Category: US Politics

The notorious talkshow host, and former mayor of Cincinatti, Jerry Springer is considering running for the Senate.

This is a nice piece by Mark Lawson – I like:

The state of American culture might suggest a horrible logic in President Springer, presiding over a country run by live-on-television plebiscites, with policy dilemmas snappily packaged: I’ve Got Chemical Weapons And Would Use Them!, I’m Dying And Can’t Get Medicare! Thankfully, that isn’t possible because of the presenter’s English birth: the US commander-in-chief must be a natural-born citizen.Britain may be powerless to stop some American follies, but we’ve inadvertently spared them that one.

For my American readers, a report in Internet week is saying that the Bush administration is planning to require Internet service providers to become part of a new monitoring system. It is all part of the “National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace” which will be launched in the new year.

David Ignatius writes on why Kissinger resigned as one of the investigators into the events surrounding Sep 11 2001.

Fred Hiatt writes about press freedom in Eritrea and the effects the war on terrorism has had on overall freedoms in the US. The balancing act of freedom vs security is one that is increasingly going in favour of security – if it can even be called that.

This is a very interesting article in the Guardian today. Jonathan Freedland writes an excellent piece on the ins and outs of whether the US empire today could be compared to the Roman Empire c300BC – 150AD.

Strangely enough, this argument is one that the irreverant Anthony Sheridan and I have discussed with the other Roman scholar, Tony. We had come to all the same conclusions drawn by Freedland, as well as the fact that like all Empires, the US will fall at some point in the future. But that unlike the collapse of the Roman empire, the fall of the US empire could be far more catastrophic given its huge number of nuclear weapons. The documentary starts Saturday.

A very interesting read, if somewhat disturbing. I can only agree with the journalist in question on his closing remarks, “The only people more dangerous than dumb bigots are smart, educated ones”.