Today’s edition of quick hits.
* Bush will reportedly let Donald Rumsfeld stay on as Defense secretary through Dec. 29 — so that he can break the record for the longest-serving Pentagon chief of all time. That’s a good reason, right? It’s not as if he were incompetently overseeing the most disastrous war in a generation. Oh wait, he is.
* Philip Zelikow, one of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s closest advisers on Iraq and the Middle East, has resigned citing “family and professional concerns.” As Tim Grieve noted, his departure is a bit of a shame — Zelikow had become known for producing memos that “often depart sharply from the Bush administration’s current line.” Among them: one that said — before it was obvious to everyone everywhere — that the war in Iraq could become a “catastrophic failure,” and another that called into the Bush administration detention system the Supreme Court eventually invalidated.
* Trent Lott is still not impressed with Karl Rove. “I’ve had problems with some of his conduct,” Lott said over the weekend.
* Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was on Fox News yesterday, and apparently noticed when FNC’s Chris Wallace was not entirely “fair and balanced.” Go figure.
* The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dick Polman, one of the smart political analysts/columnists I can think of, says there are at least four good reasons why Hillary Clinton can win the presidential race in 2008.
* The U.S. embassy in Argentina believes now would be a good time for the Bush twins to go home. Apparently, there are security concerns.
* The margin on the 2006 elections was big enough to obscure a real problem: voting machines are still unreliable and prone to breakdowns.
* The Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that news consumers were better off following Election Night coverage on websites run by television networks — not the networks themselves. Funny, I assumed everyone already knew that.
* How anyone takes Matt Drudge seriously remains one of life’s bigger mysteries.
* Time’s Joe Klein would no doubt be loath to admit it, and his new position appears to contradict his old position, but he certainly sounds like he’d like to see the U.S. out of Iraq. When someone writes, “[T]he best counsel shouldn’t be how to ‘win’ but how to withdraw creatively,” it’s hard to draw any other conclusion.
* The lucrative college student loan industry is apparently concerned that a Democratic Congress, which is more concerned with helping students than making the industry richer, may make their field slightly less lucrative in the coming years. “Comeuppance is at hand,” said Barmak Nassirian, an official of the American Assn. of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “They are in the line of fire, and they are going to take a bullet here.”
* “Personal accounts” and Social Security still don’t mix.
* I am not an expert in homeschooling, but “unschooling” strikes me as a spectacularly bad idea.
* And in the War on Christmas Peace Wreaths, a homeowners association near Denver has decided to fine a woman $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign from her home. According to the AP account, some residents who have complained have children serving in Iraq, while other residents believe the peace sign is a symbol of Satan.
If none of these particular items are of interest, consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.
