My New Years resolution this year is to take up Poo Chi.  From the YouTube: Poo Chi skit from Live Matinee live comedy performance at Tsunami Bookstore Eugene, Oregon Oct 2, 2009 Instructor: Nancy Cave Class members: Tamsin Morgan, Barbara Embree, Richard Cave Who brought the brownies? h/t FunnyDiva for the video

This is not a post about The Top Ten anything for 2009 OR 2010. This is not a post about Your Most Important xx (pick your number) Resolutions for 2010. This is not a post about Thin Thighs in Thirty Days. This is not a post about How to Make 2010 Your Best Year Ever! [...]

Here’s Firedoglake’s most popular videos of 2009. What does this collection say to you about this year?

In a stunning setback for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s state-employee mandatory furlough policy, an Alameda County Superior Court judge has ruled the furloughs illegal, since they were implemented under a state of emergency that no longer exists. In a ruling handed down late Thursday, Judge Frank Roesch said the governor’s reliance on provisions of the state’s Emergency [...]

Going to knock off a bit early today, unless anything major occurs. Have a safe New Year, and wish along with me for a better decade starting tomorrow. • A Rasmussen poll shows majority support for waterboarding Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The Cheneyites are thrilled. The moment we started having a debate about torture in this [...]

Judge Ricardo Urbina has dismissed all charges against the Blackwater guards involved in the Nisour Square killings. He explains he has dismissed the charges because the government violated the constitutional rights of the Blackwater guards by using compelled statements against them.

As one federal prosecutor told Wired, “It strikes me that they’re more aggressive with this reporter than with the guy who got on this flight.”

Don’t you feel safer now?

Why do I feel some prayers are being answers as these two bastions of bigotry are having trouble ends meet and are thus being exposed as money-grubbing Mammon-huggers?

With the nation in an anti-incumbent mood, practically nobody in Washington is truly safe. Yet potential primary candidate J. D. Hayworth has a lot of baggage to lug in a run against McCain.

It doesn’t take a magician’s trick to figure out that the Senate bill fails to lay the ground work for future progressive change. It dooms health care activists to 40 years of fighting to undo the bad structure this Senate bill would put in place.