It’s been a bittersweet year. I turned thirty seven knowing it was the age my mother was when she died. I lost my father and became a father. In many ways, it was too much packed into one year.

So today I’m ready to welcome thirty-eight. And I’m looking forward to a less eventful year.

In the very near future I’ll be explaining some exciting new additions to TPM we’ll be rolling out in the coming weeks.

Sen. Schumer issues a further warning to the White House over the US Attorney purge as Sen. Kyl blocks efforts to repeal the USA Patriot Act provision giving the White House the ability to appoint US Attorneys without Senate approval.

(ed.note: We’ve got a lot more coming on the significance of the firing of US Atty Carol Lam in the midst of her historic indictment of the #3 man at the CIA. We’ll be bringing you this shortly. There’s much more there than people realize.)

Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA): Without the ‘surge’, US currency may read “In Muhammed We Trust“.

(Flashback: Rep. Goode warns that America will be overrun by Muslim hordes.)

Update from GS: A top official at a Muslim group points out the obvious: Muslims don’t worship Muhammad, and wouldn’t want “In Muhammad We Trust” stamped on their money, either.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) is holding a presser on what the Republican response will be to the Democrats’ Saturday vote on the anti-surge resolution. Details soon.

From TPM Reader JA …

Our Republican Congressman Fred Upton just came out as anti-surge. It’s front page of the local paper. I called his office … to say thank you and the aide who answered the phone sounded worn out. I know this guy, his name is … and he said that it was so nice to hear something positive. They had already gotten 80 angry phone calls and only four good ones. Is this worth a mention so that people in this district who are talkingpointsmemo readers can call in and give support to Fred?

GOP Rep. recycles phony Lincoln quote on House floor during debate over escalation.

Sec. Gates dials back the Iranian IED story a bit further …

It’s times like these you’ve just got to miss that dear lady Molly Ivins.

Meet our new friend, Georgia State House Rep. Ben Bridges (R), chairman of the retirement committee in the state house.

Bridges is now in a bit of trouble for spilling the beans about evolution being the product of a Pharisee Jew conspiracy to bamboozle normal Americans and destroy Christianity.

“Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” reads the letter that went out under Bridges’ name. “This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

It seems that the actual author or analyst, I guess you might say, was a fellow named Marshall Hall, the husband of Bridges campaign manager, Bonnie Hall. Then they sent it out over Bridges’ signature to state legislators in Texas, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio. And they didn’t stop by letting the cat out of the bag on evolution. They also blew the whistle on all this hokum about the earth revolving around the Sun.

Barnes’ memo pointed fellow state legislators to the information at fixedearth.com which rails against the “a mystic, anti-Christ ‘holy book’ of the Pharisee Sect of Judaism” and claims that “the earth is not rotating … nor is it going around the sun.” They’ve even caught on to the “centuries-old conspiracy” on the part of Jewish physicists to destroy Christianity.

Now, it was down in Texas that things started to spin out of control. Warren Chisum (R), House Appropriations Committee Chairman in the Texas state House, took the memo from his friend Bridges and used the House operations system to distribute the memo throughout the legislature. (Here’s Chisum’s cover letter and the Bridges’ memo.)

The ADL caught wind of the Bridges memo and now Chisum says he’s “willing to apologize if I’ve offended anyone” if anyone got their big nose bent out of shape.

Reports the Dallas Morning News: “Mr. Chisum said he hadn’t looked at the Web site and didn’t realize that he was distributing that type of material. He expressed chagrin that he didn’t vet the material more carefully.”

Indeed, even Bridges is now saying that he didn’t have anything to do with the memo.

Hall doesn’t agree. He said he wrote it and got Bridges’ approval to send it out. “I gave him a copy of it months ago,” Hall, who is a retired high school teacher told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “I had already written this up as an idea to present to him so he could see what it was and what we were thinking.” And of course the two have teamed up to ban the teaching of evolution in Georgia back in 2005. So, Bridges’ denials are ringing a tad hollow.

And the views expressed in his memo are just too compelling for Bridges to deny outright.

Asked if he agreed with the Kaballah evolution conspiracy theory and the earth’s lack of motion, he told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory. I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie why teach anything?”

(ed.note: Additional research provided by Eric Kleefeld.)

More details emerge (from the Times …)

A United States attorney in Arkansas who was dismissed from his job last year by the Justice Department was ousted after Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, intervened on behalf of the man who replaced him, according to Congressional aides briefed on the matter.

Ms. Miers, the aides said, phoned an aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales suggesting the appointment of J. Timothy Griffin, a former military and civilian prosecutor who was a political director for the Republican National Committee and a deputy to Karl Rove, the White House political adviser.

Later, the incumbent United States attorney, H. E. Cummins III, was removed without explanation and replaced on an interim basis by Mr. Griffin. Officials at the White House and Justice Department declined to comment on Ms. Miers’s role in the matter.

Today’s Must Read: the opponents of the administration’s prosecutor purge get their first victory — Karl Rove’s former aide is bowing out.