Congresswoman Giffords, of course, was gravely wounded in 2011 in a murderous attack by a madman that left six dead and thirteen injured. Since then, Giffords has made a remarkable recovery; unfortunately, it apparently has not been enough of a recovery, so she’s resigning in order to concentrate on her health.  The video below of the announcement both shows the extent of her injuries, and the impressive extent to which she’s already surmounted them: I don’t know if Congresswoman Giffords will ever heal fully, but she’s already doing much better than I privately expected.

Arizona’s governor has called for a special election in April to replace Giffords.

Another Congressional Democrat has also announced he’s stepping down for health reasons (though not until November), legendary moonbat Maurice Hinchey (D-NY).  Concurrently, as this ignominious headline notes, Hinchey’s wife has been changed with her second DWI in eight months.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Probably the highlight of the night, crowd and Twitter went wild,” William A. Jacobson writes of Monday’s debate. Alas, as Seth Leibsohn adds at the Corner, if Gingrich “could run his campaign and non-debate moments the way he runs himself during the debates, he would deserve the nomination. But, too often, he does not.”

– Rep. Allen West (R-FL).

The Washington Times reports their former editor, who was also an advisor and press secretary to Newt Gingrich during the heady Contract With America days has passed away:

Tony Blankley, a noted conservative author and commentator and former editorial page editor of The Washington Times, died Sunday morning, according to family sources. He was 63 and had been battling stomach cancer.

Mr. Blankley was an executive vice president of the Edelman public-relations firm in Washington, a visiting senior fellow in national-security communications at the Heritage Foundation, a syndicated newspaper columnist and an on-air political commentator for CNN, NBC and NPR.

He was also a regular weekly guest on “The McLaughlin Group.”

Mr. Blankley was editorial page editor of The Times from 2002 to 2007, and from 1990 to 1997 he served as press secretary and general adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

At the of the post is an interview Blankley gave to our Maximum Pajamhadeen during the early days of PJM’s existence.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After watching this video, it seems obvious why Iowa is the only state in the Union where Mandom is both legally sold — and required by law for men to wear. As for the rest of us, as Jim Treacher writes, “Can you handle this? (Hint: No. You cannot):”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oh and speaking of Iowa, President Obama weighs in on his success there in 2008, and how he’s followed through on his campaign promises:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As for how New Jerseyians talk, well, you’ve heard me on a bunch of podcasts and videos; I don’t think I have much of a regional accent, but you can decide for yourself. (My dad grew up in Yonkers in the 1920s, before moving to South Jersey after the War; I suspect both he and his sister, who sounded a bit like Eleanor Roosevelt at times, worked very hard long before I was born to lose their respective accents.) But as for the rest of Jersey, “If you want to hear the nuances in what is perceived as the monolithic NJ accent, go no further,” as one of the Gormogonians write. “This video can teach you more than you EVER need to know:”

The one outlier is the fellow in the middle of the clip who speaks with what appears to be a southern dialect at first listen; I can’t recall meeting anyone who talks with that specific accent when I lived in Jersey, so I can’t vouch for how common it is, or its main geographic location in the state.

That said, at Commentary, Jonathan Tobin adds, “Romney’s Gaffe Helps Gingrich Stay on Top:”

Romney’s flippant reminder of his wealth — he bet $10k as easily as most people would wager a $10 bill — at Saturday night’s ABC News/Des Moines Register debate was the most memorable moment at an event in which his goal was to put the heat on frontrunner Newt Gingrich​. But instead it was Romney who looked shaky and Gingrich relaxed and confident. Every time the former Speaker found himself in the cross hairs of either his opponents or the moderators, he held his own easily. Though he was pressed hard on his record on health care, the Middle East, immigration and his marital infidelity, Gingrich never faltered. Coming as it did after two weeks in which his poll ratings had soared and Romney’s declined, Gingrich could not have asked for a better evening.

The debate illustrated again that the “new Newt” is a formidable debater. Though he is still capable of getting off message and saying controversial things, rather than fly off the handle, the former Speaker’s steady demeanor and cool ability to hit back every time he is challenged has served him well. And on Saturday night, it was Romney who looked flustered, not Gingrich.

Though the debate began with a discussion of economics, this latest edition of America’s favorite political reality show sometimes got bogged down in odd sidebars. Among the most curious was the lengthy discussion of whether or not Gingrich was right to say that the Palestinians are an “invented people.” Romney tried to position himself so as to seem to agree with Gingrich’s pro-Israel opinion but at the same time claim that his opponent was acting irresponsibly and causing unnecessary trouble for both Israel and the United States.

But true to form, Gingrich doubled down by asserting that he was merely stating a historical fact. Even better, Gingrich compared his willingness to tell the truth to the Arabs to Ronald Reagan’s calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” That was a bull’s eye with Republican voters even if Romney might be right that it was not a prudent thing for a potential president to say. Though Gingrich may not have gained many votes on this issue other than with the hard-line pro-Israel community and evangelicals, by standing his ground, he won the point.

Daniel Pipes explores that last topic at the Corner, in both the long and short form — “For details, see a long article of mine from 1989 on the topic or a short one from 2000.”

Or as Roger L. Simon writes at the Tatler, “Gingrich Tells Truth about ‘Palestine’—MSM Goes in a Dither.”

GDS could well be running rampant over the next 11 months — can the New Newt return fire while still appearing calm under the ultimate pressure?

Related: Great moments in DNC-MSM (but I repeat myself) hypocrisy: “Former Clinton Adviser Stephanopoulos Asks Presidential Candidates if Infidelity Should Be an Issue.”

I wonder who helped George with his debate prep tonight.

More on television and Thanksgiving from James Lileks.

(Originally posted at the PJ Lifestyle blog.)

Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays. Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: in Continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from December 22nd to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world. But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. “What’s it about?” an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. “Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?”

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Europeans think of this country as “the New World” in part because it has an eternal newness which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod? And just when you think you’re on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy slides over a nickel and tells the waitress “Gimme a cuppa joe” return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato. Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!

But Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. “The New World” is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on earth, to a degree “the Old World” can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The US Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together. Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of “the west”‘s nation states have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas – Communism, Fascism, European Union. If you’re going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.

Which dovetails nicely into this item I’ve been meaning to post all week:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Celestial Junk blog sums up the topic as “Blitzkrieg Without the Panzers;” Allahpundit at Hot Air explores the surrealism of the moment:

Via the Corner, it’s Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party catching Hannan-esque viral video lightning in a bottle by telling off the EUrocracy to its face. Your companion reading for this clip is Niall Ferguson’s op-ed in the Journal over the weekend imagining the “United States of Europe” circa 2021, after Britain has quit the Union and Germany has all but purchased the southern half of the continent. How sustainable is that scenario, though? As German hegemony over its satellites states deepens, so will resentment within those states at the loss of democratic sovereignty. What happens when, after years of backstopping the PIIGS economically and receiving nothing but resentment in return, Germany suffers a fiscal or economic crisis of its own and Germans’ resentment at having to bankroll Europe finally explodes? Greek or Italian hypernationalism is bad; German hypernationalism is a problem for the Pentagon.

As to Allahpundit’s question on German resentment at bailing out the rest of Europe, that’s a topic that Theodore Dalrymple discussed here a PJM in May of last year. For the “dek” of the article, I summed things up like this: “If for some inexplicable reason you wanted to reawaken German nationalism, how would you go about it? Theodore Dalrymple suggests a three-part strategy. And good news: current events have already set the ball rolling…”

Related: “Euro on ‘Death Watch’ After Investors Spurn German Bonds.” But then, Germany’s been an expert at euthanasia since the Weimar era.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

As Kathy Shaidle notes, “Nice comebacks to your asshat relative, esp. re: ‘America genocided the Indians, man’. Take notes.” And Tim Blair adds, noting a surprisingly small number of plastic turkey references in the legacy media this week, “That PJTV Thanksgiving turkey looks disturbingly real, by the way. Heretics.”

(Originally published November 26, 2009.)