. . . for a variety of reasons the "holiday season" tends to make me more grumpy than merry. On the other hand, I've been having a perfectly good time this weekend doing such traditional Christmas-y things as playing NCAA Football 2006, watching the Giants' tragic loss to the Redskins, and I'm looking forward to the basketball games this afternoon. Slacking off on the blog has also been fun. But a friend of mine stayed up late at home last night to produce a Christmas morning edition of Slate's today's paper, which puts any not-in-the-spirit things I could do to shame. So in the spirit of Christian generosity and what have you, I'll say that I think the counterattack on the "war on Christmas" has done me -- and perhaps the world -- some good.

As I said, I'm not normally much for the holiday season. As I result, I tend to neither with people "happily holidays" nor a "Merry Christmas." But thanks to Bill O'Reilly, John Gibson, et. al. I've become obsessed with who's saying what. Consequently, I'm now running around town -- at the 711, Rite Aid, DC9, wherever -- wishing people a Merry Christmas or, if I think they maybe look not-so-christian a happy holidays. It's the polite thing to do and I haven't been so good about it over the years. So, yes, The O'Reilly Factor is making me a better person, which I hope is not a sentiment I'll need to repeat in the near future.

And I'll leave you with that thought, but if for some reason you're trolling the internet looking for political content let me note that there's actually important stuff in today's newspapers well worth discussing in the near future.

Conveniently enough, the White House that thinks it's okay to break the law wants to put a justice on the Supreme Court who thinks official wrongdoing should always go unpunished.

Because what you want to do with your holiday weekend is help me crunch some numbers....

There's a debate raging between Larry Bartels, Thomas Frank, and others about the right way to define the "white working class." On one definition -- white people who don't have four-year college degrees -- the National Election Survey indicates that Bush won this group by a hefty margin. On another definition -- white people in the bottom third of the household income distribution -- Kerry did just fine. One can sort of argue 'till the cows come home about who the "real" working class is. Leaving that aside, I read here that 29 percent of the NES sample has "Some College, no Degree" while 46 percent never attended college.

I'd be interested in disaggragating Bush's performance among whites with "some college" from his performance among whites with no college. In principle, one should be able to figure this out from the data available on the NES site, but I lack the requisite savvy. I also imagine someone has already done this breakdown, but my Googling efforts haven't located it. Any help readers could provide would be welcome.

Kevin Drum says that given how unseriously the Bush administration takes terrorism, he can hardly "blame liberals for feeling that terrorism is little more than a Republican bogeyman that's pulled out whenever the president's poll numbers are down." Atrios says he doesn't "know any liberals who think that the issue of terrorism is just a game" then re-iterates that George W. Bush is a bad president and press coverage of his administration has been frustratingly inaccurate.

I think this sort of debate tends to further obscure a topic that's only slightly starting to emerge from the post-9/11 taboo on thinking about American priorities -- should counterterrorism really be the organizing principle of American foreign policy? It's worth keeping in mind that as of the morning of September 10, 2001 I doubt many people thought it should be.

Several conservative writers seem concerned recently that the American people don't believe the economy is strong even though, allegedly, it's really super-strong. So they offer the White House advice on how to improve its communications strategy. Today, Fred Barnes:

Yet there's a strong case Bush and his aides can make for impressive economic gains at the individual level. True, rising healthcare costs have cut into the gains, but tax reductions have helped. By citing micro numbers or fleshing out macro numbers, the administration would convey this message: it's not just you who's doing well. Most Americans are. The country is.

For instance, there's the growth in per capita disposable personal income from $26,424 in 2003 to $27,001 in 2004 and $27,365 in 2005. That's not all. In November, hourly wages were up 3.2 percent. And people are able to spend more. Real personal consumption spending has risen nearly 3 percent in the past year. True, these last two numbers are macro, but they're ones people can understand.

Sadly, per capita numbers don't really tell you anything about how "most" people are doing. But here on the White House Economic Statistic Briefing Room website we have a link to median household income data. Median household income in 2004 was $44,389 which is a lot by world standards. But in 2003 it was $44,482 which was more. In 2002 it was $44,546 which was even more. In 2001 it was $45,062 which was even more. In 2000 it was $46,058 which was even more. In 1999 it was $46,129 which was even more. In 1998 it was $45,003 which was less, but still higher than today's median. And if you go all the way back to 1997, it was $43,430 -- lower than it is today.

That's the sort of thing that probably lies behind dour economic sentiments. Lots of people -- most, really -- haven't been doing all that well. Now at the same time, it would be foolish to pretend we're living through some kind of economic catastrophe. America is still a very rich country, GDP is growing a lot, there's a lot of productivity growth, and thanks to a rise in asset prices people have been able to keep ramping up consumption even while incomes fall slightly. In other words, there's an interesting story to tell here and a bit of a puzzle. Presumably, we'd all like median incomes to go up, rather than down; to understand this trend and wonder what can be done about it. Wouldn't it be more worthwhile to let the White House write its own propaganda and spend some time thinking about that?

The Bush administration has taken to likening revelations of its illegal activities to the time The Washington Times allegedly messed up surveillance of Osama bin Laden by reporting that he was using a satellite phone to communicate with the outside world. That was certainly the story the Clinton administration always told, and Daniel Benjamin -- Clinton NSC veteran and TPMCafer -- repeats the story while disputing the analogy. Glenn Kessler, writing in today's Washington Post, says the whole thing is an urban legend. Apparently Time reported that bin Laden used a satellite phone in 1996, citing Taliban sources, and Peter Bergen reported that bin Laden used a satellite phone on CNN in 1997 citing . . . Osama bin Laden as his source.

The Times article, meanwhile, didn't say that the US government was tracking bin Laden through the phone, it just said he used a satellite phone, which several media outlets had previously reported. And whether or not it had been previously reported, presumably this is something bin Laden would have already known anyway. So . . . what's going on?

Various illegal surveillance apologists are raising the argument that the Clinton administration, too, took the view that warrantless wiretaps were a good thing. "Shockingly," these arguments turn out to be somewhat inaccurate upon further scrutiny. But debating the accuracy of these claims is largely besides the point. Of course the Clinton administration wanted, insofar as it was able, to maximize executive power while minimizing judicial and congressional oversight. Of course Al Gore or John Kerry would, from the vantage point of the White House, have wanted to do the same thing. That's the point -- you can't rely on the occupant of the office to limit his own authority because of course he'll want his own authority to be as broad as possible.

One often hears the complaint that bloggers don't do any reporting, and just rely on reading the newspapers. Tom Friedman, it seems, doesn't even read the papers:

But what's still unclear is this: Who and what were Iraqis voting for? Were they voting for Kurdish sectarian leaders, who they hope will gradually split Kurdistan off from Iraq? Were they voting for pro-Iranian Shiite clerics, who they hope will carve out a Shiite theocratic zone between Basra and Baghdad? Were they voting for Sunni tribal leaders, who they hope will restore the Sunnis to their "rightful" place - ruling everyone else? Or, were they voting for a unified Iraq and for politicians whom they expect to compromise and rewrite the Constitution into a broadly accepted national compact?

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports:

Sunni Arab leaders angrily rejected early election results on Tuesday, saying the vote had been fixed in favor of Iranian-backed religious Shiites and calling for an investigation into possible fraud. Secular politicians also denounced the results and demanded an inquiry. . . .

Saleh al-Mutlak, a prominent ex-Baathist heading one Sunni party, insisted that international groups take the lead in investigating the election. . . .

The outrage over the early results erupted as the latest tallies showed that Sunni Arab parties are expected to get at least 40 to 50 seats in the 275-seat Parliament, a three-fold increase over the number of Sunni Arabs in the transitional assembly.

Because of its strong showing in Baghdad and the south, the main Shiite coalition is on track to win at least 120 parliamentary seats. The main Kurdish coalition and a splinter group, the Kurdistan Islamic Union, dominated the three provinces of Iraqi Kurdistan and will get about the same number of seats as the Sunni Arabs. Mr. Allawi is expected to get fewer, perhaps considerably so.

So . . . I think it's all pretty clear.