Last post of the year

Tonight is New Year’s Eve and tomorrow will begin 2008. Local media have been full of end-of-year retrospectives. I know that they do this between the December 25^th holiday and the end of the year because that is a slow time of the year. January usually brings Congress, state legislatures, and city councils back into operation, often with new personnel and leaders, and new Presidents, governors, and mayors into office around the Great North American Republic, providing new news. So to fill the space and air time available the end of year retrospectives such as the top stories in various categories and the who’s who of dead people are done prematurely. U.S. News and World Report’s “The Paper Trail” aptly noted this phenomenon saying,

I've indulged in some end-of-the-year, space-filling lists to round out the holiday season.

A parenthetical note: Last year President Ford generously died during this week and the national media must have secretly jumped for joy since it gave them a chance to till their spaces and time with things that they already had in the files or cans.

Since these time/space crunches don’t affect me I will do some of these in the next few days as 2008 works its way through.

Some of these things will be brief RIP notes on some local people who left us in 2007, retrospectives on departing members of our City Council, and a new recall for U.S. Senate Republicans to demonstrate consistency regarding Senators Vitter and Craig now that Louisiana will have a Republican governor.

I have also been studying some of the recurring controversies on gay marriage and the use and non-use of “Christmas” as the name for the December 25^th holiday. I think there are some interesting links that I haven’t seen explored elsewhere, but I don’t quite have the thing enough together to post at this time.

And I am sure that there will be more to comment on as things develop.

AND A HAPPY 2008 TO ALL!