Some of the most exciting races of the 2010 election cycle are taking place in the states. California, Texas, New York, and Ohio all feature important statewide races that will have repercussions in 2012 and beyond. A Republican victory in any one of these states is certain to launch a new GOP celebrity. And since the Democrats suffer from a weak bench, they're looking to the big states to highlight some new faces of their own. John Heilemann has a roundup of the campaigns here. Democrats lead in two, Republicans in one, and the other is a tossup.

Let's look at each.

Robert Kagan and Aroop Mukharji write in today's Washington Post:

There is plenty of pessimism about democracy these days, and autocrats seem to be on the march on every continent. So we should take note when democracy triumphs over autocratic temptations.

That's what happened in Colombia recently. President Álvaro Uribe had hinted for some time that he might run for a third consecutive term, despite the constitution's two-term limit. Last summer Colombia's House and Senate, controlled by allies of Uribe, passed a bill to change the constitution. The next and final step was a popular referendum in May to endorse Uribe's reelection. If that sounds familiar, it should. It was by popular referendum that Venezuela's Hugo Chávez installed himself as a virtual president-for-life. But late last month Colombia's constitutional court rejected the bill. The referendum is dead, and Colombia's democracy lives.

Vanessa Neumann has more on Columbia in this week's issue.

In response to Bill Kristol's latest post, lawyer Dan Gentges of Milwaukee writes an email with the subject line "Lawyers in Love (with themselves)":

With apologies to Jackson Brown for the subject heading, I wanted to respond to your Blog post earlier today.  Two things are at work in the wailing and gnashing of teeth by respected members of my profession regarding the Justice Department's hiring of former Guantanamo detainee defense counsel.

Andy McCarthy explains "Why the al Qaeda 7 Matter."

The Washington Independent's Dave Weigel observes the assault on Keep America Safe is failing.

Reliable sources on Capitol Hill say the House ethics report on Eric Massa will be damning. Obamacare opponents, like Glenn Beck, might want to think twice before indulging Massa and letting this Democratic creep become the posterboy of Obamacare opposition.

The Guardian's Jon Ronson profiles Paul Davies, the Arizona State Univerity scientist who chairs the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Post-Detection Task Force. SETI, the brainchild of Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, has been active for almost 50 years. So far, nothing.

Yesterday, it was naked shower confrontations between Congressmen.

Today, the back-wax debate?

We are living in a Judd Apatow movie.

I'm not a lawyer (though a few of my best friends are). But I gather there's an old legal dictum that goes: If you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue the law, argue the facts. If you can't argue the law or the facts, blow smoke.

If you want to see some really high-class smoke being blown, it's worth taking a look at the recent statement signed by a bunch of Republican lawyers defending liberal lawyers now working at the Justice Department who'd previously represented or advocated for terrorist detainees. Nameless straw men (including me) and women (Liz Cheney) are subject to name-calling--"shameful," "unjust," and "destructive" appear in the first paragraph alone. In all three paragraphs of the lawyers' letter, highfalutin generalities are generally and highfalutinly invoked. The self-esteem and self-importance of lawyers are much in evidence. The only thing missing is an actual argument.

In the umpteenth liberal column urging the president to "get tough" and "fight back" and "pass the damn bill," Richard Cohen writes: "What's wrong with the old belief -- a virtual childhood mantra -- that 'majority rules'?"

Good question! Let's take a moment for a basic civics lesson. The United States is not a unicameral majoritarian democracy. It is a bicameral constitutional republic with minority rights, checks and balances, and dispersed power. The majority does not rule. Why? Because the Founders sought to guard against what Tocqueville called the "tyranny of the majority." Liberals can bemoan this fact all they want. In order to change it, however, they would have to enact real change to the Constitution and the rules of the U.S. Senate. Good luck with that.

With all eyes on pro-life Democrat Bart Stupak of Michigan and the 12 so-called Stupak Dems who he says will vote 'no' on health-care reform without language that would ban federal funding of abortion, Stupak seemed to strike a sunnier note late yesterday:

"I'm more optimistic than I was a week ago," Stupak said in an interview between meetings with constituents in his northern Michigan district. He was hosting a town hall meeting Monday night at a local high school.

The Sewall-Belmont house is one of the hottest places in the city for rich D.C. insiders to canoodle and raise cash at $1000-a-plate dinners, and — good news!—it's funded with your tax dollars. The funds can be funneled to Sewall-Belmont because it's also a museum of women's history and rights, and who could oppose that?

Politics is always a mixture of partisanship and principle. Politicians need to organize in parties and get more votes than the opposition to realize their principles. Given this reality, it is hardly surprising that parties will use whatever legal tactics work in order to gain electoral advantage. But sometimes the best way of realizing their principles is to foreswear the usual political game.  The debate over passing Obamacare is the time to elevate long term principle over short term partisan tactics. 

Don't miss contributing editor David Gelernter's thoughts on the future of the Internet. A lot is going on in his 35-paragraph essay, but I was struck by this observation in particular:

Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world's attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon. Nowness ignores all other moments but this. In the ultimate Internet culture, flooded in nowness like a piazza flooded in sea water, drenched in a tropical downpour of nowness, everyone talks alike, dresses alike, thinks alike.

This is exactly how I felt during the hour or so I spent watching the Oscars on Sunday. Hollywood seemed so small. Not geographically or financially. But in terms of cultural hegemony. The only real "star" on the scene -- in the sense that Cary Grant or Bette Davis were "stars" -- was Meryl Streep. And she lost. Of the nominees for Best Picture, Avatar was the only cultural experience in which the entire world participated. It lost, too.

Alabama Democrat Artur Davis will come back from the campaign trail to vote against health care.

Hard times: Rev. Jesse Jackson leads pro-bingo rally, singing "We Shall Overcome."

It wasn't until mid-December that Scott Brown's campaign team knew for certain they had a chance. An internal poll showed intense interest in the race to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. And the more interested a voter was, the more likely he was to support Scott Brown. The campaign then made the bold decision to cut this ad:

There was worry inside the Brown campaign that the public might react negatively to the outright comparison of Brown to Kennedy. That didn't happen. The ad was electric. It was the first in a series of bold moves and lucky accidents that culminated in Brown's incredible upset victory on January 19.

I can't be the only person in America who read the headline "Funkhouser has Harsh Words for Kansas City Park Board" and immediately thought they were talking about Marty Funkhouser from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Played by Bob Einstein, Funkhouser, Susie Essman's Susie Greene, and J.B. Smoove's Leon make up the triumvirate of my favorite characters on the show.

Turns out instead that the mayor of Kansas City is named Mark Funkhouser. Maybe they're related?

Check out Bryan Curtis's interesting profile of Christopher Michel, the 28-year-old former speechwriter who is collaborating with President Bush on the latter's forthcoming Decision Points. One false note:

Michel's rise was so rapid that the Israeli Knesset episode stood out as a detour, a rare false note. On May 15, 2008, Bush was set to toast Israel's 60th birthday, and Michel wrote a tribute that Latimer said should have been his pièce de résistance as a speechwriter. But after the draft got a working-over in editing, Bush stood in the Knesset and attacked those who would negotiate with terrorist groups as offering "the false comfort of appeasement." It sounded like Bush was blasting then-candidate Obama—and from foreign soil, no less. In his memoir Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor, Latimer says the line was inserted by Thiessen and approved by Bush. (Michel and Thiessen refuse to comment.) Critics dubbed the "appeasement speech" a low moment in Bush rhetoric.

What do they know? I happen to think the address to the Knesset was one of the finest speeches of Bush's presidency. You can read it here.

Why the hysterical reaction to the Keep America Safe Internet ad asking why Eric Holder wouldn't release the names of lawyers now at the Justice Department who had done pro bono legal work for al Qaeda terrorists? Why the desperate effort to find establishment Republican lawyers to legitimize the effort to insulate Holder's Justice Department from criticism?

Because the policies of Holder's DOJ have become a political nightmare for the Obama administration.

Choice words: Obama official calls Obamacare vote "the last helicopter out of Saigon."

Ed Morrissey: Wisconsin AG charges ACORN with election fraud.

Jennifer Rubin: California GOP Senate candidate Tom Campbell contradicts himself on Sam al-Arian defense.

Scandal! Sarah Palin went to Canada for medical treatments (in a province where medicine wasn't yet socialized in 1960s).

Via Jay Cost, Pennsylvania Democrat Kathy Dahlkemper will switch her vote from "yes" to "no" on health care because of the Senate bill's provisions to spend taxpayer money on abortions:

Last week, President Obama opined that health care "easily lends itself to demagoguery and political gamesmanship, and misrepresentation and misunderstanding."  No one has done more to demonstrate the truth of this assertion than the president himself. In light of such concerns, the fairest thing might be to let the left describe Obamacare in its own words, free of any potentially false portrayals by those who oppose it -- namely, conservatives, independents, libertarians, and the bulk of the voters in Massachusetts.

On the one hand, Austrians are rightfully proud that one of their own is coming home with an Academy Award. Last night, Christoph Waltz took home the best supporting actor Oscar for his truly impressive performance in Quentin Tarentino's Inglourious Basterds. On the other hand, Waltz portrayed the archvillain, SS Colonel Hans Landa, aka "The Jew Hunter" (not to be confused with Eli Roth's role in the same film as "The Jew Bear").

On Friday, David Brooks wrote a column likening the Tea Partiers to the 1960s-era New Left. "Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence," he wrote. "Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures."

Then, over the weekend, Jonah Goldberg wrote a compelling rebuttal: 

One of the reasons all of this is relevant is that the basic arguments and outlook of the Tea Parties are simply and profoundly different from the outlook of the New Left. The Tea Partiers are not in any meaningful sense Rousseauians. They certainly don't reject original sin in any serious way. And I suspect if you asked many of them they would say that the American people deserve their share of blame for the financial mess we're in. They do believe, I would bet, that America is a basically decent nation that has drifted into a kind of soft-despotism or Nanny-statism. But that vision isn't Rousseauian, it's De Tocquevillian.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

I haven't seen ABC's new show Modern Family, but the Business Insider has and noticed that the characters all drive Toyotas in the midst of the car-company's giant recall. The reason isn't that the characters are product loyalists. It's that the producers made a deal to promote Toyota products on the show. An interesting story to be filed in the gigantic folder labeled "Unanticipated Consequences."

Will he stay or will he go, now?

Either way, there will be an emotional outpouring of epic proportions on Fox News at 5 p.m. tomorrow. The ranting congressman will be on Glenn Beck's show for the full hour tomorrow.

"I just spoke with him off air," said Beck, on his Twitter account. "All Americans need to hear him."