I can't imagine a worse job to have. Like John Ashcroft, though not to the same extent, Ridge has borne an awful lot of criticism for doing his job. And yet, he did it. And if we judge by results, he did it well.

I've seen some predictions/recommendations for Rudy Giuliani to take the position, and I just don't see that happening. In fact, I don't know who would take such a job. There is nothing positive to come out of it.

John of Argghhh! comments below, in response to the link to the Fallujah presentation he provided:

Funny you should mention that - the fact that I posted the slideshow I would argue is part and parcel (if not necessarily planned by the authors) part of an information operation.

They put it out in the email stream, obviously hoping to get it out in the open.

They obviously didn't target blogs (and Instapundit still chose to not bite on it) but blogs don't yet have a truly large readership, either. But - it *is* an influential one, if you get the right ones.

I know why the MSM didn't run with it - aside from possible issues about the fact that it doesn't follow their internalized story line about the issues in Iraq - it's a single point of data, from an obviously interested party, that they can't easily independently verify - and by they time they do/did, it isn't 'news' anymore.

So your point is well taken - the info campaign should probably take into account the blogs. By our nature, we run, you decide... 8^D

The problem, I think is bigger than they didn't take into account the blogs. Near as I can tell, they (not sure exactly who "they" is, but I would start with CENTCOM - this should have been part of a post-Fallujah briefing) haven't taken into account anything. If there is no post-Fallujah briefing, then the MSM can't cover it. GEN Abizaid may be directing the warfighting excellently. But we don't know, necessarily, because he isn't on TV - Kevin Sites is. In the absence of information, the media will find something to fill up all the airtime. it isn't enough to say that they only report the bad stuff, you have to give them good stuff to report. Reporters are pretty lazy, I think - they will take whatever is given to them over what it takes time and effort to get almost every time, I think. Look at Dan Rather. Note that Abu Ghraib wasn't some huge undercover investigation, it was handed to the press by the soldiers facing court martial for what happened there.

So the point is that this got into John of Argghhh's hands through unofficial channels. It got out to the world through a blog, and it hasn't caught fire even here in the sphere. It was not part of an information campaign, or an information strategy.

Interestingly enough, one of those outside advisory groups for the Pentagon, the Defense Science Board, released a report that has been the recent peg that many news organizations have used to indict the administration for failure in Iraq/the war on terror/whatever. I haven't finished reading the whole thing yet, but it doesn't appear that it is as negative an assessment as described in the Christian Science Monitor. I also don't know that I agree with all of it, either - as it is part of the intellectual argument about whether state actors are key in the war on terror, and this paper falls on the side that dealing with states solely - which I don't think is the actual strategy, to begin with - is a mistake. However, the idea that communications are a key part of what it will take to win the war on terror seems an argument with some merit - especially given the example of Fallujah. This is, I think, one of the most insightful paragraphs in the DSB paper:

Information saturation means attention, not information, becomes a scarce resource. Power flows to credible messengers. Asymmetrical credibility matters. What's around information is critical. Reputations count. Brands are important. Editors, filters, and cue givers are influential. Fifty years ago political struggles were about the ability to control and transmit scarce information. Today, political struggles are about the creation and destruction of credibility.

You can read the whole thing here. (111 page PDF).

Fallujah was an important battle. See here, and here. Seems we ought to be using this kind of stuff in our information campaign, too.

Starting to feel alive, my eye is clearing up, and the comments are working!

Stupid spammers! Nothing better to do over a holiday, so my email box is full of junk, and the comments are broken due to comment spammers (nice, thanks for that). I'll see if I can figure out how to fix that.

And because I just have to post a health update, now I've got pink eye!

Yep, all i've got is my health to talk about. I worked 30 hours straight on a project, and now I've got double super cold/flu.

At least I'm going home today.

Hmm. More like online journal here - Winamp is playing "Enjoy the Silence" by Depeche Mode.

As blaster pointed out, I found out on Friday that I passed the California Bar. I am now almost a full fledged lawyer. Just have the oath to go, which is more of a money thing.

I know I have been remiss about the posting thing. But I blame that on my job, buying a new house, moving, etc.

I do have some thoughts though. They are just perculating for one of my short essays.

Well, I did stop by the window at Fox & Friends, and I called Mrs. Blaster before hand and she saw me out there.

I am such a red stater.

Well, finishing up school - and pulling a couple of near all nighters to do it, combined with the weather, and getting up at 3 am to travel for work (on a Saturday - again!) has given me my first cold and/or flu of the season. I feel awful, though better than earlier.

Sick is bad. Sick while travelling worse. Sick while staying smack dab in the middle of Times Square, more so. I wasn't feeling adventurous in this chilly, rainy night. So I went to Fridays. I know New Yorkers hate that homogenous American chains are here, but I was looking for something comfortable. I knew exactly what I would order when I went in, and I knew exactly how it would be. Really, head and shoulders over the XXX movie houses and drug dealers that were down here in the 80s.

Wandering looking for a drug store - surprisingly, these things are open all the time in the suburbs, they close about 7 downtown. But I went by the Fox News building and saw Geraldo (!) on his set. If I feel well in the morning, I may swing by the F&F windows.

Or I may just sleep a bit longer.

pittspilot passed the bar! Congrats!

Now that there is a bonafide lawyer on board, we can go bigtime like Volokh or Ann Althouse or Reynolds! The hits are gonna just roll in! And the mad blog money!

Mentioned a while back that I had started going back to school. Well, this was finals week. Two major papers due, back to back. Time for procrastinating, no time for blogging.

And now, to sleep.

Everybody is saying Dr. Rice. I am thinking maybe James Baker. Yeah, I know that first time around 43 didn't want to look like he was recycling 41's folks. But I think it is a possibility.

UPDATE: Just heard on the radio. It will be Condoleezza Rice.

A week ago, I would have been surprised at this. I thought Powell would stay a couple more years. But I finished reading Woodward's Plan of Attack last night (more on that later), and as I figure that Powell was Woodward's prime source, and that it reflects him the most truthfully, I am not surprised at all. I am sure Armitage was planning to leave (dang squid!), and Powell wouldn't stay on without him as deputy.

They served the country well, though. Now some new blood will help us capitalize on previous success.

With Arafat dead, elections to replace him will be held January 9. An election, which Arafat had refused to hold, may be a chance for Palestine to start choosing democracy. (Then again, maybe not.) And of course, elections are due in Iraq in January, too. Fallujah getting cleaned out certainly improves on that.

And spotted through the Volokh conspiracy, Syria may be coming apart, too.

And Iran may be agreeing to suspend its nuclear program, or some part of it. Of course, we've heard that before.

Good news - or at least the potential of it - all throughout the region.

Interesting tidbits found while surfing. First of all, a terrorist scorecard apparently assembled by a Freeper. Seems like the sort of thing we might find from a good article on the subject. But I've never seen such a thing from the MSM.

Last year I linked to an article by Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker. In that article he described a meeting between Bill Richardson and the Taliban in 1998, trying to work out a deal to put a pipeline across Afghanistan. I ran across another of Goldberg's articles - which is pretty interesting, especially if you also read this article published by NRO last week.

There is a new report coming from the Veteran's Administration which is going to state that "there is a disease with a physical basis linked to chemical exposure in the Gulf." The report notes that many troops in the Gulf were potentially exposed to low levels of sarin gas, and that there were many potential sources of exposure:

It now appears there was plenty of sarin about. The US Department of Defense told a Senate investigation in 1994 that each of the 14,000 chemical weapons alarms around the troops went off on average two or three times a day during allied aerial bombardment of Iraq – a total of between 1 and 2 million alarms.

“All alarms were said to be false,” James Tuite, a consultant to the investigation, told the Lloyd inquiry. But UN inspectors later found Iraqi chemical weapons dumps damaged by bombing, upwind of the Kuwait-Saudi border – where troops were most likely to later become ill.

Veteran's groups have been saying for a long time that chemical exposure was at the core of Gulf War Syndrome. This a victory of sorts, for them. I expect that there will be considerably more support for them, monetary and medical.

Now read this post from September of last year. It concluded:

If both of these are true, then the US has been attacked twice with WMD, and made no response to it. Which means that the United States has no WMD deterrent. And Saddam Hussein knew it. Since both attacks had minimal effect, and their source not publicly known, it would be easier to cover it up, not because we didn't want to pay benefits to Gulf War veterans, but because we did not want to reveal our vulnerability. And that is why we had to put Saddam out of power. Because he had WMD. And because he wasn't afraid to use them. Because he had no reason to be afraid.

More than a dozen years have passed since the first Gulf War, and only now has the Defese Department recognized nerve gas as a cause of Gulf War syndrome. Now, after Saddam is out of power. Coincidence?

So what happens? It fricking snows in New York. In November!

UPDATE: I know, I went to school up here. And Mrs. and Junior Blaster are in Boston, where it snowed all day yesterday. Still, I hate being cold!

I wrote a post about a month ago about "The Other War." The war between the CIA and the President. I wrote:

Whatever else about the various reports that have come out - Senate Intelligence Report, 9/11 Commission Report, one thing is clear - our intelligence system is broken, and badly. It's bad enough we have to fight an external threat.

Now "Anonymous" is officially not anonymous. Mike Scheuer is quitting the CIA so that he can speak out against the administration. And there are those who think he is not just speaking for himself. The Boston Phoenix article that first identified "Anonymous" said:

Some have speculated that "Anonymous" has been publishing with at least a measure of blessing from a CIA so angered by certain White House and Pentagon elements that it has taken the unprecedented step of allowing an active intelligence officer to inveigh against the administration — and is enjoying the fact that it can unleash a critic protected by the vagaries of national-security protocols.

It goes on to say that others deny this, too. But Scheuer's editor says he is speaking for many in the CIA on at least one topic:

"This is clearly an effort to stop him from saying what a lot of people in the CIA think about the president's proposals for reform [of the intelligence community]."

I hope Porter Goss has the juice to fix our intelligence community. It's bad enough we have to fight an external threat.

UPDATE: Well, something is happening at CIA. Not entirely sure whether this is good or bad. The Deputy Chief resigned. If you know Washington, many times turf wars are carried out in the Post. It is difficult to tell from this article whether Goss is actually doing something bad, or whether he is doing something good, but the powers that be at the CIA don't like it.

UPDATE II: David Brooks in the NYT: The C.I.A. Versus Bush. I am thinking that the Post article is the sound of an ox being gored.

UPDATE III: Holy Crikey! Get a load of this quote from this column:

Scheuer told The Washington Post this week, "As long as the book was being used to bash the president, they [the C.I.A. honchos] gave me carte blanche to talk to the media."

Dead.

Not one to speak ill of the dead, so that's all I got.

I really like NRO. Really. The campaign to sack Arlen Specter I get, sort of. A Senator threatens the President on judges after getting reelected with that President's help. Not just because he is not ideologically in tune, but because he is ungrateful.

But come on - Al Gonzales? He's the President's choice, and he's had him on the team for a long time.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

In the course of locating seven weapons caches in a single block around a mosque in northeast Fallujah, an Iraqi platoon Wednesday found a suitcase full of vials labeled "Sarin," a deadly nerve agent.

While further analysis determined that the find was probably part of a Soviet test kit with samples, its discovery in a room with mortar shells appeared to indicate an intent to weaponize the material.

posted by blaster at 03:01 PM | Comments (0)

New York back on. Driving up tonight to do some work Saturday.

For fans of Friends.

Just looked in the referrers and saw that Michelle Malkin linked my BS piece below.

Which reminds me, I saw her on Fox and Friends the other morning talking to Kiran Chetry. A reminder of why they call it the Fox News Channel.

Wish I had a screen shot of them on screen.

The troops are out there doing what they do, and doing it well.

But I suspect that what is coming is that this will be portrayed as a huge massacre of civilians by US soldiers in the press. John Batchelor said this last night on his show - he was saying that the BBC would do this, the way they did it with Jenin. (Note - AL Jazeera has been shut out of Fallujah.) And Ralph Peters is on O'Reilly saying the same thing.

I don't know that there is anything we can do about it, other than be prepared. I hope we have our own cameras on the ground there. And I do see that there are embedded reporters again, and that seemed to work well.

Drudge linked this thing that Barbra Streisand posted on her site that is a partial quote of something Jefferson wrote in 1798:

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt......If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

Remembering her fiasco with the "Shakespeare quote," I googled the phraseology and it is an actual Jefferson quote. But she seems to have missed the point of what Jefferson wrote - just prior to the bit she uses, it reads:

Seeing, therefore, that an association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry, seeing that we must have somebody to quarrel with, I had rather keep our New England associates for that purpose than to see our bickerings transferred to others. They are circumscribed within such narrow limits, & their population so full, that their numbers will ever be the minority, and they are marked, like the Jews, with such a peculiarity of character as to constitute from that circumstance the natural division of our parties.

And the little "....." elision:

But who can say what would be the evils of a scission, and when & where they would end? Better keep together as we are, hawl off from Europe as soon as we can, & from all attachments to any portions of it.

"Although written in 1798, I feel his words speak perfectly to the strong sentiments of frustration and disappointment."

I am in Wyomissing, PA, and I'm cold. I think I might be getting a bug.

But I really do have some substantive stuff to post at some point.

Gosh, these people, well, pictures worth a thousand words, right?

The belly of the blue beast - New York City!

UPDATE: Cancelled!

Just, wow. After the election, so many thoughts. Can't even put them all together. Plus, busy at work.

Beat Air Force!

They seem to be reporting an entirely different election.

Ohio is called for the President, and so is Alaska. Puts him at 269 which is at least a tie that he wins in the House.

I'd need a lot more filler. So far, no real surprises.

For Bush. Duh.

Fox called Jersey for Kerry.

South Carolina - too close to call?

Bwahahahaha!

Let's just say I don't have much confidence in that. SC will be called in a half hour or so. For Bush.

Chris Wallace on Fox - said bin Laden tape was more important for Kerry voters.

Instapundit and others are off the air intermittently. So I am going to blog along with Fox News. Enjoyed along with "The Official Blaster's Blog Margarita of Election Night": steak. Not tofu.

Enjoying the first margarita, I read Hugh Hewitt. Called the only person I know in Ohio to tell him to vote. Already done, and already on the team (wouldn't have called if I thought he wasn't). My Florida friends voted early. I don't know anyone in PA.

Call someone you know. It isn't too late.

4 jiggers Cuervo margarita mix.

1.5 jiggers Sauza Anejo.

.5 jiggers Cointreau.

Pour over ice and shake.

UPDATE: NRO in agreement in general, disagreeing in detail....

Bloghorn Bleghorn asks that question in the comments to the post below. That reminds me that I am out of tequila, and margaritas are on for this evening.

I think we'll know who will be President, tonight. Maybe very late, but we will know. Gonna need tequila either way.

Once again, Mickey Kaus argues that a Kerry Presidency will be Carteresque, and tha