This story by Ellen Barry for The New York Times is just fantastic. It’s about a Liberian-born woman raising her family in a rough neighborhood on Staten Island who decided that the best thing for her teenaged son would be to get off the streets by . . . being sent to live in war-torn West Africa.

I don’t have much to say in an analytical vein, but I’ll note that some of the issues raised seem similar to the questions Mary Waters writes about in Black Identities.

Googling for something else, I found this March 2005 Jeffrey Goldberg article that got me annoyed at Dick Holbrooke all over again:

At sixty-two, Biden has a cheerful vanity and an exuberant restlessness that make him seem far younger. Since the election, he has become a leader of a modest-sized faction—“the national-security Democrats,” in the words of Richard Holbrooke, an ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton—that includes the most hawkish members in the Democratic Party.

Because, obviously, those Democrats who thought it would be a bad idea to launch a years-long bloody, expensive, and futile military operation in Iraq don’t care about national security. Those who were totally wrong may have gotten tons of people killed, but at least they’re not dirty fucking hippies. That seems to be the general idea. Anyways this kind of thing is why I think we can do better than President Hillary Clinton:

“She is probably more assertive and willing to use force than her husband,” says Richard Holbrooke, the former envoy for Bill Clinton. “Hillary Clinton is a classic national-security Democrat. She is better at framing national-security issues for the current era than her husband was at a common point in his career.”

I mean, if those were just the words of some guy you could discount them, but he’s one of her top people.