Outside correspondent Stuart Stevens, an amateur cyclist, has researched the effects of performance enhancing drugs by actually taking them. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that this might be one of the most important sports articles ever written. To put it bluntly, the pervasiveness of performance enhancing drugs all but eliminates my interest in sports, period.

Never in my lifetime did I imagine I would witness the use of the Robot Exclusion Protocol for political means. (There are also perfectly plausible, non-nefarious explanations of this, but it’s too good to pass up either way.)

Bush sees that the growing pace and destructiveness of attacks in Iraq as proof that anti-occupation insurgents are becoming increasingly desperate. Once again, all evidence is taken as proof that whatever we’re already doing is working. What would prove that our efforts are not effective? Fewer attacks?

To me, this Washington Post story signals that Dick Cheney should turn in his resignation tomorrow. The Bush administration can spin it however they like, but Dick Cheney has done all he could since the administration decided we would invade Iraq to scare us about Iraq’s nukes. Now it turns out that there was nothing, and somebody is responsible for the lies. If Cheney possessed an iota of integrity, he’d be packing his things tomorrow.

Useful: Optimizing your RSS feed for FeedDemon. Most of these tips go for all RSS readers.

Fred Kaplan summarizes the Rumsfeld memo thusly:

What is being stated here can be summed up as follows: We’ll probably win the battle for Afghanistan and Iraq (or, more precisely, it’s “pretty clear” we “can win” it, “in one way or another” after “a long, hard slog”), but we’re losing the struggle for hearts and minds in the broader war against terrorism. Not only that, we don’t know how to measure winning or losing, we don’t have a plan for winning it, we don’t know how to fashion a plan, and the bureaucratic agencies put in charge of waging this war and drawing up these plans may be inherently incapable of doing so.

Wired Magazine had a story about Amazon’s full text search feature set to be published in their next issue, but since Amazon launched the feature, they went ahead and published the story online. Just as Google News forever changed the way I consume news, I expect that Amazon’s full text search will change the way I read and purchase books. Sometimes I just sit and wonder how I managed to get through life before the Web.

Update: Joi Ito points out that Amazon’s Search Inside the Book provides yet another venue for ego surfing.

Michael Kinsley: Taking Bush Personally. This piece is specific, not abstract.

Over at Brad DeLong’s weblog, I spotted a link to this weblog entry, busting Donald Rumsfeld for lumping in Gulbudin Hekmatyar with the rest of the Taliban in Afghanistan. I noticed the error but skipped it, assuming that Rumsfeld was glossing over the details for the sake of brevity. Hekmatyar is a scumbag, but he’s not a member of the Taliban. I’ve read lots of other interesting comments on the Rumsfeld memo as well, most of which have convinced me that my general enthusiasm for it are a product of my low expectations for the Bush administration. Clearly the memo is meant as yet another argument for Rumsfeld’s long held ideas on the transformation of the military, and in that sense, it’s just a basic call for doing more of the same stuff he already wanted to do. At the same time, it’s a rare glimpse of the Bush administration admitting that things aren’t just peachy in every way, even if only to themselves.

Update: Speaking of people latching on to specific bits of Rumsfeld’s memo, Phil Carter posted an interesting riff on Rumsfeld’s call for metrics to measure how effective our efforts in the war on terror are. (Perhaps the ultimate example of bending strategy to suit metrics rather than actual desired outcomes is the phenomenon of “teaching to the test” in public education. When teachers and schools are rated based on how their students perform on standardized tests, then they tend to focus on those tests to the exclusion of other things.)

Yesterday, Fred Kaplan posted a piece discussing President Bush’s ill-considered comparison of Iraq to the Philippines. Today, the Slacktivist posted a roundup that included a link to Kaplan’s piece and two others questioning the wisdom of making such a comparison. I should probably just recommend reading everything from the Slacktivist and Fred Kaplan and save the drive space I spend linking to them all the time, but I can’t help it.