Even though fall is closing in on us if you’re still looking for a taste of summer give this a try:

1 cup frozen peaches
¼ cup lime juice
1 ½ ounces light rum
1 ounce peach schnapps
½ ounce apricot brandy
Dash of pure vanilla extract
1 tablespoon superfine sugar
1 cup crushed ice

Put the whole shebang in your blender and blend until it’s the desired texture. If you’re watching the debates tonight, you may need one.

There were no flashing red lights or blaring sirens in the second part of Diane Sawyer’s interview with John Kerry on Good Morning America. Not like the first part. It was pretty much stump speech stuff.

I heard a very funny Harry Shearer bit yesterday on John Kerry’s preparations for tonight’s debate. He was being subjected to aversion therapy using electroshock to keep him from speaking in long, convoluted sentences. Whatever Mr. Kerry has been doing seems to be working—in the interview he was notably more declarative.

I’ve already given my predictions for tonight’s debate. I expect Bush to be Bush and Kerry to be Kerry and for there to be no surprises. I think I’d follow Steve Green’s example if I weren’t afraid it would interfere with my sleep. I’ll leave the live-blogging to others and follow up with some reflections after the debate.

After I finish my walk every morning with the dogs, I read The Bleat. I love every Lileks post whether it’s about his day as a stay-at-home dad, rants, matchbooks, architecture, or the occasional Bleatdown—a thorough fisking as only Lileks can do.

In this morning’s Bleat, inspired by the flurry of activity in the blogosphere in reaction to Nick Coleman of the Star Tribune’s column attacking blogs and bloggers, Lileks has written an apologia for Big Media. He offers both a hard power and soft power argument for the value of newspapers.

First, the hard power argument:

One: they have the resources to go places and report. You can argue about how they report it, but there aren’t many bloggers today who can get on a plane, fly to the Sudan, use embassy contacts and press credentials to attempt to get the story out. If the New York Times wants to do a story on something, it can do it, and devote however many resources are necessary. (Like the Augusta National Golf Tournament story, for example.)

As I’ve mentioned before, this isn’t nearly as true as it used to be and it’s getting less true with each news staff budget cut.
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When I went out for my morning walk this morning with Qila and Jenny, it was obvious that fall had begun in earnest in Chicago. There was a distinct nip in the air. My breath was visible in a faint, white mist as I urged the dogs forward on our way. And the first few leaves have begun to drop from the trees, still green but nonetheless ready for the change of seasons.

I got out late this morning so it was brilliantly bright. Usually I walk in the half-light just before dawn.
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Jeff Jarvis has weighed in again for the second time in about 24 hours with an Issues2004 post on election reform. In this post Jeff conflates two very different issues: electoral reform and campaign reform.

Jeff advocates the abolition of the Electoral College. I’m skeptical about that. The value of the Electoral College as it stands is to prevent a candidate with strong regional support but no national support from becoming President. That sounds like a unifying force to me and in a country as large and diverse as the United States that’s probably reason enough. To the best of my knowledge there is no pending legislation to abolish the Electoral College and has not been since 2000 which suggests to me that whining in the aftermath of the 2000 election results notwithstanding there’s no real interest in this issue in either political party.
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As I’ve written before I would sincerely like for John Kerry to give me a reason to vote for him. The positions he articulated in his interview this morning on ABC’s Good Morning America make it less likely that I’ll be able to do that. The key points that he made that I find dismaying were:

1. He plans to remove U. S. forces from Iraq within four years.
2. He doesn’t plan to maintain U. S. bases in Iraq.
3. He doesn’t expect France or Germany to put “boots on the ground” in Iraq.

It took more than four years for democracy to establish a foothold in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We’ve had bases there for fifty years.

Abandoning Iraq within four years will mean either another Saddam-like dictator there, civil war, an Iranian-style regime, a Taliban-style regime, or some combination of these. None of the above is acceptable.

Jeff Jarvis has posted the latest entry in his Issues2004 series and this time his topic is foreign policy. I agree with the subtext of Jeff’s post—that the War on Terror is the fundamental foreign policy issue that confronts us. But I also have some pretty basic differences from Jeff.

I don’t have a Wilsonian bone in my body. Don’t get me wrong. I would be thrilled if we were able to establish a functioning liberal democracy in the Arab Middle East. There’s already a functioning liberal democracy in the Middle East—Israel. And there’s already a functioning democracy (to a greater or less degree) in the Muslim Middle East—Turkey. I believe that liberal democracy would good for Arabs in the Middle East, good for the United States, and good for the world.

But I also believe that the process of giving liberal democracy a foothold in the Arab Middle East will be a protracted one—probably a multi-generational process. And there are foreign policy issues which just can’t be put on hold for a multi-generational timeframe.
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A legitimate expert, Lynne Kiesling of The Knowledge Problem, has contributed her own informed opinion on energy policy to Jeff Jarvis’s Issues2004 series.

I’ve been having so much fun with a little project I’m working on that I just had to share my first results with you. I’m doing a little network diagramming of Instapundit and the sites that Glenn links to. Just to see what kinds of relationships emerge. My early results are still a little rough but here goes.

One interesting note is that four sites account for about 10% of all of Glenn’s links.

For the month of September 2004 so far Glenn’s links look like this:

Total links	960
Total distinct sites	438
Sites linked to once	278
Sites linked to twice	76
Sites linked to three times	31

The detailed results follow.
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