White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told Reuters today that it will be at least another week -- in other words, after Thanksgiving -- before President Obama announces his new strategy for Afghanistan (not to be confused, of course, with his previous new strategy from earlier this year). Meanwhile, though, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wasn't waiting to reiterate her assessment of the situation.

The impact created by the LCROSS Centaur upper stage rocket created a two-part plume of material from the bottom of the crater. The first part was a high angle plume of vapor and fine dust and the second a lower angle ejecta curtain of heavier material. This material has not seen sunlight in billions of years. "Billions of years"?! Holy man-sized safe, Batman -- what else could be hidden under the surface of the moon that we earthlings have given up all hope of finding?

Well, it's a start -- U.S. troops may not be flowing steadily out of Iraq yet, but a lot of our stuff is.

Matt Yglesias wrote yesterday: "Representative Alan Grayson’s statement that the Republican plan for health care amounts to 'don’t get sick' and if you do 'die quickly' probably doesn’t meet a test of literal accuracy. . . . But so what? The idea of a hubbub about this is absurd."

Lindsay Beyerstein of the Media Consortium caught up with Howard Dean after an event in New York, capturing her brief, exclusive interview with him on video. She asked Dean what it would mean if Democrats passed healthcare reform through the Senate using budget reconciliation rules, rather than relying on the whims of faux-centrists (Snowe, Lieberman, Nelson, et al.) to get a filibuster-proof 60 votes.

According to at least one recent tally, as of Thursday, 29 major celebrities had died during 2009. Today comes word that leading conservative theoretician Irving Kristol has died. (In other words, we're still at 29 and counting.)

As you may know, there's a psychiatric condition known as Münchausen syndrome by proxy, which can be loosely defined as putting someone or something else in jeopardy so that you can be a hero by "saving" it. For obvious reasons, this came to mind as I watched a surprisingly reinvigorated Barack Obama give his speech to Congress on Wednesday night.