Oh, how I wish I could spend every day like this -- spend an hour or two reading the news sites, collect info and links, and then blog for an hour or so. But I suppose my civic duties in the classroom must take precedence. I just wish I had more energy to blog when I got home in the afternoon.

Lovely pic at right swiped from Kevin Walsh of Forgotten NY, via Satan's Laundromat.

HalliBush Wars, Inc.

Hey, did you hear the one about how Halliburton lost millions of dollars worth of CPA equipment in Iraq?

A third or more of the government property Halliburton Co. was paid to manage for the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq could not be located by auditors, investigative reports to Congress show.

Not surprisingly, Halliburton says it did a better job than the independent report suggests. Meanwhile in Iraq, Maj. General Geoffrey Miller -- the guy in charge of Abu Ghraib during that whole torture thing -- has been promoted! Now that's an appropriate way to respond to "disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonoured our country". (For an excellent article on Abu Ghraib, see Anne-Marie Cusac in The Progressive.)

And speaking of military personnel being rewarded for human rights atrocities, an Israeli human rights group has lashed out at army Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon for his hideous crimes against Palestinians.

The media campaign came a few days after an Israeli military court indicted an army officer accused by his own soldiers of emptying his weapon into a Palestinian schoolgirl who was already dead. . . .

Channel Two broadcast a conversation between the officer and other troops recorded on military radio at the time of shooting, where he said: "Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."

That's what I call purity of arms!

And finally from HalliBush Wars, Inc: You should read this report from Paul Street about what the Bush campaign learned from Visa's marketing efforts.

“We did what Visa did,” Mehlman recently told a gathering of the nation’s Repubican governors. “We acquired a lot of consumer data. What magazine do you subscribe to? Do you own a gun? How often do the folks go to church? Where do you send your kids to school? Are you married?” Based on “two years of polling, market-testing, and up-close demographic scrutiny,” Mehlman . . . “develop[ed] an exact kind of consumer model that corporate America does every day to predict how people vote --- not based on where they live but how they live.”

Now, do the Dems follow suit, or reject this as a twisted follow-the-corporate-leaderism?

Madison

Big Ups to everyone who was around this weekend for an outstanding Thanksgiving weekend -- Diane, Max, Christie, Garrett, Jesse, Arjuna, Ellen (no, I won't call you Granola), Josh, Amy, Ben, Jon, Colleen, Raya, Brian, Kate, Dug, Liev, and everyone else. Mega fun, great food. Good times. We should do it again next year.

Other

I am now officially listed in the Blogarama. Now when people look through the 2093 listings under "Personal -> Observations", there's a slight chance they'll click over to this site. Huzzah! Publicity!

One of the reasons I love The Boondocks is because it's the only cartoon that regularly mentions people like Flava Flav. (TPCQ: "I just came from the crib, ya know / I'm on the go -- throw ya tank into metro.")

How about you -- Do you give to the red kettle?

TimeWaster™

The Future of Starbucks is cute, even if The Onion did it better.

Today I'm listening to: Jack Dangers!