• Steven Stark at RCP argues that Obama and Edwards are their own worst enemies in the debate format. I don’t disagree.
• Former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta has some advice for the Bush Administration on how to avoid lame-duckery. I’d bet good money Podesta is wasting his time here.
• Don Rumsfeld actually resigned the day before the election. How about that.
• The Democrats really should make a point of passing the South Korea – US free trade pact. They won’t, but they should.
• Especially not if this is any indication. Please, Democrats, please stop doing this. I want to vote for you. I really do.

• Here is a pretty good, reasonable, level-headed analysis of the entire Scott Beauchamp controversy over at Slate.
• Speaking of level-headed analysis, here is Mark Kleiman on No Child Left Behind.
• Ruben Navarrette of the San Diego Union-Tribune defends Obama’s much-maligned foreign policy prescriptions. TPM’s Reed Hundt has more.
• Paul Sonne argues for Foreign Policy that the IOC should do a better job of selecting Olympic sites.
• Things continue to heat up between Russia and Georgia.

• Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff has an interesting piece on healthcare in the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” feature.
• The Tenth Circuit held that Oklahoma may not treat out of state adoptions by gay couples differently than it treats such adoptions by straight couples.
• Senior Senator of my home state Arlen Spector, has a pretty level-headed editorial about immigration in today’s WP. Unfortunately, he is probably not doing himself any favors in his next contest with this stance.
• A challenge to the NSA wiretap program may have a chance, since the Department of the Treasury accidentally gave the defendant’s lawyers a copy of the NSA Call Log. Oops.
• Stephen Bainbridge, guest-blogging for Andrew Sullivan, demonstrates that the similarities between the president and his father are greater than they would seem, and not in a particularly flattering sense.
• Matthew Yglesias conveys some foreign policy wisdom Obama dropped re: China at YearlyKos.

• Marty Lederman makes a pretty convincing case that AG AG’s semantics games about the Terrorist Surveillance Program lack any substance.
• Hell freezes over: Rudy writes an editorial I more or less agree with. Carbon sequestration is still a little pie-in-the-sky, IMHO, but that’s something of a quibble.
• Even some of the “loyal Bushies” are uncomfortable with the executive order interpreting the Geneva Conventions. Marty Lederman follows up here.
• More on postwar Iraq from Matthew Yglesias. This is very well-written.
• Arlen Spector apparently feels betrayed by Chief Justice Roberts’s decisions this term. So much so that he has pledged to probe said decisions.
• Brad DeLong posts an interesting story about Herbert Hoover in China.

Washington Monthly has a good piece in the current issue about China’s unwillingness to crack down on environmental dissidents. This is a good thing, since, as the article points out,

Of the world’s twenty most polluted cities, sixteen are in China. Ninety percent of the country’s cities have contaminated groundwater. The World Bank predicts that in the next fifteen years, China’s shortage of clean water will create 30 million “environmental refugees.”

Now, whether the government will continue to look the other way if these movements start stirring the pot a little more is not entirely clear.