Stella!!

August 20-21, 1968. Over 200,000 Soviet troops (eventually 650,000) invade Czechoslovakia.

Aug. 17, 2008--Mr. Stewart has said he is looking forward to the end of the Bush administration “as a comedian, as a person, as a citizen, as a mammal.” NYT, Arts

--“Our biggest financiers are China, Russia and the gulf states,” Roubini noted. “These are rivals, not allies. The US, Roubini noted, will likely muddle through the crisis but will emerge from it a different nation, with a different place in the world. “Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers ... This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.” NYT Mag p. 29

--At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral voters in current toss up states and still lose the election. –Frank Rich

--Mexicans were counted in a separate racial category in the 1920 census, but 10 years later that classification was dropped and the results were revised to count Mexicans as white. (As recently as the 1960s, there was no Hispanic category in the census at all; Asian Indians were classified as white.) A century ago or so ago, the Irish Catholics, Italians, Eastern Europeans and even some Germans who arrived in droves in the US were not universally considered white. (Much earlier, Benjamin Franklin feared that his fellow white Pennsylvanians would be overwhelmed by swarming Germans, who “will soon so outnumber us, that all the advantages we have will not in my opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”) NYT, Nation, 6