General Wesley K Clark

The field of nine Democratic candidates may grow to ten. Friends of General Wesley K Clark have been blabbing, and they say he's going to run. The New York Times splashes the article up front, and makes predictions of its own: that Clark will announce his candidacy on September 19th in a speech at the University of Iowa, four days after the deadline for candidates to report their 3rd-quarter finances. Clark himself gets only two sentances:

In an interview from his office in Little Rock, Ark., General Clark said today that he intended to announce his decision whether he would run in two weeks or so. "I've got to by then," he said. "I've just got to. I can't have done nothing, and if I do it, there's groundwork to be laid."

Clark's candidacy would definitely make the field more claustrophobic, no matter what Terry McAuliffe says.

While some contenders view General Clark more as a running mate than presidential threat, his credentials could pose problems for several of them. As a former military officer, he would sound at least as credible on national security matters as Dr. Dean. As a Southerner from Little Rock, General Clark might blunt the appeal of Mr. Edwards and Mr. Graham in the South. And as a Vietnam veteran, he would temper a prominent theme of Mr. Kerry's campaign, that he is the only Democrat running to have served in combat.

At some point I should ask people to make predictions on what the pair in the final running will be. I'm inclined to think Gephardt-Dean right now, but things change quickly in a race without substance.

Manly Blogging

A couple of professors have come up with a program that supposedly can ascertain the gender of the author of a piece of text. It's based on word usage, and the fact that guys talk about facts, and women talk about relationships. Brilliant.

I plugged my last post into the "Gender Genie", a website inspired by the profs. It told me my gender accurately (in case I wasn't sure, after DJN's shenanigan), but it's own published statistics show that it's wrong 50% of the time, based on 60,000 uses. Now, I could write an algorithm that was right 50% of the time; it's called guessing! Thanks for the link to Azeem Redux, and for more info on the algorithm, check out this article in Nature. Azeem also has some worthwhile thoughts on the death penalty in western society.

Dean's List

The Dean's List has been expanded to include Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Washington and Wisconsin. The Dean's List already included Iowa, New Hampshire, and New Mexico, according to the Washington Post. If you're wondering what the list is, it's just a coinage of mine. The nine states above are the states where presidential wishful (hopeful is just too optimistic) Howard Dean has aired television commercials, the heavy artillery of political campaigns. By comparison, John Edwards of North Carolina has targeted only New Hampshire and Iowa and the seven others haven't started at all.

Dean continues to set the pace (NYTimes) in fundraising, public profile, rhetorical fervor and punditry generation. I'm still convinced, along with most non-lefties, that he'll fade in the primaries. Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman is doing the rest of the pool a huge favor by staking out a right-of-center position which will guarantee him a loss in the primaries if he sticks to it, and will allow other Democrats to stay in the left-of-center arena by playing off him. Without Joe, the whole pack would run the risk of barrelling off to deep left field in pursuit of Howard Dean. With Dean and Joe holding the fringes, however, there's room in the middle for the others. Who'll be able to exploit that position and emerge with that ethereal "electable" image is a mystery, but that lucky man has the best chance of losing to Bush in November.

Vox Populi

The people have spoken: Paul Kagame is the popularly elected president of Rwanda. No, I haven't read the news yet - I just know that there were elections yesterday in Rwanda, and there's no way anyone else could have won.

Having been in Rwanda during the campaigns, it was obvious who was hot - Kagame - and who was not - anyone else. There were plenty of political rallies, and kids carried little paper flags with party initials on them. Thing is, only Kagame's RPF was in evidence. I saw headquarters of two other parties - one of which had a sign over the door endorsing Kagame! The people, both Hutu and Tutsi loved Kagame. He's done a good job - a very good job - and he deserves another term at the helm.

The one-sidedness of the elections can be viewed as a deficiency, and if it persists in ensuing election cycles, Rwanda will become just one more mockery of democracy. However, I think for now it's actually a positive. I don't think Rwanda could have sustained, at this point, a real election. This is sort of a "dress rehearsal" - people can get a feel for voting, choosing, participating in campaigns, and having a president of their choice. The real test will be if Kagame steps down or is seriously challenged next time around.

AllAfrica.com has some more scientific news on the election:

An estimated 4.1 million Rwandans began voting on Monday to elect a president in the first multiparty election since the central African nation attained independence from Belgium 40 years ago... Twagiramungu, 58, who is Hutu, faces pressure from civil society and political parties who have accused him of campaigning on a ticket of ethnicity. However, Twagiramungu has said that the issue of ethnicity is a Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF)-orchestrated weapon used to tarnish his image and silence him... Kagame, a Tutsi who led the RPF rebels who ousted the predominantly Hutu government in 1994, ending the genocide, has the support of seven of the country's nine recognised political parties and is the favourite to win today's poll.

Global perspective: Rwanda is a provincial backwater in Africa, even if it's the most densely populated country on the continent. Whatever happens in Rwanda, it's unlikely to have repurcussions more than 200 miles from Rwanda's borders. The world can ignore anything there - even the slaughter of a million innocents - without having to deal with anything except slight conscience pangs.

For Rwandese, it's another story.

I'm back!

It still hasn't dawned on me, but I am back in Boston! I've asked DJN to give me my old template back, as entertaining as this one is. It's not like I hate gays or liberals or anything... it's that I hate "Comic Sans".

Intervention in Liberia

Under pressure from the U.S., Liberian president Charles Taylor departed into exile in Nigeria yesterday, opening the country up to relief efforts by the "international community". (Click here to see the A.P. news report). Gandi figures the U.S. judged well to bring troops offshore without actually getting them involved. Here's a quote from an editorial on the subject:

No one can look at the suffering in Liberia without wanting to do something, and we're not against such a humanitarian intervention in principle. But especially with Africans making progress on the ground, no one we've seen has offered a proposal for what American troops are supposed to do once they got there. Beyond enforcing an immediate cease-fire, which unsavory side in the conflict are we supposed to favor? The danger is that U.S. troops could get sucked in for a long stay or suffer casualties with no clear purpose.

This post was guest authored by Gandhi.

Site of the Day

We all know Chops loves Israel. So I'm sure he will appreciate this site. The pictures say it all. (I'm not refering to Chops' site, by the way.)

This post was guest authored by Gandhi.

Stopping terrorism from the inside

GAZA CITY -- In this rough corner of the world, Mohamed Dahlan may have the roughest job of all. He's the Palestinian Authority's new national security minister -- meaning one of his jobs is to stop fellow Palestinians' terror attacks on Israel so peace has a chance."
(Article copied from the Wall Street Journal online).

This post was guest authored by Gandhi.