The Daddy Party?

If you work at a pretty good job you are expected to show up for work. While there are 260 workdays a year, at a good job you will get 10 days of vacation and 10 paid holidays, reducing the number to 240 days on the job. This session of the 109^th Congress is barely going to make it into triple digits. Under the Republicans Congress has become a part-time job.

The only thing Congress is really required to do every year is to pass a budget before October 1^st, but this Congress still hasn’t done it, and according to Ellroon at Rants from the Rookery it is set to leave the job for the next Congress.

Is it any wonder the voters fired them?

Fallenmonk looks at the other end of the Mall in his post, Saving Face.

The majority of Americans want our troops out of Iraq. The majority of Iraqis want our troops out of Iraq. These aren’t guesses; these are facts that have been consistent for some time. We won the “war”, but there is no possible way, at this point, we can win the “peace.” This is exactly what George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft pointed out in their book, A World Transformed, as the reason they didn’t go after Saddam in Gulf War I. This is probably a principle reason why 60% of Americans believe that George H.W. Bush was a more competent President than his son.

At least one type of loss we are absorbing is financial, as pointed out by the Christian Science Monitor in their piece on the Rising price of the war on terror. In constant 2006 dollars, the Bush wars are the second most expensive military operations in American history, and the second longest. Only Vietnam is longer, and only World War Two is more expensive.

The sooner we leave, the sooner we stop taking losses.

Update: Via Jim in Comments Terry at the Nitpicker has the numbers for the troops in Iraq in his piece: The polls in Lawrence Kaplan’s head.