Politics, at all levels: baffling

I don't know what to make of either of these two stories. First, my alma mater REFUSES TO ACCOMODATE PRESIDENT CLINTON. That's Bill, you understand. Everyone's hero. The last democrat to get anything done on a national level, the fundraiser, the kingmaker, the bloody wanderer, at least according to that Remnick guy. Who turns down Bill?

And for what?

LPAC Managing Director Jim Murphy said “What they were requesting was a space that held 1,000, which we don’t really have, at 3:15 on Wednesday. The closest we could come indoors was LPAC, where we had a long-standing endowed lecture scheduled for [4:30].” The lecture was the Annual Lee Frank Lecture in Art History. This year’s lecture was “A Japanese Potter’s Study Trip to Edo: Ceramic Research and Development in the 17th Century,” presented by Louise Allison Cort, who is Curator for Ceramics at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.

Swarthmore is not merely a Quirky Little Skool of Quirkiness and the Wearing of Outmoded Shoes (scroll down to the very end). It should be taken seriously. Yet I can't imagine any other comparable college treating an American icon so shabbily and hiding behind such a flimsy excuse.

Also today, in the forehead-smacking section of the internet, this gem: Mark Warner, the Dem's frontrunner and my horse in the 08 race, is bowing out to spend time with his family.

Not only is the event itself perplexing, the reasoning is laughable. May as well pretend he had a lecture to attend on Japanese pottery in 2009 and he didn't want to be distracted. Family -- please. No one's family is that interesting unless you've been hit, and I mean mob-style, by some serious scandal. He must have been hiding a diddled page or two in his closet. Maybe Hilary knew about it. Maybe Bayh did. In any event, I'm disconsolate.