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TweetThe announcement has been made that it looks as though Defense Secretary Robert Gates is going to be staying on in the Obama Administration for at least the next year. There are many among us on the left and in the anti-war crowd who have not been at all pleased with this turn of events.
But as I see it – and I believe I’ve made this point somewhere along the line in the past – you can’t expect a new Sec Def to swoop in and move one hundred and forty thousand troops out of Iraq in a year without huge problems. I mean, you couldn’t even unpack a box before you started planning the withdrawal, and it would likely be a disaster no matter who you were. I think that if you’re serious about your pledge to get troops out of Iraq in the next eighteen months, you have to maintain some sense of continuity in the military hierarchy to do that. Of course, my years of working as a Secretary of Defense((that would be zero years, for you keeping track)) don’t lend themselves to an educated opinion on the matter.
Besides which, I think anyone whose been paying attention knows that Robert Gates has been as forthcoming as any member of the Bush Administration with Congress and the public. That’s not saying a lot, I grant. But it seems like he’s more sure of himself and less inclined to stonewall for the sake of his personal reputation alone. I think that, with a new president of the same party as the majority in the Congress, you will probably see much more candor going forward. That’s just a guess.
And its a damned shame that we can’t do the same with the economic team, but goddamn. I’ve never seen a guy fall so far so fast as has Hank Paulson. Ben Bernanke just seems like a putz lately, too. These are two guys I know from watching Wall Street Week for years, and I’ve been nothing short of shocked to watch them crumble in the face of this crisis. So, on that level, we need new leadership.
TweetAppropos of nothing, I suppose, but the WSJ is reporting that Ross Perot’s fund made up of mortgage backed securities has been forced to liquidate it’s former 1.2 billion dollars of assets.
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TweetWHAM13 folks reviewed the new movie Twilight and guess what? They all liked – or expected to like – the book better.
I remember when I was a kid and had to do book reports I didn’t feel like doing, I would just pick up a book that was already a movie and say, “it was much better than the movie.” That’s all I had to do and the teacher would always agree because it was always true.
OK, that’s it. I’m done snarking.
TweetI remember back in the freak-out days of 2004, as Bush’s surveillance programs were sweeping a black hand across our country and the Republicans in Congress were strutting around like kings, I had the sick sensation in the pit of my stomach that come 2008, Bush would declare some sort of emergency that for such reasons compelled him to stay in office regardless of the electoral outcome. I worried at the end of American Democracy when Bush made his final power grab right at the end of his administration.
Well, now with the president gallivanting in Peru and the Treasury Secretary basically throwing his hands up in the air, unwilling to do any more, I almost wish I still had that concern. Who would have thought that the exact opposite of my worst fear would be our biggest threat?
TweetThe New Year is always a time to consider what’s passed and more importantly, what happens in the future as we look to what we hope will be another productive, happy and healthy new year. The same is true for blogs and other media outlets, and certainly it is the case here at DFE. I’ve been happy with the overall design of DFE’s appearance in this latest incarnation, but there are things that could stand some improvement. This version of the site was my first attempt at a WordPress MU installation, dealing with all the various blogs and cross-blog integration. All-in-all, it’s been a success, but nothing grows in a standing pool of water. Now’s the time, I think, to start considering and implementing a new plan to keep the waters circulating.
Topping the list of tasks is to deal with the Lefty Blogs role in the sidebar. Frankly, while there’s lots of stuff in that blogroll that I find of value, there is a growing and remarkably annoying tide of cruft rising on that list. I won’t bother mentioning any names, but I don’t see the need to share links with stuff I find of limited or no value. Moreover, the group that handles this list has done absolutely nothing to improve it’s service in the four years I’ve been using it. I can’t stand loading JavaScript modules into a page without there being some logical reason to slow down my site, and LeftyBlogs has crossed the barrier between justifiable and unjustifiable somewhere over the course of this election season.
So to those Upstate bloggers who might be reading this, let me make a proposal: I’d like to create a “Planet Feed,” similar to the WordPress Planet, which aggregates several feeds of local blogs into one centralized feed, similar to LeftyBlogs in many ways. The difference would be that there’s no need for a JavaScript POS on your page to display the blogroll, you can display it any way you would normally syndicate RSS or Atom content on your page. That lends itself to much more robust uses of our collective content on our pages, while reducing the overall processing cost of making our pages load. Rotten, Exile and I have been discussing this and if you’d like to throw your support behind it, drop me a line here.
Secondly, the layout is a bit wonkier than I’d anticipated. My vision of DFE is to be an “island in the information stream” for my visitors: I would like the home page to seem a genuinely useful place for people to stop by while they’re surfing the news on the net. Based on my incoming and outgoing links, and reviewing common visitor sessions, it seems like this has been a largely successful plan for a modest number of you out there. I want to say thank you very much to those of you who have been making DFE a part of your browsing experience. It’s for you especially that I’m making these changes, so don’t hesitate to express your opinion of what I’m planning.
Because there’s more work to be done to eliminate the cruft that hasn’t been getting hits and tighten up the format. I think, for example, that my user blogs have been under emphasized on the home page and this is the first thing I plan on addressing. My blog may switch to the other side, the News Headlines will probably factor in more heavily, and the user blogs will be prominently placed above the fold.
I’m working on ways to integrate all the news clippings into the site better than the running list of images down the sidebar that I have now. They may become an entirely new page, I’m not sure. The news section is probably going to factor in much more heavily than it has in the past, so this is a critical part of the redesign.
So, in general, that’s what I’m trying to get done for the new year in terms of the layout of the page and the architecture. One other thing is going to be (eek. again) switching web hosts. I’ve made the unfortunate decision of going with a web host which I now find to be universally panned by the bloggers in town I’ve been speaking with (Rotten, BTP in particular). I’ve found a new host which will doubtless suit my needs better, but will require a much more hands-on approach to administration. There’s going to be a lot of planning involved in this, but the payoff for the audience should hopefully be a faster loading DFE with more stuff you want.
As for content changes, in terms of my blog and the news sections, I’ll be discussing that in a later post. There will definitely be some reorganization going on. If you’d like to express an opinion on my plans or offer suggestions, I’d be happy to hear from you, so drop me a line and let me know what you think!
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