Well, at least Amazon did well this Christmas

Yeah, I know, it's not PC on the left to like Amazon. Sorry, but I love 'em. I have found that they almost always have the best deal on almost anything I buy, and when it comes to expensive electronics, you can save a lot with Amazon (and get free shipping). Yes, frequenting your local store helps small businesses in your area. But why not just stop by your local store once a week and hand them a fifty dollar bill, if you don't mind paying more (often much more) for the same product. It's more honest to simply hand them cash - which you'd never do, by the way - than complain about others who go to Amazon because it saves them money. (And mind you, the argument also presumes that a dollar in my local business's pocket is somehow better than that same dollar in my own pocket - another point I don't quite understand the logic of.)

As an aside, what is the actual benefit in having a local store that could sell me the same thing as Amazon? I'm not sure I understand the concept entirely. People at Amazon work too, and many of them are American (if "buy American" is your thing), so aren't those jobs to be valued just as much as "small business" jobs? And having small businesses in your neighborhood - what exactly does that "do," why is it such a "good" thing that it "must" be preserved? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm sincerely curious as to what the argument really is for preserving local businesses, besides the simple statement that "small businesses are good." Read More......

Israeli attack could impact Obama

From Ben Smith:

Israel’s air strikes in Gaza end any faint hopes that President-elect Barack Obama will take office with a clear path toward Middle East peace laid out before him.

It may also strengthen the hand of more hawkish advisers who have argued that his first step toward Middle East peace should be attempting to weaken and isolate Iran, not negotiating with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, analysts said. With Israeli elections scheduled for February 10, the ongoing Gaza strike and its eventual aftermath may determine who Obama will choose as his Israeli interlocutor.

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Within Obama’s transition, Democrats say there’s a subtle division between between advisers who hold out hope for a directly negotiated peace, culminating with a signing ceremony on the South Lawn, and those who have argued for a more oblique approach aimed at a negotiated peace between Israel and Syria, and weakening Syria’s ties with Iran. The latter group of advisers — which include former Clinton aides Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk — see weakening the role of Iran, which is closely tied to Hezbollah, as central to establishing an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

The hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza may strengthen their case, analysts on both sides of the divide said Sunday. But the success of the attack may have the reverse consequence in Israeli politics, strengthening foreign minister and Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni, who is seen as being somewhat more open to negotiations with Palestinian leaders than her main rival, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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The latest breaking news from ADN.com: "Gov. Sarah Palin is a grandmother."

This poor kid has one hell of a family tree:

Gov. Sarah Palin is a grandmother. The baby's name is Tripp, and he was born Sunday, People magazine is reporting.

Palin's daughter Bristol gave birth to the healthy 7-pound, 4-ounce baby in Palmer, the magazine reports on its Web site.

You have to love how media savvy the Palin family has become. People, not the hometown paper, got the scoop.

Not that I really care, but are Bristol and Levi married yet? Or was that just a political gimmick? If the right wing theocrats, like Bristol's mother, can obsess over who I could marry, I think Bristol's marriage is fair game for discussion.

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Why does the US tolerate female mutilation in Iraq?

Considering how obsessed the Bush administration has been for the failed abstinence programs that sucked up millions of taxpayer dollars, why have they tolerated mutilation? This is a brutal procedure that has no place in any government that the US is supporting. Spend money to educate and end this practice or tie it to foreign assistance received, but it has to eradicated. That it operates so openly in Iraq is disgraceful.

"This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember," said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of Baghdad. "We don't know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it."

Kurdistan is the only known part of Iraq --and one of the few places in the world--where female circumcision is widespread. More than 60 percent of women in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq have been circumcised, according to a study conducted this year. In at least one Kurdish territory, 95 percent of women have undergone the practice, which human rights groups call female genital mutilation.

The practice, and the Kurdish parliament's refusal to outlaw it, highlight the plight of women in a region with a reputation for having a more progressive society than the rest of Iraq. Advocates for women point to the increasing frequency of honor killings against women and female self-immolations in Kurdistan this year as further evidence that women in the area still face significant obstacles, despite efforts to raise public awareness of circumcision and violence against women.

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GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell obstructs Obama's stimulus package

Note from John: This is Mitch McConnel's Hurricane Katrina moment. The economic disaster has already been forecast, the storm has begun, and McConnell, like his mentor George Bush, is out to lunch, acting like it's just another day. We're going to name this next Depression after the Republicans who dawdled while our economy fell off the cliff. Politics is more important to the Republicans than our very survival.
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The GOP Senators, led by Mitch McConnell, have enabled the Bush administration's domestic and international disasters for the past eight years. McConnell is trying to further destroy the already fragile U.S. economy by continuing the same obstructionist games:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced skepticism today about the emerging economic stimulus plan, applying a brake to Democratic plans to quickly pass up to $850 billion in spending and tax cuts soon after President-elect Barack Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration.

"As of right now, Americans are left with more questions than answers about this unprecedented government spending, and I believe the taxpayers deserve to know a lot more about where it will be spent before we consider passing it," McConnell said in a statement, which will be publicly issued later today.

Obama's advisers and congressional Democrats have been huddling in the Capitol trying to craft a massive stimulus plan that could cost anywhere from $675 billion to $850 billion, while some economists are pushing for a total package worth more than $1 trillion.

McConnell -- the most powerful Republican in Washington, based on the filibuster-proof level of 41 GOP Senate seats -- called for many congressional hearings on the stimulus plan and some undetermined safeguards to assure the money is being spent wisely.

The Senate Republicans have been the most destructive political force in the country. They're not changing the way they do business. And, for some reason, despite the loss of 25% of the GOP Senate caucus over the past two years, McConnell thinks the same strategy will work now.

Seems that Mitch McConnell didn't get the memo about the new post-partisan era in which we're living. The symbolism of homophobe Rick Warren delivering the invocation at the inauguration was supposed to show McConnell that D.C. is a different place now and we all have to get along. Apparently not. (But, surely Warren will call McConnell and the other Republican Senators to get them on board with Obama's agenda, right?)

Post-partisanship only works when both sides do it and we're seeing that isn't going to happen.

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Charlie Crist does something right

We've been harsh on Florida Governor Charlie Crist in the past - he was single for an awfully long time, and then, once he suddenly decided to get married just as he was positioning himself for McCain's VP slot, he and his family said a lot of things about his new bride that were, well, just a bit odd for a straight guy. But, this time, Crist did a good thing - he criticized the RNC chair candidate who passed around a song calling Obama a "negro":

As the GOP Chairman in one of our nation’s most ethnically and culturally diverse states, I am especially disappointed by the inappropriate words and actions we’ve seen over the past few days. I am proud of those party leaders who have stood up in firm opposition to this type of behavior.

In Florida we have worked hard to reach out to ALL citizens to promote the Republican Party’s principles and values while ensuring that our commitment to African Americans, Hispanics, and other minority communities is sincere and credible. Actions such as the distribution of this CD, regardless of intent, only serves to promote divisiveness and distracts us from our common goal of building our party.

Today, the GOP has an unprecedented opportunity to embrace change and inclusion, and we are either going to welcome this opportunity fully or watch it slip through our fingers. We can only achieve success if Republican leaders reject racial or any other acts that divide us and instead embrace what unites us as a nation.

Why does it matter? Because I can call myself a fag, you can't. Why? Because everyone knows I'm not anti-gay, but you, they're not so sure (unless you too are gay). When a Republican refers to a black man as a "negro," not only are we not sure that he's not a racist, the benefit of the doubt tends to the "he is a racist" side of things when the joke teller is GOP, and especially when he's white. Contrary to the in-very-poor-taste defense that GOP apologist Ken Blackwell gave for this racial epithet, the very white Charlie Crist (well, Crist is perpetually tan, so maybe we can call him brown) seems to get it. Perhaps he can give Blackwell some lessons in balancing being a Republican and selling your soul. Read More......

Hitchens on Warren

Sometimes he shines.

I think we are all entitled to ask and to keep asking every member of the Obama transition team until we receive a satisfactory answer, the following questions:

Will Warren be invited to the solemn ceremony of inauguration without being asked to repudiate what he has directly said to deny salvation to Jews?

Will he be giving a national invocation without disowning what his mentor said about civil rights and what his leading supporter says about Mormons?

Will the American people be prayed into the next administration, which will be confronted by a possible nuclear Iran and an already nuclear Pakistan, by a half-educated pulpit-pounder raised in the belief that the Armageddon solution is one to be anticipated with positive glee?
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As Barack Obama is gradually learning, his job is to be the president of all Americans at all times. If he likes, he can oppose the idea of marriage for Americans who are homosexual. That's a policy question on which people may and will disagree. However, the man he has chosen to deliver his inaugural invocation is a relentless clerical businessman who raises money on the proposition that certain Americans -- non-Christians, the wrong kind of Christians, homosexuals, nonbelievers -- are of less worth and littler virtue than his own lovely flock of redeemed and salvaged and paid-up donors.

This quite simply cannot stand. Is it possible that Obama did not know the ideological background of his latest pastor? The thought seems plausible when one recalls the way in which he tolerated the odious Jeremiah Wright. Or is it possible that he does know the background of racism and superstition and sectarianism but thinks (as with Wright) that it might be politically useful in attracting a certain constituency? Either of these choices is pretty awful to contemplate.

A president may by all means use his office to gain re-election, to shore up his existing base, or to attract a new one. But the day of his inauguration is not one of the days on which he should be doing that. It is an event that belongs principally to the voters and to their descendants, who are called to see that a long tradition of peaceful transition is cheerfully upheld, even in those years when the outcome is disputed. I would myself say that it doesn't need a clerical invocation at all, since, to borrow Lincoln's observation about Gettysburg, it has already been consecrated. But if we must have an officiating priest, let it be some dignified old hypocrite with no factional allegiance and not a tree-shaking huckster and publicity seeker who believes that millions of his fellow citizens are hellbound because they do not meet his own low and vulgar standards.

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Wall Street Faces Worst Yearly Drop Since 1931

We're number 1!

Investors are preparing to close out the last three trading days of 2008, a year in which Wall Street has logged its worst performance since Herbert Hoover was president.

The ongoing recession and global economic shock pummeled stocks this year, with the Dow Jones industrial average slumping 36.2 percent. That's the biggest drop since 1931 when the Great Depression sent stocks reeling 40.6 percent.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index is set to record the biggest drop since its creation in 1957. The index of America's biggest companies is down 40.9 percent for the year.

Seriously, if anyone can send me some happy, upbeat economic news - basically, anything to suggest we're all NOT going to die, I'd love to post it too. You got my email (top of this column). Read More......

Monday Morning Open Thread

I'm back in DC. Joe is still on his way back to town, I believe, and will start blogging again this afternoon. I'll be taking some time off starting Wednesday. DC was downright balmy in the 60s today, while Chicago got back into the glorious 20s before I left. Otherwise, outside of the economy and Caroline, not sure what news there will be for the week. We'll see.

Sad news. The honorary Larry Craig bathroom at the Minneapolis airport is apparently waning as a tourist attraction.

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Religious right "virginity pledges" do not work

No surprise here and I'm sure the lunatic right will do their best to ignore the results. The big question here is whether Obama and the new Congress will put an end to funding this waste of money or if they will buckle under yet again to the anti-science, anti-rational American Taliban. The problem is not only in the US as the Bush administration had exported this program (with US tax dollars, of course) around the world.

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. "But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking."

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Luxury brand Chanel to slash jobs this week

This was another group that somehow thought the credit crisis would avoid them courtesy of emerging market support. It's true that many of the luxury brands have profited enormously in recent years due to the emerging markets (Russia, especially) but that too is now collapsing. Overpriced luxury was so 2006.

Chanel is to cut 200 jobs as fears grow that the supposedly recession proof luxury market is falling victim to the global credit crisis. Citing a steep decline in this year's sales, the largest French union, the CGT, said the losses at the French fashion label would concern all staff on fixed term and temporary contracts and come into effect on Wednesday. Sixteen posts would be cut from the brand's boutique on rue Cambon in the heart of Paris's fashion district, it added in a statement at the weekend.

The job losses, described by some commentators as the label's worst crisis since founder Coco Chanel fired all her staff at the outbreak of war in 1939, represent almost 10% of the company's production workforce. The redundancies come after a difficult year for the fashion, perfume, cosmetics and accessories businesses where growth has almost ground to a halt.

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