Alan Wolfe is a TNR contributing editor and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

Just before the House of Representatives voted on the Stupak Amendment, designed to stop any public funding of insurance plans that cover abortion, the U. S. Conference on Catholic Bishops (USCCB) weighed in with its endorsement. According to The Hill, their action gave the amendment a “boost,” helping its eventual passage.

To the frustration of many a cabinet secretary, the Obama administration is a little behind on its appointments. At this point—with only five weeks to go before the Senate breaks for recess—a little over half of the 514 positions that need filling have been filled. Some jobs are really important: The nominee for the Office of Legal Counsel has been held up for months. Obama’s choice for a USAID director came down just today. U.S. attorney nominations have slowed to a crawl.

Other jobs? Not as important.

Take, for example, the eight-person Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the five media entities—Voice of America foremost among them—tasked with broadcasting American culture and journalism around the globe. In theory, the board is supposed to serve as a “firewall” between the broadcasters’ mission of journalistic objectivity and the political whims of legislators, who would often rather see taxpayer dollars go towards burnishing America’s image abroad. By statute, the president and minority party nominate four governors each to keep a bipartisan mix. But right now, the BBG is only half full. The four currently serving members were all appointed in 2002, and have overstayed their terms by three years—if anyone left, the board would no longer have a quorum to conduct business. Journalistic wise man Walter Isaacson is rumored to be the administration’s choice for the vacant post of chairman, and it’s hard to imagine him being held up for any substantive reason. It’s also hard to imagine the administration nominating him between now and when Congress leaves town in December.

The sad saga of the BBG began almost as soon as it was created in its current form, when the U.S. Information Administration was dissolved in 1999. As this magazine documented in 2005, Bush partisan Kenneth Tomlinson turned the board into an ideological battleground—purging people whom he saw as insufficiently conservative—that hamstrung the broadcasters’ operations and drove morale into the toilet. After Tomlinson was ousted, the well-respected editor James Glassman restored the board to some order, before he was tapped as Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy in the dying days of the Bush administration.

It was Halloween 2001, and Kennesaw State freshman Nick Ayers was sitting anxiously in an Atlanta airplane hangar. A friend had recommended him for a campaign position with Republican state senator Sonny Perdue, who was mounting a long-shot gubernatorial run against Democratic incumbent Roy Barnes. The portly, middle-aged politician disembarked his Bellanca Super Viking and, as Ayers recounts the story, walked down the stairs holding a lid-less cup of coffee. Eager to make a good first impression, the nervous blonde teenager extended his hand for a firm shake.

The self-declared mission of J Street, the dovish "pro-Israel, pro-Peace" lobby that just concluded its first national conference this week, includes redefining the meaning of the term "pro-Israel." For too long, the organization's founders and supporters argue, right-wing elements in the Jewish community have abused the term to hijack the debate and tarnish mainstream, sensible advocates of a two-state solution.

Remember the period between the 2008 Republican Convention, but before the Katie Couric interview, when Sarah Palin was widely seen as a new politico dynamo who had breathed life into the McCain campaign? I wrote a column pointing out the the reaction to Palin eerily recalled the early reaction to Dan Quayle in 1988:

Francisco Toro and Juan Nagel write the Venezuelan news blog Caracas Chronicles. A version of this post originally appeared there.

The Honduran tragicomedy that has consumed the hemisphere's diplomats for months is at an end (read the details here). Barring the unforeseeable, which is always an iffy thing to do in Honduras, the coupster is out, the mercurial elected president is back in (pending a face-saving vote by Congress and the Supreme Court), and an election to replace him will be held on November 29, as planned.

In light of all this, who was the winner in the Honduran crisis?

Time has excerpts from David Plouffe's new book. The section about the whirlwind day he and Axelrod spent interviewing the three veep finalists--Biden, Bayh, and Kaine--is the most interesting. He has some gentle fun at Biden's expense:

This is another chapter in the Madoff saga. As with most of my information on Wall Street chicanery and respectable thieving, this comes from my old friend Edward Jay Epstein, who knows more about the slippery things around us than anyone in my circle. By far. 

By Edward Jay Epstein

Politico owner Robert Allbritton is planning to launch a local Washington D.C news website, TNR has learned. In his most direct challenge to The Washington Post since launching Politico, Allbritton is putting former Washingtonpost.com editor Jim Brady in charge of the new Metro site, sources said. Details are still emerging, but this is what I've learned so far: The new site will feature a mix of original reporting, aggregation, and GPS-map features. The site will cover D.C and the suburbs, and echo Politico's aggressive, scoop-oriented focus.

Up from History:
The Life of Booker T. Washington

By Robert J. Norrell

(Harvard University Press, 508 pp., $35)

I.

Once the most famous and influential African American in the United States (and probably the world), Booker T. Washington has earned at best mixed reviews in the decades since his death in 1915. Black intellectuals and political activists, from W. E. B. Du Bois to the present day, have generally seen Washington as a conservative racial accommodationist, yielding to the repressive power of Jim Crow and urging American blacks to abandon their political struggles for equality and instead to set their sights on a future of manual labor and petty property ownership.

This Wall Street Journal piece says New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon may have been one of them:

The filing, by the court-appointed trustee handling claims for Madoff victims, is the first documentation of how deeply invested Mets principal owner Fred Wilpon was with Mr. Madoff, a longtime friend.

When the world last left Wesley Clark in early 2004, he was a streaking meteor of a presidential candidate. Still fresh from leading NATO in the Kosovo war, he arrived as a savior for the left, who saw a bulletproof patriot that the rest of America could believe in; hero of the netroots, beloved by Michael Moore and Madonna; hope of the Clintonites, delighted by such a clean ideological slate.

President Obama and his allies in Congress are doing everything they can to rally 60 senators behind health care reform. But, for one red-state senator, even 60 "yes" votes won't do. It has to be 65. "I think anything less than that would challenge its legitimacy," he said in late September. It's a ludicrously high standard for passage--the sort you'd expect from a Republican opponent. But this comment came from Democrat Ben Nelson.

We can now add Apple to the list of companies bidding the Chamber of Commerce farewell over the group's obstruction on climate policy. This is the Chamber's highest-profile defection to date, and one that's guaranteed to keep the story percolating in the news a bit longer.

On September 12, the United States government revoked the visas of de facto Honduran President Roberto Micheletti and 14 of the country’s Supreme Court justices. Days earlier, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a U.S.-government body, voted to cut off $11 million in aid to the cash-strapped Central American country. The move came two months after the Honduran military, on the orders of its Congress, Supreme Court, and attorney general, removed Micheletti’s predecessor Manuel Zelaya from office following his repeated attempts to undermine the country’s constitutional provision limiting presidents to a single term. Explaining its decision to not recognize Honduras’s interim government, which it has repeatedly declared came to power via a "coup d’état," the Obama administration says that it is sending a "very strong message" to "anyone, be they civilian or military, who are thinking of deposing or removing from--illegally removing from office a duly elected president in any country."

Mark Lippert

Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery

By Steve Nicholls

(University of Chicago Press, 524 pp., $30)

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Edited by Bill McKibben

(Library of America, 1,047 pp., $40)

Defending The Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, And The Legacy Of Madison Grant

By Jonathan Peter Spiro

(University of Vermont Press, 462 pp., $39.95)

A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir

By Donald Worster

(Oxford University Press, 535 pp., $34.99)

A Reenchanted World: The Quest for A New Kinship With Nature

By James William Gibson

(Metropolitan Books, 306 pp., $27)

Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet

By Edward Humes

(Ecco Books, 367 pp., $25.99)

I.

In contemporary public discourse, concern for "the environment" is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.

Want a hint about what the president will say tonight? Check out the guest list for the First Lady's box, which the White House just published. It's full of people who had trouble paying for their medical care--people who, though from different walks of life, all had to confront the same essential dilemmas. Whether or not Obama mentions them explicitly, it suggests the personal stakes Americans have in reform will be a major theme tonight--as it should be, but hasn't always in the last few months.

One other notable guest: Vietoria Kennedy, widow of Senator Ted.

Full list of guests follows:

To many observers, the Federal Reserve has never looked more heroic than it does right now. This past winter, America’s financial system faced the prospect of utter ruin. And, while the economy has suffered plenty in 2009, the worst did not come to pass. The banking system that lends to our employers, thereby allowing our economy to function, never did collapse. Now, many of the accolades for averting catastrophe are going to the Fed. President Obama himself ratified this analysis last week when he renominated Fed chairman Ben Bernanke for a second term.

I've got my quarrels with the president. They are mostly around foreign policy. And, no, not just about Israel.

As for the most important domestic matters—matters that affect our long-time strength in international and military affairs—I believe he has been both brave and wise. And his advisers on these economic issues are not, like George Bush's were, people whose reputations were made making big money. Yes, making money in and from the very ways that brought on the country's financial near-fatal collapse. The people who have suffered the most from this are the poor and the middle classes. Look at every index. Or just look around you at the empty stores and shop windows.

I went to a "prime outlet" mall the other day. The prices were down, roughly 70 percent in every outlet, but there were no customers, in some locales literally no customers. What was full was the food court, full with families of four or five trying to eke out a meal at less than $2 per. Very healthy. This is President Bush's legacy. 

'We'll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN," then-presidential candidate Barack Obama explained, "so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies."

When Zalmay Khalilzad was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 2002 war, it was a given that President Hamid Karzai would never make a decision without first consulting him. And Khalilzad also ruled over the American agencies in the country, including the military. More than ambassador, Afghan-born Khalilzad was America’s pro-consul in Kabul.

Obama sure looks to be in trouble, but we’ve seen this summertime hysteria before.

As the Dog Days of August descended upon us, there developed across the progressive chattering classes a deep sense of malaise bordering on depression, if not panic--much of it driven by fears about the leadership skills of Barack Obama. The polling numbers seemed to weaken every day, and Democratic unease was matched by growing glee on the airwaves of Fox and in Republican circles everywhere. 

As the Dog Days of August descended upon us, there developed across the progressive chattering classes a deep sense of malaise bordering on depression, if not panic--much of it driven by fears about the leadership skills of Barack Obama. The polling numbers seemed to weaken every day, and Democratic unease was matched by growing glee on the airwaves of Fox and in Republican circles everywhere. 

Within ten weeks, however, Obama was elected president and joy returned to the land.