And now, a word from our Dear Leader...

Quagmire

Shiite rebels in control

"The battle for this Sunni Muslim stronghold continued for a fourth day Thursday, and five more U.S. troops were reported killed. In Iraq's south, militiamen loyal to an anti-U.S. Shiite cleric controlled large swaths of three cities."

That's 40 U.S. soldiers killed this week. Let's express that as a ratio of U.S. deaths per weapon of mass destruction confiscated. Oh yeah, you can't divide by zero.

Yay!

Verizon to offer the Treo 600 From Engadget

They haven't said anything official yet, and there's nothing more than a "Coming Soon" on their homepage, but we have some good news that we think is going to make a lot of people happy: Verizon Wireless is finally going to carry the Treo 600. And it sure took them long enough, too. Sprint was offering the phone nearly six months ago, and we'd almost thought that Verizon was going to skip the Treo 600 altogether and just wait for the 610 to come out.

Anti-U.S. Uprising Widens in Iraq; Marines Push Deeper Into Fallujah

I can't wait until Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and all their acolytes start blaming Demoncrats bad attittude for this miserable failure. In other words, we didn't clap our hands hard enough, so Tinkerbell died.

Audio Codec Quality Shootout

This taste test by Extreme Tech makes me feel a little better about my hard-thought decision a few months ago to encode and store all of my CDs in WMA format instead of MP3. Everything I'd read said WMA (Series 9) was better, but I worried about compatibility issues: a lot of devices support WMA, but nearly everything supports MP3. What if I ever wanted to buy an iPod?

The clincher for me was Windows Media Player's automatic song-organizing and downsampling abilities. It fetches album art in the background and integrates that info into Windows native file system -- unlike Apple's iTunes, win which you have to open an application to get all the relevant info. The downsampling feature means it can shrink files on the fly while transferring them to a portable audio device.

Well as it turns out, the Media Player can do that with MP3s, too. And that made me wonder if I made the right choice going with WMA. Apparently, I did. Now, if only Apple would back down and let the iPod play WMA files.

(I expected a deluge of angry comments from Mac fans on the article, but several posters make some valid criticism of the article's methodology.)

Maybe Bush is a uniter after all...

Muslim rivals unite in Baghdad uprising

More flowers of welcome from the Iraqis

12 Marines killed in new fighting

I'm guessing the Bush campaign will be trotting out those "Mission Accomplished" photos anytime soon. It's time to fire Don Rumsfield and send in more troops. There's no realistic way to pull out of Bush's mistake now, so we need to suck it up and do the job right.

And of course, fire Bush in November.

What if...

I'm doing research for a story I'm doing on the 40th anniversary of the mainframe computer and came across an interesting tidbit: IBM in the late 1970s was toying with the idea of rebranding Atari computers to create a PC line -- it's attempt to take on these crazy Apple IIs and TRS 80s that were so popular at the time.

IBM's executive council rejected the idea, and as we all know, IBM built its own PC line, albeit using off-the-shelf components. The rest is history. (In a last gasp, Atari would eventually develop its own line of IBM-compatible PCs.)

I can't help thinking whether the Atari platform would have become standard had IBM had gone ahead with the idea. Would the platform, which would presumably be harder to clone, have become so dominant? Would Motorola (which made the chip) be the dominant CPU maker rather than Intel? Given my experience with Atari, would I have become a programmer instead of a journalist?

Did someone say 'quagmire?'

Rioting sweeps Iraqi cities; 8 U.S. soldiers killed

Now that the Shia hate us along with the Sunni, the only group left to alienate are the Kurds.

Not to beat a dead horse, but...

Powell no longer sure that Iraqi trailers were weapons labs

My career has peaked

Slashdot linked to a story of mine. I'm afraid to read the comments, though. The /. crowd can be pretty harsh.

Mystery solved

Police: Evidence doesn't support abduction claim

For example, the honor student told police that after taking her at knifepoint, her captor used duct tape, rope, cold medicine, a gun and a knife to keep her under his control.

Although those items were found in the marsh where she was located, buttressing her account, police obtained videotape Thursday that showed Seiler entering a Madison store and buying those items, he said.

Also, during the time she said she was held captive, two witnesses reported having seen her apparently "walking freely" in different areas of the city, he said.

Someone used her computer during the time she was missing. Also, he said, the computer had been used to look up a five-day weather forecast and search wooded areas in and around Madison.

As I suspected...

Police: Wisconsin Student Changes Story

"She initially told police she was abducted at knifepoint from outside her apartment early Saturday. Assistant Police Chief Noble Wray said Friday she changed her story when investigators confronted her with inconsistencies in her account. "

Good thing to keep in mind for Friday's jobs report

From Eschaton.

So, let's choose our criteria in advance. Anything under 140K is seriously bad. A number between 140K and 240K isn't particularly good, but at least a sign that things could be picking up. And, anything under 306K is proof that the tax cuts are not working as promised.

Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn't on Terrorism

Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn't on Terrorism (washingtonpost.com)

The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups, according to former U.S. officials who have seen the text.

Is there anyone who still believes Bush and Cheney weren't asleep -- or more fittingly, drunk -- at the wheel?

And the Iraqis continue to welcome us with flowers

3 U.S. soldiers hurt in ambush near Fallujah

The Bush recovery continues

Forecasters scale back job hopes

Police to interview student about her disappearance

Good. There's something fishy about this girl's abduction story. What makes me really suspicious is that she was the "victim" in another weird attack in February.

Newsmap

Here's an interesting way to look at the news. This flash front-end takes Google news feeds and presents the information in a visual way. Big, popular stories are given bigger chunks of the map. A clever solution to an old problem with online news -- namely, how to prioritize the stories without the layout and headline cues printed newspapers offer. Not a perfect solution, mind you, but an innovative one.

CNN Report Puts Letterman In a Tizzy, Temporarily

Here's a White House that can't even tell the truth aboutmeaningless, easily verifiable things. The Bushies lie so often, they just do it reflexively.