torture

If it was a crime to misappropriate a word or phrase — to treat it like you own it and toss it around arbitrarily whenever it suits your purposes — then some prominent conservatives and liberals would be serving hard time. Of course there don’t seem to be any real consequences when there’s literal theft in the world of politics, so it’s a pipe dream to imagine there would be any consequences for pillaging the vocabulary, but it’s still a good thought.

American music gives us more than enough to provide a great list of songs to play this Christmas. Since I was unable to finish my own Christmas single - maybe I’ll have the time and money next year - I dug up twelve songs from a variety of styles to inspire you on the holiday. One for each day of Christmas … “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto,” James Brown - “… and tell ‘em James Brown sent you.” A solid funk groove creates the foundation for the Godfather of Soul’s exhortation to the airborne saint.

This post by HuffPost’s own Jason Linkins got me thinking today about the single most potent force in American politics. I’m speaking of course of trolls, the Internet’s very own peanut gallery. Trolls, of course, are the reason why Barack Obama lost so decisively to President McCain back in November. Leading up to the general election, trolls were everywhere. Even on Senator Obama’s official campaign web site. It was a troll who made a McCain-Palin man out of me. I remember it well. I’d logged on to barackobama.com.

The Pulitzer-winning journalist whose 2006 book so thoroughly debunked the “Mission Accomplished” myth of the Iraq war came to my town a few hours ago and asked his audience to face some nasty new diagnoses about Iraq. Being so fresh from hearing Fiasco author Thomas Ricks speak here in Seattle on Thursday night, I can’t swear to which of his statements is ultimately the most distressing.

No matter how much some folks would like to believe otherwise, you just can’t let go of the past without first addressing it. Our freshly out-of-office malefactor chieftains and their backers would love for their deeds to vanish into the mists, to be misremembered in text and concealed in myth until all the principals are dead.

2008 was kind of a rough year for American publishers, culminating in the bloodbaths of November and December which saw hundreds of firings, major restructuring at Random House, and a crisis at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt which may yet prove fatal. Industry professionals are understandably looking for a silver bullet to reverse the trend: a new blockbuster from Dan Brown? A trilogy of teen sorcerer novels from Jhumpa Lahiri? Saddam Hussein’s memoir, written from beyond the grave?