"It's a very clever initiative to improve people's lives, but it's not a complete success," a user of the bikes said.   "For a regular user like me, it generates a lot of frustration," she said. "It's a reflection of the violence of our society and it's outrageous: the Vélib' is a public good but there is no civic feeling related to it."

Good for a conservative belly-laugh.

No, such praise is not sarcasm from a birther, Teapartier, or other such anti-intellectual dregs--it comes from the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Rocco Landesman.  (See my earlier post on Mr. Broadway Bombast.)  Scott at Powerline quotes his boast: 

This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.

Scott deftly dispatches this error-plagued nonsense.  I would add:  In praising Bacon, Locke, and Newton as his greatest heroes, Thomas Jefferson claimed that his rival Alexander Hamilton had named Julius Caesar as his.  This attribution was intended to underline Hamilton's reputation as a "monocrat"--no friend of the principles of 1776.  Praises of Caesar and of Mao, obeisance to dictators, despots, and Nobel committees, assaults on an aggressive press-- what more does this Administration need to do to separate itself from the principles of 1776?

• A growing 40 percent of all Americans self-identify as conservatives, about 36 percent as moderates, about 20 as liberal, according to Gallup.  I wonder whether they factored in the reluctance of Republicans/conservatives to speak to pollsters. 
• All politics is local: Local Chinese officials make school kids salute all cars on the road (as a safety measure).  (I can imagine the compelled salutes American kids might give.)  But the other examples of Chinese local tyranny are far less petty--killing dogs, compulsory liquor and cigarette purchases, licenses for harvesting one's own corn, and prohibiting women from being secretaries.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is #15 on the NY Times trade paperback bestseller list and rising.  I'm not sure what this Zombie business means--it's all over comics strips, and kids talk about it.  Something to do with the "end of history," but there may be other meanings of brain-eating.

Ross Douthat sees that the Pope understands the world stakes in his opening to the Anglicans:  It's about standing up to Islam.

Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam's compatibility with the Western way of reason -- and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.

By contrast, the Church of England's leadership has opted for conciliation (some would say appeasement), with the Archbishop of Canterbury going so far as to speculate about the inevitability of some kind of sharia law in Britain.

There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict's approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.