How presidents sleep, and other matters

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police were spotted together at a pub in on Thursday, just a few months after their meeting with President Obama and Vice President Biden at the White House, WBZ-TV in Boston is reporting.  According to the station, the two apparently sat in a booth together in the Cambridge pub for about an hour and chatted — though it was unclear if they actually had any beer. Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden apparently did not attend. ... Caucus

The House Intelligence Committee is systematically surveying the CIA’s compliance record with its briefing obligations over the last eight years. The committee’s work isn’t yet finished, but it’s already come up with five reasonably clear-cut cases in which the CIA either failed to brief or lied to Congressional oversight. ... Scott Horton

As any reproductive rights advocate will tell you, the result is far from ideal. Massachusetts, New York, California and fourteen other states subsidize abortion procedures for women who can't afford to pay for them. Mississippi, Kentucky, Oklahoma and thirty other states do not. "Choice" in America thus varies dramatically depending on where a woman lives and how wealthy she happens to be. The system is fair only in that it accurately reflects what's missing: a broad social consensus that reproductive rights should be available to all. ... Eyal Press

I've largely stopped watching non-Shep Fox because it makes me ill. When I watch it by accident, it somehow always manages to shock. I caught a Hannity interview with Malkin last night flipping through and simply couldn't believe that this level of pure propaganda, without even a pretense at balance or debate, was now a prime-time feature. (MSNBC., of course, is pretty awful too - with Olbermann and Shultz being obvious knock-offs of Fox. Maddow is better but oozes toxic levels of smug. It wasn't so bad when Bush was in power - opposition always makes anger less smug - but now it's suffocating.) ...Andrew Sullivan

Obviously, 3.5 percent growth is a lot better than shrinkage. But it’s not enough — not remotely enough — to make any real headway against the unemployment problem. ... Paul Krugman

How well do Presidents sleep? Bush got up early, but he went to bed early, too. Clinton made late-night phone calls—in retrospect, he might have got in less trouble wandering the streets of Washington. Calvin Coolidge seems to have had trouble waking up: he had a “proclivity to sleep,” especially when he was sad, which was often, even though his Presidency coincided with what proved to be a phantom boom, with other people rouging their knees and drinking bathtub gin. Obama’s trip to Dover lacked the spontaneity that made Nixon’s walk so strange and compelling and also a little heartrending. (One is allowed to have one’s heart rended by Nixon, as long as it doesn’t become a habit.) Obama was surrounded by the dead, and Nixon by the living—but although he famously spoke to the students at the Lincoln Memorial about football, they also talked about dying, and what he and they would die for. A few hours later, the students joined a hundred thousand others in a march about Vietnam in which they shouted that he was a murderer. Obama is not there yet. What both Obama and Nixon had in common was that a war kept them awake. ...Amy Davidson