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(Nikita Khruschev and friend - On this day he and the turkey had a lot in common)

On this typical average day in 1964 news came from Moscow that Premier Nikita Khruschev "needed a rest" and was quickly removed from office, sending more than the average shockwave around the world.

Sam Jaffe (ABC News Moscow): “From all outward appearances, the Soviet people responded calmly to the news that Nikita Khruschev has been replaced. Most Muscovites learned of the changes on their way to work today. All Soviet newspapers carried a brief announcement that Premier Khruschev had requested retirement because of his age and poor health”.

This newscast, via WXYZ in Detroit from Friday October 16, 1964 also mentions the ongoing Auto Plant and newspaper strikes and an ever-folksy Paul Harvey extolling the virtues of yet another life insurance policy.

All in all, a typical average day. Kind of like this one.

Or not.

First it was killin' a turkey and now a dead bear. You betcha!

Anyway, Sarah Palin plans to join the National Council for a New America:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will be part of the National Council for a New America, an attempt by leaders in Congress and potential 2012 presidential candidates to rebrand the struggling party.

"I am pleased to announce that Governor Palin has joined the National Council for a New America's panel of experts," said House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) today. "When NCNA was announced last week, we spoke about a dynamic organization that worked to constantly bring in new people and innovative ideas."

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), who shared the national ticket with Palin, had hinted at Palin's involvement during a conference call last Thursday announcing the National Council's formation.

But, her office had been largely silent in the intervening days and Cantor's office made clear only that she had been invited to join not that she had accepted.

Palin's involvement in the group will help rebut the idea that the National Council is an organ of the establishment wing of the party set up to keep the Palins and Gov. Mark Sanford's (S.C.) -- both of whom are more hardline conservatives -- from taking over control of the party.

Her appearance on the panel is just window dressing -- some useful PR for Herself. I do believe she would have agreed with the dittohead who said he thought America doesn't need education. Only Rush Limbaugh.

Sarah will be right at home with the wingnut base that attends these townhalls. She was a complete failure as a VP candidate and had no ideas of any kind except to call Obama a terrorist lover. (Well, that was actually Karl Rove's idea. My mistake.) She might think about animals just a wee bit more, don't you think?

David Shuster brings us Sarah Palin's extremely creepy turkey pardoning and post-pardoning interview from Wasilla, Alaska. The whole thing plays like something out of the Twilight Zone or the latter stages of Fargo.

I was looking at that awful video of Sarah Palin babbling cluelessly while that turkey geeker lops off bloody heads in the background, and I realized... I've seen that guy before. So I looked through my photo archives and sure enough, he's ruined several other Republican photo-ops:

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From Countdown Nov. 20, 2008, David Shuster brings us Sarah Palin's extremely creepy turkey pardoning and post-pardoning interview from Wasilla, Alaska. The whole thing plays like something out of the Twilight Zone or the latter stages of Fargo. As a couple of my fellow C&L'ers pointed out after watching this, if Sarah Palin is a "friend to all creatures great and small" someone needs to let the wolves and polar bears know about that change of heart...lol. Images of Palin and "creatures" are more likely to be those of high powered rifles and helicopters than any sort of compassion in my book. And she does seem to use those family members selectively for what's politically convenient at the time doesn't she?

    Isn't it amazing how quickly Iraq has slipped down the list of defining issues for the presidential election, after every pundit in the country originally opining that it would be the defining argument to be fought? Of course, since those pronouncements we've had Georgia and the progressively chillier disagreement with Russia, we've had Afghanistan and especially Pakistan go to hell in a handbasket and we've had the economy do an impression of Chernobyl. Oh, and the Witchfinder from Alaska.

But there are still stormclouds on the Iraqi horizon, no matter that the Right wants to declare a whole new Mission Accomplished banner day. The Sunni Awakening is getting restless, the Shiite majority still have nasty internal feuds to resolve and the Kurds...well, Bush's bestest Iraqi allies throughout the occupation still have a damn good chance of being the spark that sets off a regional powderkeg. The Turks have already come very close to getting embroilled in an Iraqi mess when they sent a large force across the border last winter against Kurdish PKK separatist terrorists and are already set to do it again. The danger was always that the Kurds' military, the peshmerga, would turn out to resist the incursion and drag the Iraqi central government in too leaving the US torn between ripping up either the NATO alliance or years of Iraqi occupation.

So it was interesting recently to see an interview with Ahmet Davutoglu, the chief foreign policy aide to Turkey's prime minister, on the Council For Foreign Relations' website a few days ago. He warned that recent optimism on Iraq in the United States overlooks significant, dangerous problems which remain unresolved and set out a viewpoint that says Iraq should be seen as a Yugoslavia on the verge of breakdown.

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Let's all put our hands together and celebrate the neocon/BushCo. foreign policy that Rudy & St. McCain embraces.

Turkey - A car bomb targeting soldiers killed five people and wounded 68 others — including 30 soldiers — Thursday in the Kurdish-dominated southeastern city of Diyarbakir, officials said.

A bus transporting troops was passing by a five-star hotel when suspected Kurdish rebels detonated a remote-controlled car bomb, authorities said. Two high school students who emerged from a building where they were taking preparatory courses for university exams and three other civilians were killed.

Rebels from the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, have battled for autonomy in southeastern Turkey for more than two decades — a campaign that has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. The group uses strongholds in northern Iraq for cross-border strikes.

In October, Parliament authorized Turkey's military to strike back at rebels across the border.

And it looks like as things change in Iraq---they remain the same:

Suicide bombings in Iraq: not actually over. The last two weeks there's been something approaching a bombing every two or three days. And they're not where U.S. forces are spread the thinnest, but where they're in full effect -- Diyala and Baghdad. The Post reports the trend line for suicide bombings has been upward for the past two months. Happy 2008, year of the de-surge..read on

As Digby notes: One hopes the candidates haven't gotten too rusty on the issue of Iraq because it's going to be an issue whether they like it or not.