Vietnam vet Senators named John running for president and lovin’ their sammiches … God bless ‘em.

Today’s New York Times editorial plays quite a trick.  It’s a soaring, pleasing-enough headline — “Ain’t That America.”  But the pessimistic dark-clouded copy quickly shows the paper’s true colors.

The topic is illegal immigration, linked to “America’s greatest historical shames”:

“We are heading down this road again. … The evidence can be seen in any state or town that has passed constitutionally dubious laws to deny undocumented immigrants the basics of living, like housing or the right to gather or to seek work. It’s in hot lines for citizens to turn in neighbors. It’s on talk radio and blogs. It’s on the campaign trail, where candidates are pressed to disown moderate positions.”

Feel free to roll your eyes.  We know, we know, America is going down the crapper because of talk radio and blogs.  Oh, and because of conservatives.  Words like “worst” and “shame” and “hate” are hardly surprising when the Times throw this type of tantrum.

But what’s surprising this go-around is that the paper missed an easy opportunity to say one good thing about immigrants and America.  That thing, of course, is Louisiana’s new governor, Bobby Jindal, a son of immigrants — legal immigrants — from India.

That single uplifting anecdote  is probably at cross-purposes (Too optimistic?  Too, gulp, Republican?) with the Times’ editorial purposes.  We’ll just have to share that happy immigration news among ourselves.   Bobby Jindal — Ain’t That America?

We check in now with with the website of “Workers World, workers & oppressed peoples of the world unite!”

And what “struggle” do we find?  A spiffy new attack on Al Gore and his Nobel Peace Prize.

Tough to capture and do justice to all the venom contained under their headline, “Gore and the Nobel prize: ‘Green’ polluters get a boost.”  So please forgive me if the following gems just aren’t enough:

• Will it really help save the planet from environmental ruin that former Vice President Al Gore has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?  That might seem like a strange question. So let’s ask another: Has it helped stop illegal and predatory imperialist wars that Jimmy Carter got the prize in 2002; that Yasser Arafat had to share it in 1994 with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel; that Nelson Mandela was awarded it jointly with F.W. de Klerk of apartheid South Africa in 1993; or that Le Duc Tho had to share it with Henry Kissinger in 1973?
• Yet while Gore’s film painted the picture of a looming catastrophe for the planet and all its inhabitants, it had very little to say about how to stop it. Buy low-wattage light bulbs. Ride a bike to work or school. Invest in green industries.  Nevertheless, the extreme right wing in the U.S. is frothing at the mouth about him receiving the Nobel, as can be seen in the many on-line comments on this subject.
• Gore, who happens to be an heir to a family fortune built on oil—his father was very close to Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum …
• What Gore’s Nobel prize underscores is that the biggest banks and corporations have moved, and are now up to their eyeballs in schemes to make “green” money.
• Science and technology are not to blame. It is the social system under which they have developed that has perverted technology from its original purpose: to solve humanity’s problems in the struggle to survive and flourish. Capitalism has been one headlong rush to produce more and more, create markets where none existed before, and even destroy other countries’ industries in order to profit from rebuilding them.  Gore can never oppose this system—he is an advocate for it and a son of the ruling class.

Actually, forget Gore for the moment.  It’s sorrowfully rare when Le Duc Tho gets appropriate shout-outs in the blogopshere.  So let’s take the Workers World’s lead and show Henry Kissinger shaking hands with Le Duc Tho in Paris after their agreement on the cease-fire terms of the Vietnam War, 1973.

The Washington Post brings some interesting information to the story surrounding the search for missing aviator Steve Fossett: The price.

The search for Fossett, 63, may have been the largest for a single individual in the United States, said Cynthia Ryan, spokeswoman for the Nevada wing of the Civil Air Patrol, which flew 900 sorties in the search. Historians say the U.S. government spent $4 million looking for aviatrix Amelia Earhart, scanning the South Pacific for more than a year after she vanished July 2, 1937.

Nevada officials said almost $1.5 million in public money was spent looking for Fossett.

$1.5 million?  I’m sure he’s worth it.  And you can’t and really shouldn’t try to put a value on any person’s life.  I just hope that if I ever go missing in a plane incident, they’ll send 900 sorties looking for me.

Bless the Weekly Standard’s parody page for pointing out this item from the Oct. 14 New York Times Book Review:

Michael Kinsley, who reviews Alan Greenspan’s ‘’Age of Turbulence'’ this week, has a résumé that seems to have been assembled with the express purpose of inspiring awe. At present, he is a columnist for Time, but he has also been the editor of The New Republic and Harper’s, the editorial and opinion editor of The Los Angeles Times, the American editor of The Economist and the founding editor of the online magazine Slate. Along with numerous television appearances, he has written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Times of London and, of course, the Book Review.

That’s what passes for awe these days?  Sorry, but I didn’t see a Nobel Peace Prize or a Super Bowl ring on the list.  No sale.

Further evidence that St. Michaels, MD, is fast becoming America’s political home away from home.  President Bush today had crab cakes for lunch at the St. Michaels home of Dick Cheney.

Here’s the roll call of other political luminaries who have have homes there:

• Don Rumsfeld
• Tony Snow
• Nicholas Brady
• Joe Trippi

Anyone else to add to the list?

It’s Campaigns & Elections Magazine’s Walter Alarkon.  He’s the hottest and smartest rising-star political reporter today.  Why?  Check out his bold, innovative and ambitious coverage of the Funniest Celebrity in DC contest.  Click on the PDF of Campaign Insider here.  But if you can’t wait that long, here’s a random snippet of the piece we accidentally stumbled upon:

“I have a nine-year old grudge match against Joe Lieberman,” said Mortman, who was defeated by the Connecticut senator during his sole appearance in the contest.  “To my grave I will be mockingly bitter for losing out to him.”

There’s no telling how early Iowa and New Hampshire will hold their voting. News is rampant that voting may occur as early as Christmas.

Of course, if that happens, the way this competition is playing out surely someone will move up Christmas.

So we at Extreme Mortman are changing our bylaws to dictate that no state shall hold its Christmas before Extreme Mortman does. Therefore, and in that spirit, we declare that today is Christmas.

In celebration, we present a gag which could no longer wait until Dec. 25th …

Truth be told, what really attracts us to his picture is the magazine’s tag line: The Magazine For Christmas Tree Professionals Aren’t we all?

Parents of young children might appreciate this headline over yesterday’s House Republican Conference newsletter:

Speaker Pelosi’s Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Week

Sound familiar?  Just so happens this book is right now hot in rotation in the Extreme household:

By the way, a spoiler alert:  Alexander’s solution?  He says he wants to escape to Australia.

Google earned $1.07 billion in profit last quarter.  What should the company do with all that cash?

Here’s a proposal: Offer a dividend to stockholders.

Imagine the boost it would give to the economy.  Google arguably has more power to move markets than the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke.  Google’s influence on the stock market is more than the holdings individual stock owners, of whom precious few were able to get in at the $85 offering price.  By now its stock is a main component of many mutual funds, spreading its impact to many more people.  Maybe not of the level of GE or Exxon stock, but check out your mutual funds in your retirement account.  You’re likely to see Google stock everywhere.

Nowadays, when Google does well in the market, we all do well.  So why offer a dividend?  Simple.  It would be a symbol that it’s a maturing company that recognizing its importance to many investing Americans.  That would boost the stock even further over the long term.  And frankly, what else can you spend one billion dollars on?