Monday's comment from the papers in...

Today in Times Comment

• William Rees-Mogg: Remember Wally Hammond and Farmer White and stop being glum about the Ashes
• Tim Hames: The Lib Dems should stop being so merciless about Ming (for the time being)
• Helen Rumbelow: Ugly Betty shows that Americans distrust unattractive people and that the British are suspicious of the beautiful
• Martin Fletcher: Why the Islamists were good for the poor, war-battered Somalis
• Anjana Ahuja explains why nature-lovers should be grateful to Carl Linnaeus

And in the rest of the papers...

• Gary Younge: (The Guardian) - Stop the War? The Democrats have failed to take on the principal reason they were elected and, tragically, the US public is unlikely to force them to
• Max Hastings: (The Guardian) - After decades of neglect, terrible accommodation and plummeting morale, the Armed Forces' real battle is in Britain, not Basra
• Jackie Ashley: (The Guardian) - His rivals might sneer at his promise to bring people back into politics, but Gordon Brown could yet have the last laugh
• Janet Daley: (The Daily Telegraph) - Who would have thought that, in the absence of world war and in the midst of unprecedented prosperity, the State would be telling us not to travel
• Philip Johnston: (The Daily Telegraph) - Once in office, parties tend to be less generous with the information they now control. So it has proved with Labour.
• Jim White: (The Daily Telegraph) - What's got into us? Grown ups have viewed a 14-year-old's triumph of sailing across the Atlantic single-handed with jealousy
• Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: (The Independent) - Spare me from Whitehall's well-being committee
• Johann Hari: (The Independent) - The real reason there are more rats than ever
• Bruce Anderson: (The Independent) - A bad conviction: No one listening Urman Javed was in a position to bomb the USA or Denmark
• James Forsyth: (The Spectator Online) - A dynasty is born: how the Bush family are planning its third president

And from around the world…

• Wesley K. Clark: (Washington Post) - The odds are that this week President Bush will announce a "surge" of up to 20,000 additional U.S. troops into Iraq. Will this deliver a "win"? Probably not
• Jonathan Stevenson: (New York Times) - Unless America plays a constructive role in Somalia's next stage, the conflict could become a regional war and a new field of jihad
• Michalis Firillas: (Haaretz - Israel) - Accept Turkey into the EU and you gain an important ally in the Middle East and Islamic world, some say. However, Ankara's influence on co-religionists and Turkic countries amounts to naught
• Lawrence Pintak: (Lebanon Daily Star) - Al-Zawraa, the jihadist television station, is being broadcast to the Arab world. In response, Egypt's government is suffering from on-air ambiguity
• Leaders: Bush and the Imperial Presidency 2.0 - International Herald Tribune

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

In all of American history, there have only been two sets of father-son Presidents: John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams, in the early years of the Republic, and the Bushes now. And the present President made a conscious effort in his campaigning strategy to defuse the accusation of a dynasty. Nothing is impossible but I think it very unlikely that American voters would be prepared to elect a third President from the same family over a relatively short period of time, although on at at least one occasion George Bush said that Jeb Bush would be a good one.