(This is an updated version of the original article published August 10. The orginal version follows.)

The relevance of this past Saturday's Ames Straw Poll is nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If a candidate doesn't believe the straw poll important, there's no reason a poor showing matters. Just ask John McCain, whose apathy toward Iowa earned him 10th-place finishes in 1999 and 2007 but didn't stop him from earning his party's presidential nomination in 2008.

If a candidate believes the straw poll important, a performance below expectations can mean the end of a campaign. Just ask Tim Pawlenty, who finished third on Saturday and withdrew the next day. Or Tommy Thompson, who dropped out of the presidential race after finishing sixth in the 2007 straw poll.

For a mix of both, ask Mitt Romney, who won the 2007 straw poll but didn't win the Iowa Caucus or his party's nomination. This year, he's largely skipped Iowa, although he participated in August 11's nationally televised debate from Ames. He finished seventh in Saturday's straw poll, and you should read absolutely nothing into that.

Michele Bachmann certainly hopes that her victory Saturday portends good things for her campaign, but the past indicates that's not a safe bet.

Redistricting is a time for stock-taking, for looking back and looking ahead.

State legislators who've been around a while are suddenly faced with the often stark reality of signing on for another 10 years. They add a decade to their current age and wonder if they want to be in the game that much longer.

Some decide to stick with it for just one more election so they can make extra sure their party holds their seat.

Some decide to retire right away, figuring their party has drawn the map solidly enough to ensure a suitable replacement.

Legislators in the minority party are far more likely to be mapped in with fellow party members and then discover that they don't want to face the prospect of running in a primary, so they retire.

Others decide to use the opportunity to move up the political ladder. The congressional districts were redrawn, which gave state Senator Dave Koehler (D-Peoria) a possible opening. He took it.

If history is any guide, we're likely to see a raft of retirement announcements in the next few days, weeks, months and even years.

The most offensive claim made during the debt-ceiling controversy is that there's a moral equivalence between cutting government spending and raising taxes. President Obama asks for "shared sacrifice" to reduce the budget deficit. In his view, if the government spends more than it takes in - it currently borrows more than 40 cents of every dollar spent - the "balanced" approach is to "cut" spending and raise taxes.

There are quotation marks around "cut" for a good reason. No one - Republican House Speaker John Boehner included - wants to cut spending in the commonsense meaning of the term: namely, reducing government spending from today's level ($3.8 trillion). No, in Washington-talk, to cut a budget is merely to reduce the rate of increase that would have occurred in the future if current law were left unchanged.

If the politicians were honest - and reporters committed to telling the public the truth - they would talk about smaller increases in spending, not "cuts," but even that wouldn't be entirely truthful, because in many cases the reduction in future increases itself is an illusion. It involves merely canceling the authority to spend money that no one expects to actually be spent.

"A person should feel secure in their own home. No matter black, white, Hispanic, Asian - I don't care who they are - they should feel secure in their own home. The police have no right to come in your house and push you around and beat you up and do the things they did on March, 15, 2009." - Ryan Deaton, defense attorney for Marco Sauceda

Too often, we elevate the events of the American Revolution to near-mythic status and forget that the real revolutionaries were neither agitators nor hotheads, neither looking for trouble nor trying to start a fight. Rather, they were people just like you and me, simply trying to make it from one day to another, a task that was increasingly difficult as Britain's rule became more and more oppressive.

Caught up in the drama of Red Coats marching, muskets exploding, and flags waving in the night, we lose sight of the enduring significance of the Revolution and what makes it relevant to our world today. Yet the American Revolution did not so much start with a bang as with a whimper - a literal cry for relief from people groaning under the weight of an oppressive government's demands.