Athens

Photo: Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A protester threw a Molotov cocktail at Greek riot police outside the Parliament in Athens on Wednesday.
Angelidakis writes:

Athens is burning but we're staying away from the fire… It’s a crazy combination of police brutality, and public brutality, and in a way everybody is wrong.

Jon Stewart

To Mike Huckabee:
You know, you talk about the pro-life movement [abortion] being one of the great shames of our nation. I think if you want number two, I think it’s that: It’s a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to have to make their case that they deserve the same basic rights as someone else.

Holiday Sobriety

Jim Atkinson/NYTimes (excerpt):

If I decided to take a drink at a party, I might be able to tough it out for that night, but I know that the next day, another drink would be someplace in my mind. That someplace might be a manageable place, but would it be worth the considerable hassle of having to think twice every time I took a sip?

Besides, my newly wired brain doesn’t really have the interest to try. I’ve worked too hard at this, learned too much, have too much pride in accomplishing something that a lot of folks with this problem don’t — a solid sobriety that has lasted at least as long as my addiction did — to risk a relapse.

But what to do about the holidays? I rather like the view of radio talk show host Don Imus, himself a recovering alcoholic who has been sober 20 years. When the subject of parties came up on his radio show a few years back, Imus noted that he was invited to many but went to very few, for one simple reason: “I don’t drink.”

This seemed to me to be one of the more sensible things ever said about parties or alcoholism. So as the holiday season gets underway, I try to look at it this way. No one really wants to go to all those parties. I’m one of the lucky ones who has an excuse to beg off.

Josh Marshall

Obama's poll numbers are up to 79/18 approve/disapprove, prompting CNN's Bill Schneider to quip: "That's the sort of rating you see when the public rallies around a leader after a national disaster. To many Americans, the Bush Administration was a national disaster."

Losing the Khyber Pass

Photo: Mohammad Iqbal/Associated Press
NYTimes: A man surveyed gutted vehicles that had been bound for Afghanistan on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan. A witness reported that suspected militants attacked another terminal in northwestern Pakistan that was used for trucks ferrying supplies to NATO and American military forces in Afghanistan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khyber_Pass

Athens

Photo: Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
NYTimes: Pedestrians passed by a burned-out car and graffiti on a wall reading "revenge" in the vicinity of Athens Polytechnic University. Angry young people demonstrated across Greece for the third day in a row on Monday after the deadly shooting of Andreas Grigoropoulos, 15, in Athens on Saturday by a police officer who opened fire after youths threw objects at his car.

iPhone Photo: DH
Fireworks: Opening credit sequence: The Honeymooners

Steve Hildebrand

President-elect Obama's deputy campaign manager:

As a liberal member of our Party, I hope and expect our new president to address those issues that will benefit the vast majority of Americans first and foremost. That's his job. Over time, there will be many, many issues that come before him. But first let's get our economy moving, bring our troops home safely, fix health care, end climate change and restore our place in the world. What a great president Barack Obama will be if he can work with Congress and the American people to make great strides in these very difficult times.

.

Athens

Photo: Photo: Simela Pantzartzi/European Pressphoto Agency

ATHENS (Reuters) - Thousands of youths rampaged through Athens and the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki on Sunday, burning dozens of shops and vehicles in a second day of rioting after police shot dead a 15-year-old boy. Greece's worst protests in years erupted in the capital late on Saturday after the shooting of the teenager, and quickly spread to Thessaloniki and the tourist islands of Crete and Corfu.

An Athens prosecutor charged two officers from an elite police corps with the shooting death of the 15-year-old, Andreas Grigoropoulos.

A 37-year-old officer who allegedly fired the shots was charged with manslaughter, while the other officer in the car was charged with abetting him, a statement from the prosecutor’s office said. Agence France-Presse identified Epaminondas Korkoneas as the older officer and Vassilis Saraliotis as his partner.

According to the police, the two police officers had been patrolling Exarchia when their car was stopped by some 30 young men, many of them hurling stones, at about 9 p.m. Both officers left their car to confront the mob, “firing three shots that resulted in the death of the minor,” according to the statement, even though witness accounts differ.

Private Greek media and a website popular among leftist youths, www.indymedia.org, said the teenager had been shot in the chest and died while being transferred to a local hospital.

To Read

"For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever -- including the jug -- there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?"

Newsweek

One reason that tolerance for gay marriage and civil unions may be on the rise is that a growing number of Americans say they know someone who's gay. While in 1994, a NEWSWEEK Poll found that only 53 percent of those questioned knew a gay or lesbian person, that figure today is 78 percent. Drilling down a bit more, 38 percent of adults work with someone gay, 33 percent have a gay family member and 66 percent have a gay friend or acquaintance.

New York Botanical Garden

Photo: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
The Holiday Train Show.
Landmarks of New York City rendered in plant parts.
Foreground, from left: Saks Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center, including the G.E. Building, Radio City Music Hall and the Flatiron Building.

Sol Lewitt

Photo: Erik Jacobs for The New York Times

NYTimes: Mr. LeWitt’s work is, famously, about ideas before all else. He was one of the first artists to formally define Conceptual Art as a phenomenon. And he was among first to make work that downplayed the traditional art object, with its associations of individual genius, exchange value, and physical permanence -- in favor of utopian proposals and collective visions.

Via Think Progress

"A new poll commissioned by the LGBT advocacy group GLAAD found encouraging news for supporters of gay rights:

– Three-quarters of U.S. adults (75%) favor either marriage or domestic partnerships/civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. Only about two in 10 (22%) say gay and lesbian couples should have no legal recognition.

– Almost two-thirds (64%) of U.S. adults favor allowing openly gay military personnel to serve in the armed forces.

– About six in 10 (63%) U.S. adults favor expanding hate crime laws to cover gay and transgender people.

– Nearly seven out of 10 U.S. adults (69%) oppose laws that would ban qualified gay and lesbian couples from adopting children.

"Though conservatives criticized the poll for being funded by an advocacy organization, some of its results are actually more tempered than other polls. For example, a Washington Post poll in July found that a full 75 percent of Americans support gays serving openly in the military."

http://thinkprogress.org/

Model

Photo: Tony Cenicola/NYTimes
Capitol Building plaster model, by Timothy Richards, $395; 011-44-1225-311-499; www.timothyrichards.com.