Yes, the US has a lot to answer for in terms of how we've fomented discord and disorder in faraway places like Iran and East Timor and Central America on behalf of ideology, like Soviet containment, or simply on behalf of US multinationals. But some of that goes essentially hand in hand with finding your country in a position of dominance. You do it because you can. One of the reasons the US was not a big player in destabilizing the Chinese empire a hundred years ago was the US had not yet become a modern great power.

Fast forward to the present: larger, more powerful countries will undoubtedly continue to use the UN and other, less visible levers to manipulate world events in their favor. If an American eclipse leads to a great power "vacuum", there is no reason to believe that no other power will take it upon themselves to fill that void, whether the EU or China.

I don't know if diminished US influence in the future is a good thing, generally speaking.(Although I will readily agree that diminished Bushist/Neocon influence is!)

It's too soon to tell how the new century's great powers will behave, but apart from being a lot less likely to possess Bush Junior's messianic personality defect, I don't see how tomorrow's super-powers leaders are necessarily any likelier to be more concerned with an egalitarian balance among countries than any given non-crazy US president from the past 60 years, like say Eisenhower or Ford.

Even though I accept Ms. Cobban's thesis that American power may be on the wane, I think it has more to do with America's balance of payments problems and massive debt, as well as the emergence of a globalist overclass that has less and less economic incentive to see the long-term health of the US economy as intertwined with their own self-interest. Trends that have been accelerated, ironically, by you-know-who.

I remember lefty blogger after lefty blogger, from those who were invited to "blog the convention" in Boston in the summer of 2004, going on and on about how "brilliant" Kerry's speech was when he accepted the democratic nomination, how tough and determined he sounded, saluting the crowd, etc. etc.

It was a doomed exercise. None of them said a word about how cowardly he must have seemed to the general public in July of 2004, perhaps because they couldn't see it for themselves. Earlier that summer the swift boat guys viciously and scurrilously attacked Kerry, and he said and did nothing, even actively discouraging his first wife from speaking on his behalf.

He couldn't be bothered to defend himself-- too unseemly perhaps, for a patrician, but none of the bloggers who attended could see this, dazzled by the convention lights and sundry goodies. He bravely saluted them -- a nice, safe audience.

But defend himself in the outside, rough-and-tumble world of cable-TV news soundbites? Couldn't be bothered. All he could do was go on tv and ask George Jr to denounce them, a little like asking your Yale brother to tell the bullies to stop picking on him. Think of all the voters in Cleveland, who stood for hours waiting to vote for this sorry excuse for a democrat, even as he decided to fold up right away the next day, even with over 40 million bucks left in the campaign kitty. After all, if he fought like Gore, what would his friends think of him?

In all likelihood the democrats are going to get screwed by electronic devices, again. And if Hillary(or whoever)waits till after she gets shafted to complain about the jimmied, broken voting sytem, she'll just look like a whiner, and the very notion that perhaps the paperless, auditless voting machines are an antidemocratic abomination will likewise be regarded as an argument borne of sour grapes.

In the meantime, bloggers owe it to themselves to not allow themselves to be dazzled by these go-along-to-get-along losers, er, democratic big shots.

I recognize that personality tests can be sophisticated instruments, and that they generally include control questions to test for truthfulness, some of which are hard to detect, others less so(like the classic "I read every editorial in the newspaper").

But when companies who administer personality tests sell them to employers, my understanding is that they generally want employers to subscribe to a service by which professionals interpret the results.

But, human beings being human, I expect that many employers decide to discard the subscriptions and administer and interpret the tests themselves, and like you Cary I'm guessing the LW is correct, for that reason.

Of course, there's another ethical dimension to mandatory personality-testing: I don't think the inner recesses of my personality are any of my prospective employer's business. One one level it's a little like expecting me to attend social functions to stay in my employer's good graces.(Which, come to think of it, is a different manifestation of being asked to pretend to be extroverted.)

One's conscientiousness and competence-- and willingness to do said job-- should be sufficient.

1."...one of Suskind's big scoops, that al-Qaida was planning an attack on the New York subways -- a strike inexplicably called off by bin Laden's strategist, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri."

I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. Why would they call off an attack on the subway system? Although I don't doubt that this is a valuable book, I strongly suspect that the aborted subway plot, apparently based on only one source, was disinformation fed to Suskind.

2.As an aside, when I listen to politicos (and politically inclined journalists) bandying about the phrase "cut and run" I think back to how Reagan quite sensibly pulled the US troops out of Beirut in the mid-80s some time after that horrible attack on the army barracks. No one accused Ronnie of cutting and running. That wasn't so long ago. Are people just a lot stupider now?