I’ve been looking through my blog stats lately, and not only am I not stagnating, as I thought erroneously since relying on Sitemeter for the quick-and-easy stats, but it appears that my readership has grown since I switched to WordPress. I had a feeling it would.

Twelve percent of you are reading this site via an RSS reader. One of the first things I did upon request of one of you was to allow my posts to be read in full via RSS. Am I right in assuming you’d like to keep it that way, or do you think I should go back to presenting the post titles and making you click through to read?

This is an important question, because one of the things preventing me from joining Pajamas Media is that they want full control over my RSS feed, including my only being allowed to send post titles via RSS.

The other thing I’m starting to wonder about: I don’t get a whole lot of referrers anymore. Bruce Hill told me tonight that I’m the Dave Van Ronk of bloggers–that much of my audience is other bloggers. Even if that’s true, that doesn’t mean you can’t throw me a link once in a while. I mean, geez.

But I digress.

Visit are up 16% in October over September (which was up 11% over August), and that’s just counting the first thirteen days. (I’m going by average daily visits.) Pageviews have skyrocketed, but I attribute that to the WP format, which isn’t as amenable to scrolling up and down as my old hand-coded HTML was. You can still read a week at a time using the archive links in the right sidebar, though. I’m trying to put copy in the excerpt slot so that you can skim through synopses and decide whether or not to click through. That’s me, always giving you the choice to ignore me or not.

I’m debating whether to solicit a guest blogger or two to keep my audience happy during the daytime. I have a job that actually expects me to work during the day; a post at lunchtime is the most I can squeeze in, and frankly, I’d rather eat lunch away from my desk than sit in front of a computer and blog. I could also simply prepares posts ahead of time and schedule them to post during work hours, but, well, that takes a hell of a lot of planning. It seems the best I can do these days is write one or two posts before I go to bed and save them for the morning post. (And that makes me on time for work, too, so I imagine it’s going to be the wave of the future.)

How the hell do people actually manage to blog from work? The only job I ever had where I could blog was a contracting job in web where I had downtime while waiting for page approvals. Every other job I’ve ever had has involved, well, working. Like, the whole shift.

But I digress again.

Yeah, I’m thinking about a daytime guest blogger. If you’re interested, you know my email address. So do the spammers, but I like you better.

So if Adam and Eve were the first people, and Cain and Abel their sons, the question is: Where did Cain and Abel’s wives come from?

Aish.com says the Talmud says they were born with twin sisters whom they married.

I remain suspicious.

My emailbox has been filling up with spam at an unbelievable rate, and twice in the last week I’ve gone over my email quota for this account. I just raised my quota, and I will wait a few days to see what happens, but I’m about to let Spam Assassin have at anything it thinks is spam.

In the meantime, if you sent me email today or last night, I may not have received it. Resend it if you please.

Interesting quote by the president to the palestinians:

When the Palestinians contended that Israeli settlement expansion might make a state impossible to achieve, Buttu said Bush replied: ”Don’t worry. I have some political sway with Israel and will use it if need be.”

But I thought that Israel controlled the president? Gee, I must be thinking of some other president. Funny, though, how once more, the palestinian push for a state is being set to the fore, while the ending of terror is on the back burner.

Ordinarily, such a presidential session would take weeks of discussion and dozens of e-mails to lock into place. Edward G. Abington Jr., a former State Department official who advises the Palestinian Authority, said he had never seen something so unscripted.

”I chalk it up to her,” he said, referring to Hughes. ”I think it’s a reflection of how Hughes had gotten hammered over the Palestinian issue.”

During Hughes’s trip to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, she told reporters she was surprised Bush had not received more credit for his efforts on establishing a Palestinian state. At almost every public forum, Hughes highlighted Bush’s support for Palestinian statehood as a way of rebutting the perception that the administration leaned toward Israel on key issues needed for a peace deal.

But Arabs have contended that Bush’s support for statehood has been merely words. ”The slogan of a Palestinian state is not enough,” said Randa Siniora, general director of Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group in Ramallah, West Bank. ”These words have to be translated into real deeds.”

So let’s see if I have the events straight in my mind:

• Israel stops the practice of targeted assassination and stops arresting terrorists, except for ticking bombs
• Israel eases up certain checkpoints
• Israel withdraws from Gaza and some West Bank settlements and hands over control of the border to Egypt

In return:

• Some Arab nations say maybe someday they’re going to normalize relations with Israel, but someday isn’t here
• Terrorists declare a truce and continue to shoot, knife, and bomb Israelis
• Abbas demands that Israel release prisoners, including those who have murdered Israelis
• Abbas refuses to disarm Hamas and other terrorists, in spite of his obligation to do so according to the Road Map
• Egypt allows Hamas to smuggle weapons freely into Gaza, and gives Al Qaeda a foothold there
• Arab nations whine to Karen Hughes that the palestinian demands aren’t being met
• The palestinians get a meeting with President Bush, who assures them he will pressure Israel to give in to their demands

This president so lied to us about Israel. How is this any different from Clinton leaning on Israel to force a peace with murderers?

This week, Israelis caught a 14-year-old palestinian boy who was going to blow himself up in a crowd of Israelis. This story has, for the most part, been ignored by the major media outlets–even though the AP sent this article far and wide:

In another raid, the army arrested a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who told his interrogators that militants from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades - which has ties to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement - pressured him to carry out a suicide bombing after he quarreled with his father.

Salah’s parents, who confirmed their son is 14, said that after they quarreled with him about a month ago, five armed Al-Aqsa militants came to their house to tell them to leave the boy alone. Last week, they came again, this time to take him away for a suicide bombing, said his father, Moussa al Jitan.

[...] The father said Salah did not want to go, adding that he would not let them take him. The teenager did not leave the house until Israeli forces arrested him Monday, a move his parents welcomed.

“Good, he will be in jail. That’s better than dying,” said Sariel al Jitan, his mother.

This is the kind of quote that should be widely disseminated, and yet, there is almost no notice of it. This mother is happy her son is in jail, because the alternative would have been death.

The teenager said the militants threatened to kill him and tell everyone he was a collaborator with Israel if he didn’t carry out the attack, the army said.

Jamal Tirawi, an Al-Aqsa commander the army accused of recruiting the boy, said the account was “a lie.”

Tirawi said Salah was 17 and approached the group to volunteer to carry out an attack. Al-Aqsa refused because he is the only son in his family, Tirawi said. “The boy is lying, and the Israelis are lying,” he said.

Yes, and the palestinian spokesliar is telling the truth. He knows the age of the boy better than the parents. Notice, though, who gets the last word in that. The liar. Just to make sure you think his word has more validity than the parents.

Of course, the AP has to get more licks in:

Militant groups have increasingly turned to youths to carry out attacks in recent years, hoping the army would be less suspicious of them. The boy, identified by militants and his parents as Salah al Jitan, would have been one of the youngest Palestinian suicide bombers.

Notice how lovingly they mention that this boy would have been the youngest! suicide bomber! ever! if he had been successful.

This story was buried in the midst of the news that a long-wanted Hamas fugitive was captured. No major media outlet picked up more than a blurb, or the full AP story.

Why? Because it makes the palestinians look like the monsters that they are, and indicates that the murderers are not fully in control of popular opinion, after all. Evidently, some palestinian mothers do love their children more than they hate Israel.