A Nice Sig

In my inbox today was a message that ended with the following signature:

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a way that when you die You will rejoice and the world will cry.

Working on it.

Posted 03:52 PM | life generally

More Against War

I'm glad to see that people are continuing to publicly question the Bush A day or two ago on Salon Robert Scheer wrote:

Bush's haste to make war on Iraq is understandable only as a ploy to avoid dealing with the struggling U.S. economy, a still-shadowy al-Qaida leadership that has not been brought to heel yet and the alarming disintegration of the Mideast peace process.

That's certainly what it looks like to me. Scheer finishes with some terrific comments about hubris and the disturbing identity between Bush's "unique American internationalism" and what the rest of the world knows as imperialism. Highly recommended.

Related: The text of the speech Al Gore gave last Monday outlining the fatal flaws in the "strike first" doctrine. The link comes via Jason Rylander who says the speech only deserves a "Gentleman's C" because it fails to answer the toughest questions that Gore (or any Democrat) needs to be addressing right now if the Democrats have any hope of building strong candidates and real platform for Nov. and beyond (esp. 2004) . Agreed.

Finally: If you have access to The Chronicle of Higher Education, this week's issue features this article, which begins:

A military attack on Iraq would be a profound and costly mistake, declare 33 scholars of international relations in a statement that is to appear as an advertisement in The New York Times. The statement argues that the Iraqi regime can be contained through traditional mechanisms of deterrence, and charges that "war with Iraq will jeopardize the campaign against Al Qaeda by diverting resources and attention from that campaign and by increasing anti-Americanism around the globe."

And a bit more from one of the statement's principle authors, a U. of Chicago professor:

"What we tried to do here," said Mr. Mearsheimer in an interview, "was to restrict the list to scholars who focus on international-security affairs, and to scholars who believe that power matters in international politics -- that it's sometimes necessary for the United States to go to war to defend its national interests. This is not a group that could be identified as left-wing or dovish."

Now doesn't that sound like a reasonable bunch of people? But is anyone going to listen?

Posted 03:36 PM | general politics

American Candidate Update

It's true: Rupert Murdoch is planning to make a reality-tv show out of the process of picking a candidate to run for President of the United States. Details here, some commentary here. And here's at least one big reason why the idea is unlikely to produce a really populist/popular candidate: "contestants" will have to finance their own campaigns. Oh well...

[Links via Google News Search, a "beta" search engine that indexes only sites designated as "news" providers. Interesting.]

Posted 03:26 PM | Comments (1) | general politics