Chris Orr has State of Play just right. If you watch the six-hour BBC miniseries—and you should—nothing about it screams out “they ought to try to cut this down to two hours, change the setting to the United States, and do it on the big screen.” There’s no cool action that benefits from putting it on the big screen, the culture of “fleet street” is nothing like the stodgy world of American newspapering, and the basic doesn’t make a huge amount of sense.

The virtue of the miniseries is that using its implausible plot as a McGuffin, you get a lot of interesting characters and really good performances and little nooks and crannies. Cutting it down to two hours involves removing a lot of that and doing more to highlight the central, and basically nonsensical, plot thread instead. For all that the project is ill-advised, the movie does an almost shockingly good job of execution. I was half-expecting a total disaster, and what they deliver is a totally competent thriller. The fact that Ben Affleck can’t act doesn’t even ruin things. I’m pretty firmly convinced that this is the best one could have done with the source material.

But it was a bad idea to even try. You should just get the miniseries on DVD. It’s not even worth regretting that this wasn’t remade by HBO as a miniseries. British politics is different from American politics and British journalism is different from American journalism; a good story about British politics and journalism isn’t as good when you turn it into a story about American politics and journalism.

Interesting McClatchy article by Barbara Barrett looks a bit at vulnerable incumbent Senator Richard Burr (R-NC). If I were an in-cycle Senator representing a state that Barack Obama carried in November and who was currently behind in trial heat polling of a hypothetical matchup against North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper I might be interested in trimming my sails a bit. Trying to put a moderate, conciliatory foot forward. But Burr hasn’t been doing that. And as McClatchy shows, he’s being rewarded for his efforts:

Political action committees representing a variety of business interests contributed nearly half of North Carolina U.S. Sen. Richard Burr’s $700,000 campaign take in the first three months of this year.

Burr’s Senate campaign received money from drug companies, health care companies, tobacco companies and energy companies. Telecommunications firms, financial services groups and defense manufacturers also sent money his way.

It’s more or less an “opponents of progressive reform” All-Star league table backing Burr, there.

I join various Western Hemisphere leaders in hoping for rapid progress toward a warming of US-Cuban relations. But beyond that, I hope that an effort to get more reasonable on this issue can help us move beyond the larger problem of the Cold War frame of our entire approach to Latin America. For the past fifty years or so our approach to the hemisphere has been really dominated by the idea that Latin America represents some kind of soft underbelly of the U.S. security system and thus our primary concern has to the be the rise of pro-Soviet regimes.

Thus, every political controversy in the region wound up being read as a contest between a pro-American faction and a pro-Soviet faction, with America’s primary interest being in helping the pro-American side.

People will probably debate forever whether or not that was a sound approach to the Cold War era. But I think it’s clearly the wrong approach for a world in which there is no Cold War and is no Soviet Union. Nevertheless, we really keep seeing things this way. We worry that Venezuela or Bolivia or El Salvador may join the “anti-American” bloc and the really important thing about Colombia is that its government is “pro-American.” This just doesn’t make much sense as a way to think about a whole region of the world.

At the end of the day, our interests in Latin America are pretty limited. And that means we can and should take a laissez faire attitude to who wins what there and who’s on whose “side.” The Chinese aren’t going to station nuclear missiles in Ecuador and threaten our cities, and the Russians aren’t going to threaten us with starvation by monopolizing the banana crop. There’s just nothing to it. If we would just be more willing to buy stuff that Latin America makes—to lift the barriers to importing sugar, beef, etc. from the region—then people in the region would be richer. They’d probably be somewhat better-disposed toward us, and since they’d be richer they’d buy more of the stuff we make. And everyone could just sort of calm down.

Via Faiz Shakir, a New York Times editorial argues that in light of his role as an author of several of the now-infamous “torture memos” congress should impeach Judge Jay Bybee:

These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him.

I completely agree. I’m coming around to the view that criminal punishment for bad actors may be less necessary than it seemed to me in the past, but there definitely needs to be some level of accountability. The idea of the author of one of these memos sitting on the federal bench makes a farce of the whole legal system. One doubts the votes would be there to remove Bybee in the Senate, but even if that’s the case I wouldn’t mind seeing Senators go on record on this issue.

Tom Ricks has a provocative column suggesting that we don’t need the service academies for military officers:

After covering the U.S. military for nearly two decades, I’ve concluded that graduates of the service academies don’t stand out compared to other officers. Yet producing them is more than twice as expensive as taking in graduates of civilian schools ($300,000 per West Point product vs. $130,000 for ROTC student). On top of the economic advantage, I’ve been told by some commanders that they prefer officers who come out of ROTC programs, because they tend to be better educated and less cynical about the military.

This is no knock on the academies’ graduates. They are crackerjack smart and dedicated to national service. They remind me of the best of the Ivy League, but too often they’re getting community-college educations. Although West Point’s history and social science departments provided much intellectual firepower in rethinking the U.S. approach to Iraq, most of West Point’s faculty lacks doctorates. Why not send young people to more rigorous institutions on full scholarships, and then, upon graduation, give them a military education at a short-term military school? Not only do ROTC graduates make fine officers — three of the last six chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reached the military that way — they also would be educated alongside future doctors, judges, teachers, executives, mayors and members of Congress. That would be good for both the military and the society it protects.

This is an issue I’ve never thought about before. But the point that it makes more sense for the military elites of tomorrow to be educated alongside the other kinds of elites of tomorrow seems right to me. The question becomes whether or not it’s genuinely the case that the service academy graduates don’t perform better as officers. Ricks’ anecdotal impression is powerful, but you wouldn’t actually want to abolish these schools without first undertaking a more serious look at performance. But that seems like an exercise that would be worth undertaking.