All of the sudden, life is really good for John McCain:

The Republican National Convention has given John McCain and his party a significant boost, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken over the weekend shows, as running mate Sarah Palin helps close an "enthusiasm gap" that has dogged the GOP all year.

McCain leads Democrat Barack Obama by 50%-46% among registered voters, the Republican's biggest advantage since January and a turnaround from the USA TODAY poll taken just before the convention opened in St. Paul. Then, he lagged by 7 percentage points.

[. . .]

In the new poll, taken Friday through Sunday, McCain leads Obama by 54%-44% among those seen as most likely to vote. The survey of 1,022 adults, including 959 registered voters, has a margin of error of +/-- 3 points for both samples.

Of course, this is immediately after a convention, so whatever bounce there is may well dissipate soon. That is the nature of bounces.

Then again, it is worth noting that at times, bounces do not dissipate. Something that ought to worry the Obama campaign.

And amazingly enough, if you point this out, people get huffy and accuse you of being out of touch.

This is a test

To wit. And the last sentence of the post is, of course, dead-on accurate.

Jerry Taylor's reverie is my own.

This qualifies as good advice:

To keep businesses from being treated as personal fiefdoms by corrupt CEOs, Congress needs to empower investors. It needs to preempt state anti-takeover laws that prevent shareholders from kicking out incompetent management and selling the company to the highest bidder. And it needs to repeal regulations that prevent major shareholders from offering their own candidates to replace inept corporate boards in proxy contexts.

We learn anew that price caps don't work. How long before the lesson, you know, sticks?

Let's pretend that it is, anyway.

An informative obituary can be found here.

And you may quite agree once you read this:

If anyone doubts the difficulties the country's government will face trying to boost growth, they need only look at what happened to Professor Marco Biagi.

An expert on labour law and industrial relations, Mr Biagi was assassinated on 19 March, 2002, in Bologna by the left-wing terror group the Red Brigade.

His crime had been to help draft, and advocate, changes to Italy's rigid and slow-moving labour market.

"There is a hard reality in this country that people try to gloss over," says Franco Pavoncello, president of John Cabot University in Rome. "Politics can get really nasty."

To say the least.

The good fellow-co-bloggers have promised me on pain of flogging via wet noodle that they will keep you entertained while I go on a short trip this weekend. Fear not--nowhere tropical but assuredly fun nonetheless. And you get to read Chequer-board without me.

Everyone wins. Have a nice weekend.

Today is a day to take it easy. And to do things away from the computer.

A very Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. 

Up until now, I have allowed commenters to post here as "Anonymous Heroes." But with the beginning of spam comments here at Chequer-board (I had to clean up nearly 100 such comments from the same spammer today), it seems best to switch to a system that requires commenters to register.

Registration is quite easily achieve by entering a login name and a password after clicking on the "Make a new account" link at the upper right hand side. You may remain personally anonymous (in other words, no one will know your name, address, etc.) through this registration but you will have a discernible identity here on the blog. This will enable me to stop spammers in their tracks and easily get rid of trolls (which happily have been mostly absent from the blog since its inception).

I am sorry to have to force people to jump through these hoops. But I assure you that the inconvenience is at most minimal, won't involve a violation of your personal privacy and will significantly enhance the commenting experience here. A note: After you register, you should receive an e-mail confirming your registration. In the event that it does not reach your inbox, be sure to check your spam folder to see whether it is there--in all likelihood, it is since oftentimes, e-mails from this site are diverted to the spam folder.

Many thanks for understanding. And for commenting. And for reading. 

We're testing polls. Not much here except that...

Per Instapundit, a look at the particulars of becoming a reporter embedded with American forces in Iraq is provided by the intrepid Michael Yon.

While guest-blogging for Dan Drezner a few weeks ago I noted some of the problems arising from the relatively small number of American reporters now embedded with our guys in Iraq.  Good news, like the improving performance of Iraqi combat units in some areas, gets underreported.  So does bad news -- it should, for example, be a major embarrassment to the American media that reports of prisoner abuse by soldiers of the 82nd Airborne in the 2003-4 period had to be made public by Human Rights Watch only a few weeks ago.  With so few American reporters near the front lines, the picture we get of the war is inevitably very cloudy.  In the long run, this will probably result in less public support for the continued American commitment in Iraq.

I don't want to be unfair here.  Yon makes clear that becoming an "embed" is no easy task.  You need (now) to be affiliated; you need to get to Kuwait yourself; most importantly, or at least most expensively, you have to outfit yourself:

There's expense associated with planning and applying for the embed. There is specialized gear to be purchased: protective equipment alone can cost thousands of dollars per person, and even in peaceful times, the desert climate is still extremely hard on electronic equipment. Getting to the Middle East requires a long, expensive flight. And the Hilton [in Kuwait] that came so highly recommended also came with a high room rate: $590 for a room that would have been worth maybe $150 in Florida. There was nothing to drink in the room, but the front desk offered to send up two bottles of water for about $23.

So much for writing from Iraq being in my future.  But CNN and the major networks are each part of multi-billion dollar corporations; so are the largest newspapers and the weekly newsmagazines.  Expenses daunting to an individual are less than pocket change to them, and while Iraq is certainly a dangerous place reporting from a war zone must still have its professional attractions for some journalists, especially younger ones.  Yet as best I can tell there are only about three dozen reporters embedded with American units in Iraq now, compared with hundreds at the beginning of the war, when the story had real buzz.

If one were looking for ways in which the American media is falling short of its obligation to report the news, one could do worse than this.  It isn't a question of political bias so much as an unwillingness to commit resources to a story that, at the moment, has low entertainment value.

As Yom Kippur begins sundown tonight, I will not be blogging until either Thursday night or Friday morning. I have asked my co-bloggers to put up material in my stead, so be sure to check back and check out their always-fabulous work.

Please note that Dan Drezner's words are my own.

The great and good InstaPundit divides up his permalinks into three categories. The top one is the "Recommended" category and it is the one in which A Chequer-board of Nights and Days falls into. No longer does my weblog occupy the bottom of the permalinks merely because Professor Reynolds classifies his links alphabetically.

You really can move up in the world. 

In any event, thanks to Glenn for recommending Chequer-board. I would like to think that it is because of my labors alone that he does so. But I know that's not true and I would like even more to thank Patterico, Joseph Britt, Jon Henke, Leon H. and Jessica Harbour for lending their time and talent to this endeavor. I am most grateful for their contributions and their collaboration and I very much look forward to their future posts.

And many thanks to all of Chequer-board's readers. You make this little hobby quite worth the while. 

Per a generous if somewhat reckless invitation from Pejman, I'll be adding my thoughts to those of the other CBND regulars here from time to time.  Some readers may recall that I've been a guest-blogger for Dan Drezner and Greg Djerejian in the last few months; as I did on those sites, I expect to post mostly on foreign policy and Congress.

Group blogs may be the wave of the future; there have been quite a few of them started lately by such veteran bloggers as Josh Marshall and Phil Carter.  I'd be glad to contribute in a small way to an exciting new trend.  I suppose it's possible I could sour everyone on the whole idea as well, but we'll see.

Apparently Chequer-board had something along the lines of a Denial Of Service problem. Not clear whether or not it was malicious in nature. In any event, my apologies to fellow bloggers and to readers. Glad to be back.