Right You Are If You Think You Are

Ross Douthat's column in yesterday's New York Times contended that in the matter of enhanced airport screening by the TSA, now that there's a Democrat in the White House, the Democrats are all quiet on the freedom front whereas they were outraged at the assault on their rights under the Bush administration. It was all politics.

But people who follow politics closely -- whether voters, activists or pundits -- are often partisans first and ideologues second. Instead of assessing every policy on the merits, we tend to reverse-engineer the arguments required to justify whatever our own side happens to be doing.

Except, as James Fallows explains, that's not exactly the case.

There are many instances of the partisan dynamic working in one direction here. That is, conservatives and Republicans who had no problem with strong-arm security measures back in the Bush 43 days but are upset now. Charles Krauthammer is the classic example: forthrightly defending torture as, in limited circumstances, a necessary tool against terrorism, yet now outraged about "touching my junk" as a symbol of the intrusive state.

But are there any cases of movement the other way? Illustrations of liberals or Democrats who denounced "security theater" and TSA/DHS excesses in the Republican era, but defend them now? If such people exist, I'm not aware of them -- and having beaten the "security theater" drum for many long years now, I've been on the lookout.

The assumption by Mr. Douthat, backed up by scant evidence, that the liberals would reverse poles on this is based on his own assumption that because one group does it, the other must as well. It isn't based on the reality that those who are opposed to the enhanced screenings have been against them since the outset and it has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with the fact that they believe that the system is ineffective or that it is traumatic for a large number of people who are survivors of sexual assault and who rightly have an aversion to being touched by strangers. They were against the procedures during the Bush administration, and they're against them now.

So once again we're up against the false equivalency wall: both sides do it and do it at the same level of outrage. The Tea Party may be all intractable and illogical, but so was ACORN; there's no difference between MSNBC and Fox News except which side they're on; Democrats and Republicans are both the Party of No on Capitol Hill. Each one of those is demonstrably false, and yet Very Serious People like Ross Douthat and David Brooks and Mika Brzezinski and Cokie Roberts can go on TV and say a pox on both your houses. It's a classic case of transference; if you've got it, the other guy must have it to. But it simply isn't the case, and as Mr. Fallows concludes, "[r]ecognizing that is part of facing the reality of today's politics."
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DADT Day

The Pentagon is planning to release its study on the effects of repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell today.

Officials familiar with the 10-month study's results have said a clear majority of respondents don't care if gays serve openly, with 70 percent predicting that lifting the ban would have positive, mixed or no results. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the findings hadn't been released.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, who have both said they support repealing the law, were scheduled to discuss the findings with Congress Tuesday morning and with reporters Tuesday afternoon.

[...]

The survey is based on responses by some 115,000 troops and 44,200 military spouses to more than a half million questionnaires distributed last summer. The study group, led by Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson and Army Gen. Carter Ham, also visited various military bases and held town hall-style meetings with service members.

The findings of troop opinions would reflect the view of the broader population. According to a November survey by the Pew Research Center, 58 percent of Americans say they favor allowing gays to serve openly in the armed forces while 27 percent oppose.

Several prominent Republican opponents to the repeal, including John McCain, have already said they're not moved by the results of the study, which have been leaking out for the last month, because it is not giving them the results that they wanted. Mr. McCain is going so far as to indicate he wants a study of the study.

What it comes down to is that the people who are opposed to gays and lesbians serving openly in the military are aligning themselves with the worst elements of prejudice and intolerance in our society; the likes of Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and, to a lesser degree, the whack jobs like Fred Phelps. No, I don't think that John McCain would stand outside a soldier's funeral carrying a sign reading GOD HATES FAGS, but his moving of the goalposts for the repeal of DADT indicate that he was never serious about discussing the matter anyway. When it looked like it was a permanent policy back in 2004, he got all mavericky and said that when the generals told him that the policy could be repealed, he'd go along with them. So when they told him that last winter, he changed his position to "let's study it and see what the troops say," betting on the mistaken and bigoted idea that the soldiers, those red-blooded testosterone-bearing strapping young men, would never allow faeries in the barracks. Now that the study shows that the troops don't care, Mr. McCain is trying to move the target yet again.

There's a lot to despise about people like Tony Perkins and Fred Phelps, but the one thing you can say about them is that at least they are predictable in their bigotry and hatred of an entire community. They are, to quote the Bard, as constant as the Northern Star. John McCain and people like him are far more dangerous because you never know from one day to the next where they are or what they will do.
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Freeze

President Obama proposed freezing all civilian pay for two years yesterday.

"Getting this deficit under control is going to require some broad sacrifices, and that sacrifice must be shared by the employees of the federal government," Obama said in a White House speech. He called federal workers "patriots who love their country" and said the cut is not just "a line item on a federal ledger." But he said he is asking federal workers to sacrifice for the country as "they've always done."

The president's proposal comes just before a fiscal commission he appointed is scheduled to issue a final report Wednesday on how to staunch deficit spending. The panel's leadership has recommended a three-year pay freeze for most federal workers.

The freeze, which must be approved by Congress, would be the first two-year halt to federal raises in modern history. With health insurance premiums for civil servants set to jump 7.2 percent on average next year and a federal transit subsidy to be cut by half Dec. 31, the plan will amount to a pay cut for many workers.

I suppose it's better than the alternative -- after all, the president could follow the model of some government entities in some places and actually cut their workers' pay by shortening the number of days that they work -- but the savings will be very little in the overall scheme of the budget, and the sacrifice on the part of the workers, with rising costs, won't be appreciated. The public already believes -- falsely -- that government employees make a lot of money already.

The political benefits to the president are minimal. This is a gesture on his part to the GOP that he's willing to compromise, and he's expecting that they will offer something similar in return. Good luck with that. The GOP already thinks they have some kind of mandate to cut more taxes for the rich and screw the unemployed out of more benefits, and so far the White House's efforts to kill that beast have been along the lines of "Gee, you might be right."

This is in advance of the so-called "Slurpee Summit" at the White House today between the president and GOP leaders from the Hill. My guess is that at the end of it, Mitch McConnell will poke his head out of his shell and proclaim that while they tried to make headway with the White House on such things as the Bush tax cuts, New Start, and whether or not Bristol Palin gets another shot at Dancing with the Stars, the president wouldn't give them any more room and so they can't negotiate with a president who has already caved into them on just about everything. (I predict that there will be a negative press release from John Boehner's office before the meeting is even over.) After all, what's the point of bargaining with someone who doesn't have anything else to give up?
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Made It

Today is the last day of the hurricane season in the Northern Hemisphere. Unless something pops up in the next few hours, it looks like South Florida made it through another year without so much as a tropical depression coming through.
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Short Takes

North Korea lays out its nuclear details.

The Justice Department is looking for a way to prosecute the WikiLeakers.

Iranian nuclear experts were killed by bombings in Tehran.

Six American trainers were killed by an Afghan police officer.

A hostage situation in a high school in Wisconsin ended with the student gunman shooting himself and the hostages freed.

The CBO says TARP was cheap.

The Haitian election was chaotic with no clear winner.

A collision on Biscayne Bay between two racing boats killed two people, including real estate heir Steven Posner.

Hats off to Rep.-elect Frederica Wilson.
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Beyond Redemption

It's hard for a lot of people to remember a time when there were Republicans who were considered moderate and open to working with people who didn't march in lockstep with the far-right agenda, but there actually were members of the House and Senate who did just that. Most of them, though, have either retired or been marginalized. So it's a little poignant to hear one speak nowadays, especially when it's someone like former Sen. John Danforth, Republican of Missouri, when he's talking about the ones he left behind and the danger they face from within their own party.

“If Dick Lugar,” said John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, “having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption.”

Mr. Danforth is considered an authority on redemption; before he was elected to the Senate, he was -- and remains -- a priest in the Episcopal Church.

Mr. Danforth's concern has real implications. Mr. Lugar is defending the Obama administration's attempt to ratify the New Start treaty with Russia, and it is running into opposition from the Republicans based on nothing other than the fact that the GOP does not want to hand the president any sort of accomplishment. The leader of the opposition to the treaty in the Senate is Jon Kyl of Arizona, who so far has been able to come up with no clear reason to oppose it on any other grounds. The new treaty has the support of conservatives ranging from Pat Buchanan to Henry Kissinger, but Mr. Kyl is adamant.

It's obvious that Mr. Kyl and the Senate leadership have decided that it is in their best interest to oppose the Obama administration on everything, regardless of the logic or the benefit to the country. It's not just the New Start treaty, either. On a variety of issues that at one point had their support -- or at least a lack of organized opposition -- the Republicans have either turned around completely or invented new reasons to block their passage: the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, warrantless wiretapping, the closing of Gitmo, the Bush tax cuts, cap and trade, Wall Street reform, TARP, and any number of other issues, they were for them before they were against them. They're doing it because they can, and also, perhaps, because they are afraid of being held hostage by the fringe elements of their party. After all, Mr. Kyl saw that several of his colleagues in the House were defeated in primaries, including Robert Bennett of Utah, as was John McCain. So they're putting their own political interests and futures first.

It also proves one certainty we learned in the War on Terror: when a prisoner is threatened with torture -- in this case by the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin -- they will say and do anything to avoid it.
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History In the Raw

Since everyone else out here in the blogosphere is talking about the latest WikiLeaks dump, I might as well throw in my $0.02.

The biggest news is that what goes on behind the scenes in diplomatic dealings between the United States and different countries as they deal with their enemies and each other is not the smooth and polished art of diplomacy where everyone is nice and polite and courteous. It's actually rough, manipulative, competitive, mean-spirited, gossipy, distrusting, and dangerous. That's the way things go in most large-scale and complicated endeavors, and anyone who is shocked, shocked to find this going on is either naive or has a lot to learn about human interaction. That, or they never went to high school.

The massive release of over 250,000 pages of diplomatic cables and other background information is going to cause a lot of embarrassment for a lot of governments and administrations around the world, including our own, present and past. The New York Times says it has gone to great pains to insure that no sensitive classified information got out and that they consulted with the State Department on what was released. Critics will say that the decision of what's classified and what's sensitive shouldn't be left up to a newspaper, but in a country where freedom of the press is elemental -- and prior restraint is unconstitutional -- we have to expect that the editors of the media outlets do have the nation's best interest in mind. That's one of the risks we take when we embrace democracy, and so far it seems to have worked.

I have neither the training or the experience to evaluate the information contained in the documents, so I will leave that to those who do. People who are looking for political dirt to dish on the Obama administration and its dealings with foreign governments will find it, as will those who are looking for dirt and missteps on the part of the Bush administration. In that respect, the news is an equal opportunity dump. And there will probably be a lot of phone calls from one embassy to the next with the conversation going something like, "I'm sorry it got out that I think your leader is a pompous asshat," with the requisite reply, "Quite all right; I'm sorry the news leaked that we think your president is a ninny," and so on. It's not really news that everyone in the world thinks that the government of Iran should be taken out, and it's not really news that everyone thinks that the United States should do it so that when it goes to hell we can get blamed and they can move on to the next party.

Things are going to be a little bumpy for our relations with other countries for a while, and in that way I think the dump from WikiLeaks could be harmful. In previous cases where sensitive materials have been leaked to the press, it's usually done with an objective in mind; for example, the Pentagon Papers revealed, among other things, that the distrust of the government of South Vietnam and the lack of support for it by the United States went back decades. The release was meant to show that the war was being fought for our political agenda, not for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, and that the Johnson administration had lied about the war on a systematic basis. In what we've seen so far from WikiLeaks, there doesn't seem to be much of a plan other than to throw everything they've got against the wall and see what sticks. From what I understand in the shadowy world of leakage journalism, the objective is to release selected information to inform the public rather than overwhelm it. In that respect, the people behind the WikiLeaks have yet to show any reason as to why they're doing it other than that they can. If that's meant to serve a purpose other than just show history in the raw and get a lot of pundits their ten minutes on Hardball and Fox, it's not very apparent.
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Short Takes

China wants to talk about the Korean situation.

Arturo Gallegos Castrellón, the Mexican drug lord, confesses to killings.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the suspect in the stung bomb plot in Oregon, is labeled as "confused" by those who know him.

The presidential election in Haiti did not go smoothly.

Comcast had a big internet outage yesterday. (And yes, my cable service still sucks.)

R.I.P. Leslie Nielsen, 84, the actor who made deadpan delivery his comic forte.

Spider-Man, the musical, gets off to a bumpy start at its Broadway preview.
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Sunday Reading

Today is the big travel day after Thanksgiving (and I got home last night). Some Republicans are calling for the TSA to follow the Israeli model of airport security for U.S. airports. But Dana Milbank reports that it would be very expensive.

In a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, Israel uses profiling, background checks and extensive interviews to filter out the highest-risk fliers, who are then subjected to searches of luggage and person more invasive than anything the Transportation Security Administration has conjured. The air security argument has been about whether Americans would prefer Israeli-style profiling to the current system of body scans and pat-downs. But this overlooks a more fundamental problem: The Israeli system, even if it could be scaled up, is out of our price range.

El Al, Israel's national carrier, reported spending $107,828,000 on security in 2009 for the 1.9 million passengers it carried. That works out to about $56.75 per passenger. The United States, by contrast, spent $5.33 billion on aviation security in fiscal 2010, and the air travel system handled 769.6 million passengers in 2009 (a low year), according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. That amounts to $6.93 per passenger.

The analogy isn't perfect, because security is largely handled by the airline in Israel and by the government here. (In both countries, the government pays just under two-thirds of the security costs.) But this rough comparison indicates that Israel spends more than eight times as much on security per passenger. To duplicate that, the United States would need to spend an extra $38 billion a year.

And that might understate the cost of staffing the nation's sprawling air travel system with highly skilled interrogators; Israel, after all, has only one major airport. In Foreign Policy magazine, Annie Lowrey calculated early this year that if each passenger flying through a U.S. airport were subjected to 10 minutes of questioning by a guard, we would need 3 million full-time guards, at a cost of more than $150 billion a year.

That would more than cancel plans by incoming House Speaker John Boehner to cut $100 billion from the budget this year by returning spending to 2008 levels. It's also substantially more than the combined cost of TARP, which the Treasury said will wind up costing about $50 billion, and the auto bailout, forecast to cost $17 billion. It eclipses the $40 billion for AIG and would eventually top the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, expected to total $360 billion. The $16 billion that Republicans say they'll save by banning pet-project earmarks is small change by comparison.

Implementing the Israeli model also would amount to a massive government jobs program - just the sort of junk conservatives said they wouldn't touch.

More below the fold.

Caveat Emporium -- The internet can be a tough place to shop, and at least one merchant loves it when people hate him, as DecorMyEyes customer Clarabelle Rodriguez found out last summer.

Dozens of people over the last three years, she found, had nearly identical tales about DecorMyEyes: a purchase gone wrong, followed by phone calls, e-mails and threats, sometimes lasting for months or years.

Occasionally, the owner of DecorMyEyes gave his name to these customers as Stanley Bolds, but the consensus at Get Satisfaction was that he and Tony Russo were the same person. Others dug around a little deeper and decided that both names were fictitious and that the company was actually owned and run by a man named Vitaly Borker.

Today, when reading the dozens of comments about DecorMyEyes, it is hard to decide which one conveys the most outrage. It is easy, though, to choose the most outrageous. It was written by Mr. Russo/Bolds/Borker himself.

“Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com,” the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

It’s all part of a sales strategy, he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.”

That would sound like schoolyard taunting but for this fact: The post is two years old. Between then and now, hundreds of additional tirades have been tacked to Get Satisfaction, ComplaintsBoard.com, ConsumerAffairs.com and sites like them.

Not only has this heap of grievances failed to deter DecorMyEyes, but as Ms. Rodriguez’s all-too-cursory Google search demonstrated, the company can show up in the most coveted place on the Internet’s most powerful site.

Which means the owner of DecorMyEyes might be more than just a combustible bully with a mean streak and a potty mouth. He might also be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship — utterly noxious retail — that is facilitated by the quirks and shortcomings of Internet commerce and that tramples long-cherished traditions of customer service, like deference and charm.

Nice? No.

Profitable?

“Very,” says Vitaly Borker, the founder and owner of DecorMyEyes, during the first of several surprisingly unguarded conversations.

“I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”

Mercury In Retrograde

Last month was the end of the line for yet another American automotive brand. Assembly plants produced the final vehicles to carry the Mercury nameplate, an unceremonious end for a marque that had been introduced in 1939 as an upscale companion for basic Fords — but more recently allowed to atrophy to little more than a selection of lightly modified Ford sedans and S.U.V.’s.

Still, Mercury leaves behind a history peppered with compelling and even innovative cars that at once conveyed a clear message: based on Fords, but better. Depending on the year and the car, better could have meant any combination of bigger, more stylish, more powerful or more luxurious. Pairing Mercury with the Lincoln franchise after World War II underscored the theme of what is today called entry-level luxury.

Ford’s name for its new division naturally conjured up allusions of the speedy messenger to the gods from ancient mythology, for many years depicted in the company’s logo with a winged helmet. It also represented business or financial success; for many, buying a Mercury flaunted upward mobility.

John Baumann of Holland, Mich., grew up with the brand. “My father sold Mercurys, so we always had them around,” said Mr. Baumann, who was a teenager when the first Mercury Cougar came out in 1967. Since then, he’s had eyes only for early Cougars, especially the 1969-70 convertibles. He owns five.

One of the most acclaimed Mercury designs, the first Cougar was based on Ford’s Mustang but offered a striking look of its own — a roomier, more luxurious interior and, its fans say, a smoother driving feel. But it was a success the company let go fallow.

“My sons drove Capris in the ’80s,” Mr. Baumann said. ”But there’s nothing there today for the next generation — my grandsons — sporty enough to drive in high school.”

Looking at the brand’s final models, it might be difficult to envision a time when a Mercury was cool enough for a high schooler. But Tom Austin remembers when it was. Four years ago, he bought a 1953 Mercury Monterey, a car that was still fairly hot in 1957 when, as a high school student, he co-wrote and recorded the hit song “Short Shorts” with the Royal Teens.

Now a real estate appraiser in Ramsey, N.J., Mr. Austin shares the old-car hobby with his two sons. Mr. Austin’s Mercury exemplified the brand’s blueprint for revving up a Ford model with flashier styling, a more powerful engine and a plusher interior. It was a formula that Ford used, in varying degrees, to create models for the step-up brand over its 71-year run.

Bonus: John Pearley Huffman takes a Mercury Grand Marquis for a last ride.

Doonesbury -- More tweets from the twit.

HT to CLW.
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Short Takes

The U.S. and South Korea have begun joint military exercises. North Korea readies missiles.

It's Election Day in Haiti.

Some folks in Ireland are not happy with the austerity plan.

They got a lot of snow in Britain.

Joe Miller still thinks he has a chance to win the election to the Senate in Alaska.

In Michigan, the police are looking for three boys after their father tried to commit suicide.

G.M.'s IPO is now the world's biggest.
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Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing

Sarah Palin made a little gaffe the other day when she was on the radio with Glenn Beck and said that America should stand beside "our North Korean allies." Big whoop; that's not really a big deal, and everybody does it. A lot of bloggers jumped on it, but to me the occasional slip of the lip from Sarah Palin is nothing compared to the deliberate lies -- i.e. "death panels" -- and distortions she comes up with on a much more regular basis, not to mention her frequent entanglements with the basic understanding of the Constitution.

What's also a lot more telling is how Ms. Palin responded to the reaction to her gaffe. Rather than smile and acknowledge the error with a self-deprecating "well, that was a dumb thing to say," -- which would, by the way, go a long way to earning her some respect from even her opponents -- she went to Facebook and sent out a Thanksgiving "message" that was loaded up with every verbal gaffe attributed to President Obama that she could find in an obvious attempt to show that she's not the only public figure that misspeaks.

My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s....

You get the idea. Her message was a great big "Neener neener," and she's lashing out at President Obama, who, so far, has said nothing about her gaffe. As Andrew Sullivan says, "[t]here is no maturity here; no self-reflection; no capacity even to think how to appeal to the half of Americans who are already so appalled by her trashy behavior and cheap publicity stunts."

I think it comes down to a simple question: we've already had one president in recent memory who had all the maturity and foresightedness of a drunken frat boy. Do we really want to have another who reminds us all of the bratty kid we had to put up with in grade school?

HT to Judy Blume for the title.
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Short Takes

The Dud Abides -- The FBI arrests a teenager intent on setting off a bomb in Portland, Oregon, after a sting set him up with a fake bomb.

The situation is still tense along the border between the Koreas, but no military movement.

President Obama got a fat lip and 12 stitches during a basketball game.

The next WikiLeaks dump could rattle some nerves among the diplomatic corps and our relations with other countries.

Willie Nelson is out on bail after a drug bust.

Preliminary reports indicate that Black Friday was a good day for retailers.

Life upon the wicked stage -- The curtain falls early on some Broadway shows with big stars, including La Bete and Elling.
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The Coffee Commercial That Ran Forever

I was chatting with a friend a couple of weeks ago about how we knew the Christmas commercial season was finally at our throats, and we agreed that it all began with the first sighting of the classic Folger's Coffee commercial with Peter coming home from college and surprising his parents.


Wouldn't it be funny if Peter finished college and opened up a Starbucks?
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Fox Nation Gets Pwn'd by The Onion

Via TPM and Mediaite:

Most people recognize The Onion as the Peabody Award-winning satire machine that it is. Some people, however, don’t. Which is why we get a story like this every few months. Of course, it’s sometimes easy to mistake an Onion article for the real thing since the writers make sure to skew as close to their targets as possible. It also doesn’t hurt when real news outlets reprint the satirists’ work and decide not to let their readers know it’s a joke, as Fox Nation did today.

Yes, the Fox Nation editors were apparently so enamored with an Onion piece from today entitled “Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word E-Mail” that they reposted the first two paragraphs in their culture section with nary a sign as to its fictional nature. The only clue that this wasn’t real (besides a quick peek at your inbox to confirm that Barack Obama hasn’t been emailing you) was a link at the bottom instructing readers to go to TheOnion.com for the real story.

Go read the comments at the Fox Nation post to see how long it takes for them to figure out that The Onion is a satire site. And even then they still fall for it.

There are two possibilities here. Either the folks at Fox Nation are too dense to get the satire of The Onion, or they get it but know that their readers are so gullible and believe anything that they post that they would fall for it anyway. What do you think?
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Black Friday

I have nothing against people lining up at a store at 3:00 a.m. to go shopping, but I do think that's taking it to the extreme. Chances are whatever it is you're looking for will still be there when the sun is up. But if that's your passion and no one gets hurt, have fun.

I'm glad to see that there's such enthusiasm for consumer spending, and I hope all the reports of record crowds aren't just hopeful hype by the retailers. If it is so, then it's a good sign for the economy; people have been saving up for the holidays and this could be a sign of recovery.
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Short Takes

North Korea fires a missile during a drill and sets everyone on edge.

India remembers on the second anniversary of the attacks in Mumbai.

Afghan President Karzai blames the British for the Taliban impostor at the peace talks.

Something to be thankful for -- Three teenagers from New Zealand were rescued after being lost for 50 days at sea.

Tensions mount as Haiti nears their presidential election.

Dig it -- A sophisticated drug tunnel has been found near San Diego.
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Friday Blogaround

Here's your Black Friday blogaround.

- A Blog Around The Clock: the science of blogging.
- archy: family photos.
- Bark Bark Woof Woof: Motor Trend runs roughshod over Rush.
- Bloggg: TSA ravings.
- Dohiyi Mir: NTodd and the family say goodbye to a member.
- Echidne Of The Snakes: cell phones and unmarried women in India.
- Florida Progressive Coalition Blog: the thankful and the thankless.
- Left Is Right: bits of the week.
- Pen-Elayne on the Web is thankful.
- Rook's Rant: poor timing.
- Scrutiny Hooligans: kissing their assets.
- The Yellow Something Something: GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.
- WTF Is It Now?? Merry Christmas from the GOP.

If you're reading this at 3:15 a.m. before going shopping, you need some help.
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Friday Catblogging Classic

Dad's cat slept through all of it.

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Thanks

If I don't say it often enough, it's not that I don't think of it. Thank you to all who read this little blog and make your contributions in thought, word, and deed.

If you're celebrating the holiday, be mindful of the things that you have and can appreciate as gifts from others and the spirit in which they are given. And also be mindful of the gifts you give to others, even if you don't know it.

Peace.
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Happy Thanksgiving

It's going to be a good Thanksgiving for two friends of mine. After nearly a year of waiting, they have finally cleared the red tape and signed all the papers to make the adoption of their son final and should be heading home soon.

TARAZ, Kazakhstan — He was first placed into their arms nearly a year ago, an underweight 9-month-old baby in a gray sweatshirt. They were at an orphanage behind a crumbling housing project here in Central Asia, unimaginably far from their home in suburban Philadelphia, but immediately, they knew that they did not want to let him go.

They decided to call him Noah.

“He seems like the right little guy for us,” Rebecca Compton, a college professor, wrote as she and her husband, Jeremy Meyer, a labor lawyer, began what they thought would be a standard adoption process.

But these days in Kazakhstan, Russia and other former Soviet republics, adoptions are often far from standard, especially in light of the highly publicized — and deeply embarrassing — return of a 7-year-old Russian boy to Moscow in April by his adoptive American mother.

Ms. Compton and Mr. Meyer assumed they would soon be flying back to the United States with Noah. Then the delays mounted. Kazakh officials refused to sign off on the adoption.

Yet, Ms. Compton and Mr. Meyer would not give up.

They took leaves from their jobs, remaining in Kazakhstan for months on end while engaging in a bewildering fight with the Kazakh bureaucracy. It was not until last week, after setting aside their lives to pursue a child whom they now deeply loved, that they finally learned whether they could adopt him — whether this Thanksgiving would be a day of joy or despair.

[...]

Last week, they received final approval, and on Friday they walked out of the orphanage with a new, by now 20-month-old member of their family. They are hopeful that other foreigners who have also had Taraz adoptions blocked will obtain similar relief.

Ms. Compton and Mr. Meyer have to remain in Kazakhstan for a few more weeks, but they said they were fine celebrating Thanksgiving in a foreign land, given how much they had to be thankful for.

They noted that the holiday reminded them of Noah’s Kazakh name, Aldanysh. Loosely translated, it means “survivor.”

Best wishes to Jeremy, Rebecca, and Noah, and Добро пожаловать домой.
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Thanksgiving

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Short Takes

South Korea toughens up its defenses on the islands.

China is wary of the sabre-rattling going on in their backyard.

Ireland unveils its austerity plans.

It seems that a lot of people opted out of National Opt-Out Day.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) outlines his reason for being against the New START Treaty: It's because Barack Obama is the president, that's why.

The U.S. is dropping the color-coded alert system.

Charges have been dropped against the accused cat-killer in Palmetto Bay, Florida.

Million-dollar legislature: A lot of the people that make the laws in Florida are very rich.
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Family Dinner

My siblings and I got together at my parents house for dinner tonight. Mom made Pork "Osso Buco" with sauerkraut, new potatoes, and apples. For dessert my sister brought a scrumptious apple pie. We all ate ourselves to a stupor, and tomorrow we'll do the same at Carranor for the Big Dinner.

And speaking of being thankful, check out this article from The Blade on how one restaurant in Toledo is making it a day for thanks and giving for the city's homeless.

Nobody wants to brag about their benevolence.

But a mighty thoughtful day is in store Thursday at The Docks in International Park for hundreds of Toledo's hard-luck residents.

Several area businesses, churches, and outreach centers have quietly planned a special Thanksgiving Day feast for 1,100 people normally served by the Cherry Street Mission Ministries.

Their purpose has been twofold: Doing something nice for the needy and taking some of the pressure off the Cherry Street Mission.

Dan Rogers, the mission's president and chief executive officer, said he was touched when Mike Gibbons, co-founder, owner, and president of Mainstreet Ventures Inc., of Ann Arbor, approached him 10 months ago with an idea that goes beyond a simple donation.

Mr. Gibbons, of Sylvania, is opening Real Seafood to 600 of Cherry Street's clients.

An additional 500 hot meals will be delivered to 152 families who have at least one person with mobility issues too great for the restaurant experience.

"Isn't that amazing?" Mr. Rogers asked. "What a blessing to us and to our community."

And, of course, there's always another way to celebrate the day...


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DeLay In the Dock - Update

It looks like I lost my bet with myself:

AUSTIN – Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful and divisive Republican lawmakers to ever come out of Texas, was convicted Wednesday of money laundering charges in a state trial, five years after his indictment here forced him to resign as majority leader in the House of Representatives.

After 19 hours of deliberation, a jury of six men and six women decided that Mr. Delay was guilty of one charge of money laundering and one charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

As the verdict was read, Mr. DeLay, who is 63, sat stone-faced at the defense table. Then he rose, turned, smiled and hugged his wife and then his weeping daughter in the first row of spectators. He faces between five and 99 years in prison, though the judge may choose probation.

A few minutes later, Mr. Delay said outside the door of the courtroom that he would appeal the decision. He called the prosecution a political vendetta by Democrats in the local district attorney’s office, and revenge for his role in orchestrating the 2003 redrawing of congressional districts to elect more Republicans.

As I said:

I have a bet with myself that he will be acquitted on all counts. I have no basis for that conclusion; it's just a hunch. Then he will make the tour of the Fox News shows crowing about how he was persecuted by a politicized Justice Department and a vengeful prosecutor and that his name was dragged through the mud for the sake of partisan politics. He will then praise the jury who saw through the whole charade and that the justice system truly works. Of course, if he's convicted, he'll say exactly the same thing except the last part, and then he'll appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court. Any takers?

I got the verdict wrong, but I had Mr. DeLay's statement nailed.

Enjoy your years with Bubba, your new BFF, Tom.
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Hate Is A Family Value

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks such things, has designated the Family Research Council as a "hate group."

The SPLC gave the Family Research Council the designation due to anti-gay speech from its leaders, which the SPLC says includes calls for gay men and lesbians to be imprisoned.

Labeling the Family Research Council a hate group puts one of Washington's most powerful social issues advocates into the company of groups like the Nation of Islam and the now mostly defunct Aryan Nations in the eyes of the SPLC, which tracks 932 active hate groups in the U.S.

Groups are labeled hate groups by the SPLC -- which made a name for itself by using civil lawsuits to severely weaken the KKK and other white supremacist groups -- when they "have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics," according to the group's website.

For the Family Research Council, which hosts the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington -- an event which this year drew presidential hopefuls like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee -- the designation comes thanks to the group's standing at the forefront of opposition to gay marriage and open gay and lesbian service in the military.

The main offender in the eyes of the SPLC is Peter Sprigg, the FRC's senior researcher and vocal opponent of the gay rights movement. In May, Sprigg told me that an end to Don't Ask, Don't Tell would lead to more American servicemen receiving unwelcome same-sex fellatio in their sleep, part of a long line of reasoning from Sprigg suggesting that gay men are more likely to be sex offenders than anyone else.

The SPLC pointed to several other Sprigg comments when deciding to list the FRC as a hate group.

For instance, this:

[I]n March 2008, Sprigg, responding to a question about uniting gay partners during the immigration process, said: "I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them." He later apologized, but then went on, last February, to tell MSNBC host Chris Matthews, "I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions on homosexual behavior." "So we should outlaw gay behavior?" Matthews asked. "Yes," Sprigg replied.

[...]

The SPLC designation of the Family Research Council as an anti-gay hate group potentially poses more of a challenge for Republicans. Though many conservatives view the SPLC as a progressive group and therefore no more worthy of respect than, say, ACORN, the SPLC hate group label will almost undoubtedly make it into press reports about future events like the Values Voter Summit. That means Republican presidential hopefuls who may want to reach out to gay and lesbian Republican groups like the Log Cabin Republicans and GOProud -- which can be good sources of fundraising as well as "I'm not anti-gay" cred on the campaign trail -- may have to explain why they publicly praised and rushed to address a group that SPLC is calling one of the worst perpetrators of ugly myths about gays.

Cue up the accusations of "anti-Christian bigotry" and "promoting the Radical Homosexual Agenda" from the FRC in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... Ignition... We have liftoff.
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Question of the Day

Cooks ahoy!

What's your favorite Thanksgiving dish?

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Shut Up and Drive, Rush

Motor Trend is by no means a political magazine, and even if it was, I doubt that it would be considered a lefty tree-hugger journal. After all, they write about cars that consume oil and emit exhaust. But when they chose the Chevrolet Volt as the 2011 Car of the Year, that incurred the wrath of Rush Limbaugh, accusing them of being in the pocket of the Obama administration and the folks who bailed out General Motors.

Anyone that reads MT knows that they have a very good staff of writers who do not suffer fools gladly. And Todd Lassa proved it in his response to Mr. Limbaugh.

You said, “Folks, of all the cars, no offense, General Motors, please, but of all the cars in the world, the Chevrolet Volt is the Car of the Year? Motor Trend magazine, that’s the end of them. How in the world do they have any credibility? Not one has been sold. The Volt is the Car of the Year.”

So, Mr. Limbaugh; you didn’t enjoy your drive of our 2011 Car of the Year, the Chevrolet Volt? Assuming you’ve been anywhere near the biggest automotive technological breakthrough since … I don’t know, maybe the self-starter, could you even find your way to the front seat? Or are you happy attacking a car that you’ve never even seen in person?

Last time you ranted about the Volt, you got confused about the “range,” and said on the air that the car could be driven no more than 40 miles at a time, period. At least you stayed away from that issue this time, but you continue to attack it as the car only a tree hugging, Obama-supporting Government Motors customer would want. As radio loudmouths like you would note, none of those potential customers were to be found after November 2.

Back to us for a moment, our credibility, Mr. Limbaugh, comes from actually driving and testing the car, and understanding its advanced technology. It comes from driving and testing virtually every new car sold, and from doing this once a year with all the all-new or significantly improved models all at the same time. We test, make judgments and write about things we understand.

Chevrolet has not sold one Volt because it’s not on sale yet. It will not sell 10,000 this first model year (although GE plans to buy truckloads for its fleet), because it takes time to ramp up production. See, Rush, because we’re the World’s Automotive Authority, we get access to many cars before they go on sale.

[...]

GM designed the Chevy Volt after its failed experiment with the EV1, which was its attempt to respond to a California mandate. States rights, you know. While Toyota was developing, and eventually selling the hybrid Prius in ever-greater numbers, GM decided to move beyond the Prius-model with a new kind of technology that’s not quite plug-in hybrid, not quite pure electric.

It unveiled the Chevy Volt concept at the 2007 Detroit auto show. That means GM began working on it before the November 2006 elections, when the Republican Party had majorities in the House and Senate, before President Bush had signed a single veto. Bob Lutz, who famously decreed, “Global Warming is a crock of shit,” introduced the car two years before Bush gave GM its first bailout from TARP pocket change. This was two-and-a-half years before Obama’s Automotive Task Force forced GM into bankruptcy.

[...]

All the shouting from you or from electric car purists on the left can’t distort the fact that the Chevy Volt is, indeed, a technological breakthrough. And it’s more. It’s a technological breakthrough that many American families can use for gas-free daily commutes and well-planned vacation drives. It’s expensive for a Chevy, but many of those families will find the gasoline saved worth it. If you can stop shilling for your favorite political party long enough to go for a drive, you might really enjoy the Chevy Volt. I’m sure GM would be happy to lend you one for the weekend. Just remember: driving and Oxycontin don’t mix.

That was a 110-octane burn.

HT to CLW.
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To Opt Out or Not To Opt Out

I made my Thanksgiving travel plans a month before this whole issue of enhanced security at the airports blew up... so to speak. As I told you when I flew on Monday, I didn't experience any more delay or see anyone getting the full body scan treatment. The kerfuffle, however, has now gone beyond what goes on at the airport and taken on -- what else -- a political tinge with conservatives, who are finding themselves being subjected to pat-downs, demanding that the TSA start using profiling of passengers as opposed to singling out everybody, including Granny and Baby Snooks. How dare they grope Thurston Howell III and let Mustafa al-Gebra go through the metal detector without even a grab on the ass?

Today is being called National Opt-Out Day by folks that object to the full-body scans and the enhanced pat-downs. I get the point of the protests and in the case of people who are survivors of sexual assault or have other legitimate reasons to object to being touched by strangers, there has to be a better way.

But through all of this, the people who do not need to be harassed or blamed are the TSA agents at the checkpoints in the airports. They are doing their jobs as best they can. Some people have mocked them as minimum-wage rent-a-cops or worse, government bureaucrats. But it's a thankless job, the pay isn't great, the hours are long, and they have to put up with a lot of people who are lashing out at them because they can't kick the dog or yell at their kids or their spouse.

So in the spirit of the Thanksgiving season, if you're going out today to the airport, do one small goodness for your fellow citizen: smile and thank the TSA agent who checks your I.D. and guides you through the security. They have a life, too, and they are people who don't like making other people uncomfortable any more than you do, and they didn't make the rules. The least you can do is be nice.
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Ka-Ching!

Something tells me the economy is getting better.

U.S. companies' profits rose in the third quarter to an annual rate of $1.66 trillion, the highest on record, reflecting the divergence between the recovery for the corporate sector and American households.

After-tax earnings rose by 3.2%, compared with the second quarter's gain of 0.9%, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. Year over year, profits were 28.2% higher, as companies increased sales while keeping labor costs down.

If Barack Obama is a socialist bent on beating down corporate America and forcing Wall Street to its knees, he really sucks at it.
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Short Takes

The U.S. is sending an aircraft carrier to joint exercises off Korea in light of the shelling yesterday.

A second blast at the mine in New Zealand ends any hope for survivors of the first one.

The economy grew faster than expected last summer; 41 states saw growth in employment.

If you're traveling in the Northwest or Rockies today, look out.

It could be more than just weather that make traveling miserable today.

The most important news of the day: Jennifer Grey won Dancing With the Stars.
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The 100 Books

Via Michael of Musing's musings (on hiatus, apparently) and Fallenmonk, the BBC believes most people will have read only six of the 100 books listed below the fold.

I could get really picky and say that since the entire Harry Potter canon is included, all you have to do is read those seven books and you're ahead. There also seem to be some redundancies; how can you list The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and Hamlet and count them separately? The same with The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I also quibble with the inclusion of the entire Harry Potter series and only one of the Arthur Ransome books, but that's me. They're are all fiction, which is why they included The Bible and left off A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

I have no idea what the criterion was for the selection process; certainly it wasn't the quality of the writing or else they wouldn't have included such crap as The DaVinci Code. (If so, my respect for the BBC is destroyed.) I'm guessing it's based on popularity and sales. But then, there are some books on here I've never heard of, and I consider myself to be fairly well-read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - A.S. Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I came up with about 40. How did you do?

Footnote: After some research, the origins of the list and the meme are "murky and mysterious", so to lay the credit -- or blame -- at the feet of Auntie Beeb is going a bit out on a limb.
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DeLay In the Dock

Via the New York Times:

AUSTIN, Tex. — Jurors began deliberating Monday in the money-laundering trial of Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader who was forced to resign five years ago after he was indicted here.

I have a bet with myself that he will be acquitted on all counts. I have no basis for that conclusion; it's just a hunch. Then he will make the tour of the Fox News shows crowing about how he was persecuted by a politicized Justice Department and a vengeful prosecutor and that his name was dragged through the mud for the sake of partisan politics. He will then praise the jury who saw through the whole charade and that the justice system truly works. Of course, if he's convicted, he'll say exactly the same thing except the last part, and then he'll appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court. Any takers?

Frankly, it doesn't matter to me what happens to him, but there is a part of me that would enjoy seeing him in the joint and married to the guy with the most cigarettes.
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Short Takes

New York Times: "American and Afghan officials say that a man purporting to be Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, a key figure in negotiations who was paid by the West, was faking.

There were artillery rounds traded between the two Koreas.

A stampede by the crowd at a festival in Cambodia has killed a lot of people.

In the wake of the bailout, the Irish prime minister is calling for an early election once the budget is passed.

Joe Miller is filing suit in Alaska over the Senate race.

Miami-Dade is becoming a safer place to live.
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Shorter David Broder

Where oh where is the bipartisanship? The Republicans are getting all butch, so if they don't get exactly what they want, it will be the Democrats' fault.

Pearls for clutching and smelling salts are available on Aisle 4.
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Welcome to Perrysburg

I made it here with my junk untouched. Going through the security at MIA this morning was no different than the many other times I've gone through it; no "enhanced screening," with the big full-body machine. If anything, it was faster, especially since the line switched back and forth at least five times. I think I was through in under ten minutes from start to finish.

So here I am in my spot in my parent's house. The weather is typical November; grey-cloudy and rainy, and surprisingly warm; the current temperature is a balmy 65F. Alas, it will not last; the high for tomorrow is predicted to be 49, and there's a chance of snow on Friday.

As is the case with my vacations, blogging will be light and variable for the rest of the week, but I'll pop in every so often.
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Over The River...

I'm heading off this morning for a visit home for Thanksgiving with my parents and my older brother and his wife. I'm trying to remember the last time that I celebrated this particular holiday with my family in my hometown of Perrysburg, and I think it must be at least thirty years or more. Since then I've lived in a lot of different places -- Indiana, Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, and Florida -- and I've usually been able to find a place to celebrate the holiday (and watch the Lions get their butts kicked) with friends or the extended family. I especially remember the massive feasts Allen's family would do when we lived in Longmont, Colorado, and when we then moved to Michigan we'd travel the 100 miles from Petoskey to Northport for dinner with my parents. We had our first Thanksgiving in New Mexico with my parents who traveled out there to visit our relatives in Santa Fe, and from then on we either did it ourselves or accepted invitations from friends for the traditional New Mexico Thanksgiving dinner that included the traditional turkey but added the spices and chiles of the land. Here in Florida I've been the guest of friends and my extended family as well and discovered that there are many ways to enjoy a turkey dinner in the tropics.

This year we're going back to the old traditions of the big dinner at the little club our family has belonged to in Perrysburg since 1957. We'll have the dinner in the big dining room with lots of other families -- new generations and new friends, too -- and then get together with more friends later. The Lions are playing the New England Patriots, so we'll watch the game from the comfort of home instead of bundling up to sit in the bleachers of the old Tiger Stadium like we used to when we had season tickets. The one advantage of that arrangement was knowing we had a nice hot meal waiting for us when we got home... and we weren't subjected to endless Christmas-themed car commercials.

Anyway, I'll see you when I get there.
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November 22, 1963

Friday, November 22, 1963. I was in the sixth grade in Toledo, Ohio. I had to skip Phys Ed because I was just getting over bronchitis, so I was in a study hall when a classmate came up from the locker room in the school basement to say, "Kennedy's dead." We had a boy in our class named Kennedy, and I wondered what had happened - an errant fatal blow with a dodgeball? A few minutes later, though, it was made clear to us at a hastily-summoned assembly, and we were soon put on the busses and sent home. Girls were crying.

There was a newspaper strike at The Blade, so the only papers we could get were either from Detroit or Cleveland. (The union at The Blade, realizing they were missing the story of the century, agreed to immediately resume publication and settle their differences in other ways.) Television, though, was the medium of choice, and I remember the black-and-white images of the arrival of Air Force One at Andrews, the casket being lowered, President Johnson speaking on the tarmac, and the events of the weekend - Oswald, Ruby, the long slow funeral parade, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save" - merging into one long black-and-white flicker, finally closing on Monday night with the eternal flame guttering in the cold breeze.

I suspect that John F. Kennedy would be bitterly disappointed that the only thing remembered about his life was how he left it and how it colored everything he did leading up to it. The Bay of Pigs, the steel crisis, the Cuban missle crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, even the space program are dramatized by his death. They became the stuff of legend, not governing, and history should not be preserved as fable.

I never thought I'd be old enough to look back forty-seven years to that time. And according to NPR, sixty percent of Americans alive today were not yet born on that day. Today the question is not do you remember JFK, but what did his brief time leave behind. Speculation is rife as to what he did or did not accomplish - would we have gone in deeper in Vietnam? Would he have pushed civil rights? Would the Cold War have lasted? We'll never know, and frankly, pursuing such questions is a waste of time. Had JFK never been assassinated, chances are he would have been re-elected in 1964, crushing Barry Goldwater, but leading an administration that was more style than substance, battling with his own party as much as with the Republicans, much like Clinton did in the 1990's. According to medical records, he would have been lucky to live into his sixties, dying from natural causes in the 1980's, and he would have been remembered fondly for his charm and wit - and his beautiful wife - more than what he accomplished in eight years of an average presidency.

But it was those six seconds in Dealy Plaza that defined him. Each generation has one of those moments. For my parents it was Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the flash from Warm Springs in April 1945. Today it is Challenger in 1986, and of course September 11, 2001. And in all cases, it is what the moment means to us. It is the play, not the players. We see things as they were, contrast to how they are, and measure the differences, and by that, we measure ourselves.

Previously published, with minor edits, on November 22, 2003.
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Delayed Reaction

The inevitable question:

How did an agency created to protect the public become the target of so much public scorn?

After nine years of funneling travelers into ever longer lines with orders to have shoes off, sippy cups empty and laptops out for inspection, the most surprising thing about increasingly heated frustration with the federal Transportation Security Administration may be that it took so long to boil over.

It's simple: the TSA is now a branch of a government run by a Democrat.

Up until now, we were told that if we didn't submit to shoes-off and no-fluids inspections, Osama bin Laden and his brown hordes would invade the airport. Now that the conservatives have suddenly discovered that their civil liberties are more important when there's a Democrat in the White House -- just like they discovered that the deficit was a huge problem only after the Bush administration and the people who got us there have left town -- they're using the TSA as a convenient opportunity to ramp up their outrage over the assault on their inalienable right to carry a cup of Starbucks coffee through the screening.

Yes, I do get it that the enhanced pat-downs are traumatic for people who have survived sexual assaults. I'm not minimizing them at all. In fact, what is more outrageous is that when people were being singled out for random searches before this latest surge of junk-touching, the wingers dismissed the concerns of the survivors as just whining and accusations of not being patriotic enough to put up with the invasion in the name of the War on Terra.
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Out With the Old, In With the Old

The Miami Herald looks at Gov.-elect Rick Scott's transition team. Not surprisingly, it sounds like lobbyists and GOP party fundraisers are getting frontsies.

Scott is soliciting cash for his inauguration from special interests and Tallahassee insiders he eschewed on the campaign trail, offering them VIP treatment in return for $25,000 contributions. He also wants them to pay for a ''jobs tour'' being planned for December.

[...]

Scott has blamed special interests and party insiders for wasteful spending in state government, but put lobbyists Wayne Watters and Margaret Duggar and state party fundraiser Dr. Akshay Desai on his healthcare team.

Heading the budget team is Donna Arduin, well known in conservative economic circles for her opposition to taxes on wealth. She earned $180,000 in five months on Scott's campaign for authoring his jobs plan.

Arduin was former Gov. Jeb Bush's first budget director. After working in a similar role for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, she returned to Florida in 2007 to write then-House Speaker Marco Rubio's plan to increase state sales taxes and eliminate property taxes.

Heading the transition team on health issues is another former Bush acolyte, Alan Levine. Now a vice president with Health Management Associates, a Naples-based operator of 58 hospitals in 15 states, he was most recently health secretary under Gov. Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, where he helped reduce the Department of Health and Hospital workforce by 25 percent.

And the beat goes on.
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Short Takes

The Palestinian leader has demanded a halt to the settlements as a condition of the peace.

Ireland has applied to the EU for an emergency loan to help get out of its debt crisis.

There is little hope for the trapped miners in New Zealand.

Rescuers pulled 29 survivors from a flooded mine in China.

Today's Number -- 1,000,000,000 (1 billion): That's the number of people worldwide who cannot afford healthcare, according to the WHO.

The gunman who shot and wounded the park ranger in Utah is still evading capture.

Black Friday is starting early if you shop on-line.
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Table For Five

Every once in a while -- not often enough, actually -- I get together with some of my fellow South Florida bloggers. Today we met up at Balan's on Lincoln Road on Miami Beach: two of the good folks from Eye on Miami, Rick from South Florida Daily Blog, and the keeper of Discourse. It was a nice day, the food was good, and the conversation even better. We solved all of the problems that face Florida and the country and even had time to share our wisdom with some of our fellow brunchers.

As Rick notes in his post, this kind of meeting is really good. You might think that since we're all progressives, we all agree on everything. Actually, we don't, and we had a good time sharing our views. And for me, since I'm a solo blogger, it's good to be hearing other points of view without the barrier of a monitor and pixels; it makes you think in real time and learn.

Next time, Rick, we'll sit inside and keep cool. And I'll try the French toast, too. It looked really good.
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Sunday Reading

A Conscious Decision? -- Steve Benen looks at the Republican Party's tactics in governing.

Consider a thought experiment. Imagine you actively disliked the United States, and wanted to deliberately undermine its economy. What kind of positions would you take to do the most damage?

You might start with rejecting the advice of economists and oppose any kind of stimulus investments. You'd also want to cut spending and take money out of the economy, while blocking funds to states and municipalities, forcing them to lay off more workers. You'd no doubt want to cut off stimulative unemployment benefits, and identify the single most effective jobs program of the last two years (the TANF Emergency Fund) so you could kill it.

You might then take steps to stop the Federal Reserve from trying to lower the unemployment rate. You'd also no doubt want to create massive economic uncertainty by vowing to gut the national health care system, promising to re-write the rules overseeing the financial industry, vowing re-write business regulations in general, considering a government shutdown, and even weighing the possibly of sending the United States into default.

You might want to cover your tracks a bit, and say you have an economic plan that would help -- a tax policy that's already been tried -- but you'd do so knowing that such a plan has already proven not to work.

Does any of this sound familiar?

[...]

For months in 2009, conservatives debated amongst themselves about whether it's acceptable to actively root against President Obama as he dealt with a variety of pressing emergencies. Led by Rush Limbaugh and others, the right generally seemed to agree that there was nothing wrong with rooting against our leaders' success, even in a time of crisis.

But we're talking about a significantly different dynamic now. This general approach has shifted from hoping conditions don't improve to taking steps to ensure conditions don't improve. We've gone from Republicans rooting for failure to Republicans trying to guarantee failure.

[...]

Historically, lawmakers from both parties have resisted any kind of temptations along these lines for one simple reason: they didn't think they'd get away with it. If members of Congress set out to undermine the strength of the country, deliberately, just to weaken an elected president, they risked a brutal backlash -- the media would excoriate them, and the punishment from voters would be severe.

But I get the sense Republicans no longer have any such fears. The media tends to avoid holding congressional parties accountable, and voters aren't really paying attention anyway. The Boehner/McConnell GOP appears willing to gamble: if they can hold the country back, voters will just blame the president in the end. And that's quite possibly a safe assumption.

If that's the case, though, then it's time for a very public, albeit uncomfortable, conversation. If a major, powerful political party is making a conscious decision about sabotage, the political world should probably take the time to consider whether this is acceptable, whether it meets the bare minimum standards for patriotism, and whether it's a healthy development in our system of government.

More below the fold.

DREAM Deferred -- Fred Grimm on the fading chances for the DREAM Act.

Compassion? Well... wasn't that naive?

Supporters of the DREAM Act pursued a misguided strategy -- that it would be enough to tell the poignant stories of scholarly, bright, hard-working children of undocumented immigrants and the tragedy of their curtailed education.

It wasn't.

Advocates assumed that if other citizens got to know these students, they'd hardly insist on punishing kids for the sins of their illegal immigrant parents.

Compassion, as it turns out, was not integral to the new politics.

Students of the undocumented kind, no matter their academic performance, have become fodder in a ferocious political insurgency. Stories about Straight-A students, raised in the U.S., high achievers forced after high school to take menial jobs in the underground economy -- none of it mattered.

This week, José Salcedo, a Miami Dade College student government president, honor student and student rep on the board of trustees, made a public declaration of his illegal status at a DREAM Act rally. It won't help.

The populist campaign against illegal immigrants abides no special exception for young innocents, even honor students.

Politicians who know better seem cowed by the campaign against the DREAM Act, which would allow undocumented graduates of U.S. high schools without criminal records to attend college or join the military with a path toward legal residency. (Iowa governor-elect Terry Branstad further exploited the nativist mood, suggesting his state bar children of illegal immigrants from K-12 public schools.)

Even a few politicians from South Florida have found it expedient to diss the DREAM Act. U.S. Senator-elect Marco Rubio and U.S. Rep.-elect David Rivera, both sons of immigrants, oppose it. George LeMieux, the appointed U.S. Senator from Broward, a lame duck with nothing to lose, said he couldn't support the DREAM Act ''until we have taken substantial and effective measures to secure our borders.'' LeMieux well knows the long, vulnerable Mexican border will always provide an excuse to say no.

The Obama administration's trying to push the DREAM Act through a lame duck Congress. A long shot. Too much talk about compassion. Not enough about economics.

Frank Rich on the possibilities of Sarah Palin.

Revealingly, Sarah Palin’s potential rivals for the 2012 nomination have not joined the party establishment in publicly criticizing her. They are afraid of crossing Palin and the 80 percent of the party that admires her. So how do they stop her? Not by feeding their contempt in blind quotes to the press — as a Romney aide did by telling Time’s Mark Halperin she isn’t “a serious human being.” Not by hoping against hope that Murdoch might turn off the media oxygen that feeds both Palin’s viability and News Corporation’s bottom line. Sooner or later Palin’s opponents will instead have to man up — as Palin might say — and actually summon the courage to take her on mano-a-maverick in broad daylight.

Short of that, there’s little reason to believe now that she cannot dance to the top of the Republican ticket when and if she wants to.

...to which Gin and Tacos replies:

We know that Palin is an attention whore. All politicians are. But there are unspoken limits. One must "look presidential", which is defined as Potter Stewart defined obscenity – no one can explain it but we know it when we see it. This ain't it. This is the 15th minute of fame for a flavor-of-the-minute singer. It is the last grasp at a paycheck from a washed-up soap opera star. It is KISS on its 10th reunion tour too many. It is Police Academy 6. It is Jerry Rice trying out for the Broncos when everyone on the planet except him could tell he was finished.

When Braceras asks in her column, "Isn't such low-brow exhibitionism beneath the dignity of a former governor and potential presidential candidate?" she misses the point by a wide margin. Palin is a potential presidential candidate only in her own mind at this point. She and Snooki are equally likely to be living in the White House in the near future. After willingly suspending herself over (and her family) over the dunk tank full of sewage at the reality TV carnival, everyone except Palin herself realizes that her next gig is more likely to involve hawking fishing gear on QVC than delivering State of the Union addresses.

(Does that last sentiment sound familiar?)

Top Gear tries to drive on the right side of road here in America.

The studio audience’s parking lot for the taping of the American version of “Top Gear” was filled with the cars that guys who love cars love to own: Subaru WRXs with flat-black hoods, ancient Chevy Novas in primer, gymkhana-ready Mazda Miatas. There were also Mustangs, Corvettes, BMW M3s and at least one Ferrari — about 150 cars in all. It was a solid turnout for a rainy Tuesday afternoon in October at the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro.

“I just want it to not suck,” said Dave Coleman, 37, a Mazda engineer who took the day off to witness this third (or fourth) attempt to produce an American version of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s wildly popular “Top Gear” television show. And considering the cringe-worthy record of virtually every automotive television series produced in the United States, that’s a real worry for anyone who was already emotionally invested in the British show.

The new American “Top Gear” makes its premiere Sunday night on the History cable channel. Fans of the British original are waiting with the fingers of their Sparco driving gloves crossed.

Doonesbury -- We'll get back to you.
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Short Takes

The New York Times reports that North Korea has built a "vast" new nuclear facility.

A two-way street -- President Obama pushes back on criticism from Afghan president Karzai.

Former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois announced that she's running for mayor of Chicago, too.

There's a manhunt going on in Utah in pursuit of a shooter who critically wounded a park ranger.

Pass, friend -- Airline pilots will not have to go through enhanced searches.

The pope says condoms are okay for male prostitutes.

Un-friend him -- A New Jersey pastor who slammed Facebook for promoting infidelity admits to having at least one too many "friends."
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That Great GM Feeling

Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, explains how the rescue of GM saved more than the company.


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Showtime

If you're in South Florida and looking for something to do today, come out to the Wings Over Miami Air Museum at the Tamiami Airport and check out the annual Wings Over Miami Car Show that my car club is putting on in conjunction with the Sunshine Corvette Club. And if you own a classic car (1985 or older) that's either original or restored (no hot rods or custom), or a Corvette of any year, bring it along. Admission and show fee is $10, which is a donation to the museum, and additional proceeds from the event go to the Neva King Cooper School of Miami for children with severe disabilities.

There will be lots of cool cars, 'Vettes, and vintage airplanes on display, including the last Aerocar built and still capable of flight. The weather promises to be great, and it's a fun time for all. The show goes from 10 until 2 and you can also buy a sandwich and soda while you're wandering the displays. If you want to display your car, get there before 11.

Tamiami Airport is located at 14710 SW 128th Street in Miami, and here's a map to get there.
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