Who could be more thankful than a bird on Thanksgiving day who is not a turkey? I can hardly imagine. How happy are those birds? This happy:

This happy:

And yes, even happy enough to engage in autoerotica:

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! Don’t count on too much posting on this website, but I had to point out some great posting by another author featured here. John Sacheli gives us lots to think about, and giggle over, this holiday season:

» Chocolate Cannolis and the Trail of Tears - odd combo at best. » Pissin\’ in the Wind

Oh, and sorry PETA, I eat meat. It’s all about the Turkey for me. (I have two eyes in the front of my head, which makes me a predator. If my eyes were all sideways like a Gazel or something, then I’d eat grass. You’re entitled to your beliefs and choices and all that, just don’t try and make me feel guilty for being on top of the food chain. )

Exile scores a good one at RT: Cooper Vision, the phone banking company that bailed on the Dems at the behest of Steve Minarik, just got themselves a tax break courtesy of the County. And the reporting from the D&C is, um. . . exceptional as you’ve come to accept:

Cooper Vision gets its county money || rochesterturning.com: turning the tide upstate

Predictably, the article makes no mention of the phone bank scandal. Tell me again that the Democrat and Chronicle isn’t in Minarik’s pocket.

Could there possibly be a more childish defense of the president’s failed policy than this?

Pentagon Warns of Civilian Layoffs If Congress Delays War Funding - washingtonpost.com

The Defense Department warned yesterday that as many as 200,000 contractors and civilian employees will begin receiving layoff warnings by Christmas unless Congress acts on President Bush’s $196 billion war request, but senior Democrats said no war funds will be approved until Bush accepts a shift in his Iraq policy.

I’ll wager that, if the Dems don’t buckle to this one, we’ll soon see just how childish the White House can be. . . stamping their fat little feet and holding their breath, and such. . .

Careful not to choke on your turkey (or your chicken, for that matter), but President Vladimir Putin clearly has no intentions of going anywhere at the “end” of his term.  Anyone mildly familiar with Russian politics can see that this is not the rhetoric of a man planning on leaving.

That’s what happens when you screw your subordinates and let them twist in the wind: the first opportunity, they stab you in the back:

CNN.com - CNN Political Ticker Ex-aide: Bush, Cheney involved in misleading media about Plame leak «

“There was one problem. It was not true,” McClellan writes in his new book, “What Happened,” which is scheduled to be released in April. “I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.”

Ah, how I love the Internet.  I was looking for completely unrelated topics when I hit upon this Letter to the Editor at the Colorodoan, a newspaper out of.  .  wait for it. . .  Colorodo.

The actual letter is a travesty.  But the comments as they sit right now are a triumph.  Take this one rather eloquent author:

The Coloradoan - www.coloradoan.com - Ft. Collins, CO.

The founding fathers intended the separation of church and state to protect religion first, the State second. In the last thirty years - the push to inject God into politics has resulted in not only a well deserved backlash, but the complete corruption of the church (except within Christian left, which are of course, ridiculed by their brothers on the right).

I was raised Christian and have chosen to believe otherwise, and I find myself having to try harder and harder to respect this nations core religion - when it used to be easy.

Between my wife and I, over a hundred pictures got taken over the course of the Buddhahood Tony Cavagnaro tribute show.  I have had just enough time to transfer the pictures to my computer and quickly spot-check them, not enough to actually post-produce and release them to Flickr.  However, my quick once-over reveals that, incredibly, there are a few pictures worth saving.  Some came out quite nicely, actually.

Low-light situations such as club gigs are never easy to photograph, but I guess some of these shots, especially of the Mysterious Blues Band, came out fairly decent.  That’s what taking lots of pictures gets you!

The show was, by the way, incredible.  Hats off to Rick Whitney and Jenny K for putting this all together and getting everything under way. I think Rick was ready to collapse, both from the stress and from the emotion, by the end of the Buddhahood show.  It was exceptionally strange to hear the band play the old Rub the Buddha tunes, many of which never got played to my knowledge with the entirety of the current lineup.  It was crazy to look over to my right and see Evan jamming away with that stare he gets when he plays.  Looks like he’s looking straight through you for reasons you can’t quite imagine.  But it was amazing.

I got my shot on stage at the end, though I don’t suppose anyone heard me.  There was precious little room on stage and I was gingerly balancing myself between two risers, so getting the proper sound was kind of secondary.  It was worth it just to be a part of the show.

OK, hopefully, pictures by the holiday weekend’s end!

Well, no promises. But this story is likely to get picked up in the rest of the media before to long. When it does, this is going to get bad for Fox and Rudy Giuliani, both:

A myth in the unmaking | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited

Last week brought an event with the potential to change all that. Judith Regan, a former Fox host perhaps best known in the UK as the, um, brains behind the OJ Simpson If I Did It mediapalooza, has sued her former employer for wrongful dismissal.So what? So this. Regan spent some portion of the dawn of the 21st century having an affair with NYC’s then police commissioner, Bernard Kerik.

Barack Obama is unveiling his new technology plan for the prospective Obama White House. The plan is aggressive and forward-looking, with open-government mandates unlike anything we’ve previously seen. But especially for you Wire New Yorkers, here is a reason to vote for Barack come primary day:

VentureBeat » Exclusive: Barack Obama to name a “Chief Technology Officer”

Second, Obama makes new stances on several other areas of technology of interest to Silicon Valley’s tech community. He calls more aggressive government support of broadband access. Specifically, he calls for subsidies for phone carriers to be given to only those carriers offering both regular phone service and Internet broadband to rural areas. To date, carriers offering merely phone service have been able to claim subsidies from the so-called Universal Service Fund, giving them little incentive to roll out out broadband. This is also new, in that he hasn’t proposed this before.

So, this is one more way to leap-frog our way into the 21st Century in rural counties. It would be a huge boost, if not specifically to the Brodsky Bill, then for the basic fairness issue to which the Brodsky is addressed.