obama in National Review Online: Since when did conservative economists care about tax revenue? Hasn’t he heard of starving the beast?

I will grant him this, Sen. McCain becomes markedly more animated and focused when he’s talking about the Tsarist Empire and the Cold War. And I can see that Mark Halperin at ABC News is getting with the program when he cheers McCain’s ability to use the Georgian crisis as an opportunity to “distance himself from the more accommodationist Bush Administration.”

I think Halperin does us all a service by signaling that the Bush administration will seem “accomodationist” in comparison to a potential McCain administration. At several points in his statements over the last few days McCain has said that he “doesn’t think” we’re headed back to the Cold War. But listen to the tone of his voice and tell me if it doesn’t sound like the one President Bush used to employ when he’d say, circa 2002-2003, that we were taking every step possible to avoid war with Iraq.

In a world where economic might and national power are increasingly driven by information technology, can we afford a president who hasn’t learned to use email? Amanda Terkel asks the question.

Let me see if I can explain this simply.

When Sen. McCain was doing his highly circumscribed senate investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Jack’s then-firm, Greenberg Traurig, hired sometimes McCain foreign policy advisor and most-times lobbyist Randy Scheunemann “for advice on handling the Senate investigation.”

This was while Scheunemann was also lobbying for the government of Georgia.

McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers told the Times “he believed that Mr. Scheunemann was hired because he had worked in Congress for more than a decade and had experience with investigations, and not because of any ties he had to Mr. McCain.”

Here’s a good article from the LA Times on the strategic backdrop to the recent events in Georgia.

There’s a core question of US foreign policy in play here that few seem to be discussing. And that is whether it is necessary to the vital interests of the United States, or even consistent with the vital interests of the United States (I’m dubious on this latter point), to demand a Russian sphere of influence which is coterminous with Russia’s own current borders. That’s the policy goal that is the backdrop of this whole conflict, writ large and small.

Andrew Sullivan, who’s been on a tear on this story, has another good post on the bankrupt posturing of the neocons, jumping at the hopes of a new Cold War with the Russians, despite the lack of the ideological underpinnings on which we fought the first and any Russian global ambitions or capacity to fight it.

But I think in our own lives we all know the type who heads off into some new and exciting scheme, with high hopes and little forethought. And when things don’t pan out or come crashing down at their feet, rather than take stock of the situation or reevaluate their own shiftless practices, they’re off to some new ambitious plan or get-rich-quick scheme as if the last gambit had never happened.

And it’s hard not to recognize that sad figure in the Max Boots and John McCains and Bill Bennetts and all the rest with their sustaining roots planted firmly at AEI HQ. After all, what happened to the long twilight struggle against radical Islam? So yesterday, I guess. Or can we do both simultaneously, even though the Russians are themselves up against hostile Islamic groups on their southern periphery?

Watching the Bennetts and the Krauthammers get all jazzed up about Georgia as the new Afghanistan, with all the painfully awkward nostalgia and excitement of an 80s era Gilligan’s Island reunion flick is entertaining. But much less so when you realize these jokers might be running the government in six months.

Obama goes up with a new TV ad in Indiana using McCain’s “the economy is fine” talk in the GOP primaries against him. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

TPM Election Central reports on the contours of the forthcoming deal between the Obama and Hillary camps on her role at the Convention: her nomination will be put to a roll call vote as a symbolic nod to her hard-fought primary campaign, but she will urge her supporters to back Obama.

I don’t know how widely Obama is running this ad. But it’s good. And it captures something key about McCain …

Joe Klein: There’s no way to “explain [the kind of campaign McCain is running] other than as evidence of a severe character defect on the part of the candidate who allows it to be used.”

For most I think the idea is still that McCain doesn’t really approve of the campaign his campaign is running or he wouldn’t if he knew about it.