Discussing foreign policy at a tea party rally in Florida, Donald Trump leapfrogs the realists, neorealists, neoconservatives, isolationists, nation builders, and liberal idealists:He said he’d only be interested in current U.S. military actions in Iraq or Libya if the U.S. got the oil from those nations.
[F]or the third time since the end of the cold war, NATO has accepted a major mission and then demonstrated that it does not have the unity of purpose or the military capability to perform it. At least, not without the United States dominating. Meanwhile, the United States has not fully grappled with the idea that NATO may have outlived its usefulness: Its costs may outweigh the contribution it makes to American security, and the notion that the U.S. needs to remain heavily involved in European security seems less and less evident.
Some of the local stories making national news lately: A GOP central committee member who refuses to resign after forwarding an e-mail showing the president's face on the body of a chimp... Dragging students into court for campus hi jinks that happened on a weekly basis in the 1960s-70s...An anti-Islam rally in Yorba Linda.
At St. John's, the epitome of what Episcopalians call broad church (a little Protestant, a little Anglo-Catholic, mostly in the Anglican middle of the road), if there's incense, it must be Easter, Pentecost, or Christmas. Our longtime acolyte master, Monte Nelson, was trained for his work at by-the-book parishes back east. When our acolytes carry the cross and candles in stately formation, when the 
thurifers swing the thurible with cathedral elan, we thank the young ministers and Monte, too. He's shown getting Hannah Schuh, Garrett Williams, and Steven Hayden ready for Easter Sunday.
Political journalist Meghan Daum responds to friends and colleagues who ask why she doesn't take the gloves off when writing about Sarah Palin:Alas, we cannot. Not only because it would be cheap and lazy and unbecoming, but also because Palin is too well-shielded by her own incompetence. By casting herself as the less privileged, less polished outsider in the fancy school, she fashions the rest of us into playground bullies (ironic, given her predilection for bullying language) who taunt her with big vocabularies and book learning and obsession with nuance. By playing the victim (ironic, given how closely she associates victimhood with liberal whining), Palin forces her critics to choose between the roles of merciless oppressor and guilt-ridden enabler. And since the merciless oppressor part is already played ably by various screamers on blogs, cable TV and Internet comment boards, writers like me have taken the other route, leaning over so far backward to avoid saying the obvious that we sometimes can't get enough air in our lungs to say much at all.Hat tip to Jim Leach
That's why I truly hope Palin continues to fight her temptation to run for president. If there was ever a candidate who brought out the worst in people, who encouraged hollow rejoinders but made honest analysis almost impossible, it is she. Besides, if she did run, I'd have to write about her. And all the yoga in the world wouldn't keep my spine from eventually breaking from those backbends.
Pilgrim Andy captured the moment in January when St. John's pilgrims participated in the tradition of following Jesus's Palm Sunday walk into Jerusalem from Bethphage on the Mount of Olives.
