[Note: This is the second of a two-part series. The first installment ran yesterday, and covered the first half of the Iraq SOFA in detail.]

The Status Of Forces Agreement ("SOFA") between Iraq and the United States covers wide-ranging and significant issues between the two countries.

It also covers the trivial and insignificant as well. I don't know why, but this paragraph in Article 18 -- "Official and Military Vehicles" -- seemed to me to be about the most trivial in the entire document. So we start today's look at the SOFA with a very small-bore issue.

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There has been a lot of ink spilled over the ramifications of the agreement recently struck between the United States and Iraq on our presence there for the next three years. The Status Of Forces Agreement ("SOFA") was passed by the Iraqi Parliament and signed by all three members of the Iraqi Executive Council, meaning it will have the force of law come the first of January, 2009. President Bush has decided that his signature was enough for America to enter the agreement, so Congress never got their say on the document. But with such commentary flying left and right, I thought I would go to the document itself to see what it actually says (versus how people are interpreting it).

What I found is that the Iraqis got almost everything they had pushed for, and the Bush administration got almost nothing of what they wanted. This agreement was tailored for Iraq's political situation, and not America's. The Iraqis used a combination of a ticking clock and their own public pressure to insist on several points that must have horrified the Bush people. Actually, two ticking clocks -- our own elections (and Bush's lame duck status), and the fact that the United Nations authorization for us being in Iraq expires at the end of this year. Neither country, for their own individual reasons, wanted to extend the U.N. mandate, and Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki used this as a giant lever to get pretty much everything he wanted from Bush.

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Brian Williams, NBC's talking head extraordinaire, is probably a decent guy, a guy with whom you could sit down and have a beer. [More on the alcohol subject at the end, I promise.] But that doesn't excuse something he said last night on Jay Leno's show.

And no, I'm not referring to his faulty math. If my ears didn't deceive me, I heard him say Obama won the election with a vote of 53 percent to 49 percent. Um... OK... "six out of five doctors" may recommend you think about those numbers a bit, Brian, before you quote them again.

While that was amusing, BriWi's other comment was not. He suggested -- not joking around, but with a straight face -- that we call our current economic crisis a name the Irish have used for decades to describe the Northern Ireland standoff: "The Troubles." This is incredibly insensitive and outrageous, because Williams is suggesting that we equate bailing out Wall Street and the car companies with a conflict which has, to date, cost about as many lives as 9/11. Since BriWi's not a Democrat, I can't give him a "Most Disappointing" award, so instead I will just award him a gigantic dunce cap. Instructions: put on head, sit in corner, and think hard about what you just said.

Sheesh.

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I am normally not much inclined to give California Senator Dianne Feinstein the benefit of the doubt, mostly because I have a good enough memory to recall the dozens of times she has earned the "DINO" (Democrat In Name Only) label for voting with Republicans. She's not my favorite senator, in other words. She's not even my favorite senator from California -- and likely never will be as long as Barbara Boxer is still serving. But I have to say, the recent kerfluffle over her comments on torture and the Army Field Manual seem to me to be a tempest in a teapot. I am willing to take her at her word that she was quoted out of context in the New York Times, and I am also willing to take her at her word in the clarification of her comments she has subsequently issued.

If you're unaware of the fracas between DiFi (as she is known in the Golden State) and the media (and the blogosphere), here is the offending text from the Times article:

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I'm going to make a prediction here (one I have mentioned in passing before): Barack Obama is going to do something to absolutely enrage leftists, progressives, and the few remaining Americans who actually call themselves liberals; and, furthermore, he's going to do it within his first 100 days in office. The only thing I won't predict is what that "something" is going to be.

I say this for numerous reasons. Even before Obama started announcing his cabinet picks, he showed over and over again that he was more of a centrist kind of guy than anyone would give him credit for. The right wing, of course, was going apoplectic over Obama (Socialist! Radical! Ultra-liberal!) while at the same time conveniently ignoring George Bush handing out free money to Wall Street, or (for that matter) Sarah Palin running her state's government on a strict "redistribution of wealth" philosophy. But it should also be noted that the left wing was building their own caricature of Obama, one that looked strikingly like the one the right wing was building -- "Obama, the Mighty Progressive." The left refused to take Obama at his word when he spoke of compromise, post-partisan politics, or reaching across the aisle. Leftists everywhere consoled themselves by thinking, "He's just saying that to get elected, once he gets in there, he'll pass everything on our agenda and we'll be so strong in Congress that it'll actually happen."

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Barack Obama is a unique individual in many ways, both great and trivial. He has set a lot of "firsts" (or, in some cases "first in a long time"). This list usually starts with his race. Whether you prefer the "first black president" or the "first biracial president," the list of "firsts" certainly doesn't stop with the color of his skin. He is the first president to come from the state of Hawai'i, for instance. The first post-baby-boom president (by some definitions, at least). He is only the third president elected directly from the Senate (the first since Kennedy). He is the first president (to my knowledge, at least) educated outside America at an such early age (maybe in post-revolutionary times this was common, but not so much in modern times). And, charmingly, it will be the first time since Amy Carter that there will be young "First Children" in the White House.

But instead of mining this trove of trivia, what Chris Matthews focused on last weekend (on his weekly show "The Chris Matthews Show") was whether Obama would say his middle name when he is sworn in next month. Sigh. Maybe we should all encourage Matthews' rumored run for the Senate, at least it would get him off the air for awhile.

[Ahem.]

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There's an old inside-the-Beltway joke where a new House member is being shown around by a veteran of his own party. He is awed by entering the House floor for the first time, and is shown his new seat. He asks, pointing across the aisle to where the other party sits, "Is that where the enemy sits?" The older and wiser Congressman replies, "No, no, here in the House of Representatives we call our opponents 'the loyal opposition.' You're new, so you need to understand this. 'The enemy' is the Senate."

This joke came to mind while listening and reading to Republicans talk about tomorrow's runoff race between the incumbent Saxby Chambliss and his Democratic challenger Jim Martin. Because they're using a talking point which is false and which points out their own ignorance. And since it is ignorance we speak of, where better to begin than a Sarah Palin quote? (Ahem.) Here she is today, at a rally in South Carolina on "Saxby's" behalf (others have pointed out that she never used Chambliss' last name, but I refuse to believe it was because she can't pronounce it):

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This past weekend, the ChrisWeigant.com website got a mild facelift. The most noticeable new thing is the Pledge Drive logo and thermometer, (which you should click on to find out what it's all about!)

Some other minor things on the site were fixed. Such as removing the Election 2008 stuff. I also simplified the list of links and moved them over to the right-hand side of the page, to balance the page overall a bit better. The top menu bar is a little lighter and less dominating. I moved the "Email Chris" link up to the top menu bar, which I've been meaning to do for a while now. And the main text in articles (both on the front page and in the articles itself) is a bit more spread out, hopefully making it easier to read. I may even move to a sans-serif font for the main text, but I'm still experimenting with web fonts, so that will have to wait for now.

But with all renovations come some bugs, and I can't test this on every browser, so I'm relying on you guys to let me know if there are problems, either with the new stuff, or just something that's been bugging you for a while about the site. I've opened this Note to comments, so let me know what you think here.

And thanks in advance for your patience if something's broken....

For only the third time in this column's two-and-a-half year history (see note below), I am turning over my soapbox to a guest columnist. As with both previous times, the author is a commenter here at Huffington Post.

Known as "LewDan," he took exception to a column I wrote, and let me know how he felt in the comments, and later through a private email exchange. While he wasn't exactly agreeing with what I had written, I found him to have a unique perspective on the issue of race in Obama's election and also found him to be an original and well-reasoned thinker. While we disagreed on some things, we did so respectfully and with the intent of making our positions clear to each other.

Because I was so impressed by his writing, I offered him the chance to write a column for the public to read. At first he deferred, but in the end I convinced him that others would enjoy reading what he had to say. The following began as part of our email exchange, and was rewritten as a column by Llewellyn Daniel, who describes himself as:

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Deep into the interregnum (interpresidentum?... interpresidium?) between the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration seems to be a good time to ask: Does this make sense anymore? Why does America wait two-and-a-half months between when we elect our leaders and when we actually let them enter office? And does it make sense to change it?

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