Author: N.Z. Bear

The Grand Olde Party got its head handed to it last night. Any other interpretations are deluded, foolish, or otherwise stupid.
So, the obvious course of action is for the GOP to spend a few days — oh, a week at most — performing a perfunctory survey of the warm bodies closest to their leadership seats, and immediately anoint one of them to be the new face of the Republican Party. That’s the great thing about leadership elections, you know — no need to actually consult anyone resembling the actual rank-and-file of the Party. No need to actually consult the people who give the money, who work the campaigns, who actually, ‘ya know, cast the votes to keep a party in power. Or — who don’t.
Wrong. Very wrong. Amazingly, stupendously, staggeringly and absurdly wrong.
The reality of November 8, 2006 is that the Republican party no longer has control of the agenda in Congress. And yes, that includes the Senate — class=”textlink”>it’s over. The GOP doesn’t get to decide what bills will come to the floor. The GOP won’t control committees; it won’t control legislation. There is one, and only one, major decision that the Republicans have to make right now to influence how the next two years go — and that is who the party will choose to be their leaders.
This is a huge decision, and it is not one that should be rushed. Historically, however, it is a decision that has been taken behind closed doors, made by the Congressional members themselves without any whiff of input from the actual rank-and-file of their Party.
This past January, however, that changed. In the last House leadership election, the process opened up — just a little bit — when bloggers interviewed all three candidates for the GOP Majority Leader post in the House. The audio and transcripts of those interviews can be found here (please pardon the old TTLB template, and enjoy the ‘classic’ page header).
And now, the GOP faces a new leadership election. In the House, and almost certainly, in the Senate as well.
As Hugh Hewitt noted today, bloggers are now organizing in the hope that we can have a voice in this new fight. We want the potential candidates to step up to the plate and answer questions from the people that they will be, in the truest sense of the word, representing.
I don’t claim to speak for right-leaning bloggers as a whole; I speak only for myself. But if you ask me, the imperative right now for the GOP is clear: to slow the heck down, and to take the time necessary to consult with the true grassroots of the party to find the absolute best leadership team possible that will lead the GOP back into majority in 2008.
If you’re a blogger — or even if you’re not — and you want a voice in the leadership elections, add a comment here, or drop me an email directly.
The election is over. The fight for the heart of the Republican party is just beginning…
UPDATE: I’ve set up a page to solicit questions to be asked of the potential leadership candidates. If you want to make your voice heard, click over here and submit the questions you want to have answered!

Listening to class=”textlink”>Hugh‘s discussion with Christopher Hitchens today (audio sure to be here shortly), Hitch brought up the fact that Robert Gates was a key architect of a paper with President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski which advocated (in Hitch’s words) “making nice with the mullahs”.
Being a primary-source kinda guy, I went looking for the paper online, and sure enough, here it is. From the executive summary:
Rejecting the conventional wisdom that Iran is on the verge of another revolution, the report calls for the United States to reassess its long-standing policy of non-engagement with the current Iranian government…
Hmmm. Sounds suspiciously like making nice to me. Haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I suggest we all should do so…

Why are class=”textlink”>some folks being so sensitive about Kerry’s remarks — and why are they right to be so?
The key phrase we’re looking for here is “never again”. If people like Kerry — and indeed Kerry himself — had not been responsible for destroying the morale and reputation of the American military after Vietnam, we wouldn’t have to be sensitive to jokes like his failed one. But they did, and we do, because we absolutely cannot allow what happened to the soldiers of that era to begin happening to those of ours.
And the source here matters. If John McCain had made Kerry’s remarks, we’d be astounded, but McCain’s history would argue in his favor and we’d grant him the benefit of the doubt. But Kerry’s history does the opposite: his past exploits and efforts to drag the reputation of American soldiers through the mud are absolutely relevant and mean he doesn’t get to pretend that nobody could ever think he’d say something denigrating about the military. If you’ve never been known to raise your hand in anger towards a woman, you can crack a joke about beating your wife and get away with it (even if you shouldn’t). But if you’ve got a history of beating your wife, you don’t get to make jokes about beating your wife without bringing the full weight of society’s suspicion and opprobrium down on you.
Just as the “rough men” (and women) of our armed forces stand on the wall to protect our safety, ready to do (physical) violence on our behalf, people like Hugh, and Glenn, and Michelle, and yes, me, must stand on the wall of words and be ready to do literary and verbal violence on their behalf. It is a far less hazardous duty, but nonetheless a necessary one. And it is the least we can do.
To do something more, however, remember Project Valour-IT’s fundraiser: and give as much as you can to help them provide voice-activated laptops to soldiers whose injuries prevent them from full use of their hands:

After a whole day of testing, the Middle East conflict tracking page has gotten yet another overall. The ‘page’ is now an entire section, consisting of:
class=”textlink”>The Blogs View : the original page aggregating blog posts
The Map View: the map view showing local blogs and recent news events
The News View: a summary page showing all recent news events with the option for readers to rate them
The main enhancements today have been around the ‘News’ capability. The system is now open wide so that anyone can submit a news item they have found on the conflict. The item will then be placed on the unapproved items page, where other readers can rate it. Those items that achive a sufficiently positive response will then automatically migrate onto the main news page and the map page.
I’m currently working out additional methods of categorizing and presenting news items — particularly in visual form on the map — but for now, you’ll see that there are several categories from which to select when submitting an item.
My hope is that with this system, and a sufficiently interested community of bloggers and blog readers focusing on it, we can create a single location which sums up the very best reporting, analysis, and breaking news from both the traditional media and the bloggers on the ground. I invite everyone to join me in this effort, and as always, suggestions are welcome.

Given the date, and in honor of class=”textlink”>Joe Biden*, I declare that today, everyone must talk like Apu.
Consider it an Indian version of Talk-Like-A-Pirate-Day.
Now, to the Kwik-E-Mart I must go!

* “”You CANNOT go to a 7-11 … unless you have a slight Indian accent … I’m not joking.” — Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE)

Update: Obviously, with the events of today in Mumbai, this turns out to be a bad day to make a joke that some might interpret (incorrectly) as being at Indian expense (hopefully it was obvious that my target was Mr. Biden). For the record, however: my thoughts and hopes go out to all those affected by today’s bombings…

Glenn class=”textlink”>reports that Jeff Goldstein is suffering another DDOS attack, limiting access to the Protein Wisdom we all crave.
I agree with the Instafellow: this is indeed getting out of hand.
So I have a thought. It seems that what we bloggers need is a way to combat a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack which leverages the same principals as the attack itself — most particularly, the Distributed part. Call it a Distributed Guarantee Of Service.
The challenge is this: how could we establish a system so that a blogger suffering a DDOS attack (or simple system downtime, even) could be guaranteed a way to post during their outage.
The key part would be setting up a way for member blogs to ‘host’ a downed blogger’s posts. It seems to me that there are two categories of bloggers that matter here: those that are on limited / controlled hosts such as Blogspot (who therefore can’t run server-side scripts, but can generally include Javascript code) and those who have full hosts (who can run PHP or other server-side scripts).
So what I’m picturing is a PHP script that would provide the actual ‘hosting’ which would run on the full hosts, and actually act as a temporary guest home for a downed blogger. And then perhaps a Javascript applet for the limited hosts which could at least serve as a notifying beacon that there is a blogger in ‘down’ status, and link a reader to the full hosts to actually see that blogger’s posts.
There’s lots of design details to be done here. How could the blogger post? E-mail, or via a simple web-form hosted by the full members? How can the post, once entered on one full member’s site, be replicated automatically to all other members? (That’s the magic: it has to be replicated so that the DDOS attacker can’t just re-target a single backup site).
I’ll noodle on this more and post further thoughts, but I’d like to open the discussion and get some other smart minds working on this problem. Comments are open — let’s get to work!
-N.Z.
Update: OK, we’ve got some good discussion rolling in the comments. So here’s the deal: I’ve got ideas, and I can contribute support & a bit of thought bandwidth to this effort. But there’s no way I can be the primary driver of this, what with everything else I’ve piled on my plate. So we need some volunteers who do have some bandwidth to form a working group to further flesh out this problem and potential solutions, and then go ahead and actually do it.
So: if you’re interested in being part of such an effort, speak up in the comments, and/or e-mail me directly. If necessary, I can set up a Wiki or a mailing list to facilitate the discussion — but if someone else can do that, go ahead and do it! I won’t be offended.
With that said, a few more ideas on the substance of the problem:
I believe our goal is not strictly “fault tolerance” for a given blog or set of blogs. I think accomplishing that is impractical, and would involve some kind of mirroring solution that would be overkill for what we’re trying to accomplish. In my mind, our goal should be to ensure that when a blogger’s site is down:

• a) They have a place to post new blog posts
• b) There is an established system so that their readers can find those new blog posts
• c) The new posts are hosted in a distibuted manner so that they are mirrored on many different sites and are therefore protected from a secondary DDOS attack.

Note that what this essentially means is that we wouldn’t be constantly mirroring every participating blog’s site — we’d simply be mirroring new posts by a downed blogger once the system is activated. This strikes me as a simpler, and more realistic approach, although I’m open to thoughts about some crude level of mirroring for recent, pre-DDOS attack posts. Terry proposed using RSS feeds below, which is a good first thought, but I can say from my experience with TTLB that the main problem there is many bloggers don’t include full content in their RSS feeds. I suspect a better solution might be brute force: just have a way to copy the full HTML of each blog’s front page to a distributed archive. The cleverest way would be to somehow have each blog copied to a small number of mirror-blogs (let’s say 10) — if we have a solution spanning hundreds or thousands of blogs, it obviously doesn’t make sense to have every blog mirrored at every other blog’s site.
Finally, I’d suggest that we approach this problem in several phases:

• Phase 1: Quick, Dirty, and Manual: With only a little bit of coordination, we could set up a mostly-manual system virtually immediately which would allow a downed blogger to have a place to go. This could be as simple as identifying several volunteers with MovableType or other full-hosted blogs who are willing to create a special “DGOS blog” within their installlation that, in the event of an attack, a downed blogger would be given access to for posting. I’m sure there are other ways to approach the problem manually too — let’s start there!
• Phase 2: Automated and Distributed: With a manual solution in place, we can focus on implementing the whiz-bang approaches I’ve started outlining above, or alternatives.
• Phase 3: Nirvana: With any complex implementation, I find that the first release is never really the full solution you wanted. We’ll probably find that we’ve got a medium-term Phase 2 solution that will work, but isn’t perfect, and a long-term Phase 3 solution that is really everything we want it to be.

OK, that’s enough from me for now. Like I said, please speak up if you’re willing to join a working group and get cracking on this, and even if you are not, please spread the word on this idea. Thanks!
-N.Z.
Update 7/11: I’m pleased to report that Tim at Aardvark Salad has joined the effort, and his initial thoughts on the problem can be found here. Tim has requested a SourceForge project site for the effort, which should hopefully be available later today. More to come…

class=”textlink”>Glenn points out a fellow who notes the potential of solar energy:
“If 2 percent of the continental United States were covered with photovoltaic systems with a net efficiency of 10 percent, we would be able to supply all the U.S. energy needs,” said Bulovic, the KDD Associate Professor of Communications and Technology in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Um, ok. Glenn notes “Two percent is a LOT of land”, but that’s understating the case a bit I think.
Let’s do some math! (I was told there would be no math. Shhh!)
According to this page, the total land area of the U.S. is 3,537,379 square miles. Take away Alaska and Hawaii to get the continental U.S., and you are left with 2,959,005 square miles. Two percent of that is…
Fifty-nine thousand, one hundred and eighty square miles. That’s 59,180.
For perspective: Over half of the fifty states are smaller in area than 59,180 square miles. The closest in size to that number are Iowa (55,869), Michigan (56,804), and Georgia (57,906).
So: who’s for paving over Georgia?
Because unless I’m missing something, that is what we’re talking about: literally paving over that much area, and I have to assume utterly destroying any flora, fauna, or other living things that are unlucky enough to have been previously occupying it. Unless they happen to, you know, not require sunlight.
Now that would be one hell of an Environmental Impact Study.
Professor Bulovic seems to have thrown out this statistic as a positive for solar energy, but he’s obviously never negotiated with a local zoning board. If that’s the best future we can hope for with solar as our primary energy source, I suspect even the most strident environmentalists will cry out, “Bring on the coal!”

Continue reading “two percent solution?”

class=”textlink”>Markos Moulitsas:
“TNR and its enablers are feeling the heat of their own irrelevance and this is how they fight it — by undermining the progressive movement. Zengerle has made common cause with the wingnutosphere, using the laughable “kosola” frame they created and emailing his “scoops” to them for links. This is what the once-proud New Republic has evolved into — just another cog of the Vast RIGHT Wing Conspiracy.”
With such a declaration of war from Markos hanging Damocles-like above their heads, Zengerle and his New Republic colleagues must long for the days when centrist democrats could count on support from powerful institutions like the Democratic Leadership Council in holding back the righteous anger of raging far-left Kossack hordes.
But as we all know, the DLC is but a memory, having been rendered radioactive by Kos in September 2005.
On that fateful day, no DLC calls for truce were brooked, and appeals to party unity fell on deaf ears. When it was over, the formerly glorious DLC was but a smoking ruin, its leadership having fled into hiding under assumed names to live out the rest of their pathetic existences with heads hung in shame from the ignominious defeat visited upon them by the Power of Kos.
In a TTLB exclusive, I managed to locate one such leader, Hillary C, who agreed to speak with me under condition that I not reveal her location (especially to her estranged husband, who was famously spared by Kos after he pledged fealty to the One True Progressive Cause). I can say that she now resides in a small Midwestern city, earning a humble living as a Traffic Enforcement Officer (meter maid) , having been previously dismissed from her position as a Wal-Mart greeter for being “tempermentally unsuited” to the role.
“My advice to Jason Zengerle is: don’t let what happened to me happen to you!” she warned. “I had my chance. They told me withdrawing troops was the way to victory in Iraq, but I didn’t listen! I could have been President, if it wasn’t for those meddling Kos kids!”
At this point, Ms. C became agitated and delusional, ranting on about her Presidential aspirations, and I was forced to terminate the interview. Such a sad thing to see: one can only hope that the Mighty Kos will find mercy in his heart to spare Zengerle and The New Republic a similarly horrible fate…

More on the Power of Kos from across the blogosphere…

When I got this morning’s press release on the latest issue of Time Magazine, class=”textlink”> the following line stuck out:
“The details of what happened in Haditha were first disclosed by TIME’s Tim McGirk and Aparisim Ghosh, and their reporting prompted the military to launch an inquiry into the civilian deaths. ”
…because I remembered Captain Ed pointing to a story that said that in fact, the military had already begun their own investigation by then. Ed referred to a NYT piece that said:
A military investigator uncovered evidence in February and March that contradicted repeated claims by marines that Iraqi civilians killed in Haditha last November were victims of a roadside bomb, according to a senior military official in Iraq.
Among the pieces of evidence that conflicted with the marines’ story were death certificates that showed all the Iraqi victims had gunshot wounds, mostly to the head and chest, the official said.
The investigation, which was led by Col. Gregory Watt, an Army officer in Baghdad, also raised questions about whether the marines followed established rules for identifying hostile threats when they assaulted houses near the site of a bomb attack, which killed a fellow marine.
The three-week inquiry was the first official investigation into an episode that was first uncovered by Time magazine in January and that American military officials now say appears to have been an unprovoked attack by the marines that killed 24 Iraqi civilians. The results of Colonel Watt’s investigation, which began on Feb. 14, have not previously been disclosed.
The NYT piece seemed to indicate that that, contrary to Time’s self-congratulations, military officials were in fact aware of irregularities in the incident, and started an investigation independently without prompting from Time.
But details in Time’s story today seem to shed more light:
In early February, [Time reporter Tim] McGirk presented this evidence to, and asked for comment from, Lieut. Colonel Barry Johnson, U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. Johnson viewed the VCD, listened to the accounts and responded straightforwardly, “I think there’s enough here for a full and formal investigation.” Army Colonel Gregory Watt was dispatched to Haditha to conduct a three-week probe in which he interviewed Marines, survivors and doctors at the morgue.
So according to Time, the investigation conducted by Colonel Watt that is the centerpeice of the NYT story was, in fact, prompted by Time’s reporting.
My initial reaction, before reading Time’s story in detail, was that Time was unfairly making itself the center of the story. The truth — if we take Time’s latest account at face value — would seem more banal. The Times was almost certainly aware of the fact that Watt’s investigation was prompted by Time’s reporting. But the Times is famous for slighting other news outlets by failing to credit them for scoops — which appears to be exactly what happened in this case. For while the Times story does mention that the incident “was first uncovered by Time magazine in January”, it fails to make clear the crucial link that it was in fact (according to Time) that very reporting that initiated Watt’s investigation in the first place.
This is unfortunately not good news, as it was reassuring to hear that the military was on the case of this incident prior to the media frenzy caused by Time, Representative Murtha, and others. But as we nagivate through the unfolding of this incident, those of us who, like myself, want the Marines involved to receive a fair and impartial hearing must avoid the temptation to bend over too far backwards. The facts are what they are, and we need to follow them wherever they lead.
More from around the blogosphere on Haditha

Folks:
As part of the new release, I’ve made sure that TTLB’s infrastructure is ready to handle an influx of new blog class=”textlink”>Communities — and as a result, I’m now accepting requests for new ones.
Communities are simply groups of blogs related by common interests, beliefs, or other characteristics, so if you and fellow bloggers would like to start one, and get your own Community page at TTLB, sign up using the form above and I’ll get you set up. We’ve already had quite a few new requests come in from the backlog, and I’ll be posting further today to highlight the new arrivals…