The latest round of base-closing recommendations hit the streets today. Among other things, it says that the Army’s and Navy’s flagship medical centers should be merged.

The Walter Reed Army Medical Center will be essentially closed and its functions merged on the campus of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The merged facility is recommended to be called the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

James Joyner says the merger makes sense. I agree. My daughter was born at Bethesda Naval hospital in 1993. I was an Army officer at the time but that was no hindrance to my wife receiving all her prenatal care and giving birth there. Their care was excellent, btw.

Medical care has been service non-specific for many, many years. It was much easier for us to get to Bethesda because it isn’t far from the interstate beltway around Washington, D.C. Walter Reed, otoh, is buried inside DC itself and the very few times I went there it was not an easy trip. IIRC, Bethesda is also a newer and more modern facility, too.

Bill Hobbs points the way to a study by Hundred Percenter that compares the Sitemeter-tracked hits on “100 websites, big, small, political, non-political, conservative and liberal- from November 2004 to April 2005.” This blog is one of them. The study charts total hits in November 2005 and hits in April 2005, computes the delta and shows the percentage difference, plus or minus.

Unsurprisingly, blogs that H. Percenter characterizes as political or news-oriented sites show a near-universal drop in hit count. In some cases the drop seems very steep. According to H. Percenter, this blog had 100,000 visits in November and 78,000 in April, a decline of 22 percent. (It was actually 98,000 in November, but I’ll use their roundoff here.) But in October my site had a mere 50,000 visits - and in September it had 170,000 visits (chart here). What went on? Simple: I took three weeks off in October. The chart showing both visits and page views, btw, is even more revealing, as it shows that page views here have been steadily climbing since the end of January even as visits mildly declined (visits slightly rebounded beginning last month).

According to my web server’s statistics package (Awstats, more accurate than Sitemeter), this site had 65,862 “unique” visitors in November, a unique visitor actually being a unique IP address logging into the site. There were 139,974 visits, which Awstats defines differently than Sitemeter. Awstats’ defines visits as the same IP logging on more than once. On average, every reader who logged on here in November did so 2.12 times.

In comparison, Awstats shows that last month there were 58,951 unique visitors and 131,863 visits, and average of 2.23 visits per reader. This is an actual decline of unique visits of 10.5 percent, not 22 percent as Sitemeter’s data show, and an increase in the number of times the same reader comes back in the same month. So far this month there have been more than 26,000 unique visitors by Awstats’ server data, so this site is on track this month to match November’s performance.

I have never had much confidence in Sitemeter’s accuracy, especially compared to server-side trackers. I assume, though, that Sitemeter’s inherent inaccuracies are at least consistent from one month to another and from one blog to another. It is also the most widely used add-on hit counter in the blogosphere, tracked, for example, by N.Z. Bear’s Blogosphere Ecosystem.

Hundred Percenter says that, “all non-political blogs have continued to grow, while political and news oriented sites have slumped.” Certainly this is true, but I am not sure what it proves, if anything. I guess bloggers who simply want to garner hits could change their content away from politics and news, but what’s the fun in simply chasing hits?

Paul Musgrave says it is, exploring the issue from both sides. Read the comments, too.

So says Austin Bay, analyzing the threat of Britain, France and Germany to Iran that their negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program will end if Iran resumes atomic work. The three major powers of Europe bluntly told Hassan Rohani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, that they will refer further action to the UNSC if Iran moves ahead.

Admitting that the UNSC’s record counter-proliferation efforts is “spotty,” Austin says that even though the mullohcracy is extremely unpopluar among the Iranian people,

The Iranian public won’t greet a foreign military attack with delight.

There is, however, another possibility … . If the mullahs continue their nuclear warfare program, and the EU does push for UN referral, Iran risks deterimental economic and political consequences. The mullahs may calculate that sustained high oil prices (and cheating on UN sanctions, due to demand for oil) may buffer the economic consequences.

US or Israeli destructon of Iranian nuclear production facilities might produce a spike in domestic support– but the hole in the ground remains. The hole marks a failed, aggressive international adventure by a failed regime. The failed adventure is a testament to weakness. Unlike North Korea, the people of Iran do have a say, albeit a limited say. Unlike North Korea’s Stalinist sociopaths, the mullahs haven’t shown an inclination to murder Iranian citizens en masse. In this scenario, the nuclear venture boomerangs.

Would I bet on this scenario? Nope. But I’m not in Tehran , I’m not wearing a robe, and my neck isn’t in the noose.

Update: The Financial Times has more. Seems the two sides have agreed to hold a talk to discuss holding more talks.

Dale Peck slams SW3 in the NY Observer. But Jackson’s Junction really has the best pre-review I’ve seen yet:

… what would you rather have? The Jedi Mind Trick or the Vulcan Mind Meld? Oh, one may get you past the guards, but the other makes you that guard’s daddy. And in a bind: C3PO or Spock? The little gay animated Academy Award? Or, the bad mo-fo with the nerve pinch? And finally, what do you prefer to hear when time’s running out? R2D2’s squeals and squeaks or Scotty’s brogue?

Well, yeah.

I understand the devil just sent out for an overcoat - the New York Times has published a roundup of “the daily parade of small triumphs that marks slow but steady progress” in Iraq. Excellent stuff!

The origin of this word is quite intriguing. It actually is of military origin and it had nothing to with pontificating. Arthur Chrenkoff has the history.