With all the shitty environmental news going on in the world -- polar bears drowning, the ice caps melting, Bush thwarting the listing of endangered species -- here is some good news.

Greenpeace has disrupted Japan's whale huntin the Antarctic.

Hillary cried yesterday. She got choked up. Her voice cracked. She teared up. She got -- ready, here it comes -- emotional.

That's what the media has treated us to since yesterday -- ABC even dubbed it The Moment.

Just like a woman. Can we really trust them not to get all blubbery when the terrorists attack us next time?

That's the undercurrent I get, even if no one has the stupidity to come out and say it that explicitly.

Another incumbent Republican is looking to head for the exits and take a very lucrative job ($1 million a year) as a lobbyist.

This time it is Richard Baker, who has represented Louisiana's 6th District, which is the area around Baton Rouge, since 1987.

Baker had no opposition other than a Libertarian candidate in the 2006 election. The largest parish in the district, East Baton Rouge, went for Bush in 2004 with 54.5%.

I happened to be channel surfing tonight and stopped at C-Span -- mostly because I couldn't stomach the wall-to-wall coverage of Britney's Breakdown.

And there was Mike Huckabee at a campaign rally in a college town in New Hampshire. Except he wasn't speaking. He was playing the bass in a rock band performing for the crowd.

So I'm watching this and not really paying much attention to the song they are playing until it suddenly hits me -- he's playing "Fortunate Son," John Fogerty's 1969 anthem about the unfortunate men who had to fight and die in Vietnam and couldn't get out of the draft by virtue of being a senator's son or a millionaire's son. Not exactly Lee Greenwood singing "God Bless the USA."

Perry Flippin worked at the San Angelo (Texas) Standard Times. The columnist was summoned to see the publisher last month and told his job was being eliminated. Adios Perry -- your last day is Jan. 4 -- thanks for the memories.

His final column leaves nothing unsaid about the state of the traditional media and its view of journalists as disposable commodities to be axed whenever the profit margin starts to creep below 20%. In other words, corporate publishers are right up there with the worst of the Greed Masters.

For 42 years, I have chased stories and looked under rocks and aspired to do good. My reporting aimed to help people be better citizens.

Times change.

They do indeed. Informing citizens does nothing to enhance revenue.

There is a new poll out today that shows a stunning development in the race for the Democratic nomination. Former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel has taken the lead among likely caucus goers -- a development that has left other campaigns flabbergasted.

"Say what?" said Sen. Barack Obama.

"Gravel? Seriously?" said former Sen. John Edwards.

The new poll by the respected Zagbee Surveys Inc. shows a remarkable surge in just the last 12 hours.

Gravel ---- 36%
Edwards -- 12%
Obama --- 11%
Clinton --- 10%

There has been much attention given in recent years to non-lethal focused energy weapons designed to incapacitate enemy troops or an unruly mob without a lot of blood and severed body parts and such.

There is a weapon known as the Active Denial System, which transmits a beam that makes people feel like their skin is on fire. And then there is something called LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) which can be used to transmit noise loud enough to make people flee.

Or, it can transmit the Voice of God.

And it is apparently being usedto Iraq to do just that.

Ya gotta hand it to Multiple Choice Mitt Romney. He can lie and prevaricate and spin and weasel his way out with the best of them.

Having been called on the carpet for inventing a childhood memory about seeing his father marching in Michigan with Martin Luther King Jr., Romney came out and admittedhe didn't really see that after all.

He just saw it -- are you ready? -- figuratively.

Because if you wait until the next big hurricane comes blowing in and you need the government's help to get to safety -- you're probably screwed.

That's because Texas has decided that the massive traffic backups caused by thousands of panicking citizens are not nearly exciting enough. So they want to gum up the works even more.

Yep. If you want to board a bus to evacuate now you are going to have to submit to a criminal background check first.

Neocon assholes are apparently no longer the flavor of the month at Time magazine.

War cheerleaders Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer have been given the heave ho from the pages of Time.

Two conservative Time magazine columnists are on their way out the door: Neither William Kristol nor longtime contributor Charles Krauthammer will be on contract with the magazine starting next month. Mr. Krauthammer confirmed the news to Off the Record, and a spokeswoman for Time said Mr. Kristol’s contract would not be renewed.

Mitt Romney is already a bad caricature of a game-show host.

Now he's a bad actor as well -- shedding tearsas he sees a soldier's casket and thinks it might have been one of his sons.

"The soldiers that I was with stood at attention and saluted," Romney told employees at Insight Technology Inc., a company that makes infrared optical equipment for U.S. troops. "And I put my hand on my heart, and tears begin to well in your eyes, as you can imagine in a circumstance like that. I have five boys of my own. I imagined what it would be like to lose a son in a situation like that."

You would think that senators would have figured this out during Civics 101, but apparently not.

So, here is a refresher -- the Congress appropriates money. For every federal agency. Even the CIA. No, the CIA does not get to print its own money.

So it was amazing when the Senate Intelligence Committee finally figured out how to get the CIA to give it the information it wants -- withhold money.

No, this is not a joke.

The ABA Journal, which is published by the American Bar Association, has named former Attorney General Alberto "Abu" Gonzales as its Lawyer of the Year for 2007.

If you don't believe me, you can check it out here.

There was a critique by journalism professor Chris Daly of Boston University published online today of the infamous Washington Post story on the rumors about Sen. Barack Obama (which I won't regurgitate) that basically said the following:

The Washington Post reporter, Perry Bacon Jr., is just a kid.

Who is Perry Bacon Jr.? I don't really know, but in two minutes of Googling him, I learned that he graduated from Yale in 2002, so he is approximately 27 years old. Since when does the Post assign 27-year-olds to write Page 1 presidential campaign pieces? (Of course, a partial explanation may arise from the fact that Bacon won a coveted 2001 internship at the Post while still at Yale. At that point, he was the features editor for the Yale Daily News, and he had already had an internship at the National Journal and was described as having been "a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal." This is fast-tracking with a vengeance -- a problem that I thought the Post had gotten past.)

There is the beginning of a new conventional wisdom going around that Iraq is fading from the political landscape as the top issue for most Americans.

Presumably with our Fearless Leader and his Mighty Surge having pacificed Baghdad (except, oops, for Baghdad's only refinery going up in flames today) the public no longer cares about Iraq.

This new CW now says people are now more concerned about the economy, health care, etc. This is also bullshit, according to a new Gallup poll.

Mike Huckabee may be on the verge of wiping out his competition in Iowa, if a new Newsweek poll is correct.

The poll shows Huckabee surging to a huge 22-point lead over Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani in single digits at fourth.

Among Democrats, Newsweek has Barack Obama with a 6-point lead over Hillary Clinton.

There is a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg pollout today that shows that a majority of those with military conncetions -- active duty, vets and families --  disapprove of Bush and his war and only 36 percent believe the war was worth it.

The poll conducted Nov. 30-Dec. 3 also finds that 37 percent of military-family members approve of the job Bush is doing as president, a little more than the general population. The 2004 poll by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications in Philadelphia found that twice as many military families approved of Bush's performance.

Kurt Andersen has an interesting column in New York magazine in which he is discussing how he views the news and events during a presidential election cycle.

And in it he makes a casual reference to Lynne Cheney engaging in "extravagant flirtations" with a friend of his. He doesn't elaborate.

Hmmmm. Salacious gossip, perhaps? Or perhaps the hint of a bombshell?