The Candidates

My paper copy of The Nation arrived on Monday, in which various writers make the case for their chosen candidates. As it happens, The Nation has also posted all the contributions at their site, where you can read them here. You'll get: John Nichols for Joseph Biden; Ellen Chesler for Hillary Clinton; Katherine S. Newman for John Edwards; Bruce Shapiro for Christopher Dodd; Richard Kim for Mike Gravel; Gore Vidal for Dennis Kucinich; Michael Eric Dyson for Barack Obama; and Rocky Anderson for Bill Richardson.

You also get Robert Scheer on that voice in the Republican wilderness, Ron Paul.

More about Benazir Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto's niece, does not have a high opinion of her aunt, to put it mildly, and worries here about what her return means for the future of Pakistan.

...and Some Very Bad News

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued its report, and the news is even worse than many of these scientists expected. This is the most important issue the world faces right now. I wish that I could believe we're up to meeting the challenge.

The BBC has posted a draft of the executive summary of the report here.

Some Good News (At Last) About Ruler of the Sky

My Genghis Khan novel Ruler of the Sky will finally get reissued in the U.S. My agent just informed me that a company called Boyston Books, located in Manhattan, wants to bring out a new edition, and they have obtained hardcover and trade paperback rights.

In the meantime, if you read German, check out this edition; Ruler has just been reissued yet again in Germany.

The Quiet Coup

I am a bit late in getting to this, but Frank Rich's New York Times column of last Sunday, about coups in Pakistan and the US, resonated with Naomi Wolf's even more alarming piece at the Huffington Post about growing restrictions on travel and what they might portend.

Rich writes, "Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon."