Anne and I are someplace warm (see second photo), but Parker is never far from our thoughts. Here he is New Year's Eve in what we must assume is doggy heaven:

Weather Now is all new.

We're ecstatic to roll out a completely new visual design by Katie Zoellner. It's actually been lurking as a Beta site for several months. We didn't roll it out because not all of the features from our old site (see http://old.wx-now.com/) are complete. But today is the first day of a new year, which we thought an appropriate moment to finally give Katie's design some exposure.

Richard Clarke reminds the Administration (751 days, 2 hours) that Iraq isn't the only problem we face, even though it's consuming all of the Administration's bandwidth via Talking Points Memo):

National Security Council veteran Rand Beers has called this the "7-year-old's soccer syndrome"—just like little kids playing soccer, everyone forgets their particular positions and responsibilities and runs like a herd after the ball.

Without the distraction of the Iraq war, the administration would have spent this past year—indeed, every year since Sept. 11, 2001—focused on al-Qaeda. But beyond al-Qaeda and the broader struggle for peaceful coexistence with (and within) Islam, seven key "fires in the in-box" national security issues remain unattended, deteriorating and threatening, all while Washington's grown-up 7-year-olds play herd ball with Iraq.

Clarke's list of crises that merit attention, but haven't gotten any from the White House, will surprise exactly no one who has paid attention for the last five years.

I'm an hour late getting in Friday's DP, for which I'm sorry. Today was the last business day of 2006, and possibly Parker's last day in the office for a while (I'll be working downtown starting next month). Fittingly, here's Parker, doing what he does best: being a good office puppy.

The couch is dead. We're going to take it to the street tonight or tomorrow, because Parker has quite literally beaten the stuffing out of it. He even knows he's being bad, running away from it the moment I take a step toward him. But just seconds after I turn away, there he is again, performing dog-o-suction on the cushions:

Parker made it all the way to St. Louis and back without yakking. This is a first. How did he do it? He slept the whole way:

...there was Eliza: