I know very little about Sudan in general and the situation in Darfur particularly, so running across this essay in the London Review of Books was a treat, if a troublesome one. The gist of it is there’s no quick fix to be had once, or if, the slaughter is stopped. I had to . . . → Read More: The short course on Darfur and genocide

It’s as if there was a god and she’s decided to try her hand at screenwriting. There’s nothing I can say to cushion the blow. While Gov. Jeb Bush reassures Floridians that touch screen voting machines are reliable, the Republican Party is sending the opposite message to some voters.

The GOP urged some Miami . . . → Read More: Who writes this stuff, anyway?

Excluding any convention gems, this can’t be topped. Juan Cole, on his excellent Informed Comment blog, responded as follows to Dick Cheney’s recent assertion that terrorists are as determined to destroy the US as were the WWII Axis powers. Although it may be true that al-Qaeda is as determined to destroy the US as . . . → Read More: Quote of the Week

later in the day. I was out falling off a surfboard and watching my kid catch some waves that were just a hair smaller than she is. I hear the speech was great. I’m not sure if that’s “great” relative to John Kerry or just plain “great,” but either way it probably surpassed most . . . → Read More: I thought the Kerry speech was

For health reasons, I’ve been getting my convention converage entirely from the print world. Mostly it’s been disappointing, in large part because the press are still pounding many of the themes they were during the primaries (the “unstable, Bush*-bashing angry Democrat” chief among them).

Slate Magazine sent at least six writers to the . . . → Read More: “Delegates? We don’ need no steenkeeng delegates.”

by the press, the delegates to the Democratic convention escaped all but the most casual mention in most of the writeups I read. I didn’t watch anything on TV except the speeches, but I’m assuming the coverage by the networks was at least as bad and probably much worse than anything the print guys . . . → Read More: Probably because they were outnumbered 3-1

the Democratic candidate for Senator from Illinois, gave a spectacular speech at the Democratic convention. He’ll be 59 years old in 16 years, closing out his third Senate term or his second term as vice president.

The coverage of the convention has been pretty abysmal. That’s not the least bit shocking as regards . . . → Read More: Barack Obama,

I probably mentioned this already, but standout journalist Nir Rosen has a series of articles about his recent month or so inside Fallujah, the first independent city in Iraq. No one esle I’ve read has provided anything like the context he does, not to mention the scorecard for keeping track of the major players . . . → Read More: Fallujah from the inside out

What happens when the press falls down and can’t, or won’t, get up?. Four years into Mexico’s newly minted electoral democracy, all is not as it should be with the body politic. One indication is that the host of the most influential news show in the capital is a clown.

We’re not in an . . . → Read More: Scary clowns and the populist revolution

First there’s Sandy Berger doing whatever he did or didn’t do with papers from the National Archive, then we got Senator Richard Shelby (Moron-AL) under investigation for leaking news of the National Security Agency’s al Qaeda telephone intercepts, a leak that, according to intelligence officials, alerted the terrorists to surveillance of one of their . . . → Read More: I’ve Got a Secret