Joining Sarah Palin (perhaps "affirmiating" her position?), Newt Gingrich issued a statement last night opposing the proposed building of a mosque at the World Trade Center site. Gingrich took a break from his busy no-really-I'm-running-for-president-this-time-and-while-I-have-your-attention-have-you-bought-my-new-book-slash-movie? campaign to argue that the best way for Americans to be models of religious tolerance is to stop being tolerant. After all, writes Gingrich, "[M]ore than 100 mosques already exist in New York City. Meanwhile, there are no churches or synagogues in all of Saudi Arabia. In fact no Christian or Jew can even enter Mecca."

That is true. And the religious diversity and tolerance in the U.S. is something that Americans are rightly proud of, not something they usually pout about. Interestingly, ordinary Americans continue to display extremely high levels of religious tolerances, especially compared to their European cousins (and both Palin and Gingrich). A recently released survey from the Pew Global Attitudes Project looked at support for measures that ban Muslim women from wearing full veils over their faces in public places. In France, where the government is close to passing such a measure, 82% approve of a ban. Support is also high in Germany and Britain, with 71% and 62%, respectively, favoring measures to make veil-wearing illegal.

But in the U.S.? Only 28% of Americans would support a measure banning Muslim women from wearing veils.

Now, supporting the rights of Muslim women to veil their faces is not the same thing as supporting the building of a mosque at the World Trade Center site. But the finding does reflect what other surveys have consistently reported--that Americans are pretty tolerant when it comes to religious differences and they prefer to focus on interfaith cooperation rather than strife between religious traditions. That suggests Gingrich is in the minority when he thinks we should follow the lead of Saudi Arabia rather than continuing to be a model of religious tolerance and encouraging others to join us.

Journalists are an oxymoronic tribe of fierce individualists. We're in constant competition with each other, but we're thrown into each other's company--on press buses and planes--and often find ourselves in coy discussions about the amazing things we witness together. This is the stuff of memorable and close friendships; it is also valuable professionally to hear what others are thinking and test your ideas against theirs (as obliquely as possible because you don't want people stealing your stuff).

During 40 years as a journalist, I've been on many press buses and planes--and I've also been part of other regular conversations, all of which I've enjoyed and learned from; none of which were in the slightest bit insidious. The most memorable of these--and one that really helped me to shape my thinking about domestic policy issues twenty years ago--was the New Paradigm Society, a bipartisan group of centrists who met regularly for dinner in Washington at the turn of the 90s. It was co-founded by Jim Pinkerton of President Bush the Elder's staff and Elaine Kamarck (soon to be a prominent member of Al Gore's staff). The group addressed a central conundrum: the welfare state wasn't going to be abolished--not even the arch-conservative Ronald Reagan could do that--but it wasn't working very well, either. There were some great conversations and arguments that took place about how to fix the welfare system, education, housing, health care and the entitlements. The conservatives in the group tended to worry about how to provide those services less expensively; the liberals tended to worry about how to provide them more effectively. Some incredibly creative synergies emerged; other discussions were just a waste of time. Politicians as diverse as Newt Gingrich and Bruce Babbitt were occasional visitors. The friends I made there--people like Pinkerton, Kamarck, Bill Galston--remain friends to this day (others, like Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, have become friendly adversaries).

At other times in my career, I was part of a regular lunch group of political reporters in New York in the 1980s, and part of a New Testament Bible study in Washington in the 90s (I wanted to learn more about the teachings of Jesus; I went on to study 1st century Christianity for a semester at Columbia University).

All of which is to say that my participation in the now--rather hilariously--controversial list-serve called Journolist was nothing unique in my history.

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On why it will be bad, but perhaps not completely terrible horrible for Democrats this year.

When Republican chairman Michael Steele popped off earlier this month and warned that America's war in Afghanistan is "a losing proposition," he was nearly drummed out of his job for breaking with the party's official line. But with every passing day there's more evidence of unrest over the war among Republican elder statesmen. The freshest data point comes in the form of a Financial Times op-ed by Robert Blackwill, a GOP foreign policy veteran whom Condi Rice tasked with helping to salvage Iraq. Blackwill says the Afghanistan battle can't be won at a bearable cost, and that America must resign itself to yielding control of the Pashtun south to the Taliban while maintaining control of the restive north and east with a substantially reduced military force--even if it means, as he admits, "a profoundly disappointing outcome to America's 10 years in Afghanistan." Likewise, Richard Haas, another longtime Republican foreign policy hand and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in the latest Newsweek that "it is time to scale down our ambitions [in Afghanistan] and both reduce and redirect what we do." And then there's Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an early foreign policy mentor for Barack Obama, whom the New York Times notes today has been fretting about a "lack of clarity" around the American mission.

These men all represent the GOP's embattled realist wing, which recognizes the limits on American power and is far more wary of military action than are the party's neocon hawks. But while the realists once had enormous sway over Republican elected officials, it's hawks who are setting the party's agenda. On Capitol Hill, you can almost count on one hand the Republicans freely expressing concerns about the war's winnability, and the loudest GOP voices in the media tend to belong to the militaristic likes of Bill Kristol, Liz Cheney and Charles Krauthammer. Meanwhile, the party's most ambitious political figures are fighting to out-hawk one another: Consider Sarah Palin's pugilistic foreign policy vision, along with the way Mitt Romney has broken with his party's wise men to attack Barack Obama's START nuclear arms treaty with the Russians. Jacob Heilbrunn tracks the decline of the party's old national security establishment in an important new Foreign Policy essay:

[T]hese moderate conservatives all have one big thing in common: They're in their dotage. Nor is there a successor generation in sight to uphold their legacy. The result is that despite the bungled Iraq war, the right remains on the offensive. An insurrectionist movement, it not only opposes liberal elites, but also the quisling patricians in its own ranks.... Add the welter of other conservative and neoconservative organizations dedicated to propagating the message that only a return to the principles enunciated by Ronald Reagan can restore American security and, by extension, the GOP's electoral dominance, and it becomes clear that the traditional Republican establishment isn't on the defensive; it's in danger of extinction.

There is a potentially important current running against this phenomenon, namely the budding isolationism apparent in the Tea Party movement. After all, both the de facto godfather of the Tea Party, Ron Paul, and his son, Rand, apparently think the U.S. should get out of Afghanistan; while the conservative-populist hero Pat Buchanan has railed against "the hubris of the nation-builders." But for now a clear majority of Republicans--57 percent, according to a July ABC News polls--still support the war in Afghanistan. (Broader public opinion is more mixed; most Americans believe fighting in Afghanistan is the right thing to do. But also that our commitment shouldn't extend much longer.)

With the Times noting signs of unease about the war within the White House, it's possible that Barack Obama could lower America's ambitions there, much as the likes of Blackwill and Haas suggest, with the support of anti-war elements on the left and the right. Some influential Washington Democrats are already discussing such a scenario. But for now, Obama remains in a political box. The Republican Party's political leadership isn't listening to their aging wise men or the Tea Party's war-weary activists. GOP figures like Palin, Romney and John McCain appear ready to defend the war as ardently as they did the Iraq campaign through its darkest days--and are likely to attack Barack Obama over any signs of American "retreat." For Obama, cutting a deal with the Taliban could be a piece of cake compared to navigating the politics of war back home.

TIME's Katy Steinmetz files this dispatch:

Colorado, with its funky mix of liberal college cities and rural farming towns, ritzy ski resorts and barren tracts of mountain land, is a 2010 bellwether state. The statewide races are toss-ups, and factors beyond the platforms are playing big in most races. Gubernatorial hopeful and former Republican representative Scott McInnis keeps taking hits after a plagiarism scandal, which has led some to call for a brand new candidate awfully late in the game. My colleague Alex Altman dissected the GOP senate primary's bickering over who's the biggest outsider in a race where the candidates are a veritable “Can You Spot the Difference?” cartoon. And the state's third congressional district has become a hot spot for national Republican endorsements of candidates who are trying to unseat three-term Democratic Rep. John Salazar in a part of the country carried by Bush and McCain.

First to get a boost was state legislator Scott Tipton, who was endorsed by conservative pundit Dick Morris. But that shout out was soon overshadowed by a rival Bob McConnell's new weapon: the Sarah Palin stamp of approval. McConnell, a veteran and lawyer who got into the game by riding the Tea Party we've-had-enough wave, aggressively courted Palin after she expressed interest in the race. On Monday Palin posted an endorsement of McDonnell on her Facebook page.

Her justification, emblematic of the message-over-substance theme riddling so many races, was largely based on his background—mainly his military record and family-man status, topped off with mentions of his mountaineering feats. The one policy position she mentioned was his plan to “return our country back to our Constitutional roots of limited and fiscally responsible government.” That rather vague goal is standard Tea Party fare, and seven Tea Party groups have gotten behind McConnell as he gears up for the August 10 primary.

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Multiple outlets are now reporting that President Obama just called Shirley Sherrod. Will he try to persuade her to rejoin the USDA in some capacity, apologize, chat about race relations or some combination?

UPDATE: Here's the White House press release about the call:

The President reached Ms. Sherrod by telephone at about 12:35. They spoke for seven minutes.

The President expressed to Ms. Sherrod his regret about the events of the last several days. He emphasized that Secretary Vilsack was sincere in his apology yesterday, and in his work to rid USDA of discrimination.

The President told Ms. Sherrod that this misfortune can present an opportunity for her to continue her hard work on behalf of those in need, and he hopes that she will do so.

I have little interest in the shopworn debate about whether or to what extent the Tea Party movement is racist. The impetus for this story--which was written several days ago, before the Shirley Sherrod saga stole its thunder--was an odious blog post written by Mark Williams, and the critical response it prompted from a cohort of Tea Party activists who formed a sub-group essentially dedicated to running damage control on jeremiads like these. But the point of the story is that the movement's disaggregated structure, which feeds the somewhat romanticized view that it is an entirely grassroots phenomenon, has the potential to handicap its goals. As I write:

Williams' invective, which came just days after the North Iowa Tea Party erected a billboard likening Obama to Hitler and Stalin, underscores a real organizational dilemma. The movement is bent on retaining the decentralized structure that fostered its growth, but its lack of formal leadership — and its confounding array of overlapping groups — means that when rogue members spout off, they can seem to be speaking for the movement as a whole.

The group that spoke out against Williams, the National Tea Party Federation, has a moniker that belies the bare-bones reality. (The dizzying array of sects within the movement -- Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Express, etc etc -- is one reason many people still don't realize there is no single, monolithic Tea Party.) I'd argue that the movement would be well-served by resisting its ideological preference for local autonomy and becoming more centralized--if only to have formal leadership in place to respond to events like this one. That's partly what the Federation wanted to do, and as Politico notes, their efforts generated no shortage of scorn. It's a flashpoint, perhaps, of the movement's internal struggle between pragmatism and purity.