World Net Daily is reporting that Michelle Obama is disraught! Disraught, I say! She is worried about the stress and its effects on Barack Obama. Evidently, according to WingNutDaily, and no other credible source, Barack Obama has developed a facial tic because of the stress. Oh Noes! From WingNutDaily:

The strain of the long campaign and a frenetic transition period is beginning to wear on the face of President-elect Barack Obama, who has developed a facial tic under his right eye.

The tic on the lower part of his right orbital bone is clearly visible in his recent interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters. Campaign insiders say it first emerged during the primary season and has now become chronic.

A facial tic is a repetitive, spasmodic movement often involving the eyes and facial muscles. The cause of tics is unknown, but stress appears to increase their severity.

“The patients I’ve treated with tic disorders had one thing in common: They knew that the tics worsened when they were under stress,” said Dr. Robert T. London, a psychiatrist with the New York University Medical Center.

. . .

London says studies show that simple tics disappear during sleep, which suggests that a relaxation treatment, such as hypnotherapy, might work better than medication to calm the misfiring nerves during the day.

One guage of how real this story is would be a simple google search. When one performs one for “Obama” and “facial tic,” one gets many results from right wing sites, all quoting the WingNutDaily story. A similar search of google news reduces the results substantially, with no American news agency picking up the story at all. It appears WingNutDaily simply made the story up.

I’m all fascinated by this Robert London they used as their “expert.” A quick look at his background shows London to have graduated with his MD from the University of Miami in 1971. Let’s be generous and say the guy did so at age 25. That puts him at 62 years old or so. He serves now as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, with his office in Bellevue. 62 years old and only an Assistant Professor? Wow! I’ve half a mind to email the guy and see if he really said what he said. But why do that? Let’s just take the string of the sentence WingNutDaily quoted and see where they plagiarized it from. Remember, they made it look like the good Doctor was commenting via an interview with WingNutDaily’s reporter. They certainly didn’t credit July’s edition of Clinical Psychiatry News. No, this isn’t just dishonest about Obama potentially having a tic, but it is dishonest to use Robert London’s work without citing the source.

Weekly World News uses the same tactics, citing real Doctors as if they were commenting on the fiction Weekly World News weaves around the story. But Weekly World News is far, far better and has far more journalistic integrity than WingnutDaily. They’ve got Bat Boy gobbling up a whole turkey, and aliens out shopping on Black Friday. Hey, it could happen! And it is far funnier than any of the fiction WorldNetDaily puts out.

by Walter Brasch

My local newspaper editor, as he does regularly, once again attacked unions as the problem in America. This is the same editor who once said “all the laziest goof-offs and goldbricks in the newsroom” where he began his career were union officials—and that the unionized New York Times editorial writers are nothing more than “limousine liberals.”

For this most recent attack, two days after Thanksgiving, he combined the economy with what he believes are greedy unions.
“[L]abor unions and their leaders are . . . distorting the truth about the American workplace,” wrote the editor.

First he set up Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, who said that “Tens of millions of Americans are working harder than ever just to stay afloat. The latest Census Bureau report shows that wages are dropping and more people lack health insurance . . . a greater percentage of the economy is going to profits than to wages.”

Then, he cut apart Stern’s statement by gleefully citing data from the pro-business pro-management U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber said that wages, adjusted for inflation, for workers rose 30 percent from 1967 to 2007. Now, 30 percent seems good—unless you do the math. That’s about three-quarters of one percent per year, far less than any executive compensation. The editor then added in about 30 percent for benefits. Of course, these benefits also include federally-mandated deductions, like social security, Medicare, and unemployment taxes.

As an afterthought, the editor claimed the “poverty rate dropped from 22.4 percent in 1959 to 12.5 percent in 2007,” mysteriously trying to connect a reduced poverty level with reduced union influence. What he didn’t point out was that 1959 was a recession year, and that between 2000 and 2007, according to the Census Bureau, the poverty rate actually increased from 11.3 percent to 12.5 percent. About 37.3 million Americans are living below the federal poverty level; about 40 percent of all Americans fell beneath the poverty line at least once in the past decade.

Sounding the alarm, the editor tied together Democrats and unions. “[T]he plight of the American worker will grow more dire in the new year, as Democrats push to pass their legislation. . . . The danger is that their union-friendly legislation will hurt rather than help the American economy.” To wrap everything up, the editor of a newspaper with the median circulation of all dailies in America concluded by asking his readers to “consider the current state of the once mighty American auto industry, and ask yourself: What role did the powerful United Auto Workers play in its downfall?”

It’s the workers—and those pesky liberal Democrats—who the editor blames for America’s economic crises. Unfortunately, this editor isn’t alone in his contempt for the workers.

Dozens of columnists and TV pundits spread the myth that the average auto worker at General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler earns $70 an hour—about $146,000 a year. That figure, supplied by executives at the Big Three, reflects every cost associated with labor, including “legacy costs,” which are are costs of pensions and health benefits for retired workers. Thus, the automakers added up every conceivable cost and divided it by hours worked (pensioners, of course, don’t work) to get the inflated numbers. The reality is that the average UAW member earns about $28 an hour, about $58,000 a year, according to the impartial Center for Automotive Research. What the news media fail to report is that the UAW made significant concessions over the years, including wage cut-backs at Chrysler and a 2007 contract for all three auto makers that created a “second tier” wage level of $14.50–$16.23 per hour ($30,160–$33,758 per year, still below U.S. average wage of $40.405, according to the Census Bureau), reduced benefits, and a retirement plan now administered by the UAW not the Big Three.
Others who attack organized labor claim that UAW worker earn far more an hour than their counterparts at non-American non-unionized auto manufacturers in the U.S., and that’s a reason why the Big Three are failing. However, the reality is that the average wage at the international automakers is estimated at $24–$25 an hour, less than a $3 differential an hour for UAW first tier workers, according to Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic. Even the most casual observer understands that it costs more to live in the Detroit area than the rural areas where foreign auto makers established their plants.

In contrast to the concessions given up by the workers, Big Three executives still earn multi-million dollar incomes. Alan Mulally at Ford earned $2 million last year, plus additional compensation totaling about $21.7 million, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ford lost $2.72 billion last year. At GM, Rick Wagoner earned $15.7 million last year, according to the Wall Street Journal, while his company lost $38.7 billion. Chrysler’s Robert Nardelli earned $1 in salary last year, but has significant compensation package that is not publicly disclosed. Chrysler lost about $2.9 billion last year.

But, much of the media and the American public still blame workers and liberal Democrats who are favorable to the union movement for the economic crisis that led the Big Three to rev up their corporate jets and descend upon Congress to beg for a $25 billion taxpayer-funded bailout.
Are the workers and those liberal Democrats to blame for car sales being down 45 percent in October for GM, 35 percent for Chrysler, and 30 percent for Ford from a year ago?

Are they to blame for the auto industry going for the quick profit by pushing gas-guzzling minivans, SUVs, and trucks, while foreign automakers began looking at more energy-efficient cars?
Are they to blame that demand for autos has fallen off because Americans were unable to get financing in an economic crisis caused by greed of investment companies, banks, and almost every corporation that issues public stock?

Are they to blame for the auto industry executives opposing public transportation and alternative energy cars?

Are they to blame for auto executives being wrong about just about everything and for spending too much on everything from golf club memberships to private jets?

Are they to blame for the 100,000 factory layoffs in the past three years that also meant more work and no pay increases for every remaining factory worker?

Are they to blame for the auto industry outsourcing its work to countries where labor is paid pennies an hour—and then reaping huge profits by downsizing America’s workforce?

Are the workers and liberals to blame for the auto industry cutting health care and retirement benefits in order to maximize profits?
Finally, are the workers and those liberal Democrats to blame because Big Three executives failed to understand that they needed to cut corporate costs when maximizing profits so they could reduce their losses during a Recession—or for when their own bad business judgments would cause a catastrophic melt-down?

It may be in the best self-interest of non-unionized media to perpetuate the myth that the economic problems of America are because of the worker. However, such sloppy and inaccurate reporting isn’t in the best interest of the people.

[Dr. Brasch is the author of the recently-published Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush, available at amazon.com, bn.com, and numerous independent and chain stores. He is professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. You may contact him through his website, www.walterbrasch.com or by e-mail at brasch@bloomu.edu]

The latest Gallup poll of Republicans and self-identified Republican “leaners” is out. They asked the respondents who they wanted to run for President in 2012. Sarah Palin was the runaway winner. Here it is from Tampa Bay Online:

No sooner had Barack Obama won the presidential election than pundits started looking to 2012 and possible Republican challengers. A Gallup Poll asked people to rank the top 10 candidates they would like to run. Topping the list: Sarah Palin (67 percent), Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. Second to last: Gov. Charlie Crist (23 percent), one below former Gov. Jeb Bush (31 percent). The telephone poll was taken Nov. 5-16 and included 799 Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Perhaps the Republicans who responded to this can understand Palin’s sentences, while the rest of us just stare in wonder as she speaks. Or maybe they are concerned for Tina Fey’s livelihood?

I suppose what is most interesting here is the poor quality of the rest of the named field. Charlie Crist and Jeb Bush? Both have substantial problems getting nominated. Otherwise, this list is a rehash of this last election and primary, a whole bunch of uninspiring choices.

I was talking with my friend Jeff the other day. He’s a Pastor of a mainstream denomination church in a conservative part of California. I made a comment like. . . “It isn’t that all Republicans are racist, of course,” formulating thoughts as I went along. Then Jeff finished the statement quite well — “it’s just that for so many white people for whom race is an issue, they’re Republican.” I think you might be able to say the same about the issue of immigration, too, that the anti-immigration nativists tend to be Republicans, and many of them are so because they see white people becoming the minority in this country. All that said, it seems to me the Republican Party has a hugely complicated problem with race in its ranks. So the powers that be in the GOP end up presenting us with Bobby Jindal.

Everyone, though seems a bit coy about Jindal on the subject of race. The news media often talks about Barack Obama as a black man, or as an African American. The Washington Post this morning, in a profile piece of Jindal, calls him “nonwhite.” (Time’s profile of a few years ago refers not to race but to Jindal’s “ethinicity”) They catalog Jindal’s supporters, who include Grover Norquist among the fiscal hawks of the GOP, and Tony Perkins from the social conservative wing of the GOP, all the while touting Jindal’s bona fides for governance in Louisiana and also his extremist social conservative stances:

The record is still evolving, like the rest of him. But social conservatives like what they have heard about the public and private Jindal: his steadfast opposition to abortion without exceptions; his disapproval of embryonic stem cell research; his and his wife Supriya’s decision in 1997 to enter into a Louisiana covenant marriage that prohibits no-fault divorce in the state; and his decision in June to sign into law the Louisiana Science Education Act, a bill heartily supported by creationists that permits public school teachers to educate students about both the theory of “scientific design” and criticisms of Darwinian evolutionary concepts.

He voted with his caucus in Congress 97% of the time and gets a 100% pro-life voter rating from the National Right to Life Committee, and also a 100% rating from the NRA, and 0% on lgbt issues from the Human Rights Campaign. (Wikipedia) It is pretty clear that Bobby Jindal has worked hard to appeal to the extremist religious wing of the GOP on those issues, but it just might be that those issues are the real Bobby Jindal. It just may be that Bobby believes that the life of a woman is not as important and the life of the child she is carrying. Certainly Jindal’s religious record reflects the kind of zeal on often sees in converts (he is converted to Catholocism from the Hindu beliefs of his parents). What’s that? Jindal wrote an article on witnessing spiritual possession? That demon over on the left is the illustration that goes with the Jindal article about exorcism in the Oxford Review. I think it can be safely said that Bobby Jindall has made himself in the Christian conservative ranks.

But has Jindal unmade his ethnicity enough? Sure, Bobby renamed himself at the ripe old age of four after Bobby Brady on the Brady Bunch. How cute. But in India, where they are very proud of Jindal, they insist he is still Piyush, with all the ethic baggage that carries with it. They claim Jindal uses “Piyush” on all official documents, for instance. So he’s not hiding his race. No. Not at all. And the Republicans who love Bobby Jindal, they’re sure not counting on their constiuency to be “post-racial,” are they? Not so fast, not so fast.

I suppose that’s the issue that niggles at me. In today’s Washington Post, Krissah Williams Thompson notes that she’s not post-racial, that the campaign trail this year wasn’t “post-racial,” even on the Democratic side, and that even the Barack Obama campaign does not give credit to this “post-racial” notion:

In his speeches, Obama has never defined the kind of unity he seeks. It was commentators who dubbed his campaign a post-racial one and who have now declared that we live in a post-racial America. As Obama puts together his Cabinet, blogs and message boards are going crazy with discussions of whether he should be expected to appoint a team that’s more racially diverse than were those of his recent predecessors. Others argue that his “post-racial” campaign should not succumb to such quotas.

What the president-elect said about race eight months ago in a speech in Philadelphia, which he called “A More Perfect Union,” was much more complex than any cliched notion of unity. He described the country as being at a racial stalemate. “Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle,” Obama said.

Cassandra Butts, a senior Obama adviser who is African American, told the Wall Street Journal in the closing days of the campaign that she doesn’t consider Obama “a post-racial” politician. “When people say that, they seem to suggest that we are beyond the issue of race, that issues of race don’t matter,” she said. “I don’t think that is necessarily the case. I don’t think Barack considers himself post-racial in that way. He will tell you he thinks race does matter.”

I agree. For me, the goal has never been negating race through colorblindness — to do so would take a healthy discussion of existing racial disparities off the table. My aim is not for us to be post-racial but to embrace our cultural heritages while refusing to be confined by them.

That last bit is the part I think Bobby Jindal and the Republicans are ignoring. This isn’t about colorblindness. Color in our society has some pretty shameful connotations, certainly, but we can also celebrate color. I need not reflect on chains and on fire hoses when I think of black, but can also think of Odunde, of beauty. It isn’t our job to ignore racial difference, but to value it. “Post-racial,” then, is a bit of a bunch of crap if one thinks of it as “beyond” racial distinction. And that appears to me to be how Bobby Jindall has packaged himself, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Jindal is no longer Piyush, for instance, but Bobby. He is no longer a worshiper of those strange Hindu Gods, but is a very conservative Catholic in the Rick Santorum mold. He talks in a folksy bayou lilt, and never seems to refer to his racial background or ethnicity. I’m thinking that’s not what won people over for Obama, and it isn’t any kind of reflection of what we’ve got going on in this country today as far as race relations are concerned. there were many, many people on the right for whom race played a vital role in their not voting for Barack Obama. At least some of those Republicans are going to see through the Jindal disquise and see him as Piyush, the dark-skinned man who has a very white wife.

What is interesting, I suppose, is the standard evaluation that racism as a factor in voting is more prevalent in the South. The Republicans must be thinking that Jindal won in Louisiana, so race must not be a handicap for him, and besides, his name is “Bobby.” If that’s how they’re thinking, my gut tells me they have it wrong, that they haven’t adequately guaged the racism that lurks within their own party structure. I’m thinking Bobby Jindal as GOP nominee for President in 2012 is a train wreck waiting to happen, that a whole bunch of the Republican rank and file are not going to see Jindal the good politician but Jindal the convenience store owner who is married to a white woman, and they just might reject that image. Were I Jindal, I’d try 2016. The man is instead giving speeches in Iowa. Still, he’s not a stupid man, so maybe he’ll avoid testing the Republican constiuency until they mature just a bit more.

The sentencing memorandum on behalf of Mitchell Wade is in, and there’s some indications that he’s told some stories about yet more Republican office holders who accepted illegal campaign contributions. Among those office holders is Katherine Harris, she of the Florida vote recount that was so pivotal to giving us the failure that is George Bush in 2000. Seth Hettena has the story, as does Politico. Here’s a bit from Seth:

Mitchell Wade, the man who bribed Randy “Duke” Cunningham and then did much to speed the congressman’s spectacular fall, is asking a judge to sentence him to a year of home detention for all the help he provided the government. Prosecutors don’t dispute that Wade was helpful, but they believe that four years in prison is more appropriate for $1.8 million in bribes.

Would Cunningham ultimately have been convicted without Wade? Probably, but Wade made it happen much, much faster. He was debriefed 23 times by government investigators and supplied them a searchable electronic database of 150,000 documents, including the infamous “bribe menu.” And Wade’s cooperation didn’t stop with Cunningham. He provided damaging evidence against several others, including his testimony at the bribery trial of his former boss, Brent Wilkes, who’s now serving time in prison.

A 42-page sentencing memo filed by Wade’s attorneys says he aided the government in its investigation “of at least five other members of Congress” who were under investigation for “corruption similar to that of Mr. Cunningham.” These no doubt include Virgil Goode and Katherine “Pink Sugar” Harris. Wade wanted to open facilities in their districts and made $78,000 in “straw” contributions to grease the wheels. Neither Harris nor Goode has been charged with wrongdoing.

Prosecutors drop tantalizing hints about an even bigger, ongoing investigation. Wade was debriefed in 2006 and provided “moderately useful” background information in another “large and important corruption investigation” that also has not yet resulted in any charges.

“Large and important corruption investigation?” Man, this Duke Cunningham, Wilkes, Wade thing is the gift that keeps on giving. Sure, we all expect that there will be Republicans who escape the culture of corruption web they wove, but I’m sure we’re all hoping Katherine Haqrris gets caught in this one. This would be true justice in pursuit of voter fraud, eh?

George Bush, in a few words about the legacy he feels his Administration leaves the nation, had a few words to say earlier this month. The interview was done by Bush’s sister as a part of NPR’s StoryCorps feature. The New York Times has a little feature on the exceprts of the interivew that have been posted at the White House web site. I’ll comment on those White House bits:

Q How do you want to be remembered, and what are you most proud of?

THE PRESIDENT: I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process. I came to Washington with a set of values, and I’m leaving with the same set of values. And I darn sure wasn’t going to sacrifice those values; that I was a President that had to make tough choices and was willing to make them. I surrounded myself with good people. I carefully considered the advice of smart, capable people and made tough decisions.

Is he saying that his values included torture before he was elected? That those values included spying on Americans, included putting politics before justice, included appointing friends to positions of vital importantce and then standing there while a Brownie completely fucked up his job? Is Bush saying that his values measure Ashcroft and Gonzales and Rumsfeld and Brownie and all the incompetents he brought in as “smart? One thing can be certain about the Bush Administration, that he faced some severe challenges. The way he responded to them was to send the constitution to the shredder, attack others at random, and then alienate our allies around the world. There’s no value there that I’d be proud of, but Bush evidently follows a different notion of “values,” such as here, the very next sentence of the interview:

I’d like to be a President (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace. . .

Evidently freedom for Bush is a value that far outweighs the torture of thousands and the deaths of tens and tens of thousands of innocent men women and children in Iraq. He doesn’t mention any deaths in the interview. Perhaps senseless death fits just fine into Bush’s sense of freedom. It is claer also that Bush has had seven years to confront terrorism, and here we have a massive terrorist attack in India just a week or two after he makes this statement.

The man claims his values have been consistent and he hasn’t bent to political winds. To my mind that means Bush’s values were defective from the get go. I imagine I’ve got many Americans and peoples throughout the world who would agree.

Is he going to run against the Dinosaur Arlen Specter? Will Pennsylvanians get to see a real live celebrity coming to their town to campaign? Will someone finally make the single bullet theory a campaign issue? Will Tweety be able to keep his big yap shut and act like a politician, or will that even cancel out his celebrity? All good questions, and the web is in a tizzy the last few days over the possibility of Chris Matthews gearing up to run for Senate in 2010 in PA. Sorry, I’ve been more productive those last two days yawning and such. Is the latest news from the center of the state of PA, Patriot News? I suppose so:

Chris Matthews, the host of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” isn’t ready to say he’s running for the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania, but he continues to talk with top Democrats about the possibility.

Matthews met with state Democratic Party officials this week to talk about challenging Republican Sen. Arlen Specter in 2010. He met with Democratic State Committee Chairman T.J. Rooney and executive director Mary Isenhour in Washington, D.C., to discuss the logistics involved in a Senate run.

Isenhour said she left that meeting convinced Matthews has not made up his mind about running.

This story of Chris Matthews coming back to PA to run for Senate is capturing the hearts and minds of nearly everyone. Man! Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake and Huffington Post is giving advice on how Tweety could beat Specter. Quinnipiac has run a poll pitting Matthews against Specter. Fivethirtyeight.com is running a story about how Chris Matthews is staffing up for a Senate run, and Talkingpointsmemo is running a story with a Matthews nondenial denial about staffing up. There’s a frenzy going on, and if I were smart I’d just stay out of it.

I’ll settle on a yawn. First, the PA Senate seat isn’t so important. Arlen Specter will be running for his last term in office, he’ll be in the minority and during a Democratic Presidency to boot. I don’t mean to praise Mr. Specter any, but the Republican Party has changed mightily since he first ran for Senate, and while he’s not been all that mavericky, GOP values are not Specter’s values. One imagines that he’s tired of having felt the whip these last few years as the Republicans forced him into line time and time again. All this is to say that I’d not concentrate any national money here in an effort to unseat Specter, as there are plenty of other Republicans I’d rather see get the boot. Sure, SPecter has done some dispicable things while Bush is in power, but now a Democrat is in power, and I fully expect Specter to turn into the wind a bit. All this is to say I don’t see this seat as a huge priority.

Matthews? Why would we want Matthews as a Senator? He hardly makes a good TV talking head. If it weren’t that Matthews was a God in comparison to his counterparts over at FoxNews, we’d think Matthews was some kind of numbnut hick who couldn’t report work a pile of crap. Matthews has already got the world in the palm of his hands anyway, what with the Chris Matthews Show and Hardball. He’s the darling of all the talking heads and the heir to the Russet mantle. Why the heck would he want to go to the Senate, assuming he could beat Specter?

OK, ok, I know Matthews has a long history in politics, that he wrote speeches for Carter, worked for Tip O’Neill, b lah, blah, blah! Yeah, I’ve watched Hardball enough that I know the stories by heart. A strong bio does not make a candidate, a hot gossipy news story, or even anything all that interesting. There is a simple bottom line.

Look, Arlen Specter huffed and puffed and threatened to stand in the way of the Bush Administration spying on American citizens. Then he backed down and let the Bushies abuse our sivil rights. Bad Boy, Arlen. Tweety won a Media Matters of America Award for “Misinformer of the Year” in 2005. It’s not like we’d be replacing Specter with the higher priced spread or something. In fact, this would be like replacing day old white bread with day old whole wheat. Still day old, still not all that much nutritional vale, and both of them would be squashed by poltiical pressure as easily.

This is a stupid issue for all sorts of folks to be getting excited about.

It’s only a few days now until the Republicans sit down and vote for a new Chair of the RNC. There are several candidates to choose from, but I’m beginning to think Katon Dawson of South Carolina has the inside track. Yes, he’s been named one of the 25 scariest conservatives. There are those in South Carolina that thought Lindsey Graham so liberal they wanted to draft Dawson to take on Senator Graham. Though even right wing extremists have trouble with Katon awson having been a member of a Whites Only Club 12 years before noticing the policies of the club, I’m not thinking that will disqualify him among the GOP base. As I have noted before, and as Jesus’ General notes as well, Katon Dawson is now the favorite of Donald Wildmon, that extremist right wing religious mullah whack job who runs the American Family Association. Katon Dawson just may have the momentum to become the next GOP Chair, and I’m here to say that may keep the GOP in the wilderness of politics much longer.

To some degree Katon Dawson is saying all the right things on his way to changing his image so that he can at least fool Republicans into thinking he isn’t an extremist right wing whack job. Here’s how he puts his priorities to CNN:

“I am running to serve as chairman of the Republican National Committee because I’m ready to help lead our party’s turnaround,” Dawson said in a prepared statement. “We need to turn around our fortunes in many regions of the country. We need to turn around our grassroots organization, our fundraising, our use of technology and new media, and our candidate recruitment. We must move forward with the confidence that our message of optimism, hope, and freedom still resonates in the hearts of our fellow Americans.”

Of course that’s about as white bread a Reagan-esque policy viewpoint as there is. Still, the guy seems awfully clueless. He claims the GOP has a message of “optimism, hope and freedom,” when the fact is that there are only small regional pockets of the US who actually believe that. In this last election the GOP brand carried the negative attack, as is usual, with pride. Negatives are welded to the GOP brand, and that leaves little room for optimism and hope. As to “freedom,” there are surely Americans who believe the contradictory notion that spying on Americans and torturing others helps make freedom possible. That segment of the population is already part of the GOP membership. the rest of us are not fooled.

In a recent OpEd piece in Politico Katon Dawson again says almost all the right things. I’ll give him credit for knowing what the right values are that just might win back votes for the Republican Party. But when Katon Dawson gives other interviews, the result isn’t so inclusive and sane. In a June interview with Soren Dayton of The Next Right, Katon Dawson does just that when asked to comment on attracting African American voters. From The Next Right:

I asked if increased African-American turnout would create a problem for some legislative seats, and he responded, again, quite confidently, “we should win some seats we would not win normally,” due to “partial birth abortion, gay marriage, which are the pillars of the Democratic platform.”

One would expect a question about African American turnout to focus, perhaps, on African Americans, especially in South Carolina, a state where that turnout for Barack Obama was a key to his primary victory. Oddly, Katon hit the answer that must come every time Donald Wildmon pulls the string, that gay marriage and partial birth abortion, the divisive issues that failed Republicans this year, are still what the GOP should depend upon. Most telling is that Katon Dawson claims these issues are the “pillars of the Democratic platform.” Yes, lying and demonization through lying are right up Dawson’s alley. The actual facts here are that Democrats never campaign on either issue.

This is a Darwin moment in the making for the Republicans, and it may be very telling as well as ironic. The wing of the GOP that doesn’t believe in Darwin, led by such as Donald Wildmon and his fellow extremist Christian mullahs, is threatening to deal a death blow to the GOP by continuing with the same old same old divisiveness. OK, we in the Democratic Party can cheer a bit at such a development, but it is fascinating, almost like watching one of those videos where a guy hits himself in the nards with a rake or something. These Republicans just don’t seem to get it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. None of the writers here are women, at least since somegirl stopped active contributions. but the gender analyzer says there’s a 78% chance this blog is written by women. Not so decisive a reading of www.rove.com (58% chance of being a written by a woman. Hmm, not sure what to make of that. Whitehouse.gove is 77% manly, and perhaps the result with the most fun and interesting result is the response the gender analyzer gives when you plug in www.eschatonblog.com:

An error occurred
Sorry, we can only classify web pages written in english

Ah well. Happy Thanksgiving.

Have a good Turkey Day, folks.

Where to start, where to start. OK, Happy Thanksfiving. I head down to start on dinner in a bit, and am looking forward to a quiet and early meal, around 1:00. After we will head to the stadium and start partying at the tailgate there, where there’s sure to be more turkey. This is the season of eating dangerously, after all.

The incompetence? That would be George Bush’s staff sending out an invitation to American Jewish leaders to come to a reception at the White House in order to celebrate Hanukah. They sent the invitations on cards with a picture of the White House Christmas Tree being delivered. Yes, today’s incompetence is brought to you by the White House. From the New York Post:

The president and the first lady invited leaders of America’s Jewish community for a Hanukkah reception at the White House next month - but raised more than a few eyebrows by putting a picture of a Christmas tree on the invitation.

The message reads that the couple “requests the pleasure of your company at a Hanukkah reception,” written beneath an image of a Clydesdale horse hauling a Christmas fir along the snow-dappled drive to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

And, no, it is not a Hanukkah bush. A close look at the wagon reveals the message “White House Christmas Tree 2008.”

In the background, the White House windows are festooned with Christmas wreaths.

Those cards could very well become collectors items. Gee, a memory of the most incopetent Presidency ever. . . I’m betting collectors everywhere are hunting down the cards. Of course, some Americans are happy with Bush, so happy they want to secede and name him President for Life. But we’ll refrain from talking about whack jobs for now.