The weather broke this weekend, and it's beautiful here today. See today's forecast for a taste of what the next few months are going to be like.
I opened all the windows and aired out the house. We'll still need the air conditioner from time to time for next few weeks, and then we won't. If things stay true to form, we'll even fire up the heater for a few nights in December or January.
It's payback for August!
Well, this is no surprise: Specter to vote for Mukasey as US attorney general. There were two ways this could play out: Specter would be a key vote and cave to White House pressure, or — what actually happened — the Democrats would cave and Specter would take the expedient route.
I suppose the only tiny silver lining in this whole sordid mess is that the GOP is so much in the tank for torture, that they haven't figured out that they are missing an opportunity: now that the Democratic party is so compromised on the torture question, it's actually open to Republicans to reformulate themselves as the anti-torture party. McCain could do it. Huckabee could do it. Even Romney could probably pull it off. (Rudy might find it tough.)
Someone doing good writes about the basics.
CIA Admits Waterboarding. Their defense? They “only” did it to three people.
Meanwhile, we learn from ABC News that Gonzales forced out a top aide who, having undergone waterboarding to see what it was like, decided it was indeed torture and should be banned.
Spurred by this post, I went to technorati.com to see what Discourse.net's rankings were.
According to technorati.com, this blog currently has an “Authority” of 229, and a “rank” of 23,628.
Authority seems to mean no more than “the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months”. That's not “authority” — at best it is a measure of inter-blog popularity. And rank is just a measure of relative inter-blog linkularity: “Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest [sic] Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.”
When I started blogging, I cared about this sort of stuff; now I can't seem to care very much. Is that a sign of maturity, or that it's time to stop?
Reading this rabidly negative deconstruction of Gen. Petraeus's fruit salad (the tabs and medals on an officer's dress uniform), I was struck by the extent to which it remained open to a counter-narrative. It may be that Patraeus is the antithesis of a fighting General, but it may also be that he is a very good administrator (even if he's also a man who married well and is very good at ascending in environments studded with greasy poles).
It is possible to distrust, even despise, the bootlicking of superiors — evident in the General's public and obsequious support of the Bush administration's political objectives — traits alleged in that article to be long-running hallmarks of a career, and yet admire the ability to motivate subordinates and manipulate the media. Even if one discounts for the besotted reporter factor, it seems pretty clear that the areas of Iraq that General Petraeus's troops occupied were more peaceful and stayed bought longer than other non-Kurdish areas under US control. That was an achievement, exactly the sort we hope for from our modern military Proconsuls, although not one that can easily be replicated on a larger scale now that he's starting from a worse position.
Jotwell Blenderlaw