Name the National Thanksgiving Turkey that Bush will pardon on Wednesday.

After the presentation, the turkey will be flown first class to Disneyland Resort in Southern California, where he will be the grand marshal of “Disney’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.” After the parade, guests will be able to visit the turkey in Frontierland section.

Could you imagine sitting in first class next to a turkey?!

Last year I can use this photo. And yes, it’s real.

Worse than Detroit:

The most recent federal statistics for the nation’s 49 metropolitan areas with 1 million or more residents showed the Riverside, San Bernardino and Ontario area worst in unemployment at 9.1%.
The figure — which is based on reports up to September — is eight-tenths of a point higher than the second-worst region, the Detroit metropolitan area.

Pres. John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline arriving for a tour of the city on the morning of Kennedy’s assassination.

I always thought this photo was incredibly sad. A little over an hour after this photo was taken, Kennedy would be pronounced dead.

(Art Rickerby, 1963)

Gazprom and Ukrainians fighting over natural gas contracts again:

Russia’s state-owned energy company, Gazprom, will cut off gas deliveries to Ukraine on January 1 unless a new contract is signed, a company spokesman has said.

“We would like to avoid such a scenario, we would like to agree on everything before New Year, but as you understand, we cannot deliver gas without a contract,” spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov told Russia’s Vesti-24 television on Saturday.

Zzzz…they’ll settle this eventually.

American astronauts Tom Stafford and Deke Slayton holding tubes of vodka given to them by Russian cosmonauts during historic rendezvous and linkup of Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft.

Who cares what space food tastes like when your meal comes with a tube of vodka?

(The tubes of vodka didn’t actually contain vodka, as that is probably the last thing you want your crew to drink when piloting spacecraft. As a joke, the Soviet cosmonauts pasted vodka labels onto tubes of borscht and presented them to the Americans for a toast. Yes, tubes of borscht. I think I’d rather have the vodka.)

(1975)

Atomic Bomb Test In Nevada
Scorched & disheveled male mannequin clad in dark business suit standing in the desert w. lady mannequin in bkgrd., 7000 ft. from the 44th nuclear test explosion, a day after the blast, indicating that humans could be burnt but still alive.

Well, that’s comforting. The tie on the dummy is a nice touch as well.

(Loomis Dean, May 1955)

Since then, the United States has announced a $1 billion package of aid for Georgia. We should remember that military assistance would be a waste, for Georgia’s Army will never be strong enough to deter Russia. In contrast, trade and investment give Georgia international economic weight and probably help discourage a Russian invasion.

Note to Mr. Obama: It would be a nightmare to have our troops tethered through NATO to Misha. In any case, Georgia doesn’t obviously qualify for NATO membership since it doesn’t control its full territory, while the talk about NATO pushes all the wrong Russian nationalist buttons.

Ah, what’s another billion in aid? Let’s be sure to replace all their destroyed military equipment as well.

What a buncha elitists at The Economist!

The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. Ha ha. During the primary debates, three out of ten Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution.

The Republican Party’s divorce from the intelligentsia has been a while in the making. The born-again Mr Bush preferred listening to his “heart” rather than his “head”. He also filled the government with incompetent toadies like Michael “heck-of-a-job” Brown, who bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr McCain, once the chattering classes’ favourite Republican, refused to grapple with the intricacies of the financial meltdown, preferring instead to look for cartoonish villains. And in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics.

Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.

A friend told me about this flash game a few weeks ago, but I completely forgot about it until Andrew Sullivan posted a link to it.

It’s well made, and pretty hilarious. You can play various levels, including “A series of tubes” and “The Real America” where you run into enemies like Ted Stevens, burning piles of books, and hockey moms.

Los Angeles, over seventy years ago. Wonder what is there right now. Probably a mall.

(1937, Horace Bristol)