The President and the Arab Media

President Bush took a positive step by allowing two Arab networks to have access to himself yesterday. He took some good steps, but I feel that he also fell short in many important respects. An op-ed from Slate here reflects some of my concerns. Bush seems to be able to hit so many right cords and yet still miss other important ones that I'd like to hear. Why shouldn't he have apologized to the Iraqi people? We invaded their country and are occupying their land. Even though the purpose might be noble, we still caused them pain and the prison fiasco deserves not only to result in heads rolling but also a personal apology from the man (Bush) who led us to war. Being able to apologize is the mark of a mature adult and I think the President missed the chance to reflect this to the Arab world.

Warming up for the Boardwalks...

Every year, my brother and I take a brief vacation to Wildwood, New Jersey's Boardwalk to sample the local color, local cuisine, and see what is new in the arcades. After several days of overly depressing and dramatic news about the Iraq War, Bombs in Greece, the Presidential Campaign, et al. Today seemed like a good day to introduce another site that I like to frequent: Theology Web. While most of our readers are probably not thinking that Theology is a light change of pace, what about their patented ARCADE ROOM???!!!

Kerry's Calm: Signs of Storm or Signs of Life?

Most of us here at Mod-BLog have been feeling more and more that John Kerry's campaign has started to stink like an over-ripe fish. Senator Kerry has never shown any real passion or desire to be president. Instead, he was the antidote to the damaging wildfire of liberal Howard Dean, and nowadays he is the "Anybody But Bush" Nominee. Noone seems to be voting for Kerry so much as voting against Bush, and that was a recipe for disaster only 7 years ago in the Dole campaign. But David Brooks of the New York Times has a different take on the current Kerry calm.

John Kerry is doing exactly what he should be doing right now. He is in a post-primary molting season. He's emerging from the shadow of Howard Dean and becoming more like the policy twin of Joe Lieberman: a pro-trade, fiscally conservative centrist Democrat who is willing to pour more troops into Iraq to win the war.

Is Brooks right? Is this a strategic retreat while Kerry moves to flank President Bush on the right? Somehow, I doubt it. While I respect the Senator's advisers, I think they are in the job of being salesmen for a dead fish. They can dress it up, they can season it, they can heat it up, but I suspect that in the end the final product will still have olfactory issues.

UN Watch

An op-ed here about the many problems facing the UN in the wake of the recent scandals that seem to be breaking everywhere. It's ironic how the far-left continues to insist that we should allow the UN a bigger role in all of our affairs when it becomes more obvious every day just how broken and corrupt that "world body" has become.



Personally, I think the UN was a good idea. But that idea seems to have gone wrong somewhere and the practice now seems far removed from the intent. We need a world community, but what good is it if you let rouge nations like Syria and Iran have equal privleges with the nations who actually bother to follow the rules? Unless the UN starts to actually stand by its own decrees it really is going to become the joke that neo-cons already claim it to be.

eSurgery? Or Operating with Big Brother?

Newt Gingrich was once the architect of the 1996 Republican Revolution which swept majorities into both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the midst of the Bill Clinton adminstration, has since fallen from grace due to marital infidelity which uncovered his hypocrisy at the height of the Monica Lewinsky mess. However, before Newt was a congressional leader, before he had been spun by his enemies as the epitomy of evil, he was an extremely incisive analyst. Anyone who has listened to excerpts from his course Renewing American Civilization knows his is a mind to be reckoned with.



Now, Mr. Gingrich has written an article for the New York Times calling for a public-private initiative to bring medical records into the twentieth century by making them all electronic. Having just come out of the hospital for surgery for a herniated disk, these kinds of issues are very much on my mind.

The archaic information systems of our hospitals and clinics directly affect the quality of care we receive. When you go to a new doctor, the office most likely has little information about you, no ability to track how other providers are treating you, and no systematic way to keep up with scientific breakthroughs that might help you.



The results are predictable. For example, approximately 20 percent of medical tests are ordered a second time simply because previous results can't be found. Research shows that 30 cents of every dollar spent on health care does nothing to make sick people better. That's $7.4 trillion over the next decade for duplicate tests, preventable errors, unnecessary hospitalizations and other waste.

At the same time, we must keep in mind that electronic information is information easily accessed, duplicated, and pirated by interested parties. Do we want our insurance companies second-guessing every decision of our doctors? Do we want police to be able to pull up our complete medical histories on a whim, without the effort that a full search warrant requires? Do we want our medical histories potentially stolen and posted on a peer-to-peer network for all the world to see?



As always, electronic encoding offers equal helpings of advantage and risk.

The Value of History

There is a great perspective on the value of looking to the past to understand the present by Orson Scott Card. I recommend reading the full article, but here is a good quote:

When reporter after reporter at the recent news conference insisted that President Bush either apologize for 9/11 or explain why he wasn't going to, it was impossible for anyone grounded in history to think that this was anything other than the enemies of the President trying to lay a trap for him.



Think about it -- they weren't asking him about a story, they were trying to provoke him into making a story. They weren't recording what happened, they were trying to make something happen.



And since there was no answer Bush could give that would not provide a wonderful sound bite for his opponent in the upcoming election, the President's only choice was to remind them that it was Al-Qaeda that hijacked the planes and slaughtered the innocents.



After all, Bush had far less information about 9/11 than he had about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But he's supposed to apologize for not acting on the almost useless information he had about 9/11, and also apologize for acting on the extensive and reliable evidence he had about Saddam's WMDs?

No matter what political view we have, it is only fair to be honest with each other. The continuing lies and distortions don't help our country and they're not helping the rest of the world either.

Freedom of Speech/Press: The Ultimate Double-Edged Sword

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution is quite to the point:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

Freedom of speech and the press are a concept which began as a cornerstone of our government and has only grown more and more important over the centuries, as the press has become more and more influential over our way of thinking. The local paper of the 1700s was certainly powerful, but can not have had nearly the influence over hearts and minds that the combination of newpaper, television, movies, internet, etc. exerts. Reality was once that which we directly experienced, now it is both our own direct experiences and those which are transmitted to us by an every-growing media. It has produced a culture in America where thoughts and ideas are constantly being exchanged, challenged, revised, and discarded, such that vigorous debate is always going on to find the best ways to solve every problem. This freedom of speech is what makes it possible for us to have elections every 2 years for the House, 4 years for the president, and 6 years for the Senate and feel that anyone who wishes to be, is fully informed about every issue for every candidate.



Yet, from the start, this amendment has been as much a thorn in the side of our leaders, as it has been a sword with which we can hunt our enemies. Our second president, John Adams actually passed legislation called The Alien and Sedition Acts, which according to Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, was "devised to silence Republican criticism of the Federalists..." The act expired with little enforcement, due to its controversial nature. But it highlights the fact that even our own democracy has had a hard time balancing the needs of governing with the needs of free expression.



Now, the U.S. government has challenged the reporting of Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based news agency which presents itself as the Arab version of CNN. Al-jazeera has been the primary news agency for the dissemination of communications by anti-U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere - often the first agency to recieve new audio and videotapes from Osama Bin Laden himself. U.S. officials have raised the logical question of whether this is aiding and abetting enemies of the entire free world upon which Al-jazeera relies for their freedom of the press. (Check out Saudi Arabia to see how a free press survives in an authoritarian Arab country.)



Now the Iraqi blog Healing Iraq has a wonderfully sarcastic response to those on both sides of the issue. Who is being the more hypocritical? Why everyone involved, of course! Check it out.