Contrast this with the occasional Obama ad, who is still at the boring, vague, "bio ad" stage.

McCain is defining himself and Obama, setting the playing field.

I know it's a paper-thin cliche, but it's still pertinent: If American voters are so engaged and smart and insightful, then why in the world was George W. Bush ever within about 20 percentage points of Gore or Kerry?  Why did so many of us (NOT including me, I hasten to add) fall for Reagan's idiotic "Morning in America" line?  We all know the answers, and it's painful to contemplate.

Senators Lugar and Obama detained in Moscow for several hours

"I am in Ukraine with Sen. Lugar," Lugar's spokesman, Andy Fisher, said in a message sent from a personal messaging device Sunday afternoon.

    He said Russian officials refused to let the plane take off for three hours and insisted on boarding it. "They did not. The border patrol finally got orders to let us go," Fisher said.

    "We were treated just fine," he said.

    A spokesman for Obama also confirmed the plane's arrival in Ukraine.

    The senators and their aides spent three days in Russia visiting sites where warheads are stored before destruction under the U.S.-funded Comprehensive Threat Reduction program.

    The spokesmen did not have information on the nature of the dispute that resulted in the senators' being held. Telephone calls to the Russian border guard service and Foreign Ministry were not answered Sunday evening.

We checked into Obama's legislative record with Sen. Lugar, a Republican from Indiana.

Obama's first foreign travel as a U.S. senator was with Lugar in August 2005, when the two men visited nuclear weapons storage and dismantlement facilities in Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan.

The following spring, Lugar and Obama authored a Senate bill that authorized the president to carry out a program to provide assistance to foreign countries to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The bill does not specifically list different types of weapons of mass destruction, but we'll take as a given that it includes nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

The larger part of the legislation was a separate measure to stop the spread of conventional weapons, notably shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles that the legislation refers to as man-portable air defense systems, or MANPADS.

The bill's provisions were incorporated into a House bill that passed later that year and was signed into law in January 2007.

The Lugar-Obama initiative is modeled after a 1991 bill authored by Lugar and former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn. The Nunn-Lugar program provided U.S. funding and expertise to the former Soviet Union to dismantle stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

We'll note here that the legislation Obama and Lugar sponsored did not deal solely with nuclear weapons, but rather with all weapons of mass destruction, and that a good bit of their legislation focused on conventional weapons. But it does seem like part of the legislation's intent is to "help lock down loose nuclear weapons." For that reason, we find Obama's statement to be True.

Everyone has a predisposition toward the things they want to be true (yes, even college-educated liberals who follow every heartbeat of a 17-month long campaign -- what's that I hear?  oh, it's the pitter patter of little hopey-changey new politics feet).  

People really, desperately want to believe in anything whatsoever that will drive down oil prices.  Gas prices are killing them.  Everyone I know for whom money isn't exactly overflowing (pretty much everyone I know) is already getting pretty freaked about how to afford heat next winter.