I’ve never met Bill Scheurer, but I think his Peace Majority Report is a wonderful contribution to the debate on the U.S. role in the world. He takes a broad view of peace advocacy and is refreshingly willing to challenge the peace movement on its strategic choices and effectiveness.

A reader noted that yesterday was World Refugee Day. To mark the occasion, the UN High Commission on Refugees released a report that counts over 10 million asylum-seekers this year. That’s a 14% increase over last year, thanks mostly to the estimated 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria.

CSIS Strategic Analyst Anthony Cordesman didn’t use that metaphor exactly.

I’ll eliminate the suspense: I think it’s pretty silly. I understand the Clinton campaign’s desire to connect with its supporter base, develop loyalty, establish brand identity, and increase its candidate’s accessibility. Nothing wrong with that. But those goals could have been accomplished in ways that touch on issues facing the U.S. and the world, too….

Seymour Hersh has just published in The New Yorker a major interview with Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who led the Pentagon’s investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The piece is titled “The General’s Report.

I’ve received a mountain of email lately — some of it has asked for some more pics of Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner and his kid-sister Annie. Well, here’s one above of the pups sleeping which they do a lot of after some wild romps, runs, and walks that they get into on a daily basis….

As many readers of this blog know, I hosted former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson’s October 2005 cannon blast against the “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal” and the degradation of the national security decision making process in the White House.

I’m halfway through a report on disaster management and peacebuilding by Michael Renner and my good friend Zoe Chafe at the Worldwatch Institute. The frequency of disasters is likely to increase due to a number of factors, chiefly among them climate change.

I have no doubt that readers of this blog have noticed my more-than-occasional rants about insufficient U.S. funding for multilateral activities and institutions. Global poverty and U.N. peacekeeping are among the areas I’ve pushed for hardest through my ” day job,” but there’s another that’s just as much in need and even less noticed.

A TWN reader just sent me this interesting article titled “Arab Journalist Knocks U.S. Credibility in the Mideast,” that ran in yesterday’s Daily Oregonian. The title of the article aside, it’s a very interesting inventory of views of America’s Middle East mess as seen from an Arab perspective.