PS – if you don't get Pam's posthumous papers, I want 'em.

LSH: Quit worrying and post neat stuff.

As for LSH, I don't know if its age or time, I just don't often have the desire to discuss politics at length anymore. Maybe its depression, who knows. I admit, I enjoyed this site more when it was full of updates of your wanderings. Your life was so different from mine it was interesting to read about.

Most of the people reading this blog know that my hat-of-Obama-love knows no limit, but even I wouldn't have given it to him at this point. But I think Shane is on the money when he points out that this shows how low regard for America and the office of the POTUS had fallen around the world based on the Dubya presidency.

In the “I wish I had written it” department, Josh Marshall @ talkingpointsmemo.com writes:

“This is an odd award. You'd expect it to come later in Obama's presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration.”