From Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), chair of the Republicans Senate Campaign Committee …

“Energy is actually a huge opportunity for Republicans. Energy has the opportunity to change the climate if it’s done right.”

Theda Skocpol: “Although Obama seems to be “up” in current national polls, McCain is actually doing a much better job of shaping the agenda to his advantage.”

Last night TPM Reader BD wrote in to let us know that John McCain is blanketing the airwaves in Missouri while Barack Obama wasn’t on the air at all. We asked other Missouri readers to tell us whether they were seeing the same thing.

And, by and large, the answer seems to be ‘Yes’. A few readers say that Obama has gone up on the air in the last few days too, but with a much smaller run.

A national campaign is a complex undertaking, with lots of trade-offs about where to deploy funds and strategies about how to roll out messages and when. So I won’t be foolish enough to second guess their strategy on the basis of one single data point, without being privy to their overall strategy.

But given Obama’s expected overpowering financial advantage, it would seem odd to me if his campaign is ceding the airwaves to McCain in such a key potential swing state.

It’s sad to see articulate and intelligent, if terribly misguided, writers still trying to justify their Iraq catastrophe by claiming its no different from World War II and our decades’ long stationing of troops in Germany and Japan.

Today we have the instance of Max Boot …

I could just imagine an Andrew Sullivan of the 1940’s writing something similar about Harry Truman’s crazy idea to station troops in Germany and Japan without an exit strategy: “In fifty years’ time, the West Germans will not be able to defend themselves against the Soviet Union? Or East Germany? Please.” As it happens, the West Germans wouldn’t have been able to defend themselves against a broad array of enemies without a long-term American troop presence. That presence has served other important goals too, namely reassuring Germany’s neighbors that it would never threaten the peace of Europe again and fostering Germany’s internal democratic development. But just because we’ve had troops in Germany and Japan for 60 years-and in South Korea for more than 50 years-doesn’t mean we’re occupying those countries. We are there are the request of democratically elected governments.

I never fail to have my breath taken away by various neocons’ breezy and wholly unselfconscious claims to be the modern-day stand-ins for every revered past moment in the history of American foreign policy. Boot’s problem is that he doesn’t get Imperialism, though it’s actually a topic he’s written a great deal about. Or more particularly, he doesn’t understand why it ended. When I interviewed him in the months before the Iraq War he talked with a mix of extravagance and hypotheticalness about recolonizing various parts of the Middle East. The main point I remember was taking over the Saudi oil fields and running them under some sort of internationally-sanctioned protectorate and “administering them as a trust for the people of the region.”

But setting all those concerns aside there’s one distinction between the case of Germany and Japan and Iraq today that gets far too little mention. It’s not a matter of culture or religion. It is the fact in the aftermath of World War II, both Germany and Japan had been conquered by the United States and her allies in a wars of aggression that Germany and Japan had started. The civilian populations of each country, whatever their war guilt, had experienced shattering levels of violence and privation in the final years of the war. And both countries were immediately faced by nearby hostile powers they feared much more than the United States. There are almost countless differences between the two historical situations, either separate from these points or growing out them. But taken together, these three factors explain a great deal of why our occupation of Iraq lacks both the legitimacy and the acceptance we enjoyed in those two countries.

In a McCain campaign conference call today, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) dismissed Obama’s bipartisan credentials as all talk and no action — conveniently skipping right past all the times Brownback himself and Obama have worked together.

As TPMmuckraker reports, not only did the Pentagon ignore a State Department watchlist in awarding a defense contract to AEY, Inc., those 20-something dudes from Florida, but the State Department itself ignored its own watchlist in awarding separate arms contracts to AEY.

We try to be transparent around here about our political leanings, so you should know there is a strong “Romney for VP” contingent at TPM. The sun has been a little dimmer since Mitt dropped out of the GOP primary. All would be right again with the world if McCain just named him to the ticket, then we could count on him dropping little nuggets of video gold like this one:

According to Andrew Sullivan, the only senator holding up ending the HIV travel and immigration ban is none other than Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), serial frequenter of prostitutes in DC and Louisiana.

Former Republican and former U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee sees a “flicker of common sense coursing through the Republican Party.”

New York Republicans looking for someone — anyone — to field in the race to fill Rep. Vito Fossella’s empty seat have scraped through the bottom of the barrel and are still coming up empty.