That depends.
It helps to be connected and often it boils down to the good ol’ boys club, and more about who you know that what you know.

It also no doubt helped that most of the group had known each other for many years, often worked with the same organizations and think tanks, and subscribed to the same basic ideology that had a clear and consistent story line: Saddam Hussein is evil and dangerous; the US is good and benign; and if we don’t get him first, he will try to kill us.

The simplicity and consistency of that message - however questionable the evidence to support it may turn out to be - were appealing in themselves, particularly to television, on which about 80 percent of the public relies for their international news.

This article doesn’t profile one of the boys, but rather a very successful Washington publicist, Eleana Benador.

All the ties that bind aside, this is an interesting inside look at how movers and shakers move get their agenda out to the public.

The publicist says that she sees her work as “more of a mission than a business”, a mission in which her Muslim clients play a key role. “I’m totally convinced that in our world to get peace we need to make peace with moderate Muslims,” according to Benador. “If they are not our allies, we will never have peace. They are the ones who can defeat their own extremists, and they are the first victims of Muslim extremists. This is something I’m very firmly fighting for.”

Grrrr
When you are leap-blogging do you notice trends?
One I have found irritating this week is the French-bashing on pundit sites.

It’s possible the heat wave in Europe has killed 3 thousand people in France.
3 thousand.
So it’s ok to mock?
No I’m not going to link to any of the pundit blogs, there is no point of dignifying and spreading lunacy like a rash.
American soldiers are also dying from heat.

This new York Post op-ed looks at the fundamental political differences between the ‘old’ world and the ‘new.’

Nature isn’t a political animal. Perhaps we try to conquer it because it neither loves nor hates us. It is indifferent.

Blasting around the web
LovSan or W32Blaster or whatever you choose to call it is causing economic loss and headaches around the world.

A worm, though, crawls across the Internet automatically, searching out vulnerable machines. MSBlast was looking for computers running certain Microsoft operating system software. Those operating systems include the latest consumer operating system, Windows XP, as well as the business-class systems Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.

But self-propagation is not the only thing the MSBlast worm is set up to do. MSBlast is also designed to launch a co-ordinated attack on a Microsoft Web site on Saturday. Every computer in the world infected with the worm — experts believe about 1.5 million computers were infected by Wednesday afternoon — would send packets of information to the Microsoft Web site with the intention of overwhelming it and forcing it to shut down.

Check your critical updates. Here is the Windows patch to protect against this worm.
Keep your virus program updated and if you have been affected, check your companies removal tool.

1. Your computer could reboot by itself.
2. You could be directed to the Windows update page with a ‘message’ for Bill Gates (but you won’t see the message)
3. You are unable to surf, or surfing is balking and slow.
4.. If you run XP you may not be able to stay online long enough to fix things.
Here is what you can do.

UPDATE: Microsoft took the update URL down in anticipation of the potential DoS attack Saturday.