“A Different Point Of View”

Well, isn't this special. Teaching third graders the lessons of victimhood.

LONG BEACH, Calif. - Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he "discovered" them. The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.

Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.

He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.

Morgan said he still wants his pupils at Cleveland Elementary School in San Francisco to celebrate Thanksgiving. But "what I am trying to portray is a different point of view."

Others see Morgan and teachers like him as too extreme.

"I think that is very sad," said Janice Shaw Crouse, a former college dean and public high school teacher and now a spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, a conservative organization. "He is teaching his students to hate their country. That is a very distorted view of history, a distorted view of Thanksgiving."

So, since Morgan will live what he teaches he plans on giving his ill-gotten property back to the native Americans and moving back to the country that his forebears came from, right? Oh, he's not planning that?

Then he is a self-righteous hypocrite. Nothing more, nothing less. Read the whole thing. It is disturbing. (Frankly, if this guy was teaching my kids, they would be out of that class in a heartbeat.)

A Thanksgiving Day Dinner That Couldn’t Be Beat

Ah, Brutus the bear is busy this time of year. He is very much in demand for photo shoots. American grizzly bears are not usually very cooperative. Or friendly. But Brutus appears to be both. So he gets called on to pose a lot.

It’s not exactly the teddy bears’ picnic. And roast turkey is rarely on the menu for Brutus, the 7ft grizzly.

His meat, when he eats it, is usually raw, and he really prefers fruit and vegetables or fish.

But the four-year-old bear who lives in a Montana zoo is always happy to oblige his human friends.

So Brutus sat down to a traditional dinner for an American TV show to be broadcast on Thanksgiving Day on Thursday.

Called An American Thanksgiving, it shows in a series of cameos, the growth of the US from the early settlers until today.

Which is a bit academic to Brutus. All he knows is he likes humans. It’s been that way since he was born in an Idaho zoo four years ago.

Not only does Brutus like humans, but he is, we hear, also very nice. Why, we have it on good authority that he invited Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over for Thanksgiving dinner.

Deliberate Provocation

After reading some of the updates about the story of the six imams removed from a Northwest Airlines flight at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport, it looks very much like a deliberate attempt to provoke and incident. It looks even more like it when the spokesman for the six arranged to have a reporter with him when he tried again to get tickets. The behavior the men indulged in is not at all normal and I rather doubt anyone who witnessed it thought they were harmless.

This morning Shahin returned to the Twin Cities International Airport to buy six more tickets for the flight to Phoenix, but a US Airways ticket agent and supervisor refused to sell him the tickets.

In an exchange witnessed by a Star Tribune reporter, the unnamed supervisor said Shahin's tickets had been refunded and that he needed to get tickets on another airline…..

….Pat Hogan, spokesman for the Metropolitan Airports Commission, said that witnesses to Monday's events told police that before the flight that besides praying, the imams were spouting anti-American rhetoric, talking about the war in Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

One of the imams was heard saying that he would do whatever is necessary to fulfill his commitment to the Qur'an, witnesses told police, Hogan said. Other witnesses said some of the imams were repeating "Allah, Allah," he said.

And a couple of the imams asked for seat-belt extensions, even though it did not appear they needed them, Hogan said.

All of this made passengers, the attendants and the pilot uncomfortable, Hogan said. As a result, the pilot called police to have the imams escorted from plane.

Airlines have the right not to allow passengers on a plane, Hogan said.

Others have quite a lot on the background of the spokesman. He's a peach, he is. I think this was a setup, a deliberate attempt to engineer an incident. See some of the other people bloggin this for background:

Power Line, Hot Air, Jihad Watch, Sweetness & Light, Confederate Yankee, Scared Monkeys, Dr. Sanity, Wake up America, Classical Values, Hot Air, The Jawa Report,

Lost In Space

NASA scientists have about given up on finding out why the Mars Global Surveyor suddenly went silent. They took their last, best chance of locating the craft by using the new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. That effort was not successful.

After more than two weeks of silence from the Mars Global Surveyor, NASA will make other tries to locate it, but scientists were pessimistic.

"We may have lost a dear old friend and teacher," Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program said in a news conference.

The $154 million surveyor, which was supposed to last only two years but continued sending data for almost a decade, is the oldest of six different active space probes on or circling the red planet.

Among its accomplishments are more than 240,000 pictures of Mars, offering the best big-picture view of the planet. Meyer credited the probe with proving that Mars once had water.

"Every good thing comes to an end at some point," said Arizona State University scientist Phil Christensen. "It certainly in my mind greatly exceeded our wildest expectations of what to hope for. It revolutionized what we were thinking about Mars."

On Monday night, NASA had hoped to catch a glimpse of the surveyor from the camera on the new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But the orbiter failed to spot it.

Now NASA will try an even less likely search effort. Engineers will send a signal to the silent spacecraft, asking it to turn on a beacon on one of the two Mars rovers below. If the rover beacon turns on, NASA could figure out where the lost Mars Surveyor is, said project manager Tom Thorpe.

"While we have not exhausted everything we can do … we believe the prospect for recovery of MGS is not looking very good at all," said Fuk Li, Mars program manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which controls the probe. "We're still holding out some hope."

We already told them what happened, but they never listen to us.

Attention Darwin Awards Committee

We have a contender for honorable mention. Unemployed British man suffers broken relationship. Despondent, he drinks considerably more than a little bit. People he is drinking with appear to understand that man is too drunk to have any brains left. "Friends" dare man to do something stupid. Drunken fool decides to hang from 25,000 volt power cable.

But picks the one seven minute period that he can get away with the stunt because the power has been turned off.

Bare-chested and fuelled by drunken bravado, he dangles from a 25,000 volt power cable. If he had tried his foolish stunt at any other time, Shane White would have been fried.Fortunately for him, however, he had unwittingly picked a seven minute period when the power was turned off - the first in 15 months.

Oblivious to the danger, he leapt from a footbridge and, egged on by a gang of youths, hung from the railway cable for some time, eventually dropping to the ground only when his baseball cap blew off. His prank was watched by astonished passengers on a stationary train, one of whom took this photo. Opinion was divided over whether White was the luckiest man in Britain, or the most stupid. And the 22-year-old himself admitted: "It was completely and utterly idiotic. I know I’m a fool for doing it." White, unemployed, said he was so drunk on cider and beer that he had no memory of his actions until he saw the picture in a newspaper.

He turned himself in after seeing himself in the paper. He was given a four month suspended sentence.

Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places

SWM, 26, likes to cuddle. Not very bright. Well that's how it should have read. You see, it is generally considered extremely stupid to plaster your face and name on a dating website when you are wanted for a double homicide. It's probably redundant to point out that leaving your current address is not Einstein-level, either.

Calvin A. Bennett, 26, has been charged with two counts of murder in the killings of Pierce Odell, 79, and his wife, Mary, 78, who were found shot to death on October 30 outside their home in Nashville, Arkansas, about 125 miles southwest of the state capital Little Rock.

"He was taken into custody shortly before noon on Sunday, less than 12 hours after his picture was broadcast on (the television show) 'America's Most Wanted,'" said Bill Sadler, a spokesman for the Arkansas State Police.

Sadler said that people who had first seen his picture on the dating site had subsequently seen it on the popular television program.

This is a clue that Inspector Clouseau could have followed, genius.

Syria? You Want To Negotiate With Syria?

If you don't think Syria was involved in the murder of a prominent Lebanese anti-Syrian cabinet minister, you're dreaming. Pierre Gemayel was murdered in cold blood in Beirut just a short time ago. Hezbollah, closely tied to both Syria and Iran has openly promised to topple the Syrian Lebanese government. It would appear their masters have ordered them to start.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Prominent anti-Syrian Christian politician Pierre Gemayel was assassinated in a suburb of Beirut on Tuesday, his Phalange Party radio station and Lebanon's official news agency reported.

The slaying will certainly heighten political tensions in Lebanon, where the leading Muslim Shiite party Hezbollah has threatened to topple the government if it does not get a bigger say in Cabinet decision-making.

Gemayel was shot in his car in Jdeideh, a Christian neighborhood, his constituency on the northern edge of Beirut, witnesses said. A car rammed his vehicle from behind and then a gunman stepped out and shot him at point-blank range, they said.

…..

Gemayel, the minister of industry and son of former President Amin Gemayel, was a supporter of the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority, which is locked in a power struggle with pro-Syrian factions led by Hezbollah.

Gemayel is the third prominent figure in Lebanon to be assassinated in the past two years. Former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, Saad Hariri's father, was killed in a car bombing in February 2005, and lawmaker and newspaper manager Gibran Tueni was killed in a car bombing in December 2005.

And the "realists" want to talk to these people. In fact, already have started according to some reports. Maybe taking a look at the real reality instead of the one they've constructed in their heads would be a good idea.

UPDATE: From Beirut to the Beltway has running updates. The situation in Lebanon is deteriorating.

UPDATE: Lots of others:

Snapped shot, The Jawa Report, Confederate Yankee, Ace of Spades HQ, Daily Pundit, The Political Pit Bull, Gateway Pundit, The Moderate Voice, Dean's World, Right Wing Nut House, Pajamas Media, Michael J. Totten, IRAQ THE MODEL, Roger L. Simon,

Get Your Wallet

Donald Sensing looks at good old Charlie Rangel's "universal service" bill and calculates the cost. He goes much, much further than I did when doing this calculation and looks at what the entire program would entail.

So we have 8,000,000 men and women on active duty or service at any one time, including we would assume the NCOs and officers of the armed forces and their career equivalents in civilian service. What might the total be for directly-paid salaries alone, not including associated costs?

Brand new privates in the Army receive $1,178 per month for the first four months and $1,273 per month after that. By the end of their second year they pay grade E3 and make - again, this is directly-paid salary - $1,501 per month. In the middle is pay grade E2, which pays $1,427. Let’s use that figure as the overall average.

Eight million salaries paying $1,427 per month equals an astonishing 1.3699 to the 11th power dollars. That’s $136,990,000,000 per year just for salaries.

One Hundred Thirty-Six Billion, Nine Hundred Ninety Million dollars per year for salaries alone. But almost a million careerists, at least, will each be making considerably more. So a more realistic salary figure is a cool quarter-trillion dollars.

Overhead costs could easily add another 50 percent to that, although probably most overhead would be sunk costs that would be incurred at the beginning and at a much lower levellater. Even so, we may charitably add $25 billion per year. Now we’re up $275 billion per year.

Sensing calls it the “biggest ongoing budget deficit in the history of the world”.  That's about right.

Talkin’ Turkey

Well, it must be Thanksgiving week. The turkeys are coming out all over the news. Or the business of turkeys, as the case may be. It seems that the Butterball brand has been sold to a privately held company. But the new management wants the transition to be completely seamless. The turkey help line for the kitchen klueless will keep right on chugging along just as it always has.

And while customers might not notice a difference, having the Butterball name in hand has changed things at Mount Olive, N.C.-based Carolina Turkey. The company is now called Butterball LLC, and after selling only to restaurants and grocery stores for decades, it no longer has to worry about developing a brand name as it expands its consumer business.

"For this Christmas season, the product (consumers are) gonna buy — Butterball — will be the same as it was for the last 20 years," said Tom Vukina, a professor who specializes in poultry economics at North Carolina State University.

That's just the way Shoemaker wants it.

Shoemaker is a former executive at Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, the publicly traded firm that owns a large stake of the renamed company and is the world's largest pork producer. He has focused on ensuring a smooth transition — one transparent to customers — since the sale closed in October.

That includes keeping everything at Butterball's Turkey Talk-Line the same.

Callers will hear the same Midwestern voices that for years have answered the phones in Naperville, Ill., where a team of more than 50 Thanksgiving dinner experts educated at "Butterball University" are available every November and December at 1-800-BUTTERBALL to help kitchen klutzes.

"They're used to a Midwest accent," said Shoemaker of the tens of thousands expected to call this season. "I want everything to be so seamless I won't move the thing unless we move to another place in the Midwest.

"I must be anal about it."

But not very good at managing interviews it seems. That is a poor choice of words when talking about turkeys. Well, most of the time. Politicians are another matter entirely.

She Spent What?

It seems that Hillary Clinton, who frankly did not face any credible challenge in this election, managed to spend $30 million dollars for her walkover victory. That got the New York Times' attention.

Since 2001, when she took office, Mrs. Clinton has spent at least $36 million on her re-election. For 2005 and 2006 through Oct. 18, she spent $29.5 million; a final tally will not be available until next month.

At that level, she spent nearly twice as much as Senator Charles E. Schumer, her Democratic colleague from New York, did in his 2004 re-election campaign, when he spent $15.5 million and won 71 percent of the vote, four points more than Mrs. Clinton won this year.

For her money, Mrs. Clinton also won a slightly smaller percentage of the vote in New York this year than did Eliot Spitzer in his successful race for governor. Mr. Spitzer, who raised nearly $41 million for his campaign, won 69 percent of the vote.

Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s pollster and longtime adviser, received at least $1.1 million. Mandy Grunwald, her longtime communications strategist, received more than $930,000. Hudson Media Partners, an offshoot of the Glover Park Group consulting firm where two prominent Clinton advisers, Howard Wolfson and Gigi Georges, work, received nearly $200,000.

Campaign aides said much of the consulting work went toward building a donor list that would be vital in a presidential race. But they did not specify the work done by each of the consultants or say exactly how much of the money they received went to preparing for a presidential run rather than Mrs. Clinton’s Senate re-election. And the figures have raised eyebrows among the people who raise money for her.

“We’re not in this business to make consultants rich,” said one fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton who was granted anonymity in order to speak freely about the direction of the campaign.

“The wasting of money — it drives everybody crazy,” the fund-raiser said. “She’d better get a handle on this if she is going to run for president.”

Beyond the level of spending, there is also some concern within the Clinton camp about the adequacy of the controls on what is being spent.

A close friend of Mrs. Clinton, Maggie Williams, received a $37,500 consulting fee, paid to her firm, Griffin Williams Critical Point Management, at the end of July.

This is an awful lot of money spent on an already sure thing. Her campaign staff did some, shall we say, questionable decision making. And she's managed to drop her cash on hand down to about the same level as John "No Hope" Kerry. But she did it in style, apparently!

Yet Mrs. Clinton has also continued to travel and entertain in style. Around $160,000 was spent on private jet travel for her and her advisers in 2006. Her catering and entertaining bill was at least $746,450, with tabs ranging from a $124,155 bill at the New York Hilton to a $2,500 bill for a backroom fund-raiser at Ben’s Chili Bowl, the famous Washington hot dog shop.

How in the heck do you run up $2,500 at a hot dog shop? Good Lord. I am definitely in the wrong business.

Hard Numbers

Philip R. O'Connor, writing in TCS Daily takes a look at numbers. This is a hard calculus because it involves the deaths of soldiers through American history. But it is something that needs to be understood as well.

In the full sweep of U.S history, from the commencement of the Revolution on Lexington Green in April 1775, until the sunny morning of September 11, 2001, our average daily sacrifice has been between 14 and 15 military fatalities (1,217,000 fatalities/83,461 days = 14.6/day). Since 9/11, the average daily sacrifice has been 1.7 per day (3200/1900=1.68).

From the Revolutionary War until the American entry into World War I, the average daily rate was about 11 per day (578,000/52,231=11.07). From World War I through the break up of the Soviet Union, the rate was over 16 per day (636,000/38,811=16.39). Or in our long running confrontation with Soviet communism following World War II until the collapse of the Soviet empire, the rate was over between 6 and 7 per day (112,400/16,892=6.65).

As things stand, the conflict with Islamic radicalism involves the lowest average daily military fatality rate of any long run national security era. It may worsen, it may improve. If Congress had been asked on September 12, 2001, to endorse a national defense posture against Islamic radicalism that traded up to 2 military fatalities per day over the subsequent five years in return for no additional homeland attacks, the deposing of terror friendly regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ending of Libya's nuclear program, what would they have done? Would Congress accept that bargain today?

Putting this in terms of hard numbers is not meant to make light of a single death, of course. But there is a cold, hard set of facts here that is being overlooked in the rush to withdraw from a central fight on the war on terror. Iraq has become that central front because the jihadis have chosen to make it so. O'Connor makes a point in his article that says it all: "Any leader disposed toward treating these decisions in exclusively personal terms is unfit for leadership."

Knives Out

The LA Times fired a warning shot last week, letting Nancy Pelosi know that passing over Jane Harman for the chair of the intelligence committee would be bad for her media coverage. This week, they fire the first broadside with intent.

Pelosi indicated as early as last year that she intended to oust Harman from the Intelligence Committee — where Harman expected to become chairwoman if Democrats won control of the House — in favor of someone more to Pelosi's liking.

The move has created dissension within the party. Some Democrats and foreign policy experts argued that Harman, a centrist on national security, is the most credible person for the job. The Congressional Black and Hispanic caucuses countered that it was time for one of their members on the committee to take the helm.

Fresh from Pelosi's fierce and unsuccessful lobbying effort to install antiwar ally John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania as her No. 2, the coming battle over the Intelligence Committee leadership is turning into a showdown where the political has turned personal. And it could undermine the unity that the Democratic Party has hoped to show as it prepares to take the reins of power.

The falling-out between Pelosi and Harman offers a window into how business gets done on Capitol Hill, where personal friendships are often as important as policies and politics. Pelosi in particular is noted for remembering who has been on her side and who hasn't, as evidenced by her support of Murtha for House majority leader over her one-time rival Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, even though Hoyer was widely preferred by the party caucus.

The prospect of conflict between two such powerful Democratic women is tantalizing to gossipy Washington. But the split is so toxic that Democrats in California and Washington won't go near it.

Then it gets quite ugly on the second page:

A Capitol Hill staffer suggested that Pelosi also was miffed that Harman had higher visibility in the media.

Harman, using her platform as ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, landed on Sunday talk shows so regularly that she all but eclipsed Pelosi's rising star as House minority leader. An informal survey of the major talk shows over the last two years found that Harman made 18 appearances to Pelosi's six.

Associates of Pelosi say she was not troubled that Harman was on television frequently, only that Democrats' message on Iraq wasn't being aired.

Some Democrats say Pelosi's choice for intelligence chair is less about personal conflict than fixing a political problem, which ironically began with Harman's return to the House in 2001.

That problem has to do with Harman jumping in seniority over Alcee Hastings. So is this a personal fight or a political? Actually, the article makes clear that it is both and that Pelosi will not get any slack at all from the LA Times. This article is only the beginning, I suspect. The reports will get progressively more nasty as time goes on.

A Surreal Reality

Christopher Hitchens asks a simple question: why in the world are we going to take advice about Iraq from James Baker? This man happily gave up Lebanon to Syrian control in exchange for their "help" in the Kuwait war. His "reality" is one of stability at any cost. It does not matter how many die as a result of that reality. That Kissinger is suddenly rearing up making pronouncements is a sign of the "reality" being discussed. The architect of the "decent interval" is back again.

According to the Associated Press, Henry Kissinger made it official Sunday morning in London, when he told a BBC interviewer that military victory was not possible in Iraq. Actually, what he said was this:

If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.

There are a couple of qualifications in there, and what Kissinger is describing is really more the definition of a political victory than a military one, but say what you will about our Henry, he wasn't born yesterday. He must have known that the question would come up, what his answer would be, and what the ensuing AP headline ("Kissinger: Iraq Military Win Impossible") would look like.

….

The summa of wisdom in these circles is the need for consultation with Iraq's immediate neighbors in Syria and Iran. Given that these two regimes have recently succeeded in destroying the other most hopeful democratic experiment in the region—the brief emergence of a self-determined Lebanon that was free of foreign occupation—and are busily engaged in promoting their own version of sectarian mayhem there, through the trusty medium of Hezbollah, it looks as if a distinctly unsentimental process is under way.

This will present few difficulties to Baker, who supported the Syrian near-annexation of Lebanon. In order to recruit the Baathist regime of Hafez Assad to his coalition of the cynical against Saddam in the Kuwait war, Baker and Bush senior both acquiesced in the obliteration of Lebanese sovereignty. "I believe in talking to your enemies," said Baker last month—invoking what is certainly a principle of diplomacy. In this instance, however, it will surely seem to him to be more like talking to old friends—who just happen to be supplying the sinews of war to those who kill American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Is it likely that they will stop doing this once they become convinced that an American withdrawal is only a matter of time?

Read the whole thing. But it will depress you. The trial balloons have been going up in fleets. The exact wrong thing to do - talking to Iran and Syria - is being bandied about. What will the bill be this time around for the "realists"? How many dead? Only this time the "realists" pay no mind to the one harsh fact: this time they follow us home.

Pea In A Bottle

As in green peas. As in a new flavor for a soft drink. Honest. Green pea flavored soda.  But the chief executive of the company has a confession. He has absolutely no idea why anyone would actually drink the stuff. 

Green pea, along with other unusual sodas such as turkey and gravy, dinner roll, sweet potato and antacid flavour, will be part of the company's $10 to $15 "holiday pack" of bottled drinks available nation-wide.

Peter van Stolk, chief executive of Jones Soda, said on Monday the collection of strange-flavoured sodas usually sell out quickly, even though he can not stomach the drinks. Past flavours included broccoli casserole, corn on the cob and Brussel sprout.

"Why people buy it is beyond me. I can't drink a bottle of this stuff," said van Stolk.

Jones Soda, which sells traditional sodas along side more exotic flavours like fufu berry and green apple, first introduced the holiday soda pack in 2003, gaining notoriety for its turkey and gravy flavour soda.

Van Stolk says the company is the market leader in turkey and gravy flavored soda. He's also got a knack for garnering free publicity, obviously. But at least he's honest about the stuff! And you'll be glad to know he has standards:

Asked if there were any flavours that were off limits, van Stolk said he put his foot down when it came to curried chicken flavour.

"Fish taco was just nasty and we tried curried chicken. That was just wrong," he said.

I would have put that foot down on the fish taco flavor, personally.