Another Congressman has floated the idea of another draft–this time it's Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel. The San Jose Mercury News has a good article about the growing anxiety about the Pentagon instituting another draft.

Previously, Rep. Chuck Rangel (D-NY) and Sen. Fritz Holling (D-SC) had introduced a bill reinstating the draft, arguing that the poor are bearing the brunt of the nation's security policy and that a draft would make the responsibility more equal. I think they did it just to scare people into thinking a little bit harder about who actually goes out and conquers foreign lands for the empire.

Both the Mercury News and the Washington Post talk about the Internet rumor mill as contributing to "conspiracy theories" about the reinstating of the draft. WaPo links to a Buzzflash editorial about how they're calling up reservists who aren't medically fit (which has already cost the life of one soldier that we know of, a man who died of a heart attack while on duty in Iraq), and extending the tours of those already here. Politics in the Zeros has an excellent roundup of draft-preparation news which they should have linked to instead.

Interestingly, none of the above pieces mention an article I came across about a month ago by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about how the Selective Service System is, in fact, working towards a new "selective draft" — a more selective selective service system, if you will:
<blockquote>
"Talking to the manpower folks at the Department of Defense and others, what came up was that nobody foresees a need for a large conventional draft such as we had in Vietnam," said Richard Flahavan, a spokesman for the Selective Service System. "But they thought that if we have any kind of a draft, it will probably be a special skills draft."
</blockquote>
And what sort of "special skills" are they talking about? Computers and linguistics (read: Arabic). And you won't be able to get out of it by claiming you have flat feet or asthma, because it's not infantry.

White House spokespeople have repeatedly said there is no need for a draft "at this time." I don't believe anything they say, but at the present, it's true. However, a year or two down the line, if Bush gets re