Jeremiah Wright has been fairly quiet lately, giving just a handful of public addresses in the fall. But guess where he’ll be on January 20, while a certain ceremony is taking place in the nation’s capital? Just 90 miles down the road in Richmond. Yes, on Inauguration Day, the good Rev. Wright will be giving [...]

Via Ezra Klein, we are alerted to Barack Obama’s 2001 attempt at food critique for a television show that apparently never ran. (See here now his opinions on flap jacks, peach cobbler!) I envision a return to presidential politics for Frank Bruni, the chief gourmand at the New York Times. Just imagine the delicious primary [...]

In his 1955 book “The Great Crash: 1929,” John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist, explained concisely why Bernie Madoff is unlikely to be the last corrupt financier to be shoved into sunlight. At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in – or more precisely not in – the country’s business and banks. [...]

Apparently, Obama wants to name CNN’s talking-head neurosurgeon, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, as Surgeon General. Gupta is an accomplished surgeon, Emory University medical professor and award-winning journalist, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the tsunami in Sri Lanka. He’s also not totally unpolitical, having served as a White House fellow in 1997 [...]

Last week we read about a Muslim family that was removed from an Air Tran flight because of “inappropriate comments” that in fact are similar to questions many newbie flyers ask, regardless of age, race, or religious background. Now comes news that an Iraqi blogger and U.S. resident has been awarded $240,000 in a lawsuit [...]

According to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, everything is “faster, heavier and more likely to collide.” ALSO: While the galaxy may be much bigger than we knew, Paul Krugman fears that the stimulus, which will be a number followed by 11 or 12 zeros, is going to be too small to work. He does a [...]

For all that Obama has been winning praise for his relatively smooth transition (okay, Richardson and Panetta aside), Dems must not be loving the side show Blagojevich has created. In fact, as one observer put it to me, “the clowns have taken over the circus — all three rings of it.” Today’s spectacle of Burris [...]

Very bad, if inevitable, news from Gaza today: the Israelis accidently hit  a UN school, killing at least 30 children. This will, no doubt, increase international outrage…and, I hope, pressure for a cease-fire. As Swampland readers know, I supported the Israeli effort to diminish Hamas’s military capabilities–but the most valuable targets were probably hit in [...]

Foreign Policy magazine seems revivified in 2009, with a new roster of bloggers–including the estimable Tom Ricks–and some interesting articles in its Jan/Feb edition. I’d especially recommend this look at how the counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics that helped turn around the situation in Iraq can be applied to Afghanistan, by two of our best young military [...]