Here’s NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston this morning, describing a beloved woman, a fixture of her community who’s been driving children to school for 28 years: She is so popular her nickname is “Dollar;” she says that is because everyone is chasing her to drive their children. [She] is a big woman — both tall and round. [...]

The following was originally posted on May 20, 2003 on my old Blogspot site. The permanent links to those archives have gotten bloggered, and since I’d like to be able to link to this post in the future, I’m reposting it here. – – – – – – – – – – – - “The [...]

Syria has so far accepted (at least) 1.5 million Iraqi refugees. Beginning today, that country is placing limits on the number and type of future refugees it will accept. As CBS News reports: With the massive influx of refugees, Syria is starting to feel the strain. “There’s a huge impact for a country of 20 [...]

Attacking Iran would be Bad So Sarah Baxter of The Sunday Times (“Pentagon ‘three-day blitz’ plan for Iran“), George Packer in The New Yorker (“Test Marketing“) and Lance Mannion (“Oh what the heck, let’s start a third war!“) all say that the Bush administration may be considering a major strike against Iran.* That is a [...]

If you want an acerbic taste of what might be called Niebuhrian irony, see the gallows humor of American soldiers in Chris Collins’ front-line* McClatchy report from Iraq, “South of Baghdad, U.S. troops find fatigue, frustration“: Standing in a small room in the Iraqi home they’d raided an hour earlier, a dozen soldiers from the [...]

Frank Rich writes about the magic spell that President Bush is invoking in the hope it will protect him from his dementor-ish approval ratings: It was The Washington Post that first quantified General Petraeus’s remarkable ascension. President Bush, who mentioned his new Iraq commander’s name only six times as the surge rolled out in January, [...]