According to news reports this morning, the U.S. is turning over air patrol duties in Libya to European countries. This sounds like an encouraging development.

Also, The New Yorker magazine this week has a good piece by Jon Lee Anderson on the Libyan rebels -- namely, who are they? Anderson, who is on the ground with them, says it's a disorganized mix of disaffected young people clamoring for jobs, devout Muslims who think Qaddafi is a nonbeliever and Libyan expatriates who want their country back. Some of them were living in the U.S. and rushed back home to fight Qaddafi.

However, few of them are trained soldiers. The majority ran around in the early days of the rebellion with little or no weaponry or clear strategy. When Qaddafi shot artillery at them and blew some of them to bits, they were terrified and furious. It's not at all clear these folks can prevail on their own.

Send Weemie.

I think that is only de facto correct, but someone who works in politics at the time told me that he'd bet everything he owned that somehow Clinton would win because America would never elect a black man.

We now, in the present know that was wrong, but I suggest most people didn't foresee Obama winning it all, let alone beating Clinton.

(I voted Obama in both primary and National FYI)

There are at least two people who have been avoiding me for almost three years now because they also made that prediction of Hillary getting the nom, and McCain winning the general; while I predicted Obama would win both. I've seen each of them once since, and their reaction is, "Uh, I'm kind of in a hurry right now..."

I figured it would be Clinton who won the primary, not Obama, for the reason Alex's friends gave, that America seemed more likely to elect a woman president before a black president. Also, the Clinton Machine -- essentially, the Democratic Party establishment -- was a powerful competitor. She had essential votes locked up years before Obama made his decision.

But I was wrong. And once Obama beat Clinton in the primary, I was pretty sure he would beat McCain in the general because he clearly had momentum behind him. Plus, the economy went into the shitter that fall on a Republican president's watch. McCain maybe could have mitigated that if he hadn't seemed so clueless.

I admit, I wasn't sure how Sarah Palin would affect things. McCain selecting her (and his being a 150-year-old cancer survivor, making his veep choice chillingly relevant) struck some moderates as reckless given her lack of intelligence, emotional maturity and experience. He lost some Republican and independent support there. However, among a certain type -- say, ChrisW -- Palin was and remains madly popular. She represents an angry, belligerent element with a chip on its shoulder that is convinced the "educated elites" are laughing at them, even if they're doing fairly OK for themselves.

I wondered if Palin could tap enough of this self-pitying outrage to push McCain over the top. Evidently, no. I suspect that Palin can't attract much more than one-third of the electorate. That one-third of the electorate (the same third that believes Obama was born in Kenya and therefore is not eligible to be president) probably would elect her queen. But I think she makes the majority uneasy.

I'm sure you know this, but I have to keep pointing it out to my family members and co-workers: the law is that if an American citizen gives birth while traveling abroad, her child is a natural born American citizen. So even if Obama was born in Kenya (he wasn't), he would still be a natural born American citizen. This is the same law that made John McCain eligible to run for president, as he was born in a civilian hospital in Panama (not on the military base).

All true, Allen. But I hate to cede any ground to the birther idiots.

Obama was born in Hawaii, which was a state, which makes him a U.S. citizen, period. Hawaii has produced a certificate of live birth. The two Honolulu newspapers published birth notices when Obama was born.

Short of someone finding a videotape of the birth, with the governor of Hawaii standing in the background of the delivery room, wearing a lei, singing the Star Spangled Banner, with the video's authenticity notarized by a dozen nuns, I dunno what else these idiots expect to find. His original birth certificate? I can't find my original birth certificate! I've got a copy the state produced for me years ago when I needed a passport.

Did you see where Trump couldn't find his original birth certificate either, after weighing in on the side of the birthers? That was funny. The birth certificate he eventually produced was a copy that he got in the 90's. Sure, it's a valid state document, but if Obama produced the same kind of record, the conspiracy nuts would dismiss it out of hand.

Really? That's great! I had heard the military base story, not that he was born off the base. When did that come out? Not during the campaign, was it?

During the Orly Taitz talk show rounds. Where she also said Obama was using the Social Security number of a person deceased over a hundred years ago (uh, SSN's weren't even issued until after WWII).