Deadline for Friday review: met. Whew. Feedback to incorporate tomorrow, so the evening to screw around watching Michael Jackson and playing the Sims. Hopefully, I'll be resuming normal posting tomorrow.

Another crazy, busy day with work - yahoo but that means limited postings until things calm down. I hooked up TiVo late Saturday night and already don't know how I lived without it. What is the first thing I recorded? Can you believe the world's best terrible futuristic rock musical The Apple ? It was on the free Showtime preview I get all month. It's the version I remember from 80s cable - much better quality than the pan and scan video. Frankl, my mind boggles at the coincidence. I was meant to get this machine. For those of you with Showtime, it's on again Friday at 10:25AM. I double dare you.

A sad day. The part that always gets me is reading about the crew: men and women, white, black and brown, American-born, immigrants and allies. The best we have - and as usual a magnificent representation of American meritocracy. RIP.

Sorry for the lack of postage. I just got handed a raft of work and am swimming in flyer verbiage. Good thing too, since I just got the credit card bill for my London trip. So Happy Chinese New Year. It's the year of the Goat (sometimes translated as Sheep), which is my own sign. Seems like it will be one of those painful transition years according to the horoscope for 2003. Seems about right. At least you get lots of cute goat pictures.

The State of the Union last night was surprising, to say the least. The first half of the speech laid out a domestic agenda -- $400 billion over 10 years for Medicare reform, including prescription drug benefit, $600 million more for drug treatment programs, $450 million to provide mentors for disadvantaged junior high students and children of prisoners, $6 billion for bioterrorism vaccines, $1.2 billion to research hydrogen-powered cars, $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.

Every one a noble and appropriate cause - but that is a whole lot of new spending in addition to the untold costs of homeland security and the war that are already swamping the budget into major deficit. Sounds like he learned the lesson from Bush Sr. in 92 that victory without a domestic agenda "vision thing" is the ticket to one-term. I've never heard Bush sound like that - ever - and I give him credit. But as someone with many tax-paying years ahead of me, the amounts of money starting to bleed out are scary indeed. I just got SimCity 4 two days ago and I am already marvelling about how hard it is to balance taxation, spending and debt to keep an economy growing.

The second half was on Iraq. He did build some credibility with me by stating there is a clear connection to al-Qaida. But the proof of this is to come from Colin Powell on Feb 4th. Here's how Time analyzed it:

He charged that "thousands" of Iraqis were engaged in efforts to thwart inspectors and he made good on Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz's claim that the Iraqis had infiltrated the weapons inspection teams. He charged that Saddam is intimidating scientists and replacing them with imposters when the U.N. teams come knocking. If this stands up, these two charges may become the ones that tip the country and the U.N. Security Council fully in favor of U.S. military action against Saddam. Or, if Secretary of State Powell is unable to prove Bush's claims in his trip to the U.N. next week the new allegations may seem like desperate attempts to come up with any dirt that will work and undo the support the president rallied tonight.

Despite one awful cowboy moment that was chilling in its implications: "We have captured 3,000 al-Qaida operatives. Many others have met a similar fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies" -- he was restrained and clearly burdened by the weight of his decisions.

But in my mind, there has to be a powerful smoking gun to make me convinced that the US is on solid ground to launch an aggressive action in the Middle East that may only serve to antagonize and embolden our enemies and embroil us directly in the middle of the most divided and extremist region on Earth. And of course, there's no information about what our vision to occupy Iraq once we've bombed them into the stone age (but I think that news article is a planted leak / pr move). Just as there is no mention of how we are doing with the regime change in Afghanistan.

To be fair, there's a small voice in the back of my mind that thinks about The Gathering Storm, which I saw on HBO about Winston Churchill in the 30s. Churchill was broke and considered an over-the-hill, out-of-touch blowhard. While PM Chamberlain was brokering a peace accord with Hitler, Churchill was pissing everyone off by speecgifying about the threat of the Nazi rise to power.

"Then, one of Winston's political allies shows him a top-secret report that Hitler is ordering owners of civilian aircraft to register with the Air Ministry. Winston immediately recognizes that this could be what he needs to persuade his critics to take the German leader seriously. As more secret foreign-policy documents are smuggled to him, Winston reveals the increasingly unsettling information in speeches before Parliament. He finally gets Parliament's attention - as well as that of the Prime Minister, who wants to muzzle Winston and uncover the source of the intelligence leak."

Obviously, Churchill was proven right about German aggression even though he was a lone voice in the wilderness for many years. Playing the what-if game, if England had attacked Germany pre-emptively to unseat Hitler, presumably it would have spared the world 45 million dead German and Russian soldiers, 15 million dead Allied soldiers, 6 million dead Jews and other concentration camp victims and the brutal legacy of red curtain tyranny.

On the other hand, Hitler was in many ways the product of the harsh economic and political policies imposed by the Allies by the Treaty of Versailles at the conclusion of World War I. Taking out Hitler doesn't change the environment that produced him. In fact, it may have worsened the matters that spawned him - a sane Napoleonic conqueror is a lot more scary long term than a psycho. Horrible in its scope, the Second World War decimated Germany, dismantled the German lust for European domination (I hope) and paved the way for the European Economic Community - a bizarre notion when you consider 1,000 years of constant warfare in the region.

So does Saddam=Hitler in this scenario? Who knows. That's why we have to trust our government to do the right thing. And that trust will come with not only with evidence but with a plan to build lasting change that Americans can live with. Are we ready to take responsbility for managing the region indefinitely if we go in? That's why Bush Sr. did not go into Baghdad ten years ago - we pushed back the invasion and went home. That's not what we're talking about now. The "vision thing" on a prolonged US presence in the Middle East is lacking.

And for some more perspective about how US actions in the Middle East have worked in the past, read about how the US conducted a covert coup in Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah of Iran. Or how our support for Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 80s trained and financed Mujahadeen rebels including rebel leader Osama bin Laden. Or how our support for Saddam Hussein in the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s financed his regime.

"Rumsfeld has also said he had "nothing to do" with helping Iraq in its war against Iran. Although former U.S. officials agree that Rumsfeld was not one of the architects of the Reagan administration's tilt toward Iraq -- he was a private citizen when he was appointed Middle East envoy -- the documents show that his visits to Baghdad led to closer U.S.-Iraqi cooperation on a wide variety of fronts. Washington was willing to resume diplomatic relations immediately, but Hussein insisted on delaying such a step until the following year." Washington Post, December 30, 2002

Maybe I'll go watch Thirteen Days and marvel at how JFK managed to divert war with the Soviet Union by the smallest of margins playing an elaborate game of chicken. And hope that Colin Powell is the new Adlai Stevenson when he speaks to the UN next week.