Aaron Naparstek

Having dispensed with the question of whether an African-American or woman will ever make it to the White House, conservative Culture Warriors have moved on to defining and dividing Americans over their chosen mode of transportation. These two images have been floating around the right wing blogosphere under the shrieky, all-caps headline, "THIS IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW." Somehow or another this strikes me as a promising development.

With New York City's mostly uncontested primary elections less than a week away, attention turns to the 64th State Assembly district in Lower Manhattan, where New York Times-endorsed insurgent Paul Newell is running a long-shot campaign against Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Facing his first Democratic challenge since the coining of the word "cyberspace," the decidedly analog Speaker has joined us here in the Information Age with a fancy new campaign web site, ShellySilver.org. It features an eye-catching Google map illustrating "What Shelly's Doing Near You" with some of the $3 to $7 million in member items he distributes annually.

As the Democratic convention convenes in Denver, Matt Davies of the Journal News drills down on the national energy policy debate. Click through for the punchline.

Transportation Alternatives' Noah Budnick will be on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" this afternoon at 3 p.m. EST. He'll be debating Rob Anderson, the one-man wrecking crew who filed the 2006 environmental impact law suit that stopped San Francisco from building out its citywide bicycle network.

A dozen transportation policy heavy-hitters are getting together for a round table discussion on transportation infrastructure at the Democratic Convention in Denver this afternoon. The panel is titled, "Funding is the Alpha and Omega of all Transportation Needs -- Can Public/Private Partnerships Fill the Funding Gap?" New York City's Janette Sadik-Khan has a seat at the table.

Via Smart Growth America, I'm finally catching up to this great little story in last month's Baltimore Sun about all of the Orioles players who are commuting to the ballpark by bike these days:

Back in his Straight Talkin' days Senator John McCain acknowledged that offshore drilling wasn't a viable solution for America's energy troubles. In 2003, he broke with the Bush Administration and co-introduced legislation to reduce carbon emissions, by, in effect, imposing a price on them. McCain had a reputation for being a politician who told the American people the truth, even when the truth wasn't something that people particularly wanted to hear. But the past few weeks have seen a fundamental change in McCain, writes Elizabeth Kolbert in an outstanding piece in this week's New Yorker: