We’ll see what happens.

In a letter from Europe, NPR’s Senior European Correspondent Sylvia Poggioli reports that Vatican officials are bracing for a sharp shift in relations under an Obama administration that will be openly pro-choice.

We can be pragmatic about this, says Atul Gawande, and, in fact, the precendent is pragmatism:

Many would-be reformers hold that “true” reform must simply override those fears. They believe that a new system will be far better for most people, and that those who would hang on to the old do so out of either lack of imagination or narrow self-interest. On the left, then, single-payer enthusiasts argue that the only coherent solution is to end private health insurance and replace it with a national insurance program. And, on the right, the free marketeers argue that the only coherent solution is to end public insurance and employer-controlled health benefits so that we can all buy our own coverage and put market forces to work.

Neither side can stand the other. But both reserve special contempt for the pragmatists, who would build around the mess we have. The country has this one chance, the idealist maintains, to sweep away our inhumane, wasteful patchwork system and replace it with something new and more rational. So we should prepare for a bold overhaul, just as every other Western democracy has. True reform requires transformation at a stroke. But is this really the way it has occurred in other countries? The answer is no. And the reality of how health reform has come about elsewhere is both surprising and instructive.

(For more, by the way, on the mixture of pragmatisim and idealism, see the TNR Editors’ here).

A change a’comin’:

And the region is ready for a fresh start: the sheer fact that los yanquis elected a liberal African-American as President has already done a good deal to alter Uncle Sam’s image in Latin America, even among leftists. None other than Chavez said last month said “there are winds in favor of relations between the Venezuelan government and the new President of the U.S.” Cuban President Raul Castro has said much the same.

Obama’s foreign policy campaign rhetoric was welcomed by Latins tired of Washington’s obsession with the drug war, free trade and democratic elections as panaceas for a continent still plagued by one of the world’s worst gaps between rich and poor. Democratic elections are of course a good thing. But “if we want to win the hearts and minds of people in Caracas, Jakarta, Nairobi or Tehran,” Obama wrote in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, “dispersing ballot boxes will not be enough. We’ll have to make sure that the international rules we’re promising enhance, rather than impede, people’s sense of material and personal security.”

I mean, it’s nothing new to hear people talk about what a bad president Bush was.  But such a thrashing from the most prestigious journal in the English-language (and a conservative one that once supported him at that) well, it’s rough.

Maybe.

America can’t ensure its leading place in the global economy unless we grapple with the problems and opportunities of our suburbs. Nonprofits, long focused on inner cities, need to reach out to poor families and immigrants in the suburbs. The federal government should support the production and preservation of affordable housing there. Even more important, Washington needs to recognize that suburban governments are being flattened by the housing crisis—they don’t have the experience or the capacity to slow the tide of foreclosures or deal with neighborhoods strafed by vacancies. The Feds need to use some of the billions in recovery funding to help local governments buy up foreclosed properties and put that land to productive use.

I think they would have gotten along, honestly.   Both certainly were incredibly charismatic and performative.  Ali pretended to be a total egomaniac while he was actually a decent, incredibly disciplined guy, while Franklin pretended to be a decent, incredibly disciplined guy while he was actually an egomaniac who should never have been allowed near anyone’s 14-year-old daughter.  But that’s the world, ay?

Paul Moses reflects here on the priests in two recent films.  I think he’s onto something about priests being relevant in the public imagination, and I think it’s also why priests–and the Catholic Church in general–are so common in films and TV shows (in both positive and negative ways).  The intensely visual and visceral nature of the Church–physical sacraments, intense imagery on Church walls, the costumes of priests and nuns–just make for great, almost mythical and iconic imagery.  Think of the confessional: fitting into that tiny space, the body compressed, the priest’s voice behind the screen.  Forget the fact that nobody really does confession like that anymore: it’s an incredible image, and it’s used all the time on TV shows and movies.

Look: I know that Hamas does and says some terrible things.  I’m not in any way trying to deny that or excuse it.  But it also provides valuable services and can be viewed by pragmatists as a means of brokering peace in the region.  So connections to them shouldn’t be seen as evil.  Support of suicide bombings?  That’s different.  But I’m not sure there’s any evidence that Obama’s pray-er, Ingrid Mattson, supports terrorism.  I was hoping that, post-Bush, we would drop the Manichean “we won’t talk to you unless you’re our best friend” politics.  Read more here:

Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, is one of many religious leaders scheduled to speak at the prayer service at Washington’s National Cathedral.

Mattson has been the guest of honor at State Department dinners and has met with senior Pentagon officials during the Bush administration. She also spoke at a prayer service at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

But in 2007 and as recently as last July, federal prosecutors in Dallas filed court documents linking the Hartford, Conn.-based Islamic society to the group Hamas, which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization.

Neither Mattson nor her organization have been charged. But prosecutors wrote in July that they had “a wide array of testimonial and documentary evidence expressly linking” the group to Hamas and other radical groups.

An obituary in the Times:

Because of his popularity, a bad sign to many art world insiders, Wyeth came to represent middle-class values and ideals that modernism claimed to reject, so that arguments about his work extended beyond painting to societal splits along class, geographical and educational lines. One art historian, in response to a 1977 survey in Art News magazine about the most underrated and overrated artists of the century, nominated Wyeth for both categories.

Art critics mostly heaped abuse on his work, saying he gave realism a bad name. Supporters said he spoke to the silent majority who jammed his exhibitions. “In today’s scrambled-egg school of art, Wyeth stands out as a wild-eyed radical,” one journalist wrote in 1963, speaking for the masses. “For the people he paints wear their noses in the usual place, and the weathered barns and bare-limbed trees in his starkly simple landscapes are more real than reality.”

John Updike took up the same cause 25 years later: “In the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, the scorn was simple gallery politics; but resistance to Wyeth remains curiously stiff in an art world that has no trouble making room for Photorealists like Richard Estes and Philip Pearlstein and graduates of commercial art like Wayne Thibauld, Andy Warhol, and for that matter, Edward Hopper.”

It always comes down to children.  Adults can do what they want, but what does the state do when children are involved?  It’s a fascinating question:

In an effort to separate itself from the tragic death of young Madeline Kara Neumann of Wisconsin whose parents chose to pray over her rather than seek medical help, the local Christian Science Church has been meeting with state legislators to revise a state law that currently exempts faith healing practices from prosecution for child neglect and abuse.

The church said its goal is to protect children. “We want to protect children and to show that our church does not want to hang onto a legislative accommodation that is perceived as helping people abuse their children,” said Joe Farkas, the legislative affairs representative for the church.

But one expert warned that any measure drafted by Christian Scientists would aim to protect only Christian Scientists, not children.

“If the Christian Science Church is allowed to write this legislation and dominate the discussion, the result is that there will be more Kara Neumann cases,” said Shawn Francis Peters, a lecturer in religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW-Oshkosh and the author of “When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law.”