Mad Mike's America: A really good reason to buy Girl Scout Cookies this year.

Mike B: Perhaps a Golden Age of Gun Control awaits....

Wonkette: Apocalypse Now

Best pic of the week from Thump and Whip -- Way to push a narrative, Ron Paul Warriors!

Round Up by Blue Gal of the (newly updated) Professional Left Podcast. Send tips to mbru AT crooksandliars DOT org.

I don't usually post songs that are as popular as this one, opting instead for the obscure, underrated, brand new or deep-distant. Don't Look Back In Anger has turned out to be something of an anthem for the year. And maybe an anthem for 2012 and after. Maybe someday it will eclipse "Auld Lang Syne" as the penultimate assessment of the previous 365 days.

It certainly lays out all those feelings and observations. But I suspect you all know that.

In any event - classic and timely Oasis. Classic and timely sentiment.

Brace yourself for 2012.

Ending up the look back at various years in review with 1974. Seems only fitting. Ending up one crazy year by looking at another crazy year in history.

That one that started off embroiled in major scandal and ending up with the resignation of a President, the first time it happened.

The Nixon era was over and the Ford era, short as it was, began.

The year started off with an Oil embargo and the Middle East took center stage, again. Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was abducted and slowly morphed into Tanya. The Turks invaded Cyprus. Ford pardoned Nixon. Haile Selassie was deposed as ruler of Ethiopia. Aerosol became persona non grata and PLO chief Yassar Arafat addressed the UN for the first time.

A year jammed with a lot of changes and drama.

The Year in Review with CBS-News from December 29, 1974.

They don't make years quite like that anymore. Not yet, anyway.

I've heard a lot of idiotic statements in my lifetime, but this one by David Brooks on the PBS Newshour this Friday evening takes the cake. Brooks is so desperate to paint Mitt Romney as some "every man" during this GOP primary race, that he actually goes so far as to call him someone who is "running to be Tom Sawyer" and he thinks that's going to work for his campaign.

This makes my head hurt trying to even figure out what there could possibly be about Mitt Romney that would make the analogy of Tom Sawyer pop into that centrist loving, GOP apologizing, false equivalency propagating head of his, so I'm not even going to try. I'll leave that to anyone else that wants to analyze what goes on in the brain of David Brooks.

In the mean time, here's his hackery from this Friday's the PBS Newshour:

JIM LEHRER: All right, let's talk about Romney for a moment, beginning with you, David. How do you read the situation on Romney right now, where he stands and what his prospects are in Iowa?

DAVID BROOKS: He's exuding confidence. I think his people are exuding confidence.

I went to a rally this morning in the rain, and he was he was with Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. And it was just a smooth, effective, not-too-long, but sort of a corporate race. It was like George Bush in year 2000.

And what's interesting is the tactic he's taking. It's very short on policy. It's very long on patriotism. He talks about driving across the country looking at the national parks. He talks -- he sings, or at least recites, some verses from "The Star-Spangled Banner." It's as if he's running to be Tom Sawyer.

And I think it's a way to establish a connection with voters, even despite questions they may have about Mormonism or anything else. I think it's a way to distinguish, in his eyes, between him and Barack Obama. He's more mainstream.

And then, again, this theme of returning, as -- posing as Tom Sawyer, he's returning to some earlier values. And, you know, that may play this year. Mark is absolutely right. Rick Santorum and a lot of the candidates are very negative, the guy who won it four years ago, Mike Huckabee, very positive. But the mood here has darkened appreciably. And maybe they're in tune with what the voters are hearing right now.

And they pay this guy how much money to write a column for the New York Times every week? David Brooks... more proof that wingnut welfare pays much better than actually having anything you talk or write about actually based in reality.

For more on why David Brooks should never be allowed to write another column or appear on television again, I highly recommend Driftglass' tireless work following his legacy of whitewashing horrible right wing Republican policies and trying to dress them up to sound reasonable to most of the public.

Blast from the past: 2009 when Pat Buchanan struggled with pronouncing "Barack Obama." Open Thread below....

Man this sh*t is smoking! Bernard Purdie for president.

"We Are The Many" by Hawaiian artist Makana is not only written specifically as a song for the Occupy movement, it has the distinction of being a surprise act for the World Leaders Dinner at APEC when Makana pulled open his jacket and shirt to reveal an undershirt with “Occupy with Aloha” handwritten on it.“I found it odd,” he says, “that I was afraid to [sing “We Are the Many”] at first. I found it disturbing. I didn’t like the idea of being afraid of singing a song that I had created in front of any group of people.”

I knew the power in the words that I had written. And, in a world that was free of punishment for being yourself… I would have sung it at the top of my lungs. But I also didn’t want to do it out of disrespect. I did it because there was really no other option at that point. I had to do it. I had to forget about what could happen to me. I was guided by something bigger… I don’t know what it is… I can’t put a name to it… The whole thing was providence.
...

Makana seems to have gotten the job done, spelling out protesters’ frustrations with corporations, market capitalists, lobbyists, political leaders, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the bank bailout, while naming the refusal of party politics and the embrace of social media that makes “occupation” a much bigger ideological and practical strategy than trampling tents at Zuccotti Park or in downtown Oakland even begins to understand. And then, so not for nothing, he manages to sum it up with a catchy refrain (played, he says, some fifty times at the APEC dinner):

We’ll occupy the streets
We’ll occupy the courts
We’ll occupy the offices of you
Till you do
The bidding of the many, not the few
We are the many
You are the few

Since Makana's performance during APEC, he has become a giant among ki artists, and a growing luminary on the world music scene, earning Grammy nominations, and opportunities to play with rock legends like Santana and Sting.

Here we go again with some "fair and balanced" reporting from what is supposed to be one of their "straight news" shows, as opposed to what they admit is opinion during their evening lineup on Fox. Every time President Obama takes any vacation time in Hawaii, this is the kind of "reporting" we end up with from Uncle Rupert's stenographers.

From Thursday night's Special Report with Bret Baier, guest host Chis Wallace and Fox reporter Doug Luzader do their best to spin President Obama as some out of touch "elitist" because... get this... they might have spent as much at $260 at a Hawaiian restaurant to feed a family of four. OMG!! Hell, that's almost $100 less than Paul Ryan's now infamous bottle of wine, but I don't think Fox bothered to tell their viewers about that. What's worse is it was immediately followed by them showing a clip of Mitt Romney on the campaign trail hammering President Obama for being out of touch. Yeah, that man of the people, Mitt Romney.

Here's more from our friends at News Hounds -- Fox News Hypocritically Uses Jobless Claims To Play Class Warfare Against President Obama:

Once again, those Fox News hypocrites who complain the left plays class warfare jumped at the chance to do so themselves for the sake of swiping at President Obama. In a Special Report segment today that purported to be about “rough economic news,” reporter Doug Luzader gratuitously mentioned that the Obama’s spent more on dinner last night than most others in Hawaii can afford. Then he immediately moved on to suggest that Republican presidential candidate – and Mitt Romney, of all people - is more in touch.

Luzader said,

“Even here in the Aloha state, they’ve said hello and good-bye to jobs. The unemployment rate here is on the rise again. Not many can afford the $260 that the President and First Lady are believed to have spent on dinner at this island restaurant last night.” [...]

Luzader didn’t mention that Romney has far more money than Obama. Nor did he mention where the Romney family goes out to eat.

Fox News, we distort, you decide. It's only fair to call someone an out of touch elitist if they've got a "D" behind their name and they're not one of those "job creators" don't you know. Otherwise as always, the rule is IOKIYAR.

This is my segment on yesterday's the David Pakman Show. Enjoy!

Fox News on Thursday teamed up with a former Girl Scout to warn that the organization was conspiring to "promote a clear liberal ideology."

Fifteen-year-old Sydney Volankski, who left the Girl Scouts in 2010 to write about their "pro-abortion mindset" on her blog, has now discovered that a guide published by Girl Scouts of the USA (GUSA) advises scouts to check media facts through a number of sites including Media Matters, which Fox News host Steve Doocy called "clearly a lefty blog."

Glenn Beck's website The Blaze first hyped the latest claims against the Girl Scouts after they were contacted by Volankski's mother.

"Perhaps the Girl Scouts staffers were too busy to respond to us, but considering the fact that the Media Matters reference is, in itself, a form of misinformation, bias — potentially even indoctrination — we assumed that the book would no longer be on the market," The Blaze's Billy Hallowell wrote. "We were wrong."

Following that, Volankski was invited to appear on the Fox & Friends morning show.

"We were just trying to spread awareness to families," Volankski said of her blog. "We were so deceived. For eight years, we were in Girl Scouts and we didn't realize that Girl Scouts was promoting such a liberal ideology like with the Media Matters site."

"Uh-huh," Doocy agreed.

For their part, Girl Scouts has caved under the pressure and promised to to remove all references to Media Matters from future printings of their media guide, but Volankski wasn't satisfied.

"Obviously, Girl Scouts is not concerned enough to pull these books off the shelf," Volankski complained.

The former scout has also written that "role models GSUSA encourages girls to emulate include pro-abortion champions, Marxists, Socialists and advocates of same sex lifestyle."

While the national Girl Scouts organization does maintain a neutral position on reproductive rights, local and regional chapters have the autonomy to partner with groups like Planned Parenthood for educational purposes.

"In some areas of the country, Girl Scout troops or groups may choose to hold discussions about human sexuality and may choose to collaborate with a local organization that specializes in these areas," GSUSA said in a statement earlier this year. "The topic is discussed from a factual, informative point of view and does not include advocacy or promotion of any social or religious perspective."

(H/T: Talking Points Memo, News Hounds)