Likely after a few fingers of holiday cheer (or a round or two of bad stuffing), a local politico sent in this mind-blowing play concerning the city manager search. Unbuckle the belt another notch and take a look:

Six members of the council: So Betty, what do you think? You're the only council member who we all trust and respect.

Betty Dunkerley: I think we need to hire internally, since we're going into a two-year election cycle, and I don't think any of you want a new city manager whom we don't really know to be a wild-card in your races, right?

Jennifer Kim: I do! I do!

Everyone else: Shut up, fool.

Dunkerley: Which also means we need to hire now so that Laura Morrison can't run on this issue, even though she'll probably win anyway, because Cid Galindo is a cartoon character, and Robin Cravey is a flake.

Kim: But I want to run on this issue! It's all I've got!

Everyone else: Shut up, fool.

(Kim exits in tears and fires one of her staffers.)

Will Wynn: So can we get this all done before my photo shoot for the "Green, Hot and Blue" issue of Details? Who are we hiring?

Dunkerley: Well, Rudy Garza is too young, and Juan Garza is too old, so I'd say Huffman.

Mike Martinez: Too young?

Lee Leffingwell: Too old?

In an interview with Amy Wong Mok, one of the three tri-chairs on the Austin Independent School District citizens 2008 bond advisory committee (check out next week's issue for the skinny on the next proposed AISD bond election), one moment stood out. Born in Hong Kong, Mok has since become an American citizen and taken time out of her schedule to help shape the infrastructure future of Austin schools. On the holiday where we're supposed to consider the foundations and precepts of the United States, this comment from this migrant struck Chronic as quite apropos.

"Everyone is willing to come in early, roll up their sleeves, and work. It's so American, and it takes time to establish and cultivate this culture, this idea of open government and volunteering.”

Just thought we'd share. Now go grab a turkey leg. Or, if you're vegan, tofurkey.

On Tuesday, Nov. 20, our president pardoned "May" and "Flower," two turkeys supposedly spared the carving blade this Thanksgiving.

However, Bush doesn't have an especially good track record with these types of things. As Jordan Smith wrote back in 2005:

While governor, Bush presided over 152 executions and erred on the side of life only one time, in June 1998, when he commuted the death sentence of confessed serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. (Lucas died of natural causes in 2001.) More egregiously, in a 1999 interview with the now-defunct Talk magazine, Bush mocked executed killer Karla Faye Tucker, who he claimed pleaded for his mercy during a television interview with Larry King. "Please, don't kill me," Bush said she'd begged, although Tucker never made that plea.

Since then, Bush's become more acquainted with the pardon pen; this year, he pardoned Scooter Libby for his role in outing undercover nuke-nonproliferation spy Valerie Plame; as Richard Whittaker points out below, according to Scott McClellan's new bio, the prez himself was in on the bazboozlement. (Update: No, Scotty was just bullshitting. Lovely!)

Happy Thanksgiving.

For anyone reading about Chris Bell's decision to sue Texans for Rick Perry and the Republican Governors Association over an alleged campaign finance violation, there may be one question pending. Why didn't the former U.S. rep take this to the Texas Ethics Commission, the body that is supposed to be responsible for investigating such electoral violations?

According to Bell's attorney, longtime campaign finance expert Buck Wood, it wouldn't have been worth filing the paperwork. "The Ethics Commission is in such bad hands that I don't even deal with 'em any more," he said. "They ran off every long-term professional over there and replaced 'em with people who don't know what they're doing and give out ridiculous answers.

So what exactly is the commission spending its time doing? According to Wood, "They spend all their time investigating people who frankly started to run for office and didn't hardly have the money for the filing fee. Anyone with any connections to the Republican leadership, they won't do anything."

It appears New Jersey is poised to abolish the death penalty. The state has eight men on death row but has not executed an inmate since 1963, reports The New York Times.

A bill that would abolish capital punishment was approved by the state Senate Judiciary Committee in the spring and the state assembly is scheduled to consider a nearly identical measure on Dec. 6. Gov. Jon Corzine, a death penalty foe, has said he will sign the measure into law if it reaches his desk. “It would be a historic measure,” Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told the Times. “I think it is part of this bigger picture where the death penalty is on the defensive.”

An associate of Chronic's mentioned that he knew former White House press secretary Scott McClellan back when he was a whippersnapper working on one of the many campaigns fought by his mother, Carole Keeton Strayhorn. He described Scott as "nice enough but not very interesting."

Now, with the 121-word teaser from his upcoming book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong With Washington, McClellan may have become the most interesting person in the news. To quote the preview:

The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

There was one problem. It was not true.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself.

The presumption is that this refers to the administration's frantic attempts to cover up over Plamegate. So now, to take liberties with the questions asked by former Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker during Watergate: What did the press secretary know, when did he know it, and why is he putting it in a book, rather than talking to the media or investigators directly?

That's a mouthful.

The Lone Star Sierra Club is prodding Dallas utility TXU, now doing business as Luminant, to solidify its commitment to cancel applications to build eight new coal-fired power plants – made as part of its private-equity buyout deal earlier this year – by changing the permits’ dismissal status at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to dismissed “with prejudice” as opposed to “without prejudice,” as is stands now, which makes it easier to refile them, the Sierra Club says. TXU also recently applied to become part of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a group of corporations calling for mandatory greenhouse-gas regulations. If accepted, it would join fellow megautility NRG Energy Inc. NRG and TXU operate the two worst greenhouse-gas polluting power plants in the state, dually ranked numbers 45 and 50 globally for CO2 pollution.
In other climate change news, six Midwestern states and one Canadian providence just signed the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord, a regional multisector cap-and-trade program. And finally, Rainforest Action Network reports thousands turned out in more than 50 cities nationwide last Friday to protest Citi and Bank of America’s investments in new coal-fired power plants and dirty coal extraction methods such as mountaintop-removal coal mining.

Like manna from black helicopter heaven, the Daily Kos alerts us to to a steamy crossover in the tin-foil hat universe:

John Zogby is polling for Ron Paul supporter and conspiracy theorist entrepreneur Alex Jones.

Which makes perfect sense when you thing about it. As the only Republican candidate with a – gasp! – reality-based foreign-policy platform (i.e., getting us the hell outta Iraq), Ron Paul's made waves. But the rest of his platform is two-clicks away (or less) from Jones' paranoiac bloviation. The following:

"So called free trade deals and world governmental organizations … are a threat to our independence as a nation. They transfer power from our government to unelected foreign elites,"

may sound like a rambling suited for your next survivalist potluck, but no – it's there in Paul's "On the Issues" page. But really, bravo to this synchronicity – what a rich, and heretofore untapped (to my knowledge), cross-demographic slice of crazy!

But wait – there's more!

What do Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton have in common? Both have been tarred with the brush of being advocates of socialized medicine. Admittedly, Romney hasn’t got to the point where he gets his own “Hillarycare” style moniker, but he’s being pummeled by his presidential primary opponents because of the health bill he signed into law while governor of Massachusetts. They’re decrying it as a flash of communism – which is baffling, because what both candidates have come up with is the antithesis of socialized medicine. It’s mandatory private insurance.

The Massachusetts law, which comes into effect on Dec. 31, says that all residents of the state have signed up for a private insurance plan or lose their state income tax personnel exemption. By comparison to Hillary’s proposals (which would give tax credits for insurance premiums and allow the uninsured to buy into Medicaid or the same private programs that are open to federal employees), Romney’s old plan actually has a more aggressive "big government" spin. Well, aggressive like a frisky Chihuahua.