Senate Guru is reporting: Ohio: Despite both Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher entering the 2010 Democratic Senate primary this week, Cuyahoga County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones is reportedly moving forward with a Senate campaign exploratory committee. It will be interesting to hear how he expects to get traction against two statewide officials in the primary. It will be interesting. My own feeling is that Governor Ted Strickland’s quick endorsement...

Last night, with our daughter visiting from Florida, we decided to watch a 2008 film that she hadn’t yet seen: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. I love the Narnia novels and loved the Walden-Disney film based on the first in the series, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I wrote an enthusiastic review of the first film. But, on the theory that “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” I wrote nothing about the...

See here.

Historian Rick Shenkman has a point. The rating of presidents–a recent survey among historians called Abraham Lincoln our greatest president–probably doesn’t even rise to the level of a parlor game. Parlor games, he says, have rules. But both historians and the public tend to rate presidents by highly movable goal posts. I myself have been guilty of playing this game, having several years ago named my choices for the country’s best presidents. (I remember that at the time,...

For not taking vitamins? This article could lead you to think so. But don’t believe it! I don’t take vitamin pills, basically because every time I’ve started, I’ve found myself incapable of maintaining the habit. So, as in other areas of my life, a bad character trait–in this case, my tendency to procrastinate in the adoption of something I’ve been told is good for me–has spared me. I’m willing to let the early adopters have their day in the sun. If...

I was up late on Wednesday night and channel-surfed through about two minutes of David Letterman’s attempt at interviewing Joaquin Phoenix. I found it tiresome, as I’m sure Letterman did. On Thursday, I see here and there that people are wondering, “What’s wrong with Joaquin?” Maybe not much. He may be involved in a bit of anti-marketing, Joaquin doing his best Andy Kaufman. It makes sense. Kaufman could be tiresome, too. But he attracted attention. Phoenix’s occasional...

One-time late night talk host Dick Cavett writes about welcoming John Cheever and John Updike as guests on his show in 1981. I remembered this incident recently in comments at Ann Althouse’s blog. I couldn’t find it on Youtube at the time of Updike’s recent death. Cavett and the Times have posted it. While Cavett’s show seemed to drive Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show to Hollywood and show-biziness as a way of defining and separating itself, it shouldn’t be forgotten...

The two-hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth comes tomorrow. A few years back, I wrote a seven-part series on Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address, the links to which are listed below. A lifelong religious skeptic who was nonetheless an ardent student of the Bible, Lincoln was led by the crucible of civil war felt compelled to return, again and again, to that book. What emerged as he took the presidential oath of office for a second time was a unique political proclamation,...

Certainly instability born of the disconnect between the Afghan government and its people to which President Obama alluded in his news conference several days ago is at play in a suicide attack on the Ministry of Justice in Kabul. But there’s another factor as well. The Taliban and their allies obviously also are welcoming the new administration in Washington, testing the new president’s mettle, and sending a message that they haven’t given up fighting. The attack comes just before...

I’m not related. I’m not a porn-again Christian. [This gem has been crossposted at my personal blog.]

Much needs to be done to right the US economy. Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on the need for stimulus, though not on the means for doing it. Unemployment is still too high. Solvent banks need to make loans. Corporate executives need to be reined in. Government money can’t be doled out like penny candy. Unemployment insurance and Medicaid monies need to be available. That’s all true. But we also need to get over the panic that has afflicted the US economy and much of our political...

From Psychology Today: …narcissism isn’t just a combination of monumental self-esteem and rudeness. As a personality type, it ranges from a tendency to a serious clinical disorder, encompassing unexpected, even counterintuitive behavior. The Greek myth of Narcissus ends with the beautiful young man lost to the world, content to forever gaze at his own reflection in a pool of water. Real-life narcissists, however, desperately need other people to validate their own worth. “It’s...

continues its murderous ways. Apparently, the government there feels that the people don’t suffer enough. I pray for Myanmar regularly.

Is Islamic fundamentalism Turkey’s future, with secularism, what we in the West would call democratic pluralism, its past? Apparently secularists who plotted a coup against Turkey’s democratically-elected Islamic fundamentalist government fear that seemingly topsy-turvy scenario. Many have been arrested for plotting against the government there. Many in the West have presumed that because democracies have tended to be less aggressive or oppressive, having elections will necessarily result...

It appears so. By disallowing much in the way of journalist-imbedding with their fighting units, Israeli government officials clearly tried to avoid being played as the heavies as they were in Lebanon several years ago. Their efforts seem to not be working now in Gaza.

The Obama Administration yesterday began circulating a draft executive order that would close down the Guantanamo Bay detention center. But doing that could prove difficult as explained here by Columbia University law prof Matthew Waxman. [This has been crossposted at my personal blog.]

Education Week, the publication of a not-for-profit organization that seeks excellence in education, says Ohio has the seventh-best public education program among all the states. Ohio was given a B- overall. For a severely cash-strapped state whose public school funding program has been ruled unconstitutional by the State Supreme Court on four different occasions, this is, quite frankly, amazing news. Governor Ted Strickland, who was elected in 2006, has said that if he doesn’t get the school...

…now apparently more divided by a common language. The resistance reminds me a bit of wariness of attempts at metrifying the US.

Let me be clear about something at the outset: Based on the transcripts of some wiretapped conversations released by federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, I have a decidedly negative impression of Illinois’ Democratic governor, Rod Blagojevich. His profanity-laced declarations that he intended to sell his state’s US Senate seat reminded me of a pathetic playground pretender who hopes his tough talk will earn him the respect of bigger kids. Blagojevich clearly has some juvenile notions...

In 1980, Edward M. Kennedy ran to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from incumbent Jimmy Carter. Early enthusiasm for Kennedy’s candidacy gave way to mystification and finally, indifference. Why? Well, for one thing, in an interview with that era’s version of Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, the Massachusetts senator couldn’t say why he was running for president. In the end, his flimsy rationale appeared to be, “I’m a Kennedy. It’s time for me to fulfill...

Robert Graham, whose unique design for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., manages, in turn, to be moving, evocative, informative, and fun, has died. I didn’t know what to expect when my family and I first went to the FDR Memorial a few years back, but was pleasantly surprised. It’s the sort of place to which a civic-minded parent could take a civics-resistant kid (something my kids never were) and know that, in spite of the child’s willful resolves, she or he...

So says Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu of the failure of his country, South Africa, to push for Robert Mugabe to step down from power in Zimbabwe. Read about his comments here. South Africa’s government can, if it chooses, play a key role in catalyzing a peaceful transition of power in the wake of last year’s sham election in Zimbabwe. [This has been cross-posted at my personal blog.]

This morning, I felt the need to clarify what I like about Rick Warren, something I briefly hinted at here and on my own site. After cataloging what I like about Warren, I presented this summary, now here for your consideration: Those who portray Warren as a demon for his positions on homosexuality or a sellout for praying for the new president in January aren’t paying attention to the whole person. His positions–theological and political–aren’t driven by hatred. Nor, in being...

“I find the professional screamers and their checklists of what constitutes a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ predictable to the point of boredom.”-Bob Schieffer in the preface to his book, Bob Schieffer’s America [Crossposted at my personal blog.]

“No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the age of thirty years, and been nine years a citizen of the United States and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state for which he shall be chosen.” (Article 1, Section 3, The United States Constitution) There, folks, is the Constitution’s sparsely-worded set of requirements for anyone wishing to serve as a United States Senator. It seems like a good idea to review those words in light of the current...