Midday open thread

• As appalling as it is that blog posts titled No, Blacks are Not Dumber than Whites are necessary, apparently they are, most recently thanks to Will Saletan. I haven’t read most of his series arguing the reverse, don’t plan to, and won’t link it, but one thing that catches my eye is that Saletan largely bases his arguments on a paper coauthored by J. Phillippe Rushton.

  When I was in graduate school, copies of Rushton’s work were periodically mailed to every student in my department. A quick glance found him arguing that Asians are the smartest and blacks are the stupidest, with whites in the middle, while black men have the largest penises and Asian men the smallest, with whites again in the middle. It’s like the Goldilocks and the three bears story of racial difference, with whites somehow always just right. That’s the level of rigorous research outright racism Saletan apparently wants to sell us on.

  Also see Cosma Shalizi’s takedown.

• Both of those links came from Crooked Timber, which itself features a spectacular set of usage statistics for Conservapedia.
• Michael Bloomberg is being briefed on foreign policy? Oh, good.
• Jim Webb and Jon Tester will be visiting Iraq next week.
• TPM TV gives thanks for the ultimate montage of Bush administration testimony before Congress.
• By now, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson all say they will not cross picket lines for a CBS-sponsored debate on December 10. Edwards is also canceling an appearance on The View due to the WGA strike.
• Some Thanksgiving reading from the NYT: turkey adoption. It sounds like fun:
  

  “They are not the neatest of birds,” said Marcia Lane, 75, a former television actress who adopted her first turkey in 2004. She currently keeps three in a fenced-in piece of pasture behind her home in Columbus, Miss.

  In the beginning, Ms. Lane’s turkeys seemed friendly enough. She named them for characters from “The Mikado.” She would even sing Gilbert and Sullivan tunes to them. But turkeys, like some children, can be fickle.

  “All of the sudden one, for no reason, they will turn on you and decide they don’t like you anymore and peck you,” she said. “I had one that would just fly at you, and I would have to carry a rake to protect myself.”

• Atrios brings back a Thanksgiving classic.
• Another Thanksgiving, a better President: Josiah Bartlet calls the Butterball hotline. [Adam B]

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