Fifty Shades Of Chicken

A little poultry humor on Thanksgiving!

"The Turkey Hasn't Committed A Crime": More TV Fun On Thanksgiving

I miss The West Wing! In the spirit of the day I thought I'd post another fun clip from a TV Thanksgiving. This is from the "Shibboleth" episode in season two, and according to the booklet that came with my DVD set, it originally aired exactly 12 years ago, on November 22, 2000.  It looks like Aaron Sorkin may have taken a little creative license when he wrote that the unpardoned second turkey gets eaten, or maybe things have changed since 2000, because at yesterday's pardoning ceremony President Obama made it clear that both of this year's turkeys get to live out their natural lives at Mt. Vernon.  President Bartlet and C.J., I miss you!

Still Hilarious After All These Years

"As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." Love it!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Birthday, Prince Charles!

After the trauma and drama of the election and Petraeus-gate, it's fun to return to one of my other fave blog topics, the Royals. I'm actually a day late - yesterday was Prince Charles' 64th birthday and of course I want to send my warmest birthday greetings to the prince, even a day late! Anytime you talk about the Prince of Wales and age, you're almost required to do the math, so here goes. Charles is 64 and he's been Prince of Wales since 1958; his mother the Queen is 86, she's been Queen, like, forever and if she lives as long as her mother did (101), Charles still has another 15 years to wait before he becomes King, at which time he would be 79 and Prince William would be 45. Got that?

The men in the British royal family have historically not been as long-lived as the women, so there's always been a (mostly unspoken) possibility that the Queen would outlive her eldest son, depriving him of his primary career option after a lifetime of waiting. Given that Charles' father Prince Philip is now 91, however, Charles apparently gets longevity from both of his parents and would seem to be a good bet to beat the odds and actually live to become King. At that point William would presumably be named Prince of Wales, Kate would be the new Princess of Wales, their son would be... Oops, I'm getting a little ahead of things, aren't I? For now I'll stick with Happy Birthday, Charles, and of course, Long Live The Queen!

How Many Stalls Do The Men Get?

From U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar:

“For the first time, there was a traffic jam in the Senate women’s bathroom,” she said. “There were five of us in there, and there are only two stalls.”

For the record, the next Congress will have 20 female senators, which is not even close to parity with our percentage of the overall population, but definitely on the right track.

This Is The Real Scandal.

I've been trying hard to keep up with all of the info about the expanding Petraeus scandal and there's a lot to keep up with. My reactions have been all over the place, from laughing to head-scratching to eye-rolling at the stupidity of it all. This is the part that made me cry:

As a military spouse, I wish the spotlight would fall on the real tragedies and crises military families face every day. They don’t require FBI investigations or White House notification. Simply drive down the main road at Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. (or any local VA hospital), where a young man whose body consists of a head and a torso blows into a straw to steer himself through the crosswalk on the way into the hospital. This is where the reporters should be. Stop by the base post office, where a young man, face down on a stretcher, waits in a line for his mail. Step over to Dunkin Donuts, where another young man with four prosthetic limbs attempts to hand the cashier a $5 bill, which keeps slipping out of his metal claw.  Pass a young veteran in a wheelchair trying to push his infant’s stroller with one hand while wheeling himself forward with the other. In this city of amputees, and in the scores of American towns that will house and attempt to heal them for decades to come, the dirtiest secret of wartime is already out in the open, for everyone to see.

As of now this is a Petraeus-free blog.

Unintended Consequences

If you think the Petraeus sex scandal is just a sex scandal, consider:

• Both "other woman" Paula Broadwell and "other, other woman" Liz Kelley have now hired high-powered defense attorneys. Kelley has also hired a well-known crisis communications/PR guru. 
• Broadwell's home was searched by FBI agents last night and they carried out boxes of documents, a laptop computer and a briefcase.  
• A second 4-star general is now being investigated, on the basis of having exchanged 20,000 or more pages of e-mail communications with Ms. Kelley over the last couple of years.  
• The FBI agent to whom Ms. Kelley initially expressed her concerns about the threatening e-mails that turned out to be from Ms. Broadwell, had sent Kelley pictures of himself "shirtless." When the investigation didn't proceed as quickly as he thought it should, he leaked the story to a member of Congress, who told Eric Kantor, who told the director of the FBI.
• Broadwell's father says there's a lot more to this story and that the truth will eventually come out. 

Yikes. Are you still with me? Do we need a flow chart? In my original post about the scandal I said that things were sure to get juicy. I had no idea.

It's safe to say that when General Petraeus decided to get naked with his biographer, he didn't anticipate this. When Broadwell sent the original e-mail messages to Kelley, she didn't anticipate this. When Kelley asked the FBI to check into those e-mails, she didn't anticipate this. And what the heck were Kelley and General John Allen talking about in their 20,000+ e-mail messages anyway? Even if they were only discussing the weather and her daughter's upcoming multi-cultural Thanksgiving pageant, it's safe to say that the General may have been distracted from his important work making the world safe for democracy, or some such thing. It's entertaining to speculate about and heaven knows it's manna from heaven for a blogger, but still. Real people, with real families are at the center of this and their lives, and probably their careers, will never be the same. You never know where things will lead when people start secretly getting naked... 

Mittens And The Donald

The strange love/hate relationship between Mitt Romney and Donald Trump.

I Couldn't Resist...

Juice, Juicier, Juiciest...

If giving a concession speech is the hardest thing a public figure has to do, surely getting caught in a sex scandal and being forced to resign is the second hardest. As is always the case with these things, details about what forced CIA Director Petraeus to quit are trickling out and as always, there's plenty of embarrassment, bad judgement and stupidity to go around.

It didn't take long for the identity of the "other woman" to surface. No surprise, she's a lot younger and, yes, a lot prettier than the General's wife of 38 years. One of the things that always intrigued me about the Charles/Diana/Camilla dynamic was that Charles continued to be obsessed with Camilla, who was older, chubbier and dowdier than his younger, thinner, stylishly fashionable wife. None of that here. Compared to the glamorous Paula Broadwell, who's 20 years younger than the General, poor Mrs. Pretraeus looks old and tired.

Apparently yesterday was Broadwell's 40th birthday; she's married to a doctor and has two kids. Did she know that her secret was about to go public in a very big way? She recently wrote a hagiographic biography of General Petraeus and did a book tour to promote it. Videos of interviews from the tour are now going viral, and watching them now, it certainly looks like her relationship with her subject may have been more than strictly professional.

The Washington Post says that rumors of infidelity have followed General Petraeus for years. Really?  As I think about it, it seems strange that this didn't surface when he was under consideration to be CIA Director. On the other hand, "Pulitzer Prize-winning WaPo Pentagon correspondent" Thomas Ricks was on CNN yesterday talking about the scandal and when Wolf Blitzer asked if he was surprised by all this he replied, "Not at all. In the CIA, if you haven't had an affair you're not a player." Wow. Who knew?

Finally, there's this. Someone wrote into the New York Times' Ethicist column in July, saying that his wife was having an affair with a "government executive." With what we now know, it sounds like the letter could have been written by Mrs. Broadwell's husband. Was he trying to "out" his wife and her lover?

It's A Woman Thing, Part 2

Karen Hughes is a Republican who served as one of President George W Bush's closest advisers. I don't agree with everything she says but I'm cheering for this:

And if another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue. The college-age daughters of many of my friends voted for Obama because they were completely turned off by Neanderthal comments like the suggestion of “legitimate rape.”

CIA Director Resigns, Was Having An Affair

I read a lot of thrillers and spy novels, and the headline on this post sounds like the basis for a good one. In truth I'm not making it up. There's a "breaking news" headline at msnbc.com, saying that David Petraeus has submitted a letter of resignation due to an affair. First thought: With the security that surrounds a CIA Director, how on earth could anyone sneak away for a tryst with a woman he's not married to? I haven't read any of the details yet, but this is bound to be juicy.

Sacked By Visigoths

I've been debating whether I should write any kind of after-the-election wrap-up post, or just move on to the next really important things, like the upcoming season of The Bachelor, the first Jack Reacher movie and the holidays. I was leaning towards moving on, but when I see a phrase like "sacked by visigoths," in this article about shutting down the Romney campaign, my blogger juices start flowing, a headline is born and there's nothing to do but take to the blog and start typing.

Anyone reading my blog can deduce that I'm not a fan of Mitt Romney. I've had a lot of fun making fun of him, his running mate and his wife's horse throughout the course of the campaign. Still, I'm actually being sincere when I say that they all have my sympathy this week. It's not easy to run for President and it's certainly not easy to lose. One commentator on election night said that giving the concession speech as a losing Presidential candidate is the hardest thing anyone in public life has to do, and that sounds about right. It's also a brutally fast transition.

Up until about 11.15 eastern time Tuesday night, Governor Romney was a potential president, surrounded by a multi-million dollar organization, dozens of fawning staff members, cheering supporters, reporters hanging on his every word and a secret service detail. The campaign was so confident of victory that they didn't even write a concession speech, $25,000 worth of fireworks were waiting to be shot off over Boston Harbor at the end of the victory celebration and an "Office of the President-Elect" website was revved up and ready to go.

Then the race was called for Obama and after a phone call to the President and a short concession speech, Mitt Romney was back to being a private citizen. I read that he rode to the election night party in a 15-vehicle secret service motorcade; leaving the hotel Wednesday morning he and Mrs. Romney were in the back of a family car, driven by their eldest son. The secret service was gone and the staff had already started breaking down and packing up the campaign's offices.

So good-bye to the election of 2012 and on to other things. Who will Bachelor Sean pick?  Can Tom Cruise really play Jack Reacher? Are people really going to start their Christmas shopping at 8.00 on Thanksgiving night? All important to ponder and blog about. And if we start missing all the fun of a presidential campaign, not to worry. Articles about who might run in 2016 are already starting to pop up.

Lawn Signs And Looking Good In A Tuxedo

The crazy will be over soon, or at least I fervently hope so. In the meantime, here's another link to another interesting take on the election. A few days ago Republican writer/blogger Peggy Noonan called the Romney campaign incompetent. Shortly thereafter she clarified her thoughts -- she really meant that it was a "rolling catastrophe." She's now changed her mind and says that in her opinion, Mittens is headed for a big win. She can just feel it: "All the vibrations are right." Wherever it is that she hangs out, she's apparently seeing a whole bunch of Romney lawn signs. And didn't Mitt look spiffy in his tux at the Al Smith dinner a couple of weeks ago? If Mitt wins Peggy's going to look brilliantly prescient. If he loses, someone might suggest that her prediction was an incompetent one.

Friday afternoon update: Incompetent. In fact, not only incompetent, but what planet was Peggy on? To her credit, in her column today she acknowledges that things played out a little differently than she expected:

President Obama did not lose, he won. It was not all that close. There was enthusiasm on his side. Mitt Romney's assumed base did not fully emerge, or rather emerged as smaller than it used to be. He appears to have received fewer votes than John McCain. The last rallies of his campaign neither signaled nor reflected a Republican resurgence. Mr Romney's air of peaceful dynamism was the product of a false optimism that, in the closing days, buoyed some conservatives and swept some Republicans. While GOP voters were proud to assert their support with lawn signs, Democratic professionals were quietly organizing, data mining and turning out the vote. Their effort was a bit of a masterpiece; it will likely change national politics forever. Mr. Obama was perhaps not joyless but dogged, determined, and tired.

A whole bunch of Republican pundits and prognosticators have egg on their faces this week, but Ms. Noonan is the only one, as far as I know, that made her prediction based on good vibrations. Next time, maybe a little less time counting lawn signs and a little more time pondering actual facts.

Today's The Day

Election day is here! To get into the spirit of things, check out Talking Points Memo's review of the good, the bad and the ugly of the 2012 campaign.

The Cake Is Baked

Nothing too profound here. I'm linking to a short post in Talking Points Memo's editor's blog, mostly because I wanted to use "the cake is baked" as a blog post title. We're in the home stretch now, yay!

And Now It Starts

It's as predictable as the rain. At the end of a presidential campaign, or, as of early Saturday afternoon, almost the end of this one, the really fun stories start to come out. What really happened. Why our candidate lost. It wasn't my fault...

I enjoy all the "inside baseball/process stories" we get to read after a campaign a lot more than some of the silly reporting that's done during the actual campaign, and today politico starts us off with a story saying that Mitt Romney came very close to selecting Chris Christie for VP. Really? What makes this article especially intriguing is that it comes on the heels of a week's worth of coverage of the post-Superstorm bromance between Republican Christie and the Democratic President. Did Mitt's head explode when he heard that Christie, up 'til now one of his best surrogates, was going around saying how great Obama is? Almost certainly.

The election will be over soon; dishing the dirt will go on for months. Now we're really getting to the good stuff.

Like "Fifty Shades of Grey," part 2

The Economist has endorsed President Obama for president, more or less, saying that in their opinion Obama hasn't been a great president, but Romney would be worse. This isn't that big of a deal, since as I said in my first Fifty Shades of Grey post, the magazine's impact on American voters is minimal. I just wanted an excuse to type Fifty Shades of Grey as often as possible.