We've already got a houseful for Thanksgiving, so expect blogging to be light this week.

POSTSCRIPT: Just a quick reminder: When posting is sporadic -- as it probably will be between now and the first of the year -- the easiest way to keep up with the site is by grabbing the feed.

Well, we could start by screaming bloody murder about crap like this:

Soon after Trudy LeBlue began working at the new SmartStyle hair salon outside New Orleans, her salon manager began worrying that business was too slow and profits were too weak.

To keep costs down, Ms. LeBlue said, the manager often ordered her and the two other stylists to engage in a practice, long hidden, that appears to have spread to many companies: working off the clock.

Many weeks, Ms. LeBlue spent 40 hours in the salon, but was ordered to clock out for 20 of them while waiting for customers to show up, she said. With the salon's computer tracking her official hours, she was told to clean up and stock merchandise during the unpaid stretches.

"If you weren't doing hair or a perm, they'd tell you to get off the clock, but you still had to stay in the salon," she said.

What angered her most was her paltry paycheck, which she said often came to just $200 for two weeks, even after 80 hours at work. For Ms. LeBlue, that worked out to $2.50 an hour, less than half of the $5.15-an-hour federal minimum wage and her official rate, $5.35 an hour.

Workers at hair salons, supermarkets, restaurants, discount stores, call centers, car washes and other businesses who have murmured only to one another about off-the-clock work are now speaking up and documenting the illegal practice.

An honest day's pay for an honest day's work. Now there's a moral value that we Democrats can champion seven days a week and twice on Sunday. It's simple, it's powerful, and it profoundly affects the lives of real people across the country.

Like the man said, you can't beat somethin' with nothin'. And vile practices like the one described above are just the kind of somethin' we Democrats need to loudly and proudly condemn in order to start making the case that the values debate currently raging in America is not now, and has never been, about right and left.

It's about right and wrong.

And on that, my friends, the party of Jefferson and Jackson and Roosevelt and Kennedy has much to say to Americans of every region, every faith, and every color: black, white, brown, Blue, and, yes -- even Red.

Noam Scheiber offers a unified theory of Bush administration hackery. And -- because it's never too early, right? -- Reihan Salam grades the dark horse Democratic contenders for 2008.

There's been an awful lot of Democratic wailing and gnashing of teeth of late regarding President Bush's week of the long knives over at Langley, and I have to say that it seems like a massive waste of time and energy to me. Frankly, the current restructuring will either make the nation safer or it won't, and there isn't much that we as Democrats can say or do at this point to affect things one way or the other.

That said, there is a message that we Donkeys should be forcefully communicating to the press and the public in this period: namely, that Colin Powell's famous Pottery Barn Rule is now in effect. President Bush and his appointees have intentionally broken the CIA in order to "fix" it, and that makes them 100% responsible for the results. So if things go well for the next four years, they get the credit: hat's off, Rudy (or Bill or Jeb) '08, and all the rest. But if things go south -- if US policy abroad suffers a serious setback due to faulty intel, or if terror once again visits America's shores -- the President of the United States and his party are wholly responsible*.

In this new, quasi-parliamentary era (about which Matt Yglesias and others have written so well), we Democrats have an obligation to do what opposition parties do: Pray for success, and prepare for failure. And one of the ways you do that is by ruthlessly holding the party in power accountable for what happens on its watch.

Sad to say, perhaps, but that appears to be the Democratic party's primary function in the American democracy today. So let's get to it.

*Not to blame, of course -- terrorists are to blame for terror -- but, yes, completely responsible.

Jonah Edelman, Mickey Kaus, and Ron Haskins discuss Jason DeParle's American Dream.

The Democratic party hasn't exactly been helped by the perception (fair or not) that too many of its true believers are humorless scolds -- which is why I'm so delighted to see that the holy rollers and their handmaidens in the GOP have no intention of allowing us to monopolize that space in American politics.

Kevin Drum explains why the Democratic message makes for lousy elevator music.

Back Wednesday Friday (Updated 11/10).

UPDATE (11/12): Hell, let's make it a full week. See you Monday....

FINAL UPDATE (11/15): Yep, I'm back. Look for posting to resume later today.

I'm a fan of Oliver Willis and his blog, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to take issue with this:

No, Jeff, you're wrong. He's not my president. He's not interested in protecting me, my family, or yours. He doesn't care. Ronald Reagan was my president, George H.W. Bush was my president, and Bill Clinton was my president. This man? No. He's the president of Jesusland, and answers only to them.

I'm one of those Democrats who used to get monumentally pissed off back in the '90s when prominent Republicans would occasionally utter phrases like "your president, Bill Clinton." And I was right to get angry, because people who truly love this country and its democratic form of government don't go around cavalierly undermining the legitimacy of its duly elected leaders.

So, as someone who knows that Oliver does love this nation and its democratic institutions, I'd like to invite him to join me in saying the following heartfelt words:

George W. Bush is my president. Dammit!

WELL SAID:

I guess I should have expected this, but there have already been two major published articles preemptively criticizing the DLC for arguing that Democrats need to "move to the right" in response to this year's losses. First came the normally reasonable Tim Noah of Slate, who simply assumed that's what the DLC would say and then devoted several graphs to why is was a dumb idea. And today, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman interpreted Al From's rather obvious suggestion that Democrats need to close the "cultural gap" with Republicans as a call for "Democrats to blur the differences between themselves and Republicans" and then, like Noah, Krugman was off to the races with a long diatribte about how dishonorable and politcally useless this would be.

People, people, we've got enough to argue about without making up positions and then knocking them down. I work at the DLC every single day, and I've never heard a soul say anything about "moving to the right," and pace Krugman, we've gone way out of our way on many occasions to say that dealing with our culture problem is not a matter of "moving to the right" on abortion or guns or gay marriage or anything else. And if by "blurring the differences" between Democrats and Republicans on cultural issues means challenging the perception that they care about cultural stresses on the American family and we don't, then hell, yes, we need to blur that difference, but it has nothing to do with aping conservative positions on hot-button issues. What it means is taking seriously the belief of millions of people, not just religious fundamentalists, that they are competing with a toxic and increasingly amoral culture for the character of their children. What it means is addressing those concerns in a progressive way, instead of conveying the sense that we believe they should put aside all their silly superstitions about the moral order of the universe and chow down on a prescription drug benefit.

The way of the transgressor is hard in today's GOP, as PA Sen. Arlen Specter is now learning:

Angry conservatives flooded Senate phone and fax lines on Friday demanding that Republicans prevent Senator Arlen Specter from presiding over the Judiciary Committee after he remarked that strongly anti-abortion judicial nominees might be rejected in the Senate.

Republican lawmakers and top Senate aides, speaking privately for the most part, said the uproar from the right was becoming an impediment for Mr. Specter, a Pennsylvania lawmaker who has coveted the chairmanship. They said while it was likely he would still get the post, it was no longer a certainty.

"He is not out of the woods,'' said one Senate aide who is closely monitoring developments on the Judiciary Committee, echoing a sentiment expressed by Republican senators and other party officials.

Most of those Republicans said they initially believed that Mr. Specter's subsequent clarification would protect him. Mr. Specter said he did not mean his remarks as a warning to Mr. Bush not to nominate to the Supreme Court a judge who would be inclined to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion.

But the Republican officials said that continuing resistance to his taking the chairmanship of the committee that examines judicial nominees was being fanned by conservative talk radio hosts and groups outraged over his comments.

The rest is here.

Not the Perotistas. Us.

ANDREW SULLIVAN:

OUR BILL: Say this about Clinton: he always understood how to triangulate. The president who doubled the number of gay discharges form the military, signed the ban on HIV-positive immigrants, and jumped energetically on the Defense of Marriage Act, told Kerry to back marriage and civil union bans for gays in the campaign. Kerry, to his enormous credit, didn't go there. But then Kerry never presided over the execution of a retarded man for his own political purposes either.

As much as I'd like to agree with Andrew on this one, I just can't.

Kerry consistently said two things about gay marriage during the campaign: (1) he favored a federalist approach that would preserve the right of each state to make its own decision on the issue; and (2) he personally opposed the practice on traditional moral grounds. Taken together, those add up to one thing: state bans on gay marriage.

Telling a candidate that he has to get his policy prescriptions in line with his rhetoric if he wants to be taken seriously isn't triangulation. It's sound strategic advice. (It's also intellectually honest, by the way, which is something that those of us in the reality-based community are supposed to care about.) And until we Democrats are prepared to set aside sentimentality and follow that kind of tough-minded counsel even when it hurts -- especially when it hurts, actually -- people will have every right to question whether our candidates really mean what they say.

A few disconnected thoughts on the election....

1) President Bush won a significant victory here, and it costs us nothing to be gracious -- and honest -- enough to say so.

2) As the inevitable discussions about the future of the party begin, DLCers like me need to remember that our liberal friends more than earned their place at the table by setting aside their ideological concerns and working their tails off this year.

3) At the same time, libs need to remember that we DLCers aren't the enemy. Regular readers will recall that I didn't support John Kerry during the primaries because I thought he couldn't compete in Red America. Nonetheless, I did everything I could to help him once he had the nomination. In other words, we moderates earned our place at the table too.

4) William Galston and Elaine Kamarck look as right today as they did fifteen years ago, when they first wrote about the myth of mobilization. (Yes, we need to organize, particularly in light of the GOP's now remarkably effective GOTV operation, but that's not enough in and of itself.)

5) If you aren't worried about the number of Hispanic votes President Bush got the other day, you should be.

6) Republicans have reasons for concern as well: Given the country's shifting demographics, they can't win many more elections the way they did this time.

7) As members of the loyal opposition, we Democrats have an obligation to cooperate, not collaborate. So, when the president moves to the middle (and I genuinely hope he will on some issues), we need to meet him there. But on those occasions when he insists on governing from the far right -- by, say, nominating a movement conservative for the Court, or by sponsoring another round of tax cuts that primarily benefit the very rich -- we have to dance with them that brung us.

8) I wonder if the goo goo types who talk so piously about voting for the man rather than the party will ever figure out that that kind of thinking contributes significantly to the personal nastiness in American politics that they so deplore.

9) If I were a reporter looking for a fresh angle on the future of Howard Dean and his movement, I think I'd take a good look at the final, post-election financial filings in state and local races around the country.

10) It's fine to mope around for a day or two, but don't despair. We made real progress in several important areas this year. And, bleak as it may look today, we really will get 'em next time.

Assuming the current numbers hold, congratulations to President Bush and his supporters. I may not be thrilled with the outcome, but my hat's off to you.

More after a few hours sleep.

In 1994, virtually all the election-eve polls showed that, while we were looking at a close race, the Democrats would retain control of the House and the Senate, if only by fairly thin margins. What those polls missed, of course, was intensity -- the fact that Republicans from one end of this country to the other were prepared to crawl through busted glass to vote against Bill Clinton's Democratic party.

Based on the early voting trends, I think there's a good chance that we'll see the reverse today, with Democrats heading to the polls in record numbers to reject the GOP's pre-9/11 politics of distortion, division and diversion. (That's one of the unwritten stories in this election, isn't it? For all their talk of a post-9/11 world, the Republicans are the ones trapped in the old-style politics ... because they can't win without it.)

That's a consummation devoutly to be wished, folks. And you and I know exactly what we have to do to make it happen.

See you at the polls.

UPDATE/RELATED: Ogged correctly notes that "it's not too late to help. You can still sign up to volunteer at the Kerry site to get information about your local offices, which will probably be making (important!) calls to swing states to make sure Kerry voters are going to vote. Some random guy in the Bay Area started getting friends together to help out on election night, and now he has about 150 folks ready to call, and when I was doing call center allocation last night, it was a huge help to have that extra capacity. If you're not doing anything else, make the calls. You can even probably go down to your local office and pitch in and watch the results come in with people who want W to lose just as much as you do."

Not this way:

Cutbacks Threaten Work Of Homeland Security Unit A key unit of the Department of Homeland Security has slipped into a state of financial turmoil that could endanger its ability to investigate terrorists, pay informants and perform wiretaps, some department employees and officials say.

All hiring and transfers at the department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division have been banned for two months, as have almost all training, purchases of supplies and equipment, and maintenance of vehicles. Top department officials say they are committed to protecting ICE's ability to perform investigations, but agents in the field say ICE's budget shortfall of perhaps $500 million may soon threaten its national security work.

The cause of the financial hole at ICE is a set of complex accounting maneuvers used when the Department of Homeland Security was established in 2003. Those procedures have led to financial disputes among several Homeland Security agencies, officials said.

Unbelievable.