Stratfor, for what it’s worth, reads Iraq/Lebanon as two fronts in a regional war between the US and Iranian proxies that the US is badly losing….

The above “South Park” tribute to Steve Irwin ends with an image the evokes your “head up an elephant’s anus” line. But it’s not an elephant. It’s more domestic.

As a concept, “third way” has kind of a complicated history. It was drawn in part out of the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens, and cited by Tony Blair as a model. Clinton also liked the term and the concept, and to some extent it was seen as the operating approach of the Democratic Leadership Council. I suppose that in a nutshell is the issue that progressives might have. Giddens, as I read him, was really trying to think about some way to approach a set of intractable problems that divided the left and right in new ways. As Blair and Clinton used the term, it sometimes just meant the kind of centrism where you borrow a little of this and a little of that, to balance out your poll numbers. The organization in question I know a little bit about at this point: my sense of it is that it is somewhat like the New America Foundation in a lot of its ambitions–more of what Jonathan Rauch has called “radical centrism”, a centrist program that is intended to be more principled, more based on a consistent set of underlying ideas.

Is this history recap going somewhere? I mean do you have a project of some sort in mind of which this is a part?

Anyhow I agree with your recap, but it depresses me somewhat to think that all we can do to change things is hope that our elections sytem operates properly and that the electorate will do the right things.

It is just on the edge of possibility now, but I think that by 2012 we will see major polling organizations handicapping their state-wide projections in the Presidential election by including a factor for votes cast but not counted. I predicted, on the record, that such an element should have been included in 2004. The equipment we have in the field, the ease of hacker manipulation, and the corrupt officials we have here and there make it increasingly possible that we will have a failure of the system soon.