Parting Shots

I'm about to leave my desk for a couple of weeks. Here's a pair of pieces to chew on while I'm away:

? John Tierney has a sharp column today on the extent to which the Red-on-Blue culture war is "a myth created by people inside the Beltway talking to each other or, more precisely, shouting at each other."

? The Christian Science Monitor ran an interesting report last month that I only just discovered this weekend, about a slum in Kenya whose residents "asked the city council to give them the land that they had been squatting on illegally. In return, they promised to build proper houses, schools, and community centers without any government money."