29-year old Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, a Canadian citizen from Ottawa of Somali origin, was found deceased in his room at the Burnsley Hotel in downtown Denver, about four blocks from the State Capitol.

The cause of death remains to be determined, but the pound (.45 kg.) of Sodium Cyanide found by authorities next to the body may provide an important clue.

A suspicion person might conjecture that the late Mr. Dirie was visiting Denver in connection with some kind of plans related to the upcoming Democrat Party Convention, taking place August 25-28, and that the unlucky, or possibly maladroit Mr. Durie, while examining or otherwise manipulating the cyanide compound he had brought along for reasons of his own, met with an unhappy accident when he breathed in its vapors or somehow contacted the very dangerous chemical with his bare skin.

Mr. Dirie’s death (now being described as a suicide) somehow reminds me of the 2005 “suicide” of Joel Henry Hinrichs III, an engineering student with a Pakistani roommate who mysteriously chose to kill himself with a bomb containing the highly unstable and explosive compound triacetone triperoxide, in the very near vicinity of a football stadium where a game was being played with more than 80,000 people in attendance.

Fascinating, isn’t it, the way some people choose to commit suicide using very much the kinds and quantities of materials suitable for use in mass terrorism attacks in locations suspiciously close to suitable targets?

In the case of John Edwards, as in the case of John Kerry before him, as in the affair of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky still earlier, the mainstream media refrained from investigating or reporting unpleasant stories about their favored political leaders until widespread dissemination by alternative sources made the stories impossible to overlook.

Tom Maguire observes that Jerome Corsi, who wrote the book (Unfit for Command) which helped the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth sink John Kerry’s presidential hopes, has a new very recent book, The Obama Nation , currently ranking 7th in sales on Amazon. I’ve ordered a copy myself.

Tom mentions that Glenn Reynolds has been wondering what skeletons has Obama got in his personal closet that the media has so far been unwilling to investigate. The Corsi book is likely to point to a few, and that means the serious scrutiny of Barack Obama’s personal history, career, finances, and associations has only just begun.

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For example, one of Tom Maguire’s commenters reports that the relationship between the Obamas and 1960s radicals William Ayres and Bernardine Dohrn was clearly rather more intimate than Obama himself represented in his “”a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago” dismissive description. He says that, to his personal knowledge, the Ayres babysat the Obama children.

This crazy.

That little Obama endorsement video was a comedy satire, but this moonbat is completely in earnest.

Blake Fleetwood, at Huffington Post, thinks Dick Cheney and Karl Rove persuaded Georgia to provoke war with Russia to help John McCain win the US presidential election.

He just needs to get some of his ultra-left blogger friends to repeat this nonsense a few times, and my college classmates will become believers. The same process worked with “Bush went to war with Iraq to avenge the assassination attempt on his father” story and the ever-popular “We invaded Iraq to steal the oil” theory.

Angelina Jolie is keeping an open mind, Wiltshire & Washington reports.

In June, when Entertainment Weekly asked her whether she talked politics with Clint Eastwood, a longtime Republican, on the set of the upcoming movie, “The Changeling,” she said, “Actually, we don’t disagree as much as you’d think. I think people assume I’m a Democrat. But I’m registered independent and I’m still undecided. So I’m looking at McCain as well as Obama.”

A couple of YouTube 19 year old comedians satirize youth for Obama. They were sufficiently persuasive that some angry Hillaryites at Larry Johnson’s blog took this for a real endorsement.

3:55 video

Apparently, the Obama birth certificate published on Daily Kos, later demonstrated to be a forgery was the result of an effort to avoid embarrassing discussion the real document bearing the candidate’s adopted name of Barry Soetero, and consequent issues connected with his dual citizenships.

Apparently, having a Kenyan birth father automatically makes Mr. Soetero a citizen of Kenya, and being adopted by an Indonesian father makes him an Indonesian citizen, too. Triune citizenship is bound to provoke campaign discussion. John McCain isn’t going to say: “Do you really want to elect a Kenyan and/or an Indonesian President of the United States?” but plenty of other people will.

Obama’s real Indonesian surname and dual citizenship is an even bigger problem, because it provokes further discussion of, and investigation into, his childhood personal ties to Islam.

I don’t think changing one’s name or possessing (even more than one form of) dual citizenship necessarily dooms a presidential candidacy in this day and age, but getting caught prevaricating never does any presidential candidate a bit of good.

Larry Johnson and Texas Darlin are gleefully dishing up the dirt about all this.

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The top conservative blogs are today starting to catch up with this story.

Gateway Pundit has learned of the Kenyan citizenship.

House Republicans have recently produced a major reversal in the momentum of the 2008 campaign by actually fighting democrats over their crazy environmental fanaticism and determination to maintain federal regulatory roadblocks to domestic oil exploration production at a time when prices at the pump are over $4. Tourists have come into the Capitol to applaud them.

Congressional Republicans actually find a winning issue, so what happens next?

Why, naturally, the Third Senator from New York, Lindsey Graham arrives with four other weak-kneed RINOs accompanied by a matching set of five democrats to propose a bipartisan sell-out which would protect the democrats from Republican attacks. Sheer genius! Isn’t it obvious just whom John McCain ought to be picking as his running-mate?

Speaking for real Republicans, Kimberly Strassel had a few choice words about all this.

It’s taken time, but Sen. McCain and his party have finally found — in energy — an issue that’s working for them. Riding voter discontent over high gas prices, the GOP has made antidrilling Democrats this summer’s headlines.

Their enthusiasm has given conservative candidates a boost in tough races. And Mr. McCain has pressured Barack Obama into an energy debate, where the Democrat has struggled to explain shifting and confused policy proposals.

Still, it was probably too much to assume every Republican would work out that their side was winning this issue. And so, last Friday, in stumbled Sens. Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Saxby Chambliss, Bob Corker and Johnny Isakson — alongside five Senate Democrats. This “Gang of 10” announced a “sweeping” and “bipartisan” energy plan to break Washington’s energy “stalemate.” What they did was throw every vulnerable Democrat, and Mr. Obama, a life preserver.

That’s because the plan is a Democratic giveaway. New production on offshore federal lands is left to state legislatures, and then in only four coastal states. The regulatory hurdles are huge. And the bill bars drilling within 50 miles of the coast — putting off limits some of the most productive areas. Alaska’s oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is still a no-go.

The highlight is instead $84 billion in tax credits, subsidies and federal handouts for alternative fuels and renewables. The Gang of 10 intends to pay for all this in part by raising taxes on . . . oil companies! The Sierra Club couldn’t have penned it better. And so the Republican Five has potentially given antidrilling Democrats the political cover they need to neutralize energy through November.

A candidate with his own presidential seal is prone to decide he also needs his own personal salute.

And, sure enough, US News & World Report recently found, Barack Obama’s gotten himself one of those, too.

But, maybe, just maybe, Obama needs to re-think these little personal touches. They provoke mockery, and worse, they prompt cynical people, like Gateway Pundit, to investigate possible sources of plagiarism.

With the media passionately on his side, the lame duck Bush Administration about as popular as the proverbial skunk at a picnic, and all signs promising a Battle of the Little Big Horn experience for the GOP in November, Barack Obama ought to be holding a commanding lead in the polls, but recent numbers indicate a dead heat.

Uh oh! The topic du jour among the chattering classes is just how fed up with listening to the media’s harp-accompanied chorus of hallelujahs for Barack Obama Americans have become.

Not a good sign, is it?

As the democrat convention nears, we begin to hear faintly, but growing gradually louder, the theme from Jaws.

Walter Shapiro, in Salon:

The nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People & the Press diagnosed a new malady Wednesday: “Obama Fatigue.” That was the headline on a national survey conducted late last week that discovered that 48 percent of all voters and, tellingly, 51 percent of independents feel they have been “hearing too much” about Barack Obama. In contrast, only 10 percent of voters say they have been “hearing too little” about the de facto Democratic nominee.

“I was stunned by the numbers, since I didn’t expect that we’d get that kind of gap,” Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Research Center, said in an interview. Kohut, a respected pollster who rarely traffics in hyperbole, added, “I would have taken it far less seriously if we didn’t get the exact opposite result with the McCain question.” More voters (38 percent) complain that they have been hearing “too little” about John McCain than “too much” (26 percent).

This poll question, which has never before been asked about presidential candidates, is more intriguing than definitive.

As Obama sinks in the polls, Dennis Keohane wonders if it’s possible that democrats might still change their mind about nominating him.

Will Hillary outsmart Obama and take the nomination at the last minute?

Many of us familiar with Hillary Clinton’s approach to achieving her goals refused to believe that she ever gave up all hope of winning the nomination and the presidency. Her words and actions on the subject of the convention itself always left the door open for a return, should Obama falter or suffer some calamity.

Her artful evasions were enough to lull journalists and (more importantly) Obama and his supporters into the presumption of inevitability. No further rumblings of a mass protest in Denver should the first black candidate be denied his rightful due were heard. After all, he received enough publicly expressed support from super delegates to put him over the top. And he won the popular vote in the primaries, we were assured, lending legitimacy to the super delegates who voiced their support.

Everyone presumed the presumptive nominee was a lock.

Now there are a few signs that Hillary may be making her move. …

ABC news reported yesterday that Hillary Clinton does not rule out putting her name in nomination, contradicting earlier press reports.

Many people, including no doubt a goodly number of nervous Democrat super delegates, are asking themselves the David Brooks’ question about Obama’s standing in the polls: “Where’s the landslide?” After evaluating him for several months, voters in the middle still aren’t ready to embrace him.

National polls show not only a tightening of the Obama-McCain race to a statistical dead heat but momentum toward a McCain lead, something inconceivable only weeks ago. The specter of an Obama collapse has to haunt more than a few super delegates.

Buyer’s remorse seemed evident and growing among many Democrats toward the end of their primary season when Obama lost again and again to Clinton, even as the delegate math was by then stacked in his favor. That remorse was put on hold (but apparently not resolved) by Obama’s seeming to secure the nomination and the subsequent popular boost he enjoyed at first. But lately the candidate with a difference has had a hard time living up to his promise to be a new kind of politician.

According to RealClearPolitics, Obama has 1766.5 pledged delegates, 352 short of the 2118 needed to secure the nomination. He also has 463 super delegates, which puts him over the top — if they hold. If a combination of Clinton campaigning and nervousness can cause a hundred and twenty or so super delegates to sit out the first ballot, Obama does not get the nomination on the first ballot and perhaps not at all. After that first vote a great many pledged delegates and all the super delegates are free to vote as they choose.

He has a good point.

If you keep an eye on Larry Johnson’s No Quarter, you can see that there are plenty of irredentist Hillary supporters out there in the ranks of the democratic left.

If you’re not enthusiastically supporting Barack Obama, you may be a racist.

Paris Hilton was evidently piqued by John McCain using her in a recent campaign video, so she’s responding with her own

1:49 video reply.

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And the McCain campaign was quick to reply:

In the unkindest cut of all, McCain’s spokesperson Tucker Bounds (said) that on the subject of energy, Paris is deeper than Barack. He says, “Sounds like Paris is taking the ‘All of the Above’ energy approach that John McCain has advocated — both alternatives and drilling. Perhaps the reality is that Paris has a more substantive energy plan than Barack Obama.”

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Hat tip to Stephen Frankel.