Howdy-ho, it's the Clean Coal Carolers!

This holiday season, the coal industry has created the most incredibly easy-to-skewer mascots ever: the "Clean Coal Carolers."

See Rachel Maddow's take and read more about the myth of "clean coal" here and here.



They do bear a striking resemblance to another piece of--umm--animation that I can think of:

Black Friday, indeed

Were we worried about consumer confidence going into the holiday season?

Wal-Mart shoppers at a Long Island store were so eager to get in and spend their money that they trampled a Wal-mart worker to death as the doors opened Friday morning. Then some complained when authorities closed the store because of the death. (AP)

WTF?

The war on abstinence and traditional morality hits a fever pitch--NOT

It's "war on Christmas" time again, folks. And, in that spirit, an off-his-rocker social conservative has once again manufactured "liberal hostility" to his belief system. A hostility that simply doesn't exist.

It turns out that a Princeton student and Anscombe Society member, Francisco Nava, sent anonymous "threats" to himself and fellow members of the pro-abstinence society. Nava then faked being beaten for his outspoken moral conservatism by two masked men. (Daily Prince, NYT)

Clearly, this poor dude is unbalanced. But it is significant how his mental issues manifested themselves. Nava's hoax reimagined the subtle, systemic, and indifferent forces of gradual social change as brazen, focused forces that mean harm.

It really reminds me of the fundamental group psychosis of the "war on Christmas" people: because many people don't want religious values and ceremonies imposed by the government or other public institutions, they imagine that those same people are out to get Christmas. Because society couldn't become more secular (pluralistic, in my view) all on its lonesome, could it?

As Princeton's current student president told the New York Times,

"I don't think Princeton is the kind of place where students would be threatened or physically harmed for what they believe...Something about it didn't seem quite right because I couldn't see a Princeton student being so vehemently opposed to something their classmate said as to be compelled to physical violence."

By the way, here's what FOX news wrote before the hoax was revealed as such:

Little Outrage Over Student Beating at Princeton University
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
By Brit Hume

Conservative students and faculty at Princeton University are questioning the absence of campus and community outrage -- following the beating of a student leading a morality movement at the school. The New York Sun reports Francisco Nava was attacked by two men last week and told to shut up. The beating came two days after Nava received death threats by e-mail.

A heartwarming Capitol Hill holiday scene

If you ever make the walk between Union Station and the Senate office buildings, you probably know the Friendly Senate Homeless Guy. He is an elderly man who lives in the park behind the Russell Building, and as people walk by he offers cheerful greetings like, "enjoy your day!" or, "Friday, only one more day to go, have a great day!" He is quite friendly and sincere, and though he never asks for money, you always feel compelled to give him a little change (good strategy). Anyway, I like the Friendly Senate Homeless Guy a lot, so it was nice yesterday to see a Capitol Police officer pull up to the park and give him a big gift basket full of candy and treats.

On a related note, Friendly Senate Homeless Guy is just one of about 6,000 homeless people in DC. If you're so inclined, consider helping address this problem with a donation to DC Central Kitchen.

Hott!

My holiday shopping is D-O-N-E. Everyone's getting this.

Merry Christmas from Ted Stevens

House Backs Arctic Drilling at End of Marathon Session (NYT).

So, to bring everybody up to speed, this is the result of the latest attempt to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development. Senator Ted Stevens* (R-AK) got drilling language attached to a bill to fund the Department of Defense and Katrina reconstruction. Very difficult to vote against. Dirty, dirty, dirty.

I want to be pissed at the House, but hell, if I had to work until 5 a.m. on a Sunday night, I might vote away my own mother. Actually, it gets even worse for those hard-working public servants, because this is what they were voting on at 6:20 a.m.:

H.R. 4510: to direct the Joint Committee on the Library to accept the donation of a bust depicting Sojourner Truth and to display the bust in a suitable location in the rotunda of the Capitol.

*Who, I recently learned, frequently wears an Incredible Hulk tie to work

Bah, humbug

TO: Anonymous MySpace user, anonymous Xanga user, Ballparkguys.com, and all the people who are using that one image of the Grinch I posted last year
FR: Waage
RE: Blogging etiquette 101

Hi, nice to meet you. I'm glad to see your websites are getting so many hits. I can tell they are because you have deep linked to images on my site, and many, many people are downloading these images each day.

So here's the thing: it's fine if you want to use images from my blog, but can you please host them on your site instead of just linking to mine? That way you can use your bandwidth, and I can use mine. Alternatively, you may link to the page containing the image. That's fine too.

Thanks, and have a happy holiday season.

Christmas joy for you!

The Kevin F. Sherry Sweater Project: This is the hardest I've laughed since I watched Waterworld last night. Kevin models, and the site author comments on, horrible sweaters from the late 1980's. (via Screenhead)

How the First Amendment Stole Christmas

Groups on Right say Christmas Is Under Attack (WP)

Happy Winter Solstice from, as Jerry Falwell might put it, "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America." I personally fit into at least three of those categories, and on this most sacred Eve, I think I speak for all of us when I apologize for so cruelly oppressing America's ultra-right-wing Christians for all these years.