links for 2009-02-09

Here, Hollywood is letting its mask slip. Ferrell and his director Adam McKay are so confident that everyone shares their contempt for Bush that they slosh over into contempt for all things associated with Bush: the show includes cracks about Texas, Christianity, and finally the military.

The military is the military. It isn't going to whine. It isn't going to organize a team of protesters to cause a ruckus in front of the Cort Theatre. It is just going to keep its head down and drive on. The military's finest men and women will continue to be ignored at best and loathed at worst. No Medal of Honor winner will get even one percent of the publicity Ferrell will generate with this show. For every hundred books written about the failures in Iraq, there will be one paragraph written about the post-surge turnaround.

We've heard and read a lot this winter about the terrific snow and ice storms that have buffeted much of the nation, sometimes destroying both property and lives.

We Californians, basking in sunshine, are having an equally disastrous winter. It's the third dry winter in a row, notwithstanding a little recent precipitation, and the specter of severe water shortages is hanging over the state, compounding its severe economic woes.

The Sierra snowpack is just 60 percent of what would be considered normal and, barring a late-season onslaught of storms, water agencies will impose sharp cutbacks.

Thomas E. Ricks, the nation’s best-known defense correspondent, writes in a book out this week that many Iraq veterans believe the U.S. is likely to have “soldiers in combat in Iraq until at least 2015 – which would put us now at about the midpoint of the conflict.”

That would mean American forces would remain in danger past President Obama’s terms, into his second term if he wins reelection or the 45th presidency if he doesn’t.