I think of myself as pretty moderate, and not particularly partisan, though its hard to be anything but a bit disgusted during campaign season. The Democrats have been turning my stomach, and now the Republican Convention is boiling my blood a little.

Listening to and reading the foreign policy rationale spewed during the convention really makes me uneasy. I think having a military, and using it when necessary, is an important part of defending our country from a very real threat.

The thing is, I think its important to use it wisely. Using it wisely would mean making sure there were enough troops on the ground in Afghanistan to keep it from disintegrating back into terrorist playground. Using it wisely would mean not invading Iraq under false or dubious pretenses. Whether or not one was invading under false pretenses, using it wisely would mean not invading without sufficient troop strength and post-war planning in place to insure the country doesn’t disintegrate into another terrorist playground. Using it wisely would mean holding the secretary of defense accountable for such mistakes, and the others, like the torture of prisoners (including children) that occurred during his watch. Using it wisely would mean being aware that doing a sloppy job is just going to make a difficult job even harder.

The Republican standard bearers demonstrate no wisdom in this regard. They seem inclined to sweep all these bungles and mistakes under the rug, happy to sacrifice our safety and security in order to secure another term for a Republican president. They paint anyone critical of this bungling as cowards, or even traitors. They surely can’t see how this bungling could come back and bite us on the ass in the form of 20 years of terrorist attacks on American soil and 20 years of national insecurity as we constantly fear for our oil supply.

I’ve been relying on Webalizer, as provided by my webhost, to give me a view into the traffic to this blog. I’d really like a more flexible but equally inexpensive tool that would give me finer grained views on things.

I’d like to be able to easily answer which referrers are pointing to which pages, and when.

Any tips?

I’ve been using Sharpreader as my RSS aggregator for 6 months or so. I picked it largely because of the way it managed feeds. I just tried RSS Bandit again though. It seems to have similar features these days, as well as the ablility to sync state (feeds subscribed, articles read) across installs via a variety of methods, including an FTP share.

So, what is it that ever made Zell Miller a democrat? I tuned in to some polemic, delivered to loud applause after each sentence or two. I figured it was the GOP convention, but I didn’t know who was speaking until he said something in the midst of something foreign-policy related along the lines of “my party has become a party full of people who think that America is the problem.” When this statement received loud applause, I had to assume that this guy wasn’t speaking to “his own.”

What I don’t get is why this guy ever thought of himself as a Democrat. His stereotypes of his “fellow Democrats” sound like the type of rhetoric Republican’s were using against Anti-war Democrats in the Vietnam era.

Someone in the DNC should have revoked Zell’s papers long ago.