Barack Obama and the nation he leads owned the Copenhagen summit, and the administration used its commanding position to achieve some vital national goals.  In many ways this summit shows the outlines of an emerging world order in which the form of American leadership has changed and the chief challenges it confronts have changed, but […]

Beyond the brightly crackling hearth here at Mead manor, the world press is still sorting out what happened at Copenhagen yesterday. The UK Guardian has an unequivocal take: “Copenhagen Ends in Failure!” screams the headline.  The New York Times is more cautious, noting that a deal was reached but that its provisions are less stringent […]

President Obama ran for office as Mr. Cool, the unflappable leader who would calmly lead the nation through the economic and political storms ahead.  Like Joseph Addison’s famous ‘angel in the whirlwind’ President Obama would be the unmoved mover at the center of American politics and bring his intellectual firepower and his steady temperament to […]

Yesterday came the news: South Africa’s Beet Lady is dead.I’ve often been surprised but have rarely been shocked; the Beet Lady managed to do it.About five years ago in South Africa where I was attending a press conference held by Ms. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, then Minister of Health.  Glowing with confidence and assurance she told us […]

“It’s 1776 all over again, and now we got a House of Lords up here,” latter day tea-party protester William Temple told NPR in front of the Capitol yesterday.  Temple was wearing Revolutionary war garb at the time, unlike the original Boston Tea Party participants, who dressed (unconvincingly) as Mohawk Indians to conceal their identities […]

As the registration system in Copenhagen broke down yesterday, thousands of delegates to the global warming conference were left shivering in the cold.Reinhold Niebuhr would have liked this; irony was one of his favorite things — God’s commentary on man’s futile striving.But Copenhagen is more than Niebuhrian; in many ways the global warming conference is […]

Just a few selected comments on this weekend’s newspaper reading, as it were.First, in the New York Times “Week in Review” section under the headline “Our Decade of Deluded Thinking,” an unsigned author makes some astonishing comments, one astonishingly good but most astonishingly bad. First the good: the article admits that Mossadegh did not fall […]

“Aussie, Chinese Officials urge Pandas to reproduce” ran the headline in this AP story from Down Under.I haven’t talked to the pandas much myself, so I don’t know whether they were paying attention.  The closest I’ve come to an exchange with a panda was at the circus in Shanghai where they had a panda trained […]

Last week, President Obama was living the Twenty-Third Psalm as he gave a well received speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over.  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the […]

The global economic crisis is now moving into a new phase.  The first wave saw a series of bankruptcies as a financial panic wreaked havoc across the world’s major financial centers.  The panic was stemmed more or less by central bankers intervening to save some institutions, provide for the orderly or quasi-orderly break-up of others […]