I have a tendency to hold onto links for a long time while lying to myself that I intend to write a full post on each. Here’s a few random links and thoughts that I don’t have the time to expand into full posts, but are still worth your attention :

For those of you interested on who’s gonna be the next Pope, Slate has a good rundown of the top candidates. Personally, I think the next Pope should be from Latin America, but considering what a big deal they made out of the last Pope being from Poland, I’m guessing they’ll pick a really old Italian that’ll probably die soon so they can put off making a gutsy decision for a few years. Then again, JP2 apparently stacked the deck with his own cardinal electors, so the smart money’s probably on the candidate who’s the most like him.

Yeah, I’m sure you’ve already read about the Republican Senator who made a speech that left the impression that he’s an apologist for the murderers of judges. Nevertheless, you should read David Neiwert’s post on this controversy. He connects all the dots between this, the Schiavo controversy, and right-wing militias. Scary stuff…

The new Weezer song, Beverly Hills, totally blows (and this is coming from someone who liked their last two albums). Really, there’s nothing less cool than the rich and famous singing about being rich and famous. Weezer’s dressing it up in ironic detachment doesn’t help either. Just like their logo was a lot cooler when it was a Van Halen homage/parody, Weezer was a lot cooler when they were band geeks who accidentally had a hit rather than rock stars playing sold out stadiums who still want people to believe they’re geeks.

This is a little old now, but if you haven’t read it already, you should definitely check out this open letter to Condi Rice from Canada’s former foreign minister. I especially love this bit :

As our erstwhile Prairie-born and bred (and therefore prudent) finance minister pointed out in presenting his recent budget, we’ve had eight years of balanced or surplus financial accounts. If we’re going to spend money, Mr. Goodale added, it will be on day-care and health programs, and even on more foreign aid and improved defence.

Sure, that doesn’t match the gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar deficits that your government blithely runs up fighting a “liberation war” in Iraq, laying out more than half of all weapons expenditures in the world, and giving massive tax breaks to the top one per cent of your population while cutting food programs for poor children.

Just chalk that up to a different sense of priorities about what a national government’s role should be when there isn’t a prevailing mood of manifest destiny.

As anyone who lacks healthcare can tell you, sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence.

According to Robert Reich, “There are four essential American stories. The first two are about hope; the second two are about fear.” If you’re interested in reading more about The Triumphant Individual, The Benevolent Community, The Mob at the Gates, & The Rot at the Top and finding out how these four stories have helped shape our current political climate, click here. I’m convinced that the key to senate victory lies in the emphasis on a “benevolent community” being manipulated by the “rot at the top”. Like I’ve said before, it’s not enough to be right, you also have to convince people. It’s not that the Democrats lack a narrative, but that they haven’t been able to fit their shared (ha!) political goals into the stories that we already share.

A few weeks ago during one of my increasingly frequent blog dry spells, I was planning to write a long post about how brilliant the Planet of the Apes movies are as a way of cleansing my mental palate. I probably still will one of these days, but until then, you should check out this and this article at Slate. If your only memory of the Apes movies is a bunch of people in cheesy makeup, then you’re missing out on some of the most socially and politically radical science fiction movies ever made.

Finally, is it just me or is there something eerily similar about the wall-to-wall coverage of the Schiavo and Pope stories? I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the coverage of the two have the exact same subtle hint of shallowness. CNN in particular really seems to have a knack for covering big stories while completely forgetting why they’re big stories. Anybody wanna make bets on which corpse CNN will be obsessed with next week?