Paper Trail Enters the 21st Century

I've been waiting for the Paper Trail to allow comments since it was in its nascent stages...

Your new blogging/online comments feature

Hi U.S. News!

Welcome to the rough and tumble world of online communication. I've been a hard copy faithful reader of your magazine for a long, long time, and all I can say is "...it's about time!...".

However, having said that, I hope you consider taking this to the next logical place it needs to go, a la www.mydesert.com, the online edition of Gannett-published The Desert Sun newspaper, out of Palm Springs, CA.

I'm been writing my own blog for them since the end of September and find it to be a lot of fun. You can find mine under mbrheljr. As a retired prosecutor, author and law enforcement educator, my area of expertise is public safety, but I also write about different issues other than merely crime and punishment.

As we both know, U.S. News has a much broader readership than a local newspaper like The Desert Sun and allowing individual reader-bloggers to write their own blogs like they do would add a dimension that otherwise doesn't exist.

Anyhow, that's my two cents worth on this subject. Thanks for listening. Be well everyone, stay safe and Happy Holidays!

Presidential Race-2008 (Part I of II)

Senators John Sidney McCain III (R-Arizona) and Barack Hussein Obama (D-Illinois) have outlasted all their opponents and now must carefully select their vice presidential running mates, hoping against hope that their respective choices will give their presidential campaigns the added fuel needed to successfully complete the journey.

Which of these two U.S. Senate colleagues should American voters trust with their futures? McCain, U.S. Naval Academy graduate and retired U.S. Navy Captain served two terms in Congress from 1982-1986, until he succeeded former U.S. Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in the Senate where he has served his constituents ever since.

Obama graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, worked as a community organizer and a civil rights lawyer, ran unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress and has been in the U.S. Senate since 2004.

Despite belonging to different political parties, the candidates are remarkably similar on some issues. On other issues, these two are as different as day and night. Obama has never supported the Iraq War and appears to advocate bringing the troops home, if elected. However, his promise on this issue has never been supported by any details.

McCain, on the other hand, although disagreeing at times with how the incumbent President has fought the war, has always advocated bringing the troops home only after the enemy has been defeated. I suspect his intractability is based on his military experiences, including his tour of duty as a prisoner of war.

Obama seems to swim against the tide of conventional wisdom by arguing, without any preconditions, that we engage in direct dialogue with entities such as the governments of North Korea and Iran, as well as other dubious folks such as the terrorist group known as Hamas.

While I readily admit that secret, behind the scenes, discussions have taken place between warring or enemy sovereigns, since the time a certain Middle Eastern carpenter was a proverbial corporal, doing so publicly, and without precondition, is unprecedented and akin to opening floodgates we don't want to mess with.

Why? First of all, doing so would add legitimacy to individuals and governments one shouldn't attempt to legitimize. We are talking about national leaders who allow their own people to starve so they can build nuclear weapons, or others who claim the Holocaust never happened and publicly declare their stated intentions to wipe a particular sovereign nation off the face of the earth. Do such folks deserve credibility?