The New York Times

In a column in The Daily Beast, “Put a Mom on the Court,” Peter Beinart argues that the choice is “wrong” for another reason. Noting that only 4 of the 12 Noting that only 4 of the 12 women who held cabinet-level positions in the Clinton and Bush administrations had children, he wrote: “Our government is actually doing a pretty good job of providing role models for the 20 percent of American women who don’t want kids. Where it’s failing is in providing role models for the 80 percent that do....

The history of American oil spills is the history of the environmental movement. The 1969 blowout of an oil platform off Santa Barbara, Calif., gave rise to Earth Day as well as President Richard Nixon’s National Environmental Policy Act, and led to a moratorium on new drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. Twenty years later, the spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker near Alaska quashed the first Bush administration’s ambitions for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and ushered in the laws that made oil shippers liable for damage caused by their cargo.

At the height of the violence here, the group effectively governed cities, villages and even entire regions, with the explicit or at least tacit support of Iraqis. “They controlled territory the size of New England in 2006,” says Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation in Washington. ...

“The Al Qaeda in Iraq brand,” Mr. Bergen said, “is horribly tarnished,” reflecting the idea that terrorism, at heart, is a campaign for consumer loyalty. ...

“There is a fundamental asymmetry between the parties, and unless we acknowledge that, we’ll be stuck,” said Daniel Levy, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. ...

That is exactly what they have been doing, according to a new report, “Left on the Table,” by two professors at California State University, Fresno, which was published by the New America Foundation.

“We wanted to show that the program is not just important for relieving poverty, but that it's also important for local economies,” said Maria Sotero, a research associate for the Asset Building Program of the New America Foundation. ...

Megan McArdle, an editor at The Atlantic, conceded that “conservatives are often voluntarily putting themselves in the same cocoon. ...

The highly classified C.I.A. program to kill militants in the tribal regions of Pakistan with missiles fired from drones is the world’s worst-kept secret.

The United States has long tried to maintain plausible deniability that it is behind drone warfare in Pakistan, a country that pollsters consistently find is one of the most anti-American in the world. For reasons of its own, the Pakistani government has also sought to hide the fact that it secretly agreed to allow the United States to fly some drones out of a base in Pakistan and attack militants on its territory.

At a time when politics has become an almost ­minute-by-minute spectacle, political thinkers who try to discern a sweeping interpretive pattern in current events or to predict where those events may be heading are likely to find their work evaluated in terms dismayingly like those applied to candidates and strategists. One wrong guess, or an abrupt change in the political weather, can make even an illuminating political book seem as irrelevant as a bungled campaign.

I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me 20 years ago that America would someday be routinely firing missiles into countries it’s not at war with. For that matter, I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me a few months ago that America would soon be plotting the assassination of an American citizen who lives abroad.

Reading Ian Buruma makes you feel parochial. In “Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents,” he writes intimately about the relationship between politics and faith in Britain, the Netherlands, France, China, Japan and the United States. And beneath every cliché — about American religious fervor, French intolerance or Japanese godlessness — he uncovers ironies that wreak havoc with popular stereotypes.