Because the sole proprietor of Loose Cannon has been in Montana for five days and has yet to wade a single trout stream, he’s going to, in the interest of time management, piggyback this morning on some of the best political writing others have posted today.

My recommendation is to start with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s well-argued essay—penned for Real Clear Politics—as to why the United States Congress should not abandon its support of President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia. That can be found here.

Second, check out the always-insightful Joel Kotkin, writing in The American, A Magazine of Ideas. Broadening Rice’s theme, Kotkin takes aim at the economically isolationist wing of the Democratic Party. (Paraphrasing Democratic great Franklin Roosevelt to wicked effect, Kotkin writes, “The only things Democrats have to fear is themselves.”)

Switching from policy to politics, The Politico, has a fascinating analysis of how the Latino vote is breaking Barack Obama’s way. Remember when Hispanics went 2-1 for Hillary Clinton over Obama in some key states during the Democratic primaries? Well, that was then and this, apparently, is now. Decidedly bad news for Republicans, sports fans. Remember Reader’s Digest’s June issue with our poll of Millennial voters (along with an accompanying story, written by yours truly)? Well, we had under 30s—that’s a cohort of 47 million Americans—going for Obama over John McCain by 22 points. The latest poll by the Pew Hispanic Center has a similar number.

Let me go out on a limb here: If those numbers hold...if McCain loses Latinos and Millennials by twenty-something points, the 44^th president of the United States is not going to have an “R” after his name.

That's a good segue to one final political story I'd like to send you to--even as I'm watching Barack Obama speak in Germany before a Kennedy/Reagan-sized crowd: Under the heading of, oh, maybe counting your chickens before they’re hatched, it seems that Team Obama has already begun plans for their candidate's transition into the White House. Read about it at Marc Ambinder’s blog for The Atlantic…

That’s all for now. Talk at you tomorrow….