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.