Kurt Vonnegut, at age 82, has published over two dozen books.  His latest is called "A Man Without a Country."  It's a book that is brutally honest in its hopelessness, in fact – I think – overly hopeless, and yet humorous.  It may even be hopeless in order to better be humorous.  Vonnegut discusses in the book the use of tragedy to heighten laughter.  But certainly the humor works to lighten the load of dismay and despair that this book ever-so-lightly dumps on us.

"I know of very few people," Vonnegut writes, "who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren."  Later he writes this epitaph for the Earth: "The good Earth – we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."

AUSTIN, Texas -- The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Thirty-five years ago, Richard Milhous Nixon, who was crazy as a bullbat, and J. Edgar Hoover, who wore women's underwear, decided some Americans had unacceptable political opinions. So they set our government to spying on its own citizens, basically those who were deemed insufficiently like Crazy Richard Milhous.

For those of you who have forgotten just what a stonewall paranoid Nixon was, the poor man used to stalk around the White House demanding that his political enemies be killed. Many still believe there was a certain Richard III grandeur to Nixon's collapse because he was also a man of notable talents. There is neither grandeur nor tragedy in watching this president, the Testy Kid, violate his oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of our country.

The Testy Kid wants to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it because he is the president, and he considers that sufficient justification for whatever he wants. He even finds lawyers like John Yoo, who tell him that whatever he wants to do is legal.

ROME, ITALY -- A slightly unreal moment this afternoon. Here in the land of Dante, as the taxi from the airport sped by the ruins of the Roman Forum and glimpses of the Coliseum up the side streets, the car radio began playing the seventies hit "Disco Inferno." As Dorothy Parker would have said, what fresh Hell is this?

It has been that kind of year, one of incongruities and contrasts in which just about everything seemed a little off-kilter or more. It was the year of the real life-and-death Terri Schiavo story and fictional "Desperate Housewives;" the death of John Paul II and Rosa Parks; the re-election of Tony Blair and the indictment of Tom DeLay (who told one, presumably stunned audience, "Humility is something I work on every day.").

It was the year of Katrina and Rita, peace mom Cindy Sheehan and hawk turned dovish owl Jack Murtha, London underground bombings and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, intelligent design and runaway brides. President Bush announced his complete confidence in both Karl Rove and Orioles first baseman Rafael Palmeiro, who told Congress in March he had never used steroids, then six months later tested positive.

Larry Beinhart, author of "Wag the Dog" and "The Librarian," has done us a remarkable service with the publication of a new small nonfiction book titled "Fog Facts."  He has given language to a new and critically important concept, that of the fact that is neither secret nor known.  By "fog facts," Beinhart means to indicate pieces of information that have been published on back pages of business sections of newspapers or picked up by a columnist or two, information that has perhaps been circulated on the internet by those with a passionate interest in the issue and enough free time, information that is accepted as known and established by reporters, editors, producers, and pundits, but which the vast majority of the public has never heard about and would find incredibly important and shocking. 

I wish for you all as the New Year encroaches,
Bold and creative strategic approaches
To defeating the lies by election officials,
Whose major concern is filling their satchels
With bundles of goodies like payoffs and bribes,
And friendships with vendors who do not subscribe
To audits or paper or trivial matters
Like accurate results and similar blather,

But push for solutions to fill up their coffers
Like touchscreens and printers and other such offers
Of machines that lose votes and breakdown and fail;
Who sell us elections without paper trails.
And no one would listen for years upon years
To the small group of people expressing real fears
Of votes lost and stolen, of breakdowns and freezes,
of vulnerable systems with holes like Swiss cheeses.
But then in a twinkle in 2005
When scarcely a soul thought freedom alive,
Santa came through -- A surprise in his sack!
He brought in a Finn to conduct a bold hack.
He brought in his elves in the form of investors
To sue for their rights ‘gainst crooked divestors.