Happy Thanksgiving!

Some intriguing facts about this holiday that are often ignored, obscured, or misrepresented by tradition and school pageants:

The Pilgrims did not wear black-and-white clothing and buckled hats and shoes. They wore colorful clothing, and buckles wouldn’t emerge as a Puritan fashion for at least another fifty years. They are contemporaneous with the Salem Witch Trials, not the first Thanksgiving.

Of the 102 people aboard the Mayflower, only 35 were actual Pilgrims; the rest were simply common people who wanted to start new lives in the New World and make money from the fur trade.

We do not know if the group wanted to settle in Massachusetts or if they arrived there by accident, but when they arrived in late 1620, they did not find a pristine or unforgiving wilderness. Instead, they found empty villages and crop fields. Over past years, 95% of the native American population had been decimated by smallpox and other diseases introduced by Europeans. The Pilgrims appropriated the empty towns and cultivated land for themselves, and this was a key factor in their survival.

The reason Squanto spoke English was not, as some innocuous legends would have you believe, that he learned English from British fishermen. Rather, he had been kidnapped by a British sea captain and had spent about 15 years as a slave in England and Spain. After a truly Odyssean ordeal, he convinced a ship captain to take him back to New England in 1619, but when he got there, he was stunned to find that his entire village was gone. Everyone had died of smallpox two years earlier.

Squanto helped the Pilgrims plant crops and start the fur trade. A group of Indians called the Wampanoags, led by Massasoit, also helped the Pilgrims. Massasoit sought an alliance with the Pilgrims because disease had so weakened his villages that he feared the Narragansetts to the west.

The Thanksgiving feast that we commemorate today probably took place in early fall instead of late November. Duck, not Turkey, was probably the principal meat served, along with venison brought by the Wampanoag, who considered it a delicacy. There was also squash, corn, and pumpkin, none of which the Pilgrims had ever seen before, as they are foods indigenous to the Americas. Cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes, two modern-day Thanksgiving favorites, were not even invented yet.

Indians outnumbered Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving by almost two to one; there were about 50 Pilgrims and about 90 Wampanoags.

Instead of a single day, the original Thanksgiving lasted a week.

Although religious days of thanksgiving to God were sometimes declared in the colonial and early American periods, and particularly in the revolutionary period by Samuel Adams, our modern, secular tradition of Thanksgiving did not begin until 1863, during the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln pronounced a “National Day of Thanksgiving.” Thanksgiving was not fixed as the fourth Thursday of every November until 1941.

Proposition 8

Keith Olbermann provides an eloquent and moving response to the revolting bigots who passed California's Prop 8 last week:




If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don't want to deny you yours. They don't want to take anything away from you. They want what you want—a chance to be a little less alone in the world.

I keep hearing this term "re-defining" marriage. If this country hadn't re-defined marriage, black people still couldn't marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal in 1967. 1967. The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn't have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead.

The world is barren enough. It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.

And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?

The Left-Wing Media's Right-Wing Blindspots

Even before this week, conservatives have been bemoaning the notorious "liberal media" and their imbalanced treatment of the presidential campaigns. No doubt they will continue to blame the media as a major factor in John McCain's loss of the election.

The media refused to ask Barack Obama tough questions! Sarah Palin suffered constant, vicious criticism, while gaffe-master Joe Biden was almost ignored! So much bad press over Cindy McCain's and Sarah Palin's wardrobes! And so on.

But if the media lived up to their infamous liberal partiality in these respects, they fell curiously short of the mark in others.

Why so much controversy about Reverend Wright, and hardly any about the psycho, con-artist pastor who gave Sarah Palin a blessing protecting her from "every form of witchcraft"?

How did Barack Obama catch hell over a weak association with William Ayers, when John McCain has publicly expressed pride in his own relationship with convicted Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy?

Why did the media let Sarah Palin get so much press for saying Barack Obama doesn't "see America as you and I do", while hardly mentioning the Palins' cozy association with an Alaskan secessionist movement?

Isn't it curious, too, that the media reported Rashid Khalidi's ties to Barack Obama, but didn't say much about the International Republican Institute, when chaired by John McCain, giving $500,000 to the Center for Palestine Research and Studies - an organization founded by Rashid Khalidi?

Oh, and the whole ACORN thing was certainly a liability for Obama. So why didn't the media do more with the fact that John McCain was a headline speaker at an ACORN rally two years ago?

Sorry, conservatives. You can't blame Obama's victory on the media. If they really are as liberal as you say they are, then they need to get their act together.

Anti-American

For the past eight years, conservatives have denounced critics of the Executive Branch as "un-american", "unpatriotic", and even as the allies of terrorists. To such conservatives, such as Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, any criticism of the president is tantamount to anti-Americanism or even "evil" (see e.g. Hannity's work of profound demagogy, Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism. 2004.).

Their position has been "My President, right or wrong."

Soon, however, that president will be Barack Obama, and conservatives will find themselves in the opposition camp. Beginning January 20, we will see whether they still believe criticism of a wartime president to be anti-American.

President Barack Obama

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."
-Barack Obama


A man who once would have been considered by his country to be only three-fifths of a human being has just been given the mandate of that same country's people to be its president. That is America's greatness; not that we never make mistakes, but that we overcome them; not that we are perfect, but that each generation moves us closer to our ideals.

The question now will become whether President Barack Obama can repair the economy, lift America's reputation in the eyes of the world, and bring the country together to move it forward. He will be the president, that now is certain; can he be one of the great presidents in our country's history?

Yes, he can.

VOTE

Mark Twain once remarked that the man who does not read books has no advantage over the man who can't. The same could be said about voting.

GO VOTE.

Palin as President

http://www.palinaspresident.us/

Make sure you have the sound on, and click on things in the room.

(Thanks to KW for bringing this to my attention.)