This year’s plastic turkey will be delivered by Obama to… 34,000 extra troops

The Nobel prize peace laureate and anti-war candidate extraordinaire finally stopped “dithering” (to use his cousin’s words) and…gave in to the generals’ requests

Obama plans to send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan

Not much else to say

I hazard to guess that, beyond this leak, the plan was to dump the news Thanksgiving Friday. About 3 AM.

Update

I guess the news being broken changed the original plan. The official propaganda paper, the NYT published the whitewashed version -now with less troops with room to wiggle

President Obama said Tuesday that he was determined to “finish the job” in Afghanistan, and his aides signaled to allies that he would send as many as 25,000 to 30,000 additional American troops there even as they cautioned that the final number remained in flux.

So there.

Tabloids and the dark side of the Holidays

There seems to be the recurring theme in all the NYC tabloids headlines.

Newsday does a reprise of W’s push to stimulate the economy: “Go fly and visit the fabulous destinations”

The NY Post has a half a cover about the upcoming Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, but the other unveils a long standing scam in homeless charity

The Daily News goes even darker, revealing what else is getting cheaper in time for the holidays

and Metro is the darkest one of all

Happy Holydays from NYC, everyone!

..

Darkening – and whitewashing Obama

Remember Darkeninggate? Among a slew of absurd accusations coming from a particularly demented B0bot blog was the one that evil Hillary was “darkening Obama’s face in her ads” It took a lot of demonstrations that you tube tends to darken all their videos (even their non-Obama ones) for the accusations to relent. Although, an apology never came.

In the same spirit, Obama’s flunkie Marc Ambinder draws all the wrong conclusions from a disturbing poll: white people of different political stripes were shown  photos of different shades of  a biracial candidate and Obama

researchers found that self-described liberals looked at artificially lightened photographs of President Barack Obama and judged them as more representative of his actual likeness, while self-described conservative students more often chose artificially darkened photos of Obama.

In other words, all respondents agreed that “lighter is better”, they just applied this differently to Obama

The basic conclusion: the more you like a candidate, the more likely you are to “lighten” a photograph of him or her. The less likely you like a candidate, the more likely you are to “darken a photograph.”

Ah, the wonders of the post-racial era never cease!

I suppose this is why the media whitewashing of Obama never ceases. The most hilarious today is  Andrew Sullivan, seeking reassurance in Chuck Todd’s whitewashing. My favorite part is

He’s taking the usual slew of tactical hits as his opponents try every single line of attack and pound every day, squeezing every ounce of agitprop from the news cycle.

Mmm…Propaganda…And then there’s the enigmatic ending

He is strategy; his opponents are tacticians. And in my view, their tactics are consigning them to a longer political death than if they had taken a more constructive course.

With compliments like these, who needs attacks?

Over at the NY Times, Adam Nagourney explains us how Health Club for Men is good for Obama, and how even if it doesn’t pass, it will be good for Obama. And the surprising argument

Bill Clinton saw his health care plan collapse early in his first term, and he managed to rebuild himself politically in time to cruise to reelection in 1996, even after his party took a drubbing in the 1994 midterms.

I am old enough to remember  when Nagourney was writing like this for Bush. And Bill Clinton’s name was used as an example of how bad things happen to people we (media) don’t like. So, I guess things are looking up.

Update

This Gallup poll makes a good companion piece to the Abinder poll

“The only subgroup showing a greater change than whites is Republicans, down 24 points since Obama’s first full week in office.”

Wow! They do misbehave!(Obama’s flunkies)

What happened? Is it because Teh One is far away and his magical powers dim with the distance?

Tweety calls Obama “Carteresque”

s the Obama White House sending some Carteresque signals these days? Some see that in the deep bow to the Emperor of Japan, an unforced error say critics. Then there was, there was what happened in China: Obama got nothing in the way of concessions over there in spite of playing the polite visitor.

SNL attempted to make those points but got lost in sophomoric sex jokes

MoDo, much as she patronizes that woman, Palin – she ends up comparing her favorably to Obama right after piling on him Cheney’s and others criticisms:

Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.

and stunningly

Palin can be stupefyingly simplistic, but she seems dynamic. Obama is impressively complex but he seems static.

She nurtures her grass roots while he neglects his.

He struggles to transcend identity politics while she wallows in them.

How the mighty have fallen! MoDo thinks he’s worse than a woman? Woa! harsh!

The more relevant grumble comes of course from Krugman who seems to be recovering from the last koolaid injection

deficit reduction, not job creation, will be the centerpiece of his first State of the Union address. What happened?It took me a while to puzzle this out. But the concerns Mr. Obama expressed become comprehensible if you suppose that he’s getting his views, directly or indirectly, from Wall Street.

Took him 4 days to catch up with Dakincat at the Confluence – kids don’t do koolaid!

And in the real world, Blackwater – which according to Obama “got a bad rap” is now getting a secret get out of jail card from their admirer

A one-paragraph notice filed Friday says only that prosecutors have asked that the case against Nicholas Slatten of Sparta, Tenn., be dropped. The government’s detailed request to the court was filed with the judge and with the defendant, but was not made public.

Man, their security detail for Obama’s Iraq visit last year must have been something else!

Also, in the Senate, they are getting ready to dump the meager, symbolic ineffectual public option to satisfy the unsatisfiable.

Yeah, Stupak has a very good chance of being undone by these guys. Me thinks they’ll add a cherry on top instead. Like daily beatings for women contemplating abortions.

Tabloids today

Newsday is trying to sell women the “screen less” recommendation from the health Club for Men

I personally don’t ever.

The Daily News pours some gas over the  9.11 trial fire -

which is small change after Obama’s blunder

And in other news, SNL lampooned Obama again.t

Can’t wait for the CNN’s fact checking on this one!

But the real piece of news it’s being satirized, is commented here, by a disillusioned Tweety and pundits

So, then, the following day he held a quote unquote press conference with the Chinese President Hu Jintao in which there were no questions and they read statements. Now, this is of course, this is the Chinese, it’s their home turf. They were allowed to do what they wanted to. That was the White House’s argument. And the White House haggled with them to get it more open.

Tweety uses the words “Carteresque mistakes”