"We must get out strategically and carefully, removing troops from secure areas first and keeping troops in more volatile areas until later," Obama says...

But that's the whole problem in a nutshell, isn't it? As soon as troops are moved from secure areas, they become volatile areas.

No one has a plan. There is no plan. Like asking the guy falling off the building as he passes your window on the way down: "So, dude. What's your plan?"

I love your blog, I read it religiously -- along with the comments it's evidence that there is still intelligent life in the universe. But sometimes it makes me so depressed to see exposed for what they are those who seem to be making the decisions, whose voices are being heard and agreed with by the masses, whose messages and actions are so twisted and ugly and false and harmful -- I want to slit my own fucking throat!

Okay, I'm better now. Sorry about that.

To call it a coming recession. Houses aren't like apples, you gotta sell 'em now or they rot. People are hunkered down, not moving, taking their time. No, it probably won't be possible to sell new, hastily-built crackerboxes or rickety old fixer-uppers to poor people for a long time to come. Yes, there are foreclosures; there were foreclosures in the late 80's that I'm not seeing yet in MY neighborhood, anyway. There have been dislocations in the job market, to be sure. What else is new? Farmers were having a hard time getting their crops picked because so many workers had gone over to construction. Maybe the price of peaches will go down, now.

The biggest issues, as I see it, is that people are going to be buying less crap from China and driving their cars a little longer than they were when the house was an ATM. None of this means the economy is in trouble. Maybe it has a head-cold or even a light case of the flu. It ain't goin' in the hospital, though.

Just long enough. I don't fly all that often, and so I experience some nervous fear between rev-up and set-down. During the years my kids were little, whatever concern I felt for my own safety was many times multiplied by the notion that I was indispensable to them. That they would be lost without me, their single parent. And I think I was right, there was no one on the planet as dedicated to or capable of seeing them safely to maturity as myself.

A few years ago I had to go to New York and as the plane started vibrating with the intention to become airborne, I noticed something was missing: the feeling I was about to start crying for my children's possible, incipient loss of their all-important Dad in an air crash. It hit me: they're over the hump. Sure, they'd miss me terribly and they'd probably be afraid for a while, but they'd make it. They were, like, 14 and 17, I think. I just knew that they were pretty much who they were going to be all their lives, their core values and self-image (even though subject to the vagaries of the teen experience) were sufficiently in place that they would survive without me.

I leaned back as the plane rose and asked the flight attendant what the movie was going to be.

Not that it matters a whole lot, but those foreclosures "in the late 80's" I was talking about -- that was the mid-late 90's. Man, I remember when a year was a big deal. Now I'm getting my decades mixed up.

It isn't just Bush who's an inarticulate moron. "Senior White House Officials" (plural) are also inarticulate morons. How many of them are there? Obviously, way too many. Yikes.

On the one hand, it's true that the motives for the invasion were anything BUT what we were told. On the other, if a guy is robbing my house, I don't much care if it's to pay for a new car or because he enjoys the thrill. The point is to stop him. We've got to get out of Iraq and I think, if these babbling "Senior White House Officials" are any indication, the wheels are truly coming off their ability to keep convincing people we should stay. Doesn't really matter what the original plan was, because it obviously hasn't worked.

They may be disingenuous, but as a customer of Wells Fargo, I don't mind them catering to me first and non-customers second.

When the most recent reports first came out, the Iraqis were said to have met only 3 of 18 benchmarks. Then the White House started moving the goalposts and redefining success and presto-change-o, today the WaPo blithely accepts that the Iraqis have met 9 of the 18 benchmarks. Mind you, nothing has changed in Iraq. The Bush admin. has been allowed to hypnotize people into believing something different than what independent assessors of the situation in Iraq found. All this with the willing and enthusiastic help of the media, whowill be remembered by history as having helped the most dangerous liars on the planet spread their lies, all the while claiming to the eyes and the ears "of the people."

The time has come for people outside the blogosphere to emphasize what chickenhawks these guys (and gals) are and to organize in a way so as to pressure WaPo et al., to publish other voices (petitions, ads, etc.), particularly voices of people who've been right about Iraq. -- Raj

Or at least to publish their Sara-Lee-fed wanker photos alongside their articles.

In one of those metaphysical moments of synchronism, my daughter came home from school Friday and told me about this amazing writer she encountered in AP Contemporary English Lit. named Denis Johnson, and now Laura Miller's well-written review, just like that. Next stop, Amazon. One-day delivery.