The case for tackling these issues now is straightforward. If they are put off until the lame duck session, there will be little time to avoid the train wreck scheduled for January, when the first round of harsh, across-the-board spending cuts are to kick in, absent agreed upon cuts.

As Joe Lieberman put it, “this whole idea of waiting until the lame-duck session and then trying to do all of this, that we have to do in a limited number of weeks — that’s very risky.” Olympia Snowe added: “We have a lot of issues pending in the lame-duck session, and I think we ought to be settling them now as opposed to later. . .so we know what direction the country is going in — and not slapdash in the lame-duck session in all these big questions.”

But Harry Reid is having none of it. He said: “With the way that the Republicans are forcing us to legislate, I honestly don’t see our being able to do much of anything prior to the election.”

As a general matter, voters are likely to find more merit in the views of Boehner, Lieberman, and Snowe than in Reid’s complacent unwillingness to tackle the biggest issue of the day. If it comes to forcing another showdown over the debt ceiling, however, the politics become anyone’s guess.

Until recently, Bruning had been leading in the polls. Fischer had been running third, behind Don Stenberg, the state’s treasurer, who was endorsed by Sen. Jim DeMint and the Club for Growth. However, Fishcer, who has never run for statewide office before, received a late endorsement from Sarah Palin. As election day approached, the former Alaska Governor and her husband placed robocalls on Fischer’s behalf. Meanwhile, Bruning was the subject of critical ads paid for by Joe Ricketts and his PAC, the Ending Spending Action Fund.

This race, then, is another victory for a Tea Party-style candidate and another defeat for the Republican establishment candidate.

What does it mean for the general election? Bruning had been crushing Kerrey in the polls, but Fischer does all right. The most recent poll I’ve seen of a Fischer-Kerrey race was a PPP survey from late March in which Fischer led by 10 points (Bruning led by 17 points and Stenberg led by 14). Earlier in March, Rasmussen had Fischer up by 12.

Nebraska is a very Red state. Although Kerrey, an able guy and a war hero, was once quite popular there, he has spent the last 11 years in New York City running a college. He was last elected by Nebraskans in 1994. Unless Fishcher self-destructs, it seems unlikely that Kerrey can ride triumphantly back to the State after all of these years, especially running on a ticket headed by Barack Obama in a year when the Dems are hardly riding a wave. Indeed, the March PPP survey showed that 51 percent of Nebraskans viewed Kerrey unfavorably, compared to only 36 who had a favorable opinion.

I wrote here that, “based, at least, on the information that is now public,” Zimmerman should have been charged with manslaughter. I also noted that it couldn’t be the case that there is literally no evidence other than Zimmerman’s account:

The reality is that there is always evidence other than the testimony of the survivor. There is considerable physical evidence, and here, both of the protagonists were on the telephone until moments before their final confrontation. Some of that conversation was recorded. In addition, there may well be eyewitness testimony.

We now know about some, but not all, of that evidence, and the medical records may well explain the original prosecutor’s acceptance of Zimmerman’s plea of self-defense.

ABC comments on the implications of Zimmerman’s injuries:

The medical notes may bolster Zimmerman’s claim that he acted in self-defense because he was being attacked. However, the prosecution contends that Zimmerman instigated the confrontation after profiling the teen, who was walking home after buying skittles and ice tea. They prosecution says Martin was breaking no laws and was not disturbing anyone as he walked back to his father’s girlfriend’s home.

Zimmerman is entitled to “profile” anyone he wants, but he is not entitled to start a fight with Martin or anyone else. What I take to be ABC’s implicit assumption about the law is not correct. In fact, as I noted here, Florida’s statutes contain a very specific provision that governs the situation where a person initiates an altercation, but then gets the worst of it and fears death or great bodily harm:

776.041 Use of force by aggressor. —The justification described in the preceding sections of this chapter is not available to a person who:

(1) Is attempting to commit, committing, or escaping after the commission of, a forcible felony; or

(2) Initially provokes the use of force against himself or herself, unless:

(a) Such force is so great that the person reasonably believes that he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and that he or she has exhausted every reasonable means to escape such danger other than the use of force which is likely to cause death or great bodily harm to the assailant; or

(b) In good faith, the person withdraws from physical contact with the assailant and indicates clearly to the assailant that he or she desires to withdraw and terminate the use of force, but the assailant continues or resumes the use of force.

It is not clear whether there is any evidence that Zimmerman in fact initiated the confrontation; maybe there is an as-yet-unknown eyewitness. But let’s assume that he did. In that case, he would still be entitled to use deadly force if he reasonably believed that he was in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm, and he had done all he reasonably could to escape, or had “withdrawn from physical contact” with Martin and clearly indicated that he wanted to terminate the confrontation. Given the injuries described by Zimmerman’s doctor, it is plausible to conclude that Zimmerman’s belief that he was in danger of death or great bodily harm was reasonable. Further, given that the evidence of his injuries corroborates Zimmerman’s account that Martin had him on the ground and was pummeling his face and banging his head into the pavement, it also seems reasonable to conclude that Zimmerman had no reasonable means of escape other than to respond with deadly force of his own.

So Zimmerman appears to have a strong claim of self-defense–based, once again, on the limited evidence in the public domain–even if he initially provoked the confrontation with Martin. That’s how I read the statute anyway.

But right now I want to be the first to bring to your attention a major publishing event next November, just in time for Christmas.  On November 20, Little, Brown will finally publish The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, the third volume of the Churchill biography begun by the incomparable narrative stylist William Manchester.  (You can already pre-order from Amazon.)  Old age and ill-health prevented Manchester from completing the third volume beyond the first few chapters, and it fell to Paul Reid, a journalist who was close friends with Bill Manchester (as Paul refers to him) to complete the long-awaited final volume.

Through a long chain of circumstances I’ve come to know Paul a little, and we’ve had long conversations about Churchill, Manchester’s writing style and research method, and the trials and tribulations of writing long-form narrative non-fiction.  Paul kindly shared a few draft chapters with me; I think he’s got the hang of Manchester’s literary sensibility.  Manchester’s first two Churchill volumes are susceptible to a number of substantive and stylistic criticisms, but they are unquestionably the most popular Churchill biographies for a reason: Manchester captured the context of Churchill extremely well, and his narrative style is virtually unequalled.

For what it’s worth, here’s my criticism of Manchester, from my 2005 book Greatness:

William Manchester employed as a hortatory theme the viewpoint that Churchill was “the last lion”—the last man of superlative virtue and courage, whose supreme greatness shall never be seen again on the human stage.  Manchester attributes Churchill’s greatness precisely to the extent that Churchill was a Victorian anachronism in 1940. . .     Here we must suggest that for all of Manchester’s fulsome admiration for Churchill and magnificence in describing his life, his premise is wrong.  Roy Jenkins, Churchill’s most recent biographer, says that explaining Churchill as a product of Victorian aristocracy is “unconvincing. . . Churchill was far too many faceted, idiosyncratic and unpredictable a character to allow himself to be imprisoned by the circumstances of his birth.”  John Lukacs adds: “Contrary to most accepted views we ought to consider that [Churchill] was not some kind of admirable remnant of a more heroic past.  He was not The Last Lion.  He was something else.”  The “something else” at the root of Churchill’s greatness in 1940 derived not from being a Victorian man, but from being, in a larger sense, an ancient man—the kind of “great-souled man” contemplated in Aristotle and other classical authors.

Even with this caveat, I’m greatly looking forward to the last installment of The Last Lion come November.

P.S. Now, if only Jim Muller and St. Augustine’s Press could get the nearly-as-long-promised unabridged River War out sometime this century. . .  (Something of an inside joke between me and Walter Berns. . .)

When I finished Unbroken I offered 10 notes on Unbroken in “The improbable lives of Louis Zamperini.” I want to do the same for Larson’s Garden. More than anything I want to urge you to read the book. Almost every page has something interesting on it. I found the book easy to read and hard to put down.

1. I was motivated to read Larson’s book by Janet Maslin’s New York Times review. She gives a good sense of the book’s merits without quite conveying its richness. Coincidentally, Maslin also has a good review of Unbroken.

2. The subject of Larson’s book is the American ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, and his daughter, Martha, from the time Dodd was offered the job by President Roosevelt in 1933 until the Night of the Long Knives in May 1934. Dodd was something like Roosevelt’s fourth choice for the job, it having been turned down by several others before Dodd’s name bubbled up. Dodd knew Germany and spoke German, but he was an academic historian with expertise on the old South, not Germany. He was chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago when he answered the call to serve. Dodd was torn about taking the job. He wanted to complete his magnum opus, The Old South. Like Edward Causaubon’s Key to All Mythologies in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, it was not to be. (What was Dodd’s attitude to the antebellum South? Larson never does give any sense of Dodd’s thinking about it.)

3. Larson tightens the focus of the book to Dodd and Martha over their first year in Berlin, taking liberties no novelist could. He almost completely ignores Dodd’s wife and Dodd’s son, who remain ciphers in the book, and he trusts that his readers have sufficient knowledge of Nazi Germany to fill in the rest of the history after mid-1934.

4. Roosevelt had asked Dodd truly to represent the United States under difficult circumstances. Larson gives us Hitler and the Nazi regime in mid-1933 when the future was an open question. If you were Dodd, how long would it have taken you to size up Hitler in power? To give up the hope that the exercise of power might temper him or show his previously stated ambitions to be rhetorical? To give up the hope that competing forces might overthrow him? Larson lets the reader see the regime through Dodd’s eyes as he attempted to sort things out and discharge his duties on behalf of the United States.

5. Dodd is a decent man and a good character, but Martha Dodd is absolutely luminescent. A character beyond fiction, she lights up the book. As Maslin has it, she is “an indiscriminate flirt who looked at a stint in Germany as a glamorous lark, and whose own abundant writing fills [the book] with outré remarks.” Among her affairs in Berlin are one with Rudolf Diels, then the head of the Gestapo, and one with Boris Vinogradov, a KGB agent, whom she seems actually to have loved. Henry James, call your office!

Vinogradov inspired Martha to tour the Soviet Union. She found the charms of the country eminently resistible, though she seems rather obviously to have been recruited to the service of the KGB. When the authorities came calling in the 1950′s, Martha fled with her husband to Mexico and then to Prague. Larson leaves a number of threads hanging on this point.

6. Dodd had a great moment on the occasion of Columbus Day in October 1933, when he gave a speech before the Berlin branch of the American Chamber of Commerce. Larson writes: “His plan was to use history to telegraph criticism of the Nazi regime, but obliquely so that only those in the audience with a good grasp of ancient and modern history would understand the underlying message. In America a speech of that nature would have seemed anything but heroic; amid the mounting oppression of Nazi rule, it was positively daring.” Dodd explained in a letter to Jane Addams: “It was because I had seen so much injustice and domineering little groups, as well as heard the complaints of so many best people in the country, that I ventured as far as my position would allow and by historical analogy warned men as solemnly as possible against half-educated leaders being permitted to lead nations into war.”

7. Dodd’s few meetings with Hitler in the period covered by the book are fascinating. In March 1934, for example, Dodd is instructed to meet with Hitler to take up the subject of Nazi propaganda unleashed in the United States. Hitler brushed off Dodd’s complaint as representing — shocker! — “Jewish lies.” Hitler became enraged and exclaimed: “Damn the Jews!” Dodd sought to moderate Hitler by advising him on the American approach to the Jewish problem: “You know a number of high positions in our country are occupied by Jews, both in New York and Illinoi.” He named several “eminent fair-minded Hebrews” including Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. Dodd explained to Hitler “that where the question of over-activity of Jews in university or official life made trouble, we had managed to redistribute the offices in such a way as not to give great offense…” In his memorandum on the meeting, Dodd explained: “My idea was to suggest a different procedure from what has been followed here — of course never giving pointed advice.” Larson does not pass judgment on Dodd’s approach, but it’s a low point.

8. Hitler did not respond favorably to Dodd’s advice to take the subtle approach. Hitler shot back that “59 percent of all offices in Russia were held by Jews; that they had ruined the country and that they intended to ruin Germany.” More furious now than ever, Hitler proclaimed: “If they continue their activity, we shall make a complete end to all of them in this country.” Larson comments: “It was a strange moment. Here was Dodd, the humble Jeffersonian schooled to view statesmen as rational creatures, seated before the leader of one of Europe’s great nations as that leader grew nearly hysterical and threatened to destroy a portion of his own population. It was extraordinary, utterly alien to his own experience.”

9. Hitler praised Roosevelt in a letter he wrote to him that month. Hitler commended Roosevelt’s efforts to restore America’s economy and stated that “duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline” were virtues that should be dominant in any culture. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German State philosophy which finds its expression in the slogan The Public Weal Transcends the Interests of the Individual.” The State Department puzzled over how best to respond. In his diary one high-ranking State Department official wrote: “We sought to sidestep the impression that the President was becoming a Fascist.”

10. If you had been an American in Berlin in 1933, what would you have seen? What would you have said? What would you have done? What conclusions would you have drawn? These are a few of the questions that are raised implicitly on every page of Larson’s utterly compelling book.