Apparently Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has never grasped the famed “Pottery Barn” principle:

His [Rumsfeld’s] main message over a four-city tour was quite different: that the insurgency has staying power and a seemingly endless supply of weapons, and the time has come for ordinary Iraqis to realize that they – not the Americans – will ultimately decide who prevails in this conflict.
. . .
During his visit, Rumsfeld said it would be unrealistic to predict that the level of violence will recede once the Jan. 30 elections are held. In the end, he said, it will be a “uniquely Iraqi solution,” not American.

In other words, good luck with this one.
In related news, Iraq’s largest Sunni Muslim party says it is withdrawing from the upcoming elections due to security concerns.
No problem, right? We’ll just appoint some Sunnis to serve in the government. And let them come up with the “Iraqi solution.”

Hey, we’re trailblazers:

The state’s TennCare program may not be around much longer, but former President Bill Clinton predicts that one day there will be a national program similar to it.
Whether TennCare is either modified or dropped, ”ultimately, I believe the nation will have a medical coverage plan that will look like TennCare,” Clinton said. ”Ned Ray blazed a trail there.”
Clinton, who left the presidency in 2001, spoke highly of former Tennessee Gov. Ned McWherter, the Dresden Democrat who created TennCare while serving as the state’s chief executive from 1987 to 1995. Clinton was interviewed recently by The Jackson Sun for a profile of McWherter.

Of course, since unlike Social Security, Bush has already “fixed” Medicare, I’m sure this is just wild speculation on Clinton’s part. No mounting “crisis” in healthcare, right? Health savings accounts will clear up any lingering problems.

Devastating:

Massive tidal waves triggered by the largest earthquake to shake the planet in over 40 years have wiped out coastal areas across southeastern Asia as far as 1,000 miles away, killing nearly 3,000 people — most of them in Sri Lanka and India.

Fifth largest earthquake since 1900. Scientific information on the earthquake available here.
UPDATE: The scope of this disaster is difficult to comprehend. And frankly, I’m somewhat reluctant to try. Entire villages washed away. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people simply vanished into the water, never to be seen again.
We can’t control nature; we only control our response. An event generating this many deaths naturally raises the issue of preparedness:

In Los Angeles, the head of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said US officials who detected the undersea quake tried frantically to get a warning out about the tsunami.
But there was no official alert system in the region, said Charles McCreery, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s centre in Honolulu.
“It took an hour and a half for the wave to get from the earthquake to Sri Lanka and an hour for it to get … to the west coast of Thailand and Malaysia,” he said.
“You can walk inland for 15 minutes to get to a safe area.
“We tried to do what we could,” he said.
“We don’t have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world.”

Granted, these weren’t developed areas. But it seems like some manner of warning could have been issued by radio stations or something. Even a few minutes of warning could have saved hundreds of people.
On this side of the globe, most of the initial reporting on the earthquakes could only be found on the Internet. First day TV news coverage was dreadful. MSNBC and Fox News gave this story less air time than a big snow storm, and CNN wasn’t much better. Only now is CNN offering American viewers it’s International feed. Not sure where it was before. We’re talking about an event that killed several times as many people as 9/11. And it’s had to fight for broadcast time with news of Christmas airline flight delays.

. . . to you and yours.

BREAKING NEWS: Islamic militants view the U.S. occupation of Muslim territory as a recruiting tool:

French journalists held hostage for four months in Iraq said their militant captors told them they wanted President Bush to win re-election.
. . .
One of the captors from the group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq said Bush’s re-election would boost their cause, Malbrunot wrote in Friday’s edition of Le Figaro, the French daily he works for.
“We want Bush because with him the American troops will stay in Iraq and that way we will be able to develop,” Malbrunot cited the captor as saying.
. . .
Another captor, who described himself as the group’s head of internal intelligence, told the men that the Islamic Army has four enemies: American and coalition troops, “their collaborators, that is to say Italian businessmen, or even French,” as well Iraqi police and spies.

I’m shocked to read this. Who could have ever imagined that some people don’t like foreign armies occupying their country?