L.A. TIMES: A Daughter’s Cure Is Priceless.

MARKDOWNS ON home and garden stuff.

PJTV: Sonja Schmidt: Box Office Poison.

TAXPROF: Tax Court Awards $323k in Attorneys’ Fees to Two Kersting Tax Shelter Investors Because of IRS Misconduct.

KOS POLL SHOWS poor morale among Democratic voters, as reflected in low likelihood-of-voting reports. Republicans, on the other hand, are much more likely to say they’ll turn out to vote next time.

GIZMODO: Roku Channel Store Opens, But Hulu Is A No-Show.

COMING: A Toyota MR2 Hybrid? Where’s the hybrid RX8?

RETAIL SUPPORT BRIGADE UPDATE: Early holiday shopping has merchants optimistic.

THEY MUST BE PREPPING HIM FOR A CABINET SPOT! IRS files $79,000 tax lien against Schwarzenegger.

ANDREW BOLT: IPCC too “politicised” to survive.

Plus, from Tim Blair, a ClimateGate wrapup.

MORE POTENTIALLY MONEY-SAVING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF HEALTHCARE RESEARCH: Research Shows Chronically Ill Patients Might Be Happier if They Give Up Hope.

MICHELLE MOORE WRITES that she’ll be streaming video from the St. Louis Tea Party on her blog this afternoon.

WILL HIGHER OIL PRICES DRIVE PEOPLE INTO CITIES, or move businesses out to ex-urbs?

CHEER UP! Phil Bowermaster reminds us that things are getting better all the time.

IN THE MAIL: From Michael Ledeen, Obama’s Betrayal of Israel.

CATO: ObamaCare’s Cost Could Top $6 Trillion.

PJTV: Stephen Green’s The Week In Blogs is up.

VOTER ANGER IS BUILDING OVER DEFICITS: “The generic poll shows a 16-point swing to the GOP over last year.”

Plus this: “When Mr. Obama was sworn into office the federal deficit for this year stood at $422 billion. At the end of October, it stood at $1.42 trillion. The total national debt also soared to $7.5 trillion at the end of last month, up from $6.3 trillion shortly after Inauguration Day.”

HMM: Tiger Woods: Injuries Caused by Wife, Not SUV.

UPDATE: A reader wonders how his Dubai deal is holding up. (Via FreeRepublic).

ANOTHER UPDATE: If this report is true, will Tiger get the full-blown Rihanna sympathy treatment? Or will it be treated as a joke?

EUGENE VOLOKH ON DATA SHARING AND CLIMATE RESEARCH: “My inclination would be to say that data should nearly always be shared. If you share your data, this lets others check the conclusions you draw from the data, as well as verifying the accuracy of the data against other available sources. They might disprove your arguments, or lead you to improve your arguments, or, if they reproduce your results, they might help prove the validity of your arguments. But in either case, science progresses better, and the decisions made based on the science are more reliable, than if you keep the data secret.”

OLD STORY: Bloggers stealing from Old Media. New Story: bloggers reporting actual news while Old Media covers up.

Then there’s this assist for the CBC.

CHANGE! “Who says the Democrats haven’t moved public opinion in the health care debate? According to a new Rasmussen poll out today, they have steadily persuaded more and more Americans that the health care system we have is a good one.”

RUSSIAN TRAIN CRASH “caused by bomb.”

IN BRITAIN, talk of privatizing the NHS?

THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION takes on the Black Panther voter-intimidation case. “Attorney General Eric Holder has so far ignored requests for relevant documents despite a statutory mandate to cooperate.” Now they’re subpoenaing Justice Department people.

AT THE NEW YORK TIMES DOT-EARTH BLOG, a climate scientist talks about how ClimateGate is discouraging young researchers, and how to respond. “If climate science is to uphold core research values and be credible to public, we need to respond to any critique of data or methodology that emerges from analysis by other scientists. Ignoring skeptics coming from outside the field is inappropriate; Einstein did not start his research career at Princeton, but rather at a post office. I’m not implying that climate researchers need to keep defending against the same arguments over and over again. Scientists claim that they would never get any research done if they had to continuously respond to skeptics. The counter to that argument is to make all of your data, metadata, and code openly available. Doing this will minimize the time spent responding to skeptics; try it! If anyone identifies an actual error in your data or methodology, acknowledge it and fix the problem. Doing this would keep molehills from growing into mountains that involve congressional hearings, lawyers, etc.”

Excellent advice, though perhaps a bit late now. Plus, another comment: “It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”

Read the whole thing.

TUNKU VARADARAJAN: Punking the White House.

It’s funny, but I remain concerned about security. My guess is that White House security isn’t frequently tested, and hence doesn’t stay as sharp as it should. (On the other hand, a convenience market has people trying to buy beer with fake ID every day.)

PEGGY NOONAN: A White House That Is Coming To Seem Amateurish. “When longtime political observers start calling for wise men, a president is in trouble.”

MORE AMAZON Black Friday Sales.

ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER: Jerry Brown Needs To Get Serious About Investigating ACORN.

COMPUTERWORLD: Data-Leak Lessons Learned From The Climategate Hack.

MICHAEL SILENCE: Memo #4,618,903,347 to some journos: Online discussions are a good thing.

CONGRATULATING the prescient Joe Biden.

Plus this: “The Times also ignores their own reporting of two weeks back by retelling the story of Biden and the Kurds with no mention of Biden adviser Peter Galbraith, who made millions advising the Kurds.”

IT’S THE FRIDAY SALE at Amazon.

MORE ON CLIMATEGATE, in the Financial Times: Secrecy In Science Is A Corrosive Force.

TEST-DRIVING the world’s fastest personal submarine.

DAVID HARSANYI:

With good reason, the prevailing economic concern of most Americans is jobs.

With this in mind, two Democratic congressmen have cooked up a plan to help us out. The strategy entails sucking another $150 billion of capital investment out of the market each year and handing it to an organization that can’t balance a budget, borrows money with abandon, runs massive deficits and excels at creating fairy tale jobs.

What could go wrong?

SPARE TIRES ROT YOUR BRAIN? Waist Fat Doubles Dementia Risk In Women.

A DARK MATTER ROCKET?

TOP 20 UNFORTUNATE LESSONS girls learn from Twilight.

ANNALS OF GOVERNMENT MEDICINE: “Hundreds of patients died needlessly at NHS hospital due to appalling care.” Plus this: “As is typical in government medicine, there has been no accountability even though Basildon has been criticized publicly since 2001, when the Royal College of Nursing described conditions there as ‘third world.’”

MEGAN MCARDLE ON CLIMATEGATE: “This interview with the head of the UN’s climate experts is ridiculous. He responds to concerns about the peer review process being stacked by saying . . . all the work was peer reviewed. I am open to being convinced that I should not care about hacked information, and I am a confirmed believer in AGW. So why can’t, or won’t, the climate change community mount a more compelling defense?”

Plus this: ClimateGate: The end of credibility and the need for process control. “Increasingly, the average concerned citizen without a particular ax to grind will no longer trust the climate scientists simply because they say so, or because Al Gore says so on their behalf. So how do we regain that trust? By agreeing that we will not use data or the output from climate models to inform public policy unless they have been developed according to established quality systems for mission critical software and have been audited accordingly by a genuinely disinterested third party. Because of the implications for the global economy and the well-being of literally billions of people over the next century, requiring that the models and the data used to feed the models be subject to at least the process control and auditing that we would require of a medical device seems the absolute least we should do.”

Also, is it all about power?

PJTV: Thanksgiving Thoughts From AlfonZo Rachel.

THE HILL: Obama Faces A Daunting December, Thanks To Make-Or-Break Issues.

STIMULUS UPDATE: Be Thankful For More Phony Jobs “Created or Saved.”

FREEDOM OF SPEECH, personified.

ROUNDUP: Eric S. Raymond on ClimateGate.

BIG GOVERNMENT: Calif. Attorney General Offers Incoherent, Troubling Answers When Asked About ACORN Doc Dump.

FRANK TIPLER: Climategate: The Skeptical Scientist’s View. “What keeps scientists honest is knowing our colleagues are looking over our shoulders. A theory with hidden data is never to be believed. . . . The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected — that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable.” Plus, more from Richard Fernandez.

BALTIMORE MAKES “CRISIS PREGNANCY CENTERS” put up signs saying that they don’t actually do abortions.

Can we make ACORN put up signs saying they don’t actually help the poor?

IN THE MAIL: The Basic Book of Digital Photography: How to Shoot, Enhance, and Share Your Digital Pictures.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Kill The Bills: Do Health Reform Right. “Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative. The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method — a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency. The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one — tort reform, interstate purchasing. and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 — and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.” But there’s no graft in that approach.

I, FOR ONE, WELCOME our new robot employees.

And, yes, I’ve used that line before. Plus, from the comments, this from a Brit: “Blood tests? Pah! When they can ignore a bell being rung by an elderly patient for a couple of hours, then – and only then – will these robots be fit for our glorious NHS.”

FROM JAPAN, an “unbelievable cat-friendly house design.”

OKAY, NORMALLY I DON’T SHILL SO LOUDLY, but in light of the FTC’s soon-to-come regulations, I’ll note once again that anything you buy through Amazon links on the site, like this one, puts a bit of change in the pockets of the Insta-household, at no cost to you.

JOHN STOSSEL: We Pay Them To Lie To Us. “I happily suspend disbelief when a magician says he’ll saw a woman in half. That’s entertainment. But when Harry Reid says he’ll give 30 million additional people health coverage while cutting the deficit, improving health care and reducing its cost, it’s not entertaining. It’s incredible.”

Plus this: “If a business pulled the accounting tricks the politicians get away with, the owners would be in prison.”

RETAIL SUPPORT BRIGADE SITREP: So the Insta-Daughter and an Insta-Niece braved West Town Mall at 5 a.m. this morning. They report that it was “semi-crowded,” but no better than last year.

Williams-Sonoma, on the other hand, managed to lose my business. After suffering a catastropic coffeemaker failure last night, I had tasked the Insta-Daughter to buy a new one. She was snubbed by the salespeople, who skipped her to wait on someone older who was behind her in line. So she went to Belk and got a better deal on the same thing, but tells me she’ll be personally insulted if I ever shop at Williams-Sonoma again. I’ve noticed a lot of stores that treat teenagers this way, and it strikes me as quite unwise.

HAVE THINGS GOTTEN SO BAD THAT WE’RE dreaming of Diocletian? I think he’s a poor model. He took power in a military coup, vastly enlarged the bureaucracy, and tried to solve inflation caused by lousy fiscal policy with price controls, a disastrous failure. He persecuted Christians, and though he purchased some temporary stability via authoritarianism, he didn’t address the core problems and left an empire that was, overall, weaker than before. It says bad things when core Democratic constituencies think that’s what we need now . . . . Hope and change, anyone?

UPDATE: Dr. Violet Socks, who is a delightful person, says she didn’t mean to suggest any actual enthusiasm for Diocletian, or for Diocletian-like approaches, but merely the need for serious change within the Democratic Party. That makes sense to me, so please don’t beat her up with Roman-history cudgels . . . .

DOLLAR COULD FALL to 80 yen.

ADDRESSING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Commas and Periods — Inside Closing Quotation Marks or Outside Them?

HMM: Vincent Gray on Climategate: ‘There Was Proof of Fraud All Along’.

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: National Post: A French scientist’s temperature data show results different from the official climate science. Why was he stonewalled?

MORE: Col. Douglas Mortimer writes:

You know, when you consider that “We’re Saving The Planet” is the biggest power/money grabbing scam since “We’re Saving Your Souls,” whoever leaked/released those e-mails and such is kind of like the modern scientific equivalent of Martin Luther. This person/persons may well have broken the backs of the Global Warming Priests who did everything in their power to make sure that the common man, and those who would oppose them, had no direct access to the Spoken Word of God.

Well, when it comes to computer models, if you can’t see the code or the data, there’s no particular reason to trust them, even when the graphics are pretty.

HE SAYS HIS HERO IS LINCOLN, but is Obama Dithering Like McClellan? “General McChrystal told the president that the war could be lost in a year, and three months of that year have been given to the enemy to regroup and prepare. War, as it happens, is a zero-sum game in which waiting does, in fact, cost lives. This isn’t a mere political football. If you have a general who is competent, as McChrystal is, give him what he says he needs to win.”

NEW YORK POST: Clubbing SEALs. “What is especially ironic, to say nothing of infuriating, about the SEALs’ inquisition is that it underscores the utter lack of curiosity exhibited by the Pentagon in the matter of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army shrink and Islamist.”

I THINK THE ANSWER IS “NATURE:” Who made Biden — and Katie Couric — Look Dumb?

Plus this: “You might ask why they’re throwing big parties when times are so bad. But what the hell? And when can we watch the big Oprah-Obama TV Christmas special? There’s Obama putting up the White House decorations, the doorbell rings, and it’s Oprah! The doorbell rings again… and it’s — who? — Russell from ‘Survivor’?”

FARHAD MANJOO: Black Friday Is For Suckers. That’s why I’m shopping online.

AUSTRALIA: Opposition MPs Bail On Global Warming.

AHEAD OF BLACK FRIDAY, a bunch of big toy deals. Well, why wait for Black Friday for online markdowns?

THANKSGIVING: Thoughts from a displaced Brit.

UH OH: “The impression left by the Climategate emails is that the global warming game has been rigged from the start.”

AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, I thought turkeys could fly.

UH OH: If Dubai World has debt problems, then who’s safe?

A “RATHER BLEAK FORECAST” from the Fed.

ALTHOUSE & MEADE give thanks for everything.

SHOCKER: Howard Dean on ObamaCare.

A BLACK FRIDAY IPHONE APP from the folks at Popular Science.

THEY’VE BEEN SERVING WITH DISTINCTION SINCE RIGHT AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, but can we count on the Retail Support Brigade to save America one more time? I’m not sure. With doubts about where the national leadership is taking them and whether it values their sacrifice, and whether it will support them in the crunch, it’s hard for me to recommend re-enlistment at this point. On the other hand, I’ll be spending about the same as last year, but, as usual, mostly online.

DEEP RETROFITS to improve housing efficiency.

MAYOR BLOOMBERG ENSURES THAT HOMELESS PEOPLE DON’T GET FAT:

When a small church comes to the Bowery Mission bearing fried chicken with trans fat, unwittingly breaking the law, they’re told “thank you.” Then workers quietly chuck the food, mission director Tom Bastile said.

“It’s always hard for us to do,” Basile said. “We know we have to do it.” . . .

Lines at soup kitchens are up by 21 percent this year, according to a NYC Coalition Against Hunger report released yesterday. The city’s law banishing trans fat took effect in July 2008 and touched everyone with Health Department food licenses — including emergency food providers.

Good grief.

GUERRILLA MECHANICS: Some gonzo auto repair tips.

LOOKING AHEAD to Black Friday. “The real test, though, will not be when the Black Friday numbers come out in a few days. Rather, it will be whether retailers can sustain a decent sales level without phenomenal discounts.” I was at the mall yesterday, and the crowds were fairly thin. I have no intention of being there tomorrow. I’ll be doing my shopping online. Interesting discussion in the comments regarding the future of retail.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s flashing lots of new deals on and off in advance of Black Friday.

WHICH IS BAD NEWS: John Bolton Was Right.

GEORGE MONBIOT ON CLIMATEGATE: Pretending the climate email leak isn’t a crisis won’t make it go away. “I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. . . . The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people’s denial. Pretending that this isn’t a real crisis isn’t going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We’ll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.”

A CLEARANCE ON Acer 11.6″ Netbooks. Pretty much as big as you can be and still be a netbook, and Microsoft won’t be licensing XP for anything over 10″ in the future, I gather. So if you want a big netbook, here’s your chance!

UPDATE: Reader Kevin Murphy corrects me — I guess it was too much turkey-anticipation on my part:

Those Amazon entires are actually NOTEbooks, as they have Core processors and, ugh, Vista. Perhaps you mean these Acer NETbooks, which are a pretty good deal with the Atom, XP and 6 cell batteries:

I stand corrected.

THANKSGIVING THOUGHTS from Ken Anderson.

WHAT TAX PROFS are thankful for.

THIS MAKES ME FEEL GREAT ABOUT THE WAR ON TERROR: “A couple of aspiring reality-TV stars from Northern Virginia appear to have crashed the White House’s state dinner Tuesday night, penetrating layers of security with no invitation to mingle with the likes of Vice President Biden and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. . . . While the White House offered no official explanation, it appears to be the first time in modern history that anyone has crashed a White House state dinner. The uninvited guests were in the same room as President Obama, first lady Michelle Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, although it is unknown whether they met the Obamas and the guest of honor.”

Good thing they weren’t terrorists or something. This isn’t a huge shock to me, though. I visited the White House back in the ’90s and they took my Tennessee driver’s license as ID. Back then, when it expired, you got a renewal sticker that went on the back. The security guy looked at the front of my license, which showed an expiration date a year in the past, but never looked at the back. Not long after I noticed that when I bought beer at a Weigel’s convenience store, the guy immediately looked at the back. . . . One hopes the White House security will get an upgrade.

Related thoughts from Roger Simon: Crashergate: What if my Facebook friends all came for Thanksgiving?

ALLIED AERIAL PHOTOS from World War II.

TURKEYS of the year.

ONE YEAR since Mumbai.

HEH: Biden Pardons Single Yam in Vice-Presidential Ritual.

THANKSGIVING DINNER aboard the U.S.S. Minnesota in 1907.

J.D. JOHANNES: Thanksgiving In Tikrit.

IN THE MAIL: Laugh Lines, from Ben Bova.

DANA LOESCH on thankfulness.

ED DRISCOLL: Which Time Magazine Journalist Is That On The Cover?

TORONTO SUN: ClimateGate: Follow The Money.

UPDATE: Related: Explosive — Climategate Files Were Leaked To BBC But They Refused To Cover The Story.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dan Riehl thinks the BBC angle may be being overplayed.

SOME LAPTOP BUYING ADVICE.

FRANK J. FLEMING: Things I’m Thankful For.

IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO avoid the Top Ten Turkey Sins.

STOPPING HURRICANES WITH COLD WATER.