If Bush were to bow out of the race for some reason, wouldn't it be cool to see a Rice/Powell ticket? That'd sure liven up a race that is otherwise about to bore us all to tears. Imagine good-ole-boy conservatives choking on their beer and having to vote Democrat just to "keep the office pure". While "affirmative action" liberals would find themselves voting Republican. Yep. That'd be something to see. Perhaps in 2008?

An interesting political analysis of Iraq .vs. Kosovo. The parallels are striking:

Of all the historical precedents that paved the way for President George W. Bush's war against Iraq, the most directly relevant was Bill Clinton's 1999 bombing of the rump Yugoslavia.

Like Gulf War II, the 78-day NATO air campaign in Kosovo was waged without the explicit authorization of the United Nations. (Of the two, the Iraq war had much more of a U.N. mandate, through Resolution 1441, which gave Iraq a "final opportunity" -- one it did not take -- to comply fully with all previous Security Council resolutions or else face "serious consequences.") Like Iraq, Yugoslavia was a sovereign country that was bombed into submission for essentially internal infractions. Both wars were expressions of American exasperation at European impotence in the face of dictatorial slaughter. Slobodan Milosevic, like Saddam Hussein, was described as a modern-day Adolf Hitler, eager to practice genocide against minority tribes while scrambling for horrible weapons to menace peaceful neighbors.

The bottom line appears to be that the folks behind Clinton's UN-unsanctioned Kosovo war are against Bush's Iraq war because, well, Bush is Republican.

musicplasma : the music visual search engine. If you love music and have a broadband connection, your credit card may suffer irreparable damage. I uncovered a bunch of "must haves" I'd never heard before within 15 minutes. Being able to hear representative samples of the artist you're focused on is very cool.