Merry Christmas!!

Santa Claus is coming to town. . . .

Thanks, Free Spirit! ♥

Bush job approval dips again to 39%

New Zogby Survey shows Iraq a Partisan War

In the face of rising gas prices, partisan sniping over Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, and a resumption of insurgent violence in Iraq, President Bush’s job approval rating has slipped into a post-holiday funk, again dipping below 40%, a new telephone poll by Zogby International shows.

His approval rating almost mirrors the percentage of respondents (40%) who said the nation overall is headed in the right direction.

The deterioration in the President’s numbers appears to be the result of eroding support among the investor class and others who supported him in his 2004 re-election bid, said Pollster John Zogby, President and CEO of Zogby International. And the problem is the Iraq war – just 34% of respondents said Mr. Bush was doing a good or excellent job managing the war, down from 38% approval in a Zogby poll taken in mid-October.

Bush’s overall job approval rating in that poll was at 46%.

Among investors, Bush’s support for managing the war dropped five points since October, from 45% to 40%, Zogby data shows. But Zogby said the glaring split between how Republicans, Democrats and independents think the President is handling Iraq is remarkable.

“The numbers in support for the war in Iraq are extremely low among Democrats and independents,” Zogby said. “This is a partisan war.”

While 61% of Republicans said he was doing a good job managing the war (down from 70% in October), just 11% of Democrats and 28% of independents gave him good marks in that area. Among Democrats, 71% said Bush was doing a “poor” job with the war, while 17% said he was doing only a “fair” job.

Among men, 36% said the President was handling the war well, while 31% of women agreed.

For the rest: click title

Presenting ~~ One remarkable cat; SWEENEY!!

For seashell with love ♥

SEX ON THE BEACH

4cl Vodka

2cl crème (ou liqueur) de pêche
6cl jus de Cranberry Ocean Spray
6cl jus d'Orange

• Shaker tous les ingrédients dans avec des glaçons.
• Verser dans un grand verre à cocktail.
• Décorer avec une tranche d'ananas d'ananas sur un pic en bois.

And a tip of the beret to Oscar ♥

Christmas wishes for all who are far from home this season

I'm a Stranger Here

Ain't it hard to stumble
when you've got no place to fall
in this whole wide world
yes I got no place at all

I'm a stranger here
I'm a stranger everywhere
I would go home, but Lordy
I'm a stranger there

Hitched up my buggy
and saddled my black mare
gonna find me a fair deal
in this world somewhere

I'm a stranger here
I'm a stranger everywhere
I would go home, but Lordy
I'm a stranger there

I looked down the track
as far as I could see
and a little bitty hand
just a-wavin' back at me

I'm a stranger here
I'm a stranger everywhere
I would go home, but Lordy
I'm a stranger there

Jim Hightower at the HEP blog [clicky!]

Contrary to the contrived wisdom of the cognoscenti, the American majority is amazingly progressive ... and pissed off.

How progressive? It doesn't get covered by the corporate media (imagine that), but mainstream polls consistently find that big majorities of Americans are not meek centrists, but overt, tub-thumping, FDR progressives who are seeking far more populist gumption and governmental action than any Democratic congressional leader or presidential contender has dared to imagine. In recent polls by the Pew Research Group, the Opinion Research Corporation, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS News, the American majority has made clear how it feels. Look at how the majority feels about some of the issues that you'd think would be gospel to a real Democratic party:

1. 65 percent say the government should guarantee health insurance for everyone -- even if it means raising taxes.
2. 86 percent favor raising the minimum wage (including 79 percent of selfdescribed "social conservatives").
3. 60 percent favor repealing either all of Bush's tax cuts or at least those cuts that went to the rich.
4. 66 percent would reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.
5. 77 percent believe the country should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment.
6. 87 percent think big oil corporations are gouging consumers, and 80 percent (including 76 percent of Republicans) would support a windfall profits tax on the oil giants if the revenues went for more research on alternative fuels.
7. 69 percent agree that corporate offshoring of jobs is bad for the U.S. economy (78 percent of "disaffected" voters think this), and only 22% believe offshoring is good because "it keeps costs down."
8. 69 percent believe America is on the wrong track, with only 26 percent saying it's headed in the right direction.

Americans might not call themselves progressive -- but there they are. On the populist, pocketbook issues that are rooted in our nation's core values of fairness and justice, there's a progressive super-majority. It flourishes in red states as well as blue, cutting through the establishment's false dichotomy of liberal/ conservative.

It's also a pissed-off super-majority, for its views are treated with infuriating disdain by the whole political system -- including corporatized Democrats who minimize and trivialize the grassroots populist fervor. By routinely dismissing the boldly progressive views of the people as unworthy of consideration, much less action, the political elites are coldly dismissing the people themselves and saying, "You don't matter."

Daou Report

by Peter Daou

The Dynamic of a Bush Scandal: How the Spying Story Will Unfold (and Fade) - The third button on the Daou Report's navigation bar links to the U.S. Constitution, a Constitution many Americans believe is on life support - if not already dead. The cause of its demise is the corrosive interplay between the Bush administration, a bevy of blind apologists, a politically apathetic public, a well-oiled rightwing message machine, lapdog reporters, and a disorganized opposition. The domestic spying case perfectly illuminates the workings of that system. And the unfolding of this story augurs poorly for those who expect it to yield different results from other administration scandals.

Here's why: the dynamic of a typical Bush scandal follows familiar contours...

1. POTUS circumvents the law - an impeachable offense.

2. The story breaks (in this case after having been concealed by a news organization until well after Election 2004).

3. The Bush crew floats a number of pushback strategies, settling on one that becomes the mantra of virtually every Republican surrogate. These Republicans face down poorly prepped Dem surrogates and shred them on cable news shows.

4. Rightwing attack dogs on talk radio, blogs, cable nets, and conservative editorial pages maul Bush's critics as traitors for questioning the CIC.

5. The Republican leadership plays defense for Bush, no matter how flagrant the Bush over-reach, no matter how damaging the administration's actions to America's reputation and to the Constitution. A few 'mavericks' like Hagel or Specter risk the inevitable rightwing backlash and meekly suggest that the president should obey the law. John McCain, always the Bush apologist when it really comes down to it, minimizes the scandal.

There are five more ~~ to read, click the title.

Tip o' the hat to Maha.

Here comes the sun!!

Today: 9 hours and 28 minutes of sunlight

Tomorrow will be 0 minutes and 5 seconds longer.

WALNUT PENUCHE

2 c. brown sugar 2/3 c. milk 1/8 tsp. salt 1 tsp. vanilla 4 tbsp. butter 1/2 c. walnuts, finely chopped Mix ingredients in saucepan. Boil slowly until a small amount dropped in a glass of cold water forms a soft ball. Cool and then beat until creamy. Add vanilla and walnuts. Pour into a buttered pan and cut into squares or spoon onto waxed paper.

ANWR?

ANWR

ANWR

ANWR

Spy vs Spy

Why not seek warrants? Perhaps because no court would grant them. We’ve seen these abuses in the past: Wiretaps on civil rights leaders, political opponents, anti-war protesters. That’s what the Church Committee found. That’s what the FISAC (Foreign Intelligence Security Act Court), a secret court whose purpose is to grant warrants for just such wiretaps as Bush claims he wants, was established to prevent. We know that not all those unwarranted wiretaps were against overseas communications involving foreign nationals: purely domestic calls were intercepted too.

Today’s news is that one of the judges (U.S. District Judge James Robertson) on that secret court has resigned in protest.

Dick “Vice President for Torture” Cheney and Alberto “The Torturer’s Friend” Gonzales like the program. They also like holding US citizens incommunicado, without charges and without counsel, for years. The excuse that “time is of the essence” in getting unwarranted phone taps is false: Under current law the President would have 72 hours retroactively to seek a warrant. All he’d need is a few signature, and there’s no reason to believe that he couldn’t get them if the requests were even marginally legitimate.

Even the right wing is in an uproar. The Chicago Tribune, under the headline “So Much for Protecting the Constitution,” says:

The facts of this case: In early 2002, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to monitor international telephone calls and international e-mail messages without any showing of probable cause to believe that a participant in the communication was involved in unlawful or terrorist activity, and without obtaining a search warrant from a court of law. This action was a direct violation of federal law and the United States Constitution.

…

The rest is at Making Light ~~ a good read.

Solstice is coming, the goose is getting fat. . .

Please to put a penny in the old man's hat!

Today will have nine hours and twenty-eight minutes of daylight. The shortest day of the year. Celebrate: the light is returning. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will all have more light than today. Good trend, eh?

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~~ William Butler Yeats