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?