my eyes fall from my head with all the pages read

* Krugman. excerpt:

"The Iraq venture may have been doomed from the start — but we'll never know for sure because the Bush administration made such a mess of the occupation. Future historians will view it as a case study of how not to run a country.
...
"What the figures don't describe is the toxic mix of ideological obsession and cronyism that lie behind that dismal performance.
...
"Defenders of the administration will no doubt say that Christian Aid and other critics have no proof that the unaccounted-for billions were ill spent. But think of it this way: given the Arab world's suspicion that we came to steal Iraq's oil, the occupation authorities had every incentive to expedite an independent audit that would clear Halliburton and other U.S. corporations of charges that they were profiteering at Iraq's expense. Unless, that is, the charges are true.

"Let's say the obvious. By making Iraq a playground for right-wing economic theorists, an employment agency for friends and family, and a source of lucrative contracts for corporate donors, the administration did terrorist recruiters a very big favor."


[via Jesus' General]

* Top Ten Conservative Idiots:

1. Dick Cheney
"There's an exciting new level of political discourse in town, and it's all thanks to Vice President Dick Cheney! For years, partisan activists such as ourselves have remained on the fringes of legitimate political debate partly due to our use of coarse and colorful language. But now it appears that Dick Cheney has blown down the barriers by dropping an F-bomb on the floor of the Senate. At a photo session last week Crashcart got into a heated debate with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) over the Democrats' investigations into Halliburton war profiteering. When Leahy retorted that Cheney was standing by Republicans who accused Democrats of being anti-Catholic, Cheney replied, 'Fuck yourself.' Yay! Fuck yourself! Fuck yourself! Go fuck yourself! Thank you, Dick Cheney, for lowering the bar for all of us partisan outsiders. Because if it's okay for the vice president to tell a senator to fuck himself on the floor of the Senate, it should be perfectly okay for a bunch of political hacks on a website to say it. Fuck yourself! (In an added comic twist, I should mention that the incident occurred on the same day the Senate passed the so-called 'Defense of Decency' act. Ha ha.)"

* Listen to Bobby Bare Jr.'s Let's Rock and Roll.