I was back in my old neighborhood a couple of weekends ago, walking toward the farmer's market, when I passed a little knot of people who were looking up and gesturing toward the dignified brick apartment buildings that line one of the boulevards. They were all clearly from somewhere else, and one of them was explaining the handsome buildings, which apparently struck them as odd, to the others:

"I think they're pretty dumpy on the inside, but they look good from out here," he said.

Somehow this weekend I wound up in a Twitter tif with Ed Lorenzen, a senior adviser for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and, I gather, a Simpson/Bowles supporter.  In many ways, we had an unremarkable back and forth.  I'm sure he kicked my butt, he's more practiced at this debate than I am.  But, there was an interesting interaction.

So George Will, highly renowned municipal analyst and wicked good judge of character, has once again set his sights on Detroit. Somehow--don't ask me how--I knew this would happen.  I knew it would happen because the decline of Detroit, our allegedly foremost black and poor city, is in the spotlight, and it's beyond George Will's ability to say no to such delicious news.

Yesterday, The Washington Post gave us the tale of Basaaly Moalin, a 36-year-old San Diego cab driver from Somalia, who still has close family in his home country, who was recently convicted of sending $8,500 to a military group there that the United States designates as a terrorist organization.  He was caught, in part, through the National Security Agency's database of phone call details.

On one hand, I am amused that the Republican National Committee, under the direction of Subcommander Reince Preibus, is angry that NBC might produce a movie biopic about Hillary Clinton.  Corporations are people, Reince.  Your side saw to it that these corpersonations were endowed with the rights of free political speech.  Heck, Citizens United was about the right of a corporation to fund an anti-Hillary movie.

Everyone's talking about Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post. But it's also been a dramatic week for two newspapers close to my heart in different ways: The Boston Globe and The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Two days ago, The Globe, like the WaPo, was sold to an individual billionaire with a high profile. Today the Plain Dealer, which has not been sold, stopped delivering the newspaper. It will still be printed every morning, but it will only be delivered three days a week.

Last week I had a little stint guest blogging for Esquire while the unstoppable Charles Pierce took a vacation.  On of my topics was the Larry Summers for Fed Chair debate and my take was that even if you really, really like Larry Summers there's nothing about him that makes him so singular a talent that he and only he should run the Fed. Summers faces opposition from Wall Street, Congressional Democrats and prominent women, among others.

On Thursday, Russian officials announced that Russia had offered asylum to dissidents suffering persecution from the Russian government.

The group includes Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption blogger sentenced to five years in a corrective labor colony; Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former Russian oligarch imprisoned since 2005; members of punk rock protest band Pussy Riot, imprisoned since 2012; Russia's gay population; and the Chechen Republic. Russia also offered posthumous asylum to Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent assassinated by Russian agents after receiving asylum in Britain.

Fox News's hostile interview with Reza Aslan has lit up the internet. (See Michael Maiello and Historiann for two of the smarter takes.) Obviously, interviewer Lauren Green's insistence that something must be very wrong for a Muslim to write a book about Jesus, and that such a book must be wrong, is a problem.

There is a part of the American feminist movement that drives me nuts.  It's the part where all women who call themselves feminists have to be smart and sassy and so damned tough any public sign of vulnerability or weakness, particularly where men are involved, is reason enough to drum them out of the corps.

Poor Reza Aslan who participated in a cringeworthy Fox News interview about his new book about the historical Jesus only to be asked repeatedly why he would even write such a thing since he is a devout Muslim.

These are the minor incidences in life that fill me with dread.  They are the reminders that it is very hard to talk to a lot of people.  Worse, that other people very much control the conversation.

Safe to say that ever since the news broke that the entire city of Detroit was filing for bankruptcy hundreds of thousands of us Detroiters and ex-Detroiters and Michiganders everywhere have been biting our nails, gnashing our teeth, pounding the walls, spending partially-sleepless nights worrying about the fate of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA).
 

So, apparently Larry Summers is now the leading candidate for Chairman of the Federal Reserve. This is a bad idea, for lots of reasons, not least of which is that Summers' sudden ascendancy is a sign that The Usual Suspects are talking him up, and it's The Usual Suspects who not only got our economy into this mess but made our government's top priority not getting out of the mess "too quickly." Summers himself was one of Obama's leading economic advisers during the first term, and neither his advice nor Obama's first-term policy were effective in turning the Great Recession around. The result of Summers's advice was always too little, too late. It was Summers who insisted on asking Congress for a smaller stimulus package than the economy needed, on the theory that the smaller package would get passed. Of course, Congress took that smaller package and cut it down even more.

The New York Times comically believes that Anthony Weiner should drop out of the New York City mayoral race because... he sexted some willing people online?  Ah, we're told, it's a big deal because he kept sexting willing people online after having resigned from Congress for sexting willing people online.

Sexting willing people online.

The Good Ol' Boys in Texas have decreed that they're in charge of women's reproductive decisions, and the little ladies just gotta take it.  If it was just making abortions more difficult for women that would be one thing. (We expect that sort of thing when privileged men get together to use their power.) But they want to make sure women are ground down even more by setting impossible standards for reproductive clinics, by forcing ultrasounds, and by banning the Morning After pill--a most merciful choice for avoiding unwanted pregnancies.  Why do all that?  Because you just can't punish women enough for having sex with men.

Dear White People,

I understand through the Internet and mainstream media that some of you are "deeply concerned about urban riots," as the Zimmerman verdict approaches.  Please, white people, keep this deep concern to yourself.  Your concerns sound quite patronizing to the, um, no doubt multicultural assemblage of rioters that you imagine is gathering informally on the streets of Miami.

As everything points to former New England Patriots' tight end  Aaron Hernandez being the person who murdered Odin Lloyd, one wonders if the media will eventually take a look at some factors regarding the case. Factors the NFL would not want investigated.

Demographics, we've heard, are pro-Democrat. In a few years, a wave of young Latinos will swamp those dastardly Republicans in their southern redoubts, and then the donkey will soar again. Huzzah!

But wait, it get's better. According to Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast, "even working-class white people" are preparing to join the glorious Democratic demographic revolution. He discovered a Brookings poll that proves, "White working-class millennials are fairly liberal!"

In short, all we have to do is wait a decade or two for the new golden age of Democratic hegemony to come roaring back to Washington, courtesy of the aging process.

I call this the Wait for the Old Farts to Die strategy.

Hey, wow.  This fall, a movie version of Ender's Game is coming out.  It's based on a science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card, originally drafted in 1977, when I was 2 years old.  I read it in high school and I really liked it.  It's the story of Ender Wiggin, tormented at battle school as part of his training to become the ultimate weapon that saves humanity of a nasty enemy from space called "The Buggers," who remain mysterious in the first book and are explored later in the series.