Gas Prices, The Royal Wedding, and a School People Have Actually Heard Of…

1. On the Go – Phnom Penh today. Back to Takeo tomorrow. Phnom Penh (again) on Saturday. Bantay Meanchey 0n Sunday. Siem Reap on Monday. Phnom Penh (again) on Wednesday.

Nothing like spending hot season in the back of a Cambodian taxi!

2. The Lottery – Tomorrow at noon I find out whether or not I got into the NYC Marathon. Is it weird that I’m more nervous about this than I was about law school?

3. I’m Sorry… I Spoke Too Soon - In my last post I wrote that the fighting on the Thai/Cambodian border had stopped. I’m sorry… I lied. Throughout the last five days there have been several more clashes and the death toll has now reached thirteen. While there has been talk of a ceasefire, it doesn’t like it’s going to happen anytime soon.

4. A School People Have Actually Heard Of - You know what the best part about going to a big name school like Michigan is? When people ask me where I’m going to school, I don’t have to preface my answer with, “a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts.” I can just say it.

5. West Wing Season One – Finished season one of the West Wing last night and I gotta be honest- I was a little disappointed. Some of the episodes were solid, but over all I was surprised by how corny it is. While I’m going to give season two a shot, if it doesn’t get better there’s no way I’m making it all the way to end.

6. It Could Be Worse – In the last month my Facebook news feed has been dominated by complaints about the price of gas. While it’s definitely bad in America, you might be interested to know that there are exactly 100 other countries around the world where it’s even worse (including Cambodia). According to Nation Master, here are the ten counties with the highest gas prices…

1. Uruguay
2. United Kingdom
3. Israel
4. Argentina
5. Japan
6. Finland
7. Iceland
8. Netherlands
9. Denmark
10. Burundi

(73. Cambodia, 101. United States)

7. Our Republican President – In today’s Washington Post, Ezra Klein calls Obama what he really is, an old-school Republican…

Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s. (The Shocking Truth About the Birthplace of Obama’s Policies)

And in a New Yorker blog post, Hedrik Hertzberg, does a good job of explaining what makes Obama so disappointing…

One of the mysteries of the Obama Presidency has been Obama’s inability—or disinclination, I’m not sure which—to give sustained emotional sustenance to a certain slice of his supporters. I don’t mean the “Democratic base,” especially the institutional “interest group” base. And I don’t mean the disillusioned left, which is easily, almost perpetually disillusioned because it has such an ample supply of illusions. (A lot of lefties, notwithstanding their scorn for “the system,” seem to have an implicit naive faith in the workability of the mechanisms of American governance. Hence their readiness to blame the disappointments of the Administration’s first two years mainly on Obama’s alleged moral or character failings—cowardice, spinelessness, insincerity, duplicity, what have you.) Mainly, I guess, the slice I’m talking about is of people like me: liberals who continue to respect and admire Obama; who fully appreciate the disaster he inherited and the horrendous difficulty of enacting a coherent agenda even when your own party “controls” both Houses of Congress; who think his substantive record is pretty good under the circumstances; who dislike some of the distasteful compromises he has made but aren’t sure we wouldn’t have done the same in his shoes (etc.—you get the idea); but who are puzzled that our eloquent, writerly President seems to have done so little to educate the public about his own vision and to contrast it with that of the Republican right—which is to say, the Republicans. (Obama Cuts His Rhetorical Deficit)

8. The Royal Wedding - Kate, William, Harry, Pippa, Michael, Carole, Charles, Camilla… I can’t get enough.

Yes, I admit it… I’m all about the royal wedding.

9. The Royal Snub - “United Kingdom newspaper The Sun reported on Friday that the Cambodian King was ‘the only Royal out of dozens worldwide who has failed to respond’ to the invite to the nuptials, to be held on Friday.

Wait. Not so fast…

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Koy Kuong said yesterday that the newspaper had been mistaken in their assessment of the situation and that the King had indeed replied to the invitation more than two weeks ago.

“The newspaper is wrong, in fact the King responded on the eighth of April and cannot attend,” Koy Kuong said. (The Phnom Penh Post)

Too bad.

10. Photo Dump – And finally a few more random pictures…

Have a great day!