America's Next Top Model has its tv finale tonight. The winner: Colorado's Nicole Fox, an 18 year old C.U. sophomore from Louisville, Colorado.

Congrats, Nicole. (She became my favorite weeks ago.) More on her here.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

How scary is this? I got this notice from the Department of Justice today.

The Department of Justice's (DOJ) National Institute of Justice and Bureau of Justice Assistance are hosting a symposium November 18-20, 2009, to explore the potential for implementing predictive policing strategies to help make communities safer. Predictive policing integrates data analysis with law enforcement strategies and tactics. To find out how best to apply predictive policing approaches, the DOJ is supporting a number of police departments nationwide in demonstrations, or field experiments, designed to test the effectiveness of various predictive policing strategies and techniques.

[More...]

This strikes me as quite good news:

[E]arlier in the day, in a meeting about floor procedure going forward, [Senate Majority Leader] Reid let three of the key skeptics within his party know that if they join Republicans at any stage of the process to block the bill, he still retains the option of passing major parts of the bill through the filibuster proof budget reconciliation process. In response to a question from TPMDC Nelson told reporters that, at a meeting this afternoon with Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Reid "talked about process, procedure, discussion about reconciliation and a whole host of issues of that sort."

"Nobody's really jumping up and down to push for reconciliation," Nelson said, "he's not threatening that, but anybody can conclude that if you don't move something on to the floor, that is one of the possibilities."

(Emphasis supplied.) Important that people get that message. Good on Reid.

Speaking for me only

Via digby:

The story of the Palin family wardrobe.

This is an Open Thread.

Hot off the presses:

Senate majority leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, is meeting with fellow Democrats to brief them on his version of the major health care legislation, which a senior Democratic leadership aide said would cost an estimated $849 billion over 10 years while reducing future federal deficits by $127 billion. The aide said it would extend health benefits to roughly 31 million people.

What's in the plan? No idea.

Details here. People is recidivist in its objectification of Depp. He previously was named most sexy in 2003.

Good thing he lives in France, cuz this type of thing has been keeping men down for years and years in the United States.

This is an Open Thread.

Two potential topics of conversation - First, Alabama and Florida meet for the SEC Championship on December 5. Who do you like?

Second, Levi Johnston will be posing for Playgirl. Sarah Palin calls this participating in pornography. Do you agree?

This is an Open Thread.

Viewing politicians through the lens of their physical attraction is not limited to women.

John Edwards got it far worse than Sarah Palin.

In November 2000, People magazine named John Edwards as its choice for the "sexiest politician alive." A sampling of news and blog post titles:

• 51 Thoughts on the Apparent Sexiness of John Edwards
• John Edwards, Sexy Beast?
• JOHN EDWARDS IS TOTALLY HOT! (Orlando Weekly)

Would his $400 haircut have made as many waves if he wasn't so attractive? Conservatives ragged him over his looks. A blogger at Michelle Malkin's site wrote, "Edwards, who essentially rose to prominence because of his pretty face and his bouncy hair, has now come full-circle on his Iraq position."

How about President Obama's shirtless picture that topped the news for days? ABC ran with "President Beefcake? D.C. magazine to feature shirtless Obama on cover". Other story leads: "Who would have guessed that President-elect Obama is ripped?" and from the NY Post, "Just call him "Ab"-bama. Buff-bodied President-elect Barack Obama put his chiseled frame on full display..."

Tina Brown today, on the Newsweek cover: [More..]

Digby cites Rick Pearlstein:

Question: Has Obama succeeded on his promise of being a “post-partisan” President?

Rick Perlstein: Well, the problem with Obama’s post-partisan agenda is that he came into it, he came into his presidency at a time when millions of Americans, perhaps even tens of millions of Americans don’t consider a Democratic president legitimate, don’t consider liberalism legitimate, don’t consider the idea of the state forming new programs to help people legitimate. So, he’s in a situation a lot like Abraham Lincoln faced in 1860 when you had millions of Americans who didn’t even consider what was going in Washington to have anything to do with them. [. . .] If people say that you're illegitimate and your liberal agenda is extremist socialist destroying the America that we all grew up with, you have to be willing to say, “This is unreasonable. This is extreme.” And if you aren’t able to say, “This is unreasonable and this is extreme,” then you're granting your opposition an undue influence. You’re basically negotiating with the unnegotiatable. And as Abraham Lincoln said quite eloquently in his 1860 speech at Cooper Union, you can’t win that way.

(Emphasis supplied.) Lincoln 1860 was a theme Digby and I discussed a lot in 2003 and 2004, long before the emergence of Barack Obama, so these themes are not new to us. However, my first post at Talk Left applies the thinking to Obama. Digby recapitulates the point well:

Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III has proposed an extraordinary Constitutional theory - that 14 Senators have the power to amend the Constitution. First, let us revisit Sessions' views on Senate confirmation of judicial nominees:

“One of the many reasons why we shouldn't have a filibuster, an important one, is Article I of the Constitution. It says the Senate shall advise and consent on treaties by a two-thirds vote and simply 'advise and consent' on nominations,” he said in a 2003 floor statement. "Historicaly, we have understood that provision to mean -- and I think there is no doubt the Founders understood that to mean -- that a treaty confirmation requires a two-thirds vote, but confirmation of a judicial nomination requires only a simple majority vote."

While this reading of Article I is not supported by the text, what is really extraordinary is Sessions' views on how the Constitution can be amended:

Glenn Greenwald visits the twisted minds of the Weekly Standard:

Joscelyn insists that -- even though they've never been charged with, let alone convicted of, anything -- these men are guilty, evil Terrorists. To make his case against them, he relies on Bush-era documents containing unproven, untested, and uncharged allegations. But what he dishonestly -- though understandably -- fails to note is that each of these individuals are available to appear in the ACLU video because they were released from Guantanamo by the Bush administration [. . .] If, as Joscelyn claims, the ACLU are Al Qaeda's "useful idiots" for producing a video containing interviews with these individuals, what are Bush officials who released them onto the streets?

(Emphasis supplied.) Straight from the Ed Meese School of Constitutional law:

[F]ormer Attorney General Edwin Meese III, [. . .] when asked whether “suspects” should have the right to have a lawyer present before police questioning, replied “Suspects who are innocent of a crime should. But the thing is you don’t have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That’s contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.”

(Emphasis supplied.) This is a decades long story for Republicans and conservatives. They have long believed in a police state.

Speaking for me only