Our Turkey Day

Posted by Jeremy Brown
We are staying in a lovely undisclosed hotel in Manhattan very near the Empire State Building which is lit up in red and green. It used to be lovely browns and oranges this time of year, but Christmas comes increasingly early these days.
Anyway, we can see that majestic but lonely skyscraper right from our hotel window and, though I have now been living in rural Massachusetts as long as Ilived in the Big Apple, it makes me teary with pride in this Gotham of my youth (must end this sentence because I have run out of nicknames for NYC).
We had a wonderful feast with the family and my parents courageously ate the sugar-free cheesecake I made for them thought it tasted like drywall joint compound (granted a smooth, high grade brand. For the sugar eaters, Cara’s gorgeous apple pie was a smashing success. She couldn’t have done it without moral support from me, of course.
I am blogging this from the hotel using the TV internet and I haven’t figured out how to copy and paste text, so I’ll give you my take on a couple of stories of the day off the top of my head (hey, it’s a holiday post; they can’t all be gems).
I see that one of the brand new floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade was SpongeBob Squarepants. I like that very much. I thought America would lke to know that.
Looks like a hold has been put on the Ukranian election results. While knockng on wood, I think we can stop rocking anxiously in our cushy, faux Queen Anne rocker/recliners now. Maybe.
And Colin Powell’s source for the Iranian nuke report has been called into question in some capacity I can’t qute recall. A lot of folks enjoy pointing out that he has been in this sort of situation before. But from where I sit, it seems to me that the world pretty much recognized that, while Iraq probably had some sort of chemical or bio weapons way back when (though no one really expected as little as was found) it was pretty widely understood that the Bush Admin was milking that angle to an extreme. It gave people like Kerry something to hide behind so he could vote thumbs up on the war authorization.
When it comes to Iran, no one who has been paying attention has any doubt that the Mullahs have an active nuclear weapons program. So, while the precise details may or may not be as Powell reports, no serious person can say that this is a tale wagging a dog. It’s fairly clear, when it comes to resolving an accurate picture of what has really been going on with Iran’s nuclear program, the world is playing catch-up.