So last night I worked until 3am. I didn't really get started until around 5 in the afternoon, so it's not like I was pulling a heroic 18-hour day. More like I overslept and had a lot of crap (bike repair, errands, etc) to deal with and so I made the executive decision to pull a swing shift.

It works for me, the late-night style. It's quiet. The only other people I have to interact with are fellow late-nite workers. I can focus more easily.

This can pretty quickly turn into a nocturnal workaholic lifestyle. Like a devoted lush might with booze -- close out a bar every night, crawl back in around 2pm -- I feel a pull to let the rhythms of labor determine my schedule. I can still do conference calls, meetings and all that jazz, because unlike an alkie I don't have a lengthy boot-up process. I can pretty much get up at any time, suck down a coffee and be lucid for at least 90 minutes before getting punchy if, say, I only got 45 minutes sleep or something.

Yet I really wonder about giving in to this lifestyle. Work is going to hit a peak this winter, which is a good time to hit a peak when you're working online and indoors; it's a shit time to leave the house, anyway. But I'm hesitant to give in. I know I have a less than completely healthy relationship with work, and I need to exercise my will here, lay down some more structure, routine.

Nothing new here, really. Focus, Koenig. Focus. That's my turn on Ali's rumble young man rumble.

John Robb has a good post on the inevitable failure of our clear and hold strategy in Iraq. When I mentioned in my little critique of Bush's "Strategy for Victory" that Clear and Hold weren't going to work as military strategies, this is what I was talking about.

The bottom line is that this can't really create order. A secondary downer is that the transition from US forces to Iraqi forces in the "hold" portion will likely exacerbate the violence in the short term.

In the long term, though, that's the only way. We've got to leave and we've got to leave soon. Iraq will never be remotely peaceful (or even orderly/stable) as long as US troops are stationed there.

A problem we have on the Left is that many of our most ardent activists have no sense of humor.

For the record, "having no sense of humor" here means trying to rationally respond to the diary with an argument about the probability that the 2004 election was rigged electronically.

It's a big debate that's gone on there (and elsewhere) for quite a while. My take is that the possiblity is quite distinct given that the systems Dibold sold the government were ludicrously insecure and downright faulty in a lot of cases. However, no hard evidence exists that anything went on that might have swung 100k votes in Ohio. While I recognize the potential for widespread fraud -- and I absolutely hate the fact that there were actual, measurable, voter supression activites that were actively witnessed -- I'm not about to accuse the Bush administration of subverting democracy in the 2004 election.

Nor am I willing to call for the heads of any members of their campaign other that Kenneth Blackwell, who served as both Ohio Secretary of State (thus overseer of all election-related activities) and Ohio Chair for Bush/Cheney'04. Last person who did that was... Katherine Harris, who more or less did steal the 2004 election by purging 30,000 elegeble voters, overwhelmingly African Americas, from the rolls. A turnout of 5% among those voters would have swung the election in favor of Al Gore. Yeah. She stole it, just like Kenneth tried to do.

But Kenneth's state wasn't within the margin of error for that sort of skullduggery. The reality is that the GOP, the "conservative movement" and the religious right put together a politlcal machine which turned out more votes than the Democrats and their coalition were able to match.

Or rather, that's what I believe. I believe it because there's nothing solid pointing to another reality, and this is the world you have to play in if you want to participate in the politlcal process. Even though there was the potential for electronic fraud, and we all know the people in charge are ethically challenged, you can't call the other party illegitimate -- essentially guilty of treason -- without some sort of hard evidence implicating specific individuals.

Otherwise there's no bottom. It's just a war of all against all. I don't believe in that kind of reality.

Confession: I don't like checking my voicemail. I find it oppressive.

This is highly unprofessional and needs to stop.

Anyway, have a good Friday. I'm goin' potlucking.