For the past few years, progressives have been saying that one of the most important things Democrats needed to do was to get tough. Republicans had been kicking sand in their faces too long, and the time had come to hit back just as hard.

But now the candidate who should be as familiar as anyone with "the Chicago way" -- given that he's actually from Chicago -- is on the receiving end of some less than polite politics, and more than a few progressives don't like what they're seeing. Barack Obama and his advisors did a lot of careful planning for this campaign, but there's one thing it doesn't seem they prepared for: Their main opponent, Hillary Clinton, is running like a Republican. And it appears to be working.

Perhaps all of them saw how both Clinton and Obama killed each other in that CNN debate earlier this week and were afraid of turning off voters. Either way, tonight's debate was the tamest GOP affair in weeks. This, despite the fact that half of this field could be out of contention after next Tuesday.
Overall, the tame affair was good news for both Romney and McCain, the two frontrunners in Florida; both got to sound and look presidential. Romney, in fact, may have had his best debate performance in a long time because he wasn't attacked.

But Rambo is such a vexed, iconic figure that his return demands further explication. The troubled veteran (of a war so far in the past only the most senior officers in the current war remember it) became in the 1980s a byword for American callowness, belligerence and media-saturated self-delusion. To this day, foreigners -- charming people, or so we're told -- tirelessly condemn the "Rambo mentality" that drives the United States into new catastrophes while rewriting past debacles as inspiring victories.

Besides being an expensive state to run ads in, Florida has also taken on the status of "must-win" for the Republican field. Rudy Giuliani, who has looked like an also-ran (if that) for weeks now, has staked his entire nomination strategy on big states like Florida. And even though he has financial problems of his own, Giuliani is likely to use whatever remains of his war chest to soak Florida in advertisements to augment his near-residential status in the Sunshine State in a Hail-Mary effort to resurrect his campaign. Romney, as the article notes, is more than capable of simply funding his own ad buys to hopefully expand his delegate lead. Put all of this together and McCain's media-designated status as the Republican front-runner hinges heavily on stopping Romney in Florida.

The skepticism about government is currently directed against Bush, against conservatives and against Republicans. But this should give Democrats little comfort. As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg argues in the The American Prospect, “there is a perverse consequence brought about by the scale of conservatives’ failure.”

The problem, Greenberg says, “is that conservatives have failed in ways that have undermined Americans’ sense of collective capacity. Their failure has communicated not just their own incompetence, but also the message that government in general is incompetent.

“By failing so dramatically,” Greenberg continues, “conservatives have created a significant roadblock for Democrats: They have undermined people’s faith in the very instrument that we as progressives want to use to solve problems.”

The current spirit of today's privately funded human spaceflight efforts is akin to that of NASA's suborbital Mercury program in the 1960s. But there are stark differences, too. Spaceflight then was a matter of national prestige, with NASA and the U.S. reluctant to stretch risks of both pilots or spacecraft.

Commercial firms have a little more breathing room when it comes to risk.

"Space is risky, and somewhere, sometime over the next 10 years, we have to expect things are not always going to go well, and we have to ready for that," Whitesides said in a telephone interview.

Despite the increased risk, people will pay for a ride that goes fast and a ride that goes high, analysts say.

We need to make judgments about the future course of US-Cuban relations according to our parochial interests today -- and to realize that commerce, travel, the exchange of people, ideas, facebook commentary, and money are powerful empowering forces that cannot make the current situation worse than it is. In fact, there is every indication that ending the travel and economic embargo of the United States would open many new positive and constructive possibilities both within Cuba and between Cuba and the United States.

We have been lousy at trying to script a regime strategy for Cuba. We need to stop it -- and stop thinking about it and let Cubans determine their own course, which I think America can softly and positively influence if we stop trying to demean and humiliate that nation.

Border enforcement sounds nice, but we've shown no capacity to effectively shut down the Mexican-American border, and the sort of domestic militarization an actual fence would signal is, to say the least, unsettling. Corporate enforcement is important, but ID fraud foils much of it, and the taller our fence and the more stringent our corporate crackdowns, the more sophisticated Mexican document forgery will become, which brings problems all its own, particularly if you fear terrorism.

Trying to stop the flow of immigrants when they reach our border is, in sum, a fool's game. The question is whether you stop some immigrants before they leave home.