A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York died after he was trampled by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy.

Maybe the real “War on Christmas” isn’t being caused by athiests or liberal judges. Maybe Christmas just needs to be saved from itself.

In his latest diatribe, he points out his restaurant experience:

So, I have a confession and a suggestion. The confession: I go into restaurants these days, look around at the tables often still crowded with young people, and I have this urge to go from table to table and say: “You don’t know me, but I have to tell you that you shouldn’t be here. You should be saving your money. You should be home eating tuna fish. This financial crisis is so far from over. We are just at the end of the beginning. Please, wrap up that steak in a doggy bag and go home.”

Um, buddy… what are you doing in a restaurant then? Wouldn’t it make more sense to stand outside the restaurant and discourage people from entering? Shouldn’t you be eating at home? And what’s wrong with finishing the steak? They’ve already spent the money. If they can afford steak, buying one extra can of tuna fish tomorrow won’t break them.

And tuna fish is high in mercury. Not recommended for pregnant or nursing women. Or anyone more than two or three times a week.

Also, earth <> flat.

David Yermack, a professor of finance at New York University, made a case the other day in The Wall Street Journal that with the $465 billion Ford and G.M. have invested in their factories over the past decade, they “could have closed their own facilities and acquired all the shares of Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Volkswagen.”

The problem with giving money to GM, Chrysler, and Ford is one of bad management. The people who run these companies have dug themselves into the ground. Should we reward them for this?

What will happen if we don’t bailout these companies? Severe job losses. A hit on the economy. A loss of prestige… although where’s the prestige in being an unsuccessful car company? Starting a new car company from scratch is more expensive then keeping one around… but maybe that’s what is needed?

The problem with the Big Three automakers is that they persist in old ways of thinking. To them, cars were perfected in the 1950s, and since then, we’ve just added features - cup-holders, seat belts, and power windows.

But people don’t want only an automobile that makes their lives better - they want one that makes the world better. The real travesty of bailing out the Big 3 would be to continue supporting 20th century thinking in a world with 21st century problems. Any bailout should include an equity-share and new heads of these companies… or there shouldn’t be a bailout.

Invisible Man #1 Cover

*Not based on H. G. Wells.

Prop 8 on the move

Stephen Colbert had Dan Savage on his show tonight to discuss Proposition 8, a ballot measure in California to ban gay marriage. The measure passed, 52% to 48%.

On the show, Colbert stressed, as many other pundits have, that it was Barack Obama’s supporters in the black community that voted in the measure. And the data is convincing at first glance: African Americans voted for the measures 70% of the time, according to a CNN exit poll. (Regular warnings about using poll data apply. You can’t assume that these numbers are that accurate.)

However, let’s take a closer look at the numbers. Dan Savage said that older voters are the reason Prop 8 passed. And the 65+ crowd did vote for Prop 8 at a 61% rate. The rates go down by decade, mostly, which suggests that younger voters support gay marriage. Perhaps this will signal a repeal of the ballot measure in the future.

Importantly, however, Older people voted for the measure in larger numbers (11,304,910 voters in California X 15% are over 65 X 61% of these voted for prop 8 = 1,034,399) than black people did (11,304,910 voters in California X 10% are black % 70% of these voted for prop 8 = 791,343). The black voter margin is larger than the nearly 500,000 votes that the ballot passed by. So by this number, we could make a case that the black vote made a difference, but not as big a difference as the elderly and retired vote.

Now, let’s factor in the change from 2004 to 2008. the CNN exit poll from 2004 suggests that only 6% of voters were African-American (as opposed to 10% in 2008). That leaves a net change of about 450,000 new black voters. If 70% of those voted for prop 8, that’s well under the margin that Prop 8 passed by.

VERDICT: Black voters alone do not account for passing Prop 8. The largest groups to vote for Prop 8 are the elderly, followed by Republicans, who voted for the measure a whopping 82% of the time. (And then black voters. They’re number 3.)

PS. I love watching House in high definition.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention that older, black voters (the overlap of the main groups mentioned) are around 1% of the voting group. Small enough, for the statistical purposes, that I’ve ignored them. (Also, I’m assuming that older black voters would have voted for Prop 8 at the 70% or greater that the general black population did. Unfortunately, the CNN poll doesn’t have data broken down for black voters by age. Why is this? Good question.)

President-Elect holds a meeting of financial advisors (not from Meryl-Lynch)

What’s amazing about this photo, and different from the last eight-years, is that it exists.

Remember that in 2000, when Cheney convened his Energy Task Force, the American people had to sue him to even get a list of the attendees.

I know it’s only a photo, and it’s not policy, but isn’t it nice to have a President-elect who is already open about who his advisors are?? Doesn’t that signal a huge shift in the tone and nature of this government? And the fact that he’s already on the job before his first-paycheck… well, kudos, America!

(courtesy of the New York Times)