"This breaking news just in from Simi Valley: Ronald Reagan is still dead!"

(For you youngsters who may not remember the joke, a little background here.)

The New York Stock Exchange was closed today, in honor of the seventh day of Reagahanukkah - like regular Hanukkah, except without the candles - and my company, grudgingly, gave us the day off.

You know, I may have misjudged what a great man and great president Ronald Reagan really was.

Actually, up until yesterday, it looked like corporate greed would trump corporate ideology and keep me in the office today. But corporate policy says that when the NYSE doesn't trade, we're supposed to get a holiday. So in this case ideology had a little help from bureaucratic inertia.

I've been spending the day sleeping, reading and spending some much-needed time with my kids, and plan to go right on doing that. I've been, grudgingly, talked into taking them to see the new Harry Potter movie, which starts shortly. So no more posting until late tonight.

In the meantime, here's an open thread to talk about what's on your mind.

Cheers.

The troops, on the other hand, get thrown in the trash:

The Pentagon will increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to about 145,000 this summer, from the current 140,000, in recognition of the continued difficulty coalition forces are having in providing security leading up to the hand-over of political power to Iraqis on June 30...

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the increase in the troop level in Iraq is routine. ''As you bring troops in to replace troops that are there, you will have a spike in the total numbers as you do that transition,'' he said. (emphasis added)

Maybe that's the same "spike" Rumsfeld was talking about last winter:

"The increased demand on the force we are experiencing today is likely a “spike,” driven by the deployment of nearly 115,000 troops in Iraq. We hope and anticipate that that spike will be temporary. We do not expect to have 115,000 troops permanently deployed in any one campaign.

Donald Rumsfeld
Testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee
February 5, 2004

It must be, because those guys are still there:

The first Army units that are scheduled to leave are elements of the 1st Armored Division and the 2nd Armored Calvary Regiment; they were originally scheduled to leave in late April but had their one-year tours extended for 90 days.

And it looks like most of them aren't going anywhere any time soon:

At least one of those Army units might face a second extension. On Monday, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he could not rule out keeping soldiers from the 1st Armored Division in Iraq beyond the current three-month extension.

''I think (another extension in Iraq) is unlikely, but in the end, we are going to have to do what is needed to be done. Never say never,'' Myers said.

Never say never. That must be Pentagonese for: "Fucked again."

Capitol Hill Blue, an interesting little web site that covers politics and government in, and from, Washington, takes a look at the Bush campaign's plans to turn the electronic ghost of Ronald Reagan into the third man on the Republican Party ticket.

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Ruy Teixeira over at Donkey Rising is as skeptical as I am that the Bush campaign will get any meaningful bounce out of the week-long Reagan marathon now playing on a cable news network near you.

He notes that part of the survey work for the most recent Gallup Poll, which shows Bush still narrowly trailing Kerry, was completed after Reagan's death. What's more, yesterday's Rasmussen tracking poll (not the most reliable source, but the only daily tracking poll I have access to) showed Bush losing two points over the past three days.

If Dutch were going to give Shrub a boost, you'd think at least some of it would be showing up by now.

Obviously, I've never bought into the Reagan coattails effect. But this evening I think I put my finger on why the Reaganpalooza it could actually hurt Bush, not help him.

It's something I read in an advertising textbook some years back when I was thinking (shudder) about trying to get a job (twitch) as an ad copywriter (retches).

I was saved from that fate. But one of the concepts that stuck in my head was the idea of the "contrast gainer" - or, conversely, the "contrast detractor."

The idea is that product comparisons can be critical, particularly in visual ads. To use a crude example: If you put a bouquet of carnations next to a bouqet of flowers, the carnations look ... ordinary, drab even. But if you put the carnations next to a bucket of manure, they look vivid, fresh, colorful, etc. For carnations, manure is a contrast gainer; roses a contrast detractor.

It doesn't always work that way. Some objects compliment rather than contrast each other: coffee and donuts, to use another simple example. It all depends on the product, I guess. I don't know. I only skimmed the book.

But for the past five days (and for the next two) the Bushies are aggressively holding their guy up next the iconic image of the late Ronald Reagan - not my idea of a great president, but a larger-than-life figure to many voters and an object of cult-like veneration to the Republican Party.

Care to guess who comes off looking like a bucket of shit in that particular contrast?

Update 4:55 AM ET: A bit more confirmation of the no-bounce hypothesis from the LA Times poll just out:

Kerry: 51%
Bush: 44%

survey dates: June 5-8

Back in April, I posted some extracts from the web diary of Abu Ghraib prison interrogator Joe Ryan, which was hosted by a conservative talk radio station in Minneapolis - where Joe was a sometime on-air personality - until the heat generated by the torture scandal prompted station management to flush his writings down the memory hole.

But then the plumbing backed up. Alert reader Bernhard H. (who also spotted Pentagon torture attorney Mary Walker's unintentionally ironic on-line interview) discovered a few weeks worth of entries in the Google cache for Joe's old page.

Well, via Talk Left, I see that UK Indymedia has found a few more weeks worth of Joe's entries on the Alexa search engine cache. And just in case they disappear again, UK Indymedia has also posted them in PDF form.

A friend of Juan Cole gives the world's oldest joke an Iraqi spin. Check it out.

It's been pointed out to me that the interview with Mary L. Walker - the Air Force's General Counsel and squadron leader for the team of lawyers that drew up the Pentagon's torture memo - has been pulled from the web site of the Professional Women's Fellowship.

I'm not surprised, since many of the comments recently left there (none of them by Whiskey Bar readers, I hope) were definitely, well, unchristian. Not to mention revolting.

However, the Internet being what it is, you can still find copies of Ms. Walker's comments elsewhere, like in the Google cache, or on this site. And, just to be doubly certain, I've attached a text version to the bottom of this post.

(You can also find what appears to be a partial copy of the Pentagon memo itself here.)

As I mentioned in my previous post on Ms. Walker, the remarks quoted in her interview take on a certain double meaning when matched with what's in the Pentagon's report. But one comment, which I didn't notice the first time around, seems particularly, well, pointed:

WALKER: As a leader I also love to see people grow and develop. And sometimes that has to take them out of their comfort zone. I am in the people-stretching business. (emphasis added)

Ouch.

Update 11:13 PM ET: Michael Froomkin, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law, has an analysis of the Pentagon torture memo up on his website, Discourse.net. Assuming that Ms. Walker actually is the memo's lead author, it documents what we already know: In addition to being a poor excuse for a Christian, she's also a poor excuse for a lawyer:

On pages 22-23 the Walker Working Group Report sets out a view of an unlimited Presidential power to do anything he wants with “enemy combatants”. The bill of rights is nowhere mentioned. There is no principle suggested which limits this purported authority to non-citizens, or to the battlefield.

Under this reasoning, it would be perfectly proper to grab any one of us and torture us if the President determined that the war effort required it. I cannot exaggerate how pernicious this argument is, and how incompatible it is with a free society. The Constitution does not make the President a King. This memo does.

For the full text of the Walker interview, click below:

I spent Wednesday morning reading the transcript of the AG's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I think this exchange with Pat Leahy perfectly captures the Abbott and Costello quality of it:

LEAHY: Has there been any order directed from the president with respect to interrogation of detainees, prisoners or combatants, yes or no?

ASHCROFT: I'm not in a position to answer that question.

LEAHY: Does that mean because you don't know or you don't want to answer? I don't understand.

ASHCROFT: The answer to that question is yes.