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Winner: Andy Malcolm of latimes.com, who reported that Jeremiah Wright's disastrous appearance at the National Press Club was organized by a Clinton supporter, Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, a former editorial board member of USA Today who shared the dais with Wright.

Winner: David Zucchino, for a moving feature in the Los Angeles Times on the basic training of the American infantry in Iraq. "Marines learned to rub their hands together when examining a buddy for wounds in the dark; blood is sticky. They were told to carry markers for scrawling on the foreheads of the wounded: 'T' after applying a tourniquet, and 'M' after giving morphine."

Winner: Elizabeth Edwards, for her attack on the media's strobe-light journalism—in which "the outlines are accurate enough but we really cannot see the whole picture ... Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden's health care plan? Anything at all?" she asked. "But let me guess, you know Barack Obama's bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties."

Winner: Gerard Baker expresses horror in the Times of London at the Democrats' unfailing aptitude for snatching defeat from victory: "Four fifths of the American public think the country is on the wrong track. The President wallows in the highest disapproval ratings since polling began. The Republican Party has spent most of a decade bungling almost everything it touches, abandoning its principles and sinking into a mire of corruption, hypocrisy and incompetence. And here we are, six months from a presidential election, and it is the Democrats once again who seem to be staring defeat in the face."

Winners: Two California inventors who the New York Times reports are preparing to release a system that will let motorists distill ethanol fuel in their backyards. Though their "MicroFueler" faces some regulatory and cost hurdles (the system itself costs nearly $10,000), the inventors think their new "personal" refinery will shake up fueling as dramatically as the PC shook up computing. Just in time: the Globe and Mail quoted an economist who predicted that oil prices could reach more than $200 per barrel over the next five years. The same economist predicted that our northern neighbors could be paying around $8.50 a gallon by 2013.