Joe's apparently on the cover of the latest Liberal Opinion Week. As he keeps reminding us, his "famousness is unstoppable". His Googlism is a blast, too.

Maybe one of these days, if we pester him enough, he'll start his own blog. It's probably the ultimate compliment for our times, when you tell someone: "You should do a blog ('cause you're way more interesting than me...)"

Here's an email I got from him this morning:

This was sent to Nick Anderson (cartoonist for the Louisville Courier). He posted it to our cartoon message board. No one knows who wrote it. Have fun...


URGENT ASSISTANCE - FROM USA

IMMEDIATE ATTENTION NEEDED :

HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

FROM: GEORGE WALKER BUSH

202.456.1414 / 202.456.1111

FAX: 202.456.2461

DEAR SIR / MADAM,

I AM GEORGE WALKER BUSH, SON OF THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH, AND CURRENTLY SERVING AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THIS LETTER MIGHT SURPRISE YOU BECAUSE WE HAVE NOT MET NEITHER IN PERSON NOR BY CORRESPONDENCE.

I CAME TO KNOW OF YOU IN MY SEARCH FOR A RELIABLE AND REPUTABLE PERSON TO HANDLE A VERY CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS TRANSACTION, WHICH INVOLVES THE TRANSFER OF A HUGE SUM OF MONEY TO AN ACCOUNT REQUIRING MAXIMUM CONFIDENCE.

I AM WRITING YOU IN ABSOLUTE CONFIDENCE PRIMARILY TO SEEK YOUR ASSISTANCE IN ACQUIRING OIL FUNDS THAT ARE PRESENTLY TRAPPED IN THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ. MY PARTNERS AND I SOLICIT YOUR ASSISTANCE IN COMPLETING A TRANSACTION BEGUN BY MY FATHER, WHO HAS LONG BEEN ACTIVELY ENGAGED IN THE EXTRACTION OF PETROLEUM IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND BRAVELY SERVED HIS COUNTRY AS DIRECTOR OF THE UNITED STATES CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY.

IN THE DECADE OF THE NINETEEN-EIGHTIES, MY FATHER, THEN VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, SOUGHT TO WORK WITH THE GOOD OFFICES OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ TO REGAIN LOST OIL REVENUE SOURCES IN THE NEIGHBORING ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN. THIS UNSUCCESSFUL VENTURE WAS SOON FOLLOWED BY A FALLING-OUT WITH HIS IRAQI PARTNER, WHO SOUGHT TO ACQUIRE ADDITIONAL OIL REVENUE SOURCES IN THE NEIGHBORING EMIRATE OF KUWAIT, A WHOLLY-OWNED U.S.-BRITISH SUBSIDIARY.

MY FATHER RE-SECURED THE PETROLEUM ASSETS OF KUWAIT IN 1991 AT A COST OF SIXTY-ONE BILLION U.S. DOLLARS ($61,000,000,000). OUT OF THAT COST, THIRTY-SIX BILLION DOLLARS ($36,000,000,000) WERE SUPPLIED BY HIS
PARTNERS IN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA AND OTHER PERSIAN GULF MONARCHIES, AND SIXTEEN BILLION DOLLARS ($16,000,000,000) BY GERMAN AND JAPANESE PARTNERS.

BUT MY FATHER'S FORMER IRAQI BUSINESS PARTNER REMAINED IN CONTROL OF THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ AND ITS PETROLEUM RESERVES.

MY FAMILY IS CALLING FOR YOUR URGENT ASSISTANCE IN FUNDING THE REMOVAL OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ AND ACQUIRING THE PETROLEUM ASSETS OF HIS COUNTRY, AS COMPENSATION FOR THE COSTS OF REMOVING HIM FROM POWER. UNFORTUNATELY, OUR PARTNERS FROM 1991 ARE NOT WILLING TO SHOULDER THE BURDEN OF THIS NEW VENTURE, WHICH IN ITS UPCOMING PHASE MAY COST THE SUM OF 100 BILLION TO 200 BILLION DOLLARS ($100,000,000,000 - $200,000,000,000), BOTH IN THE INITIAL ACQUISITION AND IN LONG-TERM MANAGEMENT.

WITHOUT THE FUNDS FROM OUR 1991 PARTNERS, WE WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO ACQUIRE THE OIL REVENUE TRAPPED WITHIN IRAQ. THAT IS WHY MY FAMILY AND OUR COLLEAGUES ARE URGENTLY SEEKING YOUR GRACIOUS ASSISTANCE. OUR DISTINGUISHED COLLEAGUES IN THIS BUSINESS TRANSACTION INCLUDE THE SITTING VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, RICHARD CHENEY, WHO IS AN ORIGINAL PARTNER IN THE IRAQ VENTURE AND FORMER HEAD OF THE HALLIBURTON OIL COMPANY, AND CONDOLEEZA RICE, WHOSE PROFESSIONAL
DEDICATION TO THE VENTURE WAS DEMONSTRATED IN THE NAMING OF A CHEVRON OIL TANKER AFTER HER.

I WOULD BESEECH YOU TO TRANSFER A SUM EQUALING TEN TO TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT (10-25 %) OF YOUR YEARLY INCOME TO OUR ACCOUNT TO AID IN THIS IMPORTANT VENTURE. THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL FUNCTION AS OUR TRUSTED INTERMEDIARY. I PROPOSE THAT YOU MAKE THIS TRANSFER BEFORE THE FIFTEENTH (15TH) OF THE MONTH OF APRIL. I KNOW THAT A TRANSACTION OF THIS MAGNITUDE WOULD MAKE ANYONE APPREHENSIVE AND WORRIED. BUT I AM ASSURING YOU THAT ALL WILL BE WELL AT THE END OF THE DAY. A BOLD STEP TAKEN SHALL NOT BE REGRETTED, I ASSURE YOU.

PLEASE DO BE INFORMED THAT THIS BUSINESS TRANSACTION IS 100% LEGAL. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO CO-OPERATE IN THIS TRANSACTION, PLEASE CONTACT OUR INTERMEDIARY REPRESENTATIVES TO FURTHER DISCUSS THE MATTER.

I PRAY THAT YOU UNDERSTAND OUR PLIGHT. MY FAMILY AND OUR COLLEAGUES WILL BE FOREVER GRATEFUL. PLEASE REPLY IN STRICT CONFIDENCE TO THE CONTACT NUMBERS BELOW.

SINCERELY WITH WARM REGARDS,

GEORGE WALKER BUSH

Switchboard: 202.456.1414

Comments: 202.456.1111

Fax: 202.456.2461

Email: president@whitehouse.gov

According to the compulsively meaningless Googlism, Saddam Hussein is not related to King Hussein.

Also wonder why my paper is so mad with one of golf's all-time greats (see last line).

See also that Blogger has introduced Audioblogger which allows you to post a message to your blog in the form of an MP3 file. Pretty cool.

Take a look at these terrific anti-war posters by Micah Wright's Propaganda Remix project. Scroll down to the posters and click on any of them to start the slideshow.

So, Bob Graham joins the field for the Democratic nomination, subject to his doctor's all-clear. Makes for some interesting potential strategies. With Graham as VP, Lieberman or Kerry would theoretically be stronger; while the guy who must be hurt most by a Graham candidacy is probably John Edwards.

I wonder if anyone will finally find that old photo of Graham, when he was Governor of Florida, visiting Disney World and posing with Mickey Mouse. The caption is supposed to have famously read: "Governor Bob Graham (left)....."

Oh, and as the Post story properly acknowledges, Graham is related to Donald Graham, the Post's publisher.


Goodbye and thank you, Fred Rogers.

Guess what his middle name was?


Comment?

Some shuffling on the primary schedule for next year. Looks like Iowa and New Hampshire will still retain some degree of pre-eminence, with a likely last week of January date, but now Virginia's getting into the act.

Like last time, though, the most important primary could still turn out to be the one that's going on right now - the money primary.

Bill Maher was excellent on Larry King last night. He seems to be back to his usual form with the new show on HBO. It was interesting that he said he felt more at home there than at ABC, since when the network bought "Politically Incorrect" from Comedy Central they didn't really know what they were getting, according to Maher.

As the time seems to get shorter for avoiding war, most of us appear to be taking refuge in comedy.

Here's Joe's latest cartoon (would be better with the graphic, but works fine in words):

Colin Powell (testifying before the UN Security Council): "Gentlemen, we know for a fact that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction."
Kofi Annan: "How can you be so sure?"
Powell: "Because we kept the receipts".

Has Zell Miller lost it?

Tonight, Tony Blair suffered the biggest rebellion among his own party since taking office, when 122 Labour MPs voted against military intervention.

With the Prime Minister having always been the consummate tracking-poll politician, the fact that he is persisting with his course in the face of such overwhelming opposition indicates that he absolutely believes he is right.

He is such a skilful political operator, you'd think it wouldn't be beyond him to be able to persuade the citizens on whose behalf he governs to share his certainty?

You'd think so, but you'd be wrong.

Nice piece in the Washington Post on what happened between Dan Rather and Saddam after the cameras were turned off.

I missed this letter from Monty Python's Terry Jones in The Observer a couple of weeks back. As - like everyone else - I've been struggling to rationalise what has been happening, and what appears likely to happen; this just simply makes it all clear.

It would be funny if it wasn't so serious.

And talking of which, it was only a matter of time before the most obvious manifestation of French culture - at least as far as folks in Florida are concerned - was targeted.

Comment?

So, Saddam wants a televised debate against Bush. Sounds perfect. As Howard Kurtz says, why stop there? Screw Dan Rather, Where's Vince McMahon? Shades of that great Frankie Goes to Hollywood video for "Two Tribes" that had Reagan and Chernenko duking it out in what looked like a cockfighting pit....

Seriously, though, as Kurtz says, why are we so dismissive of the idea? In a country where almost everything has to be validated by television before it's accepted into the popular discourse, seems to me it would make complete sense to have Bush stand up and tell us why he wants to kill the guy standing six feet from him.

Here's the relevant quote from the CBS interview with Saddam.

"I am ready to conduct a direct dialogue -- a debate -- with your president. I will say what I want and he will say what he wants," Saddam was quoted as saying.

"This will be an opportunity for him, if he's committed to war, this will be an opportunity to convince the world."

"This is something proposed in earnest, " Saddam said. "Out of my respect for the people of the United States and my respect for the people of Iraq and the people of the world. I call for this because war is not a joke."

"As leaders," Saddam said in his invitation to Bush, "Why don't we use this opportunity?"


Sorry, Saddam. If Ralph Nader couldn't get a look in, I doubt you will.


Nice Note today from ABC News on the Florida gathering of potential Democratic candidates last week.

As Roger Simon points out, early polls are almost exclusively based on name recognition, so it's no surprise that Joe Lieberman has been installed as the front-runner of the "crazy eight" (I'm not sure whether I prefer that, or "seven dwarfs" or even "six pack"...) but in terms of sheer ink, Howard Dean leads the field, with CBS's Bob Schieffer even saying on "Meet the Press" that Dean had "electrified" the crowd in Florida. So much so, in fact that former House leader Richard Gephardt - see above re name recognition - seems to feel he needs to remind people that he's actually running.

The Post's coverage has a good run-down of how each candidate's stance on Iraq went down with the audience. Not at all well, for some....

Comment?

The current issue of Entertainment Weekly has an interview with Bruce Springsteen.

In it, he's asked whether we'll go to war with Iraq. Here's his response:

I think we [already] are; I think the administration is just set on it. A month ago I wasn't so sure, but now I am. Those drums are being beaten really hard.

I think the administration took September 11 and used it as a blank check. And like most Americans, I'm not sure the case has been made to put our sons and our daughters and innocent citizens at risk at this particular moment. But I don't think that's gonna matter, unfortunately....

The actual war against terrorism is extremely complicated. You try not to be cynical, but without the distraction of Iraq, [people would notice] that the economy is doing poorly, and the old-fashioned Republican tax cuts for the folks that are doin' well will seriously curtail services for people who are struggling out there. I don't think that's the kind of country that Americans really want. All the cutbacks in the environmental restrictions - it's just a game of shadows and mirrors at the moment.

Normally, I'm pretty hostile to "stars" and how they use their opinions - largely because where an important issue is involved, their ability to mobilise support is often outweighed by the way opponents use their presence to marginalise the issue - but throughout his career Bruce has, if nothing else, been a citizen first and foremost.

He also had an interesting comment on Europeans' perception of the US:

For the best part of a decade, we've had a bigger audience overseas than in the States. Two thirds of my audience has been there; they were very connected to the ''Tom Joad'' record, very connected to music that was explicitly American, [so] there must be a tremendous commonality felt about the values of those songs. People continue to be very taken with America, with its bigness and its history and its drama, its myths and its values.

There's a lot of dissent about America [now], about this administration's policies. But I think those things are specific, I don't think they're something as general as a blanket anti-Americanism. Bob Herbert said in a column in The [New York] Times a few weeks ago that [Europeans] respond to a country that uses its power wisely abroad and dispenses its benefits fairly at home. Those are the things that are very debatable right now - the direction we're going in.

Came across a piece in a recent Salon from a couple of weeks ago which demonstrates perfectly how the Bush administration has succeeded in confusing the war on terror with a campaign against Iraq.

At the end of the first week of January, the Princeton Survey Research Associates polled more than 1,200 Americans on behalf of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain. They asked a very simple question: "To the best of your knowledge, how many of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens?"

Of those surveyed, only 17 percent knew the correct answer: that none of the hijackers were Iraqi. Forty-four percent of Americans believe that most or some of the hijackers were Iraqi; another 6 percent believe that one of the hijackers was a citizen of that most notorious node in the axis of evil. That leaves 33 percent who did not know enough to offer an answer.

Comment?

Some selected quotes from Jack Straw's presser today in Brussels, prefaced, it should be pointed out, by this line: ‘‘We are taking this step because words must mean what they say."


"Fifteen weeks is long enough for Saddam Hussein to demonstrate whether he is committed, actively, full and immediately, to comply and disarm peacefully - or not. So far he has demonstrated only substantive non-compliance."

"It's not up to us to demonstrate Saddam's guilt - he's already shown that. It's up to him to prove his innocence."

Afraid it all left me a bit misunderinformed.

I linked earlier to the IPodLounge and on closer inspection discovered it has one of the coolest and most compelling wastes of time I've come across recently.

Check out the 'Travels With My IPod' gallery. Brilliant!

My friend John Naughton addresses Google's purchase of Blogger in The Observer today, and draws the interesting parallel with Google's purchase of the Deja archive and, effectively, the rights to everything anyone ever committed to an onscreen field before they knew what they were doing.

Whether the new Bloogle, or Glogger, turns out to be the final piece of the jigsaw of mainstream acceptance seems to depend partly on how the marriage of the two technologies works. If blog postings can be searched as effectively as Google currently does web pages, that will be a tremendous step forward.

I'm STILL convinced that something called www.readmyemail.com would be hugely popular, since that's all anyone seems to want to do when they meet someone new. And its sister site www.itsaboutyou.com, could collate any blog references to a specific name....!

Interesting piece in today's New York Times about how in some retail outlets, DVDs are outselling CDs. Storage media - of any kind - will always continue to be superceded by whatever the next most effective means of archiving might be. The challenge for those who produce the content is to make sure customers will pay for both the songs and some means of storing, recalling and sharing them.

The next watershed will obviously be the mass acceptance of recordable DVD, which looks like it will coexist alongside digital storage for a while before the next technological leap means consumers will pay again to upgrade content they already own. It's probably a short step to some form of holographic, 3D-type display, with an experiential element to the content; an ever-closer marriage of, say, movie and video-game, where the viewer's activity and choices determine the outcome (from a pre-shot raft of six or seven different plot paths).

But is the public ready yet for that sort of advance? Isn't there a case - particularly an economic one in the current climate - of urging a technological pause, at least long enough for people to get used to the last revolutionary piece of hardware? There was a nice cartoon in the Sunday Times magazine today where a trendy is bemoaning the fact that he simply dosen't have enough CDs to fill his I-Pod...

I recently decided against getting a picture messaging cellphone, partly because I honestly couldn't be bothered. Now I'm regretting it slightly, as I have a feeling that the mobile operators are pushing it so hard it will be an important part of the new communications sphere, and I should see what all the fuss is about.

One of the reasons I held back was that I didn't feel like investing the time to get to know how to use it, since I didn't think I'd use it enough to quickly become intuitively familiar with it. It was almost like a technological "exhaling"; before again leaping in to do battle with yet more expensive crap. Either that, or I'm just getting too old for all this and don't want to surround myself with any more complexities. Who knows?

Check out Gizmodo, the gadget weblog, and see what I mean. All that great stuff - only so many braincells to assimilate it all.

Comment?

When Howard Kurtz turned his eye recently to American Candidate, he quoted exec producer RJ Cutler as saying: "The person who wins this show is going to emerge as a real potential leader in this country." And hey, Cutler should know, having produced both the brilliant The War Room on the 1992 presidential election, and The Perfect Candidate, about Olly North's senate bid in '94.

I'm honestly not sure whether that says more about television itself or the quality of our political candidates.