The BBC has an interesting story about a World War II summit meeting that tells us a bit about how the world has changed, and also, perhaps, about how it hasn’t.
The story took place in 1942, when Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, traveled to Moscow for a summit meeting with Joseph Stalin, the dictator who led the Soviet Union. The two countries were new allies, brought together by their common foe, Nazi Germany.
The initial meetings between the leaders didn’t exactly go smoothly. Churchill requested another meeting, which began at 7 p.m. At 1 a.m. an under-secretary of the British Foreign Office was invited to join the proceedings and found Stalin, Churchill, and Russian Foreign Secretary Molotov sitting around the shredded remains of a suckling pig on a table covered with countless bottles of liquor. By that time Churchill was just drinking wine and complaining of a headache, and Stalin made the bureaucrat drink a concoction that was “pretty savage.” The meeting continued until 3 a.m., when the Brits stumbled back to their rooms, packed, and headed to the airport.
The drinking party was unconventional — although not unusual for the Soviets, whose reputation for long, vodka-saturated banquets continued for decades — but it did the trick. Churchill and Stalin established a personal connection that helped the allies steer their way to victory over the Axis powers.
It’s hard to imagine our modern political leaders having drinking bouts and making bleary-eyed policy decisions at 2 a.m. after guzzling countless shots of booze. We obviously wouldn’t want them to do so. But the importance of making a personal connection remains as true today as it was 70 years ago during the dark days of a global war. Summit meetings still make sense because we want our leaders to be able to take the measure of each other and establish relationships that can stand the stress when times get tough.
He says he’s learned his lesson, and he wants to get back into the fray and fight for the people of New York. But why would any voter want to pull the lever for a politician who showed such contempt for voters that he stuck to obvious falsehoods until it no longer become possible? Who would believe him?
The BB sent along a link to this article from 
According to 
Some people in the IRS decided that groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their names should be given additional scrutiny, to see whether they were acting in ways inconsistent with their tax-exempt status. About 300 groups received the scrutiny. The IRS says that low-level employees were responsible and that, when more senior officials learned about it months later, the practice was stopped. However, it now appears that 
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During yesterday’s testimony, 
It’s like old times — or, at least, it’s like the run-up to the 2012 election, when the President and Mitt Romney and Joe Biden and Paul Ryan and their minions seemingly were somewhere in Ohio every day. Since then, Ohio has dropped off the political map a bit, and that is fine by me. It’s been nice to return to our daily lives and get to the point where a visit by the President is once again a big deal, rather than a tiresome cause of another pre-election traffic snarl.
An 
In our catch-phrase, talking-point era, the immigration issue has been reduced to mantras like “securing our borders” and fuzzy video images of people scaling flimsy walls in desert landscapes. Of course, immigration involves a much more complex, multi-faceted set of concepts and questions. We are a land of immigrants, built in large part through the hard work and aspirations of those who came to our shores in search of freedom. We need immigrants to perform certain jobs in our economy, and we want immigrants who will be doctors and entrepreneurs. We feel a more obligation to offer asylum to those seeking to escape persecution in their native lands. Millions of people now working in America came here illegally; what are we realistically to do about them?
Every year, the process of completing tax forms seems to become more complicated and more overwhelming. Taxpayers juggle federal, state, and local forms, labor through increasingly lengthy instructions, and strive mightily to interpret myriad weird descriptions of deductions, credits and “adjustments to income” to determine whether they have any application to our lives. This year, 
I’d venture a few predictions about how this story will play out. First, the McConnell campaign’s reaction has just focused attention on the story and will boost the sales of Mother Jones magazine far beyond what would otherwise have occurred. (Incidentally, the Mother Jones story and the quotes from the tape recording seem like pretty thin gruel. I don’t think anyone will be shocked that U.S. Senators and their staffs spend time researching opponents and discussing how to best portray them as idiots, demons, or out-of-touch plutocrats. If the McConnell campaign hadn’t gone ballistic, the story probably wouldn’t have made a blip on the nightly news.)
The proposal is being sold as a way to generate revenue — $9 billion over a decade — but also to achieve greater “fairness” in the tax code. One of those faceless, nameless “senior administration officials” who are always quoted in these articles says that those pesky wealthy Americans can “accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.” Under the proposal, a taxpayer’s tax-preferred retirement account could not finance more than $205,000 per year of retirement, or about $3 million this year.
