Things to be thankful for

-- My health and the love of my wife, family, and friends.

-- The brave men and women serving our country in the armed forces.

-- that America dumped the 109th Congress.

-- I'm thankful Rick Santorum will have more free time to find the WMD.

-- Really thankful we no longer have to go to war with the Secretary of Defense we had.

-- for "red state values" like protecting reproductive rights, supporting stem cell research, and rejecting discrimination.

-- I'm thankful Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who calls climate change the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” will no longer chair the Senate environmental committee.

-- and that Al Gore helped the nation, and the world, face an inconvenient truth.

-- I'm thankful the Dixie Chicks aren’t ready to make nice.

-- I'm thankful Ted Haggard bought that crystal meth but never used it.

-- I'm thankful for "the Google" and "the email" (and the "series of tubes" that make them possible). I'm particularly thankful Maf54 isn't online right now.

-- that Keith Olbermann's ratings are up and Bill O'Reilly's ratings are down.

-- I am so thankful I won't ever have to spend Thanksgiving hunting with Dick Cheney.

-- and last but nor least, I'm thankful the "Decider" only gets to make the decisions 789 more days.

Have a very happy Thanksgiving

Agonist Radio tonight (and all week)

My blog buddy Sean-Paul Kelley is hosting his progressive radio program each evening this holiday week on KTSA-550 AM. Stream it live over the Web if you cannot listen in the San Antonio market. Here's a podcast from last night's program and his conversation with Nathan Newman about the just-settled Houston janitors strike. Here's tonight's schedule:

700-730: Intro segment, introduce the night's guests, main topic, poll question and call-ins, etc.

730-800: Cliff Schecter is a regular contributor to MSNBC, the Huffington Post, a National Political Correspondent for The Young Turks on Air America and proprietor of Cliffschecter.com online.

800-830: Ted Rall will discuss his new book, Silk Road To Ruin

830-900: Ciro Rodriguez to talk about his quest to knock off Henry Bonilla in the still-to-be-scheduled runoff election in CD-23.

900-930: Charles Kuffner.

930-1000: S-P BS'ing his way through the last 30 minutes of the show.

Call in (toll free) 800-299-KTSA.

They tried to steal it, but we stole it back

Frequent commenter Bev sends this along:

A major undercount of Democratic votes and an overcount of Republican votes in U.S. House and Senate races across the country is indicated by an analysis of national exit polling data, by the Election Defense Alliance (EDA), a national election integrity organization.

These findings have led EDA to issue an urgent call for further investigation into the 2006 election results and a moratorium on deployment of all electronic election equipment.

"We see evidence of pervasive fraud, but apparently calibrated to political conditions existing before recent developments shifted the political landscape," said attorney Jonathan Simon, co-founder of Election Defense Alliance, "so 'the fix' turned out not to be sufficient for the actual circumstances." Explained Simon, "When you set out to rig an election, you want to do just enough to win. The greater the shift from expectations, (from exit polling, pre-election polling, demographics) the greater the risk of exposure--of provoking investigation. What was plenty to win on October 1 fell short on November 7.

More:

"The numbers tell us there absolutely was hacking going on, just not enough to overcome the size of the actual turnout. The tide turned so much in the last few weeks before the election. It looks for all the world that they'd already figured out the percentage they needed to rig, when the programming of the vote rigging software was distributed weeks before the election, and it wasn't enough," (Sally) Castleman (the national chair of EDA) commented.

Greg Palast previously warned us this might happen (read everything at the link, ahead of the excerpt below, to understand how they almost stole it):

It’s true you can’t win with 51% of the vote any more. So just get over it. The regime’s sneak attack via vote suppression will only net them 4.5 million votes, about 5% of the total. You should be able to beat that blindfolded. If you can’t get 55%, then you’re just a bunch of crybaby pussycats who don’t deserve to win back America.

We took your advice though, Greg, and stole it back. And we're going to work a little harder in 2008 to do the same thing.

Thanks for the heads-up. Botha ya's.