The one Christmas present I want most: more Democrats in Congress!

NPR's Morning Edition has a story here on the 110th Congress ending its year with more frustrations than accomplishments, courtesy of a Republican President whose muleheadedness makes his late predecessor Ronald Reagan seem the very soul of compromise and comity by comparison, and a minority of his party's Senators and Representatives that will not break faith with him, even (or perhaps especially) on continuing to fund the Iraq fiasco with no strings whatsodamnever.

Much has been said (here, among other places) about the Democratic Congressional leadership's tendency to emulate the favorite strategy of former LSU head football coach Jerry Stovall, who led the Tigers when I was pursuing my degree there in the early 1980s: run the ball up the middle for three downs, then punt. Time and again Reed, Pelosi & Co. boldly promised to bring Junior Bush to heel, and time and again they backed down when he planted his feet and his GOP fellows on Capitol Hill backed him. But in fairness, it should be noted (again) that the Dems do not have a clear majority in Congress, but only a plurality, particularly in the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to prevent filibustering (for which the Senate's GOP members set a new record this year, as Rahm Emanuel was at pains to point out in the NPR story) but the leadership can only muster 51...and one less than that on anything to do with Iraq, where that notorious DINO-saur Joe Lieberman usually votes with the Repubs.

The problem is not that the Dem leaders lack the desire or the will to press their issues; it's that they recognize futility when they see it and elect to work on the things that can be moved forward, rather than the ones they know don't have a sno-cone's chance on a New Orleans JazzFest weekend afternoon of getting past those filibustering GOP Senators or Bush's veto pen. It's called "picking your battles," folks.

If you want to see more progress on Iraq, on health care, on immigration and so forth, the thing to do is not excoriate the Dems' leaders, but to elect more progressive Democrats to Congress and give them a veto-proof majority in both houses. Fortunately, an election is coming up next fall which will allow us to do precisely that, as well as (one dearly hopes) excise that stubborn Texan from the Oval Office and replace him with a Democrat.

This just in: Pissing in the ocean could actually help save the planet!

Wired magazine's website lists this year's "10 Craziest Ways to Hack the Earth." One of them is ocean fertilization: the addition of nutrients such as iron and urea (a key component of human urine) to help grow more CO2-scrubbing plankton. Of course, topping the list is "The Status Quo"—that is, continuing to pump out greenhouse gases, overload landfills, clear-cut forests etc.

Get the door...it's Domino's with your new PC!

Remember Apple's old Mac Performa LC model that came in a flat, wide form factor users dubbed "the pizza box"? Well, now Gizmodo.com shows us here that someone has literally taken an actual cardboard pizza box and built a full-featured, working computer (non-Mac, alas) inside it, right down to the CD-ROM tray that slides out from the front. As the site points out, it's too bad the tray can't be rigged to dispense steaming slices of pepperoni-and-cheese-laden pie, but still...

On this date in 1803, the US bought my home state for a song

204 years ago today, in what still stands to this day as the biggest, sweetest real-estate deal in history ("Seward's Folly" nabbed us Alaska 64 years later, but it didn't have nearly as much square footage), then-President Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, instantly tripling the geographic size of his fledgling nation...and helping France's then-dictator Napoleon Bonaparte solve some nagging political and financial headaches he was having. The property sold for only three cents an acre—that's right, $0.03 each for over 530 million acres (800,000 square miles or 2,100,000 km) of prime, unspoiled land, much of it as yet inhabited only by indigenous tribes of primitives and sundry wild animals. TheFreeDictionary.com has the full story here.

Because of this deal (which a fellow New Orleanian, the late John Chase, described colorfully in his delightful daily Times-Picayune comic strip back in the 1950s, later collected in the book Louisiana Purchase: an American Story), all or part of 15 states were eventually added to the Union—including the state of my birth, which took its name from the territory. The US gained sovereignty over the abundant natural resources of all those states and over the mighty Mississippi River, which together became the engine of so much of our country's commerce and history. And Your Humble Correspondent, who might easily have been born into some other family in some other state or even a whole other country, gained a rich cultural heritage in which he feels some justification for taking pride.