This is what the Bush Administration regards as progress in Iraq

FUBAR:

The Iraqi government declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew Friday after insurgent gunmen set up roadblocks in central Baghdad and opened fire on U.S. and Iraqi troops just north of the heavily fortified Green Zone.

With just two hours notice, the prime minister ordered everyone off the streets of the capital from 2 p.m. Friday until 6 a.m. Saturday. U.S. and Iraqi forces also were engaged in firefights with insurgents in the dangerous Dora neighborhood in south Baghdad.

As the state of emergency was announced in the capital, a car bomb ripped through a market and nearby gas station in the increasingly volatile southern city of Basra Friday, killing at least five people and wounding 18, including two policemen, police said.

At least 19 other deaths were reported in Baghdad.

Throughout the morning Friday, Iraqi and U.S. military forces clashed with attackers who were armed with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and rifles in busy Haifa Street that runs into the Green Zone, site of the U.S. and British embassies and the Iraqi government.

Two Iraqi soldiers and a policeman were wounded in the fighting, said police Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said.

The region was sealed and Iraqi and U.S. forces conducted house-to-house searches.

Gunmen also attacked a group of worshippers marching from Sadr City, the Shiite slum in eastern Baghdad, to the Buratha mosque on the other side of the city to protest a suicide attack a week ago on the revered Shiite shrine. At least one marcher was killed and four were wounded, Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said.

The U.S. military on Friday said a Marine had died in combat and a soldier was killed in an unspecified non-hostile incident three days earlier. Their deaths raise to at least 2,514 members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

This is the course that Senate Republicans have just resolved to stay. Hey, guys, how's that working for ya? Of course we'll see in November, but I wonder how all these Good Christian Men sleep at night knowing that they are trading the lives a generation of American kids for their own Congressional perqs.