The Senate heads to the floor for vote on opening health care debate; Maj. Nidal Hasan traded e-mails about money transfers with radical cleric; Iraqi detainees talk trash about Brett Favre with Packers fans.

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These are grim times for American executives. The public is angry, and consumers are holding on to every nickel. It's hard to escape the sense that the economic future may be less comfortable than the past. But not all American managers are gloomy. "Optimism is higher than it was last year," says Brenda Lei Foster, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. A survey of its 370 members found that more than 90 percent are optimistic about the next five years. The reason: Instead of simply shipping goods made in China back to the United States, "companies here [are] focusing on the Chinese domestic market."

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China - Shanghai - United States - Asia - Chamber of commerce

A summary of what's in the major publications.

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The future of the Republican Party will be shaped by a governor—but it's not likely to be Sarah Palin. The twin poles of the Republican Party were on display this week. One was at a Republican Governors Association meeting in Texas. The other was on the airwaves across the country as Palin methodically went rogue.

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Republican - Sarah Palin - United States - Texas - Country music

Cabernet sauvignon—and particularly the cabernet produced in California's Napa Valley—is the signature American wine. When a Napa cab, the 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, beat out some leading French wines in the Judgment of Paris, it heralded the coming-of-age of American viticulture and gave the phrase Napa cabernet international cachet. Nowadays, however, that phrase is more apt to elicit snickers than praise; in the minds of many consumers, it has become synonymous with overwrought, overhyped, and overpriced wines. Indeed, scorning Napa cabernets is almost as fashionable as dumping on California chardonnays. Plenty of Napa cabs deserve the derision, but even as the valley suffers through a richly deserved reversal of fortune, there are still producers turning out honest, delicious wines that demonstrate why people got excited about the valley in the first place. And if you are currently in the market for something homegrown and fowl-friendly to drink on Thanksgiving, these attitude-free Napa cabs will make fine choices.

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Wine - Napa Cellars - Cabernet Sauvignon - Stag's Leap Wine Cellars - California Cellars

The Suite Life on Deck (Disney Channel, Fridays at 8:30 p.m. ET) is a follow-up to The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, itself a kiddie sitcom about identical-twin boys kicking it Eloise-style at a Boston hotel. Last week, the sequel ranked as the No. 4 show on cable and No. 1 overall among children ages 6 to 11. Should children actually be watching The Suite Life? This columnist does not pretend to offer parental guidance and, as far as he knows, does not have any 6-year-old kids. But there's an outside chance that he'd prefer to plop his imaginary, rhetorical-device-type offspring in front of Law & Order during the time slot in question. Zack and Cody Martin, played by heartthrob monozygotes Dylan and Cole Sprouse, are high-school students now in their second season of spending a semester at sea on a luxury liner. Cody, who is bright and occasionally overbearing, spends week after week nursing an innocent crush on a hayseed shipmate. Zack, an unimpressive student, devotes his mental energies to pulling pranks and trying to score chicks, or whatever the TV-G-rated equivalent of scoring chicks is. The Suite Life is of course mild in its sexual content, offering double entendres-once-removed and gentle references to oiling up bikini models and such. How did the protagonists' rock-star father meet their lounge-singer mother? It is strongly implied that she threw her underwear on stage, or so Dad claims. It takes a little effort to get one's own panties in a bunch over a kids show employing material like that, but it's a snap to feel unqualified disgust for the way the show giggles at Zack's crass predations. In one episode, a new passenger turns his head, but he's turned off by her baggage, her literal baggage. The luggage locks are a bad sign. "That means she's suspicious and cautious," he says. "I'm looking for naive and vulnerable." Cue the laugh track. Elsewhere, he describes part of his philosophy of life to a pal: "There is nothing—nothing—better in this world than an unhappy hot girl." In watching eight episodes of the show, I haven't seen Zack achieve any romantic success, but nor have I seen him receive any proper sanction. Thus do I eagerly await Walt Disney's presentation of a feature-film spinoff titled Zack & Cody's Rockin' Roofie Frat Party.As if to mitigate the noxiousness of this material, the show gives us a naive-but-tough female lead in Cody's love interest, a winsome yokel named Bailey Pickett who has come to the high seas from Kettlecorn, Kansas. Bailey is all the more appealing for being presented in contrast with her roommate, a high-heeled hotel heiress drawn as a caricature of Paris Hilton, as if Paris weren't already a caricature of herself. The show intends to mock the fictional ditz, London Tipton, for her compulsive shopping and repulsive frivolity, and indeed it does. Still, there is something a trifle depressing in the way Suite Life milks her money and glamour for all the cutesiness they're worth. This is the kind of show that takes a nonjudgmental attitude toward marrying for money. Don't get me started on the ship's mincing black chaperone, Mr. Moseby, emasculated in his Bermuda shorts. He gets one of the series' least-age-appropriate laugh lines: During a shipboard beauty pageant—arranged by Zack for the purpose of scoring chicks—one young lady comes out for the talent competition wearing an Abe Lincoln beard and stovepipe hat and proceeds to skip rope while reciting the Gettysburg Address. Annoyed by the quality of the performance, Moseby despairs, "Where's John Wilkes Booth when you need him?"But what I find most bothersome about The Suite Life on Deck—more troubling, even, than the way it forces me to align myself with horrible uptight PC scolds—is its infatuation with showbiz itself. As noted, Zack and Cody are the children of professional musicians. Another shipmate is a former professional singer. (His stage name—give the show some credit for wit—was Li'l Little.) London hosts a Web series, titled Yay Me!, which actually exists on the Disney Channel's site. Of course, TV would be nowhere without the backstage doings of Monkees and Partridges, of Liz Lemon and Desi Arnaz and all the rest. But really. In common with such other Disney fare as Jonas, Hannah Montana, and Sonny With a Chance—and also iCarly, the big Nickelodeon show of the moment—Suite Life can see no further than the camera. Right now, a startling volume of tween culture is devoted, directly or indirectly, to puttin' on a show in the manner of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. It seems important to remember that things didn't work out too well for Judy in the long run.

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Suite Life of Zack & Cody - Disney Channel - John Wilkes Booth - Hannah Montana - Cody Martin

Become a fan of the Political Gabfest on Facebook. We post to the Facebook page throughout the week, so keep the conversation going by joining us there. Listen to the Gabfest for Nov. 20 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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Facebook - Social Networking - Online Communities - United States - Government

In the annals of stupid drug reporting, a special commendation must be reserved for NBC's Today show, which on Nov. 19 aired (video) one the stupidest drug stories in broadcast news. The program, which specializes in terrorizing mothers with sensationalist stories, discovered that today's kids are "huffing" inhalants from hair spray and air duster cans.

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Today - NBC - Television - Broadcasting - Arts

This week, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that most women begin regular mammograms starting at age 50 instead of 40. Days later, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists revised its guidelines on cervical cancer screening: Now it suggests women receive their first Pap smears later than previously recommended and, depending on certain risk factors, get them less frequently. The move to reduce unnecessary screening has some critics of health care reform suggesting that America is moving headlong toward rationing care. In a Facebook note today, Sarah Palin wrote, "We need to carefully watch this debate as it coincides with Capitol Hill's debate and determine whether we are witnessing the early stages of that rationed care before the Senate bill is rushed through as well." After chief political correspondent John Dickerson sent Palin's note around, Slate staffers began debating what, exactly, rationing is; the value of screening; and the relationship between patients and the medical community. An edited transcript of the discussion is below.

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Cancer - United States - U.S. Preventive Services Task Force - Cervical cancer - American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists

In his Sept. 9 speech to Congress on health care, when President Obama said, "The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally," Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., shot back: "You lie!" What Obama meant was that health care reform would not extend government subsidies to illegal aliens to purchase health insurance. What Wilson meant was that health care reform would nonetheless allow illegal immigrants who were uninsured to purchase unsubsidized health insurance through the exchanges that reform would create. Indeed, to whatever extent the government could track down uninsured illegal immigrants through the tax system, it would compel them to buy health insurance. This was unacceptable to Wilson and other conservatives—not because they felt illegal immigrants should be left in peace, but because they felt illegal immigrants should be excluded entirely from whatever superstructure would be created by health care reform.

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Joe Wilson - United States Congress - Health insurance - Barack Obama - Insurance

This review only needs to consist of six words: Werner Herzog. Nicolas Cage. Bad Lieutenant. Not every one of those elements (with the possible exception of Herzog's name) is enough to sell a movie on its own, but the combination? Most definitely. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Edward R. Pressman Films) isn't really a remake of Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara's 1992 exploration of a crooked cop's journey through the depths of spiritual debasement. It's more like a dream one might have after watching the original Bad Lieutenant, doing three lines of cocaine, staying up all night, and collapsing on some none-too-clean sheets in a seedy New Orleans motel. The main thing the two films share is a fascination with abjection—these aren't just bad lieutenants, they're baaaad lieutenants. It's a fascination so extreme and so systematic that it exists at the permeable border between high drama and low comedy.

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BadLieutenant - AbelFerrara - New Orleans - Nicolas Cage - Werner Herzog

A daily video from Slate V.

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New Moon - Solar System - Earth - Astronomy - Planets

The vice president did not produce any new Bidenisms this week, but we've dug one out of the archives in honor of his 67th birthday today. Please continue to send your nominations (with a link, please) to slatebidenisms@gmail.com. For more, and our stab at a definition, see "The Complete Bidenisms."

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United States - Gmail - History - Vice Presidents - Complete Bidenisms

Michael Lewis' book The Blind Side tells the true story of Michael Oher, a poor black kid who gets adopted by a rich white family and transforms himself into a football star. The movie version zooms in on Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), the woman who gave the hard-up prodigy the care and feeding that he needed to become a man and an NFL draft pick. This feels less like an artistic choice than an economic one. The Blind Side plays like filmmaking by focus group, a movie that aims to please and ends up condescending to its audience.

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Sandra Bullock - Michael Oher - Blind Side: Evolution Of A Game - Michael Lewis - Blind Side

A new report from AAA, the car association, predicts that 33.2 million Thanksgiving travelers will be driving at least 50 miles to their holiday destinations this year. Another 2.3 million are expected to fly somewhere for the weekend, and many more will be riding intercity buses and trains. Last year around this time, the Lantern looked at the carbon emissions associated with these various forms of travel. The column is reprinted below.

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Thanksgiving - Travel - holiday - American Automobile Association - AAA

In this week's Summary Judgment, Mark Jordan Legan sums up what critics are saying about the big weekend movies: Reviews of: The Twilight Saga: New Moon, The Blind Side, and Planet 51.

"So what's that?" I asked, gesturing at a bowl of grayish fleshy ribbons with little spikes. It was one of the many tough-to-identify animal parts cramming the Lazy Susan. Zhang Haiqing, deputy director of the Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, Chongqing Municipal People's Government, mulled the question for a minute. A gracious host to a group of journalists who had traveled to Chongqing, Zhang had lived in Seattle in the 1990s. He probably intuited the squeamishness of the visiting Americans.

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China - United States - Chongqing - Seattle - Asia

New Moon, the second installment of the Twilight series, hits theaters today. It features a family of teenage vampires who drink animal blood and who look down on those vampires "weak" enough to prey on humans. The film raises several questions about the logistics—and aesthetics—of blood-drinking.

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Vampire - Twilight - New Moon - People - Otherkin

Day 6 I begin the day by flying from Albuquerque, N.M., to New Orleans. It's cheating, but only a little. Warned not to film in Texas because the state had no patience for long hair, Easy Rider skipped the state, so I do, too. Renting a car at the airport, I head directly to Morganza, La., a rural community up the road from Baton Rouge where Hanson, Wyatt, and Billy try, and fail, to enjoy a meal. "You name it, I'll throw rocks at it," one local tells the town sheriff as they enter the diner. The teenage girls dining there have a different reaction. Visibly attracted to the men, they follow them outside and coo over their bikes. Easy Rider used locals as the diner patrons and Fonda recalls giving the men a single line of motivation: "We've just raped a 13-year-old white girl outside of town."

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New Mexico - San Diego - United States - New Orleans - Arizona