Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

A man adjusts a ballon at the U.K.'s biggest balloon fest.

You might have thought that now isn't the most opportune time for the elected leaders of both the United States and Iraq to pack up and head to the beach, ranch or villa for a nice long vacation. Silly you.

You probably reasoned that with 162,000 U.S. troops sweltering in the war zone, with the Iraqi government fracturing along sectarian lines and with what is billed as a make-or-break report from the U.S. commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, due next month, maybe tradition ought to be ignored and the summer heat withstood just this once. You doubtless pointed out that no matter how uncomfortable triple-digit temperatures might be for the grandees of Washington and Baghdad, soldiers burdened with body armor and combat boots -- and the constant threat of getting shot or blown up -- have it a bit worse.

You were right, of course -- it's unbelievable that the Iraqi parliament is taking a month-long vacation, that Congress has left for its traditional August recess and that George W. Bush is heading off to Kennebunkport and then to Texas. What you failed to take into account is that none of this really matters, because the war in Iraq is on autopilot.

-- EUGENE ROBINSON

The Beauchamp dispatches show the extent to which the discourse over Iraq has been poisoned and how quickly the left, the right, and the military were willing to go to the mat to defend their version of what is—or what they thought ought to be—true. No one cares anymore about the troops, the truth of their reports from Iraq, or the serious issues of professional journalism associated with a series of this type. The troops have become pawns in this debate; their stories a kind of Rorschach test that reveals more about how we view the war than its reality on the ground.

-- PHILIP CARTER

We’re entering the early mid-late summer blur, I suspect. Something deep, ancient, elemental and ancestral in the back of our minds has noted the angle of the sun at noon, and concluded: in two weeks I shall see school buses making practice runs. Of course, this information was useless to our Neolithic forebears, but it explains their epic poems about giant yellow beasts that prowled the land and devoured the first-born.

-- JAMES LILEKS

An increasing number of parents (are) contacting college officials to request roommate changes for their freshman children because they found the prospective roommate's Facebook profile objectionable.

-- MARIANNE RICHMOND

Only a few years ago, ethanol was just a line in a farm-state politician’s stump speech — something that went down well with the locals but didn’t mean much to anyone else. Now, of course, ethanol is widely touted — and, within reason, rightly so — as an important part of America’s search for energy independence and greener fuels. One day, we may be using cellulosic ethanol, the kind derived from grasses. For now, the ethanol boom is all about corn. And the real question is whether that will finally kill American farming as we know it.

Farmers in the corn belt have watched the coming of the ethanol boom with an ill-concealed excitement. They’ve invested in small-town processing plants, and they’ve happily seen the price of corn fluctuate steadily upward. But land prices have also moved steadily upward. Land set aside for conservation is being put back into production. And a bidding war has broken out over acreage, a war that farmers are sure to lose to speculative investors.

In short, the ethanol boom is accelerating the inequity in the rural landscape. The high price of corn — and the prospect of continued huge demand — doesn’t benefit everyone equally. It gives bigger, richer farmers and outside investors the ability to outcompete their smaller neighbors. It cuts young farmers hoping to get a start out of the equation entirely. It reduces diversity in crops and in farm size.

-- THE NEW YORK TIMES

The paradox of American policy in the Middle East is that almost everywhere there are free elections, the American-backed side tends to lose.

-- HASSAN M. FATTAH

One way to characterize Bush's second term in domestic policy is that he's consistently moved to Plan B too late to salvage anything from the demise of his Plan A. That was certainly the case on Social Security reform, and in all probability will be the final story on immigration. Will he replicate that misjudgment on Iraq?

-- MICKEY KAUS

A program that has monitored sexual Web sites for illegal material over the last several years has not resulted in a single prosecution.

-- NEIL A. LEWIS

I liken falling in love to opening an emotional parachute; it's this enormous silken canopy of feeling that, once released, you can't imagine used to be housed in the tiny confines of your chest.

When it's out and flooded with sunshine, the parachute's an amazing thing; you're almost flying, you feel larger than yourself, can see for miles.

The problem is that once it's out of its pack, it's almost impossible to stuff the parachute of love back into the small space of yourself - if you're forced to.

This is what constitutes heartbreak, when you're walking around, desolate, trailing fabric and rigging like some gut-shot soldier cradling his intestines.

So, once you've experienced that feeling a few times, is it not unreasonable to try to avoid it, to hold something back in a relationship?

-- SAM de BRITO

Meat, the magic marriage bullet! Oh, if only I had thought to order a steak or a hamburger on my first dates, I, too, could be married to a smart, funny, kind man who owns a suit (but isn’t one), and we could have winked at our mutual love of meat by having just the cutest little mini-cheeseburgers at the wedding!

-- ZUZU

Photograph by Getty Images