The stories say "Black Friday" is looking good. Not good if you are one of those who participated in the anti-consumerist, pro-environment Buy Nothing Day. But, rather, good in the sense that shoppers are filling their carts, which may help boost a battered economy and eventually lead to millions of out-of-work Americans finding a job sooner than would otherwise be the case.

It's possible that the cheerful public demeanor from surveyed shop owners and chain managers may truly reflect an improved situation that will carry on throughout this year's holiday season. But it's always wise to be a bit leery of what we're told immediately after Black Friday. The retailers may actually think sales are going gangbusters. Or they may be whistling in the dark. No matter what the reality, as was pointed out before last season's disaster, the day-after message is always upbeat

A few things you can count on every year around this time:

  1. Sales data for Black Friday will be touted by biased interest groups. They are invariably have an upside bias;

  2. Headline writers will get it wrong

  3. Survey data will be taken as the equivalent of actual sales;

  4. Strong forecasts will be subsequently proven wrong.

For instance, check out this bit appearing on November 30, 2008, from the National Retail Federation:

Though the holiday season is far from over, retailers across the country are breathing a collective sigh of relief after shoppers headed to stores and websites in droves over the weekend. According to the National Retail Federation's 2008 Black Friday Weekend survey, conducted by BIGresearch, more than 172 million shoppers visited stores and websites over Black Friday weekend, up from 147 million shoppers last year.

Here's the dive the 2008 holiday sales actually took.

You can find The Wall Street Journal's more tempered view of how things are going this season in the article Aggressive Bargains Lure Hordes of Shoppers, but They're Still Slow to Open Wallets.

As every veteran retailer will explain, whatever the hype, it's the not the sales results on the day after Thanksgiving that matter most, it's those in the last week before Christmas.

Just in case you're wondering how "the biggest shopping day of the year" got its name, Ethan Trex has the skinny:

If you ask most people why the day after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday, they’ll explain that the name stems from retailers using the day’s huge receipts as their opportunity to "get in the black" and become profitable for the year. The first recorded uses of the term "Black Friday" are a bit less rosy, though.

According to researchers, the name "Black Friday" dates back to Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. The Friday in question is nestled snugly between Thanksgiving and the traditional Army-Navy football game that’s played in Philadelphia on the following Saturday, so the City of Brotherly Love was always bustling with activity on that day. All of the people were great for retailers, but they were a huge pain for police officers, cab drivers, and anyone who had to negotiate the city’s streets. They started referring to the annual day of commercial bedlam as "Black Friday" to reflect how irritating it was.

So where did the whole "get in the black" story originate?

Apparently storeowners didn’t love having their biggest shopping day saddled with such a negative moniker, so in the early 1980s someone began floating the accounting angle to put a more positive spin on the big day.

Marketing propaganda. Ain't it wonderful?

• Jacob Weisberg on Obama's Brilliant First Year:

  About one thing, left and right seem to agree these days: Obama hasn't done anything yet. ...

  This conventional wisdom about Obama's first year isn't just premature—it's sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20. If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health care reform a bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more than any other postwar American president at a comparable point in his presidency. This isn't an ideological point or one that depends on agreement with his policies. It's a neutral assessment of his emerging record—how many big, transformational things Obama is likely to have made happen in his first 12 months in office.

• And speaking of President Obama, here's a photograph I'm guessing not many people thought would show up in the official White House Photo Stream over at flickr.
• Amanda Marcotte, who did sensational blogging of Mad Men this season, turns her eye to the character of Liz Lemon on 30 Rock, exploring the question of what's up with the show's political stance. Does it have one? Is it liberal? Why is Liz Lemon character (the liberal?) always giving in to Jack Donaghy (the conservative?)? In an essay that really shows Marcotte's strength as a commentator on that place where politics and popular culture intersect, she writes:

  To really understand what’s going on with "30 Rock", you have to accept two of the show’s most basic premises fully: 1) Liz is a fuck-up and 2) Jack is a master of a world created by people like him for people like him.  These two facts are unrelated in a causal way, but they do go a long way to explaining the characters’ very believable friendship.  More importantly, they explain why it’s both true that Jack is always right and in control, and yet the moral center of the show is still (mostly) liberal.

• Where are they now? Unfortunately, a lot of the members of the Bush administration are flocking back from the shallow political wilderness in which they found themselves for a while, and Dave Weigel has the lowdown on where they're landing.
• The Columbia Journalism Review recounts the busting of the so-called Sudokubomber, who was caught cheating by the Philadelphia Inquirer, sponsor of the Sudoku National Championship. Sherlock Holmes meets math geek expertise.
• What's a vote worth? In the most recent New York City race for mayor, $183.
• Richard Florida, in The Geography of Obesity, looks at BMI's by region and by the occupations most associated with those states. Some findings:

  Obesity is lower in states with higher concentrations of artists, musicians, and entertainers (with a correlation of-.6), those with larger concentrations of gays and lesbians (-.5), and immigrants (-.5). This likely reflects broader structural characteristics of those states, as more highly educated states also tend to be more tolerant and open to diversity.

• One of the eeriest optical illusions I've run across lately.

Rumsfeld! Below the fold.

I had a boss a decade ago who hated the idea of employees working from home. Hated it. Glared at me every time I suggested we let a few of our team work at home at least a couple of days a week. That team mostly comprised editors and, with an Internet hook-up, they could easily have accomplished their tasks in the basement in their jammies, with the Cheetos close at hand, if they so chose. In some cases, it would have saved them a two-hour round-trip commute. And cut down on their dry-cleaning bills.

It was all about control. He was the kind of boss who didn't believe his staff was working unless he could actually see them working. Didn't matter that their tasks had a required level of output whose quantity could be measured by how often deadlines were met or missed and whose quality was randomly scrutinized by us higher-ups, some of whom also could have worked from home. If Timbuktu had broadband, they could have edited from there. Even though my boss was a good deal younger than I, and should have been more with it, he stuck to this cramped, old-management style right up until the day he left the job. Just as he stuck to the view that people would never give up dead-tree newspapers for on-line coverage.

Economic news in the past couple of months has been decidedly mixed, which is why close observers - amateurs and professionals - have spent so much time lately debating what's next: V-shaped recovery or double-dip recession? Positive job growth or continuing massive unemployment? The mixed news applies in the work-from-home market, too. More people are working from home now. But many of them are earning less money than they did previously.

Sue Shellenbarger at The Wall Street Journal reports:

Amid the economy's many ailments, some good news has remained mostly off the radar: The at-home work force is growing, and it is encompassing new occupations ranging from radiology and nursing to auditing and teaching.

The bad news: Fierce competition means your odds of landing one of these jobs are poor. And if you succeed, you will probably take a pay cut.

For companies, home-based employees, independent contractors and freelancers are helping cut costs and improve customer service. Full-time, home-based freelancers and independent contractors in the U.S. are expected to increase by 200,000 workers to 11 million by the end of 2009, says Ray Boggs, a vice president of IDC, Framingham, Mass., a market-research firm; he sees another 200,000-worker increase in 2010.

While that is a mere blip on the radar in an economy that has been losing nearly that many jobs in a month, the trend means a lot to the individuals who are benefiting from it. They are avoiding dreaded commutes, doing volunteer work, pursuing college degrees or caring for family. And they are performing increasingly complex tasks from home, from reading MRIs to helping clients search for Bigfoot, the mythic wilderness monster.

"We are seeing a general broadening of the work-at-home landscape," says Christine Durst, chief executive of a work-at-home Web site and co-author of a new guidebook on the topic.

Applicants are stacking up by the hundreds of thousands, however. Based on my survey of a dozen companies that use home workers, your odds of actually landing one of these positions range from about 25-to-1 to 300-to-1.

Kent Conrad is trying to sell his Social Security/Medicare cutting commission idea to the White House, and they seem to be listening, to a degree. To briefly recap:

Senators from both parties on Tuesday put new pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to turn the power to trim entitlement benefits over to an independent commission.

Seven members of the Senate Budget Committee threatened during a Tuesday hearing to withhold their support for critical legislation to raise the debt ceiling if the bill calling for the creation of a bipartisan fiscal reform commission were not attached. Six others had previously made such threats, bringing the total to 13 senators drawing a hard line on the committee legislation....

Among [the panels] chief responsibilities would be closing the gap between tax revenue coming in and the larger cost of paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. The Government Accountability Office recently reported the gap is on pace to reach an "unsustainable" $63 trillion in 2083.

The panel would also have the power to craft legislation that would change the tax code and set limits on government spending.

Conrad and his new bipartisan "gang" which includes Evan Bayh, Diane Feinstein, Joe Lieberman, and Mark Warner want to cede essential power over to this commission for writing tax law by creating a new permanent Senate rule, that any legislation created by it would be subject to an up-or-down vote; it could not be amended. Note that none of this gang is demanding that critical legislation like healthcare reform not be subject to cloture rules.

Here's the bad news:

Top White House officials, including budget director Peter Orszag, met Tuesday with Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sen. Kent Conrad to discuss establishing such a commission, which has been pushed by Mr. Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, and his Republican counterpart on the committee, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire.

Senior congressional officials said the idea was gaining traction. Two officials said the White House was likely to make its own proposal for a panel, which could have less power than the proposed Conrad-Gregg commission. White House aides said no final decision had been made.

The idea is to bring Republicans and Democrats together to make tough decisions about how to cut costs or raise revenue in areas including Social Security, Medicare and taxes. For the White House, establishing a commission would show that the Obama administration is serious about tackling the deficit while postponing any real moves until after the 2010 elections.

Hopefully the White House's iteration of this commission, should they insist on it's necessity, will have far less power than the one Conrad and Gregg envision. These Senators know that cutting Social Security and Medicare is political suicide (and how much would Gregg and Republicans love to have a Democratic president and Congress commit that hari-kari?) and want the cover of having an independent commission making them do it. That the "idea is to bring Republicans and Democrats together to make tough decisions about how to cut costs or raise revenue" when we have a body to do that, called Congress, is particularly galling. That's what we elected them to do--make those decisions on our behalf. And if we don't like their decisions, we hire somebody else for the job. Conrad's commission would be unelected, unanswerable to the American people.

The other Congressional body isn't keen on this idea.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, Calif.) and senior Democrats such as House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey of Wisconsin have vociferously opposed delegating tough decisions to outside panels or commissions.

Pelosi is receiving strong support from Campaign for America's Future, which along with a large group of progressive organizations, is organizing to oppose this panel. From the statement they are sending to Reid, Pelosi, and Obama:

We write in strong opposition to proposals to create an entitlements or deficit-reduction commission that would override the normal legislative process and replace it with expedited procedures prohibiting amendments and limiting debate.

Those supporting this circumvention of the normal process have stated openly the desire to avoid political accountability. Americans -- seniors, women, working families, people with disabilities, young adults, children, people of color, veterans, communities of faith and others -- expect their elected representatives to be responsible and accountable for shaping such significant, far-reaching legislation.

Any deficit reduction measures should be carried out in a responsible manner, providing a fairer tax system and strengthening -- rather than slashing -- Social Security, Medicare and other programs that are vital to the middle class. And as unemployment continues to grow, we need a real debate about how to balance the need for economic recovery and productive public investment with the goal of long-term budget responsibility. The American people are likely to view any kind of expedited procedure, where most members are sidelined to a single take-it-or-leave-it vote, as a hidden process aimed at eviscerating vital programs and productive investment.

This fight could reach the boiling point soon, as Conrad and his gang are holding the threat of killing legislation to raise the debt ceiling--must pass legislation before the end of the year, or American defaults on its debts--to get their commission. These "fiscal conservatives" are in a game of chicken--unleash potential economic catastrophe by allowing the the US to default--in order to reach their end goal of slashing Social Security and Medicare. Pelosi needs to hold her ground, and be joined by Reid and Obama, to put an end to this undemocratic and dangerous proposal.

One of the funniest emails I've read in weeks. It's referring to the swift-boat attacks now in play on climate scientists which could soon be the subject of a congressional (Yes, I'm cereal) investigation:

Since you're BFF with that liar Michel Mann [sp?], why don't you explain to him there's this thing called water vapor. Maybe he can take that into account the next time he try to scare everyone.

OK, no problem, I told my buddy Dr. Michael Mann about 'this thing' called water vapor. Based on his reaction, which sounded something like hysterical laughter, I'm pretty sure he already knew about it. But as long as I was visiting the wingnut zone, I also called the head of geology at Exxon-Mobil and explained about this thing called a drill. Maybe they can use one the next time they're looking for oil.

• Jean Williams posted a brief and accurate piece on the CRU email hack and was over run with a horde of overly eager skeptics. I had the same experience. No doubt Hezbollah and Al Qaeda will be heartened to know that conservatives are onboard with Jihad, making sure their pipeline of oil money is available to keep killing innocent people for decades to come.
• In the meantime, climate change projections again outpace all but the more aggressive models:

  A report by a group of leading scientists that global warming is accelerating and that world sea levels could rise at worst by 2 metres by 2100* is grim reading.

• China is teeing up another lunar probe and hopes to send a manned mission to the moon as early as 2017:

  Official newspaper the China Daily said that Chang'e 2 will have a higher resolution camera and will orbit closer to the surface. China is also planning a third mission in 2015 that will land on the Moon, collect samples of rock and return them to Earth.

• Last but certainly not least, the Moonie Times, going under? Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of toadies for a megalomaniacal religious lunatic.

T'was that Saturday after Thanksgiving and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a Daily Kos editor. But the pundits... ah, the pundits...

Ellen Goodman:  

Is there such a thing as communications malpractice? If so, we might consider the case of Women v. the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

I'm not talking about medical malpractice. The scientists who surveyed the mammogram studies did their job honorably.

Bob Herbert:

The American economy is broken, ruined by the greed and irresponsibility of fabulously wealthy corporate chieftains and their shabby acolytes and enablers in government. While Wall Street is handing out billions in bonuses, American families are struggling with joblessness, home foreclosures and rampant debt. The economic woes are exacting a fierce toll on family life, and children are taking a big hit — emotionally, psychologically and otherwise.

One effect of the Great Recession, according to a recent series in The Times, has been a big jump in the number of runaway children, many of them living in dangerous conditions on the street.

Kathleen Parker:

Some people can't stand prosperity, my father used to say. Today, he might be talking about Republicans, who, in the midst of declining support for President Obama's hope-and-change agenda, are considering a "purity" pledge to weed out undesirables from their ever-shrinking party.

Just when independents and moderates were considering revisiting the GOP tent.

David Ignatius:

The Democrats, in our scary 2010 movie, will be heading toward the midterm elections hoping to preserve their 81-seat margin in the House. Vulnerable incumbents will be clamoring for more economic stimulus, but the Obama administration will be constrained by the huge budget deficits needed to bail out the economy after the 2008 financial crisis.

Trust the Villagers to get around to noticing the obvious. Once they do, you begin to question whether it's as true as they say.

John Tirman:

Two events in the last month have raised the terror alert to red: the killing of 13 soldiers and police at Ford Hood, apparently by a Muslim psychiatrist, and the decision to try high-level 9/11 suspects in a civilian criminal court in New York City.

However, these events are being manipulated by the right wing to bang the alarm bells ever louder. From House Republican leader John Boehner and Republican Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan to former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson and blogger Michelle Malkin, many on the right are grandstanding on both events with such force that it is cultivating terror in the American public.

Robert Read (UK):

Alongside improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and housing, vaccination has practically eliminated infectious diseases as a cause of childhood deaths in industrialised countries. Our children no longer die or are crippled by diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, or polio, to name a few examples. Even in the world's poorer countries that have yet to benefit from infrastructure improvements, vaccination has eradicated smallpox, is on the verge of doing the same for polio, and has cut deaths from measles by three quarters in the past decade alone. The countless millions of lives saved by vaccination are arguably science's greatest triumph.

The anti-vax movement is well organized and not going away. It will look for any opening to get a foot in the door. But Euro vaccine has adjuvant, and it's not as well studied as the rest of the vaccine components. This is one of those cases  (vaccines are evil, buy my all-natural snake oil and make me rich instead; don't do any more studies) where you look at the extremes and say "a pox on both your houses".

Stacy Feldman at SolveClimate writes:

• • • • • • •
Green Diary Rescues appear on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The diary rescue begins below and continues in the jump. Inclusion of a particular diary does not necessarily indicate my agreement with it.

• • • • • • •

Josh Nelson told us what he said we needed to know about the scandal he said is misnamed in The SwiftHack (ClimateGate): "First of all, this story should never have been called ClimateGate.  Given the similarities between this smear job and the Swift Boat attacks on Senator John Kerry, SwiftHack is a far more appropriate name. ... The scientific consensus that humans are responsible for climate change -- and that we must stabilize concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases at 350 parts per million -- remains overwhelming.  This latest cybercrime and the private emails it revealed do nothing whatsoever to change that."

Eddie C posted An Early Thanksgiving Sunset photo diary.

• • • • • • •

Oke has posted the Overnight News Digest.

This evening's Rescue Rangers are watercarrier4diogenes, blank frank, HoosierDeb, mem from somerville, YatPundit and shayera with shayera editing.

• First-time diarist Liberal Lass has a touching story of how Daily Kos saved her Thanksgiving Day in With Thanks to Kos and KINship. Your Rescue Ranger has something in his eye... (Blank Frank)
• michelewln expresses thoughts about a resilient spirit, in more ways than one, with Phoenix Rising. (mem from somerville)
• RLMiller brings us a climate-change conference update in US, China, and India at Copenhagen: a lot like Waxman-Markey. (YatPundit)
• Mother Mags provides a thorough update on every civil libertarian's least-favorite sheriff in Joe Arpaio Spews More Venom. (Blank Frank)
• Frank Cocozzelli brings back an old-fashioned word to discuss a hot contemporary topic in Catholic Remonstrance Now! (YatPundit)
• In a tasty bit of Bushco and GOPwit mockery, WIds exposes yet another DC shocker in Vegegate!. (watercarrier4diogenes)

jotter with High Impact Diaries: November 26, 2009.

emeraldmaiden has Top Comments 11/27/09 - Turkey Hangover.

Enjoy and please promote your own favorite diaries in this open thread.

Every year on the day after Thanksgiving, most of the news seems to be devoted to "Black Friday," the official start of the holiday* shopping season. Personally, I'd rank getting up at the crack of dawn to fight over sales items right up there with getting up at the crack of dawn to sit in a deer stand waiting for a hapless victim to wander by. In other words, neither is ever going to happen -- but that's just me.  

Where do you stand on the post-Thanksgiving shopping lollapalooza? And if you participated this year, how did it go? Great sales and crowds, or not so great?

*just doing my part to wage the war on Christmas

Over at TPM, Brian Beutler has come up with his top five "hysterical Republican whoppers and talking points." Agree, disagree, or do you have your own top five (or ten, or twenty, or ...)?

Number Five: Paul Ryan Draws Line On Graph

Back in the Spring, when Democrats were putting together the federal budget, House Budget Committee ranking member Paul Ryan (R-WI) released a much-mocked Republican alternative ... his numbers weren't based on any analysis at all. Instead, Ryan used CBO numbers through 2018 and then drew an upward-sloping line on the graph completely at random. It didn't take long for Republicans to catch on and begin claiming that Democratic policies would make government spending half of GDP before the end of the century.

Number Four: Senate Health Care Bill Will Cost $2.5 Trillion

This one's only now catching on, and it's a doozy. Hours after the CBO released an analysis of Senate health care legislation last week, Senate Budget Committee ranking member Judd Gregg (R-NH) released a statement: "American taxpayers are about to see an unprecedented expansion of the federal government that will cost a staggering $2.5 trillion when fully implemented." From there, it went viral

Number Three: Republicans Try Math

It seems like so long ago that the House passed far-reaching cap and trade legislation. Before they did, though, the GOP did its best to raise the specter of another energy crisis, thanks to a new, and tyrannical "light switch tax." To underscore their point, they claimed that, based on an MIT study, cap and trade legislation could cost the average household $3,128 a year. Too bad the author of that study claimed it was all hogwash.

Number Two: Inhofe Says Obama 'Gutting Our Military'

His claim was based on a meme, which made the rounds in early April, that the White House's call for a modest increase in defense spending amounted to a "defense spending cut." Inhofe took it to a whole new level. And to add insult to injury, he was in Afghanistan at the time.

Number One: Death Panels

It's possible that if TPM's Eric Kleefeld hadn't pored over every word in this rambling Facebook post by Sarah Palin, somebody else would have stumbled across it. But it's also possible that it would have gone unnoticed, and we would have had a very different political summer. "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care."

From my inbox Friday morning:

It's sort of amusing: despite all his crazy bluster, Glenn Beck, at the heart of it all, is just a carnival salesman, and his product is his own hot air.

He may be one of the most powerful voices in the Republican Party, but he's still just a Morning Zoo radio show host who found a gimmick that put him on the big stage.

It almost says more about the G.O.P. than Glenn Beck that they are so devoid of talent and ideas that a guy like him could skyrocket to straight to the top in such a short period of time.

The Cree Indian folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie has often complained that too many people saw her as Pocahontas with a guitar. She's anything but. Her career, which began in the early 1960s at beatnik coffeehouses in Canada and the United States, has been marked by political controversy, drug addiction and numerous hiatuses. This year she broke her most recent 13-year-long pause with a new album, her 18th, Running for the Drum.

If you know Buffy's songs - love songs, ballads, political - but haven't yet heard any takes from Running for the Drum, you may be surprised by her fresh sound in this new album, although that haunting voice hasn't disappeared. There's a message, however, that won't be a surprise to anyone. The lead song is called "No No Keshagesh." In her native tongue, Keshagesh means "greedy guts." "It's what you call a little puppy who eats his own and then wants everybody else's."

Here are the lyrics (audio with the whole band here):

I never saw so many business suits
Never knew a dollar sign could look so cute
Never knew a junkie with a money jones
Who's buying Park Place? Who's buying Boardwalk?

These old men they make their dirty deals
Go in the back room and see what they can steal
Talk about your beautiful for spacious skies
It's about uranium. It's about the water rights

Got Mother Nature on a luncheon plate
They carve her up and call it real estate
Want all the resources and all of the land
They make a war over it; they blow things up for it

The reservation out at Poverty Row
The cookin's cookin and the lights are low
Somebody tryin to save our Mother Earth I'm gonna
Help em to Save it and Sing it and Pray it singin

No No Keshagesh you can't do that no more.

Ol Columbus he was lookin good
When he got lost in our neighborhood
Garden of Eden right before his eyes
Now it's all spyware Now it's all income tax

Ol Brother Midas lookin hungry today
What he can't buy he'll get some other way
Send in the troopers if the Natives resist
Same old story, boys; that's how ya do it , boys

Look at these people Lord they're on a roll
Got to have it all; gotta have complete control
Want all the resources and all of the land
They break the law over it; blow things up for it

While all our champions are off in the war
Their final rip-off here at home is on
Mister Greed I think your time has come I'm gonna
Sing it and Say it and Live it and Pray it singin

No No Keshagesh you can't do that no more.

Sad to say, unless the guys slowly slowly slowly rewriting regulations for the financial institutions of our country don't stop saying yes, yes keshagesh, to the very people who did so much to bring on the worst economic crisis of the past 75 years, Buffy's description of their behavior will still be apt decades from now. Not that mere regulations will do all that needs to happen.

A beaming Amy Goodman interviewed Buffy and played a few of her songs for an entire hour that was cablecast on Thanksgiving.

Here she is with one of her lesser-known light-touch songs.

Here she is with "Cripple Creek" on Sesame Street, where she performed from 1975 to 1980.

And here she is singing the iconic, but still controversial "Universal Soldier."

What's coming up on Sunday Kos ....

• Devilstower will demand that all potential Democratic candidates must meet his 10-point test of purity before they can place a holy donkey next to their names.
• With the recent drama in the New York 23rd, and the news this week about the GOP's new "purity test" for candidates, Steve Singiser will reflect on the current state of the GOP, while wondering what the heck happened to Reagan's 11th Commandment.
• SusanG will review Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 11/22/2009-11/25/2009. All adults. MoE 2% (Last weeks results in parentheses):

Full crosstabs here. This poll is updated every Friday morning, and you can see trendline graphs here.

There is a little bit that one can divine from the numbers above. The President's numbers continue to soften (a trajectory that has been confirmed by numerous other pollsters). Meanwhile, on balance, this is a weak tracking poll for Democrats and a strong one for Republicans. The exception to the rule is in the House leadership, where Nancy Pelosi continues her recent resurgence (with a seventeen point bump in her net favorability in less than two months). At the same time, John Boehner continues looking for the basement with his numbers, which drop a point today to a net minus 53 favorability. On the Congressional ballot test, the margin narrows incrementally, with the Democrats now staked to a five point advantage (37 to 32).

Two numbers, however, which are not listed in the graphic above ought to give the Democratic Party no shortage of concern.

The first indicator of potential peril is the right track-wrong track metric. With each passing day, the mood of the nation is going to be reflected on the current political leadership in Washington DC, rather than the transgressions and incompetencies of the past leadership. And the mood of the nation appears to be darkening, rather than growing more optimistic. After a meteoric rise in the opening few months of the new Obama adminstration, the RT/WT metric now sits at its worst level in months (-17: 40/57).

But a bigger indicator of peril comes from a new survey question added the DK tracking poll for the first time this week. The poll now includes a rather simple indicator of baseline voter enthusiasm for the year 2010. The question offered to respondents is a simple question about their intentions for 2010:

QUESTION: In the 2010 Congressional elections will you definitely vote, probably vote, not likely vote, or definitely will not vote?

The results were, to put it mildly, shocking:

Voter Intensity: Definitely + Probably Voting/Not Likely + Not Voting

Two in five Democratic voters either consider themselves unlikely to vote at this point in time, or have already made the firm decision to remove themselves from the 2010 electorate pool. Indeed, Democrats were three times more likely to say that they will "definitely not vote" in 2010 than are Republicans.

This enormous enthusiasm gap, as well as some polling analysis done by PPP (and analyzed well here by Nate Silver), seems to make passing legitimate health care reform an absolute political necessity for Democrats. This polling data certainly should be something for Congressional leadership to consider, as they move along the legislative path.

Now that it's 2009 and Barack Obama is president, Republicans claim that they believe voting against a filibuster is the same thing as voting for the bill.

They are, of course, wrong. Think back to what happened in 2003, the last major health care debate. In that year, Republicans took the exact opposite view when the Senate passed Bush's Medicare prescription drug coverage benefit by a vote of 54-44 on the heels of defeating a filibuster of the bill by a 70-29-1 vote.

That means 16 senators voted to end the filibuster and also against the bill. Among them were six Republicans, three of whom are still in the U.S. Senate:

1. John Ensign (R-NV)

2. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

3. Judd Gregg (R-NH)

4. Trent Lott (R-MS)

5. Don Nickles (R-OK)

6. John Sununu (R-NH)

Those six Republicans were joined by ten Democrats who voted to move the process forward despite opposing the underlying bill. Just three Republicans voted for the filibuster and against the bill (Chaffee, Hagel, and McCain.)

So the next time you hear a Republican say that voting against a filibuster is the same thing as voting for the bill, think back to the last time health care was on the Senate floor, and keep in mind that in their minds, the only thing that matters is stopping this administration from turning America back in the right direction. They don't care about the American public. The only thing they care about is their own political fortune, and they believe that health care is their Waterloo. They will do or say anything to stop Democrats, no matter what that means for the nation.