One might think some of this would have made news. It's a must read. Transcript of Rumsfeld and Abizaid press conference.

If you ever wondered what happened to Patrick Ruffini, he seems to have landed a paying job working on GeorgeWBush.com He promises some blogofabulous features in the near future. Here's a start - news feeds.

Patrick was a frequent linker to Blaster's Blog, so I don't mind doing him a favor by mentioning this new work. Psst - Patrick, read the item below, too.

UPDATE: I see that Jane Galt has seen this in the Washington Post.

The blackouts didn't extend down where I was, but I thought it was kind of weird to see television broadcasting from where there was no power. I just hope the hospitals have as much backup as the cable channels.

But now that we are in the recrimination phase, and the people in power are out of town, the out of power people get the mike. Two mornings in a row I have listened to Imus in the Morning and heard an interview about the power outage with a Democrat. I guess all the Republicans are unavailable.

Yesterday it was Gov Richardson of New Mexico, and today Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe. I guess the talking points are out. The fact that President Bush's energy bill, stalled in Congress for 2 years due to Democrat obstruction, addresses the issues of the grid, makes for a nice omelet on the faces of the Democrats. So they are blaming President Bush, of course, of tying these grid issues up, which of course everyone agrees on, with the other parts of the bill, like drilling in ANWR.

So their recommendation is to jettison all the provisions that the Democrats disagree with, and then getting the electrical grid out of being a hostage to those.

Of course, if they really wanted to get those electrical provisions in place, they could just vote for the bill, too. Not sure why a blackout means that the Democrats should get their way.

If the Democrats had stopped their obstructionist tactics, then perhaps this blackout might have been avoided altogether.

Republicans need to get their vacation team out to hammer this on every cable channel and radio show, instead of letting the Democrats ride herd on the news cycle for the next week or so.

But I see from Instapundit that Ralph Peters beat me to it.

Our enemies are frantically trying to prove to the people of Iraq and the world that they remain powerful and viable. But they aren't powerful or viable: They're reduced to a faltering program of assassinations, blowing up aid workers and infrastructure attacks that will alienate the people of Iraq. Any support they gain through such actions will be negligible, while the anger they have rekindled can only harm their cause.

When they attack our guys, they find they are armored and armed. If these guys are trying to prove how tough they are, blowing up the UN isn't going to impress anyone.

They are losing, and what's more, I think they know it.

In the comments to my post about a Krugman column below, "Cliff" writes:

So, I guess you may or may not have been right thinking that ordering fire extinguishers 6 years in advance was silly, and you may or may not be right that our military logistics are good, bad, or the best.

But you failed to make a good argument.

I responded in the comments. But I thought of another rejoinder today as I was flipping channels, and A& had on John Wayne's The Green Berets. And one of the characters was "the scrounger," who is standard fare for Hollywood movie depictions of military life. Not just Viet Nam, but WWII, too, with movies like Operation Petticoat. The scrounger is the guy who knows how to work the system, or around the system, and get the stuff the commander really needs. This isn't just Hollywood making something up from whole cloth - a good supply sergeant in the Army is worth his (or her) weight in gold. Because the logistics system tends to get a little fuzzy at the end of the line.

I am not trying to run down the military to score points on Krugman. Actually, in the grander scheme of things, the military logistics system is superb. Superb at getting lots of stuff from one end of the world to the other. Think about the fact that we have 150,000 troops 8,000 miles away, with thousands of vehicles, armored and otherwise. That is pretty impressive. But it doesn't make much difference to the guy in the chow line that his food came all of that way if it doesn't taste good.

And that is what Krugman misses - that you can't measure the superbness of the logistic system by asking a guy in the chow hall how good the food is. If he were home he would tell you it was bad. It will always seem screwed up at the end of the logistics chain.

I mean, think about my fire extinguishers (and other items) - the Army couldn't get them to me for 5 years into the future, but less than a year later, put a half million soldiers and their equipment into Saudi Arabia.

When my friends wrote me from the desert then, guess what - they said the chow sucked.