In the shadow of the intelligence failure that culminated with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab lighting an explosive aboard a Detroit-bound flight, the titular head of the U.S. intelligence community was busy fighting another war. For months, in fact, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence (DNI), had been waging an epic bureaucratic offensive. His job had been created in the wake of September 11 to foster cooperation and accountability among the 16 agencies sifting through the mounds of inbound data about threats to U.S. interests.

From the hills outside Mandalay, Burma’s second city, the vista resembles a postcard of Asian serenity. Monks climb stone steps to a hillside shrine, where local men and women leave offerings of flowers and fruit. But the placid scene conceals one of the most repressive states in the world--a state that the Obama administration has decided may be more worthy of American friendship than American threats.

For more than four decades, Burma’s junta has persecuted its population. In conflict-torn eastern Burma, the army reportedly employs state-sanctioned rape of women and girls, conscription of local children, and the burning of villages. Nearly one million Burmese have fled to neighboring countries, while those who stay are sometimes press-ganged into forced labor, during which, numerous reports reveal, they may be beaten or even killed. Dissent, of course, is virtually unthinkable. According to the documentary film Burma VJ, which chronicles the monk-led 2007 Saffron Revolution, troops raided monasteries after the protests, beating monks and tossing their dead bodies into creeks. The junta, meanwhile, has run the economy into the ground, while the regime’s senior leaders live in opulence.

After ten months of waiting, USAID finally has a new chief: Rajiv Shah, currently the agriculture department’s top scientist. Directing the country’s principal agency for administering foreign aid is a heady position for someone who is all of 36. And it’s going to be a difficult one. Shah is stepping into the middle of a struggle that has been quietly simmering for years in Washington.

If Creigh Deeds loses today—and few candidates have hoisted themselves out of the kind of hole he’s dug—let it be known that the Commonwealth of Virginia missed out on having a very nice man in Richmond.

“When you elect a governor, you elect not only their positions, but you elect their character, their heart,” declared Senator Mark Warner, to a gamely cheering crowd of about 150 in Alexandria’s Market Square last night. “This is a good man, a man who has served Virginia and Virginians with distinction.”

“I think there’s something to be said for having a little emotion,” said the state’s other senator, Jim Webb, on Deeds’ well-known sensitivity.

The current governor Tim Kaine then explained that each of his three children in the page program at the Virginia state senate had picked Deeds as his or her favorite senator at the end of the session. “Somebody who is in a high and exalted position, who will take the time to make an impression upon a young person, that’s my kind of person,” Kaine effused. “I know his heart, I know his character, and character counts at the end of the day.”

As the state’s Democratic firmament praised Deeds, the candidate stood off to the side of the stage, smiling, not talking to anyone. When Kaine called him up onstage, Deeds approached people in at the border of the crowd and started hugging and handshaking. Those he made contact with seemed more surprised than anything else to find themselves being embraced by the gangly Deeds; he comes off more like a man pretending to be a candidate than the real thing. 

Whenever I read the words, "You're not from around here, are you?" I automatically imagine them being said with a serious Southern--or at least rural--twang. This election year in Virginia, though, I think that expression has a decidedly suburban lilt--as it's the overwhelming sentiment Creigh Deeds has encountered as he's trawled for votes in Northern Virginia.

Ever since 2001, when their successful gubernatorial candidate Mark Warner commissioned a bluegrass campaign song and sponsored a NASCAR team as part of his "rural strategy," Virginia Democrats have been preoccupied with winning over rural voters, especially in Southwest Virginia. In Deeds, it seemed they'd found the perfect candidate for doing so. A state senator from sparsely populated Bath County near the West Virginia border, Deeds's support of gun rights--not to mention his firsthand experience castrating large farm animals--make him very much at home in Virginia's rural areas. But those traits have made him an alien in Northern Virginia. And despite the best efforts of rural-vote-gurus like Mudcat Saunders to argue otherwise, Virginia Democrats' path to victory still runs through the D.C. suburbs.

Maybe the most remarkable part of the story about Jim Webb's trip to Burma--the first member of Congress to visit there in over a decade--is that the American Embassy has no idea yet if he's actually met with the Burmese Prime Minister since, as the AP story puts it, "communications between Yangon and Naypyitaw were unreliable." More on the extreme strangeness of Naypitaw--which seems to be a cross between Brasilia and Pyongyang--can be read

Is there a more dangerous assignment for a rising party star to accept than a State of the Union rebuttal? Seriously, it’s hemlock.

In a spacious Hilton ballroom yesterday, surrounded by middle-aged construction workers with their arms folded and collars unbuttoned, Joe Biden is barking into his microphone. "With or without your endorsement," he declares, "I'm going to be the best friend labor has ever had in the White House!" It's an outlandish claim--FDR? Harry Truman?--but not out of place.