Thanksgiving Holiday

Advice From Eschaton: Dealing with your Fundie relatives this season. Include this How to Use the Bible in Your Political Arguments.

All I Want for Xmas Is Fair and Verifiable Elections - Hecate is launching an anti-Christmas boycott until he gets what he really wants - I’m not going to be buying Xmas stuff and I’m not going to be charging Xmas stuff until this country has a system in place that ensures fair and verifiable elections. I don't think this will work but I am not spending anything much on Christmas and this is a good excuse. I think I might expand this into I will not spend money at Christmas until Christmas is not commercial. What I will try instead are activity gifts, the smaller and more local the angle the better. Think about putting the X to Xmas.

More wacky exit poll info. They had to do so much adjustment to the exit poll data to match results, which is what the exit polls do - massage the poll data to match the actual results, that the party identification for Republicans went up 7%. There is a 7% Dem over GOP advantage in the latest very large polls. The final messaged exit polls have it even. There will be and shouldn't be a honeymoon for Bush and the GOP.

Minimum Wage - the states get it even if Bush and the GOP leaders in Washington don't. Based on 1968 minimum wage it should be at $8.50 an hour, not $5.15.

Positioning the Democratic Party - Fairness, Opportunity, The Future, and a discussion thread. Here is another analysis that examines the "trust gap" for the Party. Democrats need a heartland strategy to go with a positive message that reaches the heart as well as the wallet.

The problem with America's intelligence for Iraq was that mostly fair-to-good analysis was overruled by political decisions from the top. Bush and the GOP's fix, make the the intelligence agencies more political. Creating a New Worthless Intelligence Agency

When it comes to ignoring accurate CIA intelligence, the preeminent example in the Bush administration was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's indifference to al-Qaeda and her failure to ensure that the president read and understood the explicit warnings of an imminent surprise attack that the agency delivered to her. As the Washington Post's Steve Coll has summarized the matter in his book Ghost Wars, "BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S. was the headline on the President's Daily Brief presented to Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch on August 6 [2001]. The report included the possibility that bin Laden operatives would seek to hijack airplanes. The hijacking threat, mentioned twice, was one of several possibilities outlined. There was no specific information about when or where such an attack might occur."

The Agency may have become little more than a speed-bump for an imperial president who also dominates the Congress and the courts, but it is still part of the checks and balances of power within the executive branch of our government that make the U.S. a democratic republic and protect us from an imperial usurpation of power. With the reelection of President Bush and the appointment of Porter Goss to bring the CIA under White House control, it becomes increasingly hard to see how the republic will survive.

George Bush's real agenda from the tax-free right-wing think tanks.

Little is said in media analysis of the Bush victory about the role of big business in financing an elaborate, well-coordinated reactionary propaganda machine of think tanks like Heritage and Hoover, which pushed America far to the right. Business worked for 30 years to win this election and Bush knows exactly what it wants in return ­ more tax cuts, continued dismantling of publicly-supported programs like education, health care and pensions, and expanding US hegemony and business around the globe.

Real Americans tell the world about real moral values.