Don't miss this enlightening interview between Nate Silver (not pictured above) of FiveThirtyEight.com and former right-wing talk radio host (turned "documentary filmmaker", above, right) John Ziegler on the subject of the latter's commisioning of a highly questionable Zogby poll.

Ziegler, whose sole occupation now appears to be sowing fear among the ignorant about the forthcoming Obama administration, was profiled a few years ago by the peerless David Foster Wallace (above, left) in the pages of The Atlantic. That essay (titled "Host") is well worth your time, both as an elegy of a great talent lost to suicide and analysis of an annoying pest still among us.

Link to the essay via Andrew Sullivan.

The Backwards Beekeepers traveled south to remove two hives from the inside of a fence in Torrance yesterday. Have you ever had 20,000 confused, pissed-off bees flying around your head, other than during your last acid flashback? It's pretty great.

Now those fence bees have a more socially acceptable home in hive boxes, and they can do their thing without some neighbor blasting them with a water hose. Torrance has a new honey supply.

Kirk Anderson is our Yoda of the bee world, and his enthusiasm is contagious.

By Nate, via General Bonkers.

Saturn has its own unique brand of aurora that lights up the polar cap, unlike any other planetary aurora known in our solar system. This odd aurora revealed itself to one of the infrared instruments on NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

"We've never seen an aurora like this elsewhere," said Tom Stallard, a scientist working with Cassini data at the University of Leicester, England. Stallard is lead author of a paper that appears in the Nov. 13 issue of the journal Nature. "It's not just a ring of auroras like those we've seen at Jupiter or Earth. This aurora covers an enormous area across the pole. Our current ideas on what forms Saturn's aurora predict that this region should be empty, so finding such a bright aurora here is a fantastic surprise."

The new infrared aurora appears in a region hidden from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which has provided views of Saturn's ultraviolet aurora. Cassini observed it when the spacecraft flew near Saturn's polar region. In infrared light, the aurora sometimes fills the region from around 82 degrees north all the way over the pole. This new aurora is also constantly changing, even disappearing within a 45 minute-period.

Cassini Finds Mysterious New Aurora on Saturn (NASA.gov)

Via the fine lady.

Thanksgiving - Sexy [sic] Turkey Hat - Knitting Pattern

Via The American Caliban.

May I recommend instead something more like the Crack Fox's peach hat?

It's all about the love, people.

Veterans Helped by Healing Paws (NY Times)

Bush may have some nefarious plans for last-minute pardons and executive orders up his sleeve, but he's handling this part with admirable decorum.

Fear of the politician with the unusual name and look did not end with last Tuesday's vote in this rural red swatch where buck heads and rifles hang on the wall. This corner of the Deep South still resonates with negative feelings about the race of President-elect Barack Obama.

What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did President Bush — voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come, political experts say.

The region's absence from Mr. Obama's winning formula means it "is becoming distinctly less important," said Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University. "The South has moved from being the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics."

That "buck heads and rifles" line is a lazy, ignorant stereotype, so I hope the rest of the research isn't as compromised. Especially this, because reading it is like getting Christmas six weeks early:

By leaving the mainstream so decisively, the Deep South and Appalachia will no longer be able to dictate that winning Democrats have Southern accents or adhere to conservative policies on issues like welfare and tax policy, experts say.

That could spell the end of the so-called Southern strategy, the doctrine that took shape under President Richard M. Nixon in which national elections were won by co-opting Southern whites on racial issues. And the Southernization of American politics — which reached its apogee in the 1990s when many Congressional leaders and President Bill Clinton were from the South — appears to have ended.

"I think that's absolutely over," said Thomas Schaller, a political scientist who argued prophetically that the Democrats could win national elections without the South.

For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics (NY Times)

Andrew Sullivan has been linking to many articles and blog posts that document the bitter recriminations, finger-pointing, and outright panic among the wreckage of the Republican party in the wake of their second consecutive crushing defeat.

It's all very entertaining reading.

The absurdity of Sarah Palin's vice-presidential candidacy appears to have been the final straw for conservatives who are actually interested in ideas and reasoned arguments (see George Will, David Frum, Kathleen Parker, Chuck Hagel, and Sullivan himself); however much I may disagree with them—which is nearly always in the case of the first three—they advance positions that are usually grounded in reality.

These relatively non-insane conservatives now see a Republican party that's quickly being abandoned by moderates and independents, inhabiting a shrinking geographical territory, and—most worryingly—reliant on our very own Taliban Lite to fill its rallies with pom-poms and chanted slogans (and to turn out reliably on election day). Hardcore evangelicals have become Republican Party's crystal meth: a cheap and potent rocket fuel that eventually turns them into a toothless social pariah.

Here are two excerpts from good essays that Sullivan has linked to recently.

John Cole:

This is not a cosmetic problem for the GOP. This is systemic...

That is what is so damned entertaining about the short-term circular firing squad- it really symbolizes how deep in denial some of these folks are. These guys are delusional if they think the problem was an insufficient number of Red State mugs on the Palin plane and inadequate fealty to the cause. The problem is not inadequate adherence to unnamed “principles,” the problem is that they simply have no principles. They have slogans. Nothing symbolizes the slogan driven tactics over strategy GOP quagmire quite like one of my favorite episodes from the last election- the tire pressure gauge imbroglio.

There was nothing that really summed up the idiocy of the GOP quite like Rick Davis and company passing out tire pressure gauges in an attempt to mock a common sense approach to dealing with one of many aspects of the energy crisis. I am sure it will surprise no one that the brain trust at Red State was issuing action alerts for this, too.

In short, America got seduced by the Republican sweet talk, we took them home into our bedroom for some good times, and instead of performance, it turns out the Republicans have a serious case of electile dysfunction. Rather than hold true to their “principles,” they chose to sit on the edge of the bed for eight years and tell us how good it was going to be, and we lost interest and fell asleep.

Mark Lilla:

How...could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals." It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with "ordinary Americans" whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that "populist paranoia" was "subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government." But by the mid-'80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the "common sense" of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by "our disoriented elites," which is why "so many people -- and I include myself among them -- who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism."

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

To borrow Slog's headline about this: Do you need more proof he's a dick?

Illustration by Patrick Moberg.

A few miles away, thousands of people streamed into JFK Stadium at Parkview High School on Saturday for a late-night rally. But Mr. Obama stayed on his chartered Boeing 757 as he spoke by conference call to thousands of his team leaders around the country, the volunteers who form the ranks of an army that he hopes will give him an edge in the waning hours of the presidential race.

As he pressed his right hand to his forehead, his sober expression seemed at odds with the confident gleam in the eyes of his advisers. While Mr. Obama smiles less than he once did, gauging his mood simply by looking at him is risky: his baseline cool temperament has seldom spiked along the rocky points of his journey.

Even Keel for Obama in Final Turn to Election (NY Times)

We are now just one day away from what I hope will be a resounding victory for Barack Obama as the next president of the United States.

In that one day, it's incumbent on all us to get our asses out to vote (standing in torturously long lines to do so, if necessary) and to make sure that our friends, neighbors, and families to the same. We've come too far to let up now.

A lot of my favorite bloggers are writing their summing-up to the campaign, outlining their closing arguments on why electing Barack Obama is crucial at this moment in American history.

So here's mine, in the form of a conversation on Bill Moyers Journal a little over a year ago.

It features Bruce Fein, a former Reagan administration official, conservative activist and Constitutional scholar, making a powerful case that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should be impeached. Fein wrote the first article of impeachment against Bill Clinton in 1998, and early in the conversation he explains why the crimes of Bush and Cheney were worse than Clinton's:

[Bush] is seeking, more institutionally, to cripple the checks and balances and the authority of Congress and the Judiciary to superintend his assertions of power.

He has claimed the authority to tell Congress they don't have any right to know what he's doing with relation to spying on American citizens, using that information any way that he wants, in contradiction to a Federal statute called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He's claimed authority to say that he can kidnap people, throw them into dungeons abroad, dump them out in Siberia, without any political or legal accountability.

These are standards that are totally anathema to a democratic society devoted to the rule of law.

The march of time and a lack of political will may have taken impeachment "off the table" (Nancy Pelosi's words), but this conversation is a valuable reminder of what has happened to our country under the Bush-Cheney administration and a challenge to us as citizens to study our mistakes and repair some egregious damage.

Set aside for a moment John McCain's regressive economic agenda, his recklessly belligerent foreign policy, his campaign rhetoric that sought to exploit his listeners' most fearful and ignorant impulses, his refusal to recant campaign ads filled with outright lies, his cavalier selection of a proudly mediocre and manifestly unqualified vice-presidential candidate, and his general all-around impression as a cranky old bully whose attention to detail and ability to focus seem to be quickly slipping away.

Set aside Barack Obama's well-considered and reality-based proposals regarding the economy, the environment, foreign policy, energy, education, immigration, and health care, his unflappable and informed approach to problem-solving, and his ability to bury a three-point shot under ridiculous pressure.

Consider instead the terrible damage done to our constitutional government over the last eight years. George W. Bush and his enablers have sought (often successfully) to upend the crucial balance of power between the three branches of government in pursuit of an unbridled "unitary executive" with the power to dictate law and suppress dissent. Through secrecy and stonewalling, they've adamantly refused to submit to even the minimal Congressional oversight crucial to a semi-trasparent democracy.

It is a vital and thankless task for the Obama administration to undo the damage done by Bush to the constitutional order of our government before this power grab becomes permanent, as it would under John McCain. Our Constitution establishes a powerful presidency, but we must not let it become a monarchy.

Take a few minutes for a look back at nearly eight years of very fucked-up governance:

Tough Talk on Impeachment (Bill Moyers Journal)

See you at the polls.

Step 1: go batshit crazy.

In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."