It's been the perceived wisdom this season that Americans are outraged, and that solutions need to be drastic. But perceived wisdom, especially among self-interested media types, isn't always accurate, and doesn't always reflect what the populace expects. And change often comes when a dam bursts, not with steady trends - watching the water rise often does little to predict the outcome. (Plus my experience with earthquakes tells me that an aftershock can be worse than the original quake - effects do ripple).

My biggest objection during the time we helped remove Qaddafi was not a condemnation of regime change, but "what's the precedent?" Unless you're the Supreme Court in 2000 writing a "one-time-use-only" clause into your work, or even if, there's the constant concern in both foreign and domestic policy that a new clever "remedy" will be copied and extended in ways we find unreasonable but ways the bastardizers think wholly fair. Thus part of the history of how Republicans have mimicked and abused Democratic strategy in the Senate or amazingly refused to take any action on a Supreme Court nominee based on a fairly meaningless comment by Biden lots of years ago.

I am currently reading my second book about Vladimir Putin and the response to him. The first book I read was Putinism: Russia and its Future with the West, written by Walter Laqueur, a French-Jewish author who has been studying Russia for decades. I am currently reading Kicking the Kremlin: Russia's New Dissidents and the Battle to Topple Putin.

I live in the United States. I speak with a West Coast American accent. While I am of French ancestry and my mom often is there, my social world is completely in the United States (and France and Western Europe in general are facing basically the same problem). I don't really have other options. I currently live in Berkeley, the part of the US that most liberally allows me to be myself and do what I want.

It's official: Debbie Wasserman Schultz will not speak at the Democratic convention. She's still nominally chairwoman of the DNC, though Hillary was forced to strip her of all actual power as down payment toward winning Bernie's endorsement. The issue for the convention was not whether Debbie would be booed by Sanders delegates if she took the podium, it was whether she would be booed off the stage a la Ted Cruz. The question became pretty much moot Friday, after Wikileaks released 20,000 hacked DNC emails, some of which detailed how she and her staffers basically colluded with the Clinton campaign to sabotage Bernie's run. Then yesterday, Robert Reich called for her to be fired immediately, rather than just demoted out of the way.

I would look at remaking Washington, DC. Right now, what is it doing for anybody? For real Americans?

Congress can go on permanent vacation. Don't need them. Or those mouthy judges.

And I don't plan on living there.