In honor of the beleaguered holiday traveller, another one from the animation archive… (adding: whoops! viewable now.)

(More animation available under the new “Animation and Film” category to your left.)

From a New Yorker profile of Obama in 2007:

A potential crisis in the Social Security system is a long way off. Why, then, would a new President spend political capital on yet another tax hike when he will almost certainly seek to undo the Bush tax cuts for more immediate demands, like universal health care? When I asked Obama about this, he smiled and leaned forward, as if eager to explain that my premise was precisely the politically calibrated approach that he wanted to challenge. “What I think you’re asserting is that it makes sense for us to continue hiding the ball,” Obama said, “and not tell the American people the truth—”

I interrupted: “Politically it makes sense—”

He finished the sentence: “—to not tell people what we really think?”

And this is Ali Abunimah, also writing in 2007:

Over the years since I first saw Obama speak I met him about half a dozen times, often at Palestinian and Arab-American community events in Chicago including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which Edward Said was the keynote speaker….

The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing.

As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.” He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, “Keep up the good work!”

How completely predictable that Obama is eager to say what he “really thinks” when (1) what he “really thinks” is inaccurate and (2) it serves political power, but is not eager to do so when (3) what he “really thinks” is accurate and (4) it requires confronting political power. (Of course, god only knows what Obama truly believes about Israel/Palestine at this point.)

PREVIOUSLY: “Power was taking her son.”

Watching Olbermann’s rundown of the past year, all I can think is: thank god that’s over with.

Which is what a lot of people told me they felt reading my Year in Review cartoons (here and here). (And as incomplete as they are, note that I managed to squeeze in sixteen panels apiece, rather than the twelve-panel format I’ve used in previous years. It was that kind of year.)

In related news, it looks like Joe the Plumber has found his intellectual equals at last …

Not that I’ve had a whole lot of time for the blog this past month, but you can expect even less over the next week or so. In the meantime, don’t forget that beloved holiday classic, A Very Sparky Christmas.

And despite all the problems of the day, remember: the Bush administration will soon be history. And that alone is cause to rejoice.

From Salon:

Finally, experts suggest that publishers missed crucial opportunities to cope with digital books, Internet innovations and economic pressures. “The big houses proved incapable of looking at the future. I’ve always been struck at how relatively un-nimble the big houses are,” says Tom Engelhardt, a consulting editor at Metropolitan books and the author of the prophetic novel “The Last Days of Publishing.” He recently wrote an essay about the crisis at his Web site, TomDispatch.com, and says he predicted the crash for years — but no one would listen.

This is in line with my own anecdotal experience in publishing. For the most part, the publishers I’ve dealt with seem only to have recently become aware of the demise of the quill pen, let alone the advent of the internet. Personally, I’ve had enough of it — I was already considering leaving the burning house before I even realized it was on fire. I’m not going to stop publishing books, but I am going to pursue a less traditional model. More on that some other time.

Here’s the thing about the publishing industry: the job of any given person at a publishing house is not actually to try to sell books. It is to appear as though they are trying to sell books. It is a small distinction, but a crucial one.

Carol Chomsky, wife of Noam and herself a noted linguist, has died at their home in Massachusetts at 78. According to a New Yorker profile of Chomsky, they first met when she was three and he was five; they had been married for 59 years.

I’m not being facetious here when I ask about Caroline Kennedy. Since she’s likely to be the next Senator from New York, I’d like to know a little more about what kind of Senator she might be. Until last year, this is the only thing I knew about her :

That and I think I might have caught her on a talk show once talking about one of her books. That’s it. I understand that she’s had a semi-public life, but I tend to follow electoral politics, not the lives of celebrities from political families.

I’m sure Kennedy is a good person and might make a good Senator, but her thin political resume makes her a blank slate. Where’s her political platform? Has she ever participated in a debate? Does she have a voting record of some sort? Being a prominent Democrat who supported Barack Obama is hardly a defining trait when we’re talking about appointing someone to the United States Senate.

Even worse, when I go to Wikipedia and try to find out what she actually stands for, this is what I get :

Seriously, this isn’t a joke. If Caroline Kennedy were a normal candidate for elected office, she’d have a website in which she presented herself to the people she’s trying to represent, but the closest I could find to that in five minutes of Googling was a Wikipedia bio and her entry at the IMDB.

Unlike every other name on the AP’s short list for the Senate seat, Caroline Kennedy has never been elected to anything, ever¹. The people of New York are supposed to accept her jump from “professional Kennedy” into the U.S. Senate based on the assurances of a few powerful elites?? At the very least, the Senate seat should be filled by someone who has actually been chosen by the people of New York for something. Congressmen, State Senators, Mayors, and other elected officials from New York should be outraged by the fact that Kennedy is able to cash in on her family’s name and skip ahead of dozens of dedicated public servants to ascend to one of the most powerful positions in the nation.

Must be nice.

^{1 : Before anyone mentions it, the selection of Joe Biden’s senior advisor to fill the open Senate seat in Delaware is equally unjust. In some ways, it’s even more bizarre in that Ted Kaufman is clearly just a seat warmer so that Biden’s son can run for the seat in a 2010 special election (Joe was re-elected to his Senate seat last month too), but at least in this case, the potential nepotism will ultimately be decided by voters.}

Another installment from the animation archive, circa 2000 or so.

… whoops! should be viewable now.

Not to put too fine a point on it. But if you only listened to Hannity’s show today, you would know that Obama is delaying the release of his report about his campaign’s contacts with Blagojevich for a week — and you would have heard Hannity’s commentary about a Christmas week document dump, which he finds verrrrry interesting, the sort of thing you do when you have something to hide, blah blah blah.

What you would not know is that Obama’s delay is at the request of the prosecutor himself.

Seriously, there’s no other way to put it. Sean Hannity is a lying scumbag.