Bill Maher on MSNBC earlier this week (according to today’s Washington Post):

"We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think that religion stops people from thinking. I think it justifies crazies. . . I think religion is a neurological disorder."

I thought that this comment by an Iraqi injured in yesterday’s attacks on Shiite worshippers was interesting:

"Those infidel Wahhabis, those Osama bin Laden followers, they did this because they hate Shiites," said Sari Abdullah, a worshipper at the al-Khadimain mosque who was injured by shrapnel. "They are afraid of us. They are not Muslims. They are infidels."

In today’s ’New York Times,’ David Brooks argues that deficits do matter and predicts the emergence of a leader who will take up the issue.

Brooks writes, "There’s going to be another Ross Perot, and this time he’s going to be younger. There’s going to be a millionaire rising out of the country somewhere and he (or she) is going to lead a movement of people who are worried about federal deficits, who are offended by the horrendous burden seniors are placing on the young and who are disgusted by a legislative process that sometimes suggests that the government has lost all capacity for self-control. ... In the past months we have learned that the prescription drug benefit passed last year is not going to cost $400 billion over 10 years. The projections now, over a slightly different period, are that it’s going to cost over $700 billion. And these cost estimates are coming before the program is even operating. They are only going to go up. That means we’re going to be spending the next few months bleeding over budget restraints that might produce savings in the millions, while the new prescription drug benefit will produce spending in the billions. ... We may as well be blunt about the driving force behind all this. The living and well organized are taking money from the weak and the unborn. Over the past decades we have seen a gigantic transfer of wealth from struggling young families and the next generation to members of the AARP. In 1990, 29 percent of federal spending went to seniors; by 2015 roughly half of all government spending will go to those over 65. This prescription drug measure is just part of that great redistribution."

Here’s a list of the top 50 Contenders for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination, provided by the NewPolitics blog. Topping the list, of course, is Hilary, John Edwards is 2nd, and, it gets silly toward the end, Lyndon LaRouche is 50th.

The real sleeper is at #18. Tennessee’s Governor Phil Bredesen emerges as the southern dark horse. Can this work again, an unknown Southern Governor wins just like Carter and Clinton. Just Google ’Phil Bredesen for President.’

The Washington Post editorial page has this to say about Lawrence Summers:

One can agree or disagree with this ranking of reasons or with Mr. Summers’s reading of the research on gender and ability. But it’s contrary to the mission of a university to attack people for provoking fresh thought on big issues -- issues that, as Mr. Summers rightly put it, "are too important to sentimentalize." The furious reaction from some members of the Harvard faculty may reflect disaffection with Mr. Summers’s leadership on issues ranging from his questioning of tenure to his expansion of the campus. Mr. Summers has sparked controversies on other subjects, too, including political diversity in the law school, the quality of African American studies and campus criticism of Israel. If those subjects in part underlie the movement against Mr. Summers, his critics should engage them directly and not unjustifiably paint him as an anti-feminist bigot.

Read the whole thing.

Peter, is there any way the Ashbrook Center can provide Harvard’s poor Iraqi guests a somewhat less alienating vision of American freedom? A sample of what’s in store for them in the PRC:

Here is a bit of the syllabus for Prof. Bernstein’s course to be attended by the Iraqi visitors at Harvard:

We will use the methods of Cultural Studies to consider US imperialism not only as a military venture, but as a cultural project. Cultural Studies is (to offer a very condensed definition) an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the creation and flow of power and resistance, especially through ordinary people’s uses of mass-marketed products. The field of Cultural Studies enables us to consider imperialism not as a narrowly defined governmental venture, but rather as a sprawling set of practices in which many, if not all, people participate. These practices include performances on stage and screen, tourism, holiday rituals, and the writing and reading of literature (both “high” and “popular”). One may look for imperialist practices not only in military units, but in World Fairs, museums, and schools.

Cultural Studies opens unique avenues by which to consider issues of gender. Analyses of imperialism based in military history or international relations often focus on men as colonizers and conquerors, women as victims. In contrast, this course’s focus on culture opens the following questions:

1. How has gender affected the experiences of colonized people (and how has the experience of being colonized affected those people’s genders)?

2. How has gender affected the experiences of colonizers (and how has the experience of colonizing affected those people’s genders)?

3. How has gender functioned as part of the ideologies and strategies of American imperialism?

4. How has gender functioned as part of the ideologies and strategies of anti-imperialist activism and resistance?

These four questions constitute the heart of this course.

Here’s Win Myers’s conclusion:

All of this adds up to an attempt to leave the six visiting Iraqi students with the impression that America, liberator of their country, is in fact a racist, sexist, homophobic land. They will learn, in effect, just how awful life here really is, as seen through the eyes of one of the world’s most prestigious institutions.

But will they believe it? At the very least, the danger exists that they will speak with media, here or abroad, and tell of what they learned in this course. So armed, anti-American media in the Arab world can bombard its audience with news from the belly of the beast on just how horrendous life here is. Or, conversely, they may seize upon such a class to demonstrate our ostensible degeneracy to an audience already propagandized by decades of anti-Western bile.

Let’s hope that our Iraqi visitors find the presentation of life at Harvard to be so at odds with the world they observe around them, and with the nature and generosity of their hosts while they’re in America, that the conclusions they draw will be more enlightened than the ideology of some Harvard professors. Let’s hope, that is, that they ask themselves: how could a people so vicious sacrifice blood and treasure to free us from Saddam? If they draw the logical conclusion, they will have a leg up on many Harvard students and professors who, never having experienced real tyranny, spend their lives imagining themselves victims of the freest society on earth.

Here’s hoping that the Harvard Republicans, mentioned in the NYT piece on Karl Rove’s speech at CPAC, make the effort to offer the Iraqi guests a different picture of life in America.

It seems some Greenpeace protestors thought it would be fun to storm the international petroleum exchange in London yesterday, but the oil traders were not amused and beat the crap out of them, sending two to the hospital. Would this have happened 20 years ago?

Read this, this, and then this.

The President has set an agenda and the best the Democrats can do is say "us too!" The humility Beinart urges is already present in Bush’s speeches and he has already articulated the standard to which we are to be held. So the Democrats seem to be caught between rigid opposition and shameless imitation. Not a good place.

Craig Crawford swears that the campaign has already started for 2008, much earlier than ever before. O.K. Maybe. But if I were advising the Democrats, I would say this: Do not worry about 2008; be seriously concerned about the 2006 elections. You must not lose any House or Senate seats for if you do, you will have no chance of winning the presidency in 2008. And, even if you should win the the presidential election in 2008, no good will come of it for your party. Be concerned with your party, not with who the candidate for president should be. The Republicans, by being concerned with party victories in 2006, are playing very smart politics that will have lasting consequences. The Demos still seem not to get it. Hillary Clinton’s contribution to this debate (along with John Kerry and other Demos) is to urge that Election Day be made a federal holiday to encourage voting. She also pushed for legislation that would allow all ex-felons to vote. This will not solve your party’s problems, Hillary. Peter Beinart’s advice to the Demos about their rhetoric is more serious, but they are not listening to him, or, they know they can’t do it. If the Demos don’t get their act together, politics will become boring.

UPDATE: A bad omen for Hillary’s prospects. Llloyd Grove reports on a speech given by David Geffen:

I think President Bush is a great man and I’m happy that Dennis Hastert is Speaker of the House and that Bill Frist is Majority Leader in the Senate. But did you know that since George Bush became President that the Federal Budget has grown by 38% to $2.57 trillion dollars.

George Will offers some thoughts on that here .

U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart

rejected the argument that the state’s ban on polygamy violates constitutional rights of religion and privacy, saying the state has an interest in protecting monogamous marriage.

Thomas L. Friedman is calling for a revolution in Lebanon. He makes perfectly clear that the mischief in Lebanon--once called the oldest real democracy in the Arab world--is directly related to Syrian imperialism. He reminds us that the city of Hama was leveled by the Syrian army (10,000 to 20,000 Syrians slaughtered) in 1982, and that that method is still alive. But Friedman says that Hama no longer rules, rather "Baghdad Rules" is now the name of the game:

What else can the Lebanese do? They must unite all their communities and hit the Syrian regime with "Baghdad Rules," which were demonstrated 10 days ago by the Iraqi people. Baghdad Rules are when an Arab public does something totally unprecedented: it takes to the streets, despite the threat of violence from jihadists and Baathists, and expresses its democratic will.

Rafik Hariri stopped playing by "Lebanese Rules" - eating any crow the Syrians crammed down Lebanon’s throat - and openly challenged Syrian imperialism. If the Lebanese want to be free, they have got to take the lead. They have to summon the same civic courage that Mr. Hariri did and that the Iraqi public did - the courage to look the fascists around them in the eye, call them in the press and in public by their real names, and confront the European Union and the Arab League for their willingness to ignore the Syrian oppression.

Via Democracy Project, a post by Bill McClay about a CHE article on a suicide hotline, originally sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ. Here’s Bill’s conclusion:

Having been associated for the past twenty-five years with American institutions of higher learning, most of them secular in character, it takes a great deal to shock me. But this article did. Imagine the fact that universities like Brown, and others all over the country, which bend over backwards in other respects to be as touchy-feely as possible---but where suicide among students is a shockingly common problem---have refused to make use of this service, for which there is an obvious and crying need, SIMPLY BECAUSE THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED BY A RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION, even though there is not a shred of religious content in what that organization does---nor is anyone claiming that there is. Better to run the risk that suicidal students have nowhere to turn, than to run the risk that they might turn to.....a Christian organization. That says all that needs to be said about their priorities. And Mr. Repak has decided, it is better to renounce any and all vestiges of Christian identity than to cease providing the service.

Does the animus really extend that far? And is this the sort of attitude that proponents of "faith-based" initiatives have to look forward to? I fear that the answer to both questions may be "Yes."

This is heartening. Here’s a taste:

for the moment, Iraq does seem to have turned a corner politically. The most telling sign is that the Sunni Muslims who mostly boycotted the political process are now said to be looking for ways to get back in. One prominent Iraqi describes a recent meeting with leading Sunni sheiks who complained that they had mistakenly assumed that the Americans would lose their nerve, postpone the elections and thereby enhance the power of the insurgents. Now the sheiks want a piece of the action.

Whether this Baghdad Spring continues depends largely on the wisdom of the leaders of the Shiite alliance that won nearly 50 percent of the vote. This week they are negotiating over who will get the top positions in the new government that was elected Jan. 30. But perhaps more important, they are debating ways that would give the Sunnis a role in the new government.