Via LifeHacker, a practical article on making and keeping new year's resolutions:

Alexander Kharlamov: How to make and keep New Year’s Resolutions

Via Juan Cole, Larisa Alexandrovna writes a compelling analysis of Bush's reasons for moving an additional 15,000-20,000 troops to Iraq, along with sending another carrier to the Persian Gulf, and predicts that the results will be disastrous for the nations of the middle east—including Israel—as well as for the rest of the world.

Saddam's Execution and the Campaign Against Iran

It is estimated that up to 13,500 vehicles flooded in Hurricane Katrina have entered the used car market in other states, many of which have been retitled and do not reflect that they are salvage vehicles, according to an article on the web site of the Center for Auto Safety. The article further listed the states which do not retain the "salvaged" notation when titling vehicles from another state, and Mississippi is one of those states.

In other words, watch out if you are buying a used auto, even from a state far away from New Orleans or the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It is easy nowadays to obtain a VIN check and record summary, and the price of such a report is well-worth the minimal investment

Middle east scholar and administration critic Juan Cole lists ten myths about Iraq. The first myth is that the U. S. can win.

But if it [winning] means the establishment of a stable, pro-American, anti-Iranian government with an effective and even-handed army and police force in the near or even medium term, then the assertion is frankly ridiculous. The Iraqi "government" is barely functioning. The parliament was not able to meet in December because it could not attain a quorum. Many key Iraqi politicians live most of the time in London, and much of parliament is frequently abroad. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki does not control large swathes of the country, and could give few orders that had any chance of being obeyed. The US military cannot shore up this government, even with an extra division, because the government is divided against itself. Most of the major parties trying to craft legislation are also linked to militias on the streets who are killing one another. It is over with. Iraq is in for years of heavy political violence of a sort that no foreign military force can hope to stop.

One wonders what's in the mind of Bush when he proposes a "surge" of 25,000 - 30,000 men to clean out Baghdad. The biggest myth of all is that our military could do the operation on the cheap without asking the American people to make sacrifices. General Shensiki was unwavering in his insistence that less than 500,000 troops was too small a force and he was fired early on.

General Shensiki was an optimist. The administration never came clean with the American people as to the real reasons for the invasion. Whether it was to gain control of middle eastern oil or to reduce the production of oil and keep the price up, whatever the administration wanted, it was and is incapable of attaining it because of it's sheer incompetence and criminal cronyism. A million troops wouldn't have made a difference with this administration. And us chumps are the ones who will have to pick up the bill.

Juan Cole: Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2006

Judicial nominee Michael Wallace has announced that he will ask President Bush on Tuesday to withdraw his nomination for appointment to the 5th Circuit.

Wallace is a highly intelligent lawyer, eminently qualified intellectually for the position. Unfortunately, he is a right-wing extremist who clearly lacks judicial temperament and who could not be expected to impartially rule on cases involving civil rights and similar fields of law about which he has never attempted to conceal his opinions and beliefs. Wallace was appointed by Reagan to head the Legal Services agency of the federal government with the intention that he would do his best to destroy the agency entrusted to him, a pattern Reagan and his Republican successors have followed many times since. He nearly succeeded. There is no reason to believe that he would behave any less ideologically as a federal appellate judge. The American Bar Association obviously felt the same way.

Extreme right-wing lawyers, wrong-headed as they may be, do not possess the ability to damage persons, institutions, and the law itself in the way a judge can. The American people have repudiated what Wallace stands for and we are all better off that he remains a very successful practicing lawyer.

Jerusalem, December XXV, IV. There was mixed reaction in the markets to the birth of the Son of God. The futures market in human chattels took the biggest hit, with 1-year future contracts declining by I.V dinarii. The sacrificial animal industry declined XII%. Imperial revenue bonds declined II% on news that a significant new monarch had appeared on the scene that could create long-lasting instability within the empire.

His majesty, King Herod, stated to reporters that he was aware of the new developments, having already received intelligence to that effect from eastern sources, and that he had placed the armed forces on alert to deal with the developing threat. "Investors can be confident that no problem of monarchial succession will disrupt the regular operation of markets as long as We are king."

The king further stated that Roman imperial military intervention was not called for and that local troops were more than adequately prepared to carry out his plans which he refused to disclose, citing security reasons. He expected his precautionary actions to be unpopular among the subjects of his realm, but stated that he had the unqualified support of the financial sector, including the directors of the Temple Currency Exchange, which felt particularly threatened by by prospect of a new regulatory regime hostile to their currency arbitrage business.

"The small sacrifices that must be made by the general population will ultimately lead to greater happiness and prosperity in the future." said His Majesty. "Everyone must sacrifice in these troublesome times. I myself will forego my usual daily plate of hummingbirds' tongues sauteed in Falerian wine for the duration of the crisis."

According to an anonymous source within the kings's circle of economic advisors, "These developments present too much risk to settle for half-measures. Inaction would allow the threat to grow and finally to become unmanageable."

The king promised reporters that the additional military expenditures would not lead to a tax increase, but could easily be accommodated within the current budget by reducing governmental waste and inefficiency.

It was later reported that the royal treasury had taken a long position on casketmakers, favoring manufacturers specializing in small caskets.

According to TPM Muckraker, our own Thad Cochran benefitted from the largesse of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and in turn helped Mr. Abramoff's client, the Mississippi Choctaws, by quietly inserting language in legislation that exempted the Choctaws from supervision by the National Indian Gaming Commission and by supporting on the floor of the Senate a federal grant of $16.3 million to the Choctaws to build a jail which the Justice Department said that the Choctaws could afford to build themselves.

Which is to say that while Senator Cochran may not have done anything illegal, it seems awful sleazy.

Email: Abramoff Associate Urged Funds for GOP Sen. Who "Never Said No"

Here is a transcript of a panel discussion between Juan Cole, expert on middle eastern affair, Dr. Gilbert Burnham, a Ph.D. and an M.D., who is a co- director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Les Roberts, associate professor of Clinical Public Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. The latter two academics wrote a recent article in the British medical journal, Lancet, estimating the number of civilian deaths that have resulted from the U. S. invasion of Iraq. The conclusions are shocking: 650,000 persons have perished as a direct result of our invasion, the proportional equivalent of 7.8 million Americans out of our population.

Read and ponder.

Kucinich-Paul Congressional Hearing on Civilian Casualties in Iraq

Mississippi is always near the bottom in income and quality of education. It looks as though the Democratic House and the Republican Senate are once again at loggerheads, this time over money for schools, and won't be able to agree on a budget before the legislature meets in January.

The state is faced with a double-bind: Without a better-educated populace, things are not going to get better for most Mississippians, but without ways to put that education into use, either as employees or entrepreneurs, our best and brightest will go elsewhere to find opportunity. Conversely, students without prospects of earning a decent living have no incentive to take advantage of educational opportunities. If getting a high school diploma in Mississippi led to a livable income, people would get a high school education. The same goes with higher education. In economic terms, if the opportunity cost of not going to school is very low, people will be much less inclined to take advantage of school.

Look at it this way: if suddenly every adult Mississippian acquired a PhD, would the state become prosperous? Hardly.

The problem is that the economy of this state is structurally incapable of generating general prosperity. Mississippi's ruling class has always assumed, either consciously or unconsciously, that the hope of the state lies in low wages, weak unions, tourism, agriculture, and natural resources. How a highly-educated citizenry fits in with that vision has not been addressed, since that kind of economy can easily function with a small, well-paid elite and a minimum-wage workforce.

Admittedly, this is a vast oversimplification of the problem, but unless we start addressing it, we will never receive the benefit from the billions we spend on education, both from our tax money and the money transferred to us from the more prosperous states by the federal government. We will never achieve prosperity by electing to Congress men who have brought us massive tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful, NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, the Bankruptcy "Reform" bill, and who have invariably opposed over their entire political careers every proposal to increase the minimum wage or any other measure to help the non-affluent.:

There was a time when the following poem was meaningless to me. Now it speaks as if it were written today:

Consider these, for we have condemned them;
Leaders to no sure land, guides their bearings lost
Or in league with robbers have reversed the signposts,
Disrespectful to ancestors, irresponsible to heirs,
Born barren , a freak growth, root in rubble,
Fruitlessly blossoming, whose foliage suffocates,
Their sap is sluggish, they reject the sun.

The man with his tongue in his cheek, the woman
With her heart in the wrong place, unhandsome, unwholesome;
Have exposed the new-born to worse than weather,
Exiled the honest and sacked the seer.
These drowned the farms to form a pleasure-lake,
In time of drought they drain the reservoir
Through private pipes for baths and sprinklers.

Getters not begetters; gainers not beginners;
Whiners, no winners; no triers, betrayers;
Who steer by no star, whose moon means nothing.
Daily denying, unable to dig:
At bay in villas from blood relations,
Counters of spoons and content with cushions
They pray for peace, they hand down disaster.

They that take the bribe shall perish by the bribe,
Dying of dry rot, ending in asylums,
A curse to children, a charge on the state.
But still their fears and frenzies infect us;
Drug nor isolation will cure this cancer;
It is now or never, the hour of the knife,
The break with the past, the major operation.

--C. Day Lewis (1904-1972)

It looks as though George W. Bush and his chickenhawk coterie are determined to fight to our last drop of blood in Iraq (and possibly Iran and other parts further east).