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Friendship, party loyalty -- yeah, whatever. That is Phill Kline's attitude, it seems.

Otherwise, a close political ally like state Sen. Karin Brownlee, R-Olathe, wouldn't have been so shocked when yours truly called Monday night for a comment.

"No!" Brownlee said in disbelief when I told her that Kline had reversed himself and would indeed be running for Johnson County district attorney.

"He didn't!" she said. "I waited to endorse Steve until after Phill announced he was not running."

"Steve" is Steve Howe, the career prosecutor the Republican establishment is lined up behind, conservatives and moderates both. The unity candidate who supposedly was going to replace Kline when the latter finished his two-year stint as a placeholder to finish out Paul Morrison's term as district attorney.

Barack Obama's presidential campaign plans to strike at the heart of the Republican base by attempting to woo evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics to his side.

This effort has been dubbed the "Joshua Gener-ation Project." Joshua, Moses' successor, led the Israelites into the Promised Land. Apparently, if we have enough faith in Obama, he will lead us all into a new America.

Obama is better at biblical language and imagery than any Democrat in modern times. But this is cynical manipulation of the devout, and it is no better when Democrats do it than when Republicans use religious language for partisan advantage.

Obama has declared himself a committed Christian. He can call himself anything he likes, but there are certain markers among the evangelicals he is courting that one must meet in order to qualify for that label.

Some insight into Obama's Christianity comes from an interview he gave in 2004 to Chicago Sun-Times religion editor Cathleen Falsani for her book "The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People."

An Eagle editorial said that if Kansas Social and Rehabilitation Services Secretary Don Jordan "is making false claims and pandering, he should be replaced" ("Bullied? Get to bottom of Jordan's claims," June 10 Opinion).

Actually, if Sedgwick County Deputy District Attorney Ron Paschal was quoting Jordan accurately ("Concerns arise over SRS files' validity," June 8 Eagle), we already know Jordan is making false claims -- we just don't know which claim was false.

Was it the claim he made to Citizens for Change in which Jordan said, on tape, that his workers were bullied, yelled at, cussed at, screamed at and threatened by county prosecutors? Or was it Jordan's claim, according to Paschal, that the talk about bullying, yelling, cussing, screaming and threatening was all just "pandering"?

Unless Jordan now wants to deny what Paschal said, the one thing that's clear in all this is that Jordan is unfit for the job.

But some things are even more alarming than Jordan's comments. One is the rush by judges to bury their heads in the sand. They say they haven't seen any bullying. But if bullying is going on, surely the judges don't expect it to unfold before their eyes in open court. Judges should be demanding a full investigation, not compromising their impartiality by assuming this could never happen.

In the Tournament of Abuses Parade, aka the George W. Bush presidency, it's almost impossible to lock in on one outrage. So many roll by in rapid succession.

Look quickly. The steel traps of Guantanamo Bay are wedged tightly by the Fox News float and the Echo Chamber Drumbeat Corps.

If you had a moment, you could get outraged by the National Debt Moving Monument. It will hit $9.5 trillion by the end of the block. Then you get distracted by the $740 million U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

Amid it all, right now you can't even award the Governor's Cup to one of the biggest outrages in modern times: a Senate Intelligence Committee report on how a beaten-down, boxed-in Iraq was made into something that, in Bush's words, was "a gathering danger."

You can't give that outrage the top prize, because something even more outrageous is being floated right now. Rather than review old pretexts for invading, we're scraping up pretexts for staying a lifetime.

When Barack Obama achieved his historic victory last week, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards' two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up.

On one side stands Obama's resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. On the other is John McCain's promise of a wise warrior's vigilant conservation of the past.

Given the dividing line separating the two Americas of 2008, a ticket uniting McCain and Hillary Clinton might actually be a better fit than the Obama-Clinton "dream ticket," despite their differences on the issues. Never was this more evident than last week when Clinton and McCain both completely misread a one-of-a-kind historical moment as they tried to cling to the prerogatives of the 20th century's old guard.

Remarkably, neither Clinton nor McCain had the grace to offer a salute to Obama's epochal political breakthrough, which reverberated so powerfully across the country and throughout the world. By being so small and ungenerous, they made him look taller. Their inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest could not be a more telling symptom of the dysfunctional Washington culture Obama aspires to mend.

Yet even as the two establishment candidates huffed and puffed to assert their authority, they seemed terrified by Obama's insurgency. Clinton held her nonconcession speech in a New York City bunker, banishing cell-phone reception and television monitors carrying the news of Obama's clinching of the nomination. McCain, laboring under the misapprehension that he was wittily skewering his opponent, compulsively invoked the Obama-patented mantra of "change" 33 times in his speech.

Listening to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton repeat stories they claim to have been told by the poor and the unemployed -- who are unable to pay for food and medicine and feel miserable about it -- is enough to make one think we are living in a Third World dictatorship and not the United States of America. But victimhood and a "can't-do" spirit is what the Democratic Party has mostly been about since the Great Depression.

A more positive narrative comes from a new book, "Lessons From the Poor: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit," edited by Alvaro Vargas Llosa and published by the Independent Institute. The book is an optimistic triumph and a lesson about the unlimited capacity of the human spirit, properly inspired and unencumbered.

In the introduction, Llosa writes, "Entrepreneurial ability and energy are present almost everywhere. But in those countries that still languish in backwardness, the labyrinth intervention of the state and the absence of adequate institutions have kept that ability and energy from translating into full development." He writes of nations that used to be poor but are no longer, detailing how their people climbed out of poverty. He blames political, legal (and, I would add in some cases, religious) systems for stifling prosperity.

Llosa is about creating wealth, and his inspirational stories about real people and how they did it ought to be read in every school and in every home that has accepted inevitable failure.

In 1988, the Ananos family of Ayacucho, Peru, founded the Kola Real Co. Coca-Cola and Pepsi had pulled out because of the unstable political situation. In just 20 years, the Ananos family has transformed a mom-and-pop operation into the biggest transnational manufacturer of nonalcoholic beverages in Latin America. They now have subsidiaries in Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, four Central American countries and Thailand. By 2005, they had more than 8 million customers and 8,000 workers. Their sales totaled $1 billion.

An axiom of American presidential politics is that an issue passes from the state of being possibly pertinent to being gravely serious when it becomes the subject of parody on "Saturday Night Live."

Fair or not, NBC's "Saturday Night Live" has spoofed public perceptions of Gerald Ford's clumsiness, Jimmy Carter's paltriness, Ronald Reagan's forgetfulness, George H.W. Bush's whininess, Bill Clinton's tawdriness and George W. Bush's vacuousness.

This year's presidential elections have offered a bounty for the comedy-minded. And as in the past, the leading presidential contenders have made cameo appearances to demonstrate that they are adept at parodying themselves.

John McCain made the most recent and most consequential of these appearances last month. In it, he asked the American people: "What should we be looking for in our next president?"

The answer: "Certainly someone who is very, very, very old."