Still waiting.

* It's not exactly Douchiest College honors, but Duke is #14 on the Times's ranking of top 200 universities worldwide.

* Bitter Laughter reports by way of Nate Silver that public option opt-out may be a compromise that can actually get through the Senate—and Steve Benen agrees it's not a bad thing.

* Also in health care: Olbermann's hour-long "Special Comment" from last night, which wasn't nearly as unbearable as I imagined it would be when I heard it was coming.

* A second NJ-GOV poll—albeit one taken before Fatgate—shows Corzine up, this time by three.

* Lots of talk today about this New York Times genealogy of Michelle Obama, focused on an enslaved ancestor who was raped by her owner.

* Pee before you fly. It's funny how low-cost, outside-the-box carbon solutions—like Stephen Chu's suggestion that we paint our roofs white—are never taken seriously. It's like our society has a death wish.

* The literary journal is dead. Long live the literary journal.

Everybody and their mother is gushing over this profile of a young Barack and Michelle Obama in The New Yorker. I am no different.

Michelle Obama finished speaking not too long ago. She's been called Barack's secret weapon, and she clearly is—that was one of the better-delivered political speeches I've ever seen, especially given the difficult dual contexts of rehabilitating Michelle's public image and winning over still-suspicious Hillary voters. She was quite literally perfect.

I was almost too nervous to watch the Ted Kennedy tribute and speech; contrary to the way I saw it described on television, it seemed to me that Kennedy was extremely frail and liable to collapse at any moment.

But perhaps the most serious news tonight is the revelation of an apparent assassination plot: at first it seemed to be merely two meth addicts with rifles, but now "at least" four people are under arrest...

Anatomy of a smear. Via Ben Smith.

This is the '08 version of a really weird conservative urban legend that pops up every four years, The names change, but the basics remain the same: 1) It always involves the wife of the Democratic presidential candidate; 2) It always portrays the wife -- not the candidate -- committing some anti-American, unpatriotic act.

I was first exposed to this during the 1988 campaign when the line was, "There's a picture out there of Kitty Dukakis burning the American flag...just wait til that comes out..." (that one got out of hand when a GOP senator actually believed it and called a press conference to say he would soon produce the evidence -- which never materialized). Four years later, "There's a picture out there of Hillary Clinton burning the American flag...just wait 'til that comes out..." In 1996, the Hillary thing repeated itself. In '04, there was a similar one about Teresa Heinz Kerry.