Robert Earl Keen — Merry Christmas From The Family.

I suppose timing has a lot to do with it. With the Thanksgiving holiday closing in, and recognizing that they were not in a supermarket freezer or otherwise dinner-table bound, a bunch of gobblers (in suspiciously human form) decided this week was an excellent moment to show off what turkeys they are.

You need to have two parties before you can have a third one…

Leave it to the Aussies to come up with the ad that LGBT activists have clamored for throughout all our fights with the fundie-bangelicals over our basic human right to marriage equality. Every time our own USA organizations launch a marriage equality advertising campaign, their ads focus on straight allies, supportive relatives of LGBT couples, or members of the political class: hardly ever do we see affected couples.

This will be the model: one employee sprinting through the parking lot bringing toys & holiday cheer to “competitive shoppers.”

When a newspaper abandons journalistic standards in its news pages one hardly expects to find much commitment to truth on its opinion pages. Therefore it is not surprising that the Washington Post opened its pages to Tennessee Senator Bob Corker to spread the story that government support for homeownership through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was the cause of the housing bubble.

Thursday’s Oregonian attempted to answer the “how much is #Occupy costing us, anyway?” question for Portland taxpayers, focusing on Police Bureau overtime. I’m sure we’ll see Parks Department estimates on repair and reseeding and replanting the park campgrounds very shortly as well. For now, though, the paper provides some numbers about sworn officer presence on Mayor Sam Adams’ “Outta the Park!” wee hours street-fair and compares last year’s under-budget overtime expenditure with this half-years’ slightly high usage.

The best part of my visit was that I got to help pass out some of the supplies to the occupiers along with Maira, who was trying to be very democratic distributing the items. I was happy to see that we had just enough hats for everyone, so nobody that was there was going to go without at least one piece of clothing from the supply fund.

Shawnee Mission East (Kansas) high school principal Karl R. Krawitz bravely stood up to the office of Governor Sam Brownback over a visiting student’s joking tweet about the Governor. Brownback’s communications office, reviewing social media scrupulously for messages related to the obviously thin-skinned governor, took great offense to high school senior Emma Sullivan’s Monday tweet from the back of a student tour group as Brownback delivered an anodyne greeting about public service and civic engagement:

“Just made mean comments at gov. brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot”

One person was arrested and two others hospitalized after a melee in Rome, New York. Pepper spray was used by police to break up a fight in Kingston, North Carolina. Gunfire was heard in Fayetteville, North Carolina. A shooting at 1 am injured a woman in the leg in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. A fight broke out in San Leandro, California, and a man was shot. And, a woman pepper sprayed a crowd around her injuring twenty people.

This is not an excerpt from a conservative blog post on the latest incidents of violence to occur as a result of the Occupy movement. This is what happened late last night and early this morning when shoppers were pushing their way through crowds to get the best deals from Big Box stores like Best Buy or Walmart.