Thanks

You may celebrate Thanksgiving in the traditional way, replace the turkey with veggie vegan something, protest the holiday's origins or just plain ignore it and watch football or travel down to the Bosque del Apache to see the cranes instead. Any way you roast it, I hope you'll enjoy another experience of Arlo Guthrie's T-Day song, Alice's Restaurant, as you mark the day in your own way.

Here's a video of Arlo from 2005 performing the entire song in concert. When was the last time you heard the 18-minute plus saga about what happened to young Arlo and his hippie friends in Stockbridge, MA on a Thanksgiving long, long ago? The video above is the film's original trailer from 1969, when many of us were suffering through an earlier quagmire war -- but with way fewer gray hairs on our heads, during an eran when Thanksgiving herb meant something other than parsley, sage, rosemary or thyme.

Fore more to ponder, here's the 2007 version of 21 Reasons to Give Thanks by the Think Progress Report:

21 Reasons To Give Thanks

• We're thankful for our country's troops.
• We're thankful the minimum wage has been increased for the first time in a decade.
• We're thankful MC Rove has more free time to work on his dance moves.
• We're thankful Congress has "wasted time" trying to end the war in Iraq. 
• We're thankful radio stations don't play "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."
• We're thankful for journalists like Molly Ivins, who was never afraid to "raise hell."
• We're (not) thankful for wide stances.
• We're thankful to Michael Moore, whose documentary SiCKO started a national discussion on health care reform.
• We're thankful people don't call us Buzzy, Cookie, Brownie, or Scooter.
• We're thankful we can now call Al Gore the "Oscar-winning, Emmy-winning, Nobel Prize laureate" former vice president of the United States.
• We're thankful Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales won't visit our bedside if we're sick in the hospital.
• We're thankful not all Dick Cheney's cousins think like he does.
• We're thankful to be considered one of the "ten most dangerous organizations in America."
• We're thankful that visiting the Mall of America isn't really like visiting Iraq.
• We're thankful President Bush isn't giving out any more back rubs.
• We're thankful for 12-year olds who can take down Rush Limbaugh in a fight.
• We're thankful our Halloween costumes aren't very "original."
• We're thankful no one (except the birds) gets hurt when Dick Cheney goes hunting now.
• We're thankful for "phony soldiers" who have the courage to speak out about the war in Iraq.
• We're thankful the "Commander Guy" has only 425 days left in office.
• And last but not least: We're thankful to The Progress Report readers for their tips, energy, and support.

Thanks to You
Finally, thanks to all the readers, commenters and guest bloggers from here and places far away who've driven our daily page hit stats steadily up, up, up since I started this blog back on July 15, 2004 -- some 3,386 posts, 5,617 comments and 313,890 visitors ago and counting. The posts in the early days were rather sporatic, and the visitors few. At the time, I think Joe Monahan was the only other political blogger in New Mexico. Now there are many local bloggers focusing on a variety of angles and targeting a number of niches. By all accounts readership and participation across the board is still growing rapidly.

With a presidential race picking up steam, competitive U.S. House and U.S. Senate contests already garnering national attention and legislative and local elections on the horizon, I can only imagine what the traffic stats will be for New Mexico's blogger community in the coming months. Let's hope we have some election results we can really be thankful about when election day 2008 has come and gone and our troops can finally come home. We've all suffered much too long within the Bush regime's distorted version of reality. Let's hope the worst of our national nightmare ends next November and that next Thanksgiving we can truly be in a hopeful, celebratory mood. Only we can make it happen. Peace.