David Jarman points out that National Journal's "most conservative/most liberal" rankings make no sense:

If I had to guess as I write this, I'd say no. But the trendlines for the Fed chairman aren't moving in the right direction. Today's Wall Street Journal had a piece noting that the Fed chairman was headed toward a closer than expected vote in the Senate next week, with Dems Byron Dorgan and Jeff Merkley joining Bernie Sanders, the Senate's chief Bernanke-hater on the left, as opponents of a second term.

The Places In Between was my introduction to Afghanistan. Published in 2006, it was written by Rory Stewart, who at age 36 has already lived a life at once so adventurous and so quirky to defy easy narrative. He will soon take a safe (Tory) seat in the British parliament and rise quickly in the ranks, so quickly that he will still be thought young when he ascends to 10 Downing Street. Why not? (Rory is the second of my friends who is thought to be the future prime minister of an American ally, the first being Michael Ignatieff, Liberal Party aspirant in Ottawa.

Listening to Barack Obama explain his new strategy for Afghanistan tonight, you may have been struck by a sense of deja vu. Before a sea of somber West Point cadets, Obama invoked the grim memory of the September 11 attacks. He vowed that the days of “blank check" policymaking are over. He called al Qaeda a “cancer” that threatens the region and said he would not allow the group a safe haven there. He insisted that the U.S. would get tougher about corruption within the Karzai government and would extend a hand to low-level Taliban fighters willing to switch sides. He pledged to accelerate training of Afghan security forces and explained that doing so will allow our troops to return home.

If these points sounded familiar, it’s because Obama has made them all before. Go back and read the president’s March 27 speech explaining his first troop increase for Afghanistan; tonight’s speech often reads like a lightly rewritten version of that one, this time with 30,000 new troops substituted for 17,000, and new specifics about a date for beginning a U.S. withdrawal (namely, June of 2011).

This is not a complaint about self-plagiarism. It’s a compliment for Obama’s consistency and intellectual honesty. Back in March, Obama described his vision as “a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” That vision implied a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan—one which the Pentagon properly understood to require tens of thousands of more troops to implement. For a time this fall, White House officials fretted that General Stanley McChrystal’s troop request had given them a “sticker shock” which required a re-review of their strategy. But no one who understood the war, no one as smart as Obama, should have been surprised by McChrystal’s troop request.

Which is why it made sense for Obama’s speech tonight to reiterate his March vision. Sure, he could have cited declining political support for the war, and the fraud-tainted election of Hamid Karzai, and the still-precarious U.S. economy as reasons for changing his mind. It would have been hard to blame him. But Obama’s reiteration of his main talking points from March indicates that he believed what he was saying at the time and simply hasn’t seen anything dramatic enough in the past six months to change his mind.

No matter what you think of it, the kind of troop increase that President Obama announced tonight is going to be expensive. With an estimated $1 billion dollar price tag for each additional thousand troops deployed, the new strategy will drive costs well above the $130 billion originally budgeted by the administration for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal year 2010, likely requiring a supplemental spending bill to pass sometime early next year. You can expect the fight over that bill to get nasty.

A few things stand out upon a first reading of Obama's official Sudan policy announcement, TNR's copy of which is pasted below.

One is the stark language it uses regarding President Omar Al Bashir's indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The policy explicitly states that the United States will support "international efforts to bring those responsible for genocide and war crimes in Darfur to justice" and says that "accountability for genocide and atrocities is necessary for reconciliation and lasting peace." Until now, the United States has been extremely cagey about the ICC indictment, to the point where our Sudan envoy, Scott Gration, has made it sound like we're interested in deferring accountability indefinitely in order to improve relations with Khartoum. I've heard that Hillary Clinton's deputy, James Steinberg, was pushing to ensure that our policy didn't undermine the ICC ruling during the policy review process. The change is a good thing: International justice continues to be imperfect, but one should not be allowed to commit the worst crimes in the world and get away scot free.

The second interesting thing is the role that counter-terrorism plays in the policy. During the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Sudan hearings last summer, Gration and Senator Russ Feingold got into an fairly hostile dispute over the value of Sudanese cooperation on intelligence and counterterrorism issues--with Feingold arguing that the value of Khartoum's intel cooperation is vastly overblown, and that the issue had often been raised as a way for Sudan's government to avoid accountability for human rights violations. Since all of the data on such cooperation is secret, the two ended the exchange by vowing to discuss the matter further in a "secure" setting.

Today's Washington Post story about Barack Obama's growing troubles in Afghanistan pinpoints a potentially strange political dynamic. With liberals like Russ Feingold and some House progressives getting nervous about a major American commitment, Obama's will increasingly need to ally with conservatives--many of whom are bashing him on domestic policy--to sell the war effort.

For the past few weeks, we've heard a lot of debate about whether constitutional law can possibly survive close contact with the concept of empathy. But after spending the afternoon at the Sotomayor hearings, listening to senators left and right prattle about empathy and its relationship to justice, I have another question: Can the concept of empathy survive close contact with constitutional law?

There is something a bit troubling about the Democrats' current obsession with discipline, as though there were no higher aspiration than matching the ruthless efficiency of the House Republicans. A political party is not the same as a Third World liberation movement. It ought to accommodate moments of dissent and occasional deviations from the party line without the forms of retribution that have recently taken hold in the liberal blogosphere.

Once upon a time, the Democratic family consisted of two basic types of politicians--those who supported the Iraq war and those who were against it. As the war dragged on and the political climate changed, however, varied new species began to evolve, with all manner of ideas and opinions about the occupation. For months, these different Democratic factions lived more or less in harmony. But Pennsylvania Representative John Murtha's dramatic call last month for a fast U.S. exit from Iraq was like a climate-altering asteroid event.