Berkeley Bubble

There’s a great article in the Sunday Times of India today about former Israeli soldier-turned-Harvard professor Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches the most popular course on the Harvard University campus, Psychology 1504, a course that offers students the “keys to happiness”:
He gets bigger crowds than the likes of Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt and Martin Luther King […]

Since I am still abroad in India, I was unable to partake of what was usually an annual ritual during my childhood-watching the NBA’s All-Star slam dunk contest. I rarely write about professional sports on this site as these stories seem a bit passe and trivial compared to such weighty issues as the Iraq […]

The Times reports today on how the Senate essentially stopped any effort to debate the future of US military policy vis-a-vis the Iraq war. But the article’s title, “Senate Rejects Renewed Effort to Debate Iraq,” is misleading. Given that a supermajority or 60 vote margin is required to renew debate, the article’s title should […]

Josh Green’s comments to my earlier post questioned why I was leaning slightly toward what he referred to as “milquetoast” John Edwards over Barack Obama. I write this post to clarify my position vis-a-vis Barack Obama’s candidacy and John Edwards. Edwards, IMHO, is the furthest thing from milquetoast–he is in many ways the […]

Representative John Murtha may indeed be the heart and soul of the Democratic majority when it comes to Iraq, and he’s now outlining a plan for reigning in the reckless, out of control policy that is our military (mis)adventure in Iraq:
Murtha, D-Pa., the chairman of the House panel that oversees the military’s spending, also said […]

It looks like the Democrats have finally developed a spine on the Iraq war issue–as this CNN report details, Democrats and a small group of Republicans will by all reports pass a resolution opposing the President’s decision to commit an additional 21,500 troops to the war-torn middle-east nation that is now in the midst of […]

Frontline has some great coverage of the Court’s recent decisions in the MP expulsion case and the Ninth Schedule decision. There are several articles by noted constitutional law experts, including A.G. Noorani and Raju Ramachandran, which I recommend to all those interested in judicial power and politics in India.

I know it’s an awful way to pitch this story, but the spate of new polls out suggest that Hillary has a fairly large lead over her leading challengers, Barack Obama and John Edwards. Here are some of the latest numbers from Polling Report.com.
Time has Hillary at 40, Obama at 21, Edwaards at 11, […]