December 03, 2003

Here’s a big reason we need to find an exit from Iraq ASAP

New York Times columnist David Brooks considers the challenges facing all those twenty-somethings we sent to Iraq: “Trained as trigger-pullers, many are also asked in theater to be consultants and aldermen. They are John Wayne, but also Jane Addams. “Can anybody think of another time in history when a comparable group of young people was asked to be at once so brave, fierce and relentless, while also being so sympathetic, creative and forbearing? “When you read the dispatches from Iraq, or the online diaries many soldiers keep, or the e-mail they send home, you quickly sense how hard it is to commute between these two universes. Yet the most important achievements seem to occur on the border between chaos and normalcy.”

Posted by tbrown at 12:32 PM

Don't ask. Don't tell. Don't translate

"Confronted with a shortage of Arabic interpreters and its policy banning openly gay service members, the Pentagon had a choice to make. "Which is how former Spec. Glover came to be cleaning pools instead of sitting in the desert, translating Arabic for the U.S. government." -- The Washington Post In the last two years, the Defense Department has discharged 37 linguists from the Defense Language Institute for being gay.

Posted by tbrown at 12:26 PM

Ralph Nader is thinking of ‘running’ again

Apparently not content with getting George Bush elected once, Ralph Nader is considering playing the spoiler again. Here’s an L.A. Times story. Here’s a link to the web site for his “exploratory” committee.

Posted by tbrown at 12:24 PM

Rep. DeLay, report to your lifeboat station

Rep. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, has abandoned his puzzling suggestion that members of Congress and their guests stay on a luxury cruise ship during next year’s Republican National Convention – because of blowback from labor unions! Read all about it (free registration at the New York Times site required).

Posted by tbrown at 12:21 PM

Checking in on Ahnuld

Schwarzenegger is finding that being governor is a little more difficult than he bargained for. Sacramento Bee blogger Daniel Weintraub has a string of posts that spell out how the Terminator plans to eliminate California’s staggering budget deficit. It’s not a pretty picture, and it’s one Schwarzenegger made even more dismal by his campaign pledge not to raise taxes. Here in the liberal wonderland of Seattle we’ve never seen a tax we didn’t like, except the one on lattes (which was, indeed, a bad idea). Yet, according to a business think tank, we’re still spending ourselves into a hole that will require increasingly difficult choices the deeper we go.

Posted by tbrown at 12:20 PM