New passport rules went into effect today. You'll need one to fly to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda, and to re-enter the U.S. from those countries when traveling by air.

Beginning in January, the passport rule will extend to travel by sea and land, including automobiles.

And if you're behind on your child support? Forget about it.

Here's how to apply for a passport if you don't have one.

Re: the video. Yes, that's actor Steve Martin on banjo accompanying Roger McGuinn.

Thousands of monks in Burma have been executed or moved into prisons.

According to one Swedish diplomat who has now left the country, the military has won.

Liselotte Agerlid, who is now in Thailand, said that the Burmese people now face possibly decades of repression. "The Burma revolt is over," she added.

"The military regime won and a new generation has been violently repressed and violently denied democracy. The people in the street were young people, monks and civilians who were not participating during the 1988 revolt. "Now the military has cracked down the revolt, and the result may very well be that the regime will enjoy another 20 years of silence, ruling by fear."

This was the lead and main story on the news in Spain this weekend....Sky News, BBC, CNN International, and Bloomberg devoted most of their half-hour programs to it. The military blocked journalists from entering the country so they reported news they received from "citizen journalists" and aired their videos. Some journalists reported from Bangkok. They also aired a lot of telephone calls they received from people inside the country.

Wasting time, good will and attempting to wreak havoc, the original Lieberman-Kyl Amendment on Iran was tantamount to granting President Bush the power to wage war against Iran. Still wasting time and attempting to wreak havoc, the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment was gutted of its war authorizing provisions, but remained provocative, unnecessary and stupid. It should have been voted down. It was not. It passed. Among the Ays was Senator Hillary Clinton. Among the Nays were Senators Chris Dodd and Joe Biden. Absent was Senator Barack Obama.

Via Greenwald, Rudy says one of the dumbest things said about anything by anyone this year:

In London this week, Rudy Giuliani proposed what is probably the single most extremist policy of any major presidential candidate, certainly this year and perhaps in many years:

Rudy Giuliani talked tough on Iran yesterday, proposing to expand NATO to include Israel and warning that if Iran's leaders go ahead with their goal to be a nuclear power "we will prevent it, or we will set them back five or 10 years." . . . .

If this is something the US would insist on, there would no longer be a NATO. The US would lose everyone with such a proposal. No serious person would even say this as a pander. A standard pander on Israel, one Hillary used in fact, is calling for a unified Jerusalem under Israeli control. As Yglesias notes, even Israel knows that is a nonstarter. But as a pander, it has been a standard call for many US politicians.

And I guess that was the point, Rudy felt he had to say something even more ridiculous. And he did.

The U.N. Annual Opium Poppy Survey, a report on the Afghan Opium Trade, has been released (available here, pdf.) Opium production is up.

The report is the work of a combination of international anti-drug agencies. From the executive summary:

In 2007, Afghanistan cultivated 193,000 hectares of opium poppies, an increase of 17% over last year. The amount of Afghan land used for opium is now larger than the corresponding total for coca cultivation in Latin America (Colombia, Peru and Bolivia combined).

Favourable weather conditions produced opium yields (42.5 kg per hectare)higher than last year (37.0 kg/ha). As a result, in 2007 Afghanistan produced an extraordinary 8,200 tons of opium (34% more than in 2006), becoming practically the exclusive supplier of the world’s deadliest drug (93% of the global opiates market).

More....

Anne Applebaum writes:

In the end, most presidents do learn on the job: Bill Clinton would probably never have predicted he'd contemplate bombing Belgrade, just as President Bush surely had never devoted much thought to Afghanistan. It's not easy to predict whose particular set of experiences will suit which particular crisis and which weaknesses will prove fatal. But we can certainly entertain ourselves between now and November 2008 trying to guess.

(Emphasis supplied.) Actually, Anne Applebaum demonstrates her non-expertise on the issues. In 1992, the Balkans were very much a hot spot and Slobodan Milosovic very much an issue:

Glenn Greenwald says:

[O'Hanlon and Pollack] . . . almost certainly will occupy key national security positions in the next Democratic administration, particularly in a Clinton administration.

Where does Glenn get this from? I do not know this is true and it absolutely should not be. Is it true? Why? How? Such a thing must be unacceptable.

Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, has struck back against the mean blogs:

The lefty blogosphere, meanwhile, has gotten itself all in a tizzy over the failings of the "foreign policy community. . . . First, many of the people in the various national security bureaucracies are indeed Humphreys, and deserve to have their every move and utterance treated with great skepticism. . . .

But that of course is a description of the two peole subject to the "blogger tizzy," Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack. They chose to describe themselves as war critics when they were Iraq Debacle and Surge supporters. They lied. And predictably, I think they knew this personally, their lies were used for the purpose of giving their analysis credibility it did not deserve. It was the dishonesty, stupid. Much like these lies from McCain:

It’s entertaining, in that I was the greatest critic of the initial four years, three and a half years. I came back from my first trip to Iraq and said, This is going to fail. We’ve got to change the strategy to the one we’re using now. But life isn’t fair.

Greatest critic? My left cheek:

Yglesias points to this piece by Moira Whelan and it give me an excuse to repeat a point I made to Peter Beinart in 2006. Whelan writes:

Sitting back and expecting that everyone will walk towards the light that is the sound foreign policy as presented by whoever is writing the piece, simply ignores the political realities that exist. Ignoring political realities that exist in other countries is considered irresponsible in foreign policy wonk circles. (Take, for example, the arguments used against the administration ignoring political realities in Iraq.) Ignoring it here is standard fare. . . . The line between "foreign policy" and "politics" exists only in the minds of some in the Foreign Policy Community. . . .

Hear, hear! That's what I told Peter Beinart, and told Yglesias and Atrios again recently:

Yglesias reminds us of this 2004 TNR article of how retribution in the foreign policy establishment works:

For many in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, Dean was seen as dangerous. . . . No one was more concerned on this score than Daalder's Brookings colleague and occasional co-author, Michael O'Hanlon, who penned scathing op-eds in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times attacking Dean. O'Hanlon, who advises several of the candidates--including Kerry--told me, "More Democrats should have recognized [Dean's] danger and spoken out against him." . . . [N]ow that Dean is done, Rice and especially Daalder may find their career prospects also dimmed. When I spoke with the foreign policy gurus who would likely stock a Democratic administration, they seemed to regard the Dean campaign as a debilitating black mark on one's resumé. . . . "This whole campaign causes me to question [Daalder's and Rice's] judgment . . ."

Now O'Hanlon and Pollack dishonestly claim to have been critics of the war and the Surge. So they are dishonest AND wrong. There should be repercussions for such behavior. No Democrat should consider having them in their Administration. Their judgment AND their word can not be trusted.

I think while right on the smaller point, Matt Yglesias and Atrios miss the larger point that Anne Marie Slaughter gets wrong in discussing partisanship and foreign policy. Atrios writes:

Partisans are people who disagree with the Very Wise People of Washington who float above the muck doing The Business of the People selflessly and without regard for petty worldly concerns. It is wrong to criticize these people or undermine them in any way, for the fate of the Republic requires that we praise their wisdom and reminisce proudly about their moderate liberal death squads. They are the people who run the country, and we should let them do this without fear of criticism or accountability.

I do not think that is what Slaughter was saying entirely. She was arguing for something more - the separation of partisan politics from foreign policy. As if foreign policy was an issue "too important" for partisan politics, as opposed to say, health care, tax policy or the environment.

That is, fundamentally where Slaughter goes wrong here, not in the silly framing she chose. It reminded me of a discussion I had with Peter Beinart last year regarding his book "The Good Fight":

Atrios and Jim Henley discuss Anne-Marie Slaughter's curious Op-Ed piece in WaPo today and make their points. I was most perplexed by this paragraph:

In the blogosphere, pillorying Hillary Clinton is a full-time sport. Her slightest remark, such as a recent assertion that the country needs a female president because there is so much cleaning up to do, elicited this sort of wisdom: "Hillary isn't actually a woman, she's a cyborg, programmed by Bill, to be a ruthless political machine." Obama has come in for his share of abuse as well. His recent speech to Call to Renewal's Pentecost conference, in which he called on Democrats to recognize the role of faith in politics, earned him the following comment from the liberal blogger Atrios: "If . . . you think it's important to confirm and embrace the false idea that Democrats are hostile to religion in order to set yourself apart, then continue doing what you're doing." Left-liberal blog attacks on moderate liberals have reached the point where "mainstream media" bloggers such as Joe Klein at Time magazine are wading in to call for a truce, only to get lambasted themselves.

As Hillary has made great strides with the blogs lately, as Conn Carroll of Blogometer has noted, one wonders if Slaughter has been keeping up. The other big story she may have missed is Barack Obama, whom she praises earlier in her piece for his bipartisanship, having gone ballistic negative on Hillary, labeling her "Bush Cheney Lite." Does not sound very bipartisan to me. And when for gawd's sake, did Joe Klein call for a truce with the blogs?

Ms. Slaughter seems very ill informed indeed. Even in her specialty, foreign policy. Perhaps she missed the bipartisan Levin-Reed Amendment which called for a binding Iraq withdrawal timeline, which was supported by Republican Senators Hagel, Smith, Snowe and Collins, only to be stymied by a Republican filibuster and a Bush veto threat. Oh by the way, the blogs strongly supported this bipartisan bill.

Frankly, it makes me question whether Ms. Slaughter knows much about anything.