Miscellaneous (Depressing) Holiday Reading

(for those who are avoiding their relatives with the vague 'work to do on my computer' excuse...)

1) On Common Dreams, Marjorie Heins has a nice summary of the Bushist rediscovery of the practice of stalinist science. Any day now, our children will be taught that President Bush invented the Internets. Or maybe that god did. Or that god told President Bush to do it. Or, that President Bush felt in his gut that god was telling him to do it.

2) About those judges: From NYT:

President Bush plans to renominate 20 candidates for federal judgeships who have been unable to win confirmation in the Senate, the White House said today, in a signal that the president is ready for a showdown early next year.

"An effective and efficient judicial system is vital to ensuring justice for all Americans," the White House said. "The president nominated highly qualified individuals to the federal courts during his first term, but the Senate failed to vote on many nominations."

On a side note, when exactly did "the White House" become capable of speech?

3) You go to war with the army you have. From the LATimes:

Members of a second National Guard unit that prepared for duty in Iraq at the Army's Ft. Bliss compound have come forward with allegations that they were not adequately trained.

The soldiers said in interviews, e-mails and official documents that they were sent to war this year with chronic illness, broken guns and trucks with blown transmissions.

The unit's M-60 machine guns reportedly were in such bad condition when the soldiers deployed in February that one sergeant — in a section of a post-training summary sent to his commanders that was titled "gun maintenance" — wrote: "Perhaps we should throw stones?"

4) A civilian contractor with the Army Corps of Engineers responsible for securing Iraq's explosives, on Saddam's well-organized munitions dumps: "Those Iraqi army officers were the only ones who knew where they'd hidden all this stuff. It's like trying to figure out where the squirrels hid the nuts," he said. "The whole thing was dysfunctional."

5) John DiIulio comes out of hiding, and was last seen "attacking liberals for their political cowardice", as Brad deLong puts it.