Marshall Plans for All

It seems to me that calls for a "new Marshall plan" of some sort or another are frequent enough that it's a bit odd for John Edwards' campaign to be implying that Mitt Romney's ripping them off when he calls for "a new type of Marshall plan” that "“ould assemble resources from developed nations to work to assure that threatened Islamic states had public schools, not Wahhabi madrassas, micro-credit and banking, the rule of law, human rights, basic healthcare, and competitive economic policies."

On another level, Team Edwards is even selling itself short. Their proposal for a "Marshall Corps" -- at least as it was explained to me as a group of civilian experts who the president would be able to deploy where needed -- is significantly more interesting (albeit at this point still somewhat vague) than Romney's rather banal and totally undefined proposal for some new foreign aid program.