A car bomb ripped through a police compound in a northwestern Pakistani city on Tuesday, killing 11 women and children and one officer, the latest in a string of attacks proving that Islamist militants remain a potent force in the country.

This originally appeared on Robert Reich's blog

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Jim Kessler: the latest pundit to use hindsight to invent nonexistent differences between Ronald Reagan's political standing in 1982 and Barack Obama's today.

Marty Peretz owns the New Republic, a venerable, 95-year-old magazine of politics, arts, and culture. And because he owns it, he is allowed to call himself "editor-in-chief" and the magazine has to publish his racist rantings.

Extremist Pastor Bill Keller, the man behind the anti-Muslim 9/11 Christian Center at Ground Zero, is now joining the ranks of General David Petraeus and others who are speaking out against Florida Pastor Terry Jones' plan to burn copies of the Koran on Sept. 11.

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warned Tuesday an American church's threat to burn copies of the Muslim holy book could endanger U.S. troops in the country and Americans worldwide.

Now that Labor Day has come and gone, another annual tradition can be renewed: the mass migration of agricultural workers down the East Coast, to warmer climes. The trip down I-95 is an annual requirement for an estimated 100,000 laborers. Wary of proliferating checkpoints, the undocumented tend to travel in small vans and other inconspicuous vehicles, heading as far south as Georgia and Florida, where there's a longer season for crops like peaches and tomatoes. That would be the Florida tomato business, by the way, where in addition to the standard outrages inflicted on agricultural laborers -- poverty wages, fear of deportation, chemical poisoning -- many break their backs under a clearly unfree labor regime. Look for a moment, and work in the Florida tomato fields starts to bear an unmistakable resemblance to indentured servitude.

Has the war of metaphors gone too far? Historians, constitutional lawyers and even zoologists have jumped into the fray provoked by Wall Street critics of the Obama administration and Congress.

Wow. If President Obama fought every day like he did on Labor Day, talking to a group of Milwaukee union members, Democrats wouldn't be looking at "enthusiasm gap" come November. The president, sleeves rolled up, looked like he was having a great time, joking about Republicans "sipping Slurpees" while Democrats did the tough work of getting the economy out of a ditch. For this passionate labor crowd, Obama dropped his talk of bipartisanship and hammered Republicans for opposing his agenda, even the tax cuts for small businesses they have traditionally backed.

A determined Republican stall campaign in the Senate has sidetracked so many of the men and women nominated by President Barack Obama for judgeships that he has put fewer people on the bench than any president since Richard Nixon at a similar point in his first term 40 years ago.

The great political failure of the 1960s was the New Left's inability to bring the labor movement into its great liberationist tent. There were lots of reasons for that, one of them being that most big union leaders didn't want to be in that stinky tent with a lot of hippies, feminists, dashiki-wearing black militants and "fags." (That last comes from AFL-CIO leader George Meany's description of the New York delegation to the disastrous 1972 Democratic convention: "They've got six open fags and only three AFL-CIO representatives!") Also, not a small matter: The New Left opposed the Vietnam War; again, most labor leaders supported it.

There are 3 items, all related to books, which I wanted to note for the holiday:

(UPDATED) To an audience of about 50 people -- fully half of whom were members of the press -- Pastor Bill Keller launched his 9-11 Christian Center at ground zero this morning with a fiery sermon targeting Muslims and Mormons as hell-bound followers of false faiths. Keller took aim in particular at Glenn Beck, a Mormon, and Imam Rauf, the organizer of the Park51 Islamic community center.

Government agencies are seeking broad new authority to ramp up killings and removals of gray wolves in the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes, despite two recent court actions that restored the animal's endangered status in every state except Alaska and Minnesota.

In the turbulent year of the tea party, Republican Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware set out to jangle no nerves as he ran for a Senate seat long held by Vice President Joseph Biden. It's the way Republican strategists originally envisioned 2010, a roster of seasoned politicians pointing the party toward significant gains in the Senate.

With the fight over Congress intensifying and President Obama’s agenda hanging in the balance, coverage of this fall's governor’s races has largely fallen by the wayside. But the outcomes of some of these races will have significant consequences -- none more so than the contest in Texas, between Republican incumbent Rick Perry and Democrat Bill White, the former mayor of Houston.

Craigslist has apparently closed the adult services section of its website, two weeks after 17 state attorneys general demanded it shut down the section.

Forecasters say Tropical Storm Earl has made landfall near Western Head, Nova Scotia.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer will not participate in a second debate with her Democratic opponents. Which is sad, because that first debate was wonderful television. When Brewer was actually able to form sentences, they were full of nonsense.

(updated below)