After being disappointed that the Iraq Study Group produced "a new way forward" plan for Iraq that did not agree that his administration's brilliant plan for the Iraq war has been right all along (although he really liked the catchy new slogan), President Bush has finally located a group of "experts" who told him exactly what he wanted to hear.

Experts Advise Bush Not to Reduce Troops

President Bush heard a blunt and dismal assessment of his handling of Iraq from a group of military experts yesterday, but the advisers shared the White House's skeptical view of the recommendations made last week by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, sources said.

I thought was interesting in light of the Ben Domenech episode and WaPo's newly stated intention to hire a both a new conservative and a liberal blogger.

Newspapers Sign On to Syndicated Blog Service

A syndication service that delivers commentary from 600 bloggers for use by newspaper publishers is set to launch on Tuesday, further blurring the lines that divide blogs and mainstream media.

BlogBurst, as the service from blog technology company Pluck Corp. is known, includes headlines and articles for use by newspaper publishers in the news or feature sections of their online services, as well as print editions.

Pluck initially has signed up Gannett Co. Inc., Washington Post Co., San Francisco Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman and San Antonio Express.

We're all familiar with how the Republican right keeps quixotically (although they come pretty close on occasion) pushing Constitutional amendments to address issues where they perceive their interests are being thwarted by misinterpretation of the current US Constitution by the judicial branch, i.e. "judicial activism" - prime examples being prohibition of flag burning, gay marriage, and abortion.  They complain that the judiciary is abusing their authority in invoking the Constitution, which in our constututional republic form of governemt is the only higher authority than themselves, in a way they don't like, so the only way to curb this abuse is by doing and end-run around the judges and changing the Constitution itself.

Even though these efforts are usually futile, they are important because they make excellent issues to rally the Republican Party base around their simple, coherent, and unified messages codified in the precise language of the proposed amendments.

Looks like the spooks are finally getting serious about preventing one of the favorite expoits of the computer-savvy opponents of government coverups:

NSA offers guidance to feds on redactions

The National Security Agency has issued a report suggesting ways to improve federal officials' use of redaction in documents being released to the public.

The report, titled "Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized Reports Converted From Word to PDF," was released by the architectures and applications division of the Systems and Network Attack Center at NSA.

The authors identify three common mistakes officials can make in trying to sanitize documents:

Setting the background to black behind text "is a common and effective means of redaction for hard-copy printed materials," the report stated, but is not effective for documents in electronic form.

Similarly, placing a black rectangle over images or making them unreadable by reducing their size also does not work for electronic documents.

Finally, officials frequently overlook hidden information such as metadata.