Thanks for all your support in 2009 and looking forward to a great year ahead!

Open Thread below...

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From the incomparable Gordon Skene at our sister site, Newstalgia:

I can't think of a better way to end up the year than with a special, rare, never-heard-before performance of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin (not together unfortunately, but Dino's in fine form) from the Hungarian Relief Fundraiser put on in Los Angeles on November 30, 1956.

For some reason, this recording has never been issued anywhere - the master tapes sitting on a shelf in a garage the better part of forty years before I got the call to "take the junk away".

Dean had just broken up his act with Jerry Lewis and Sinatra was going through a career change that took would take a dramatic upturn as well. If memory serves (but don't hold me to it), this predates the Ratpack by about a year.

In any event, this is a rare recording and you get to hear it first.

From all of us here at C&L, we wish you all a safe and joyous New Year's Eve and hope for the very best for 2010.

Looks like good Tweety was back today taking a whack at Dick Cheney's former aide Ron Christie along with Salon's Joan Walsh. True to form Christie defended Cheney's recent stenography session at The Politico. Ron Christie is one of the more annoying pundits out there so this didn't bother me one bit. I'll give him this as annoying as he is though. He's got more stones than his former boss since he's at least willing to come on MSNBC and defend the turd. That's more than you can say for spineless Cheney who hits you in the back with a knife and runs. But that's not anything that should be surprising from someone who got five deferments during Nam.

Transcript via Lexis Nexis.

MATTHEWS: We start, however, with the security blame game. You have to call it that. Ron Christie is a Republican strategist and former aide to Dick Cheney. We`ve got to read a statement here from the former vice president. He got up the other day, or I guess it was early today, and released this statement. And I guess he wants us to read it aloud because it`s something that he obviously put pen to paper so that we all would do just that.

This is the former vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney. Quote, "As I`ve watched the events of the past few days, it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won`t be at war.

"He seems to think if he gives the terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won`t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and a trial in civilian court, we won`t be at war. He seems to think if we close Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda- trained terrorists still there, we won`t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words `war on terror,` we won`t be at war.

"But we are at war, and when President Obama pretends we aren`t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn`t he want to admit we`re at war? It doesn`t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office and doesn`t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency, social transformation, the restructuring of American society. President Obama`s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war."

Could you, Ron Christie, as someone who has served the vice president and remains totally loyal to him, explain to us why he comes out of wherever he lives, gets to a word processor and puts all those words together to say over and over again what the president seems to think is that we`re not at war with terrorism? What does he mean by that?

RON CHRISTIE, FORMER DICK CHENEY AIDE: Well, good evening, Chris. I think the vice president`s statement speaks for itself. I think if you go back -- and I think it was very wise, the way that you started this segment, of connecting the dots. President Obama, when he was on the campaign trail, was very strong about prosecuting the war on terror. When he came in, immediately the war on terrorism vernacular disappeared from the president and his officials.

You had the secretary of homeland security saying that we`re dealing with overseas man-made contingency operations. You move forward later into the year, you had Guantanamo Bay, which President Bush also wanted to close but recognized that bringing enemy combatants and terrorists onto American soil would convey certain constitutional rights, Miranda rights, habeas corpus petitions, that would transform that from a war footing to a civilian footing.

And then you get this latest incident, Chris, where President Obama was on vacation. There was a Muslim radicalized individual who tried to blow up an American airliner on Christmas Day. The president`s response was muted. And again, he came out and said the "alleged" attempt and "the suspect."

And I think that there are people -- Dick Cheney, a number of politicians, Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon, Maureen Dowd from "The New York Times," Ruth Marcus from "The Washington Post" -- who look at President Obama`s reaction throughout the entire year and say, Is he showing the emotions, is he showing the fight and the vigor to fight a war on terrorism, rather than transform this into a civilian prosecutorial matter? I think that`s where Dick Cheney was coming from with his statement this morning.

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The Rachel Maddow Show's video site summed this one up as well as I could ever hope to.

Rachel Maddow holds Dick Cheney and Republican opportunists to account for their shameless hypocrisy, distortions and outright lies in criticizing President Obama's response to the attempted bombing of Flight 253 in the face of their abject, egregious failures to deal with terrorists threats to the United States when they were in power.

She also took at whack at her cohorts in the mainstream media for whether they want to act like journalists and fact check the B.S. that's being fed to them instead of just repeating it, or do their jobs. This was truly one of Rachel's finer moments on television.

I don't expect either of the Cheney's or any of the other hacks politicizing this terrorism debate to be coming on her show any time soon. Keep giving them hell Rachel.

MADDOW: After days of essentially unanswered Republican political attacks against the Obama administration, finally, today, we got the big kahuna. The white whale of Republican politics, former Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney, involved in this.

After five days of Republicans owning the airwaves on this issue, doubling and then tripling down on politicizing this thwarted terrorist attack, with almost no opposition from the Democrats, the maestro of terror politics, Mr. Cheney, gave a statement to Politico.com today. Not decrying the terrorist incident itself, but instead using that attack as an opportunity to bash the president, to accuse the president of not keeping America safe.

Now, as is often the case in politics, when attacks from one side go unanswered for a long time, when one side gets the platform all to themselves, that side can sometimes get over-exuberant. They can overplay their hand. Republicans, left to their own devices, have in this case excitedly launched a series of obviously baseless, factually incorrect, demonstrably untrue and hypocritical attacks.

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These Iranian students are really putting it on the line for their beliefs, even risking their own futures:

Behind the drama unfolding in the streets of Iran, the regime is quietly clamping down on some of the nation's best students by derailing their academic and professional careers.

On Wednesday, progovernment militia attacked and beat students at a school in northeastern Iran. Since last Sunday's massive protests nationwide, dozens of university students have been arrested as part of an aggressive policy against what are known as Iran's "star students."

In most places, being a star means ranking top of the class, but in Iran it means your name appears on a list of students considered a threat by the intelligence ministry. It also means a partial or complete ban from education.

The term comes from the fact that some students have learned of their status by seeing stars printed next to their names on test results.

Mehrnoush Karimi, a 24-year-old law-school hopeful, found out in August that she was starred. She ranked 55 on this year's national entrance exam for law schools, out of more than 70,000 test-takers. That score should have guaranteed her a seat at the school of her choice. Instead, the government told her she wouldn't be attending law school due to her "star" status.

Ms. Karimi says she thinks she got starred because she volunteered in the presidential campaign of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi last spring. She also participated in several antigovernment "Green Movement" protests that are convulsing Iran.

"They tell me, 'You are not allowed to study or work in this country any more.' Why? Because I voted for Mousavi and wore a green scarf?" says Ms.Karimi in a phone interview from the city of Isfahan, where she lives.

More than 1,000 graduate students have been blocked from higher education since the practice began in 2006, according to statements by Mostafa Moin, a former education minister, in official media in September.

Star treatment is reserved for graduate students, although undergrads also face suspension for political activity, according to student-rights activists. Several hundred undergrads have been suspended for as many as four semesters, according to student activists and human-rights groups in Iran. Under Iran's higher-education law, students are dismissed from school if they miss four terms.

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(I ask you - what would New Years Eve be without ol' Blue Eyes?)

I can't think of a better way to end up the year than with a special, rare, never-heard-before performance of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin (not together unfortunately, but Dino's in fine form) from the Hungarian Relief Fundraiser put on in Los Angeles on November 30, 1956.

For some reason, this recording has never been issued anywhere - the master tapes sitting on a shelf in a garage the better part of forty years before I got the call to "take the junk away".

Dean had just broken up his act with Jerry Lewis and Sinatra was going through a career change that took would take a dramatic upturn as well. If memory serves (but don't hold me to it), this predates the Ratpack by about a year.

In any event, this is a rare recording and you get to hear it first.

Thanks to everyone for a great 2009 - especially the crew at C&L. It's all been good fun, dusting off history.

Happy New Year - try and stay sane in the meantime. Wait til 2010!

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It seems that the Fox talkers who have been attacking President Obama this week for allegedly being "soft on terror" -- particularly Wayne Simmons, who sneeringly referred to Obama as 'the boy king' earlier this week -- are especially upset that two of the key leaders of Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, the organization claiming credit for the attempt attack on Flight 253, are men who were released from Guantanamo Bay and sent back to Yemen.

Simmons was on Fox's Your World yesterday with David Asman, and they both were appalled that these men had been freed.

Asman: You stay in touch with all your exes in the military and intelligence community. What's the morale like there, where people see prime targets being released back where they can do damage?

Simmons: It's pathetic. It's low. It's horrible. It's frustrating. It's every adjective you can think of to describe the work that these outstanding men and women in the intelligence community and in the military put into tracking these guys down and killing them or capturing them. And then end up now like maybe the SEALs do. So, a lot of men and women are questioning, just where is the leadership? Or why is there a lack of leadership? They are putting their lives on the line, grabbing these guys, only to have them turned loose again. It's pathetic.

But there was one little fact missing from the entire discussion: These two men were released by the Bush administration and returned to Yemen to participate in "art therapy."

In fact, it was none other than Dick Cheney himself -- who only the day before was similarly attacking Obama -- who secretly released the men. As Eric Massa pointed out:

"I would remind the American public that the apparent leaders of the al Qaeda cell in Yemen were 2 terrorists who were released by Vice President Cheney in secret. I think there's a level of accountability that has to be levied personally on the vice president," Massa said in an interview. "He is personally responsible for that."

Awfully optimistic, aren't they? I hope they're right:

Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Fewer Americans than anticipated filed claims for unemployment benefits last week, pointing to an improvement in the labor market that will help sustain economic growth next year.

Initial jobless claims fell by 22,000 to 432,000 in the week ended Dec. 26, the lowest level since July 2008, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The number of people receiving unemployment insurance fell in the prior week to 4.98 million, and those receiving extended benefits jumped.

Companies are retaining staff as sales improve and production picks up. Gains in consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of the economy, may encourage more hiring in coming months, helping to bolster the rebound from the worst recession since the 1930s.

“It’s boding well for outright job growth,” said Stephen Gallagher, chief U.S. economist at Societe Generale in New York, who forecast claims would drop to 430,000. “It seems that some of the layoffs that took place in the early part of the year were excessive.”

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From The Situation Room, Jonathan Turley calls out Tom Ridge's hackery from his appearance on Larry King. It was nice to see Turley point out that the term Malveaux used, enhanced interrogations -- that she tossed out there so lightly, is torture. Unfortunately we don't have enough like Turley to counter all the talking head torture-lovers like Ridge, King, Hoekstra and Cheney.

MALVEAUX: I want to go to you, to Jonathan.

Clearly, there are some prominent Republicans who are looking at the situation about Mutallab being tried in a military tribunal situation, as opposed to the federal court system. And they want a military tribunal. They want to be able to question him, perhaps enhanced interrogations.

We heard this from the former Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge on "LARRY KING." I want you to take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "LARRY KING LIVE")

TOM RIDGE: I take a look at this individual who has been charged criminally, does that mean he's going to get his Miranda warnings?

Does that mean the only kind of information we want to get from him is if he volunteers it. He's not a citizen of this country. He's a terrorist, and I don't think he deserves the full range of protections of our criminal justice system embodied in the Constitution of the United States.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MALVEAUX: What do you think about his point that he's making? Are we missing vital -- perhaps vital intelligence from Abdulmutallab on whether or not there are additional attackers who are out there?

JONATHAN TURLEY: I think that's very unlikely.

First of all, supposedly, he was speaking very freely for some time after his arrest. But what we know from the past, from the Bush torture program, is that it yielded very little information. Information it did yield was known to be highly suspect.

But it's not really about the information that you get from special interrogations, which is a nice way of saying torture. It is also not about what rights he deserves. What is really the question is what rights we have to give people to maintain our credibility around the world.

That is, the way the world viewed the Bush administration was that, well, George Bush often looked almost Caesar-like, sending some people to federal courts, some people to military tribunal. Some people got no trial at all.

In this case, we had Richard Reid, who was virtually identical in his act. He went to federal court. Zacarias Moussaoui went to federal court. And I think that it's a problem if we treat a legal system as sort of improvisational, that we simply go by case by case of what we feel someone should have in terms of rights.

The credibility of a legal system is its consistency. Without consistency, it lacks coherence. And I think what Mr. Ridge is saying that, when we really don't like you or we think that we might get some information out of you, then we won't give you the rights under our system.

And that creates the type of anger and, frankly, the view of hypocrisy that the United States has faced. But I think it's very unlikely. A military tribunal doesn't -- doesn't generate intelligence. It's not a way to generate any more intelligence than a federal trial is.

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With all the regular anchors out for the holiday week, Ann Coulter is gleefully stepping up to help lead the parade of right-wingers bashing President Obama for his supposedly weak response to the threat of terrorism. That's been the primary subject of every single Fox prime-time show, in fact, and not a single defender of the president could be found on any of them.

But Coulter, guesting on the Glenn Beck show, went the extra mile by resurrecting the Obama-is-a-closet-Muslim smear that was so popular during the election:

Coulter: I think if you polled Americans after 9/11, they would have said, 'Drop the political correctness when it comes to boarding airplanes.' And, um, like I say, Obama can be doing more than Bush. He is specially situated that way, as having gone to madrassas as a child. Um, not being a white male, which is the height of political incorrectness.

Ah, yes, some lies are just too good to let die a normal death:

Obama lived in Indonesia as a child, from 1967 to 1971, with his mother and stepfather and has acknowledged attending a Muslim school, but an aide said it was not a madrassa.