It's Thanksgiving so you know what that means.

I used to think that someday this would get old, but so far...nope still works for me.

Happy Thanksgiving IMers!

Donald Trump fires the inaugural parade announcer who has been doing the job since the Eisenhower inauguration.

Courtesy of CBS News: 

When President-elect Donald Trump officially takes over the White House in two weeks, his inaugural parade will be missing the legendary voice of 89-year-old Charlie Brotman, the announcer of every inauguration celebration since Dwight Eisenhower in 1957. 

Brotman, who learned last week that he’ll be replaced by a younger, vocal Trump supporter, said he was “heartbroken” about the inauguration committee’s decision. 

“I was destroyed,” he told local Washington D.C. news station WJLA. “I’ve been doing this for 60 years.”

If any of you saw Rachel Maddow's amazing segment on this guy \you know that he recently lost his wife of  65 years.

He said the only thing keeping him going was his work on the inauguration. But now that's gone as well.

I swear this Donald Trump is like Snidely Whiplash, Charles Montgomery Burns, and Ebeneezer Scrooge all rolled up into one. 

Is it Thanksgiving already? Well you know what that means.

I decided to post the Countdown version this year, which featured David Shuster sitting in for Keith Olbermann.

Of course almost all of the versions of this are fairly entertaining, but something about the classics just keeps us coming back to them.

Hey folks remember when people actually thought this moron might run for president?

Ah, good times.

The citizens in the Alaska community of Barrow have decided to return to their traditional roots and change the name of their town to something you will never be able to pronounce.

Courtesy of Yahoo: 

A slight majority of voters in the largely Inupiat city of Barrow approved efforts to change the community's name to Utqiagvik (oot-GHAR-vik) in their local election Oct. 4. The vote was tight, with 381 in favor of the name change and 375 against it. 

"Basically, it reinforces the cultural identity of the people," said Mayor Bob Harcharek, who is not Native. He noted that early day missionaries set up schools in the area where students were forbidden to speak in their native language and were punished if they did so. "It caused some social psychological problems." 

Barrow City Council member Qaiyaan Harcharek, the mayor's son, introduced a local ordinance in August that began the process ratified by voters. The younger Harcharek is Inupiat on his mother's side. 

"We are now in an era where the reclamation of tradition is critical to the perpetuation of identity as Iñupiat," he wrote in an email Friday to The Associated Press. "The people of Utqiagvik voted to regain our traditional name. Hopefully, it signifies the beginning of a decolonizing revolution. Regaining our traditional names is just one step towards that healing!"

As you can imagine this decision is not going over well with folks who run businesses with the name "Barrow" over the top, nor with many of the non-native residents.

However it is hard to blame the people of Utqiagvik for wanting to get back some of the heritage that was beaten out of them by the early missionaries.

As I have shared before what happened to the native children in Alaska was horrific and essentially constituted the wholesale destruction of an entire culture.

The children were torn from their families, and sometimes sent as far away as Arizona, to be "properly" educated in the ways the white man.

As a result many of the children returned to Alaska villages unable to speak the language, knowing nothing about how to survive in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet, and stripped of any sense of self worth.

Alcoholism and drug use became an epidemic, and many of these villages still have no recovered.

So yeah, Utqiagvik (oot-GHAR-vik) is hard as hell to pronounce. But tough shit, learning to do so is really the very least we can do to show respect for a people who have managed to survive frigid temperatures, famine, pestilence, and of worst of all, the arrival of the Christians.

It's Thanksgiving! You know what that means! Time for the great Sarah Palin turkey massacre video!

Gosh has it been seven years already?

You'd think I'd get tired of seeing this, but nope. It still makes my day.

P.S. And for those who like their turkey slaughter with a little Keith Olbermann commentary here you go.

President Obama expertly trolls the Republicans while performing the Thanksgiving traditional of pardoning two turkeys.

President Obama could not resist poking a little fun at the opposition while providing amnesty to Mac and Cheese, two potentially delicious undocumented main dishes.

Here is more from TPM: 

This year he used the official pardoning ceremony as an opportunity to comment on and poke fun at the conservative backlash over his recent executive actions on immigration. 

"I am here to announce what I'm sure will be the most talked about executive action this month," Obama said. "Today, I am taking an action fully within my legal authority, the same kind of action taken by Democrats and Republican presidents before me, to spare the lives of two turkeys, Mac and Cheese, from a terrible and delicious fate." 

"They'll get to live out the rest of their days respectively at a Virginia estate with 10,000 acres of roaming space,” Obama continued. “I know some will call this amnesty."

Stupid tradition, but at least the President makes the most of it. 

Well it's Thanksgiving so you know what that means. Let the great Sarah Palin turkey slaughtering video commence!

God that never gets old!

Here is a little write up that HuffPo did for those who may not be familiar with this video gem: 

Fresh off a defeat in the 2008 presidential election, Palin headed to a turkey farm in her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, to pardon a local bird -- a common practice among governors. 

Palin delivered her prepared remarks over frequent interruptions from clucking birds not as fortunate as the turkey getting the reprieve. She even touted herself as a "friend to all creatures great and small" before posing for a photo op. 

What happened next was entirely unexpected. While many had recently learned that Palin could be unpredictable -- even a maverick, perhaps -- Americans couldn't have foreseen her conducting a lengthy on-camera interview while live birds were being fed into a machine of mass turkey murder mere feet behind her. 

Palin seemed to unwittingly nail her remarks, commenting on the need to find "levity" in her job as turkey after turkey was decapitated by the metal cone of death in the background. The man shoving the struggling birds into the device even looked up toward Palin and the camera as the governor presciently predicted that the spectacle would invite skepticism.

What can I say, it's a tradition.

On this day I need some white meat, some stuffing, some cranberry sauce, and some Sarah Palin blabbering while turkeys are being slaughtered in the background, to make my holiday complete.

And let me remind everybody once again that Palin was asked if she was sure that was where she wanted to stand and she said, "No worries."

Good news Christians, Kirk Cameron is riding to the rescue of Christmas. Is it that time again?

Courtesy of The Blaze:  

Actor Kirk Cameron is taking political correctness to task this fall with a new movie that aims to deflate arguments regularly made against Christmas, while simultaneously pushing back against atheist activists’ annual attacks on the holiday. 

In “Saving Christmas,” Cameron plans to tackle some of the most controversial and disputed issues surrounding the celebration of Jesus Christ’s birthday — claims that he says have had a profound impact on the way believers and nonbelievers alike view the Christian celebration. 

Cameron said some of the claims that will be addressed in the film include: the notion that Christmas is really a church co-opting of winter solstice celebrations, that Jesus was not born on December 25, that Christmas trees are pagan and that consumerism is overshadowing the true reason for the season.

Well bad news there Mike Seaver, because in fact Christmas WAS indeed a pagan holiday and virtually everything about it is borrowed from other traditions predating Christianity.  (As you can learn for yourself by clicking here.)  

The “Growing Pains” actor, who has gone on to direct and produce numerous faith-themed films, said that atheist activists’ attempts to diminish the true nature of the holiday by taking aim at nativities and other symbols of faith amounts to political correctness run amok. 

“[It is] offensive to 90 percent of people in our country who want to see nativity scenes and who know the birth of the Christ child is the fundamental root of Christianity, which is the ideology that built this country,” Cameron said.

Once again Atheists do not care about crosses and nativity scenes placed on private property, we only want them kept away from government facilities and public areas.

And that 90% number is bullshit by the way.

Personally I LOVE Christmas and have no problem with a Santa Claus, commercialism, and even a baby Jesus or two. However for me it has always been the religious people demanding that everybody remember the "reason for the season" and cramming Christianity down our throats who have poisoned the well.

And I personally find the idea that the idiotic, Bible thumping Kirk Cameron is going to actually convince anybody that Christmas is solely a creation of Christianity laughable on its face.

Remember he is the guy who along with Ray Comfort literally tried to prove the existence of God using a banana. 

(H/T to Politicususa.)

Republican lawmaker helps to cripple Hawaii's sex education program because he claims it "normalizes" homosexuality.

Hawaii State Representative Bob McDermott clearly very upset that he never gets in any of this.

Courtesy of Raw Story:

Hawaii’s state Department of Education announced on Saturday that its middle school sexual education program would only be taught to students whose parents explicitly opted-in. 

The announcement was a victory for Hawaii State Representative Bob McDermott, who claimed that the program would “normalize” homosexuality. Rep. McDermott has long fought against sexual education programs like Pono Choices, which was developed by the University of Hawaii at Mānoa’s Center on Disability Studies using funding from the federal Office of Adolescent Health. (“Pono” is a Hawaiian word typically translated as “righteous.”) 

“I am a little uncomfortable saying this, but this is what your children, your 11-year-old children, are being taught. To me, this is outrageous because it robs them of their innocence and it’s not appropriate,” McDermott said about the program late last year. 

“I can assure you my 11-year-old girl knows nothing about anal sex, and one of the reasons is because she’s not exposed to Pono Choices.” (Yeah, well I can assure this uptight prick that his daughter knows all about anal sex, and could probably teach him a thing or two. These kids are NEVER as innocent as their parents think they are.)


After he made that statement, the Department of Education temporarily suspended the program until it could determine the curriculum’s “appropriateness.” It found that “the cirriculum meets department standards” and “is a culturally responsive curriculum that has resulted in positive outcomes for students.”

However the program was only reinstated on an "opt in" basis which means that parents have to sign a paper allowing their children to attend instruction, rather than the usual method of "opting out." Of course the result of this approach is that more children will miss the opportunity to learn and that is not good for fighting STD's and keeping teen pregnancy stats low.

Personally I am a little surprised that Hawaii is still struggling with this kind of thing.

Not only did they recently pass a law allowing gay marriage, but in my experience it is just about the gayest place on the planet.

Not to mention that everybody is dressed in brightly colored garb, wearing flowers around their neck, and that they have a long standing tradition of young men who dress like women to have sex with other men, called the Mahus.

Historically the Mahus are widely accepted in Hawaiian culture, and are also revered for their dancing and sexual abilities.

But leave it to some uptight haole to screw things up for the people of Hawaii.

Is it Thanksgiving already? Well you know what that means!

I know that some of you expressed a desire NOT to see this video this morning, but much like seeing Uncle Harold pass out with his pants unzipped in front of the football game after dinner this too is a Thanksgiving tradition.

Besides WHO can really get tired of watching Sarah Palin fail so hilariously at trying to mimic the President turkey pardon.

My favorite part is that according to my friend Linda Kellen Biegel, (Celtic Diva) who was there that day, the cameraman suggested that she might want to move to a different location, but she looked back and then said she was fine right there.

And the rest is Thanksgiving history.

Betty Bowers, America's best Christian, offers the perfect Thanksgiving prayer.

This may seem a more appropriate post for tomorrow, but I offer it today because I have a certain video to post tomorrow which has become an IM tradition on Thanksgiving.

Nothing beats listening to Sarah Palin struggle to read from one of her ghostwritten books in her own screechy voice. You know, besides listening to two cats fornicate that is.

This excerpt (Brought to us by the great folks over at Wonkette.) is from Palin's new book entitled "Good Tidings and Great Joy, Protecting the Heart of Christmas," or perhaps better known by it's alternate title "I know absolutely nothing about Christmas but I hear you can make a buck by faking it"

To be honest you simply cannot get the true experience of having the screechy stupidity wash over you and steal away your will to live unless you listen to Snowdrift Snooki read it herself, which you can do here:

However I will provide this transcript, because I am a nice guy and it IS Halloween and this was the first thing to really make my hair stand on end the entire day.

It starts right in the middle of some sentence about walking in the woods I believe:

"Occasionally startling a moose, passing caribou further north, and hoping the kids in the back keep up. 

As Governor I was able to see even more jaw dropping vistas throughout Alaska. But the most beautiful scenes were the ones I've taken in through the lenses of my snowmachine goggles. (Alaska Snowmachine reference to show you are outdoorsy, check.)

When we arrived at the homes of our friends and families, we frequently played Eskimo Bingo. (By the way using the term "Eskimo" in Alaska these days is considered somewhat culturally insensitive. Something you would think a woman married to a Yupik would know.) A gift swapping game, and the only time we'd enthusiastically encourage the kids to be greedy. (I don't really think the Palin kids required muhc encouragement.)

Everyone brings a wrapped gift for exchange and places it on the floor. With a timer ticking, we roll dice in a pie tin, and hope to get doubles so the gift grabbing can begin. Each person gets to steal present from the center of our circle. Even ones already nabbed.

This might sound like a fun parlor game, but but gets intense. (Hair pulling and eye gouging is allowed I'm sure.)

When someone unwraps something good and places it on the floor, even for a moment, it's fair game.

One year, a highly coveted box of homemade chocolates, from a bakery in Indiana, caused us to play well into the night. (Okay is it just me or is the idea of "home made chocolates" coming from a bakery kind of inconsistent?) I ended up with that one because I'm the mom, and I refused to let the game end until it ended well. (Okay, is this really the side of her that she wants the people buying this book to know?)

Some years I've ended up with one of the gag gifts. A singing fish wall plaque. A dusty old fossil from dad's shelf. A warped tin sign that reads, "Give me beer, the in-laws are here."

But Todd makes sure my real Christmas gifts are AMAZING.

He's always given good gifts .

When we were seventeen, and my friends had already received polo sweaters, the newest go go's, vinyl record, or Gloria Vanderbilt jeans from their boyfriends, Todd surprised me with a traditional Eskimo grass woven basket, and Alaskan gold nugget earrings, from a native village near his home town. (A seventeen year old was happy with a grass woven basket?)

In that tradition he has since given me a beautiful red manual ice auger, for ice fishing on the lake, a 30-06 rifle, a pair of hockey skates, snowshoes for hardcore winter workouts, and cords of winter spruce for my fireplace. I so appreciate that one, as I have an affinity for chopping, and stacking my own wood. (Okay my bullshit detector just burst into flames.)

As the old saying goes, "Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice."

Wow and just when you thought Palin might be running a little low on mooseshit.

I have been around habitual liars before but this idiot takes the cake.

Must see! 11 year old Yemeni girl eloquently speaks out against marrying off children to older men as she flees from her family.

I often get dinged for not going after other beliefs as vehemently as I do Christian ones. But that is not because I find them any more acceptable, in fact most of the time I find them even more toxic, especially within the Islamic community.

However because they tend to impact us less here in the US I do not make them the focus of my rants nearly as often.

However make no mistake, I find the idea of honor killings, oppression of women, and the marrying off children to be the indefensible acts of a primitive culture that has no place in the 21st century.

This child is terrified for her very life, and the fact that her own family has put her in this situation is sickening.

However I must point out that less than two hundred years ago this very same horrific tradition was widely practiced right here in the United States. Christianity is no less complicit in this type of abuse than is the Islam. The difference is that in America we moved beyond our superstitious view of women and sexuality, and now tend to respect both genders equally.

Except in Texas of course. 

Egyptian girl dies after undergoing female circumcision.

Courtesy of Al Arabiya:

Suhair al-Bata’a, a 13-year-old Egyptian girl, has died undergoing circumcision at a village in the Daqahliya governorate northeast of Cairo, Egyptian media reported on Sunday. 

“We left our daughter with the doctor and the nurse. 15 minutes later, the nurse took my daughter out of the operation room to a nearby room, along with three other girls whom the doctor was circumcising,” Mohammed Ibrahim, a farmer, told Egyptian daily al-Masry al-Youm. 

“I waited half an hour, hoping that my daughter would wake up, but, unfortunately, unlike the rest of the girls, she did not,” he said. 

The doctor who circumcised Suhair had previously circumcised her elder sister two years ago. 

“I want nothing but to hold the doctor accountable and to have justice for my daughter,” Suhair’s mother, Hasanat Naeem Fawzy, told the newspaper. 

The police ordered an autopsy and summoned the doctor to find the cause of the young girl’s death. 

A health inspector report said the cause of the death was due to “a sharp drop in blood pressure resulting from shock trauma,” the family’s lawyer, Abdel Salam, told al-Masry al-Youm. 

Egypt's National Council for Women condemned the deadly incident of female circumcision as a criminal act that reflects “extreme savagery,” calling on the government to investigate the issue and punish the culprits. 

UNICEF Egypt has also condemned the incident, saying female circumcision has neither medical nor religious justification.

Genital mutilation in the name of God. 

Only ONE of the shameful iron age rituals left over from a time of ignorance which lives on only because of superstition and a lack of education. 

While I support the idea of the doctor being prosecuted for this, I also don't believe the parents should be given a pass. There was NO reason for this little girl to die, and her parents should be charged with whatever passes for Egypt's version of manslaughter or negligent homicide.

Let's take a short break from politics to enjoy something uniquely Alaskan.

These pictures below come to us courtesy of our friend Dennis Zaki who was downtown yesterday for the unofficial start of the Iditarod here in Anchorage.

 I have sometimes been critical of the way sled dogs are treated up here in Alaska (Though I have to admit things are much better for them now than in the past.), however you cannot help but to be impressed with the enthusiasm these beautiful animals demonstrate at the opportunity to pull that sled.

As somebody who has ridden on the back of a dogsled I can tell you that getting the dogs to run is NEVER the problem, the problem is getting them to stop.

According to my e-mail it looks like Dennis is headed out to Willow for the official start of the race today, so perhaps he will gift us with a few more of his amazing photos.

This country is not separated Right to Left, it is separated from North to South.

Courtesy of Salon:  

Mainstream American history, from the point of view of the white majority in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, is a story of military successes. The British are defeated, ensuring national independence. The Confederates are defeated, ensuring national unity. And in the 20th century the Axis and Soviet empires are defeated, ensuring (it is hoped) a free world. 

The white Southern narrative — at least in the dominant Southern conservative version — is one of defeat after defeat. First the attempt of white Southerners to create a new nation in which they can be the majority was defeated by the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Doomed to be a perpetual minority in a continental American nation-state, white Southerners managed for a century to create their own state-within-a-state, in which they could collectively lord it over the other major group in the region, African-Americans. But Southern apartheid was shattered by the second defeat, the Civil Rights revolution, which like the Civil War and Reconstruction was symbolized by the dispatching of federal troops to the South. The American patriotism of the white Southerner is therefore deeply problematic. Some opt for jingoistic hyper-Americanism (the lady protesteth too much, methinks) while a shrinking but significant minority prefer the Stars and Bars to the Stars and Stripes. 

The other great national narrative holds that the U.S. is a nation of immigration, a “new nation,” a melting pot made up of immigrants from many lands. While the melting pot story involves a good deal of idealization, it is based on demographic fact in the large areas of the North where old-stock Anglo-Americans are commingled with German-Americans, Polish-Americans and Irish-Americans, along with more recent immigrant diasporas from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. 

But even before the recent wave of immigration from sources other than Europe, the melting pot never included most of the white South. From the early 19th century until the late 20th, the South attracted relatively few immigrants. Who wanted to move to a backward, rural, apartheid society dominated by an oligarchy of a few rich families? Apart from several encapsulated minorities — Cajuns in Louisiana, Germans in central Texas — most white Southerners remained descendants of colonial-era immigrants from the British Isles, chiefly English and Scots-Irish. And while Irish and German Catholics and Jews diversified the religious landscape of the North, the South was dominated by British-derived Protestant sects like the Episcopalians, Baptists and Methodists from Virginia to Oklahoma and Texas.

You know I think that this chasm between the North and South was NEVER more apparent than after the election of Barack Obama. In the North it was celebrated as this incredible step forward as a country, and the very embodiment of the progress we were making as a nation. But in the South is was seen as an aberration, and sign that something had gone terribly wrong, and the country was no longer the America that they loved so much.

I encourage you to read the entire article, it is very illuminating and portends of dangerous times ahead. Times that it would behoove us to prepare for, or find ourselves once again in the grip of a war we did not see coming.

Happy Super Bowl Day!

Do you know what I love about Superbowl Sunday?

It is just about the ONLY American religious holiday that I can participate in without reservation.

Oh sure I'm worried about concussions, and the long term physical effects that the game has on the athletes, but not nearly enough to let it diminish in any way the taste of my special Superbowl nacho and guacamole platter. Yum, yum!

My brother is coming over later today and we will engage in our usual Superbowl ritual of him blaming me for everything that went wrong in his life, and my telling him that he was adopted.

Then at some point we will have our usual argument about whose fault it is that our parents got divorced and we will finish up the day with him in a headlock and my telling him that being an inch and half taller is no compensation for having an ingrown penis.

Ahh, good times!

I am not going to tell any of you who to root for, but you should be aware that the Ravens are going to win. I tell you this to you with the casual confidence of somebody who just learned three days ago who was even playing this year, and who chose the Ravens simply because he learned that the 49ers are homophobic. Good enough for me, go Ravens!

Okay so I don't pay attention to football all that much, sue me.

Besides we all know why MOST of you will be tuning in anyhow, don't we?

And of course it can't be the Superbowl without at least ONE controversial ad, right? Ooh, the line up looks good this year.

A Christmas day follow up.

I just thought I would give all of you a little update on my Christmas. (Assuming of course that anybody cares.)

Anyhow we had a great time. (In other words there were NO stabbings.)

The spinach dip was a huge hit, as always. And we all ate WAY too much food, drank too much wine, and followed that up with my mother's apple pie, which NONE of us really needed. (I just finished my workout, but it will take several more to work off that damn pie.)

My brother and I exchanged the traditional $50 Best Buy gift cards (I really don't know why we bother every year.), and other gift cards were scattered among the cousins, nieces, and nephews.

My mother cried when she opened the I-Pad my brother and I had purchased for her. That was a little unsettling as my mother rarely cries. She kept saying it was too much, but since, against all advice to the contrary, she refused to abandon us in the woods when we were little and helpless, NOTHING is too much for her.

Afterward my brother and I spent almost an hour and a half trying to set it up for her, since she did not have an I-Tunes account.

Then for some reason I-Tunes would not load properly on her computer, but my brother and I eventually worked through it as my daughter heckled us from the other room claiming that if we would have just swallowed our pride and let her, or one of her cousins do it, Mom would have been gleefully using her I-Pad an hour ago. (My brother and I were NOT to proud. We did not let them try for fear they were right. Totally different.)

Speaking of my daughter, she had decided to open her gift at my Mom's rather than at our house (Bigger audience in case  I screwed it up), and really loved her new camera. She gushed over all of it's bells and whistles, and started to describe them to me is if she was trying to sell ME the camera.  Then she found that it came with two lenses and she was just over the moon with happiness.

(I am only guessing of course, but I think I done good.)

After the opening of the gifts it was time for the insults to fly, and embarrassing family stories, to be told, but everyone was in such a good mood over their gifts that nobody had very much venom at their disposal. (Personally I was disappointed at the lot of them.)

Essentially it was a pretty great Christmas, as indicated by the fact that everybody in family is completely fucking spoiled.

But what can I say?  I love them.

I mean somebody has to, right?

Presenting a time honored Immoral Minority Thanksgiving day tradition. Sarah Palin's turkey pardoning fiasco.

I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I have watched this video, and it just NEVER seems to get old.

There are of course numerous versions of this video, but I decided to go with the traditional Countdown version featuring Keith Olbermann stand in David Shuster. Unlike some of the other videos they had the decency to blur out the actual headless turkeys and bloody carnage taking place behind that clueless dipshit from Wasilla. I did not want to ruin anybody's appetite today.