The Purple Pretzel

oy.

The New Year Has Arrived

And it's time for some of us to start putting our money where are mouths are. Consider this the first of many increasingly less gentle reminders that it would be a good idea to throw a few dollars to your favorite candidates for congress whoever they may be. There's a link to the left (as this is a gentle reminder I won't include the link in the post) where you can donate to a few candidates, or find your own favorites.

BoBo's World

In which BoBo quits his job to stay home and take care of his family.

Oh, wait, he didn't. So what the hell was the point of his column?

Streets of Crap

I never thought much of the chances for our Iraq Excellent Adventure, but I did think a narrow window of opportunity existed right after the invasion such that if we really could've gone in and metaphorically paved the streets with gold - got the infrastructure working, made noticeable improvements in peoples' daily lives very quickily - that we would've at least been a bit more popular with the locals. The basic ethnic conflict issues would've remained but perhaps US soldiers and the occupation generally wouldn't have been as much the targets of the insurgency as they are now. Now, it seems, we're just going to give up.

BAGHDAD -- The Bush administration does not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February, officials say. The decision signals the winding down of an $18.4 billion U.S. rebuilding effort in which roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the investigation and trial of Saddam Hussein.

Just under 20 percent of the reconstruction package remains unallocated. When the last of the $18.4 billion is spent, U.S. officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq's 26 million people.

"The U.S. never intended to completely rebuild Iraq," Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, told reporters at a recent news conference. In an interview this past week, McCoy said: "This was just supposed to be a jump-start."

...blogger appears to be working again

Test

Blogger is screwed up for me today. This is a test to see if I can
post by email.

If anyone working for Blogger happens to be a reader, the error I'm
getting when I try to publish is;

001 java.io.IOException: No space left on
deviceblog/48/41/3/atrios/archives/2006_01_01_atrios_archive.html

Miserable Failure

I've never understood why it wasn't more common to point out that the "commander in chief" is, in fact, a complete failure.

The War on Christmas

Continues:

FAIRVIEW HEIGHTS, Ill. -- Vandals have twice struck a home in this Metro East town where a black Santa Claus was on display in the yard.

Vandals on Friday stole the Santa and spray-painted a death threat and racial slur on the home of William Glass. Last week, someone tied a noose around the Santa's neck and hung it from a tree.

Open Thread

Where do we go from here? When does the thread appear?

Claude Raines

Shocked, just shocked.

I once had a short (came at the end of the conversation and thus we didn't really have a chance to flesh it out) debate about bloggers and the FEC with a journalist. While it was fairly short, it still took fairly long for me to explain that whatever ethical issues we might think are important that what he was talking about involved placing requirements on "bloggers" which weren't required of anyone in the media. His position seemed to be that, by definition, the respectable media didn't have these problems.

whatever.

Gibberish

Our media elite are so goddamn clueless. Or liars. I can't even tell. The bit highlighted at uggabugga is wrong for other reasons as well. There's no reason Rudy "married my cousin got divorced twice screwed my girlfriend in the Mayor's Mansion where my kids lived regularly wore drag lived for awhile at my gay pals' place pro-choice" Giuliani is "more to the Right" of McCain unless we define "more to the Right" as "have head slightly deeper into Bush's ass."

Jeebus.

Open Thread

So when do we destroy the thread already?

Quote of the Day

From Jane:

Perhaps there is an unquenchable public appetite out there for wisdom gleaned from 1950s cocktail napkins that I just wasn't aware of. If so today it was not disappointed.

More Thread

Enjoy.

Bullshit

This just isn't true, and even if it is true it's no justification for bypassing the courts.

SAN ANTONIO -- President Bush on Sunday strongly defended his domestic spying program, saying it's a limited initiative that tracks only incoming calls to the United States.

"It's seems logical to me that if we know there's a phone number associated with al-Qaida or an al-Qaida affiliate and they're making phone calls, it makes sense to find out why," Bush said. "They attacked us before, they'll attack us again."

Why Did They Need to Bypass FISA?

That's really the question.

I don't really buy the attempts to spin it as just some high tech superduper data mining method.

Open Thread

We saved the world. I say we thread!

Wankers of the Day

New year, new wankers.

Coldplay.

Happy New Year

As tbogg says, it's going to be one wingnutty year. Put on your seatbelts and spittle-guards.

Open Thread

You know there are quite a few American threads that are highly underrated. This, unfortunately, is not one of them.

Open Thread

The thread I bear is scorching me.