who runs away for a year when they are nine??? rimone, apparently.

* froomkin:

"The year 2006 started with President Bush firmly in denial about how terribly wrong his war in Iraq has gone. It ends that way, too.

But in between, something changed: Bush lost his parade.

Somehow, Bush had managed up until this year to lull voters -- and seduce journalists -- into complicity with a worldview that was simply not based in reality.

There's been plenty of evidence for years now that Bush was living in a self-imposed bubble of non-reality, particularly when it came to the situation in Iraq.

But it wasn't until Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial," came out in September that it was definitively established, to the full satisfaction of Washington's cocktail-party circles, that the president is not to be taken seriously on Iraq.

It wasn't until November, when the voters resoundingly threw Bush's congressional enablers from power, that it became undeniably clear that Americans reject Bush's leadership.

And Bush's response to this month's report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group is making it manifestly obvious that, for all the White House's attempts to give the impression that Bush listens to people who disagree with him, he does not.

He appears to still listen pretty much only to two people -- Vice President Cheney and political guru Karl Rove -- even though both were proven catastrophically wrong in 2006."

* froomkin:

"My fondest (but probably naive) hope is that the (libby) trial, if not directly addressing the elephant in the room will nevertheless remind journalists that there is indeed an elephant in the room. And maybe they'll do a little more, you know, reporting."

* larisa has a Clerks clip up - explaining halliburton.

* rimone writes about being raped, part1, 2. i don't have the words to even comment - and i've been dreading/postponing even reading the posts since i first saw the title of her first post ('My Rape (part I)') last week. I can report that even if you too are squeamish about such matters, you can safely read part one, which is actually about rimone's childhood:

First some background: in the beginning, there was the intelligent but bored and lonely little girl who rode the subway to Greenwich Village only to run away from home and end up cross-country in California when I was nine. A year later, when the police returned me to my distraught parents, the notoriety at school gave me the nearest feeling of acceptance that I’d ever had, but the attention didn’t last as long as I’d have liked.

who runs away for a year when they are nine??? rimone, apparently.