It looks like President Bush is getting back to the United States just in time...no, not to shepherd those spending bills through Congress so that the government isn't facing fiscal crisis in January. Instead, President Bush is getting back from his round of Asian diplomacy just in time to stand before the cameras and pardon a turkey.

It's that time of year - tomorrow morning, President Bush will carry out the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation, a time-honored tradition where the President of the United States of America anoints two turkeys as inedible. They are then retired to a Disneyland where they get to live out their natural lives. This year, some one at the White House web section decided to put up a banner on the front page of the White House website that reads "Gobble the Vote." I hear they're inviting the Florida Secretary of State's office to demonstrate the proper vote gobbling technique.

OK, the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon is a sweet tradition carried out by presidents forever, or, in this case 59 years. Just as Ford pardoned Nixon, presidents pardon turkeys as a matter of course. Under the Bush presidency, it's time that it stop; more than that, it's time that the media stop giving this sham act such fawning attention.

For much of the day, the limited doses of news that Americans will get about our Unitary Executive will be limited by the moments devoted to the damn turkeys (two get spared the knife; one is ruled the alternate in case it gets stage fright). Instead of reporting on critical decisions being made - like our exiting Congress refusing to finish their jobs and pass the spending bills - we'll hear President Bush yucking it up while certifying that Ben and Franklin, or Washington and Lincoln, or Corn and Copia (these names are for real - they are this year's options) are very nice turkeys.

But I think there's a certain moral authority that goes with the pardoning of the turkey. Every year, it's a reminder that our president is ultimately a decent man who wants us to think about what brings us together during Thanksgiving. Right now, we have a President that has encouraged Americans to be further divided, and it's hard to believe that he's just a decent family man.

What's more, turkeys are about the only thing that George W. Bush has ever pardoned. I can't do any better than to point to Alan Berlow's take on his performance as Governor of Texas, alongside his trusty Secretary of State Alberto Gonzales in which he considered 153 cases for execution. Berlow wrote that Bush and Gonzales were faced with "as many as two executions a week, as many as eight in a single month...we have access to Bush's daily appointment logs -- which show that he rarely spent more than 30 minutes on an execution briefing -- and we have Gonzales' own files, which show that he did not send Bush a clemency petition laying out a defendant's best arguments for a pardon on even one occasion. Most important, we have Gonzales' actual execution case summaries on which Bush relied in making his decisions to proceed with more than 99 percent of the death warrants that landed on his desk."

Our president has proven himself incapable of taking clemency seriously as an option when deciding whether or not a human life should be taken. By humorously sparing two pre-selected turkeys from the butcher's blade, President Bush makes a mockery of the men whose executions he approved in Texas. Torturers carry out mock executions; President Bush conducts a mock pardon every year. And by covering the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation in such a fawning manner, the media helps the president mock justice and innocence.

If you're watching CNN or Fox today, and they're making a big deal about "gobble the vote," turn off your TV. President Bush's efforts to paint himself as a family man preparing to enjoy the holiday with his loved ones belies the violence that he has personally committed. Don't pardon his awful decisions to execute so many human beings by watching him pardon turkeys.

Here is a story that is touching, heartbreaking, and a little bit funny just in time for Thanksgiving.

I was an inter-collegiate debater throughout my years as an undergraduate; in spite of that, I wish I had been 1/3 as articulate as the "college kids" from Swarthmore who crank out War News Radio on a weekly basis. If you only listen to one podcast a week, this should be the one.

As War News Radio's Peter Holm reports (that's a link to an mp3 file, by the way), the Maine National Guard has devised a curious means of lessening some of the separation anxiety felt by the families of members of the service deployed in our global adventure. They take a photograph of the soldier, and blow it up to make a life-size cutout which is given to the family. Holm shares the voices of service members' families who talk about how they've integrated the Flat Soldiers into their daily lives. It's a touching reminder of what so many families will be missing this year from their Thanksgiving Dinner tables.

Check out the Maine National Guard's Family Assistance Center and their gallery of photos of "Flat Soldier Sightings."

Happy Turkey Day to everyone out there, but especially to everyone who can't make it home, and to everyone in the home they can't make it back to.

Quick, get Curveball on the phone!

That must be what someone somewhere is thinking whenever they get a chance to accuse Iran of seeking to further their nuclear program these days.

How else can we explain the bizarre accusations found in a recent United Nations report that Iran was trying to acquire uranium from Somalia of all places? Somalia has uranium? I mean, c'mon - the last I heard, they didn't even have any copper wire in the country because in the decade-plus of chaos they've been experiencing, every bit of anything that anyone could make a red cent from has been pulled out of the country. So, it seems a little strange that we'd start thinking that Somalia is a source of uranium for a country that's trying to build a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

But, that doesn't stop people from bloviating. Take the moronic blog Atlas Shrugs which couldn't even stay coherent enough to say uranium - they said the Iranians were trying to get plutonium from Somalia! Indeed, I guess when you've got a fourth-grade understanding of international politics, you may in fact believe that Somalia has naturally occurring plutonium laying around, the periodic table being at least a 7th-grade level skill in our country's educational system.

So, where is this coming from? It's in a leaked document posted by the Council on Foreign Relations for the world to play with (thanks, Laura Rozen). The UN Monitoring Group on Somalia was established by the Security Council to determine who was violating the arms embargo on the war-torn, government-less country. Buried amid all of the report's detailed paragraphs and information is this two-lined, thoroughly undetailed paragraph about Iran:

At the time of the writing of this report, there were two (2) Iranians in Dhusamareeb engaged on matters linked to the exploration of Uranium in exchange for arms to the ICU.

Like Iraq, this isn't the first time that Iran has been accused of sourcing uranium it would need for a clandestine nuclear weapons program from an African country. This summer, following publication of another UN report, Iran was accused in the Times of London of moving a significant quantity of uranium from the Democratic Republic of the Congo through Tanzania. It was sensationalist, baseless hokum, and well debunked by Jeffrey Lewis at Arms Control Wonk.

More than that, the prospects of getting enough uranium to be of any use to a bomb program out of Somalia are even slimmer than they would be from the DRC. For one thing, there's no active uranium mining industry in Somalia - any uranium mining operation would create quite a footprint, and Iran would get caught long before it got a big enough drill bit in the country. But mostly, there just isn't enough uranium in the country. Check out eRiposte over at Left Coaster who long ago spelled out why Somalia could not have been a source of uranium for Iraq (see numeral four in the post in particular), reasons that would go for Iran, too.

But even more than that, some analysis of Somalia's uranium reserves, like this one from the World Energy Council, show that they've got only about 6,600 tonnes of uranium in the country, and that commercially, it would only be accessible if there was a prevailing price of $80 to $130 in the uranium market - i.e. it is very difficult and expensive to exploit these reserves.

When you consider that Iran has considerable uranium reserves of its own, or at least plenty for a weapons program as the Nuclear Control Institute claims, you start to see that there's really no reason that they'd be trying to set up a mining operation in what is probably the most chaotic country in the world.

So while it might be unquestionable that Iran and Hezbollah are helping to arm and train the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia, why are we back in Africa with Iran?

The UN Monitoring Group shows that ten states are breaking the arms embargo on Somalia. Some of them are good friends of America's - Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Djibouti, who our President regularly lauds for being contributors to America's Global War on Terrorism. All are cited for helping out the Islamic Courts Union, which the United States believes is providing safe haven to al Qaida-linked terrorists.

But more than that, Ethiopia comes out for a lot of criticism in this report. More than just arming the Transitional Federal Government in Somalia, they appear to be sending troops into Baidoa to prop it up. And the Ethiopian government would seem to have ample reason for burying the fact that they are engaged in a major military adventure inside Ethiopia.

So, America has its Curveballs, and the rest of the world may, too. For a change, it may not be our country who is accusing Iran of African uranium adventures in which it has no need to be engaged, but other states in the region who are hoping to bury the true lead here - that they have embarked on a reckless adventure of their own in one of the world's saddest places.

It's a useful corrective to keep this fact in mind when someone comes back sometime soon and says that Iran is getting uranium from Somalia.