Well, that’s it for me. It’s been an exciting year for us here at TPM. In a couple weeks, we’ll celebrate the first anniversary of TPMCafe. And TPMmuckraker has now been up and running for more than two months. We even work in a bona fide office. Next month we’re going to get our new 2006 election tracking blog up and running at TPMCafe.

Thank you to all the readers of each of our sites for helping us make this possible. And I want to particularly thank those of you who chipped in for our two fundraisers to launch those two new sites. It means a great deal to me. And I hope you’re enjoying the sites your contributions have made possible.

I’m going to step away for a week. Sit on a beach with my wife. Hopefully recharge my batteries and clear my head.

Matt Yglesias is going to take over for me here at TPM while I’m away.

Bad news: Top Air Force officials are said to be under FBI investigation for improper contract awards. Good news: Through his lawyer, Duke Cunningham says he’s ready to cooperate! This and other news in today’s Daily Muck.

Greetings, I’ll be your guest blogger for the next week or so. You may remember me from such guest blogging gigs as the last time I did this, the time before that, or even my blog at TPM Cafe which, obviously, you all should be reading.

In addition to the various TPM Media landmarks referenced below, I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday yesterday, leaving the heady days of early twentiesness behind in favor of the stable sobriety of the mid twenties. The United States Congress, meanwhile, seems to be heading in the opposite direction and embracing adolescent stunts in lieu of policymaking: “the Senate yesterday voted to make English the ‘national language’ of the United States, declaring that no one has a right to federal communications or services in a language other than English except for those already guaranteed by law.” So the only services people will have a legal right to obtain in non-English languages will be the ones they . . . have a legal right to obtain in non-English languages? Good times.

If you’d like to get in touch, drop me a line at myglesias at gmail. English is preferred, though my French is pretty good and I can usually discern the meaning of writing in your other romance languages. All replies, however, will be strictly in English.

Hey, don’t knock our $22 million contract with scandal-prone Shirlington Limousine Company, says DHS. In case of a terrorist attack, we’re counting on those limos to get our officials to safety.

Promised troop reductions in Iraq not so promised anymore; Rumsfeld explains that people criticize him because he’s “done a lot” of stuff.

“I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties,” Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) remarked at yesterday’s Hayden confirmation hearings, “but you have no civil liberties if you are dead.” This comes via Dave Weigel and nicely encapsulates at least three different pieces of horribly misguided rightingery.

First off is the sheer cowardice of it. Sure, liberal democracy is nice, but not if someone might get hurt. One might think that strong supporters of civil liberties would be willing to countenance the idea that it might be worth bearing some level of risk in order to preserve them.

Second is just this dogmatic post-9/11 insistence on acting as if human history began suddenly in 1997 or something. The United States was able to face down such threats as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany without indefinite detentions, widespread use of torture as an interrogative technique, or all-pervasive surveillance. But a smallish group of terrorists who can’t even surface publicly abroad for fear they’ll be swiftly killed by the mightiest military on earth? Time to break out the document shredder and do away with that pesky constitution.

Last, there’s the unargued assumption that civil rights and the rule of law are some kind of near-intolerable impediment to national security. But if you look around the world over the past hundred years or so, I think you’ll see that the record of democracy is pretty strong. You don’t see authoritarian regimes using their superior ability to operate in secret and conduct surveillance to run roughshod over more fastidious countries. You see liberalism prospering — both in the sense that the core liberal countries have grown richer-and-richer and in the sense that liberal democracy has consistently spread out from its original homeland since people like it better. You see governments that can operate in total secrecy falling prey to crippling corruption. You see powers of surveillance used not to defend countries from external threats, but to defend rulers from domestic political opponents.

The U.S.S.R., after all, lost the Cold War, not because we beat them in a race to the bottom to improve national security by gutting the principles of our system, but because the principles underlying our system were actually better than the alternative. If you don’t have some faith the American way of life is capable of coping with actual challenges, then what’s the point in defending it?

Late Update: Reader S.L. reminds me that Patrick Henry had some thoughts on a related subject.

Dennis Hastert, accounting wizard: “Well, folks, if you earn $40,000 a year and have a family of two, you don’t pay any taxes. So you probably, if you don’t pay any taxes, you are not going to get a big tax cut.” Bet a lot of people would be happy if this were actually true.

Late Update: Folks are writing in to say that a married couple with two children would not, in fact, pay any federal income tax. Just, you know, all kinds of other taxes. Fair enough, but that’s obviously not the same as saying a family of two doesn’t pay any taxes, at least under standard uses of the word “any.” I mean, under this construal Hastert’s trying to justify a tax cut that gives a giant share of its benefits to the rich with the rationale that . . . the tax he’s trying to cut is disproportionately paid by the rich.

Later Update: Now I’m getting other accounts indicating that a married couple with two children would pay federal income tax after all. Some correspondents indicate that this may depend on whether or not you live in a state with a state-level EITC. Others are also noting that a married couple with two kids is what we ordinarily call a “family of four” rather than a “family of two.” Be all this as it may, the point remains the same — families of two or four making $40k pay taxes, plenty of taxes, and if Hastert doesn’t know that he desperately needs to get out more.

Did the telephone companies hire a third party “scapegoat” to feed the NSA’s database? Turns out that’s a growing industry.

Mike McCurry’s takeaway from his catastrophic effort to spin the blogosphere: blogging is “a primal scream in the darkness.” Like the scions Bourbon Restoration he’s remembered everything and learned nothing. People disagreed with McCurry about the net neutrality issue because people disagree about issues. People got so mad at him precisely because of this kind of patronizing attitude. He was peddling flimsy arguments as if it never occurred to him that the blogosphere is full of people who know a lot about the internet and could handle a grown-up argument (see a non-flimsy, though ultimately unpersuasive, anti-neutrality piece if you’re interested).

One of the most neglected aspects of the blogosphere, in my opinion, is that precisely because it’s (mostly) composed of people who aren’t professional journalists, it’s composed of people who are professional doers of something else and know a great deal about what it is they “really” do. Consequently, the overall network of blogs contains a great deal of embedded knowledge. The consensus that emerges from that process can, of course, be mistaken but even though the most prominent people expressing that consensus may not be experts in the subject at hand (the most prominent bloggers tend to be generalists), the consensus will almost always be grounded in some kind of well-informed opinions. If you want to push back on that, in other words, you’d better know what you’re talking about and not treat your audience like a pack of mewling children.

Art Brodsky has the latest on how Net Neutrality is faring in the Congress.