The Rest Of The Week In Review

It's a little late, but that's what happens when you play hooky from blog for a day. So here's some minor stories that might be of interest.

• Two great pieces by Rick Perlstein this week, reacting to views of his book and the tremendous change between the time of Nixonland and the present day, with an African-American atop a major party ticket. You owe it to yourself to read On The Presence Of The Past and The Meaning Of Box 722.

• Considering how many Democrats have been elected recently as populists who are against unregulated trade, it's not surprising that they've banded together to promote an outside review that would put a moratorium on new trade deals unless they include labor and environmental standards. For the first time, labor and populist Democrats are "playing offense" on trade.

• You probably know nothing about this, but there's a brewing crisis in Turkey that may plunge the country into chaos. See, most broadcast and print outlets have no international bureaus, so things like this slip through the cracks.

• The "quake lake" crisis in China is a race against the clock, but also kind of a marvel of human engineering in the face of our ever-changing natural world. They're now attempting a controlled release of 300 million cubic yards of water. It's really fascinating, but of course, scary as well.

• If he wants to truly support the troops, President Bush must sign the new GI Bill and fulfill the promises we made to our veterans. Hear from this father of a Medal of Honor winner and you won't look at the issue the same way again.

• "Poblano" is one of the bloggers who came on the scene during the primary season, armed with statistics that allowed him to predict results in the Democratic race better than most polls. He started Five Thirty Eight.com and finally revealed himself as a 30 year-old from Illinois who also developed a statistical model for predicting baseball stats. Progress Illinois has a profile.

• Last week was the one-year anniversary of the death of Steve Gilliard, a great blogger and mentor to all of us who came online after him. This TAPPED piece by K.A. Geier was the most interesting tribute, I thought, because it used his health struggles to illustrate the larger inequality problem in our nation's hospitals in the absence of effective advocates on the patient's behalf. It's a great way to pay tribute to Gilly's legacy, by fighting injustice.

• Speaking of the history of blog, James Joyner has a brief on blogs then and now. It pretty much tracks with my experience, and a good primer if you're new to the blogosphere and want to know what it was like way back when.

• And finally, I don't know what you're talking about, but K-Mart's abstinence pants have nothing to do with abstinence. The graphic on them reading "True Love Waits" is purely unintentional.