Today’s video of the day comes from a charismatic Black church, where the congregants are enagaged in shouting. Although I respect their beliefs and practices, the competitive nature of this particular scene makes me wonder if they’re really getting their praise on.

Today, I’ll be appearing on Fox News’ “The Live Desk w/ Martha Maccallum. We will be discussing the news topics of the day. The show airs live from 1:00 to 2:00. My segment runs the second half of the show.

If men had been the only voters in Missouri, Montana or Virginia, we’d have a Republican Senate. It’s time for the Dems to listen to what women were voting for in the 2006 elections.

Post Election Polls: Men Were Angry At Bush, Women Wanted Change
By Ellen Goodman

Allow me to use my grandmother-of-two voice. This is a bit more low key and benign than Nancy Pelosi’s famous “mother-of-five voice.” Toddlers and tryptophan tend to mellow me out.

Nevertheless, during this holiday interregnum between the election and the installation of a new Congress, a grandmaternal word or two to the Democrats may be in order.

There’s already been a surfeit of talk about the role of women in this election. Alas, this was not The Year of the Women Redux, although Speaker-elect Pelosi has broken the “marble ceiling” and has the bruises to show for it. Yes, there will be more women in Congress than ever before, but so far the percentage has only gone up from 15.4 to 16.4485981. Hold the applause.

This was, however, the year women provided the Democratic margin of victory. If men had been the only voters in Missouri, Montana or Virginia, we’d have a Republican Senate. This is also the year in which women drove the agenda.

Pollster Celinda Lake, who coined the terms “soccer mom” and “security mom,” hasn’t found the right moniker yet for women in 2006. She tries out two of them — “change moms” and “had-enough women” — and then settles for an explanation: “Women solidified around change a year ago and didn’t budge.”

They were the first to think the war was going sour and first to believe the economy was going downhill. And, at the family heart of the matter, a majority of women unhappily concurred that their children were going to be worse off than they are.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

Instead, we should atone for the genocide that was incited — and condoned — by the very men we idolize as our ‘heroic’ founding fathers.

No Thanks to Thanksgiving
By Robert Jensen

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.

In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.

Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits — which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.

That the world’s great powers achieved “greatness” through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.

But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin — the genocide of indigenous people — is of special importance today. It’s now routine — even among conservative commentators — to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.

Today, I will be appearing on CNBC’s Kudlow & Company, which airs from 5-6PM. I will be on the second half of the show, which will deal with the 2008 presidential election.