No more Summer Session duties. Time to get caught up on things....
+ B.U. IR prof Andy Bacevich had another scorching op-ed in yesterday's Boston Globe. As much fire as Bush draws from the left, the most withering stuff comes from disaffected, life-long conservatives like Bacevich. Matt Yglesias has a great follow-on piece here.
+ Did you know that the airborne version of the Straight Talk Express features "a special area with a couch and two captain's chairs" set up for intimate interviews with the candidate himself? And that "only the good reporters" will be allowed into the areas? And that if McCain and his people know "that you have a hostile line of questioning or you have a long and well documented critique," that you'll never be invited in? Behold John McCain, the straight talking, straight shooting man of the people!
+ Obama made a big announcement yesterday about his plans for a new approach to faith-based initiatives. Not surprisingly, the media absolutely mangled the coverage. Here's the section that virtually everyone missed in the initial round of coverage:
"Now, make no mistake, as someone who used to teach constitutional law, I believe deeply in the separation of church and state, but I don't believe this partnership will endanger that idea - so long as we follow a few basic principles. First, if you get a federal grant, you can't use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can't discriminate against them - or against the people you hire - on the basis of their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs. And we'll also ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work."
This makes the program nothing whatsoever like Bush's program. If a religious group wants in to this program, they are going to have to agree to abide by very strict non-discrimination and non-proselytization provisions. Assuming that they are willing to do that, and that there is oversight to ensure that they are in fact doing what they have promised, I really don't see why anyone would be opposed to this. Because as Steve Benen points out (and for the record, he worked at Americans United for Separation of Church and State during the early years of the Bush administration:
Obama has identified the pre-Bush safeguards and strengthens them, not abandons them.
By all appearances, Obama's vision is consistent with what Bush's plan would have been, if Bush cared about constitutional law, the interests of taxpayers, the rights of families in need, and the integrity of religious institutions.... There's simply nothing wrong with this. If Obama honors church-state separation and keeps the safeguards in place, as he clearly intends to do, there's no reason the government can't partner with ministries willing to provide a secular social service.
At bottom, this is about community organizing, not religion. Virtually everyone seems to have missed that here. Virtually...
+ Put that together with this - Obama announcing his opposition to a CA ballot measure banning same-sex marriages - and it seems to me that he had quite the day yesterday.
+ Andrew Sullivan has headed to P-Town for his annual vacation, and in his study he uncovered a pre-Iraq war book from Lawrence Kaplan and Bill Kristol, "The War Over Iraq." Amazingly, he's decided to reread it and report back on what Kaplan and Kristol had predicted and promised. Shock and surprise! They were wrong, wrong, wrong, about everything, everything, everything! But I'll be honest: even I was shocked by the magnitude of their errors. And to think... for all those errors he got a gig at the New York Times.
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