Dr. King and Sarah Palin: Pretty Much the Same Person. Not.

Making the world safe for democracy: Hooters comes to Japan.

Wear clean underwear: Routine traffic stop results in body cavity search under anesthesia. Tennessee law requires a search warrant be issued before a body cavity search is performed. Did Oak Ridge police request a federal prosecution in an attempt to get around state law?

Kibbutz Centennial: Degania Aleph turns 100 years old.

Carnival: dead in the water. I love that the cruise line is offering a free trip to the Splendor's passengers. If it was me, I don't know if I would be too eager to take another trip with Carnival.

The New Republic: Lessons From Bush 43. Here's the most interesting quote:

Those who study his presidency, then, won’t find a huge amount in the man himself. They’ll try to reach out and touch Bush the man, the thinker, the politician—and accidentally punch through a cardboard cutout. Behind the cutout? People who had been wanting to invade Iraq forever and got their way. People who had wanted to cut taxes for the rich forever and got their way. People who had been waiting forever for lucrative Pentagon contracts and got their way. The list goes on and on. The story of Bush will be much more about the myriad ambitious thinkers, ideologues, charlatans, and capitalists who threw themselves gleefully into the president’s orbit than it will be about the man himself.

This confirms what I have been saying since the 2000 presidential campaign: that Bush was a nothing -- simply a placeholder for the Republican establishment whose positions had been repudiated by the success of the Clinton Administration. We traded the Clinton success -- both foreign and domestic -- for eight years of the Republican/Bush chaos that ensued. Is it any wonder that we are where we are?

Important economic news! Oh wait, this is a joke. Isn't it?

Mick Jagger replies to Keith Richard's autobiography's criticisms. I like this bit:

I am forced into the role of martinet, the one who gets blamed for silly arbitrary rules. (Like, for a show in front of 60,000 people for which we are being paid some $6 or $7 million for a few hours' work, I like to suggest to everyone that we start on time, and that we each have in place a personal plan, in whatever way suits us best, to stay conscious for the duration of the show.)

I like Jagger a lot better -- and Richard a lot less -- after reading this non-apologetic, "sadder-but-wiser-girl" rejoinder.

Slate: Democrats didn't lose the battle of 2010. They won it.

Yes, Virginia, there is scuba diving in East Tennessee.

Your archetypal "Tea Party" candidate? The New Republic:

Since winning the Republican nomination for Joe Biden’s Senate seat in Delaware (thanks in part to $150,000 in out-of-state Tea Party money), Christine O’Donnell has provided virtually all of the race’s rhetorical oxygen. She has been asked to explain why it took her 15 years to get her college degree; what exactly happened when, in high school, she and a witch had a midnight meal “on a satanic altar;” how serious she was when she campaigned publicly to stop people from masturbating; and why the IRS has taken a lien on her property for unpaid taxes.

I'm still waiting to learn her answers.

John B. Judis:

The Tea Party is an accretion of various movements of the past decades, including the Christian right and, as Wilentz shows, the older anti-Communist Right. But it fits above all into the framework of American populism, which has always had right-wing and left-wing variants, and which is rooted in a middle class cri de coeur—that we who do the work and play by the rules are being exploited by parasitic bankers and speculators and/or by shiftless, idle white trash, negroes, illegal immigrants, fill in the blank here.

There's an ugly mood in the political air these days. Times are hard and the public is looking for someone to blame. The tea partiers are blaming -- who? Mostly, they blame Democratic politicians, despite most of the perceived problems occurring on a Republican watch. Regardless, my sense is that the "tea party movement" is more about scapegoating than anything else. And whether it is scapegoating to further Republican or Libertarian aims, this movement is certainly taking advantage of a weak economy to further such right wing partisan goals.

What worries me is that, the last time a national public was looking for someone to blame for bad economic times, we ended up with the Germans electing Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. And the internal group that got blamed for the disastrous German economy was, well, you know. While it hasn't happened yet, the ever-cyclical nature of anti-semitism suggests that, sooner or later, someone's going to try to lay it all on the Jews. Or the Muslims, or the Catholics, or the Blacks. And so forth.

The irony is that, despite the apparent middle class domination of the "tea party movement," that same middle class is unlikely to be the beneficiary of the the "movement's" success: "What’s undeniable, though, is that those most likely to benefit from right-wing middle class insurgencies are not the embattled middle classes, but the business interests and the wealthy associated with the Republican Party. That was certainly true of the 'Reagan Revolution,' which put an end to the movement toward income equality that had begun in the 1930s. So who benefits from these movements is not the same as who controls them on a day-to-day basis."

There's an ugly mood in the air.

Henley Bridge closes Jan. 3 for at least 2 years: But where will they have Boomsday?

Every homeowner's nightmare.

School bus driver charged with drunken driving: She was en route to pick up kids for Cedar Bluff Elementary School. Is a story like this why my kids don't ride the bus?

Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair:

[I]t’s an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the first two years of a McCain-Palin partnership in the White House might have produced. There would probably have been no stimulus bill, and the country’s economic condition would be no better (and probably worse). General Motors and Chrysler would have been allowed to go bankrupt rather than helped to emerge into a state of healthiness, as they may well be doing. There would have been no significant new regulation of the financial industry. The Bush tax cuts for those Americans with the highest incomes—something McCain had opposed before reversing himself—would have been extended. There would have been only modest health-insurance reform, at best—McCain’s proposals were Republican boilerplate and meant for use in the campaign, never a serious program. Perhaps there would have been greater progress on immigration, though McCain had already abandoned that issue, and it’s easier to imagine his taking the more nativist stance he has since adopted. There would be no Supreme Court justices Kagan and Sotomayor, but there would likely be two more conservative justices, and the days of Roe v. Wade would be numbered. There would be no troop drawdown in Iraq. The United States might well have bombed or blockaded Iran in response to that country’s flawed election last year, or in response to its nuclear program. There would have been serial feuds between aides to the president and vice president, but the fact that Vice President Palin had an independent power base, far larger and more enthusiastic than McCain’s own, would have limited what President McCain could do about it. The “Ground Zero mosque” dispute would probably have arisen anyway, and McCain might have been hard put to do anything but side with the opponents. The Palin-family soap opera would now be daily fodder for the national press rather than mainly the tabloids.

In that the Republicans/Tea Partiers are trying to regain congressional power by blasting the current Administration, it's valid and important to consider where the country would be had McCain won the election in 2008. Based just on Chrysler and GM going under and the resulting massive additional unemployment, we'd be in even worse shape. A McCain win would have meant Bush redux; with the country sliding down the recession slope at an ever-increasing pace back in late 2008, a McCain administration likely would have continued the descent, at a terrible cost to even more Americans.

Another thought: I am not, and have never been, a particular supporter for the Obama Administration. However, I have been saying for years that what we need are statesmen: public servants who have the courage of their convictions, even in the face of powerful opposition. In that context, the Administration and the congressional Democrats who have cast supporting votes -- even at the potential cost of their jobs -- have been acting like statesmen. We should remember that.

Man shoots couch during dispute: Guns don't kill people; stupid people kill people.

Are the couch's injuries life-threatening?

Study: Health reform will save Tennesseans $2.7B. Gee, I thought that health care law spelled the end of life as we know it.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.:

The country doesn't need this class war, and it is irrational in any case. Practically no one, least of all Obama, is questioning the basics of the market system or proposing anything more than somewhat tighter economic regulations—after the biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression—and rather modest tax increases on the wealthy.

But even these steps are apparently too much for those financing all the television ads, which should lead voters to ask themselves: Who is paying for this? What do they really want? And who gave them the right to buy an election?

Why, the Supreme Court did.

Mississippi Judge Jails Lawyer for Refusing to Recite Pledge of Allegiance. Here is the Contempt Order, too.

What blows me away is that, in this day and age, such nonsense still happens. Being able to refuse to recite a pledge of allegiance is fundamental to our constitutional liberties. Props to this attorney, who is willing to go to jail to protect this basic right.

And by the way, this issue was decided by the Supreme Court back in 1943: "'[N]o official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.' West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642, 63 S.Ct. 1178, 1187, 87 L.Ed. 1628 (1943). A state therefore may not compel any person to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag." Sherman v. Community Consol. School Dist. 21 of Wheeling Tp., 980 F.2d 437 (7th Cir. 1992).

Requiring the lawyer to recite the Pledge upon pain of contempt and jailing is a clear violation of well-settled constitutional law. The Mississippi Chancellor should know better.