Colin Farrell pays tribute to his gay brother:

"I can't remember much about the years of physical and emotional abuse my brother Eamon suffered. I was very small. The thing I do remember though, quite literally, is blood on his school shirt when he came home in the afternoon. The beatings and taunting were very frequent for my him and a constant part of his school years. I didn't understand at that time the concept of 'difference'. Back then, as now, he was just my big brother. If I did understand what difference was I understood it in the most pure and unaffected childlike way. To me then, as a child, difference meant being left out. Joy and laughter came with being included, being embraced, and BELONGING to.

People are often afraid of difference. They feel that anything that causes fear, should be turned away from. My brother represented fear for so many people, but caused joy in my life. 

Drawing on data from a recent Economist/YouGov poll John Sides made the above graph (click to enlarge). He notes:

The programs that make up the largest share of the federal budget are typically the ones that the fewest people want to cut....As you move downward, into categories of spending that are increasingly popular, you get to the largest federal programs, particularly entitlement spending. Really, there is only one area of federal spending — national defense — that is sizable and that even a modest fraction (22%) is willing to cut.

A reader writes:

Hans Kung says that Jesus and Paul remained celibate.  Well, there may be evidence to the contrary.  The gospels show Jesus regularly preaching in the synagogue and rabbinic custom held that in order to do that a rabbi had to be married.  Many scholars have argued that Paul remained celibate but in the authentic Epistle to the Philippians 4:2, Paul asks his yoked-marriage partner (syzygos) to mediate a dispute.  The early theologian Clement of Alexandria maintained that Paul was married and upheld the institution in his Miscellanies Book III.  When Christianity later got on its celibacy kick in late 2nd and 3rd centuries, many of the evidences of marriage were either muted or expunged from the tradition. 

Gregg Carlstrom attempts to convince me everything is ok:

The reality is that the Iraqi Security Forces are improving, as Michael Hanna makes clear in a smart new Foreign Affairs piece. They still have a long way to go, of course, and Iraq will remain plagued by horrific violence for years; it's debatable how much credit Maliki himself deserves for improved security; and the non-security sectors of the Iraqi government are another story entirely. But Allawi's sharp criticism of Maliki yesterday (عربي) should be treated as political posturing, not evidence that the Maliki government is a failure.

"No, Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice – the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution – while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears," - Richard Dawkins.

When video games attack:

Addressed to Virgin Airways boss Richard Branson. Money quote about the food:

It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing.

The more we look under Peter's rock, the worse it appears. From the Memphis diocese, a court seal was just removed from the court cases dealing with sexual abuse. It shows a church routinely ignoring the past pedophile records of priesthood candidates, and even when abuse has occurred, the routine response was reassignment to other parishes. The case of Father Juan Carlos Duran is among the worst:

"I just remember him asking me in the car or asking when we are alone, 'Please, please, let me give you (oral sex),' stuff like that," said a 14-year-old boy identified as "John Doe" in a sex abuse lawsuit filed against the diocese and the Dominicans. "I can't remember the exact number of occasions, but it was multiple."

The "John Doe" case prompted The Commercial Appeal and the Memphis Daily News to file suit to gain access to court documents related to that case ... The documents show that at least 15 priests have been accused of sexual misconduct over about four decades in the Memphis Diocese. Some had been accused of sexual abuse elsewhere and had been moved from one diocese to another.

A summary of the Memphis Commercial Appeal's stories on the abuse here. This extract from a deposition is pretty staggering:

First Things, the theocon-RNC journal whose editor defended Marcial Maciel to the bitter end, and piled calumnies on the reporters, such as Jason Berry, actually disparages Berry's latest report as "thinly sourced." Joseph Bottum, the Catholic Republican reactionary who used to edit the Weekly Standard's back of the book, lards up his acknowledgment that the Legion almost certainly was deeply corrupt with snark about Berry and NCR. They really do have no shame, as an FT reader helpfully notes:

[T]he absolutely dismal past of First Things in relation to Fr. Maciel and the Legion of Christ makes snark in Mr. Bottum’s post particularly inappropriate.

Jason Berry and the National Catholic Reporter were telling the truth about Fr. Maciel’s crimes at a time when the editor of First Things was participating in a campaign of calumny against the victims of Fr. Maciel’s abuse. Certainly by the time that Fr. Neuhaus published his infamous diatribe against Berry, his partner Gerald Renner, and the accusers/victims, there was enough documented evidence and public first-person testimony to persuade anyone who was not either systematically sheltered from information, willfully obtuse, or simply not paying attention.

An Arkansas woman is charged with harassment:

Denise New's 16 year old son filed charges against her last month and requested a no contact order after he claims she posted slanderous entries about him on the social networking site. New says she was just trying to monitor what he was posting. "You're within your legal rights to monitor your child and to have a conversation with your child on Facebook whether it's his account, or your account or whoever's account. It's crazy to me that we're even having this interview."

A senior Tory recently expressed sympathy on libertarian grounds for owners of bed and breakfasts to discriminate against gay couples in renting rooms. It was a clumsy statement but I see where the man was coming from. But the Tory attempt to win the gay vote in Britain was not helped by it. Nor will the defection of the founder of LGBTory, the wonderfully named Anastasia Beaumont-Bott:

"I feel guilty because as a gay woman affected by LGBT rights I am on record saying you should vote Conservative, and I want to reverse that," she said. "I want to go on record to say don't vote Conservative. I'd go as far to say that I'll vote Labour at this general election."

Johann Hari chronicles the "collapsing" of the Conservatives on gay outreach:

David Cameron's putative Home Secretary has just announced that he thinks B&Bs – places open for hire to the public – should, in practice, be legally permitted to put up signs saying "No Gays". How is this different to turning away black people or disabled people or Jewish people – except that Cameron would sack Grayling if he supported discrimination against them?

Meanwhile, Cameron has given two interviews to the gay press – and both have led him to tell shocking untruths, or demand the interview be stopped.

Over the last year or so, I've been trained in and have been practicing transcendental meditation. I don't consider this in any way a contradiction of my faith in Christ; in fact, I think it has helped me pray more deeply and helped me get closer to the "being with God" that prayer is really all about. And that's why the video above is so encouraging to me; it suggests I am not alone in this; and I am still enough of a Catholic to find a priest's endorsement of this approach to be reassuring.

I wish the Catholic church actually did more to help us lay Catholics know how to pray, and reached out to other traditions of prayer and meditation to keep us Catholics more immune to the world's often irresistible falsehoods and delusions, compulsions and addictions (including, I might note, blogging).

It seems to me that Gordon Brown should have avoided saying he would hang on as prime minister for a full five year parliamentary term. And can you imagine an American presidential candidate saying this three weeks before an election:

He rejected the suggestion that politics had been his entire life, pointing out that he had first been ''an academic''.

George Prochnik, author of In Pursuit of Silence, makes his case against noise:

If you were to go to many cities in the 19th century, in particular during the Industrial Revolution, life would have been louder than what we have in New York. But I think the noise we suffer from today is more incessant. We have a different set of issues -- nighttime noise and air traffic being some of the most obvious culprits -- but in the 19th century, even people from the working class often lived in situations where it was easier to find an actual quiet space or a space where the sound of civilization was mixed with some kinds of natural sounds. It's important to remember that not all noises are created equal, and many surveys have demonstrated that people's reactions to noise vary wildly depending on whether they're natural or mechanical. Even at loud volumes sounds like birds singing and waterfalls are soothing.

Santiago, Chile, 12 pm

As we watch figures like Palin and Bachmann and Beck and Hannity define contemporary Republicanism, the gulf between the GOP and the British Tories has widened to a chasm. Gideon Rachman wonders what could happen if Cameron wins:

Like many youngish politicians, Mr Cameron would dearly love to embrace President Barack Obama and to drink deeply from his aura – if such a thing is possible. But the Tory leader has to pretend that the US politicians he is closest too are the likes of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin.

This is a pretense that is increasingly painful.

Joshua Tucker asks:

[T]he big picture question I want to throw out is the following: do yesterday’s events represent the end of the Electoral Model of regime/government change in the post-Soviet space? Has the failure of the electoral model to spread since 2005 led to its demise? Will this reverberate outside of the post-Soviet space? As I noted in my previous post, Iranian Tweeters have clearly taken notice (as one Iranian Tweeter wrote “We must learn #Kyrgyzstan. It took em 1day 2drive away the gov. They occupied gov buildings,Weapons & Fought back #IranElection”.). As the sun comes up on the United States, I’ll see if I can get some guest posts from some of the other scholars who have written on the Colored Revolutions, but for now I welcome any and all comments on the topic.

Follow up from Professor Kelly McMann here. D. Dalton Bennett is on the ground in Kyrgyzstan and provides an excellent summary of the events thus far.

One of the critical legacies of Pope John Paul II was his unwavering support for the biggest institutional force in the greater conspiracy to commit and hide sex abuse in the Catholic Church. I'm referring to the Legion of Christ, a creepy, vast, enormously wealthy church within a church, run by pederast, pedophile, bigamist and con artist, Marcial Maciel. Maciel, who was addicted to morphine, abused (at least) twenty seminarians and had (at least) two wives, and several children. The Legion at its peak had resources of $33 billion. His chief enablers and supporters were, of course, the theocons, who got a thrill up the leg observing this strictly orthodox leadership cult, combining the political and social attitudes of the 1950s with the oomph of modern day evangelical growth and money.

Richard John Neuhaus was a staunch supporter and dismissed all the charges against Maciel with "moral certainty." Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum spoke at Legion conferences. Bill Bennett spoke at Legion events and said, "I am fortunate enough to know and trust the priests of the Legionaries of Christ. ... The flourishing of the Legionaries is a cause for hope in a time of much darkness." Bill Donohue supported Maciel against now-substantiated charges of abuse. But in some ways, Maciel's most disturbing enabler was Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard Law Professor and former ambassador to the Vatican:

[Glendon] taught at Regina Apostolorum Athenaeum, the Legion's university in Rome, and advised in the planning that led to the order's first university in America, University of Sacramento, Calif. In a 2002 letter for the Legion Web site she scoffed at the allegations against Maciel and praised his "radiant holiness" and "the success of Regnum Christi [the order's lay wing] and the Legionaries of Christ in advancing the New Evangelization."

Maciel - whom John Paul II called an "efficacious guide to youth" - ran what can only be called a corrupt cult, designed in part to protect his own long life of sexual abuse and misconduct, where members were ruthlessly pressured to raise and give money to the organization.

How did Maciel get away with this for so long? 

Jason Berry, a journalistic icon in the coverage of the sex abuse scandal, has added a critical and disturbing aspect of this story. Yes, it's about money, the one thing that has not emerged yet in the church's current crisis. Yes, vast amounts of money that Maciel retained and funneled - in cash - to critical Vatican officials, who subsequently turned a blind eye to Maciel's crimes (Ratzinger was one of the very few Vatican officials who refused to accept the money, an indication both of his integrity but also of his awareness of what Maciel was up to). This flow of cash to important and influential figures was a massive operation and Berry has even found former members of the Legion who were recruited to hand over the cash to critical cardinals and officials in plain sealed envelopes:

"When Fr. Maciel would leave Rome it was my duty to supply him with $10,000 in cash -- $5,000 in American dollars, and the other half in the currency of the country to which he was traveling," explained Fichter. "I would be informed by one of his assistants that he was leaving and I would have to prepare the funds for him. I never questioned that he was not using it for good and noble purposes. It was a routine part of my job. He was so totally above reproach that I felt honored to have that role. He did not submit any receipts and I would have not dared to ask him for a receipt."

Among those who were recipients of large gifts were the head of the Congregation for Religious, the organization that actually had the authority to investigate Maciel. That gift - in true mafioso style - was a lavish and generous renovation of his residence.

Maciel then wanted to institute a personal vow for members of the Legion - as a way to bind cult-members to silence about any and all of Maciel's crimes. Even the head of the Congregation for Religious, in his newly fabulous apartment, balked at this. So Maciel went directly to John Paul II's key aide and personal confidant, Polish Msgr Dziwisz. And by going directly, I mean funneling huge amounts of cash. One way Maciel did this was by selecting key wealthy Legion members for attendance at the Pope's private mass. These Legionnaires subsequently donated vast amounts to Dziwisz as a gift to the church - a bit like getting campaign contributions by having private access to politicians. Money quote:

One of the ex-Legionaries in Rome told NCR that a Mexican family in 1997 gave Dziwisz $50,000 upon attending Mass. "We arranged things like that," he said of his role as go-between. Did John Paul know about the funds?

A reader writes:

I appreciate that you’re strongly supporting the Tories in this election, but your coverage to date is so spectacularly one-sided.

Relying on Alex Massie to complement your own posts is rather akin to giving The Daily Telegraph carte blanche over the Dish. It isn’t very informative to posters outside the UK, nevermind those who are actually living here (including me). Given Johann Hari is not only a superb journalist, but a friend of yours and someone who you’ve repeatedly linked to on other subjects. Perhaps you might want to give his commentary equal billing where the general election is concerned?

“You can’t polish a turd” as a perfect summary of the Tory case against Labour is not only not the real issue, but on the balance of facts not necessarily true. There’s the genuine consideration that levels of crime in all recorded categories in the UK are the lowest in decades. There’s the genuine consideration that waiting list times in the NHS are at the lowest since record-keeping began. There’s the genuine consideration that Labour has signed some of the most family-friendly legislation on record, that they introduced civil partnerships, and that they, for the first time in history, provided everyone with the right to guaranteed paid holiday.

There’s the minimum wage (which the Tories opposed). There’s the abolition of section 28 (which the Tories opposed). There’s the fact that, according to many economists, the steps the Labour government took (opposed by the Tories) helped the UK out of recession. There’s the longest period of low inflation since the 1960s. There’s the Good Friday agreement and the Northern Ireland peace process.

Now, I certainly haven’t made my mind up about who I’m going to vote for, but I’ve probably provided more information about some of the genuine achievements of the Labour government in one paragraph than you have in the last couple of weeks. So, if you actually want to inform your readers about the UK election, rather than simply repeating the point ad infinitum that you hope the Tories win, I suggest you start doing it properly, and now, rather than using stupid political gags which benefit no-one.

Another:

Labour in Britain still have a bit of hope; the Mythbusters proved that it is actually possible to "polish a turd."

Hannity does the prepping. But this is truth: 10,000 people showed up in Minnesota in April to celebrate the two heroines of the GOP base. Who else in the GOP can get that kind of crowd and unleash that kind of energy? My view remains that Sarah Palin is the one to beat for the GOP nomination in 2012. And that is perhaps the most alarming fact in American - and global - politics today.

Nike uses the voice of Tiger's dead father to get past the scandal and get back to selling stuff:

Hans Küng focuses on one of the more obvious and most fixable causes of the Church's sex abuse problem:

Of course, celibacy is not solely responsible for these crimes. But it is the most important structural expression of the Catholic hierarchy’s inhibitions with regard to sexuality, evident also in its attitude toward birth control and other questions. In fact, a glance at the New Testament shows that although Jesus and Paul led celibate lives, they left others complete freedom to do so or not. Based on the gospel, clerical celibacy can be advocated only as a freely-chosen calling (charisma), not as a compulsory rule for everyone. Paul decisively contradicted those contemporaries who were of the opinion that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” As he wrote, “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7: 1-2).

A reader writes:

Thanks for publishing these. I feel more Catholic knowing we are fighting this.

Here's my story: In 1967, when I was 9, my devoutly Catholic family moved from a small Midwestern town to a small Massachusetts town. In the new town, on top of the culture shock of going from the plains to the coast, I felt a palpable tension in the working class parish that also had a convent and parochial school. Many of my classmates at St. Mary's school attended Mass at "St. Evan's" in the next town. St. Evan's was everything St. Mary's was not; it was newly built and progressive, and the St. Mary's parishioners seemed to resent it as if it were a rebuke. I thought it was because our parish was dying, and maybe it was. I always wished we could go to St. Evan's because our priests were either old and cranky, young and weird (the guy with the red silk-lined cape stood out), or wonderful and transferred soon, over the howls of the parishioners.

Years later I opened a Newsweek magazine and read the caption under a photograph of a man standing on some church steps. The church was St. Mary's and the story was about the sexual abuse of children in the parish by a priest named Father P. The time-frame of this abuse was the 1960's prior to 1967. I sadly realized the older siblings of some of my classmates must have been his victims. I wondered if it explained St. Evan's.

One of my dearest classmates at St. Mary's had been Billy, the youngest of a large Catholic family, and a fellow outsider.

Credit cards have been shown to make us spend more. Ryan Sager argues that this isn't the full story:

Every person’s financial situation and mind works differently. For some people, doing many more of their transactions in cash (or check — you have to have some way to pay bills) would be a huge improvement. If you shop a lot recreationally, for instance, this could slow you down. For some people, just using a debit card could be the answer. For me and other people who like a lot of control and data and feedback...a solution like credit cards plus something like… Mint.com is a good answer.

The key, as in so many things, is a high degree of self knowledge, a willingness to experiment and track results, and the information to understand what biases might be driving your behavior.

Duncan Trussell narrates the history of Nikola Tesla and the alternating current. Also starring John C. Reilly and Crispin Glover:

A reader writes:

I had a similar experience as your reader's. The Episcopal church I go to in Upstate NY got word of sexual abuse by a rector who had left the parish almost 20 years ago. For six months they investigated secretly and found more who were abused. They invited the entire parish to an emergency meeting to tell us what happened before we found out in the papers. It was a sad meeting, of course. Many of us worried out-loud if our parish would recover.

The abuser was banned from the church. The parish instituted more awareness programs. People didn’t leave the parish in droves. Here’s hoping that the Pope will start trusting Catholics with internal secrets.

Another writes:

Here is an even more relevant story from the Episcopal Church. A brief summary:

Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge, defends soft paternalism against Whitman:

If libertarian paternalism creates a slope risk then real paternalism must generate a “cliff” risk. But have we seen this in history? In America we started as Puritans but moved away from it. When Prohibition was passed into law it did not lead to a slew of other paternalistic interventions. On the contrary, once society got to see prohibition in action, the law was eventually repealed. Is there any evidence of a paternalistic slide? The only example Whitman gives is smoking, where there certainly has been a progression of increasingly intrusive laws passed. But there are several problems with this example. First, most of the anti-smoking laws are based on externalities, not paternalism. People do not want to fly, eat, or work in smoke-filled environments. Indeed, many smokers favor such laws. Note that while smoking bans are not nudges, they are shoves, even these shoves do not seem to have led to a batch of similar crackdowns in other domains. I have not seen any municipality institute a ban on loud talking in restaurants, for example, though come to think of it...

David Brooks points to an article on parents spending more time with their children. There's an education gap, i.e. before "1995, mothers spent on average 12 hours a week with their children. By 2007, that number had leapt to 21.2 for college-educated moms and 15.9 hours for those with less education." He asks:

I was fascinated by how parental time correlates to education. Is it possible that college-educated parents are spending more time passing down their advantages than other parents? Could it be that the rich replicate themselves by dint of hard work and parental attention, on top of all the other less worthy advantages?

Uncomfortable questions.

Gail Collins replies:

Today on the Dish we rounded up several early reports of the Kyrgyzstan uprising and started to cover the British election. Andrew and others discussed the "success" of the Iraq surge, USA Today mirrored the Dish on settlements, Israel continued to alienate Turkey, and WaPo defended Karzai.

Bob McDonnell jumped the Confederate shark. Continetti began to come around on Palin, McWhorter deciphered Sarah-speak, and Bartlett and Andrew highlighted the disconnect between the party of Palin and the party of Reagan.

More personal accounts of abuse here, here, and here. Jonathan Zimmerman countered the anti-Catholic canard, Gerson kept his head in the sand, and Donohue rambled on. Episcopal contrast here and Presbyterian here. Heaven-blogging here and evil-blogging here.

-- C.B.

The unrest could provide yet another blow to President Barack Obama's diplomatic efforts as his administration has been working with [deposed leader] Bakiyev to strengthen ties with the majority Muslim country in an effort to keep Manas air base -- a strategic refueling point located in Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek -- open. Strengthened U.S.-Kyrgyz relations has also been the focus of an effort to maintain a foothold in Central Asia, a region long under Russian influence and currently the object of Chinese interest as well.

Larison's take-away:

These are the fruits of yet another “color revolution” that far too many Westerners enthused about out of misguided idealism, weird anti-Russian hang-ups or ideological fantasies of a global democratic revolution.

David Kushner profiles WikiLeaks. Kushner writes that since launching  "in December, 2006, WikiLeaks has posted more than 1.2 million documents totaling more than 10 million pages":

WikiLeaks' stance that all leaks are good leaks and its disregard for the established protocols for verifying them...alarms some journalists. The site suffers from "a distorted sense of transparency," according to Kelly McBride, the ethics group leader for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. "They're giving you everything they've got, but when journalists go through process of granting someone confidentiality, when they do it well, they determine that source has good information and that the source is somehow deserving of confidentiality." Lucy Dalgish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, thinks WikiLeaks' approach gives fresh ammunition to those who seek to pressure journalists to cough up the names of their unnamed sources. She forbids her staff from using the site as a source.

This chart has been floating around:

 
Several bloggers have asked why no cable news show has mirrored NPR's success. Julianne Dalcanton doesn't understand the mystery: 

To me, the reason seems dead obvious. Radio is the only delivery mechanism that you can absorb while doing something else. Driving? Check. Cooking? Check. Reading email? Check. Lingering in bed after the alarm goes off? Check. I don’t have a “principle” against watching televised news. I just don’t have time.

Wilkinson agrees with Chait. And adds:

If libertarian-ish young people drift into the Democratic Party simply because they’re grossed out by everything responsible for making Sarah Palin a hero, they’ll have to be convinced by old-guard liberals that, say, turning Social Security and Medicare into forced savings programs defies all that is liberal and holy before the youngsters manage to convince other Democrats that this type of thing is a pretty good idea.

On April 6, 2010 in Herat, Afghanistan, Afizeh, 40, bears the scars from burns she inflicted on herself ten years ago. The issue of female self immolation is increasing in prevalence in the region close to the border with Iran, as tensions rise between the traditional subordinate role of women and the increased awareness of women's rights in the wider world. By Majid Saeedi/Getty Images.

Glen Whitman fears that soft paternalism will lead to hard paternalism. One example of what he is talking about:

Once upon a time, banning smoking on airplanes seemed like the reasonable middle ground. Now that’s the (relatively) laissez-faire position, smoking bans in bars and restaurants are the middle, and full-blown smoking bans have come to pass in some cities.

Julian Sanchez flips the equation:

Americans consider straightforward legalization of gambling or prostitution or drugs too extreme a position—though at least with regard to marijuana, the public opinion trend seems to be moving steadily in a more libertarian direction. But a proposal to combine legalization with some mechanism for permitting “problem users” to limit their own access—supposing the obvious privacy problems presented by such mechanisms could be worked out—might conceivably be presented as a reasonable compromise, recasting the status quo prohibitionist policies as the new “extreme.” 

A reader writes:

I lived in Kyrgyzstan for 2 years and my wife is from Bishkek, so we have watched the events of the last few days with mixture of dread and sadness. Scott Horton makes a valid point re US payments for the base at Manas, but he misses a much larger one: US complicity in the revolution in 2005 that allowed Bakiev to come to power in the first place.

When President Akaev fled from Kyrgyzstan after similar protests in '05 there was an opportunity to support a broad-based coalition and democratic process for filling the vacuum. The USG had actively intervened in the revolutions in both Georgia and Ukraine, making it clear that the US supported reform-minded opposition leaders. In a real sense, the US actively helped mid-wife these revolutions, providing moral support, logistics and, in some cases, political and technical advice to the reformers. In 2005 when the revolution took place in Kyrgyzstan, many observers were expecting the State Department to take a similar role. It never happened. 

The Dish is grateful for the number of servicemembers sharing their expertise and experience on this issue. Previous emails here, here, and here. (And a blogger reax here if you missed it.)  Another writes:

I spent 20 years in the USAF (1986-2006) working in reconnaissance and air-to-air / air-to-ground engagements and spend thousands of hours in the air listening to radio broadcasts and directing or assisting in engagements. I’m not stupid enough to think that combat isn’t messy, gruesome, and often chaotic. But the circumstances of that video are very clear in my mind (and harken back to the shooting down of U.N. helicopters over Northern Iraq).

It was horrible to watch for two reasons: first, the opening salvo, and second, the follow-on shooting of the van. The initial engagement probably fit very narrowly under the rules of engagement (ROE) during that time period in Iraq. But not the second.

Johann Hari reviews Lisa Miller's new book:

The heaven you think you're headed to--a reunion with your lost relatives in the light--is a very recent invention, only a little older than Goldman Sachs. Most of the believers in heaven across most of history would find it unrecognizable.

That's Garry Wills' description of the core method of Barack Obama's career and life. His review of the Remnick book is a must-read (and an inspired assignment). I don't agree with its conclusion - a "wasted" first year - but I was intrigued by these insights into how Obama altered the facts of his own life-story for political ends:

He said [at Selma]: “My grandfather was a cook to the British in Kenya. Grew up in a small village and all his life, that’s all he was — a cook and a houseboy. And that’s what they called him, even when he was 60 years old. They called him a houseboy. They wouldn’t call him by his last name. Call him by his first name. Sound familiar?” Actually, Remnick shows that Obama’s grandfather was a respected village elder and property owner, who left his native town for Nairobi to cook for British colonials, and then traveled with British troops to Burma, bringing back their Western clothes and ways to his village.