Mitt A Little Bit Of Luck

Ed Kilgore explores why the right couldn't beat Romney.

Biden His Time In Beijing

My former Nixon Center buddy Steve Clemons reports that the VP is taking over the China portfolio.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying & Love Timeline

Elementary school-age social media can sure be mean. Over the last couple of weeks I've had trouble posting Episconixonian items to my Facebook page. This evening I learned I wasn't alone. Lots of Google Blog users were complaining.

Someone posting on Google's user forum sent me here. Shoot, all I've got to do, advises Facebook, is turn my blog into a graphic object, which involves issues such as these:

The Open Graph protocol defines four required properties:
og:title - The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., "The Rock".
og:type - The type of your object, e.g., "movie". See the complete list of supported types.
og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. We support PNG, JPEG and GIF formats. You may include multiple og:image tags to associate multiple images with your page.
og:url - The canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/.

Aren't the folks at Facebook great the way they make everything so clear? While I wasn't irrevocably opposed to figuring some of that out at some point, I kept nosing around. This citizen of the blogosphere is diligently working the issue, though so far without a breakthrough.

Finally I posted a cri de coeur on Facebook to see if anyone else was struggling. My seminary bud the Rev. Gwynn Freund, vicar of a church in San Diego, helped out. So did my brother the Very Rev. Canon Robert Cornner, who told me he'd been able to post from his Google Blog to his new Timeline page.

I'd been resisting Timeline. I like the simplicity of the old Facebook. But I made the switch, and sure enough, as the presence of this post on Facebook attests, I'm again able to post blog links to the status box without being absolutely certain about the canonical URL of the object that will be used as my permanent ID in the graph.

Did Facebook purposely make it harder to use its service to impel customers to use Timeline? One does wonder. But when the curia rules, what can we do but obey? Besides, as I usually remind those who complain about Facebook, it's still, uh, like, free. Bloggers can't be choosers.

Now: Who's going to be the first to get a sermon out of "canonical URL"?

Next War Watch: Santorum Surges

Molly Ball at the Atlantic plays catchup on Rick Santorum, who's actually been in the GOP primary race since 1997. This stood out for me:

Santorum is an extreme Iran hawk, arguing that tough action, likely military, is needed to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. In effect, he says, the U.S. has been at war with Iran since 1979, and regime change will be necessary to ensure the country is no longer a threat. Santorum has been pounding this drum for some time. In 2005, he authored a bill to put $10 million toward Iran regime change.

Iran's Shi'a Pet?

Most of my former colleagues at the Center Previously Known As Nixon were skeptics about President Bush's invasion of Iraq. Now one of its scholars, Dov Zacheim, describes the strategic consequences of replacing Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated Baathist regime with Nuri al-Maliki, whom Zakheim calls "nothing more than a Shi'a strongman":

Maliki insists that he is not a tool of the Iranians. Strictly speaking, he is correct. Iraq will never allow itself to be completely dominated by Tehran. Nevertheless, just as there can be no denying that Iran was the real victor of Operation Iraqi Freedom because America defanged its only seriously powerful regional rival, so too is it true that Iraq has increasingly come to share Tehran’s perspective on regional affairs. Witness its abstention on the Arab League’s vote to suspend Syria. Iraq is now firmly rooted in what King Abdullah of Jordan years ago termed “the Shi’a crescent,” which includes also Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, which also abstained from the Arab League vote, and Syria.

Palestine? N.I.M.K.

As Jordan prepares to host the first talks between Israel and Palestinians in over a year, Ethan Bronner outlines the kingdom's aims and stakes:

King Abdullah is...eager to send a message to Hamas, the militant Islamist group that governs the Gaza Strip, that despite the rise of Islamism in the region, the Palestinian Authority remains, in his view, the leader of the Palestinians. Mr. Abbas has started talks for a unity government with Hamas, but they are proceeding slowly.

The king also has a very specific interest in a moderate Palestinian state being established in the West Bank and Gaza — he has tensions with Islamists in his own country and in addition, he does not want to encourage any thoughts of a Palestinian state being established in Jordan instead, as some on the Israeli right advocate. More than half of the inhabitants of Jordan are Palestinian.

Jordan and Israel share a common interest in focusing Palestinian nationalism on the West Bank and Gaza to prevent its being focused on either of their states. Mr. Netanyahu and his aides say they also worry that any Palestinian state in the West Bank would ultimately be overrun by Islamists.

Hot Air Jordan

What better day for a little hope on the Israel-Palestinian front?

Benedict Definitely Has His Priorities Straight

Padre Jeff left his episcopate
Deep in the heart of Texas
Rome wants 'em straight, not celibate
Deep in the heart of Texas

Higher Powers, In And Out Of The Newsroom

David Carr is media columnist for the New York Times and author of a harrowing drug addiction memoir, Night Of The Gun. On Dec. 28 NPR rebroadcast an October Carr interview by "Fresh Air"'s Terry Gross. Re-listening to a Carr interview is almost as good as a repeat of "Dexter." While his voice, injured by smoking, radiation treatments, and possibly exposure to toxins while he covered the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a little rough, he speaks about my parents' beloved business in smooth, graceful cadences. Transcript here, podcast here.

Excerpt one, on the omniscient and indispensable elite editorial intelligence behind daily newspapers:

When I wake up in the morning and the gun goes off, I'm checking Twitter. I'm checking RSS feeds, and I get four newspapers at my house every day. I get the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Star Ledger - because I live in New Jersey - and, of course, the New York Times.

And the reason I do is because the day before this, all this stuff has gone whizzing past me, and I seem to know a lot. But I don't really know what part of it is important. And I used to think it was so silly that newspapers would - like, I'd go to our page one meeting, and they'd be organizing the hierarchy of the six or seven most important stories in Western civilization. Meanwhile, the Web is above them, pivoting and eliding, and all these stories are morphing and changing. And I thought: Well, how silly is this?

But you know what? I came to want that resting place, where someone yelled "stop" and decided, "Look, this is stuff you need to know about going forward." Newspapers have become a kind of magazine experience for me, where they're - where it's a way to look back at what has happened.

And on his faith life and the great mystery of altruism:

I am a churchgoing Catholic, and I do that as a matter of - it's good to stand with my family. It's good that I didn't have to come up with my own creation myth for my children.

It's a wonderful group of people that I go to church with, and it's community. It's not really where I find God. And sort of what the accommodation I've reached is a very jerry-rigged one, which is: All along the way, in recovery, I've been helped - without getting into the names of specific groups - by all of these strangers, you know, who get in a room and do a form of group-talk therapy and live by certain rules in their life.

And one of the rules is that you help everyone who needs help. And I think to myself: Well, that seems remarkable. And not only is that not a general human impulse, but it's not an impulse of mine. And yet I found myself doing that over and over again.

So, am I underneath all things, just a really wonderful, giving person? Or is there a force greater than myself that is leading me to act in ways that are altruistic and not self-interested and lead to the greater good?

And so that's - that's sort of as far as I've gotten with a higher power thing, is I'm - you know, I'm kind of a pirate, kind of a thug. I mean, I've done a bunch of terrible things, and yet I'm able to, for the most part, be a decent person. How is that? Do I have some inner strength of character? I think not. I think something else is working on me.

You know, I think it's okay to sort of like have a superstitious belief in God and not really have thought it through. I think it's okay to just - I think there's freedom in allowing for the possibility of it. Like, I don't have a presence. I don't have some idea in my mind of a woman or a man figure or anything like that.

But I find the spaces between people, whether I'm making a newspaper with them or in recovery or living with them as family or friends or - I find something really godly in that. I don't have trouble acknowledging that.

What's In A Holy Name?

Eternal Father, you gave to your incarnate Son the holy name of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation: Plant in every heart, we pray, the love of him who is the Savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER