For more than a year, Halliburton contractors at the US military base in Camp Junction City, near the Iraqi city of Ramadi, permitted troops and civilians to use contaminated water, the AP reports. The company’s own water-treatment expert at the camp, Ben Carter, wrote in an incident report that “raw sewage is being routinely dumped upstream of intake” and the camp’s water “is without question contaminated with numerous micro-organisms, including Coliform bacteria.” Anothe former Halliburton hand, Ken May, claims a widespread incidence of diarrhea and stomach-cramping. MORE »

• Embedded journalists on the War on Christmas. [Mr. Sun]
• The NYT confuses the black people, even though one of them is NOT wearing a bow tie. [Gawker]
• Why is that purple fingers seem so… dirty? [GNN, TMFTML]
• Focus on the Family on how sending a man shopping makes him gay: “Noodles are replaced by artichoke hearts, milk exchanged for broccolini, the sought-after turkey traded for a single hairy coconut.” [G.p]
• War on Christmas train wreck on CNN. It ends with how the Nazis ALSO banned Christmas! [Political Teen] MORE »

We have received this wisdom from a reader, and, truly, it all makes sense now:

This panda worship is so primal. Could he be a messiah? What if we broadcast, worldwide, nothing but the pandacam 24/7. I think all wars would end. We should seize control of the public and private airwaves, cyberconnections, etc, and substitute all media w/ butterstick. There are stupider solutions to the Middle East mess.

Yes, we must make it so. It sort of explains him disappearing into that cave recently… We’re not sure he’s a Christian god, however. He seems more like a reincarnation of the Buddha: Think of how he bears the weight of his imprisonment, his calm and thoughtful nature, his roly-polyness. His roly-poly-holiness.

• WP politics editor John Harris: “For all its interesting and useful features, some things I don’t like about the on-line crankosphere are its frequent humorlessness and tendency to blow issues way out of proportion.” FUCK HIM!!!! BOYCOTT THE WASHINGTON POST AND ITS BUSH-TOTING TOADY COVERAGE!!! [WashingtonPost.com]
• Dial-a-bite Sabato gets a couplet comeuppance: “need a quote/do not tarry/call U-Va. and ask for Larry.” [WP]
• “JON KLEIN LIKES SHOWTUNES.” [FBNY]
• Please be gentle with Arianna. [Esquire]
• Tom Shales lights into the new Nightline’s faux gravitas: “‘Shorter shorts — a sign of the times?’ Probably not.” [WP]

Wonkette’s Forward Operating Base Operative writes in with an update on the Iraqi elections, including a heart-warming scene that makes us think maybe the Lincoln Group was onto something with their Osama bin Moe sitcom idea:

As I was driving in my Stryker to a polling site to let my Iraqi born interpreters to vote, one told me he thought this election was another “poke in the insurgents eye.” I thought about this, then I did the old “Three Stooges eye poke” thing to him…which he deftly parried with the old “Three Stooges hand in front of the nose” move. Then we both did the nyuk, nyuk, nyuk bit…and laughed till our balls hurt.

FOBO skips over the “Tom Clancy” stuff and goes straight for Marxist Brothers right after the jump.

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Rush Limbaugh is making a fuss over a Hotline report that John Kerry tried to fire up his troops at a campaign reunion Christmas party by promising them an impeachment trial in their stocking: “If we take back the House, there’s a solid case to bring articles of impeachment against this president.” Spokeskid David Wade insists that Kerry was “joking,” which surely must be the case as they held the festivities at a place called “Finn McCool’s.” I guess Drinky McLoser’s was booked. MORE »

We didn’t make it past the Note’s hilarious fake Iraqi election exit poll. The one they funded by selling off on “vintage, eBay-ready Note Notebooks.” Complete with fake exit poll hotline! There will likely be fake results! Not unlike 2004. MORE »

Saddiq Ahmad Turkistani was freed from a Taliban prison in the early days of the Afghan war. He’d been wrongly imprisoned, he told reporters–though he had indeed helped hatch a plot to kill Osama Bin Laden. He despised the Taliban and al Qaeda, and was an eager supporter of the U.S. war on terror. MORE »

Remember that spate of horny Hill staffer ads that polluted Craiglist last month? They seemed suspicious at the time. You know what they say: One horny Hill staffer ad is funny, two horny Hill staffer ads are a coincidence, three are a joke. (Four horny Hill staffer ads are sign that Kennedy is hiring.) And what do you know, a reader has fessed up to convoluting the November entreaties to “spank me with your legal pads because I’ve been sooooooo bad at answering constituent mail lately.” (She says she was bored. We said December is the new August!) Of course, anything that wonkily perverse will get people’s members paying attention, and the reader has sent along one of the more lusty inquiries. Now, remember: The only thing more sketchy than the ads posted on Craigslist are the responses to them. That said, let’s hear it for the “power mad lawyer” who put his longings so poetically:

I’ll take you to my law firm and fuck you on the conference table in view of not just the White House (we’re right across the the street), but also the Washington Memorial. And I’ll have my own white obelisk ready for you, baby. And at the risk of getting totally corny with the analogies, my white obelisk is ready for a plunge into your Tidal Basin as I look into the Reflecting Pool of your eyes.

Excuse us while we expurge a Beltway of vomit.

Full letter after the jump.

EARLIER: While Their Members Are Away the Staff Will Play [Wonkette]

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December is the new August. Sure, it may not feel like August, what with the freezing fucking cold and whatnot, but it feels like August what with the empty streets, thumb-twiddling social events and the bottomlessly inane excuses for trend stories turning up in the Washington Post. Then: Neely Tucker searching for something to say about shade, “Why are there odes to the sea, to the stars, to a Grecian urn, and so few to shade?” Now: Phillip Kennicott, similarly reaching for interest in a — dare we say “ode” — to “gray”:

We remember this from finger painting. Mix colors together and you get nasty browns and eventually black. Mix black and white together, and you get lovely gray.

Yes, that is also the color that appears before our eyes when all the words blur together. You may recognize it yourself. MORE »