One of the world’s most beautiful women tears up talking about one of the world’s worst political messes, and her hopes for an Iraqi refugee boy she recently met in Syria. Resist her appeal if you can:

Link:

As Afghanistan struggles to cut its raging opium production, aid workers try to find alternative crops, but for some former poppy farmers the choice was easy — they planted marijuana instead.

I took this photo earlier tonight at the big Barack Obama rally in NY. His staff had a scissors lift (a.k.a. a cherry-picker) and was taking photographers — and, by the end of the evening, print reporters as well — up in it to get crowd shots. Obama communications director Robert Gibbs said 22,758 people registered online to attend the rally in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, right across the street from New York University, though it’s impossible to know how many of them showed up. It was a very big rally, that’s for sure.

Obama took the stage to the strains of Kanye West‘s “Touch the Sky” (a number of us political press dorks were uncertain of this, but — love the New York press corps — I confirmed it with a nearby reporter from Vibe Vixen) and left to the beat of Yellowcard’s “Believe,” which I didn’t notice until Googling later is a 9-11 tribute song.

Obama’s staff appears to have chosen the date, time, and site of the rally to conveniently coincide with both the Clinton Global Initiative here in New York and John Edwards‘ evening appearance on MTV in a Q & A session with MTV viewers and MySpace readers. The deeper reason for being in New York, of course, is that it has a lot of delegates and distributes them proportionately, and so, in a protracted nomination fight, could add to Obama’s total even if Hillary Clinton wins her home state, as expected. Plus it’s coming up on the end of the quarter, and Obama’s large rallies have tended to serve as pretty effective low-dollar fundraisers, thanks to the dozens of official campaign T-shirt hawkers one finds at them. Heck — within an hour of leaving the rally I received an Obama mobile text-message reminding me to buy a T-shirt , in case I had not done so at the rally, and giving me a 20 percent off discount code to do so.

The rally was clearly targeted toward the MTV demographic, from the choice of location right near a university to a special pre-show guest appearance by 25-year-old Chinese-American rapper Jin, who warmed up the crowd with his “Open Letter to Obama,” perhaps the only hip-hop song ever written that name-checks Jack Abramoff.

Obama opened with some jokes about having lived in New York, which draw giggles from the crowd. “I used to hang out in Washington Square Park,” he said, before giving his mic a quizzical look. “I know a little something about Greenwich Village. I was going to say I know some of the bars around here but I think my communications director was trying to cut that off.”

He then went into his standard stump speech, with slightly more digs at Clinton than usual, and the first dig at Bill Richardson I’ve heard anyone bother to make (in a litany of people who tell voters false things, Obama said, “there are those who will tell you getting out of Iraq is painless”).

After the speech, Obama’s Echo Boom followers streamed out of the park, their faces beatific with the glow of political first love.

I’m contributing to the TPMCafe Book Club, which this week is discussing Matt Bai‘s new book, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.

My take, followed by a question:

Reviewers, including the discussants on this site, have largely praised the book’s portraits and reporting, but taken issue with Bai’s broader argument that the Democratic Party lacks an argument for itself. In my own reading of the book, though, it seems clear to me — as I think Matt has tried a bit to clarify on this site — that that insistent voice asking, “What next? Where do we go from here?” that recurs throughout the narrative is as much Andy Stern’s as Bai’s own. Though the book does not take Stern as its central figure, it is Stern’s push to reshape union politics for the new economy and push to reshape the Democratic Party for the new century that I hear Bai sympathizing with more than any other insurgent effort, and that’s saying something, since he describes himself as feeling a respectful affection and admiration for many of the new players.

My question, both to Bai and to the other discussants, is whether the changes Stern has advocated — his push for a new argument and agenda — have begun to materialize, and whether we are starting to see the first glimmers of the new Democratic argument being laid out on the campaign trail this election cycle.

For example, the Democratic candidates this cycle all have agreed in principle that they ought to propose and support universal healthcare coverage. This might not seem new, but it is fact a shift to a consensus position that did not exist in, say, 2002, when the Democrats were narrowly focused on the question of prescription drug coverage, or even in 2004, when John Edwards derided John Kerry’s health care reform proposals as too ambitious. Further, the Democrats, with the exception of Dennis Kucinich, seem to have temporarily given up what to many voters was the impossible (or impossibly scary) dream of national health insurance in favor of a public-private patchwork that fills the gaps in the system but leaves the majority of American who are already insured or satisfied with the present system unperturbed. This consensus probably would not have emerged had not Stern’s SEIU demanded it as a precondition for considering the candidates for an endorsement.

Second, though he emerges as a figure in the book only on two pages of the 306-page volume, former Vice President Al Gore, through his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, has transformed the nation’s understanding of the environment. We may have witnesses the Death of Environmentalism, but Gore has birthed something even more significant: a new international awareness of the coming climate change crisis. Where Gore has played the role of visionary hero and evangelist, the Democratic candidates for president this election cycle are starting to turn his vision into a policy agenda for the American economy and for global sustainability. When John Edwards tells an audience in a declining industrial town on the fringes of Iowa life about the new hope a “green economy” might give them, he is laying out a cause that can bring new hope to the world and to their community alike. Instead of building washing machines in Iowa, they can build wind turbines, which they can then stand tall within their corn fields, helping America become energy-independent while also helping themselves to a middle-class lifestyle. Hillary Clinton, too, has made “green jobs” a central part of her argument for the new economy, and Barack Obama has laid out powerful ideas for energy independence, some of which owe a lot to the pioneering work of Nordhaus and Schellenberger.

So my question, again, is: Are we starting to see the new argument emerging along with the new infrastructure?

UPDATE: I should also note that questions of global sustainability and the power of corporations to demand green change though their power down the supply chain has been a major theme of this week’s Clinton Global Initiative conference.

As others have pointed out today, philanthropy by the wealthy can rarely have the same impact in the international arena as collective action by people with less money through their governments. That said, a remark by UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres at a press conference with Angelina Jolie on the education of children of conflict really brought home for me what one purpose of the Clinton Global Initiative is, beyond the direct power of the philanthropic efforts it helps to inspire and organize. The point of a $9 million education commitment Guterres was discussing was not just the money, he said. The money was “an instrument” that established the principle that refugees had a right to be educated.

The establishment of social principles and recognition of rights is something that can and sometimes must precede government action, and something philanthropy can help build. In some ways the CGI is operating as a massive lobbying effort by Bill Clinton and many others directed toward business interests and the wealthy, with the goal of making them more progressive. If corporations help establish a general social principle and change their own values through through their commitments to philanthropy, that changes the political climate for the next Democratic president. To put it more concretely, if, say, WAL-MART makes a commitment to asking the shipping fleets that move its goods around the country to change from regular gasoline to bio-diesel, that influences not just the environment and not just the American trucking industry, but also the political climate for Democrats seeking legislative solutions to climate change, by turning a potential business opponent into an ally and industry green leader. Indeed, going straight to the heads of industry can lead to grassroots impacts — such as a world where American truckers become more environmentally conscious, because they have to be — and where those changes could, in turn, potentially trickle up again through the political system.

–Crossposted from Tapped.

For anyone who ever thought the blogosphere was insular, I’d like to lay out all the relationships behind today’s D.C. cafe society contretemps, because it’s actually kind of funny. Brian is/was Ezra’s roommate. Sommer is Matt’s friend. Ezra is staying with Matt here in NYC while we are all up here for the Clinton Global Initiative. Alex and I are friends, as are Alex and Megan. Matt and Ezra and Megan went shooting together on Yom Kippur (bad Jews!), along with Dave, who is throwing a joint birthday party with Brian later this week. Also, Megan and Matt work together. And I used to work with Matt and still work with Ezra. And I think we are all Facebook friends.

If you’re wondering why such an insular group couldn’t resolve something like this over a couple of phone calls and instead had to spill all this ink on it today, well, good question. You’d think at the very least Matt and Ezra could have worked this out over breakfast, but no, that’s not how the blogosphere works. I blame technology. Sometimes it’s good for everyone involved to hash everything out in public, and sometimes…well, it isn’t.