The big conflict in the world today isn't between Democrats and Republicans, or even the West and the Middle East. It's between the individual and the collective. For it's the individual who believes rights to be unalienable, while it's the collective that seems to consider them subject to majority rule. It is the individual who sees his own happiness as a worthwhile goal, while the collective believes we're grist for the mill of the "public good." It's the individual who sees man as an end unto himself, while the collective sees him as a means to an end for others. And it's the individual who understands that capitalism protects our liberties, even as the collective tries to obliterate them. [SmartMoney]

Today, more than a century after Darwin and Nietzsche, 70% of Americans believe that Jesus was the Son of God. But... like every successful product, Jesus has been tailored to the demands of the market. Every denomination, every region, every class, every generation in American history has asked for a Jesus made in its own image. That appetite has been met by an army of priests, preachers, theologians, reformers, and even novelists.

If the omnipresence of Jesus in our ostensibly secular country is troubling, his malleability is reassuring: Americans seem less eager to do Jesus's bidding than to have him do theirs....

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Americans found Biblical grounds for enlisting Jesus on both sides of every debate. The abolitionist Angelina Grimke used Matthew 23:4--where Jesus attacks the Pharisees who "tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others"--to rebuke slave owners. Southern apologists, on the other hand, noted that Jesus never explicitly condemned the widespread Roman practice of slavery.

Half a century later, the socialist Eugene Debs proclaimed that "The revolutionary Savior always and everywhere stood with and for the poor," while the advertising man Bruce Barton declared, in the bestselling "The Man Nobody Knows," that Jesus "thought of his life as business." Jefferson and Emerson, Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King, Jane Addams and Aimee Semple MacPherson: From the sublime to the ridiculous, they all laid claim to Jesus.

Mr. Kerry would outspend Mr. Bush on health care, education, and obviously veterans benefits. He would spend $20 billion more on homeland security,and $50 billion more on aid to states. He would spend an additional $14 billion on energy and environmental programs and expand paid volunteer programs with more federal money. According to the Washington Post, which analyzed his plans this week, Mr. Kerry has proposed spending $165 billion more on new programs during his first term than he could save by raising taxes through a repeal of some of the Bush tax cuts and shutting down corporate loopholes.

With John Edwards expected to announce his withdrawal from the presidential race today, the contest for the Democrat nomination narrows to two men--Sen. John Forbes Kerry, D-MA, and Sen. John Forbes Kerry, D-MA.

"I think we're going to see them go at it hammer and tong until the convention," said Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democrat National Committee. "We couldn't hope for two men who offer more contrast; the war hero vs. the peace protestor, the wealthy husband of an heiress vs. the assailant of the privileged class. One backed the attack on Iraq, the other opposed it. One voted for the USA Patriot Act, the other denounces it. One supported the president's 'No Child Left Behind' education plan, the other is harshly critical of it."

Mr. McAuliffe said his main job as party chairman over the next six months is to "keep the two John Kerrys focused on attacking President Bush, rather than sniping at each other over character issues."

Beijing is fearful that pro-democracy candidates will do well enough in the next legislature, in which 30 of 60 seats will be elected democratically, to upset its control of the government. To reverse its fortunes, Beijing has threatened the dissolution of the next legislature if too many people Beijing doesn't like win seats. For good measure it has launched an intimidation campaign, smearing democratic politicians and activists as "unpatriotic,"which can be code for subversion or a threat to national security....

This is what "one country, two systems" means. That attractive-sounding formula, first devised to entice Taiwan into joining the mainland, is a fiction that has allowed the international democratic community to imagine that Beijing will tolerate Hong Kong's autonomy, and democratic expansion in Hong Kong. [NYSun]