One thousand, one hundred and sixty-six American soldiers dead and counting so far in Iraq. See the faces of the fallen, as compiled by the Washington Post. Clicking on each photo gives you the soldier’s name, age, photo, hometown, unit and how he died.

What are they dying for?

The Chicagoist reports that the 2004 city budget is $180 million bigger than 2003 and raises taxes “all over the place” to make up for a huge shortfall.

What can we look forward to? According to the Trib:

• An increase in the amusement tax from 3 percent to 4 percent on tickets for live performances at venues of at least 750 seats (Tickets at smaller clubs are untaxed.) and from 7 percent to 8 percent for all other amusements, such as White Sox, Cubs and Bears games;
• An increase from 3 percent to 3.5 in the city hotel tax;
• A jump from 16 cents to 48 cents on a pack of cigarettes;
• An increase from $2.75 to $3.75 in the car-rental tax;
• And a 25-cent increase in the city’s $2 parking tax.

This really puts the lie to Da Mare’s take on how the Republicans “outfoxed” out-of-touch Washington Democrats in the election, as reported by the Sun-Times’ Fran Spielman:

“We always thought the Republican Party was Washington, D.C. The Democrats are Washington, D.C., politicians. They don’t reach out to a mayor, a governor, or the state chairman. There’s no local anymore,” Daley said.

“If you watch the Republican Party, they’re to the people. … They’re more grass-roots than Democrats. We think we are. The Republicans outfoxed the Democrats. They became the party of precincts, a county, a city. Their strategy was to go to the people and not to the money people. … We’re supposed to be the party of the people. We’re the party of the money. … We’ve become the party of the insider.”

I suppose if anyone would know an operation that favors insiders when he sees it then Da Mare would. Why didn’t the Kerry campaign and the Democratic National Committee lean on Daley and his ilk for some expert advice? Perhaps huge budget deficits, corruption scandals and a flurry of tax increases didn’t some like such a great starting point (though Kerry obviously did support tax increases).

Major-league baseball agreed to let the Expos move to Washington, D.C., on the premise that the city’s taxpayers would cough up a bunch of dough to build a new ballpark at no cost to the team’s yet-to-be-named owners. Since moving to the nation’s capital, the team’s looked for a new name but more importantly for a handout.

Economics professor Dennis Coates explains why this is a terrible idea that won’t benefit anyone but those very owners. Funding sports stadia with taxpayer dollars is one of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare. Why, I even wrote a paper on the topic.

UPDATE: A good blog I recently discovered that exclusively deals with the topic of taxpayer-funded stadia is Field of Schemes. It’s the offshoot of a book by that title, which I have not read, but the blog is a good read in and of itself.

Alan Keyes lost the race to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate by a larger margin (43 percentage points) than any other major-party candidate, ever. Keyes won only 10 Illinois counties. I’ll let you guess what might have contributed to his victory in Effingham.

Note: This post was written using my Logitech io Personal Digital Pen. Originally, the underlined words were hyperlinked in HTML but I’m letting that slide this time around.

Here are two hard-hitting anti-war/Bush ads worth supporting:

• Not There
• He Just Doesn’t Get It

… wrong Web site. Can’t these guys get anything right?

Here was what I thought was the most telling moment of last night’s presidential debate:

KERRY: Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, “The enemy attacked us.”

Saddam Hussein didn’t attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn’t use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world’s number one criminal and terrorist.

They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, who only a week earlier had been on the other side fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other.

That’s the enemy that attacked us. That’s the enemy that was allowed to walk out of those mountains. That’s the enemy that is now in 60 countries, with stronger recruits.

[SNIP]

LEHRER: Thirty seconds.

BUSH: First of all, of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that.

Let’s go to the tape. Take a look at Dubya’s desperate attempt to clarify that he understands that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are unrelated and that the former was the true culprit behind 9/11, while he has spent the last three years insinuating that they’re one and the same — bosom buddies on par with Laverne and Shirley.

On point after point, Kerry directly attacked Dubya’s horribly failed foreign policy. Kerry has no real solutions to the problems Dubya created, but he finally put the onus on the president to defend his terrible record. No wonder Dubya was so annoyed.

Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi writes from Baghdad:

Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest. …

It’s hard to pinpoint when the “turning point” exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq’s population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush’s rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a “potential” threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to “imminent and active threat,” a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Read the whole shebang.