What's up?

Happy Sunday, capstoners:

Good news is we're past the halfway mark of January and we've only been in school for a week. Bad news, as it were, is we're a long way from Spring, 2010. Bad news on a macro scale is Haiti's post-earthquake devastation, but even that has a good-news element: it's restored a sense of proportion or perspective to the things Americans find themselves griping about regularly, and its afforded us the chance to do something for those truly in dire straits even if it's only donating to the relief efforts. In a country with a median income of less than 2 dollars a day, any size gift is worthwhile, and as shown in Nicholas Kristof's column in today's NYT, it will provide health benefits for the giver as well. Cell phone contributions of ten bucks can be made by texting the word "HAITI" to 90999 for the Red Cross or 20222 for Bill Clinton's global initiave foundation's relief efforts. Neither takes a lot off the top for administrative costs, as does Citibank if you use a VISA card from there, which is itself a commentary of the self-proclaimed masters of the universe residing on Wall St. There's also, at a micro-level, the loss of Nico Kadimoke, particularly for best freind Ashley Blosch in our class, to lupus, one of -those ill-understood auto-immune disorders that continues to remind us how little we know about the things that cut down the best of our young people well in advance of the time that we can understand. Obamadogs is a place to honor what is good as well as give due to the bad news parts of our news and politics these days. The two sides of life are inextricably interwoven, as the Haiti story shows. True. there's the Limbaugh line, seconded by Iowa's Steve King, who called for the immediate deportation of undocumented Haitians so they could go back and clean up the mess of the earthquake in their home of origin; but there's also the generosity that natural disasters of this magnitude bring out in the response of Americans and others who recoil at the undeserved devastation and squalor that inexplicably visits the places on the globe least prepared to deal with it. Jeremy Rifvin, for example, has a post on Hugginton Post elaborating what the response to the earthquake reveals about Human Nature -- that is the heart of a book he's just published called the Empathic Civilization --which is an assault on those who argue blindly that we are all self-seeking rational actors who should follow their instincts to look out for No. 1 (a view that is not only embraced by Rush Limbaugh but the Rational Actor school of economics and political science as well.)

In any event, this is a big week in the life of this democracy. Tuesday's verdict on the successor to Ted Kennedy will have repercussions well beyond Massachusetts, and that would be my nominee for the second most important story of the week following Haiti.

For number three, the chatting classes have seem to think the book Game Change is the third story. I have a very different view and have posted my own comment for what it's worth on the online verion of Frank Rich's column today in the NYT. I'd like to hear what others in the class would nominate as top stories before we get a change to share assessments tomorrow eve along with the first third of Ricci.

Thoughts?