The New Republic

Al Gore may have given one of the finest speeches of his career.  It had poetic resonance but was rooted in real science.  It was politically visionary but was animated by an, alas, secure sense of climatic disaster.  It was quite plain-spoken about the economic realities that made global warming so ordinary but argued the hope that suicidal habits were good for no one, not even the greatest suicidalists, China and, most significantly, the United States.  It is my view -but maybe not Al's- that in the end, however, America READ MORE >>

Clinton Emergency: [The New York Times]: “A man claiming to have a bomb strapped to his chest walked in to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign offices in Rochester, N.H., today and took hostages, police and witnesses said.”   READ MORE >>

The NYT political blog reports that Hillary Clinton put some meat on the bones of her oft-stated pledge to tap both Democratic and Republican statesmen as diplomats should she become president: READ MORE >>

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I was just at a talk that French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave in Washington this morning. (Quick reaction: shorter and more winning than you might have thought.) Afterward, Sarkozy apologized for only being able to take one question and explained that his trip was sheduled to the hilt--a speech to Congress, a meeting with Bush, etc. It's possible that I mis-heard, or that this was lost in translation somehow, but, if not, one of the items on his agenda struck me as interesting, at least for the purposes of this blog: A phone call with Hillary Clinton. READ MORE >>

Yesterday I noted that Sam Brownback's meeting with Rudy Giuliani looked like a direct slap at Mitt Romney, as though Brownback were saying he was so convinced Romney was a phony he'd rather support the pro-choice Giuliani instead. Now Greg Sargent has some evidence that that's how it's being received. Reports Sargent: READ MORE >>

Alex Bolton has a great piece in The Hill about today's meeting between Sam Brownback and Rudy Giuliani. It made me think three things: 1.) Notwithstanding the meeting, it would be pretty hard for Brownback to endorse Giuliani. Consider, for example, this passage involving an anti-abortion activist in Iowa: READ MORE >>

On August 6, Ehud Olmert was on his way to the truly charming West Bank town of Jericho for one of those confidence-building meetings with Mahmoud Abbas. Alas, Israeli security had found out -- their intelligence is superb! -- that Fatah operatives attached to the Palestinian Authority had planned to target Olmert's party as it entered Jericho and assassinate him and others. The Israelis discovered the plot, and arrested some of the principals. Since these were security officials, they knew the details of the visit. READ MORE >>

James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years By Wayne Franklin (Yale University Press, 705 pp., $40) Click here to purchase the book. READ MORE >>