Just some scattered links below. The presidential campaign has entered a period of doldrums, reflected in Salon's numerous speculative articles on VP candidates: pro and con for Obama/Hillary, McCain/Lieberman, Obama/Hagel, and other such nonsense -- Camile Paglia likes Kathleen Sebelius as Obama's VP, which makes more sense than any of the above, although I'm ambivalent at best. Also read some talk about how Obama should retain Gates as Secretary of Defense -- no doubt he could do worse, as Clinton did in replacing Gates with Woolsey at CIA, but at this point we should still hope for better. Obama has made some noise about bringing Republicans into his administration, but this doesn't look like a year where he has to double cross the Democratic base to inch over the finish line.

Meanwhile, I have been having a good time looking at FiveThirtyEight -- subtitle is "Electoral Projections Done Right," and they look pretty right to me.

Big news here in Wichita is the GAO report which apparently puts Boeing back in running for the Great Tanker Scam. Goes to show that intense lobbying still works in Washington.

Tony Karon: America's great mistake was to make too much of al Qa'eda. Certainly true. As Gilles Kepel has shown, before 9/11 Al Qaeda had lost its battle for a political constituency in the Muslim world. The 9/11 attacks might have faded into a brief Warhol moment of notoriety (and most likely self-destruction, like the Luxor tourist attacks in Egypt had backfired against Zawahiri's group) had Bush not chosen to open up Afghanistan and Iraq in his war of retribution and conquest. Even so, Al Qaeda remains marginal, an irritant exaggerated into a menace by our own incomprehension, a mirroring of Bush and Bin Laden egos. Alternate version of essay here.

Andrew Leonard: Gas prices and offshore drilling. Steps through the basic logic of the offshore/arctic drilling proposal Bush and McCain pushed out today, finding the real nub of contention over the question whether we recognize or still deny that we face a finite resources crunch over oil supplies. Until we recognize the need to fundamentally change our energy economy, adding marginal capacity is little more than a stall tactic. I full well expect that sooner or later we'll wind up sucking every recoverable drop from those sources (at more or less cost to the environment). Maybe it would make sense to start planning how to do that, but not if it's just going to be burned up willy nilly, which is what would happen under the current regime.

Phillipe Sands: It Was Top Down, Stupid. A lot of pieces lately on the torture chambers and their prisons from Guantanamo to Bagram and points unspecified. Sands, a stickler for points of international law, points to the top of the order chain.

Chris Floyd: Torturegate: Truth but No Consequences. Another useful review of the torture testimony, with more on where it's going, or not. Doesn't include today's FISA vote, where House Democrats caved in (or to use their preferred technical term, "compromised").

Andrew J Bacevich: Fault Lines: Inside Rumsfeld's Pentagon. A review of two recent books on how other people screwed up the Iraq War -- Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's Special Plans guy, and Ricardo Sanchez, the first military commander of the occupation forces:

Apart from the finger-pointing and score-settling, these two accounts do agree at least implicitly on a single issue: taken as a whole, the national security apparatus is irredeemably broken. [ . . . ] From quite different vantage points, Feith and Sanchez affirm that the principal product generated by the interagency process is disharmony, dishonesty, and dysfunction.