So Tenet has now said Iraq was wrong. Wow.

You just have to wonder why the administration continues to peddle the obvious lie that invading a country with no ties to terrorism was part of the War on Terror? Or that they've made any mistakes at all? Contrast that hubris with what Tenet said at the end of his speech:

"Demographics and distribution trends are something we also need to keep an eye on," Tenet said. "The developed world is not reproducing at levels to maintain its position, while developing nations who cannot afford it, mostly Muslim ones, are exploding."

Tenet said a developing nation's low per capita income, high unemployment among young men and high infant mortality rate strongly increase its likelihood of becoming a "terrorist safe haven."

"In 2010, 100 million people outside of Africa will be infected with HIV," Tenet said. "The secondary implications of this are staggering."

He said the work of public health officers, missionaries and literacy teachers in third world nations are crucial to the war on terrorism, because terrorists build supporters by spinning poverty as a form of humiliation caused by wealthy nations like the United States.

Hmm. Instead of focusing on the old paradigm of state-sponsored terrorism, Tenet is pointing to a new model in which economics and public health matter more to creating environments that prevent terror. Would that the current administration pay attention...

Apparently, I'm now too old to be drafted. Hooray!

The New Republic finally endorses Kerry. Big surprise, eh? Well, I'm just happy they stopped muttering about Joe Lieberman. Of course, being TNR, they had to get in a gratuitous swipe at Howard Dean:

On foreign policy, Kerry's record is less impressive. His vote against the 1991 Gulf war suggested a tendency to see all American military action through the distorting prism of Vietnam. And his behavior in the current Iraq debate has not been exemplary. To be fair, his position has been more consistent than his detractors give him credit for. Republicans mock him for "voting for the war" before opposing it. But Bush himself urged congressional authorization for war as a way to force U.N. inspectors back into Iraq and to disarm Saddam Hussein peacefully. It was reasonable to believe that only a credible U.S. threat of force would produce an intrusive new inspections regime (which it did). And Kerry is right that, if Bush had allowed those inspections to continue, they would have eventually revealed that Saddam lacked weapons of mass destruction and eviscerated the rationale for war.

Kerry's greater failure was his vote against the $87 billion supplemental to equip American troops and rebuild Iraq. He was right to support funding the supplemental by repealing part of the tax cut (particularly since Bush officials like Paul Wolfowitz had shamelessly suggested that the war would cost America virtually nothing). But, once that effort failed, he should have supported the legislation anyway, as Senator Joseph Biden did. Building "firehouses in Baghdad"--a notion Kerry has repeatedly mocked--is not only something we owe the Iraqi people, it stems from the fundamentally liberal premise that social development can help defeat fanaticism. Abandoning that principle under pressure from Howard Dean is the most disturbing thing Kerry has done in this campaign.

Need I mention, again, that Dean supported the first gulf war, and was against the second? The exact opposite of Kerry's position both times. So you'll forgive me if "pressure from Howard Dean" caused me any concern. I will support Kerry wholeheartedly, but to suggest that Dean, who was right on Iraq both times, over the course of a decade, pushed Kerry away from a "principle" is ludicrous. TNR just cannot admit they made a mistake vis-a-vis Iraq. Oh, wait, they already did.

Today is Brad's birthday. Hooray!

Unlike Helena's birthday, Brad demands attention and gifts, preferably of an imported variety for both. However, I have never had the inclination to purchase a giant gray elephant for him. That privilege has been reserved.

In Brad's case, I've found that shiny design oriented gifts work best. I was dismayed to see that Logitech offered a newer, shiner version of the item I had already given him. Then, after further review, I realized that the newer version was cheaper, used proprietary RF technology and had a smaller less cool mouse. Plus, there was no bluetooth hub! Brad always prefers more expensive items, especially if they're technologically superior. So now I am assuaged.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Brad!

Work has been extremely busy lately, with server crashes, design decisions and motherboard madness taking up large chunks of my time. Pile on the additional coding and you have a recipe for less posts from me on the blog.

Considering I still have more coding to do, I'd like to ask all the people who have access to try to post as often as possible, and in turn, I'll try to get the additional features up as quickly as possible.

In the interim, everyone who thinks a draft is a bad idea should head over here and sign this petition. Normally, as I've said in the past, I hate petitions. I think they do little good and act as only a salve for people's consciences. In this case, however, I think the six-degrees-of-separation map is cool enough by itself to warrant asking people to sign up.

I'll also point people over to the new John Kerry interview on Rolling Stone which points out that Kerry would scrap the silly color-coded system:

What do you think of the color-coded terror alerts the Department of Homeland Security issues?

I think Americans, sadly, laugh at it. They don't know what to do.

Will you continue that program?

No. I'm going to find some more thoughtful way of alerting America. If we have to alert America, I think the most important thing to do is alert law enforcement more effectively across the country. Law enforcement doesn't have even a single, unified watch list yet. They still have separate watch lists, with different names and different people. This is the single, simplest, most important thing the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to do, and they haven't done it.

Common sense. Good to see it in a President.

And finally, your daily dose of sleaze.

Happy Battle of Zama Day!

Scipio managed to crush Hannibal once and for all today. And he never let Cato forget it...

Comments have been added to all the sections, so you may now go to town in any of them.

In addition, I've thrown up a whole bunch more images in the Virginia section of the imageserver. Go check them out. Two have a whole flock of wild turkeys in them.

I can finally focus on the two remaining coding projects to bring the site to its full potential. We'll see if I have time to get to it this week. I doubt it.

Watch Jon Stewart make mincemeat of Crossfire. It's well worth it.

This article is why the Post is superior to the other paper.

A real reader's advocate bucks the paper occasionally, and uses specific stories to explain flaws. Michael Getler is doing a decent job, and between him and Dan Froomkin, there's a competent culture of criticism at the WaPo that leads to a healthier newsroom. If you rush the facts, or say something for "balance" when the story shows something else, you'll get burned. As well you should.

This article is the one that has everyone buzzing in the blogosphere. First, let's get the conclusions out of the way. Everyone allied against Bush can now call ourselves the Reality-Based Community, or RBC for short. And now, some choice excerpts:

The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.'' The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group -- the core of the energetic ''base'' that may well usher Bush to victory -- believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's certainty -- the issue being, as Kerry put it, that ''you can be certain and be wrong.''

What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?

All of this -- the ''gut'' and ''instincts,'' the certainty and religiosity -connects to a single word, ''faith,'' and faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.

Faith is fine. Faith, however, is not facts. As someone who uses his instinct a lot, I think "a feeling" is just a way that our brains and their wacky pattern-matching/stereotyping ability describe events we wish to relate. But to convince others who do not share the same brains as us, we need to use facts. And that's something this president has never done.

Now one can preview stories before you post. Give it a whirl!

And yes, this isn't a code change I was planning to make. But someone asked and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Amusing.

James Tobin is gone.

Wow. Major props to JMM for blowing this wide open. Good for him.

As a good first post to comment on, let me just apologize to everyone for failing to note Helena's birthday yesterday. I was feeling ill and didn't mention it, and for that I am deeply sorry.

I am unhappy that I cannot see her in person to wish her the best (my phone call, despite being ungodly early, was still the second she received!) but let me just say, virtually, that I hope she has as good a year this year as she did the last. I miss her, no more so than during the holiday months fast approaching.

Perhaps, one day, we'll get to take another holiday photo like in days of yore. Or go to Vegas. Or road trip back to college. Or just find a nice Crate & Barrel to argue in together. Salad days, indeed.

After some furious coding, I've enabled comments on the "news" section of the website. I should be enabling it on the rest of the subsections sometime tomorrow. To post a comment, you must be logged in. Regular users can see posted comments without being logged in, but are unable to post themselves.

The comments also use Markdown, so you'll be able to style your text just as you can with regular stories. In addition, each comment is color-coded to the member who posts it, so be sure to go into the author section to change your color to something easy to recognize.

I've also tweaked the page so that you won't get the annoying refresh-accidental-double-post problem. When you click "add comment", the comment is added to the database and then the page is generated later. So no matter how many times you click refresh, you won't get an annoying "you submitted a form via POST" message or the equally frustrating sight of multiple posts.

After I finish adding the comment form to the rest of the subsection pages, I'll have completed 1/3 of the coding work left on the site. The remaining 2/3 should be just as difficult, but even more rewarding for you, the user. So go test it out today!