Yes, it's early, yes, a lot could happen. But a man who could not have used certain restrooms forty years ago is in the center ring, not as a freak in the manner of Alberto Fujimori or Sonia Gandhi, nor even as a faction fighter in the style of Jesse Jackson, but as a real player. One of our great national sins is being obliterated, as the years pass, by the virtues of our national system. I don't agree with Obama and I don't particularly like him, but I am proud of this moment.

Interestingly, Obama himself is a marginal black man—half white, half Kenyan—but that is often the way ethnic gains are made in American politics. The first Irish and Italian mayors of New York, Richard Croker and Fiorello LaGuardia, were Protestants. And Harry Golden said of Barry Goldwater, that he always knew the first Jew to be president would be Episcopalian.

African American: An American of black African descent. The term may also be written with a hyphen as African-American.

The term entered into usage largely starting in 1988, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson held a news conference to urge Americans to use it to refer to blacks. African American has largely supplanted black in health matters. For example, "Breast cancer tumors in African-American women are more aggressive than tumors in white women."

The term has been a subject of debate, in part because it is ambiguous. It might be limited to Africans who have immigrated to America or to people born to one African and one American parent. Some have argued that the term African American should refer only to the descendents of slaves brought from Africa to America.

From a scientific viewpoint, the term African-American makes absolutely no sense. Most genetic evidence now supports an African origin for all humans on earth. Thus, everyone living in the Americas today is, properly speaking, African American.

As the primaries start in New Hampshire this week and roll on through the next few months, the erratic behavior of voting technology will once again find itself under a microscope. In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 — even though he’s pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person “undervote” for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.

The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, have even sponsored a bill that would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012.

...But I plan to vote for Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary because he is a rational, centered personality who speaks the language of idealism and national unity. Obama has served longer as an elected official than Hillary. He has had experience as a grass-roots activist, and he is also a highly educated lawyer who will be a quick learner in office. His international parentage and childhood, as well as his knowledge of both Christianity and Islam, would make him the right leader at the right time. And his wife Michelle is a powerhouse.

The Obamas represent the future, not the past.

Mr. Giuliani’s strategy has been to limit participation in contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and other early voting states and focus heavily on Florida. The campaign had estimated that it had its best chance of success there, banking on the state’s large population of former New Yorkers and its hopes that Mr. Giuliani’s message of a strong national military, support for Israel and a tough stance on Cuba would play well.

When asked whether he would have enough money left after Florida to compete on Feb. 5, Mr. Giuliani said: “We will have some. But frankly, you know, Florida is real important to us. So we are going to put, if not everything into Florida, almost everything.” Many media experts have estimated that a heavy dose of television advertising for the Feb. 5 primaries could cost $25 million to $35 million.

"John McCain has created this myth that he is a hero, and he is not," Kiley said from his home in Garnerville, N.Y.

Kiley's group cites as evidence a May 1973 U.S. News & World Report article by McCain in which he said he realized, on his third or fourth day of captivity after his plane was shot down in 1967, that his knee was so swollen the blood might pool in it and kill him. So he offered to give military information to his captors in exchange for medical treatment.

In the article, McCain said he told the story to make the point that the North Vietnamese only gave medical treatment to prisoners of war if they thought they were going to get something in return.

McCain did not say that he went through with his end of the deal.

Kiley claims information McCain gave to the North Vietnamese led to an increase in U.S. planes being shot down.

...Many argued that the term "African-American" should refer to the descendants of slaves brought to the United States centuries ago, not to newcomers who have not inherited the legacy of bondage, segregation and legal discrimination.

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The most senior Democrat to have called, the earliest and the longest, for the removal of Saddam Hussein is Peter Galbraith.

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I have to say that, as a spectator, I'm much more fascinated by the Republicans. Watching those shifty, devious, unscrupulous creatures clawing at each other in spasms of demagoguery and pander is like beholding the whole vile, fear-driven history of humanity.