Glad I don’t live here:
“Cold Front Will Drop Denver Temperatures 60 Degrees”
Further research, however, reveals that Montana is the king of drastic weather changes:

January 11, 1980. The temperature at the Great Falls International Airport rose from -32F to 15F in seven minutes as warm, Chinook winds eroded an Arctic airmass. This 47 degree rise in seven minutes stands as the record for the most rapid temperature change registered in the United States.
. . .
December 14, 1924. The temperature at Fairfield, Montana (about 20 miles WNW of Great Falls), dropped from 63F at noon to -21F at midnight. This 84 degree change in 12 hours still stands as the greatest 12 hour temperature change recorded in the United States.
. . .
April 25-26, 1969. A late season storm brought a drastic change in weather to eastern Montana. A day after numerous stations registered their highest temperature for the month (many in the 80s), a cold front swept through Montana bringing blizzard conditions to much of the eastern half of the state. Temperatures fell more than 50 degrees in 24 hours with wind chill readings well below zero for nearly 48 hours.
. . .
January 23, 1916. An Arctic cold front slammed through Browning, Montana, dropping the temperature from 44F to -56F in 24 hours. This 100 degree change stands as the most dramatic temperature change ever recorded in 24 hours in the United States.

Unfortunately, the abrupt temperature changes in East Tennessee are almost always of the cold variety. For a change, wouldn’t it be great to tune into the weather and see the following forecast: Today–cloudy, high 45; Tomorrow–sunny, high 85.

Keith Olbermann reviews President Bush’s track record regarding Iraq.
Yet notwithstanding that:
(1) this leadership has screwed up at every turn, and
(2) neither the Iraqi government or American military commanders asked for more U.S. troops,
we’re now supposed to risk more lives and dump more money into this nation-building fiasco. Wonderful.
UPDATE: The speech didn’t contain much that was unexpected, other than the veiled threat at expanding the war (see below). But I’m a bit confused by this line:

It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq. So my national security team, military commanders, and diplomats conducted a comprehensive review. We consulted members of Congress from both parties, our allies abroad, and distinguished outside experts.

With the possible exception of Senator Lieberman (I), when was this alleged consultation with Democratic members of Congress? My understanding is that the Democratic leadership was only informed of the plan on Wednesday, just a few hours before the speech was released. That’s consultation?
Please, no. Limit one botched war per presidency.

Via Political Animal, there’s this Q & A with Iraqi study group commissioner Leon Panetta:

When your bipartisan panel came to the conclusion that relying on Iraqi forces and embedding U.S. advisors was the right course of action, rather than a surge, did you think that you were reflecting the consensus of the U.S. military at the time?
Yes. We sat down with military commanders there and here, and none of them said that additional troops would solve the fundamental cause of violence, which was the absence of national reconciliation. We always asked if additional troops were needed. We asked the question of [Gen. George] Casey and others, we asked it of Marine commanders in Anbar. Do you need additional troops? They all said the same thing: we don’t need additional troops at this point; we need to get the Iraqis to assume the responsibility they’re supposed to assume…
Did you interview Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who’s about to take over command of multinational forces in Iraq? What did he recommend? He is now said to be a supporter of the surge.
At that time he was talking about the need to train and embed U.S. forces in the Iraqi army. (laughs)
. . .
Can any number of U.S. troops stop small death squads from continuing sectarian killing in the middle of the night throughout Baghdad?
We had an American general tell us that if the Iraqi government doesn’t make political progress then all the troops in the world won’t make any difference.

So according to American generals, a surge won’t solve the problems in Iraq. But presumably Mr. Bush thinks it may extend him some additional political cover.
Yesterday Richard Clarke spoke at the Center for American Progress. He pointed out a number of things America needs to be doing in the global “War on Terror.” He then made a simple point regarding Iraq: whether America leaves a year from now, or seven years from now, chaos will follow. If we continue assisting the Iraqi government for several more years, this transition will presumably be less chaotic. But whatever marginal benefit this buys us will clearly not be worth the thousands of Americans and hundreds of billions of dollars it will cost. Our resources should be used more effectively elsewhere.

• A bunch of people on TV news are all aflutter about President Bush’s upcoming speech on his “new” plan for Iraq. I think I can save everyone the drama. If you want to know the “plan” you can get a preview in three easy steps:
  (1) Go to the White House website,
  (2) In the Iraq section, dig up “Strategy for Victory” 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, [how many ever versions we’ve gone through], and
  (3) Reword the headings, change the font, and throw in a few new graphs and bullet points.
  That will pretty much be it.
• Washingtonian asks if Washington would be better with more writers like Malcolm Gladwell. I haven’t read any of Gladwell’s books, but I’ve seen him on C-SPAN several times, and he’s interesting. You have to admire a writer who comes up with a contest like this:
  

  The mischief peaked with what Gladwell refers to as “the contest.” He and another young science reporter, William Booth, chose a phrase and competed to see who could insert it in the newspaper faster. The contest culminated with the phrase “perverse and often baffling.”
  Booth wrote a story on mollusks. “The copy desk took out ‘often,’ ” he says in the recording, “arguing, I think correctly, that mollusks were either baffling or they weren’t.”
  Finally, with the clock ticking, Gladwell struck gold. He discovered that Washington is home to both the country’s highest number of gastroenterologists per capita as well as the highest fees for gastroenterology, flying in the face of supply-and-demand rules.
  Baffling indeed, and possibly perverse–at least by the standard of Post editors. Gladwell won the contest.

  It’s not everyone who can go off the beaten path into academic research and crank out an interesting article or book.

• What is up with the price of oil? $54 a barrel? I have yet to get a handle on what causes these price movements, but it’s not supply and demand.
• I’m not necessarily the biggest Kathy Griffin fan, but I appreciate how she sometimes tells it like it is:
  

  “Larry King is either deaf or just doesn’t listen, according to our favorite comic, Kathy Griffin.
  During her two-hour set for the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center on Thursday, Griffin quipped, ‘[King] doesn’t listen to a word you say. It’s unbelievable. After a while, I just wanted to [bleep] with him and try to say something shocking. Did you hear me say that Oprah would be the first gay president? And he’s like, ‘She has a show, am I right?””

• James Howard Kunstler looks at a future with declining oil production:
  

  If you really want to understand the U.S. public’s penchant for wishful thinking, consider this: We invested most of our late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future. American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. Period.

• This is encouraging:
  

  Hamilton wouldn’t comment Monday on whether Fulmer would receive a raise, a telltale sign that he probably won’t.
  With a salary of $2.05 million per year, Fulmer also didn’t receive one following last season’s 5-6 finish.
  “I’m on record as saying that I’m giving him a contract extension,” Hamilton said. “The media and fans have more of a sense of urgency than we do about it. Phillip knows he’s the coach at the University of Tennessee. He’s going to get a contract extension. We’re working toward doing the right things to make sure we all achieve the goals we’ve got out there, and we’ll announce what we’re going to do at some point.”
  Hamilton said he and Fulmer have talked at length about what realistic expectations should be at Tennessee.
  “I know people are going to start charting the course of how many we’ve had since when, and I realize this league is very cyclical, but I think it’s reasonable to expect a couple of SEC championships over a 10-year period of time and be in the SEC Championship Game four times,” Hamilton said.

  It’s a testament to the ridiculousness of coaching salaries that we’re even discussing giving a raise to a $2 million/year coach who hasn’t won a conference championship in eight years.

I thought there was a pricing disparity; it wasn’t my imagination:

Despite the nearly 10% drop in the price of oil during the past week, the national average price of a gallon of gasoline has actually gone up $.03. That seems pretty fair, right?
The price of oil briefly fell below $55 during Friday’s trading session before rallying to close at $56.31. Despite closing higher, the price of oil fell over 8% for the week – the single largest weekly drop in oil prices since early in 2005.
Unfortunately, the decline of the price of oil didn’t carry over to the national average price of gasoline, which actually has increased three cents during the past three weeks.

Funny how gasoline prices always trail oil price drops much slower than price increases. Or maybe it isn’t.
Speaking of oil, there’s been some discussion regarding this report regarding a proposed deal allowing Western oil companies to cash in on Iraqi oil fields. Jerome a Paris writes that this law, if ever implemented, would be a reasonable business arrangement. But, he adds, the country is far too unstable for outside oil companies to risk investment.
I can’t argue with the last point.