In the few hours between landing after a swing through Pakistan, the Middle East, and North Africa and taking off again for Berlin, Singapore, Japan, and the Philippines, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found time on Friday to stop over in much friendlier territory: a subterranean banquet hall at Washington’s Reagan International Trade Center. There, she addressed the people who tried to make her president of the United States.

The occasion: a “policy conference”—really more of a reunion—put on by a Hillary-centric advocacy group called NoLimits.org, which her staunchest defenders had founded in the wake of the 2008 election. They wanted to preserve the sisterhood that had grown up around her campaign, and the secretary, by being there, was just returning their loyalty. “We have had some extraordinary times,” Hillary said, relaxed and smiling. “There were so many of you here who were there with me on that long, exciting, death-defying journey across our country! You’re the ones who helped put all those cracks in the glass ceiling.”

The conference drew a peculiar mix: well-preserved Hillraisers, mingling and gossiping in their blonde coifs and furs, alongside supporters of a more pedestrian stripe, many of whom came with one friend or sat alone. They had all paid upwards of $175 apiece to listen to speakers like Barney Frank and Obama aide Jim Messina talk about issues of the day. The real draw, though, was Hillary herself.

The crowd (women, mostly) sat spellbound while she narrated her travels. They shook their heads when Hillary told them, in intimate tones, of visiting rape survivors in the Congo. When she finished, they surged forward to touch her hand, catch her eye, or take her picture—flashes of recognition crossed her face as she bent down from the dais to greet them.

The G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank governors are meeting today in St. Andrews, talking about the data they will need to look at in order to monitor each other’s economic performance and sustain growth (seriously).

The underlying idea is that if you talk long enough about the U.S. current account deficit and the Chinese surplus, stuff happens and the imbalances will take care of themselves--or move on to take another form.

Warren Buffett seems to agree.

From a new cover story on Sarah Palin by Weekly Standard hack Matthew Continetti:

Last week, when Joe Biden traveled to upstate New York to campaign for Democratic congressional candidate Bill Owens, the vice president took aim at Sarah Palin. "The fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin thinks the answer to energy was 'drill, baby, drill,' " Biden said. "No, it's a lot more complicated, Sarah, than 'drill, baby, drill.' "

A good sign of condescension is when someone tells you that "things are more complicated" than you think.

Now direct your attention to a previous paragraph in the same article!

Because Andrew Jackson was the founder of the modern Democratic party, we have a tendency to look at him through big-government eyes. We draw a line that starts with Jackson, runs through Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, and ends up at Barack Obama. But the facts are more complicated than that.

Do they still edit at the Standard? Is there no one around to keep poor Continetti from embarrassing himself in public? And then, naturally, a cursory Lexis search of his work reveals the following:

--Jan 2, 2004: In other words, he screams at Person X because Person X is an obstacle to Desire Y. But it may be more complicated than that.

--June 18, 2007: Gerald Ford typically is cited as the last pro-choice Republican nominee, but the history is more complicated than that.

--June 9, 2007: According to this line of thinking, most GOP voters are still unaware of his positions on these issues, and when they find out, they'll go elsewhere. The reality is more complicated.

--August 25, 2008: But even here, the story may be more complicated than Georgian provocation and Russian reaction.

• Unemployment Has Crept Over Ten Percent, and I Think That’s a Good Thing. What? by Noam Scheiber
• Did Rembrandt Reveal a Murder in One of His Paintings? An Intriguing Whodunnit Film. PLUS: 'The Maid.' by Stanley Kauffman
• The UN Report on Gaza Is Biased, Shoddy, and Unrealistic. But Israel Must Deal Honestly With Its Own Failures. by Moshe Halbertal
• Don’t Blame Obama for the Bad Economic News. Blame Congress. by Jonathan Chait
• From the TNR Archives: The Strange Genius of Oprah Winfrey, by Lee Siegel
• Is David Brooks Punking Me? He’s Got to Be Punking Me. by Noam Scheiber
• Is It Even Possible to Control the Cost of Heath Care? by Jonathan Cohn
• Max Baucus Gives the Passage of a Climate Bill THIS MUCH Chance, by Bradford Plumer
• What Happens When Emotions Overrun the Death Penalty Debate? by Christopher Orr

As always, be sure to check out economic news on The Stash, environment and energy coverage on The Vine, the latest on health care at The Treatment, metro policy debate on The Avenue, and Marty Peretz's The Spine. Also be sure to take a look at TNR's new blogs by William Galston, Simon Johnson, Ed Kilgore, Damon Linker, and John McWhorter.

In case you haven't gotten your issue of Der Spiegel this month, the German mag has some very cool details on the intelligence work that led to the discovery--and eventual destruction by Israeli airstrike--of a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor being built with North Korean help:

In the spring of 2004, the American National Security Agency (NSA) detected a suspiciously high number of telephone calls between Syria and North Korea, with a noticeably busy line of communication between the North Korean capital Pyongyang and a place in the northern Syrian desert called Al Kibar. The NSA dossier was sent to the Israeli military's "8200" unit, which is responsible for radio reconnaissance and has its antennas set up in the hills near Tel Aviv. Al-Kibar was "flagged," as they say in intelligence jargon.

In late 2006, Israeli military intelligence decided to ask the British for their opinion. But almost at the same time as the delegation from Tel Aviv was arriving in London, a senior Syrian government official checked into a hotel in the exclusive London neighborhood of Kensington. He was under Mossad surveillance and turned out to be incredibly careless, leaving his computer in his hotel room when he went out. Israeli agents took the opportunity to install a so-called "Trojan horse" program, which can be used to secretly steal data, onto the Syrian's laptop.

The hard drive contained construction plans, letters and hundreds of photos. The photos, which were particularly revealing, showed the Al Kibar complex at various stages in its development.... One of the photos showed an Asian in blue tracksuit trousers, standing next to an Arab. The Mossad quickly identified the two men as Chon Chibu and Ibrahim Othman. Chon is one of the leading members of the North Korean nuclear program, and experts believe that he is the chief engineer behind the Yongbyon plutonium reactor. Othman is the director of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission.

A year later, the nascent plant was a pile of smoking rubble. This episode has always struck me as curiously under-discussed in foreign policy circles.

--Jill Lepore on murders and American history

--Mark Bowden on the line between internet dirty-talk and internet sexual predation

--Jenny Diski on Roman Polanski and rape

--If all this is too grim, check out James Poniewozik's short essay on the media's centrist bias

--And, finally, one Yankee fan who is not very happy

At Doublethink, Sonny Bunch cites the horrifying murders committed by Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky in Cheshire, CT in 2007, and concludes:

As far as I am concerned, those two have made their lives forfeit. I want the state to take vengeance upon them for the evil that they have done. If they were to be drawn and quartered and their remains were scattered to the four corners of the continental United States, you wouldn’t hear peep out of me.

Every time I start to waver on my support for the death penalty ... I see a story like this and it snaps me right back into line.

Left unexamined is the irony that Bunch borrowed his description of the murders in question from a New Yorker article with a clear anti-death-penalty slant--indeed, one that suggests that America's high murder rate and high execution rate are opposite sides of the same coin. ("If the history of murder contains a lesson, [Cesare] Beccaria believed, it was this: 'The countries and times most notorious for severity of punishment have always been those in which the bloodiest and most inhumane of deeds were committed.'")

Bunch does suggest several reasonable caveats about limiting the death penalty to crimes that are the most egregious and where guilt is the most certain, though I fear they are politically impractical: This is one case where the slope appears to be slippery.

But what struck me most is the way Bunch uses his moral intuition that Hayes and Komisarjevsky deserve death as a basis for policymaking (i.e., the death penalty), and then immediately cuts the legs out from under his own argument by suggesting that same moral intuition would be unperturbed if the (alleged) murderers were drawn and quartered--a law enforcement policy I think it's safe to assume he does not support.

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks "V" speaks to the worldview of the Tea Party fruitcakes. Apparently the fruitcakes agree (see the accompanying photo, sent by a reader.)

A little while ago, I spent some time thinking about that question and came up with a tentative answer: women's soccer needs more jerks playing it. I'd say the fact that ESPN Sports Center featured these highlights from the semifinals of a mid-major conference college tournament (i.e., not exactly the World Cup) helps my argument.

Earlier this week, the entertainment industry blog Deadline Hollywood reported that Oprah Winfrey will be moving her talk-show to her own cable network when her contract with CBS expires in 2011. Her production company responded that she has not yet made a final decision. No matter what Oprah decides to do, the rumors and speculation can only help her popularity, and as Lee Siegel wrote in a TNR cover story in 2006, the true genius of Oprah is that she blurs the line between her private life and entertainment life so well:

“In TV terms, Oprah's multiplication of herself into simultaneous actual, fictional, and didactic selves was on the order of Picasso inventing cubism … If Oprah is in a fake romance, and if she is gay, neither reality would contradict her public advocacy of courage, fortitude, and growth through suffering. Rather, her seemingly calculated intimations of a hidden second life only strengthen her hopeful message of ceaseless personal possibilities.”

If you haven't yet, it’s worth reading this definitive piece on the Oprah phenomenon.

Ben Smith notes that national security advisor Jim Jones, speaking at the J Street conference last week, called the Middle East conflict "the epicenter" of U.S. foreign policy problems around the world.

It's worth noting that one of Obama's senior advisors on Jones' NSC, Iran point man Dennis Ross, completely disagrees with the notion of "linkage." Ross thinks it's more important to deal with Iran first. Which may be an illustration of why Obama's foreign policy in the region feels a little muddled.

Paul Krugman's column today is about how the stimulus was too small. I agree entirely. What I find puzzling is his apparent belief that the Obama administration is the primary culprit for this shortcoming. Here's Krugman:

But while health care won’t be Mr. Obama’s Waterloo, economic policy is starting to look like his Anzio. ...

President Obama came into office with a strong mandate and proclaimed the need to take bold action on the economy. His actual actions, however, were cautious rather than bold. ...

The president, then, having failed to exploit his early opportunities, is pinned down in his too-small beachhead.

If the Democrats lose badly in the midterms, the talking heads will say that Mr. Obama tried to do too much, this is a center-right nation, and so on. But the truth is that Mr. Obama put his agenda at risk by doing too little.

Emphasis mine. Krugman does make a nod toward the reality that getting a larger stimulus through the Senate might have been tough:

Administration officials would presumably argue that they were constrained by political realities, that a bolder policy couldn’t have passed Congress. But they never tested that assumption, and they also never gave any public indication that they were doing less than they wanted. The official line was that policy was just right, making it hard to explain now why more is needed.

Krugman's case that the administration didn't test the upper limits of what Congress would enact isn't exactly true--the Senate took his stimulus plan and whittled it down. It's possible that if Obama had submitted an even larger proposal to Congress, he would have gotten a larger plan in the end. On the other hand, it's also possible his plan would have collapsed entirely, or taken much longer to be enacted.

And yes, there's a case that the administration should have complained after the fact that the final product was too small. But there's also a counter-case, that the general atmosphere of liberal dissatisfaction with the stimulus, against the backdrop of conservative hysteria, made the whole enterprise more unpopular than necessary. If only there was more cheerleading, this argument goes, the stimulus would have been more popular, and the atmosphere for adding to it more receptive.

I don't have extremely strong opinions either way about the political calculus. Senate wrangling is tricky. What I find odd is that Krugman takes as a given that the White House blundered--this is the premise for most of his commentary on the stimulus. Meanwhile, the incontrovertible fact is that you can't spend one more dollar than Ben Nelson wants to spend, and there's no evidence that Nelson even understands the economic theory underpinning fiscal stimulus, let alone has any willingness to expend political capital on its behalf.

So everything that Krugman writes about what Obama should have done really meanss "what Obama should have done to persuade Ben Nelson to act differently." And Obama does have some influence over Nelson, but ultimately Nelson makes his own decisions.

Krugman's column employs a pretty good World War II analogy. Let me use another: imagine a scathing column about the 1938 Munich accord that devotes most of its energy to castigating Czechoslovakian President Edvard Benes for his ineffectual efforts to gain the support of Britain and France, rather than putting Britain and France at the center of the story.