Around The Intertubes

Flu blogging!

• What do you make of the big Florida power outage today? Does that seem as accidental as four undersea cables getting cut in one week?

• The Democrats are having yet another debate tonight (their 24th?). *yawn *zzzzzz
  

• The entire right half of the blogosphere blasted off and went into orbit around Instapundit's head after hearing Obama's Army Captain anecdote the other day. I've read about this in various places but I thought John Cole's post (with bloggy links) was most entertaining. This write-up from David Botti also sets the record straight on a few of the right wing talking points, specifically:

"Carter also pointed out this post on the National Review Online which took issue with the idea that captains were commanding rifle platoons; a job normally reserved for lieutenants. At one point I had a captain commanding my rifle platoon; so, that takes care of that, fact-check. Particularly in the Marine Corps Reserves, where officers must complete a period of active duty service before switching to reserve duty, you find hardly any Lieutenants. The result is that higher ranks are sometimes taking up lower billeted job positions."

• The 60 Minutes segment on Don Siegelman was pretty interesting. Could Karl Rove possibly be a little more disgusting? He is a boil on this ass of this nation.
  

• The Iraq/Kurdistan/Turkey love triangle is starting to get heated. As an aside, I can't help but romanticize the peshmerga freedom fighters a little bit. "Peshmerga", which means, literally, "those who face death". As opposed to "American", which means "those who give up their freedoms out of fear." Yes, I'm still pissed about FISA. And the Patriot Act. And telco immunity. What a bunch of pussies we are.
  

• Speaking of Iraq, this was an interesting find by Sully. I continue to think that those who latch on to the surge results as an indication of victory are seriously deluded. Only by the most extreme goal-post maneuvering will we be declaring victory in Iraq any time soon. On the other hand, that might actually be our smartest exit strategy -- reset the objectives to something easy we've already met and then get the hell out of there before they suck us dry.