Blessed are the Holbrookes

Usually I speak ill of famous people who die and get lionized in print and puffland. Richard Holbrooke will serve as the first exception to the rule that celebrity dead old farts smell as bad as the living, the obscure and even the young.

"When I graduated from Brown," he told an interviewer, "John F. Kennedy was president and we all thought that public service in government was the highest thing we could do, a noble calling."

How often have you recently heard anyone say that out loud, with meaning, without winks and nods suggesting that, of course, making money is better? Working in government can be just as dull and idiotic as working in the private sector, no doubt.

Holbrooke embodied that idea of noblesse oblige, that privileges carry with them obligations, an idea once common to anyone with a university education.

The man who brought peace to the Balkans after the bloody break up of Yugoslavia could be very gruff (how else do you get a Slobodan Milošević to deal?). He was not a saint (pace, Diana Johnstone).

Yet Holbrooke represented the best instincts of the nonideological pre-boomers and he stands as someone with a remarkably more solid character than his peers. A young man graduating from any university today could certainly do worse than to emulate him.

Opera 11 bats it out of the park!

I'm in love! Yesterday I downloaded Opera 11. Once again I  experienced the thrill of the original Firefox, which was the Roadrunner to the slow moving, poky Internet Explorer's Wile E. Coyote. Now Opera 11 does it to the arthritic Firefox.

Opera 11 is a free (as in "free beer") web browser with e-mail and lots of other functions. It is fast and the install file is little more than 8 mb. (Get it here.)

All right, so I have to learn a few things about Opera. In two minutes I got the essential functionality I crave thanks to extensions and "widgets." There's much tweaking to come, of course. I'm a perennial tweaker.

But later, dude. Right now I just want to zip around the 'net like I did in the old Firefox hotrod. This is a new start. I'm not even importing my literally thousands of bookmarks.

Thanks, Opera!

What If Obama Knows What He's Doing?

The taxi driver called me one of those "far left liberals who are disgruntled" when he defended the president out of long overdue ethnic pride, but little else. What if, a nagging thought argued quietly, Barack Obama has a benign overarching plan hidden in plain sight for strategic reasons?

It's a crone of a thought: the mother of all doubts.

Over and over during the 2008 campaign, my heart sank at some apparent stumble. "There goes Obama," I'd muse sadly. I believed, oh how I believed! It was 1960 again (some folks got Kennedy-Johnson bumper stickers to prove it) and this time ... this time there would be no assassinations, no Vietnam.

It took me until the nomination to figure out Obama's strategy. Obviously, he can't do it again the same way; he doesn't need to, in fact. There's also no reason why the president should share his grand plan with, of all things, a blogger.

Still, I'm bitterly disappointed. Let me pluck the health care petal, the finance reform petal and the peace petal to begin counting the ways. Yes, Obama's "deal" keeps millions out of the cold ... for now.

It all comes down to the man: Is Obama merely a more skillful liar than Bush or is he one of those once-in-a-lifetime statesmen with a plan? In the fog of the moment, I can't tell.