The Boilerplate, 6/5

Andrew Sullivan was not impressed with the Democratic display of faith last night. If you were there, he was the guy in the shorts.

Ben Smith on a passage on Bob Shrum's book that is bound to make the Clintons as uncomfortable as a former ambassador.

Obama, here outlining his foreign policy vision in Foreign Affairs, went out of his way last night NOT to crticize the Israelis for the condition and alleged mistreatment of Palestinians.

McCain, tailed by immigration questions, certainly hopes that Wolf Blitzer asks Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani to clarify their positions tonight.

I still don't know what a "pole dancer" is... it sounds a bit saucy, but is a saucy Scarborough a firing offense?

Howie Kurtz has a facebook page, too.

Neuroscience brief of the day: Why it's good to listen to music when you're blogging.

While most people need peace and quiet to cram for a test, the brain itself may need noise to learn, a recent MIT study suggests. In experiments with monkeys, the researchers found that neural activities in the brain gradually change, even when nothing new is being learned. Challenging the monkeys to adjust their task triggered systematic changes in their neural activities on top of this background "noise."

This is freaky: