November 2003

There’s a great idea! The US Army has launched an offensive around Baghdad called Operation IRON HAMMER in an effort to nail some of those inconvenient guerrillas. Apparently, this is a “Get Tough” policy involving a “hard line on terrorism” and various other examples of the rhetoric of false strength. What this boils down to…

Two new blogs have recently started linking to us, neither of which I’d ever seen before. Those are the ReachM High Ranch at , a simpatico and well designed US political blog, and About Pip, an idiosyncratic personal blog by a British expat in Sweden: . Fortunately, it’s nothing at all to do with the…

The Service Employees International Union in New York is going to do this: “As part of the anti-Bush campaign, union President Dennis Rivera has recruited 1,000 rank-and-file members and staff to fan out across the country beginning next month to get an early start organizing get-out-the-vote operations in more than a dozen “battleground” states. Those…

In the Democratic primaries, it’s getting to look certain that Howard Dean – former governor of Vermont, toast of the Left and supposed “Bloggers’ Candidate” – is going to win. Blogs are spilling a lot of ink over him at the moment, but Nathan Newman has some of the best stuff on him here. “one…

Somebody has invented a test to classify your political opinions, The Political Compass. It defines your politics as your position on two axes, an economic one running from extreme communism on the left of the graph to total free market capitalism on the right, and a liberal/authoritarian one running from fascism at the top of…

I notice that Yankeeblog is having a similar experience to us with random googlers turning up on their site despite searching for something – well – random. “As someone who finds internet search engines fascinating, I’m always curious to see what searches bring people to this blog (with the exception of the person looking for…

On Saturday, for the first time, I decided to peer down into my site stats. A few surprises awaited – not that the numbers were that impressive, an average of 6.8 hits/day. Wow. That’s going to make Instapundit quake in their boots, I don’t think. But the real surprises were down in the “last guests”…

They don’t like direct democracy/demagogy either, which is all good. My current reading is Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics, which is one of the most thought-provoking things I’ve seen in a long time. As a taste – “Revenge is a recklessness with the future in a vain attempt to repair a suffering that is…

A truly impressive blog just discovered. Run by two people – one a yank in exile, the other an Afghan in Kabul, it’s informed, aggressive and simple like blogs should be. Based on news and writing. Some samples: “We need to do a bootcamp and fast-track OCS school to put at least 1000 Arabic speaking…

“Shortly before dawn on Aug. 28, an M1A1 Abrams tank on routine patrol in Baghdad “was hit by something” that crippled the 69-ton behemoth. Army officials still are puzzling over what that “something” was. According to an unclassified Army report, the mystery projectile punched through the vehicle’s skirt and drilled a pencil-sized hole through the…