The competition for the next phase of the campaign started as soon as the results were in. Clinton, speaking in Youngstown, Ohio, launched a string of attacks against Obama that didn't seem to stir the audience. It is often the custom for the winner to wait for the loser to to finish speaking, but watching Clinton's attacks on the television, the Obama camp sent their man out a little early. The cable channels switched to his speech and dropped Clinton, as Obama's people knew they would. "I guess cable just likes winners," said a top Obama aide coyly.

When your policy involves relying exclusively on one increasingly unpopular leader, and that leader is demolished in an election, it tends to open "a host of new challenges." All the more so since by aligning ourselves so closely with Musharraf, we did real damage to our own reputation in Pakistan.

One interesting note: as far as I can tell, the Pakistani religious parties seem to have done very, very badly. I hope this means that we won't hear any more hyperventilating about the possibility that jihadis could sweep to power in Pakistan at any minute if we don't keep supporting dictators. The religious parties have never been very popular in Pakistan. They seem to be even less popular now.

The natural tendency of Government is toward abuse of power. Men entrusted with power, even those aware of its dangers, tend, particularly when pressured, to slight liberty. Our constitutional system guards against this tendency. It establishes many different checks upon power. It is those wise restraints which 'keep men free. In the field of intelligence those restraints have too often been ignored.

Here, there is no sovereign who stands above the law. Each of us, from presidents to the most disadvantaged citizen, must obey the law. As intelligence operations developed, however, rationalizations were fashioned to immunize them from the restraints of the Bill of Rights and the specific prohibitions of the criminal code. The experience of our investigation leads us to conclude that such rationalizations are a dangerous delusion.

The ending punctuation point of Fidel Castro's tenure in office marks the conclusion of the longest serving head of state in power today (except monarchs).

The US embargo against Cuba -- which all nations but three vote against each year in the United Nations -- has utterly failed to generate any positive impact on the Cuban government or people.

Of all the low cost opportunities to demonstrate a new and different US style of engagement with the world, Cuba is at the top of the list. Opening family travel -- and frankly all travel -- between Cuba and the US, and ending the economic embargo will provide new encounters, new impressions, and the kind of people-to-people diplomacy that George W. Bush, John Bolton, Richard Cheney, and Jesse Helms run scared of.

In many states the laws regulating commitment to a psychiatric hospital requires that the individual is at a strong, fairly imminent risk of harming himself or others or to use a more popular phrase, is "a clear and present danger" to one's self or others. Perhaps to be even more direct, there has to be a very high suspicion that not placing a person in the hospital would result in suicidal or homicidal actions in the very near future. Consistent with our core beliefs as Americans, the law protects the rights of the individual, as it should be.

In the process of preserving one's basic rights, how far can we intervene to help preserve his or her very life?