Truth be told, I haven't been feeling the Thanksgiving spirit. Looking outward, it is difficult to see past the smoldering economic rubble that fills the lives of so many of those dear to me from my own tenuous outpost on the edge. With no plausible course of action on the horizon to bring appropriately wide-scale relief, let alone begin the rejuvenation and rebuilding that our system and society so desperately need, the call to dig deeper and muster up some tritism to serve as my offering on the alter of national habit has mostly just served to highlight a situation so grave for so many people that reveling in an annual orgy of gluttonous overconsumption simply feels a microcosm for so many of our current ills.

I'm grateful for Black Friday and cramming more victuals down my gullet in one sitting than many households (including my own) should responsibly make last for an entire week in the current economy! Yay.

So it was, under a dark cloud, that I wandered the internets ... sampling the fluff-headed bullshit offered up by the pretty people, self-centered fluff from those who's biggest concern in life is sports, and obligatory self-absolving highlights of whatever local groups spent their day providing a once-annual decent meal to ever growing ranks of the poors. Not much of a silver lining in sight. At Fire Dog Lake, Dakine manages to one-up my malaise by missing the point entirely.

Clearly the time had come to move past Thanksgiving 2011.

One of the more inexplicable facts of modern life from the layman's perspective is that one John Yoo continues to hold a job. The simple fact of being employed isn't really that inexplicable ... of course a man of his background would be expected to find themselves parked at some think-tank somewhere getting paid handsomely simply for being a generally horrible person (as we all know, the primary purpose of think tanks is to quietly pay off people for acting so horribly in public life they have rendered themselves unemployable in polite society). The surprising bit is that he is employed by an institution that claims a mission of turning students into highly qualified, well trained legal professionals. And his job, apparently, involves teaching these students that his cocked-up legal opinions and the thought processes underlying them - repudiated by every other legal mind asked to place their own professional career and reputation on the line - may be ethically employed by the next generation of American lawyers.

Such is academic excellence at the legal department, University of California, Berkley (Boalt Hall). Co-overseen by David Caron and Christopher Edley Jr.

Recently, Mr. Edley found himself confronted at a public forum. His responses were, and continue to be, a bit eyebrow-raising. Subsequent discussions regarding Obama and his decision to ignore serious Bush-era lawbreaking has been fascinating. But equally fascinating is the snapshot of how the head of a reasonably prestigious legal program views issues of law, responsibility, accountability and the role of educational institutions in society.

Two of Couer d'Alene's finest came home from war. And will be laid to rest (video of memorial service).

When I discovered Couer d'Alene Idaho, the only thing I knew about the area was that it looked breathtakingly beautiful in a travel brochure ... and equally beautiful when I visited. Literally, that's it; that and I could get to a major airport in around 30 minutes (which was my sole professional criteria at the time). Another visit and I had a home and was preparing to move a household and office from Las Vegas.

It would take a somewhat tense conversation with a friend in San Francisco, who was decidedly uninterested in visiting, before I would learn of the darker reputation that the Aryan Nations had bestowed on my new locale. Since that time, I have learned bits and pieces of the story and watched the final chapters as the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden was seized and destroyed. Kept abreast of rumors that the core moved north and west to the Priest River area (incidentally, the exact area where the Spokane bomber was located). And generally just picked up local gossip. But I had never gotten a complete story of the history. Until now.