Russ Feingold won’t be running for president. Personally, I’m glad he’s not because this allows me to avoid making up my mind about what to say about a Feingold presidential campaign. On the one hand, I’m very substantively enthusiastic about Feingold and what he stands for, and thus would be disinclined to say bad things about his candidacy. On the other hand, it seems to me that he would have been a terrible messenger for a Feingold-style message and that nominating him as a presidential candidate would be a pretty poor tactical decision.

The old CW was that as China got richer, it would grow more democratic. The new CW seems to be that China will get richer, but not more democratic. The inside pages of your newspaper, however, keep being filled with stories like this one where “2,000 people mobbed and ransacked a hospital in southwestern China on Friday in a dispute over medical fees and shoddy health care practices, a human rights group said today.” To me, it always seems more likely that the whole place will collapse into chaos.