I'm surprised by some of the letters from people who have lived in Cambodia claiming the food is not that good. I worked in an immigrant Cambodian community in the US for a number of years, and was invited into homes for meals 40 or 50 times. The food was amazingly good (noodle soups and fish, mostly). They prized complex bitter flavors that I haven't found in any other cuisine. This was years ago and I've been trying to recapture the flavors myself with little success. Maybe the quality of ingredients available here is different than in Cambodia, or maybe their cooking was influenced by years in refugee camps in Thailand.

A few posts have claimed that the best Cambodian dishes are really Thai dishes, as if Cambodian food was somehow derivative. The direction of causality may be the other way around. Modern Thailand was part of a large Khmer empire for hundreds of years, not the reverse. There are many Khmer influences on Thai culture as a result.

yes, DO IT...DO IT...

Fred will be instantly covered with Eau d' Bush. And that don't smell good.

"Look, obviously, we are completely incompetent and even all our old friends hate us. Old news. Let's just move on and talk about how we're gonna keep repeating all our past mistakes until we're done."

a Bong Hit Archipelago? Planning my next vacation already.

Meanwhile, back to economics. We are now in a situation of inequitable globalization. Capital has globalized but labor, and labor laws, have not. Capital can go wherever it wants to chase cheap labor, but labor cannot chase capital. Though it is highly problematic, the global capital horse is already out of the barn. The only way to start balancing that injustice is to allow the globalization of labor (allow people to follow the capital) and push the globalization of just labor laws (which should be getting more attention from congress than fence-building). How can one call oneself a liberal and not believe that people have a fundamental right to move and work where one wants to? Migration has been a fundamental characteristic of human society for 10s of thousands of years. Now, only the middle and upper classes have that ability - to move to other countries and work there (ever heard of an expat?). It's only the poor who we want to put movement restrictions on. So - if you're rich and sound like us, come on in. If you're poor or talk funny, stay out. How progressive.

You sound like such a nice person, aj. Academia is probably one of the few professions where people from other countries regularly come into this country and take good jobs that an American citizen would love to have and are capable of doing. When on the job market, I frequently didn't get jobs that went to foreigners. So what? They are all human beings with as much a right to those jobs as I. I love this country because I think it DOES stand for something you seem to be against: freedom, opportunity, hope.

So, you're all for freedom, opportunity, and hope, as long as they're kept out of the hands of those nasty foreigners?

I love "liberals" whose entire argument regarding immigration boils down to "I got mine, but I'm not sharing it with you - you're on your own." America is a vastly rich, stable, relatively underpopulated country. That prosperity, by the way, is directly the result of many generations of immigration. Ninety-nine economists out of a hundred will tell you that shutting our borders will be very bad for the economy. On the global scale, we are a wealthy, gated community surrounded by under-privileged, economically depressed neighborhoods - and we refuse to help them in any way, though our wealth rides on the backs of their poverty (our foreign assistance budget is a small fraction, as a percentage of our GNP, or any other industrialized nation). We just want these folk to stay out of our nice neighborhood, because they'll bring down property values, you know. Again, I expect these sentiments from the Limbaughs of the world, but they can in no way be called 'liberal.'

And in other shocking news,

The sun came up this morning.

Gravity continues to pull everything down.

The Pope calls for more catholics.

My dog chased a squirrel.

It must be so nice for Lieberman not to have to think about what his opinions have to be anymore. Kind of like retirement.

are democratic powers-that-be circling the wagons around the LEAST popular of their candidates? The ONLY one guaranteed to lose? She'll lose bigger than Gore and Kerry put together (whatever the hell that means mathmatically).

Obama's money is more a sign of grassroots support than "big money" support. The average donation is smaller than anyone's and the number of donors is many times higher than ever before. Until we have a parliamentary system of government where someone who gets 5% of the vote gets a proportionate seat at the table, not backing the best person who has a chance at actually winning is simply self-defeating. I do wish we had such a multi-party coalition-building system (or a least a system of run-offs), but until we do I will always back the candidate that has the best chance of beating the worst candidate. Right now, I think that is Obama.