… to reader Craig B. for two seasons of Arrested Development on DVD. Happy War on Christmas, Craig!

…from a reader:

I was a grocery store, waiting in line to check out. The man in front of me approached the cashier with a cart full of groceries. The cashier said “Happy Holidays!”. Well, it goes without saying that the man was furious at this. How dare she not say “Merry Christmas”. He literally stormed out of the store in anger, leaving his groceries behind for the employees to put away. As he was leaving, he said “I’ll never shop here again!”

Nothing like celebrates the spirit of the season like a little manufactured outrage. Thanks, Bill O’Reilly!

I figured the big eyed urchin table lamps would have at least a couple of bids by now.

I try not to read anything by Thomas Friedman, because his writing tends to make me wish I were dead. But Chris Floyd was man enough to read his latest column, and had this reaction:

This, ladies and gentleman, is what passes for Establishment thought on the most respected newspaper in the land. This complete and utter moral perversion — like unto an act of sexual congress with the beasts of the field — is now the conventional wisdom of the chattering classes, the “public intellectuals,” and the powerful elites whom they so cravenly serve. This blood-flecked drivel — a precise echo of the genocidal fury being voiced on what once was once considered the lunatic fringes of the far right — is now at the heart of American political life.

In the rest of his post, Chris also has some less positive things to say about Friedman.

As it turns out, “regular Joe” Thomas Friedman, who so frequently advocates economic policies with little regard to their impact on working Americans, is among the wealthiest human beings on the planet.

As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in “a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club.” He “married into one of the 100 richest families in the country” - the Bucksbaums, whose real-estate Empire is valued at $2.7 billion.

Let’s be clear - I’m a capitalist, so I have no problem with people doing well or living well, even Tom Friedman. That said, this does potentially explain an ENORMOUS amount about Friedman’s perspective. Far from the objective, regular-guy interpreter of globalization that the D.C. media portrays him to be, Friedman is a member of the elite of the economic elite on the planet Earth. In fact, he’s married into such a giant fortune, it’s probably more relevant to refer to him as Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman than columnist Tom Friedman, both because that’s more descriptive of what he represents, and more important for readers of his work to know so that they know a bit about where he’s coming from.

Mind you, I don’t think everyone needs to publish their net worth. But Friedman’s not everyone. He’s not just “doing pretty well” and is not just any old columnist. He’s not just a millionaire or a multimillionaire - he’s member of one of the wealthiest families in the world, and is one of the most influential media voices on the planet, who writes specifically about economic/class issues. If politicians are forced to disclose every last asset they own, you’d think at the very least, the New York Times - in the interest of basic disclosure - should have a tagline under Friedman’s economic columns that says “Tom Friedman is an heir to a multi-billion-dollar business empire.”

Again, there’s positively nothing wrong with people being rich in general, or Tom Friedman being a billionaire scion in specific. The problem is that so few of his readers know this, even as he aggressively uses his platform to justify policies that almost exclusively benefit his super-wealthy brethren - all under the guise of supposed objectivity.

Then again, the fact that we know so little about who is actually making opinion in this country isn’t surprising. Even looking at this kind of information as it relates to the most important opinionmaker in the world is looked down upon by Washington insiders/elites/politicians. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson from “A Few Good Men,” deep down in places they don’t talk about at parties, they want billionaires like Friedman dictating the debate because they need someone creating public rationales for policies that enrich Big Money interests, sell out America and guarantee the next fat campaign contribution.

More here.

You know: the deranged half. The kids at Sadly No explain.

A couple items of business. As noted above, the window on signed prints closes soon. Also as noted, some new holiday-ish items in the store — “Happy War on Christmas” cards and 2007 calendars.

Finally, I’ve got some stuff up on eBay. A couple of rare posters from gallery shows I’ve had, and also just some general detritus from the cluttered attic of my life. Special bonus for readers of this site: I’ll throw in a signed print (of my choice) for any of these auctions, even the non-TMW-related stuff, whose closing price is over $40 — if the winning bidder mentions the offer.

… oops, forgot one thing: Hell in a Handbasket would make a lovely holiday gift, if I do say so myself. And for reasons too insidery and annoying to explain at the moment, an extra boost from holiday sales would have an enormous impact on my future publishing prospects.

Good news!

Every day it seemed more Iraqis woke up to death threats tossed into their carports. At first the death threats were handwritten, but as kidnappings became a daily occurrence, the kidnappers grew more brazen and organized. The terrorists now issue generic, computerized threats with the organization’s name as letterhead. Only the name of the victim is written by hand.

I’m pleased to see this leap forward in death squad productivity. But there’s still the drag on economic efficiency of writing the victims’ names in by hand. The solution is clear: tax cuts for death squads, which will allow them to make the capital investment to fully automate their death squadding.

And if that doesn’t do the trick, we should add Iraq to NAFTA, thereby lowering the barriers to trade in death squads, enlarging the death squad market and creating needed death squad economies of scale.

(You may think this is just a grim, tasteless joke, and completely unrepresentative of how many economists think. But it’s not.)

Wrong again.

Also, sky still blue.

… more here: “No, not just ‘wrong’. Amazingly, freakishly, mind-numblingly wrong.”

Stephanie Miller just played a clip of O’Reilly discussing the “secular progressive” war on Christmas and — wait for it — traditional marriage.

That would be this Bill O’Reilly.

Kristof:

Dexter Filkins, who covered Iraq brilliantly for this newspaper until his departure this summer to take up a fellowship at Harvard, says he was constantly accused of reporting only the bad news, of being unpatriotic, and of getting Americans killed.

“I don’t think it ever affected our reporting,” he said. “But I did find it demoralizing, the idea that the truth — the reality on the ground that we were seeing every day — did not matter, that these overfed people sitting in TV studios and in their living rooms could just turn up the volume on what they wanted to be happening in Iraq and that that could overwhelm the reality.”

Mr. Filkins added: “I have almost been killed in Iraq 20 or 30 times — really almost killed. “I’ve lost count. Do these people really believe that we were all risking our lives for some political agenda?”

Richard Engel of NBC says he was taken aback when pundits accused him of standing on a balcony in the Green Zone and simply feeding the world bad news. “Like most journalists in Iraq, I have never lived in the Green Zone,” he notes, adding: “To imply from afar we were just lazy was missing the point, and also dangerous. I know several reporters who were so incensed by similar criticism, they took extra risks.”

Of course, being Kristof, he has to throw in a jab at the left:

While it’s the right that led those toxic attacks, the left is also vulnerable to letting ideology trump empiricism. Mr. Filkins notes that while he used to get nasty letters and e-mail primarily from conservatives, much of the fire more recently has come from liberals accusing him of covering up atrocities — all of it from people whose ideological certitude is proportional to their distance from Baghdad.

I’ll leave it to the informed reader to decide for him or herself whether email from liberals accusing journalists of “covering up atrocities” is likely to be remotely close in quantity and vituperativeness to right wing accusations of treasonous liberal media bias, or whether this is just another example of Kristof’s ongoing dedication to transparently false equivalencies.

Some related thoughts on the differences between right- and left- wing media criticism in this post and this cartoon.