Escalation is underway:

ome 25 U.S. troops in Iraq were killed in a single day this weekend, making it the third bloodiest since the war began....

Twelve of the 25 were killed in the crash of a Blackhawk helicopter northeast of Baghdad. Some were killed in Anbar province by Sunni insurgents. Five were killed in Karbala, in Shiite territory... In the current phase of operations, as more troops move into Baghdad, the increase in troop strength is less significant than the increase in the tempo of operations. As the U.S. military becomes more aggressive, it will incur more casualties.

I picked up this because of an AP piece in the local paper that I read while getting lunch. It quoted a couple anonymous Iraqi officials on how good American intel was, “The Americans don’t act on rumors but on accurate intelligence..." Yeah, right, buddy.

Anyway, those troops killed in Karbala were trying to have a meeting to make security plans. The meeting was blown up. Not a good sign.

The rest of the Stratfor analysis is semi-bunk. They posit a few hypotheticals, and opine that Sadr may be playing into Bush's hands, as the Decider is ostensibly trying to restart "the political process" by threatening militia organizations with a crackdown.

First of all, I find it hard to believe that this is Bush's actual goal. I think his goal is to run out the clock on his term in office without having to face the consequences of his actions. This escalation is best understood less as a "surge" and more as a "punt."

One of the young rockers from the dojo made that. Pretty sweet.

Real honest online activism; getting every member of congress on-record about escalation is an important step in stopping it.

It's also a great use of the interweb; a lot more real and effective than circulating petitions which (pssst, here's a secret) are mainly about listbuilding.

This, on the other hand, actually may matter, so check the link and see if your representatives have gone on the record (mine have) about whether or not they support the Bush/McCain doctrine escalate in Iraq.

Jerome Armstrong, who I still have to post a recap about, continues to behave like a thug on MyDD. The latest example is a popular diary written by an Edwards supporter which takes Barak Obama to task for using similar language to Joe Lieberman. Jerome put it on the front page, and edited in an image from Google News with Edwards using similar language.

The image is two and a half years old, so that's pretty weak sauce, but the point here isn't the substance of the argument; it's what Armstrong did with his admin powers.

Here you have a community site that's had a pretty good vibe to it over the past year or two. It's a community that has good things bubble up from the diaries, and has a smaller (but in many ways sharper) community of commentators than the bigger blogs.

On this community site, you have one of the admins taking a community contribution, editing it without permission to completely flip it around on the author, and putting the result on public display.

That's thuggish, bullying behavior, and it's destructive and wrong. Even if Jerome's an Obama fanboy and was hurt by the community member's diary -- or maybe as he said was the case with Dean in this post and they've put him on the payroll so now he's carrying water -- this is a shitty way to behave on a community website. It's a petty violation of what anyone would consider normal standards.

This upsets me partly because people in the campaign world think Jerome actually has good advice (highly debatable), but more because he really brings the whole tenor of MyDD down. Matt and Chris and Jonathan and the other posters have a good thing going, and Armstrong's half-bright technology posts, childish abuses of admin power, and transparent frontpage shilling muddy the waters.