Representative Jim Davis (D-FL 11th), the Democratic candidate for governor, received an A from the IAVA and 100% from the DAV.

The Reptilicon ads claim he’s never at work, but he seems to show up for veterans issues and a lot of other things, like the offshore drilling votes, when he votes the way a representative of Florida should.

The Shrubbery has hinted that more troops will be going to Iraq after the elections. We don’t have any more troops, and 4,000 of the people in Iraq today are on extended tours, so the message is that people are not going to be rotated out when their replacements arrive.

They have been calling up every warm body they could locate in the Reserve and just about used up all of the deployment time available for the National Guard without changing a number of laws, so the regular forces are going to be extended, and they know it.

The people who are near to the ends of their enlistments know they are going to be retained by “stop-loss” orders because many of the new enlistees can’t be trusted with a broom, much less a weapon.

The Reptilicons brought this on themselves by drawing active duty military personnel into partisan political activities. They have broken down a very high and long-standing wall between the military and anything political, and now they are reaping what they sowed.

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Blogger has issues today, but it looks like they are swapping equipment out, so it should be back quickly.

This is based on the error messages I’m receiving, because Blogger Status is also down.

The bigger sites should still be available because they seem to be on a separate system.

Blogger Status is back:

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

We are experiencing some troubles with one filer. This affects publishing to some of the blogs and they will not be available for viewing on blogspot.

Posted by Prashant at 11:24 PDT

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Tomorrow we will have an outage of 60 minutes from 2p to 3p (Pacific Time) as we perform some hardware repairs. Posted by Pal at 15:39 PDT

Update from Jack, the Grumpy Forester in comments:

I just discovered that, having switched to Blogger Beta, I can no longer comment at non-Beta Blogger sites that use Blogger comments. skippy would be an example of a site where my comments are rejected. A fix is supposedly in the works…

Kevin Hayden at American Street provides a an introduction and link to a MSNBC report: Gitmo interrogations spark battle over tactics.

Before you go read part one of a two-part report there is something you should know that isn’t totally clear from the article. These investigators are the military’s criminal investigators who gather evidence for courts martial, not civilian criminal cases. The administration was talking about creating military tribunals to try those charged as “enemy combatants” and these people worked under the military’s rules of procedure for trials, which are a bit different than those of civilian courts.

These investigators are complaining about tactics that are unacceptable for military trials and they complained all the way to the top of their chain of command, Rumsfeld himself.

These complaints went up the chain of command early in 2002, well before the Iraq war. The DoD can’t claim they didn’t know what was going on, because they had been told about the techniques in use almost two years before Abu Ghraib was revealed.

The investigators told them this would blow up on them, but they did it anyway.

Update: Part 2 is now available.