From the NY Times (and thanks to Chip for the link):

Bill Clinton and his opponent in the 1996 presidential election, Bob Dole, are teaming up to revive the commentary segment “Point-Counterpoint” on “60 Minutes.”

Mr. Clinton and Mr. Dole have contracted to provide 10 debate segments, beginning Sunday night. The commitment does not extend beyond the end of the television season in May, but if the format is successful CBS will try to continue it next season, CBS executives said.

Reminds me of the time about 10 years ago when my sister-in-law Sue was teaching freshman Rhetoric & Comp or some such course, I think at NYU. The class was reluctant to speak. Sue kept trying to engage them in conversation. Finally, a few sessions in, someone finally spoke up, disagreeing with something Sue said. Sue, completely delighted, replied, “Mary, you ignorant slut.”

Shocked silence descended.

Fortunately, Sue was able to explain why she was impuging the sexual virtue of the first student who disagreed with her. These students were maybe 2 years old when Jane Curtin and Dan Ackroyd made that phrase famous.

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Michael O’Connor Clarke points us to the new coding of airline passengers based on their perceived threat level and suggests his own 5-alarm system.

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A USA Today survey shows that 87% of Americans say that nothing any celebrity could say would change their mind about the Iraqi war. Good!

But that hardly means that celebrity protests make no difference. Even if they change no minds, they help legitimize the anti-war position. So, keep it up Sean, Martin, Tyne, Anjelica and every uni-named star who speaks her mind.

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John Brady Kiesling, a US diplomat with twenty years of service, has resigned because “the Bush administration has squandered U.S. legitimacy through a ‘swaggering and contemptuous’ approach to foreign policy.” (Salon)

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USAToday today runs an interview with President Bush. It prefaces the transcript with:

Excerpts from USA TODAY’s interview Thursday with President Bush, edited for length and clarity.

Edited for CLARITY? Since when is a newspaper supposed to be fixing up a politician’s garbled language? That’s what we have PR flacks for.

USAToday owes it to us to publish the full, unedited interview on its Web site. I couldn’t find it there.

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From Mark Dionne comes this Buzzflash “news analysis”:

Ari Gets Laughed Out of the White House Briefing Room

BuzzFlash Note: Although we didn’t see this occur, we have received three separate reader accounts indicating that the White House press corps finally laughed at the absurdity of Ari Fleischer’s lies, at least once. The following is the account from one of our BuzzFlash e-mail reporters about the White House news briefing on Tuesday, February 25:

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ON CSPAN — WH press conference with Ari ended just now. It’s grim. Not much new but a reiteration of the “Saddam must disarm” and some hints that Saddam and other top Iraqi leaders might be assassinated if GW gives the executive decree.

Then one tidbit floated up. A reporter asked about a French report that says Bush is offering a bundle of concessions (and I think she actually said ‘buying votes’) to Mexico and Colombia, granting worker amnesty and so on. Ari tap-danced. Then she (the reporter) started to press the issue by saying “they (the French) are quoting two US State Dept. Diplomats that Bush intends to give work permits to Colombia and Mexico.”

…. Ari just drew himself up with imperious indignation and said something like “you’re implying that the President is buying the votes of other nations and that’s just not a consideration” or words to that effect. And guess what happened? The whole press corps, normally sheep, broke out in laughter… sweet, derisive laughter. They kept on laughing as Ari turned on his heels and strode out. Sheesh.

Go down to White House Press Briefing (02/25/2003) and click on the video. After it buffers, play from about 28 minutes forward for context, 30 minutes forward to watch Press laugh at Ari’s BIG FAT GOP LIE.

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John Perry Barlow has written a surprisingly even-handed message to Farber’s list that says: “With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick Cheney is the smartest man I’ve ever met.” So, he asks, what’s going through Cheney’s head? How can the world’s only super-power protect its global interests and stabilize the world? Answer: By acting like “the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to use…By these terrible means, they will create a world where war conducted by any country but the United States will seem simply too risky and the Great American Peace will begin.”

Yes, that Cheney is brilliant! And the plan can’t fail … so long as the people we’re subjugating can’t get their hands on any box cutters.

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From Mark Federman comes a link to a press release from the Los Alamos Study Group (a “non-profit, research-oriented, nuclear disarmament organization…”) that describes the recently-released minutes of a meeting of “thirty-two senior nuclear weapons managers from U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, the uniformed military, the National Nuclear Stewardship Administration (NNSA), and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.” The meeting was set up to plan an August meeting about how to build nuclear weapons that can be used on the battlefield, not merely for deterrence. It seems as if we’re about to build a whole new round of nukes.

Feel safer?

Says the press release:

It is impossible to overstate the challenge these plans pose to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the existing nuclear test moratorium, and U.S. compliance with Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1970 and is now binding law in the United States. 

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David Spector, on a mailing list, points us to some parodies of the inadvertently absurd Homeland of Office Security site, Ready.gov.

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I find something moving about this collection of photos of peace rallies around the world.

Thanks, David I.

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