John P. Abizaid, commander of the US Central Command, and the top US commander in the Middle East recently told a Senate palel that “Iraq is on a trajectory for Civil War”:http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/08/04/generals_voice_fear_of_civil_war_in_iraq/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+–+National+News.  Recently, the British ambassador to Iraq voiced a similar opinion.

Assuming this is true, what is the US going to do about it, or, more to the point, who will the US back?  The Kurds?

I just tried out “Google Reader”:http://www.google.com/reader (Google’s RSS Aggregator) for the first time. It sucks. Sure, it’s got lots of slick AJAXY UI wizzardry, but it isn’t very efficient. You get a list of the titles of all the items in your feeds and then have to select each one to actually see the content. Even with the keyboard shortcuts and whatnot, you can only view one item at a time.

I don’t know that I’m totally sold on the whole “River of News”:http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews concept, where all the items for all your feeds are shown on one page in reverse chronological order. But I do like seeing all the entries for a given feed, or group of feeds, displayed that way so I can quickly whip through them with the scrollbar, stopping on the items that catch my eye.

It feels like it takes me about the same amount of time and effort to eyeball an entire blog entry and decide if I want to read it in depth as it does to make the decision based on reading a headline. More importantly, my error rate is lower from eyeballing the whole story, because I base my decision on more information (and blog entry titles often suck) and I don’t have to do anything more to read the entry, because it’s right there in front of me. When forced to go by the title, I have to select the title and wait for the rest of the item to load (thankfully this happens quite quickly with Google Reader), and then I often decide to pass on the item after all because the full-text shows me that the entry wasn’t very interesting (for example, a recap of a news story I read somewhere else already).

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s a lame slogan. How am I going to compete with “Four More Wars,” or whatever that new Republican slogan is that Newt Gingrich has been floating.

Today, Peggy Noonan demonstrates why she should be severed from the mass-media and beaten bloodless. Maybe then she’ll stop spinning.

During the past week’s heat wave–it hit 100 degrees in New York City Monday–I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world’s greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not?

OpinionJournal – Peggy Noonan

She must have seen how well Al Gore has been doing with “An Inconvenient Truth” and thought she’d see how she could do with a convenient lie.

So what, Bush said “shit” while talking to Tony Blair about the death spiral between Israel and Hizbollah in Lebanon.  Why is it news that a middle-aged american male would use a swear in what he thought was a private discussion about an ugly international situation? Sounds about right to me.

What I want to know is why, days after that conversation, he still seems to be trying to get his shit together and “send Condi.”