Tonight begins the 8 days celebration of Hanukkah. What's it about?

In 167 B.C.E. the Syrian-Greek emperor Antiochus made the observance of Judaism an offense punishable by death. He also ordered all Jews to worship Greek gods.

The year before, Syrian-Greek soldiers had seized the Jewish temple and dedicated it to the worship of the god Zeus. Enough was enough. Jewish resistance began in the village of Modiin, near Jerusalem when Greek soldiers demanded Jews bow down to an idol and eat a pig. Mattathias, a Jewish High Priest, refused to accede to the Greek soldiers' demands and he and his five sons killed the Greek soldiers. [More...]

The TSA searches are inspiring a new line of Fourth Amendment products. This shirt has metallic dye that will show up on the scanner. I like TalkLeft's Fourth Amendment Tote better.

(larger photo here and here.)

And, you don't have to continually launder it or remember to wear it. You can have it with you at all times to remind everyone searching your bags, from subway cops to courthouse security officers to entry monitors at sports arenas, that the Fourth Amendment is alive and well.

Of course, if you really want a 4th Amendment t-shirt, we have that too. Order now for Christmas -- especially for your kids, nephews and nieces who will be traveling home from college for the holidays.

Open Thread.

Silly topic (silly in discussing it now) - can the GOP win the Presidency in 2012? Let's take President Obama's election in 2008 as the baseline and see how it goes.

In 2008, President Obama won with 365 electoral votes, thus with 95 electoral votes to spare. In other words, the GOP would have to pick up 97 EVs to win. What states did Obama win that can go GOP in 2012? Colorado (9 EVs), Florida (projected 29 EVs in 2012), Indiana (11 EVs), Iowa (projected 6 EVs in 2012), Michigan (17 EVs), Nevada (projected 6 EVs in 2012), North Carolina (15 EVs), Ohio (projected 18 EVs in 2012), Pennsylvania (projected 19 EVs in 2012), Virginia (13 EVs) and Wisconsin (10 EVs). In addition, GOP states Texas, Arizona, Georgia, and Utah will add a projected 7 EVs will GOP states Missouri and Louisiana will lose a projected 2 EVs for a net gain of 5 for the GOP. Adding these up we get a total of 154 electoral votes, which would easily put a GOP candidate over the top (195 + 154 = 349.) More . .

In a strange post (strangely seconded by Matt Yglesias), Ezra Klein writes:

[Julian] Assange isn't whistleblowing or leaking. Both of those are targeted acts focused on an identified wrongdoing or event. He's simply taking the private and making it public, with relatively little in the way of discrimination.

Since Assange isn't an American, isn't in the government and has no direct knowledge of the activities of the American government, how could he possibly be "whistleblowing or leaking?" What Assange did was publish documents provided to him by actual leakers (Bradley Manning being the principal one apparently.) Ezra gets "leaks" all the time. (I call it access.) Ezra continues:

Here is how Markos puts it -- GOP Continues to make fool of Obama:

This is how the GOP responds to Obama's good-faith cave-in to their agenda.

Officials say Senate Republicans intend to block action on virtually all Democratic-backed legislation unrelated to tax cuts and government spending in the current post election session of Congress.

They wrote a letter. The President has become a punchline.

Speaking for me only

David Kurtz makes a good point regarding David Leonhardt's wrongheaded column regarding Dems and taxes. I wrote about it earlier. Kurtz writes:

[Leonhardt's article] has an internal logic to it, but it rests on a series of premises that I would argue still go back to the core issue of the Democrats not being tough enough -- and I don't mean tough in simply a hardheaded, muscular way but in a savvy, persistent, opportunistic sense. Let me put it this way: If the roles we're reversed and Democrats were on the opposite side of the issue, wouldn't the analysis be that Democrats were running a huge political risk by blocking middle class tax cuts and getting blamed for raising everyone's taxes? MORE . . .]

Public Enemy Num. 1 (snark), Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, with an assist from Time Editor Citizen Rick Stengel, plays the Clinton Card:

Hillary Clinton, Julian Assange said, "should resign." [. . . T]he WikiLeaks founder was replying to a question by TIME managing editor Richard Stengel [. . .] Stengel had said the U.S. Secretary of State was looking like "the fall guy" in the ensuing controversy, and had asked whether her firing or resignation was an outcome that Assange wanted. "I don't think it would make much of a difference either way," Assange said. "But she should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up. Yes, she should resign over that."

I'm not too sure about the "espionage in the UN" issue. But the argument I've seen is not very convincing:

The latest Wikileaks document release has a state department cable from August, 2009 on Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's pardoning of convicted drug traffickers (many of whom were cops.)

This was reported in depth at the time, and I don't see that the cable adds much. But perhaps it will put the spotlight on a bigger issue.

While searching around trying to determine if Ismal Safed ever got his pardon (and why it was considered a big deal since it involved only one sale of three kilos to an undercover agent), I came across this March, 2010 GAO report on the DEA's performance in Afghanistan. It says the DEA seized 4,083 metric tons of heroin in Afghanistan in 2008. (One metric ton equals 1,000 kilograms.) Three kilos out of 4,083,000 kilograms (and considering the opiate/heroin trade in Afghanistan amounts to $3 billion a year)is like a grain of sand. It also notes the pervasive problem of corruption, and interestingly, the high number of Afghan police who use heroin. [More...]

Much of the recent commentary about the tax cuts has skipped over this political reality. It’s instead focused on how tough the Democrats should be and whether they should insist on the expiration of all the Bush tax cuts on income above $250,000 a year. But that’s no longer one of their options. Unless they believe they will benefit more than Republicans from a standoff in which taxes go up, which is hard to believe with a Democrat in the White House, their only choice now is among various versions of retreat.

(Emphasis supplied.) Yep, Bill Clinton got killed in the 1996 election because he raised taxes. Oh wait, he didn't. Sheesh. You know what's going to hurt Obama and the Dems in 2012? No job growth. Do low taxes lead to job growth? David Leonhardt (yep, the same guy) says no:

The U.S. Supreme Court today heard oral arguments in Schwarzenegger v. Plata, the lawsuit over whether California must release prisoners pursuant to a court order as a step towards rectifying abysmal prison conditions in the state.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the conditions documented in court papers were horrendous. He referred, for instance, to a passage in one brief describing prisoners “found hanged to death in holding tanks where observation windows are obscured with smeared feces, and discovered catatonic in pools of their own urine after spending nights locked in small cages.”

Justice Sotomayor to the lawyer for California:

When are you going to avoid the needless deaths?” she asked. “When are you going to avoid or get around people sitting in their feces for days in a dazed state?”

[More...]

Apparently, some people are doubting President Obama's negotiating skills.

You don't say. It runs in the political family though, as progressive activists pretty much stink at political bargaining themselves.

Maybe Obama can send this guy instead of Geithner to the tax cuts for the rich negotiations:

Open Thread.