Off to a bad start already...

Ok people, it's been a week since the election so the time for complaints and introspection is over. Now it's time to get back to our regular job of bashing the crap out of the Bush admin (oh what would we have done if he hadn't won?)!

The AP reports that the rapid U.S. push into Fallujah has come without the sort of fateful showdown that would break the back of the insurgency. In fact, advance U.S. and Iraqi government warnings gave the militants plenty of time to get out of town, and it appears many did just that.

So um, we screwed up again, eh? Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this supposed to be our big operation to put down the insurgency once and for all to make way for a free Iraq? Now as much as I want Bush to fail at anything he does, we absolutely must succeed in Iraq. The possibility for it to become a real threat to America is to great now. Whether we can still do that remains to be seen, but hearing something like this certainly doesn't make one more optimistic.

Also, President Bush named Alberto Gonzales to replace John Ashcroft. He is the first Hispanic to have the post of attorney general.

Gonzales' career has been linked with Bush for at least a decade, serving as general counsel when Bush was governor of Texas, and then as secretary of state and as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court.

Though considered to be less polarizing than Ashcroft, Gonzales publicly defended the administration's policy — essentially repudiated by the Supreme Court and now being fought out in the lower courts — of detaining certain terrorism suspects for extended periods without access to lawyers or courts.

He also wrote a controversial February 2002 memo in which Bush claimed the right to waive anti-torture law and international treaties providing protections to prisoners of war. That position drew fire from human rights groups, which said it helped led to the type of abuses uncovered in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

And, of course, he once was a partner in a Houston law firm which represented the scandal-ridden energy giant Enron.

'Nuff said.