Death Squads.  That's right, Rumsfeld's newest solution to the Iraq problem are “Salvadoran“ style death squads.  Crazy tinfoil hat conspiracy theories from nutjob leftist websites?  No, its straight from Pentagon background briefers to the pages of Newsweek:

[O]ne Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

Desperation at work.  The Phoenix Project, redux.  That program really worked well as well.

I'd start setting up the cameras pointing at the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad right now for the shot of the last U.S. helicopter out.

From blogger The Conservative Cajun:

I've never been afraid to admit when I've misjudged or have been wrong about a situation, and the Iraq War is no different. Now, I'm not saying I was wrong about going there in the first place. We needed to take out Saddam Hussein, and we did. We needed to take out his barbaric and disgusting sons, and we did. We needed to go in there and eliminate any current WMD program. I believed that Saddam did have an existing WMD program, so did Bush, so did Clinton, so did Tony Blair and Putin. Who really knows if I, and the other mentioned men, we wrong? Who's to say Saddam didn't destroy the programs or move some across the border during the build up to the war?

Whose to say?  Everyone in touch with reality.

The thought processes of a wingnut:  From Andrew Sullivan's E-mail of the Day yesterday--a winger with a brother who served in the Fallujah area lets us know how he weighs information on Iraq.

My brother was a reservist near Fallujah (who thankfully came home just this past year, although he is still technically under contract until December), who reports that coercion was encouraged, and abuse (not the same as coercion) was greeted with a blind eye. Now, he and I don't see eye-to-eye on Iraq, because I pay attention to Chrenkoff's reporting in addition to what I hear from my brother and from the MSM. Thanks to Chrenkoff, I know that there are large areas in Iraq where things are going right. Thanks to my brother, I also don't automatically discount everything that MSM says (even a stopped clock is right twice a day).

Who is Chernkoff?  Some reporter on the scene in Baghdad?  Of course not!  He's a wingnut blogger in Australia! 

So, let me get this straight--you'd rather trust the analysis of some person who you have never met, who lives on another continent, who as far as we know, has never been to Iraq, and who is a mere casual observer, over the views of your own brother, who was there and saw with his own eyes the state of war?

Not to mention the fact that this pro-war nut is “thankful” his own brother is no longer there.

I do not make this shit up people.  

Tom Riley, the spokesman for the Administration's Drug Czar, John Walters, commented on the retirement of Keith Stroup, longtime leader of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) by quoting the Big Lebowski:

 "The '60s are over, Lebowski. The bums lost. My condolences."

I'm not sure Riley really got the quote--the speaker in the film was  the millionaire Lebowski, a guy who moralized all of the time and got all of his money despite having never worked a day in his life.

Then again, maybe Riley did get the quote.

I have not read a better description of what it is to write than this, from Richard Wright’s lecture on his Native Son, “How ‘Bigger’ was Born” (both works 1940). If one isn’t writing like this, physically like this, I can’t see how one is writing:

“That was the deep fun of the job: to feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perceptions, making new and — until that very split second of time! — unheard-of and unfelt effects with words. It had a buoying and tonic impact upon me; my senses would strain and seek for more and more of such relationships; my temperature would rise as I worked. That is writing as I feel it, a kind of significant living.”

And then, the writer’s devil-and-angel appears — why Dionysus was god of wine and art:

“The book was one-half finished, with the opening and closing scenes unwritten. Then, one night, in desperation — I hope that I'm not disclosing the hidden secrets of my craft! — I sneaked out and got a bottle. With the help of it, I began to remember many things which I could not remember before.”

And all of this left the world changed utterly:

“True, we have no great church in America; our national traditions are still of such a sort that we are not wont to brag of them; and we have no army that's above the level of mercenary fighters; we have no group acceptable to the whole of our country upholding certain humane values; we have no rich symbols, no colorful rituals. We have only a money-grubbing, industrial civilization… if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.”

I am waiting for the Last Supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer. A new rebirth of wonder. Yours — E.K.

The year 2004 was one of the worst in living memory for the Republic.  Let us move forward with the hope that 2005 will be a year of national renewal and political change.

Funny things have been happening in North Korea for months.  First strange things began happening with the telephones.  Foreigners couldn't call out.

Then Kim Jong-Il went for a summit in China in September.  He was out of the country for several days.  He reentered Korea near the northern town of Ryonchon.  At some point near the time that his train was passing through the town, a massive explosion destroyed the town.  Speculation was rife that the attack was an assasination attempt.  They don't fool around in North Korea. 

Then strange things began happening in the last Stalininst enclave on earth.  Pictures of Kim Jong-Il began coming down.  Rumors that hundreds of North Korean general officers had defected to China swirled.  Reports indicated that there was unrest amongst the people.

North Korea responded.  

Quite contrary to what the U.S. claimed, not even a button of a general officer's uniform, to say nothing of more than a hundred of general officers, has ever been found across the border.
We do not know such a word as "defection".

Reports now filtering out of the country may indicate that the collapse of the Demorcratic People's Republic of Korea is around the corner.  Expect Bush to claim victory.

There's a lot going on right now:

Seven weeks after a U.S. offensive on the guerrilla bastion of Falluja in a bid to quell the revolt before the Jan. 30 vote, there are signs the insurgency has recovered much of its vigor. . .

In the bloodiest of Tuesday's attacks before the Baghdad explosion, insurgents overran a police post near Saddam's home town of Tikrit, 110 miles north of Baghdad.

They hauled out 12 men and shot them dead, then blew up the police station in a dramatic show of force. . .

Where is the new plan to get this election going and defeat the insurgency?

Elsewhere. . .

Workers from Indonesia to India rushed to bury corpses to ward off disease Wednesday as cargo planes touched down with promised aid — from lentils to water purifiers — to help the region cope with its tsunami catastrophe. The death toll soared to 63,000.

But our president is leading out front on these issues from . . .

Q At the ranch?

MR. DUFFY: At the ranch, yes

Phil Carter and I have a lot in common.  We both are newly minted attorneys and we both write for blogs, and we both agree that the current statistics on American troops killed in action aren't reflecting the intensity of combat faced by our soldiers.

Early this month, the Iron Mouth featured a short analysis of Iraq causalities compared to those of other wars.  Our look at the numbers attempted to factor in the advances in medical science which allow soldiers who would have died in an earlier era to survive being wounded and even return to the battlefield.  When the effect of medical advances was factored in, American casualty rates were comparable to those in other wars.

Today Phil Carter and Owen West did their own analysis of the effects of medical advances on the casualty numbers in Slate, and came up with a similar result.  Phil also went into more depth on his unrivaled blog, Intel-Dump.

The Iron Mouth's analysis showed that without the effect of advances in medical technology and science, the number of killed in action for the entire Iraq war up to the end of November, 2004 would have been around 5593 soldiers killed in action.  Phil's analysis came up with similar numbers: 2,975 for 2004 alone.  

Now Phil and I aren't alike in every way--he works at a much larger firm than I do, and he also writes for Slate on top of his duties as a first-year associate.  But it is reassuring to see a writer of his caliber applying a similar analysis to the problem of the Iraq casualty numbers and coming up with a similar result.

Turns out America's Top CEO's miss the Big Dog:

No wonder.  The current idiot can't do anything right.

Holiday reading. (from the ever-useful Metafilter.)

The folks over at that paragon of reason Little Green Footballs are sure that Osama is dead.