I have more than a passing acquaintance with the question of whether electronic media will replace books because of my day job in a rare book and manuscript library that sits within a larger library with nearly 3 million bound volumes and millions of electronic resources. The answer in my neck of the woods is that books will coexist for the foreseeable because it is the policy of my bosses that our library will continue to order new books and preserve old books; the electronic resources merely complement...

My post earlier this month on the “vicious underbelly of the blogosphere” rearing its ugly head in the Graeme Frost affair reverberated far and wide, including a reference in a Washington Post op-ed column and in this article in NRC Handelsblad, a Dutch newspaper. (Sorry, no link available.) NRC Reporter Tom Jan Meuss refers to The Moderate Voice as “a weblog that is looking for common ground.” I could not have said it better.

Buy me a flute/And a gun that shoots Tailgates and substitutes/Strap yourself To the tree with roots/You ain’t goin’ nowhere – BOB DYLAN Looking back over the long arc of the war in Iraq – a misadventure that shows no sign of ending any time soon — the predominant themes are the arrogance and ignorance of a presidential administration that has done virtually everything wrong and gotten very little right. The result is that well into the fifth year of the war there...

You know that America’s drug policy is totally cattywampus when farmers in North Dakota go to court to try to force the Drug Enforcement Agency to lift its ban on industrial hemp, a harmless lookalike cousin of the Evil Weed. The feds call industrial hemp (photo) a controlled substance — the same as marijuana, heroin and LSD — but it is in fact a harmless and renewable cash crop with thousands of applications that are good for the environment. In one of several legal actions that...

I have refrained from commenting on the horrific suicide bombing in Karachi that greeted the return of former Premier Benazir Bhutto because I think that Pakistan is pretty much an unfixable mess at the moment and there’s not a whole lot that I can add that hasn’t already been said. But on further thought there is something, and that is what short memories we have. Bhutto is being described as some sort of returning heroine when in fact she was just another corrupt ruler, albeit one...

It has been a tough decade for the venerable New York Times. After winning a record seven Pulitzer Prizes for post-9/11 coverage that exemplified the great journalism the newspaper has produced for 150 years, it has been pretty much all downhill. To be sure, the Times has been buffeted by market forces beyond its control, but its problems are substantially of its own doing, including scandals involving reporters Jayson Blair and Judith Miller and other ethical lapses, forays into purple prose that...

I was interviewed by the U.S. correspondent for a big European newspaper the other night for an article on blogging and political discourse in America. Not surprisingly, the trigger for the article and what drew him to me was the S-CHIP debate and saga of Master Graeme Frost. As I typically do in such interviews, I made a number of overarching statements, generalized like mad and ground my own ax to a surgically fine edge. Among the points that I made was that any discussion about the merits...

South African reggae legend Lucky Dube was shot dead last night in an apparent botched carjacking in a Johannesburg suburb. Dube, 43, was murdered as he dropped his son off at a friend’s home as South Africa’s out-of-control crime wave threatened to overshadow tomorrow’s Rugby World Cup final against England. More here.

An effort to override President Bush’s veto of a $35 billion, five-year expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program fell short today in a 273-156 vote in the House of Representatives. While that outcome was expected, it is only one lost battle in what is shaping up to be a helluva war. The bill had passed the Democratic-controlled Senate and House with substantial Republican support, an acknowledgement that the health-care crisis in America has crossed the tracks from...

Slate has a new blog called The XX Factor. The blog is written exclusively by wimmin, and while I am sure it will include some first-class contributors, I have some issues with wimmin’s blogs in general and so-called feminist blogs in particular. Some of that has to do with self-indulgent piffle like this (sorry, I couldn’t help myself), but the larger issue is that feminists need to be part of the broader conversation, as Dana Goldstein aptly puts it, and not segregated. We’ll...

I have no idea of the color of Laura Nyro’s eyes, but she was the first exemplar of blue-eyed soul that I heard and remains one of the finest despite a career largely spent in the shadows by her own choice and that ended prematurely with her death in 1997. Blue-eyed soul is a term used to describe R&B or soul music performed by white artists, which was an anomaly for this teenager in the mid-1960s. My musical tastes ran from classical to jazz to rock with a special fondness for brown-eyed...

Turkish soldier patrols near Iraqi border The historic enmity between Turkey and the Kurdish separatists who now face the prospect of Turkish military strikes in northern Iraq is not something that you can blame on the Bush administration. But it is one more monkey-wrench in a war that was supposed to be over in months, if not weeks, and of course shows no sign of ending anytime soon. In a vote reminiscent of the 2003 resolution authorizing George Bush to launch military strikes against the Saddam...

Alex & Yaderlin Jimenez If some conservatives have their way, Alex Jimenez will become to an expanded domestic-spying program what Graeme Frost became to the expanded S-CHIP program: A human face on a contentious political issue. Frost, of course, is the 12-year-old who gave a Democratic Party radio rebuttal to President Bush’s veto of a bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program that had passed Congress with broad bipartisan support. Before you could say “Michelle...

I have broken what for me has been a cardinal rule in recent days in using Nazi analogies when writing about the Bush administration’s embrace of torture as well as a deafening lack of response from most Americans to this and other outrages not unlike the Germans who failed to speak out about the excesses of the Third Reich. Nazi analogies usually are bad because they stifle debate and inevitably trigger side debates about whether comparing someone to Hitler or something contemporary to an...

Rep. Joe Knollenberg explains nay vote to constituents With a House vote scheduled for Thursday, the question of the hour is whether enough Republicans will change their votes and join Democrats and many of their own colleagues to override President Bush’s veto of a five-year, $35 billion expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. The stakes are high for Republicans because the president has basically hung them out to dry, but it appears that few if any nay voters are...

The WaPo is reporting that the U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating blows to Al Qaeda in Iraq, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group. The Bush administration, of course, began describing AQI as the chief bogeyman after other stay-the-course rationales sunk under their own weight, including the bald-faced lie that it was these insurgents who launched the 9/11 terror attacks. But while AQI has indeed been dealt a number of crippling blows since the Surge...

Two years after his death in Afghanistan, Navy Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy has become the first person to win the Medal of Honor in Afghanistan and the first sailor recipient of the nation’s highest battlefield award for combat since the Vietnam War. President Bush will present the medal — a star-shaped bronze emblem suspended from a sky-blue ribbon — to Murphy’s family on Oct. 22 at a ceremony at the White House. Murphy, 29 of Patchogue, Long Island, N.Y., was one of three...

Even in the seventh year of the Age of Bush, I still don’t want to believe that my country is being led by an intellectual, ethical and moral lightweight in the thrall of dangerous power mongers whose views are inimical to what my mother told me that the U.S. of A. is supposed to stand for. Then I wake up and realize that Our Long National Nightmare rages on. I also have come to understand something else of perhaps greater consequence. I’ll cut right to the chase for those of you who...

A bad aircraft is finally about to take part in a bad war. Ten V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor planes, which cost 30 lives and $20 billion over a quarter century of development, have been deployed to Iraq. Repeated efforts to kill the Osprey at the highest levels of the Pentagon, including by Dick Cheney when he was defense secretary, were unsuccessful. Cheney and others argued that the Osprey was too dangerous and too expensive, but it has been a darling of the influential congressfolk in whose districts...

Politics is a dirty business and barring a late bid by the Flying Nun there probably isn’t a candidate running for president who doesn’t have a skeleton or three in their closet. Then there’s Rudy Giuliani, the Republican front-runner by most accounts, who needs more than a mere closet for all of his personal indiscretions and serial philandering. This is because Bernie Kerik, his most excellent longtime friend and associate, is taking up so much room on his own. Bernie was Rudy’s...