Yesterday, torture advocate Dick Cheney emerged to accept an award from the Center for Security Policy, and gave a speech blasting the Obama administration for "dithering" on Afghanistan, saying, "Signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries."

Cheney said the Obama administration seems to be pulling back and blaming others for its own failure to implement the strategy it had embraced earlier in the year.

Terence Samuel on the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races:

Current political weather reports forecast gloom and doom for Democrats come election time. The predictions are of severe changes in the climate from the triumphs of 2006 and 2008, when they took control of the Congress and won back the White House, to something considerably less favorable in 2009 and 2010. The anticipated result could be anything from a few lost Senate seats to a huge Republican comeback built on the decline in President Barack Obama's popularity. The president is now less likable than Hillary Clinton, we're told.

The Washington Post today profiles Lt. Carey Cash, the Navy chaplain serving at Camp David, where President Obama attends services. Cash -- a great nephew of music icon Johnny Cash -- is a conservative Southern Baptist who won't, apparently, give Obama the trouble that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright did.

If Obama is seeking some spiritual guidance as he contemplates troop escalations in Afghanistan, though, I hope to God his admiration for Cash does not lend credence to what Cash has to say about God and war.

Liz Cheney, champion of the torture wing of her party and MSM darling, opines on the president receiving the Nobel Peace Prize:

President Obama's only real diplomatic accomplishment so far has been to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy from unilateral bullying to multilateral listening and cooperating. That's important, to be sure, but not nearly enough. The Prize is really more of Booby Prize for Obama's predecessor. Had the world not suffered eight years of George W. Bush, Obama would not be receiving the prize. He's prize-worthy and praiseworthy only by comparison.

The Defense Authorization Act, which contains the revisions to the newly reconstituted military commissions, passed the House yesterday afternoon. As I wrote yesterday, the revisions lack the "voluntariness" clause that the administration's own Office of Legal Counsel reportedly said was necessary to make the commissions constitutional.