Democracy is not flourishing under Russia's Vladimir "Bad Vlad" Putin, nor is its population. Putin devoted a considerable portion of his May state-of-the-nation speech to Russia's annual population loss of 700,000. "We need to reduce mortality, have an effective migration policy, and increase the birthrate" - in decline for 15 years. "We have raised this question many times but in fact have done little," he said. So now Russia has begun offering cash to its women to produce more babies.

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John McCain has shocked the self-deluded left - shocked it - by signifying as a conservative Republican actually interested in the Republican presidential nomination. Amazing. Lofty liberal columnist E.J. Dionne put it this way: "If McCain spends the next two years obviously positioning himself to win Republican primary votes, he will start to look like just another politician."

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For the third and fourth time in four years, the Senate - clotted with lawyers but boasting just one physician - has failed to impose caps on medical malpractice awards. Three Republicans, all lawyers, voted with the Democrats to uphold a filibuster preventing floor votes on two bills. There oughta be a law . . ..

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Which returns us to the matter of the vacancies on the appellate courts - with the announced departure of the 4th Circuit's stellar Michael Luttig for Boeing, 18 vacancies overall. For those vacancies, the Bush administration has offered just 10 nominees. Why - oyez, why indeed? And of the 10, the distinguished Democratic members of the genteel Senate Club aren't particularly happy about any of them and are threatening selective filibusters. Same old same old, and tiresome - and wrong. The administration ought to flood the Senate with appellate nominees and employ nuclear devices as necessary to win floor votes on each one.