1.) Maurice Clarett got canned earlier this week.

2.) Chad Hutchinson got cut this morning

3.) Meetings are still the most useless way to decide things

4.) Men’s tennis might be more boring than the NHL.

5.) I want a burrito for lunch.

Have a good Wednesday, everyone!

Its true! I’m so sad. How will I get my boston burrito news? Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to move.

I’ve been watching a lot of CNN today where the news has obviously been hurricane Katrina and the damage in Mississippi and Louisiana. It’s been amazing seeing the damage that’s happened there because of this hurricane, especially since for New Orleans this was nowhere near the worst it could have been.

I got a little irked earlier today when one of the mayors down there compared the damage to the tsunami. We had warning, the death toll is nowhere near the same as the hundred thousand plus that died in that catastrophe, and our resources are far greater. After seeing footage all day about the damage, I realize that I’ve been too hard on the mayor. This is one of the worst natural disasters to hit the U.S. that I’ve seen in my lifetime. The worst part of the whole situation is the flooding that doesn’t seem like it’s going down as fast as it might in other areas.

My thoughts and prayers go out to those that are affected. Those residents face a long road ahead to rebuild and recover. If anyone has particular charities they know about that would be good to donate to, please leave comments below. The American Red Cross web site is swamped right now, but as soon as I can donate I will be giving some money there.

People are posting photos if you want a different perspective on the thing.

Update: Kevin Drum links to a good list of relief organizations.

Just to get away from politics for a moment, I’m sure some of you have see the Pedigree Puppy Chow commercial that I have dubbed “Death By Cuteness”. Everytime I see it, my heart melts a little. They are so cute I’m afraid I’m going to go into cuteness overload.

If you get bored, also look at the Bulldog Puppies commerical. It would definitely win for death by cuteness if it were a full length spot.

Kareem recommends TechCrunch and I’m already happy I added it to my RSS aggregator. Without them, I wouldn’t have heard of unblokt, a collaborative writing site. Play around with it, it’s kind of addicting. I’m looking forward to the “completed” narrative.

From the unblokt help page:

unblokt

-a collaborative experiment in novel-writing
-a random sentence and its successor are displayed
-write a new sentence which fits in between
-at the beginning, don’t worry too much about connectedness
-near the middle, start trying to bring sentences together
-at the end, try hard to weave everything tightly
-here’s a place to praise, complain, and wonder: google group

Just rumors or maybe some reality: From Political Wire:

Meanwhile, Sportsbook.com notes bettors now think Cheney might run for president in 2008, despite previous denials. The odds started to change after journalist Bob Woodward made a similar prediction a few weeks ago.

Click through to PW for more.

Is it too early to open up the Election 2008 category?

I’m moving the FatMixx RSS/Atom feeds to FeedBurner. I’ve been impressed with them since Kareem started using them. I’m seeing them used on more and more blogs and I’m curious about how they work, what options they offer, etc. The old FatMixx feeds will simply redirect to the new feeds, but I’d appreciate it if you’d take the time to modify your aggregators to use the new RSS feed URL below:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fatmixx

Let me know of any problems. The URL for the comments feed remains the same.

What would you say is the biggest mistake made by the Administration in executing the war in Iraq?

Would it be the lack of post war planning? The number of troops sent in? The amount or style of diplomacy prior to the war? Underestimating the difficulty of establishing a democracy in a country with Iraq’s history?

I think it’s something else. The root of any mistakes in this war have more to do with navigating domestic political issues. The White House and Republican congressional leaders chose to have the war authorization bill come up during the run up to the 2002 midterm elections. The diplomacy in 2003 was focused inward, at Americans, rather than at our allies.

You can see this in the efforts to reframe the Iraq war. The current story is this: In order to remove a potential threat in Iraq and establish a foothold for a modern, thriving democracy, we attacked Iraq. WMD was the catalyst but our aims have always been to spread democracy and establish a model Arab or Muslim democracy in the Middle East.

It has all the cachet of a Frank Luntz campaign slogan, which is no coincidence. And like the campaign slogans in other areas, it’s a slogan meant to frame the debate around the issue more than describe the policy. It’s disconnected from reality.

So, we come to Iraq today. Is reality disconnected from the slogans? Are we spreading democracy? From Reuters:

Secular Iraqis said on Wednesday a proposed new constitution left no room for doubt about the Islamist path the country was heading down two years after a U.S.-led invasion was supposed to produce greater freedoms.

The document presented to parliament on Monday is suffused with the language of political Islam in defining the state, and assigns a primary role to Islam as a source for legislation.

“The draft aborts the democratic process Iraqis hoped for and is a big victory for political Islam,” said writer Adel Abdel-Amir. “Islamic law, not the people, has become the source of authority.”

So, like the Healthy Forest initiatives the truth isn’t what the slogan says. We’re spreading a democracy of convenience, destroying a secular but cruel government with one that creates an oligarchy of the mosque that will encourage corruption and strife. Will it be less cruel? Will it be free? Will it be better than what was there before we came?

Despite the brutality and despotism, the decades of Baath Party rule under Saddam Hussein left a largely secular legacy, which included relative freedom for women.

“We had hoped for a secular constitution that would separate religion from state,” said Mirza Dinnayi, leader of the Yazidi sect viewed by Islamists now running Iraq as devil worshippers.

…

Iraq’s state media organs — the daily paper al-Sabah and satellite channel al-Iraqiya — have come out full guns blazing in favour of the draft, which the Sunni minority favoured by Saddam are mobilising to bring down in an October referendum.

But the popular Azzaman daily said in a column on Wednesday that parliament would be better off dissolved than promulgating a document such as the draft, as expected, later this week.

…

[Safia] Souhail said the United States, a crucial backstage player keen for a deal that meets U.S.-backed deadlines, had let the Shi’ite Islamists and Kurds in government do as they wish.

“We have received news that we were not backed by our friends including the Americans. They left the Islamists to come to an agreement with the Kurds,” she said.

Safia Souhail, you might remember, was the Iraqi woman who hugged Janet Norwood, mother of a fallen soldier during the 2005 SOTU address. She’s a leading human rights activist in Iraq, according to Reuters, and currently Iraq’s ambassador to Egypt.

So…

Is this where we want to be? Put aside the domestic politics for a moment. Forget about the Bush administration. In order to answer this question, a crucial question in my opinion, we really need to answer the following:

1. What are the “U.S.-backed deadlines” and why those deadlines?
2. Are those deadlines worth letting “Shi’ite Islamists and Kurds in government do as they wish?”
3. Does the U.S. have any vested interest in the type of government in the new Iraq?

To me, it does matter what government we leave. Perhaps this constitution will be the Iraqi’s Articles of Confederation, creating stability until they can realize what they want. I worry, though, that giving power to the religious leaders (especially in a way that leaves them unaccountable) will be a tough decision to reverse. It’s hard to take power away from people…

This problem of sincerity goes beyond Iraq. In a related item, Greg Djerejian posts a letter sent to the Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland on the topic of FSO morale at State under SecState Rice. One of the things the former FSO writes:

I won’t deny that there’s skepticism - but it’s not generalized, it’s compartmentalized to certain key areas that remain, essentially, “hangovers” from the first Bush term. The concerns I hear most about center around 1) public diplomacy 2) Iran and 3) China. Of the first, skepticism focuses on the fear that public diplomacy will be devolved further into the “style” of an ineffective political campaign, rather than an approach based on sound policy choices and legitimate outreach. Of the second, most concerns center around the realization that this Administration, like most of its predecessors, lacks any form of leverage with Tehran, and that changing this requires a wholesale change in the bilateral relationship (e.g. we actually have to develop one - but how?). And of the third, the concern is that a focus on China, largely driven by Congressional pressure, will reduce US-Asian relations to a subset of the China question. This may not only be counterproductive in the region, but will cause undue harm to relations with key allies, such as Japan and Australia.

As is usual at Greg’s place, Joseph Britt chimes in with a very cogent point:

If the message of our public diplomacy — really, this starts with Presidential statements and proceeds on down to formal PD programs — appears to be crafted with the domestic audience foremost in mind, this needn’t be a result of a deliberate choice. More likely it is because the domestic audience is the one administration officials know. This isn’t true of all of them, of course. It pretty clearly is true of the new Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Karen Hughes, a career consultant on political campaigns.

I think I had read that Hughes was now doing that job but promptly forgot it. Here’s her job description at State’s web site. Britt’s point, by the way, is a good one. Read the whole thing if you have a chance.

I disagree a bit with it. Whether it’s a conscious choice or not, it’s got to be clear by now that worrying about the reality on the ground has to be the top concern. I also wonder how unconscious the decision could be in a White House with Cheney, Powell, Rice, and Rumsfeld at key positions in the White House. All of them have significant foreign policy experience. It’s hard to imagine that one of them didn’t bring this up during the last few years.

(this chain of thought prompted by this post over at Eschaton)

Phelps is at it again. One of these days there’s going to be bloodshed at one of these “protests.”

We need it. Please see my page for voting and suggestion purposes:

Heidi’s Blog — Wedding Venue Help

(baby)

This must be how they’re training the new generation of Ditto-heads…

A very interesting article at ESPN.com applies an interesting metric to analyze the bubble QBs for the 2005 season. It’s Insider only but worth it. I’m a baseball fan and love the fact that performance is so quantifiable in baseball. It’s great to see the ways fans in other sports are working to analyze performance there. Between Hollinger and this guy we’ve got a good start on the NBA and NFL.

Just when I say I’m down on Technorati, they set up an interesting deal with Newsweek to integrate blog coverage into their web site. Technorati CEO David Sifry gives a good rundown of the features on his blog. It’s essentially the sports buzz features I’ve been running here but they’re integrating it into stories and giving it a section on the web site.

You can see the Newsweek Blog Roundup today.

Update: It’s “gratifying” to see they only have around a hundred link in when you get to stories further down the list. Blogging about politics is HUGE compared to blogging about sports. It’s amazing to me that this is the case, but it’s most definitely true. I’ve always been surprised at the small number of good sports bloggers out there, which makes it tougher to sell blogs to folks at work. Politics has the right intersection of writers and passionate fans, I guess.

Is there a better band name than “Kajagoogoo”?