Right about this one, Tom: few could have put it together better than Joe Bob did.

My Irony Meter was pegged, too - and I wish there'd been something quantitative about the demographics of the people who did respond to that CNN poll, as unscientific as it must've been. The implication is obvious: the generation last affected in one way or another by the Draft, who I might expect to stand foursquare against it now, seem to be its major supporters.

It'll be their - which is to say: our - children caught up in it.

A point about universal military service - to the best of my admittedly fuzzy recollection, there have been only two so-called Free World nations who had it, post-WW II: Israel and South Africa. Israel's reasons go without saying; so do South Africa's, but only from the perspective of a government using its army to suppress its own people... (make your own comparisons between fenced-in "homelands" vs Gaza and the West Bank).

Republicans authored the bill Briggs talks about? No surprise, really: who else believes "we have the power to MAKE people become good citizens"? I won't even get into how it might all be paid for, as I suspect the bill's authors didn't either: "don't tax; spend anyway".