I was travelling yesterday and still am, so regular blogging may not resume until later today, even tomorrow. For now, here are several brief items worth noting:

(1) Former White House Communications aide Dan Bartlett admits what has been painfully evident for a long, long time: right-wing blogs such as Powerline and Hugh Hewitt (the ones Bartlett named) eagerly turn themselves into mindless vessels for the GOP message machine, as they “regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them.” It’s hardly difficult to understand why the White House and U.S. military love to use them. As John Cole says, it’s “another victory for citizen journalism.”

(2) Time has advised Sen. Russ Feingold that they intend to publish his Letter to the Editor in the next print edition. On a related note, Radar Online’s John Cook examines Joe Klein, the Time scandal and the blogosphere’s general interaction with both.

(3) The College Republicans at the University of Massachusetts are hosting an event called “All I am Saying is Give War a Chance.” It is devoted to the “costs, necessities, consequences, and benefits of war.” The speaker is grizzled warrior Jonah Goldberg. Is there anything more outright ludicrous than a bunch of combat-avoiding, prime-fighting-age College Republicans and Jonah Goldberg sitting around in Amherst chatting with each other about the Glories and “benefits of war”?

(4) There are several thoughtful reviews of A Tragic Legacy which I have been meaning to post: this one from Amanda Marcotte; this one from Hume’s Ghost; and this one from The Mises Review’s David Gordon.

(5) Shortly before leaving yesterday, I read this excellent and anger-producing article by The Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig, detailing the plight of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish-born German who languished in Guantanamo for almost five years despite multiple findings that he was guilty of nothing. The still-growing stain on the United States from the collective abuses of Guantanamo is almost impossible to overstate.

(6) Dan Froomkin has a superb analysis of Bush’s evolving rhetoric on Iran this year, and Marcy Wheeler, at her new FDL home, has compiled a very helpful timeline of related events.