--Noam Scheiber on Rahm Emanuel

--George Packer on Mitch Daniels' shameful Iraq history

--Conor Friedersdorf fillets Victor Davis Hanson

--Peter Beinart on the peril posed by Charles Rangel

Marty, dissenting from my praise for Peter Beinart's column on the degraded capability of al Qaeda, writes, "There is an instinct among many liberals and lefties to deny that the U.S. faces real peril from Al Qaeda."

Jon Chait did me a good deed in rebutting Matthew Yglesias' canard calling me a racist. But the blogoleft has been so deprived of facts that it is left to fight its battles by resorting to epithets, of which "racist" is the most common.

Peter Beinart has a terrific column on how and why al Qaeda has gotten so much less dangerous:

Richard’s post nicely highlighted a tension in last night’s speech that struck me as well, but I think that the pull toward realism was far, far greater than the pull in the other direction.

I haven't said much about Obama's China visit trip, in part because I'm no expert on Sino-American policy. But what Peter Beinart says here rings quite true for me:

On the homepage today, you will find Buzz Bissinger's terrific piece about Philadelphia sports fandom. Bissinger's article reminded me of this article, from our archives, by Peter Beinart. Beinart, a lifelong Celtics fan, weighs in on his team's relationship to Boston, and on race relations in the city more generally. Check it out.

In light of the latest Petraeus '12 speculation (this time from Peter Beinart), Andrew Sullivan wants to know why everyone's so sure the General is a member of the GOP, wondering whether people are just assuming "that military = Republican." As best I can tell, the assumption that Petraeus is a Republican stems from the fact that he is.

Barack Obama has become the fourth U.S. president to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The announcement has generated a lot of news and debate. TNR went into the archives to pull our past pieces on the Peace Prize and its recipients.

This week’s TNR cover story by James Mann deals with the vexing problem that China poses to the community of nations—and to the young Obama administration. Mann observes that, even as China has opened up economically, it has pursued an aggressive foreign policy. Writing in TNR thirteen years ago, Peter Beinart anticipated this situation.