They're always trying too hard, and you can't help but feel twenty times more self-conscious about trying to reward their efforts by feeling "at ease". The concept of "letting things come naturally" just doesn't seem to exist for Germans, which makes the ostentatious German display of awkward, quasi-official philo-Semitism nearly as uncomfortable and unbearable as unofficial anti-Semitism anywhere else in the world.

“We must never forget” is more than a phrase.

 I beg to disagree. "Never forget" became nothing more than a meaningless phrase when nearly one million (or just over - sources disagree)  Tutsi men, women and children were murdered by people who were attempting to erase every trace of Tutsis from the planet. - as clear cut a case of bonafide, no-fooling genocide, as humanity has seen since the second world war. All those "lessons" we'd all supposedly learned by repeating "never forget!" sure got thrown aside in a hurry when someone might have to actually  stop it from happening again.

The shoah is a perfect backdrop for lazy studios looking to cash in on an Oscar (the holiday season is their dumping ground for these more "important" films) precisely because of the clear cut good guys/bad guys, and the ability for Nazis and murdered Jews to stand in as empty vessels for an audience to pour in their negative, and sympathetic, feelings respectively. The backdrop takes care of more than half the work script writers need to do, because hey!, everyone knows about the holocaust, amirite?

In true Hollywood fashion, the concept of "enough already" takes 10 years longer for scriptwriters, directors, producers, and actors than it does for everyone else on the fucking planet, so you can expect to see another few million variations on the theme until 2025 at least, by which point, almost all the Nazis and holocaust survivors will be dead anyway. On the plus side, even the most derivative and formulaic shoah movie is usually ten times better and more original than yet another self-congratulatory movie about the McCarthy hearings.

Just what I know I've always wanted - to politicize Thanksgiving!

Thanks, but no thanks.

No, I really do hope Keith Olbermann gets SARS. The main issue with Keith Olbermann is not that he "isn't entertaining" or that he "can't act", but rather, that he's a 24 carat douchebag, and deserves to contract a mostly non-life threatening, yet still painfully and potentially humliating disease. I think SARS would do the trick, but virulent rectal herpes or Norwegian scabies would be fine, too.

By all means though, keep straining to find weak excuses for Olbermann's douchebaggery. Maybe you'll find some excuse for Bill O'Reilly's equally tedious histrionics while you're at it.

Here's the big picture: Obama's creating an American version of a unity government to get us through the mess he inherits from the unbelievable failures of the Bush administration, and to chart a new course as the Reagan Revolution implodes.

It takes absolutely zero political shrewdness for Barack Obama to "negotiate" with Reid and Pelosi when the Democrats have a nearly veto proof majority. Can you believe that Democrats are no more averse to wielding total control in Washington than Republicans were? I know, what a surprise.The Democrats also don't need Joe Lieberman, but since he announced his intention to caucus with the Democrats since 2006, he's kept his promise. Despite his "scandalous" support for John McCain's presidential run, they're willing to accept Lieberman as long as keeps voting with the rest of the Senate Democrats 90% of the time. The anti-Lieberman hysteria is confined to the ideological (read, Daily Kos) wing of the party that has practically zero influence on the day to day decisions made by Reid and Pelosi.

While we're at it, this gushing over Obama's "bi-partisanship" is almost as ludicrous as the bitching and moaning during the Bush administration from the left when the odd token Democrat became "tainted" by accepting a role within the Bush administration. You're not going to find any actual conservatives in the Obama White House any more than you would find any progressives in the Bush White House, and for the same reasons.They neither want nor need each other, and frankly, we should hope it stays that way.

I will not give up.

 Well, that's a shame relief. Say, would you care to spend three or four of the most miserable best hours of your life arguing over Alger Hiss? I'll bring Pete Seeger!

 This reminds me of those endless squabbles between Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney over who smoked dope and/or nailed Anita Pallenberg first: the wider world stopped caring almost sixty years ago. Let it go, Steve. If it really sticks in your craw that badly, you know how the vanity press system works.

Would this be the same progressive left wing of the Democratic party that has spent the last eight years theatrically wailing and gnashing its teeth about the Bush administration's lack of commitment to bipartisanship and centrism? Why yes, it would appear to be so.

The lesson of the Reagan Democrats (and Obama Republicans) appears to be sailing past Chris Hayes.

She needs to start snorting blow off of her infants quivering, naked torsos - in public - to put her newfound agreement with People, and this Stalin comparison, the test. After all, even Walter Duranty would be pressed not to write something slightly negative in the New York Times had Uncle Joe started huffing Peruvian tap dancing powder off any of Iagoda's body part during the May Day parade.

Judaism and Mormonism have little in common, but they also present no actual threat to one another. Jews don't believe in Mormonism, and as such, these posthumous "baptisms" really aren't much more than a tone deaf exercise by the Mormon leadership attempting to "honor" and "show sensitivity" to murdered Jews. It's silly, but it can't hurt anyone in temporal or spiritual terms.

 But hey, if anyone's really outraged, the tables can always be turned. How about putting the Mormons in cherem? I'm sure THAT will show them.