Reading

Campaigns are built to fool us into thinking that we're voting for individuals. We learn about the candidate's family, her job, her background -- even her dog. But we're primarily voting for parties. The parties have just learned we're more likely to vote for them if they disguise themselves as individuals. And American politics would work better if we understood that.

Obama's mistake is captured by that disdainful reference to "politicking." In a democracy, separating governing from "politicking" is impossible. "Politicking" is nothing less than the ongoing effort to convince free citizens of the merits of a set of ideas, policies and decisions. Voters feel better about politicians who put what they are doing in a compelling context. Citizens can endure setbacks as long as they believe the overall direction of the government's approach is right.

Refsdal portrays the Taliban as a bunch of dudes goofily hanging out: combing their long dyed hair; joking with one another; praying a ton; and repeatedly firing on U.S. convoys from high in the mountains. (“Use the rocket launcher, Rafiq, the rocket launcher.”) Dawran is a doting father of young kids who tells the reporter stories about how he came thisclose to killing a “traitor” but then took mercy on him. His men gawk at how scared Refsdal appears and can’t seem to load their ammunition properly. “These guys sound and act a lot like a U.S. small unit, but replace all the quotes from ‘Anchorman’ and ‘Talladega Nights’ with ‘Allahu Akbar,’” observes Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security. I’d add that Refsdal acts a lot like embedded journalists everywhere — painting a sympathetic portrait of the soldiers that are feeding him, protecting him, and giving him shelter.

My daily routine probably seems boring because it's so routinized. I virtually never surf the Web at all. It's extremely rare that I go to a website. Everything is through my RSS reader (which has probably 200 to 250 feeds). The one website I will browse around is the New York Times, even though I have their feeds in my reader. I don't digest newspapers as papers, just as discrete flows of information. I've made a set of decisions about what is going to flow towards me and I kinda just deal with that throughout the day as opposed to going out into the Web and deciding what to read.

My daily routine probably seems boring because it's so routinized. I virtually never surf the Web at all. It's extremely rare that I go to a website. Everything is through my RSS reader (which has probably 200 to 250 feeds). The one website I will browse around is the New York Times, even though I have their feeds in my reader. I don't digest newspapers as papers, just as discrete flows of information. I've made a set of decisions about what is going to flow towards me and I kinda just deal with that throughout the day as opposed to going out into the Web and deciding what to read.

Followers of Moroccan blogger Ahmed, who writes on Alash? [Ar] (Why?), know he is fond of the art of satire. Earlier this month he published a post about a supposed announcement by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy [Ar] of a series of measures to “encourage” French Muslims to follow a French version of this year's Ramadan.

irtually every single member of congress, every senator, every Capitol Hill staffer, every White House advisor, every Fed governor, and every major political reporter is a college graduate. What’s more, we have a large amount of social segregation in the United States—college graduates tend to socialize with each other. And among college graduates, there simply isn’t an economic crisis in the United States. This is not the best of times, but it’s perfectly rational in gradland to be balancing concern about the labor market situation with dozens of other concerns.

Unsurprisingly, Edley’s bold plan to reach students “from Kentucky to Kuala Lumpur”  has garnered opposition. The thoughtful critique is that the Internet can’t replicate the intellectual and personal experience of going to college in person. That’s true (if overstated, and becoming more so as technology improves). But it’s also the wrong way to think about the issue.

In an article last year in The American Interest, Philip Auerswald and Zoltan Acs of George Mason University suggested that the defining characteristic of American capitalism is not only an entrepreneurial culture that generates great wealth but also a philanthropic infrastructure that recycles that wealth in ways that create more opportunity, more growth and more wealth. This virtuous cycle, they concluded, is the "inner dynamic of American capitalism and the source of its prosperity." They contrast that to socialist countries, where philanthropy is weak and government takes on the recycling role, or less-developed countries, where oligarchs' fortunes are not recycled at all.

Ross was soft-spoken and analytical, but braced. An industrial policy? We don't have one. We also lack a comprehensible energy policy (indeed, any energy policy), an efficient transportation policy (favoring interstate-highway transport over rail), and especially under the G.W. Bush administration, groaned Ross, U.S. investment in research and development foolishly suffered. All of this culminating in, "Within five to ten years we could be a second-rate power."