And I don’t mean a chicken in every pot given the proliferation of beans, franks and store brand peas’ diets (Le Sueur peas still too expensive, but we can dream…)

Speaking of dreams, several of the poultry-related R.E.M., USC type came true in Omaha, Columbia and Gainesville before this year’s Turkey Day, but I digress…(at least until later in this column)

ObamaDems Year of the Chicken stretches into years of Chicken s**t

Soon after the Vernal Equinox and the Obama-Pelosi-Reid cramdown We the People’s throats of ObamaCare, despite the Scott Brown Miracle in Massachusetts, Cockstradamus oracled:

I am confident that next year will see a significant increase in the number of households that keep and raise chickens for food, thanks to the refusal of ObamaDems to allow us to bail ourselves out of this deep recession in which the under-employment rate rivals that of the bulk of the years of the Great Depression at upwards of 18% and higher.

The chicken is a very efficient recession-blunter what with the eggs, breasts, thighs, wings, alarm clock and strong male role model.

Sure enough, the numbers of families that find it necessary to raise chickens in order to have something in a pot to eat, has increased so much that the Peach State cities of Roswell and Atlanta are considering laws making it harder. Much as TARP bailed out fat cats; and Yellow and Blue Dawgs failed to stimulate anything other than public sector jobs and unemployment compensation for the private sector that has to pay for the public, governments at all levels insist on refusing to allow Americans to bail themselves out. (Don’t worry, I know this is a Thanksgiving Day column, but the list of what the Rooster and his Hen Houses are thankful for needs setting up.)

Despite the hope that Obama’s change back to the contented Clinton economic solstices in the person of Larry Summers, former S&L regulator and now Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, William K. Black concludes that he:

…passed up the obvious title: “Heckuva Job Larry!” That was the moment of President Obama’sappearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that set all Americans cringing. Yes, he really said that Summers “did a heckuva job.” The candidate that was gifted the opportunity to run against the legacy of one of the worst presidents in U.S. history has, as president, used Bush as his role model to continue many disastrous policies.

Did something Big have to be done at the height of the Fall 2008 crisis? Yes, but no troubled assets were taken off any books. Rather, we simply put money on Paulsen’s Pals’ books; passed a stimulus for state and local governments that should have had to tighten their own belts further; sicked pitchforks on job producers; and turned over 16% of what’s left of the US economy to President Barack Obama’s discretion to waive ObamaCare for his pals after insulting tea drinkers from New Jersey to Virginia to Massachusetts.

Then came Rick Santelli: Let the tea flow and the thanksgiving begin

It began with a 2009 CNBC rant against the latest of ObamaDems’ intolerable acts: taxpayers current on their mortgages would bail out non-taxpaying delinquents. This on top of the Paulson Pals Panic Prevention Plan; a $700B+ non-stimulus; ObamaCare and two budgets in excess of $2.6 Trillion that dwarfed all of the deficits under former President George W. Bush and the Republicans. Obama’s first two budgets even quadrupled Dubya’s last two budgets passed by Democrat majorities, including Senator Obama. Most everything President Obama complains about, he voted for in the Senate.

ObamaDems scoffed at Scott Brown’s anti-ObamaCare victory, but choked on it a few weeks ago on Election Day 2010, and with that, let Thanksgiving Day 2010 begin.

Thanksgiving Day in the Year of Tea Partiers and Gamecocks

Famously, yours truly quit 18 years of Democratic Party affiliation in 2000 and became a Republican. But before we were with the GOP, we were first: a child of God; a DeVine; a South Carolinian; a Christian; a Southern Baptist; a sweet tea drinker; a Wofford Terrier; a South Carolina Gamecock; a lawyer; and, finally, a conservative.

Thank you God for all of the above, and for all the friends and family we have known and still know today, especially including the one that provides the Stone Mountain of Georgia roost from which we view all things social, legal, political, and athletic today.

More speciafically, this Fighting Gamecock is thankful for:

1. That liberal Obama Democrats got their comeuppance for all their policy failures and arrogant overreach;
2. That Americans began their re-education in the failure of liberal Democratic Party policies that had not prevailed since the last super-majority Democratic Congress and President in the late 1970s;
3. That Gamecock made his way back to Atlanta after three years in exile in the Queen City of Charlotte;
4. That Gamecock has such good friends online especially including a certain persistent cuss of a Hoosier pilgrim at Redstate who made the trek from his adopted Lone Star State home to Stone Mountain of Georgia; shared a cocktail with DeVine in Marietta as USC’s Cocks covered Troy’s Trojans 69-20; after earlier conversing with Fred Maidment in Tucker over soda and jumper cables; and
5. That the men’s teams of the USC founded in Columbia in 1801 finally ended the “chicken curse” by winning a national championship at the College World Series; winning their first SEC East Crown thus earning the right to play for only their second football conference title next week against Scam Newton and Auburn in the Georgia Dome; and by beating the then #1 ranked teams along the way in the sports of Baseball (Arizona State), football (Alabama) and basketball (Kentucky) in calendar year 2010.

And finally, thank you God, for sending your son Jesus Christ to save our sins and the Pilgrims to establish the Shining City on a Hill.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson