Frank Rich writes in a throroughly insightful op-ed for the New York Times that “a president can’t stay the course when his own citizens won’t stay with him.”

Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war’s inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.

Meanwhile, over at the Washington Post, Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer write that Bush is moving the goal posts again.

The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.

The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

In other words, stick a fork in it. Now, if only someone would grow some testicles and inform the President, he might be able to stop putting his foot in his mouth.

Oh, if only this were true…

Some people have already managed to get versions of Mac OS X to run on their PCs. Here are links to some information on doing that.

• Uneasy Silence
• 360hacker.net
• OSX86 Project

I’d like to end the week with the cast of 21 players presently implicated in the Rove scandal. It’s a thorough list of White House officials involved in the leak, and some description of each individual’s involvement. Enjoy.

Can you work less and succeed more? Richard Koch says you can.

You’ve probably heard of the law the pesky Pareto principle. It’s also called the 80/20 principle, because about 80 percent of results flow from 20 percent of causes… Well, one day I had a sudden thought. Businesses have known for a long time that they can improve their position enormously by concentrating on the key 20 percent of activities. But why can’t people do the same? It turns out that we can.

Wow. I posted a self-improvement article, and it didn’t come from Steve Pavlina!

Is there any truth to this rumor that I’ve been seeing a lot over the past few days?

“One or more of the grand juries have concluded their probe and have voted True Bills, Federal Criminal indictments, against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, “Scooter” Libby, Condoleeza Rice, and Theodore B. Olson; and several media people not previously mentioned in the monopoly press as implicated,” wrote Skolnick.

“Shown also as unindicted co-conspirators are two Judges on the U.S. Supreme Court, William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, who are among the “Gang of Five” also in Bush versus Gore. Because of the horrendous consequences involved, the indictments are suppressed and there may be an extended delay until they appear on the Chicago Federal Court open records.

The dispute over Global Warming has largely centered around a small subset of data that seemed to indicate no temperature change in the troposphere from the ’70s to the present. Those who stand to benefit from “debunking” global warming (ie, petroleum companies, polluters, auto manufacturers) have clung to that data in spite of the overwhelming evidence in all the rest of the data on the matter.

A team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now say they have found the reason for that anomoly. In early equipment designs sensors were exposed, which would make readings taken in direct sunlight show warmer temperatures than later equipment with sensors protected from direct exposure. Thus the old readings were artificially high, which ultimately (and somewhat coincidentally) produced the same numbers as today’s more accurate readings of a warmer troposhpere.

It’s his speaking ability. I knew it all along.

The Light Of Reason has different thoughts on the matter…

DailyKOS puts into words what many of us have been thinking, probably better than anyone else who’s tried:

Sometimes, an event is simply apolitical. Bush could’ve difused this early with a gracious 30 minute meeting with Sheehan. Instead, he loosed the attack dogs on her. Every attack on Sheehan from the Right is a reflection of their moral decay, their unamerican disdain for her right to protest her son’s death, and yet more evidence of Bush (and Rove’s) tacit endorsement of the politics of personal destruction — even when the target is a grieving mother.

In light of the slimeball attacks being mounted against Cindy Sheehan by the right-wing media, Cenk Uygur at The Huffington Post considers what might have happened if Fox Fake News, Rush Slimebaugh, Bill O’Really?, and the rest of the gang had been around when Rosa Parks made her stand.