Happy Thanksgiving

++President Obama wished the country a happy New Year and likened the Syrian refugees to the pilgrims.

++Josh Marshall wants to remind us that if you are concerned about the threat of the Syrian refugees then check out the number of immigrant visas given to all those from the Muslim countries this past year. It dwarfs the minuscule number of Syrians by hundreds of thousands.

++The Donald made fun of a disabled New York Times reporter, who had previously written about him. Similar to his remarks about Charles Krauthammer.

++Been binge-watching the Man in the High Castle. A Phillip Dick story that actually put me off the prophetic writer for years when I read it in high school. 
But the point is in episode One when Joe is traveling to the "Neutral Zone" he stops in the Midwest where the sky is filled with snow-klike flakes. The cop who is helping him commented, "It was the hospitals day to burn the infirm and crippled." A perfect Donald Trump society.

++Heard Rush on a car radio and he said something true. The more the media writes about the Donald's lies,the more the Republican base supports him. Because they have been trained to hate the media.

++Pope Francis warns that if "special interests" try to derail the climate talks in Paris, it would be catastrophic.

++Right on cue, my rightwing friends e-mail me a Breibart article quoting a German scientists saying NASA has made up the climate data for years. The e-mail started by quoting Franz Fanon. Why don't they get some conservative quotes? Like Reagan's "Trees create pollution."

++Read Bob Woodward's "The Last of the President's Men". This is Woodward's metier--Richard Nixon, the creator of the EPA. Nixon comes off especially creepy and misanthropic. Based on Alexander Butterfield's archives and taped interviews, Woodward returns to the scene of the crime. 

++The "scoop" for Woodward is the handwritten memo from Richard Nixon to Henry Kissinger that the bombing program in Vietnam has produced "zilch" and that it had fizzled. Woodward even calls Henry on the Amtrak to verify. Henry couldn't but he said the bombing of Vietnam had no effect on the war--except the thousands dead. Great read and shorter than Woodward's other books.

++Makes you wonder what effect President Obama's 7,000 sorties have had on ISIS. In Woodward's interview with Butterfield, he said the "Christmas Bombings" of Vietnam solely had to do with ensuring re-election. Polls said the Americans favored bombing. So what's President Obama's excuse?

++Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Sorry I couldn't be in New York.