Morning Reading (Slightly Delayed): End-of-Year Round-Ups

Continuing my recent trend of posting comic strips (which, I have to admit, is always the recent highlight of my morning reading), here is today's Garfield post-Christmas analysis. Thank you, as always, Jim Davis.

In other interesting reading, as always at the end of a year, pundits and journalists are having fun analyzing the year behind us and looking to the year ahead-- and, as this will mark the start of a new decade, there's some interesting pieces about the 2000s (or, as my old film professor called it, "the uh-ohs") as a decade.

• Amusing as always, Maureen Dowd let her brother Kevin take over her NYT column today for a highly unusual (for this column) conservative perspective on the year's events.
• Nicholas Kristof republished an old column today called "Johnson, Gorbachev, Obama" that is a truly excellent look at Afghanistan foreign policy, largely from an Afghan perspective. Well worth the read.
• President Obama is in Hawaii for Christmas-- the first president to spend the holiday itself away from Washington in more than 20 years. But that doesn't mean he gets to escape the duties of the job-- as presidents throughout history have learned. The New York Times' White House Memo has a piece on "Taking Work Home-- Even When Home Means Hawaii." (Incidentally, for a great book on presidential vacation spots, check out Kenneth Walsh's "From Mount Vernon to Crawford.")
• The Washington Post has an interesting piece on how Obama and the Democrats can possibly turn their challenging 2009 year around in 2010 and hopefully limit the losses in the House and Senate with a refocus on the economy and generally dialing things down from this extremely contentious first year.
• The Post's Joel Achenbach also has a review of the decade we never expected-- the 2000s-- and where we've come since then.