That question headlines the Slate co-cover story at the moment. There and everywhere else.

Or lord, give me strength.

Here's the opening of the Slate piece, by William Saletan, whose coverage this year has ranged from occasionally insightful, to generally annoying and idiotic:

Is Howard Dean toast?

That's what pundits are suggesting, Republicans are hoping, and Democrats are fretting in the wake of Saddam Hussein's capture. Dean surged to the front of the Democratic presidential pack by opposing the war in Iraq. As the postwar turned bloody, expensive, and stagnant, it looked like a brilliant bet. But this morning, reporters and analysts seem convinced that the latest card drawn from the deck leaves him with a losing hand.

The first problem with that argument is the premise: "Dean surged to the front of the Democratic presidential pack by opposing the war in Iraq." That's the standard pundit line, in spite of historical evidence to the contrary. It's just so easy, I guess. And the only explanation they could come up with. For some reason, "Because he really connects with people" just doesn't work for them.

The point of the Saletan piece is that Dean is not necessarily toast, but the point of my post is how retarded the freaking question is.

But since we're talking about Saletan, and the question, he makes a nice case for how Bush swept Gore's acheivements into past history, and how skillfully Dean is reframing the Saddam capture with this statement:

"Our troops are to be congratulated on carrying out this mission with the skill and dedication we have come to know of them," he said this morning. "This development provides an enormous opportunity to set a new course and take the American label off the war. We must do everything possible to bring the U.N., NATO, and other members of the international community back into this effort. Now that the dictator is captured, we must also accelerate the transition from occupation to full Iraqi sovereignty."

Notice how Dean repeats every element of the 2000 Bush approach. Somebody other than the president—in this case, our troops—gets the credit. The mission becomes history. Capturing Saddam becomes a means to a more difficult end: getting the United Nations into Iraq, and getting the United States out.

But the funniest thing about Dean, the military and the media is that Dean was never the anitwar candidate. If you listened at all to his remarks, right from the beginning, he has been a pretty hawkish guy, with a strong opposition to this war.

The mischaracterization in the press may have helped him in the primaries, and his correction of the record will get him back where he needs to be in the general. Saletan refers to this as repositioning, which I guess it is, though no mention is made about who mispositioned him in the first place. Regardless, the Slate piece ends on a positive note for Dean:

It's clear from interviews Dean gave to reporters Saturday (written up in Sunday's Washington Post and New York Times) that he's repositioning himself as a more hawkish candidate in the general election. He was planning to claim that position tomorrow in a major foreign policy speech. Now he'll have maximum attention as he does so. Bush's aides would be unwise to assume that Dean can't make their latest triumph vanish into history. They should know.

Eventually Saletan gets a clue. If only we could hope for half as much from the rest of the media.

---

You can read the full text of the Dean speech in question via the Dean blog here.

This is kind of scary. From AP:

IBM to move software jobs to India, China

Dec. 15, 2003  | ARMONK, N.Y. (AP) -- IBM Corp. plans to move up to several thousand skilled software jobs from the United States to India, China and other countries, which could amount to one of the biggest such actions yet in the technology industry.

IBM documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal said about 4,700 programming jobs could be shifted overseas to save costs, a growing high-tech industry trend known as "offshoring."

The individual move, no big deal. The trend, very big deal:

While companies long ago began moving manufacturing jobs and other blue-collar work to Asia, big business is now increasingly shifting skilled work there as well. According to International Data Corp., foreign workers performed about 5 percent of information technology services for American companies this year, but by 2007, that share will grow to 23 percent.

Twenty years from now we may look back on this time as a very different world. This could prove to be one of the really significant developments in our national history.

We are what we do.

Wesley Clark didn't ask to testify at Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes trial, he was called by the prosecution. But he will be the most senior U.S. official to testify, and it did offer a nice boost for his campaign--well beyond the price of losing a few days during a crucial month.

From an AP story just posted about his first day of testimony:

"The fact that Wesley Clark is going to testify in the middle of the primaries is fairly amazing," said professor Michael Scharf, the author of several books on the tribunal.

"Clark is gambling that this will give him national and international press attention just at the time he needs it for the primaries. It will enable him to look very patriotic, very presidential," he said in a telephone interview.

But timing is everything. A week ago, it might have grabbed major press attention. The morning after Saddam's capture, a footnote.

Major bummer for him. But the story is kind of interesting, by AP standards. (It's mostly about the trial, not the campaign). You might have a look.

From the official Survivor site--I found this stuff kind of interesting:

Sole Survivor Sandra's win has tipped the SURVIVOR scales in favor of women! Sandra is the fourth woman to win it all, compared to only three men. But wait, there's more: Sandra is the first Survivor to have no votes against her, ever. And although she won in the end, Sandra never won an individual Immunity Challenge. As for Lillian, Sandra's mate in the Final Two: it's impressive that Lillian made it this far, considering that she had the lowest number of preshow votes in our Sole Survivor poll and had been already voted out once before!

Very surprising to see the women take the overall lead. They seemed to be struggling in the early days.

(Yes, I almost have Survivor out of my system today. Almost.)

Survivor Pearl Islands page here.

Survivor All Stars page.

Huh. That's kinda startling. From AP:

 BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Saddam Hussein could be tried "in the next few weeks" and could be executed if convicted, an Iraqi Governing Council member said Monday. Other council members said the televised trial would likely begin later, perhaps by summer.

The trial will begin "very soon, in the next few weeks," Mouwafak al-Rabii, a Shiite Muslim council member, told The Associated Press.

President Bush said Monday it was up to the Iraqis to determine Saddam's fate but said the United States will "work with the Iraqis to develop a way to try him that withstands international scrutiny."

I just assumed it would proceed along American time.

I'll be willing to bet the trial will not start in the next few weeks, given that Americans will be heavily invovled, but the net effect will probably be a much quicker trial than most of us would have expected.

(Thanks to TalkLeft for the link.)

A great little site called Walter In Denver (great taste in music, among other things) has just begun a nice little weekly feature called Rocky Mountain Blog Roundup.

Believe it or not, there are some really interesting, and/or popular Colorado blogs, including Walter, TalkLeft, WorldWide Rant, VodkaPundit and ResurrectionSong. (I'm forgetting somebody.)

This feature picks the best post of the week from each, so have yourself a little sample. I chose a dark one.

Mildly disturbing/annoying Salon cover story today, titled:

Clark: Howard Dean can't win

Key quote:

"I don't think the Democratic Party can win without carrying a heavy experience in national security affairs into the campaign," he told Salon in a phone interview last week. "And that experience can't be in a vice president."

I don't think that's going to help us beat Bush, but I guess he's gotta do what he's gotta do. The electability issue is about the only card Wes Clark seems to have at the moment. Not a strong card, but maybe a card.

It was an extremely abbreviated morning-after version of the Survivor Finale, what with that whole Saddam Hussein thing. (This morning pot pouri shows like to pretend they're news shows.)

They used to devote the entire show to this event, with the host out there in LA for a live broadcast with the whole cast.

This time it was just the final four, for three segments in the second hour, via satelite. And not a single interesting thing was said.

(And the ratings for last night were good but not like the old days. All Stars will probably be the last great big one.)

Survivor Pearl Islands page here.

Survivor All Stars page.

I will be posting on other topics. Prolly today.

I told you I was going to obsess over Survivor. But it's over now. Nearly. For a month and a half.

Meanwhile, I've got so many other things to say.

Back in a little while.

Survivor Pearl Islands page here.

Survivor All Stars page here.

That guy is so lame. The one reunion moment I figured for can't miss, was Osten's response to the show's relentless belittling of him. I bet they even worked to provoke him, by including one final slap in the face as he sat there in their studio watching the final episode Sunday night.

The little weasel. No fireworks, no anger, no nothing. What a pussy. Just sat there and said he had no regrets, would have done it the same all over--which is pretty sad to begin with--and that blah, blah, blah, his health was more important. Same old nothing.

What did he even show up for, after the way they treated him? I figured he had two choices: tell them to fuck off with their reunion invitation, or show up to tell them to fuck off in person. He just sat there passively and kept taking it.

Weasel.

---

Maybe he was there to increase his fame, didn't want to screw that up. What kind of fame, exactly, did he think he was going to earn there?

Oh, and Darrah said she wants to be a model. No takers yet. Hope she's concentrating her efforts on print.

Survivor Pearl Islands page here.

Survivor All Stars page here.

Dimples just said we have to hand it to Satan Junior, he was a good player. And that dumbass Andrew Savage agreed.

What?

The guy made it as far as he didn't mostly because everyone thought he was so pathetic. And he rode a lot of coattails and landed on the lucky side of things. I don't think he even played that part of the game particularly well.

But regardless of that, I'd rank him as probably the worst player of the season, because he had the lowest chance of winning. Nearly zero. To win Survivor, you have to do two things: make it to the finals, and win the final vote. Unless you can get there with some chance of pulling off that second one, it makes no difference whatsover how close you come to getting booted in the finals.

Jon is the one person with almost no chance there. Even pitted against Lill Abner, one of the most pathetic players in the history of Survivor, the show of hands showed he still would have lost. Against anyone else it would have been a landslide.

Nearly certain defeat, no matter what proceeded the finals. How is that playing well?

Survivor Pearl Islands page here.

Survivor All Stars page.

Best moment all night. Dimples to Satan Junior:

"But when I say, 'Was it a plan,' is that you? If I see you on the street, are you kind of that kind of a jackass? Or are, you, in fact, putting this on?"

Satan Junior is actually taken aback by the jackass crack. "I'm kind of nice," he says, "but I'm an a-hole, pretty much."

Huh? He's just a pathetic moron.

---

So naturally they've got Jon's grandmother in the audience. Can't wait to hear what she says. If I were her I'd be most pissed that he said I was home watching Jerry Springer.

Update: She didn't seem to thrilled about it, but defended it as part of playing the game. (And so did Christa and Lill.) And it turns out that Dimples bought the story too, and so did the crew. They were so shocked by the news that they called his family to see what they could do, and in Dimples' words to grandma, "You answered the damn phone."

Bet he was livid. Bet Mark Burnett was thrilled.

Survivor Pearl Islands page here.

Survivor All Stars page.