Bill Burton is playing into Hillary Clinton's hands in Michigan, making it look as though Barack Obama is blocking a re-do of the primary there.

It's stupid and it's unnecessary;  and it may end up giving Hillary the justification among superdelegates she needs to take the nomination away from Obama.

Here's my reasoning...

In "The Professional," Fred Kaplan's extended New York Times Magazine profile of Defense Secretary Robert "I Am Not Now Nor Have I Ever Been Donald Rumsfeld" Gates today, the editors bury on page 96 what is to me the most telling anecdote in the story.

It won't fit in the intro, so join me overleaf to find this revelation.

In 1973, the disastrous Vietnam war was winding down, we were deep in the investigation toward impeachment of Richard Nixon, and Americans were suffering the recession triggered by our first oil shock, which was itself a response to Nixon's policy of unqualified support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

That summer, I graduated from high school, which is supposed to be a happy and optimistic event, into an ominously growing world of shit.

In the midst of this gloom, Paul Simon released his second solo album, There Goes Rhymin' Simon.  For me, for everyone, that album arrived as  a light in the darkness.  Top 40 radio loved Kodachrome and progressive rock radio loved Loves Me Like A Rock and I loved them too, and I played the album over and over;  but as a student of classical music, I especially loved American Tune, inspired by a melody in Bach's St. Matthews' Passion. Every time I heard that song, it lifted me up.

Saturday, Curtis Stigers' live performance of it made me cry.

Grab a copy of Stigers' performance and a tissue and join me overleaf.

Saving Christmas at Southwestern Oklahoma State University.  And it doesn't even need saving!

Join me for a brief discussion of RedState.com's priority problems, and disconnect from reality...  

This will be a quickie diary, but the message offered in it is too important to pass up.
Kent Jones, Professional Comic Relief of Air America's Rachel Maddow Show, hit on a metaphor with great depth and strength today, a metaphor that really sums up my personal reaction to the Bush Administration's leak to Roll Call on Monday, and to everything that has followed inevitably from it.

I offer the MP3 audio of Kent Jones' insight to you here.  

I urge you to listen to all 45 seconds of it, and ponder its wisdom.

Then follow me over to the corpus.

The constant counter-argument to the proliferation of electric and hybrid-electric vehicles has been the size and weight of the battery packs, the inadequate energy density of the available batteries, and the toxic ingredients and expensive manufacturing processes that go into making those batteries.

But what if we had high-energy batteries that used no toxic electrolytes and could be printed like the pages of a book?

Well, that's just what researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute announced today.

Prepare to get enthused...

George Bush has taken advantage of Senate recesses 170 times (167 times through January, 2007, and three more in April, 2007) over the last six years to fill positions that would otherwise require Senate confirmation  with people who would likely -- or certainly -- have failed to win Senate confirmation.  Bush has never missed an opportunity to flip the bird at the Senate, even permanently appointing a US Attorney using the notorious Patriot Act II provisions on the very day he signed into law Congress' legislation outlawing the practice.

Follow me into my nightmare...

If you don't know already, find your Representative's name in the lookup box at the top of this page.

If you don't know already, find your Senators' name in the lookup box at the top of this page.

Here are three toll-free phone numbers, no waiting:

877-851-6437
800-828-0498
800-459-1887

Ask the nice operator to transfer you to your Senators and Congressperson.

What to say?  You have to ask?

(This will be short, but there's no open thread that isn't three miles long today)

The Associated Press is reporting in an unsigned story that the Democratic National Congress is suing the Justice Department...

demanding it turn over any e-mail traffic with the Republican Party on the U.S. attorneys controversy and criminal investigations.

More overleaf...
See the update overleaf...

Melissa Block interviewed David Iglesias extensively on today's All Things Considered.   You can hear the interview at the Listen link here.  He's already been interviewed by Senate Judiciary Committee staff, and is scheduled to testify...

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette front-paged a very good story 11/24 headlined "Robot callers might buzz off" about pending state legislation to add political robocalls to Pennsylvania's Do Not Call list, but buried on page A-15 the story of what might very well be the dirtiest robocall of the 2006 campaign.

More... well, on page A-15.

By now, you've probably heard about Mean Jean Schmidt's ballot being repeatedly rejected by the scanner in her polling place.  

But you may not have heard this even funnier story from OH-2.

After the House Armed Services Committee passed HR 6054 (the Bush/Cheney Retroactive Torture Definition and Legalization Act) out of committee by a vote of 52 to 8 last week, this week the Senate Armed Services Committee produced its own alternative version.

Both of these pieces of legislation are seriously flawed, and both need to be stopped.  Right now, before the next House committee considers HR 6054, we have to let legislators know that voting for HR 6054 could make them international war criminals.

Listening to the the introduction to today's superb This American Life, I was mildly stunned to hear Jonathan Gold, food critic for the LA Weekly, describe how (among other petty cruelties) high-school jock and bully Jack Abramoff delighted in pushing Gold and his cello down a flight of stairs back when they both attended the same high school.

I guess we have here another example of how bullies tend to grow up and become felons.

(Of course, Abramoff's attorney denies that such a thing ever happened.)

I've been getting really annoyed with the business pages announcing that the Stock Market is hitting its 2000 highs.

It isn't.  It's a long way from those highs.  And the business press corps' utter failure to tell the whole story is giving corporatist wingers phony talking points that hurt America.

Wayne Adkins' take on Stephen Colbert's performance raises a point that I haven't seen raised elsewhere, and while not precise, the parallel he draws between Colbert and Wenyi Wang is not really all that strained, and deserves notice.

AP is reporting that all 18 members of the Granny Peace Brigade were acquitted today of all charges.

This is a story that is more entertaining than it is political;  the NY Times ran a piece on it last Friday that pointed up the improbability of any of the defendants suffering any penalty for their October 17 protest at the Times Square recruiting station, when they all insisted that they wanted to enlist for the Iraq occupation.

Both the judge and the prosecuters were in a most untenable position;  apparently, D.A. Robert Morgenthau, pressed to prosecute for political reasons, assigned two of his least-experienced prosecutors to the case, knowing that there was not a hope in hell of winning.

One of the primary talking points in Rumsfeld's defense has been that "out of thousands and thousands of admirals and generals, if every time two or three people disagreed we changed the secretary of defense of the United States, it would be like a merry-go-round".  However, as the dissemination continues of revelations about Pentagon resource-shifting from the needs of combat troops to expensive and unreliable new weapons systems, new polling evidence indicates that the recognition of Donald Rumsfeld's incompetence runs deep in our armed forces.