One of the more interesting moments of last night's 60 Minutes broadcast of their interview with Barack Obama was the point where he indicated that he was open to ideas from anyone, whether it be FDR or Ronald Reagan, as long as the ideas workto solve a current problem.

My first thought was that this was a calculated political move, designed to appeal to conservatives who are still skeptical about an Obama presidency. But on at least one issue -- the need to eliminate nuclear weapons -- Reagan's legacy fits perfectly with Obama's current position.

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The news the other day that American Express is reorganizing itself as a bank holding company so it can access federal bailout funds was the last straw.

"What about us?", my wife and I complained. Why should we hold our breath and hope that some of the hundreds of billions allocated for the big institutions that helped get us into this mess in the first place will somehow trickle down to us?

So, we've decided to reorganize ourselves as a bank holding company, the better to access federal bailout funds.

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According to Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post, the excitement around the world about the election of Barack Obama has reached the point of "mass hysteria." In a piece in today's Washington Post, she says the following:

"Things could get worse, too: Mass hysteria can inspire the world's crazed assassins, as the RFK analogy shows. This subject is borderline taboo, but I don't think I was the only one momentarily gripped by terror when Obama walked on to that stage in Chicago: What if something awful was about to happen? In some of the weirder realms of the Internet, you can already find verses from Nostradamus allegedly predicting that Obama's election heralds the end of the world, and someone out there probably believes them."

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A subsidiary theme within the flood of commentary on the Obama victory is the fate of the Republican Party. In an article on Monday entitled "The Republican Rump," Paul Krugman suggested that "the Republican rump, the party that's left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin's rallies, where crowds chant "Vote McCain, not Hussein!" It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that "the other folks are voting." It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama's Marxist -- or was that Islamic? -- roots."

Let's hope it doesn't play out that way.

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As an American and a citizen of the world, I was thrilled by Barack Obama's victory in yesterday's election. But even as we savor his historic victory (our historic victory), it's not too soon to start thinking about how to transform the inspiration of the moment into the new policies we desperately need. This was a key theme of Obama's speech last night, and it's worth taking him up on it by beginning a thoughtful conversation about the future of the country.

In the area that I specialize in -- foreign policy -- change is hard. Disentangling from Iraq, finding a more practical course in Afghanistan, crafting coordinated international approaches to curbing climate change and reviving the global economy, making good on Obama's pledge to seek a world free of nuclear weapons -- these challenges will not be resolved in a day, a month, a year, or, in some cases, a decade or more. But we have a chance to get started in the right direction for the first time in this century -- if we can get beyond the politics of immediate gratification.

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As an American and a citizen of the world, I was thrilled by Barack Obama's victory in yesterday's election. But even as we savor his historic victory (our historic victory), it's not too soon to start thinking about how to transform the inspiration of the moment into the new policies we desperately need.  This was a key theme of Obama's speech last night, and it's worth taking him up on it by beginning a thoughtful conversation about the future of the country.

In the area that I specialize in -- foreign policy -- change is hard. Disentangling from Iraq, finding a more practical course in Afghanistan, crafting coordinated international approaches to curbing climate change and reviving the global economy, making good on Obama's pledge to seek a world free of nuclear weapons -- these challenges will not be resolved in a day, a month, a year, or, in some cases, a decade or more. But we have a chance to get started in the right direction for the first time in this century -- if we can get beyond the politics of immediate gratification. 

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One of the more objectionable arguments in yesterday's speech on nuclear weapons by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was his assertion that "there is absolutely no way we can maintain a credible deterrent and reduce the number of weapons in our stockpile without resorting to testing our stockpile or pursuing a modernization program." In plain English, Gates is threatening that the Pentagon and the National Nuclear Security Administration -- which runs the nuclear weapons complex -- will break a longstanding moratorium on nuclear testing if they are not allowed to build a new warhead (known in bureacratese as the "Reliable Replacement Warhead." This assertion is wrong in so many ways it is hard to know where to start. Point one is that according to the Pentagon's own experts, the plutonium "pits" that form the most important active component of current bombs are good for at least 85 years, as set out in an analysis by Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association.

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In a speech today at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, Bush Administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a last ditch effort to justify the continued possession of nuclear weapons by the United States, even as figures ranging from Barack Obama to Henry Kissinger to a growing network of citizen's organizations have endorsed the goal of "a world without nuclear weapons."

Given that Gates has been mentioned as a possible Secretary of Defense in an Obama or a McCain administration, his opinions still matter -- although one would hope that his status quo position on nuclear weapons would disqualify him from receiving such an appointment. This is especially true given that eliminating the threat of nuclear weapons should be the top priority of the next administration, as Joseph Cirincione, the President of the Ploughshares Fund, suggested in a recent interview.

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The hate-mongering politics of Sarah Palin, John McCain and
their supporters are not going to be enough to "change the subject"
from the economic crisis and the fact that most voters see Barack Obama
as being better equipped to deal with it. But pointed references to
Obama as someone who "pals around" with terrorists and somehow isn't
a "real" American with "small town values" are resonating with an increasingly
hateful and vocal minority of the electorate who don't want to see an African-
American as our next president.

While the televised talking heads have for the most part minimized this issue
by pointing to a few instances in which McCain has called Obama a "good man"
in response to questions at his rallies, Frank Rich makes clear in his Sunday
column of this week that McCain needs to do far more to rein in the hatred that his campaign has helped to fuel.

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The good news is that Sarah Palin lost the debate to Joe Biden. The bad news is that she didn't self-destruct in the way she had in the Katie Couric interviews. It was observed by many of the post-debate analysts that she basically repeated the same talking points regardless of the question at hand -- but of course if we got rid of every politician who did that we wouldn't be able to muster up enough folks to fill the House and Senate.

What I wished I had done to make the debate more entertaining--although I'm not really drinking these days--is to have played a drinking game during last night's debate, in which everyone would have to take a drink whenever one of the candidates said a key word like "Main Street" or "Wall Street" or "middle class."

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Well, gee, John, thanks for agreeing to show up at tonight's debate, now that you've gotten the economy back on track. Oh, you haven't? Well, at least it's not your fault. According to you, John "the Maverick" McCain, the problem was that those damned DC insiders (i.e., your longstanding colleagues) were too busy playing the "blame game" to strike a deal.

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Whenever a major national figure talks about "putting politics aside" for the good of the country, it's time to hang onto your wallet. So it is with John McCain and his suggestion about putting off tomorrow night's presidential debate so that he can ride into Washington and save the economy -- not to mention life as we know it. Barack Obama has put forward the same line (not on cancelling the debate, but on not "politicizing" the bailout), probably in self-defense, to avoid charges that he is a self-serving, unpatriotic, and -- god forbid! -- politically motivated person. Of course, it's all politics: the bailout is politics, the discussions over how to shape the bailout are politically driven, and the process that got us into the mess was shaped by politics. Why pretend otherwise? In the hopes that it might lull people to sleep and divert their attention from the question of who helped get us into this mess in the first place.

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I spent last Friday night in my local park watching an outdoor showing of the Hitchcock classic "North by Northwest," in which advertising man Cary Grant is mistaken for a CIA agent by the name of George Kaplan. It ends up that Kaplan is not a real person at all but an illusory character created by the Agency to entrap a ring of foreign spies led by the coolly evil James Mason. But once Grant has been mistaken for Kaplan, CIA bigwig Leo G. Carroll decides that he makes a better decoy than the faux character they have created, so they use him to reel in their prey.

Granted, I've been a bit disturbed of late -- not least of all by the Republican convention -- but I got to thinking after the film of the parallels between the Cary Grant character and America's star of the moment -- Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

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After my post the other day, I felt the need to write something
that puts the war in Georgia in a bit more of a context. With the
situation changing by the hour, it makes more sense for me to
look at the roots of the conflict than try to beat the news media
to the punch on breaking information.

Perhaps the most ironic statement yet in the war of words over Russia's military intervention in Georgia was John McCain's assertion that "I'm interested in good relations between the United States and Russia, but in the 21st century, nations don't invade other nations." Too bad no one told the Bush administration that before it went into Iraq.

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Like many of you, I've been wracking my brain about what can be done about Russia's intervention in Georgia (and Georgia's prior intervention in South Ossetia), with no great answers. Perhaps a little humility is in order. Bearing this in mind, I was particularly struck by Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate, which begins by asserting that "It is impossible to think about the Russian assault on Georgia without feeling like a heartless bastard or a romantic fool." Even as it appears that Russia may be withdrawing (not confirmed as of this writing), Kaplan's analysis is worth reading for thinking about next steps.

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