Things are running along speedily over at The New Ledger, and I hope you’ve been reading our work. I’m very happy with where we’re at in terms of meeting our benchmarks for traffic and links - and I also wanted to be sure you saw a few of the pieces I’ve written over there. You can always find the pieces I’ve authored at TNL’s Ben Domenech archive, but here are a few of the ones published over the past month:

Our Cosmopolitan President
Do the Wrong Thing: Obama’s War on Giving
The Centrist President
Burning Down Detroit
The End of Starbucks
Don’t Stop Believing
The War on Philanthropy

Hope you enjoy these.

My last Washington Times oped of the year is here:

Soon there was a growing pile of pictures of newer Christmases, but fewer and fewer from home. These were images from distant lands, small trees propped up with small ornaments in his drab quarters in Korea, Vietnam, Panama. My grandmother was in more of them, pale and smiling next to his tanned features. A handmade book from the end of their first year of marriage, full of notes and doodles drawn for her benefit, told how much time they’d spent apart and how much he loved her. A blurred picture of the two of them entwined and smiling in their old trunks on some unnamed Caribbean beach showed more heartfelt affection than I ever recalled seeing them demonstrate in public. In another, she posed against one generous gift, a gray Studebaker parked on the dusty road of a military base, her arms outspread with pride.

I hope you’ll take the time to read it.

Slingin Sammy Baugh - the greatest two-way quarterback who ever lived - has died at age 94.

The only quarterback to ever lead the league in touchdowns, defensive takeaways, and punting (he still holds the NFL record for highest career punting average), Sam Baugh once threw four touchdowns and intercepted four passes (he was the first to ever do that) in the same game. The skinny Texan (6′2, 175) with a heavy drawl had famous tilts running the double wing against the Bears - he once left the Championship Game with a concussion after a particularly brutal tackle of Sid Luckman - was the sports rivalry of the forties. He played for 16 years, all without a facemask. He won the passing title six times, a record that has only been tied once, and never beaten.

After returning home in 1952, he got a few coaching jobs, then retired to his 6,000 acre ranch. His wife Edmonia died in 1990, after 52 years of marriage. In the years since, he welcomed hundreds of passersby to his home, regaling them with tales of the old days of the gridiron.

Sam Baugh’s number, 33, remains the only one the Redskins have ever officially retired.

(Read an on-scene account of Baugh’s style from 1937 here.)

I have an oped in today’s Washington Times on conservatives contending for the youth vote.

I also have a post over at RedState on Rod Blagojevich and President-Elect Obama’s short honeymoon, which happens to be today’s AOL Political Machine poll question (the poll isn’t live yet as I’m sending this out, but it will be later).

My latest op-ed at the Washington Times concerns America’s new status as a center-left nation.

It is not all Mr. McCain’s fault - supporters of small government and the free market have simply failed to make their case to voters. It took a plumber from Toledo to make even a dent in Mr. Obama’s leftist pleasantries, prompting right-leaning voters old enough to remember the Soviet Union as more than an ironic fashion statement to recoil in shock with a cry of “Why, that’s, that’s socialism!” Yet on Election Day, these voters found themselves outnumbered, and not by small margins. They were outnumbered not just by young voters attracted to Mr. Obama’s celebrity or minority voters attracted to his historical nature - though they are legion - but by voters who are tired of the status quo, who have heard no case for the free market on the national stage in a generation, and who want to give Mr. Obama’s policies a shot, and see what happens.

Read the rest of it here.

An apt bit of doggerel, I think, for the coming years.

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

-Rudyard Kipling

Michael Tomasky never would’ve written this article had Rudy Giuliani been the Republican nominee. Of course, he isn’t, and we know why - but this article makes me miss him dearly. He was without question the most experienced executive in this year’s presidential stakes, and for all his personal faults, represents the change a leader can attain who has a steady hand in response to overwhelming challenge.

No less a savant of urbanism than Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that great liberal and occasional neoconservative who never abandoned his nostalgia for Tammany’s no-nonsense efficiency (“We built the entire Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in 31 months!” he once barked to me), saw nothing but discouraging signs. I remember with crystal clarity the speech he gave to Lew Rudin’s Association for a Better New York in the spring of the 1993 election year. New Yorkers, he said, had withdrawn into “a narcoleptic state of acceptance” of a host of quality-of-life ills and annoyances. The following year, shortly after Giuliani had taken office, Moynihan told a city hearing on juvenile violence that the rate of out-of-wedlock births essentially ensured that the city’s youth was lost for years to come: “The next two decades are spoken for … There is nothing you’ll do of any consequence, except start the process of change. Don’t expect it to take less than 30 years.”

No one quite understood the force of the tornado that had just hit town. By the end of Giuliani’s first year, the city was a visibly different place—made safe, Toronto-ized, starting down the road toward being Olive Garden–ized (yes, there were downsides!); a place that suddenly was no longer the city where Travis Bickle prayed to God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk and where—in real life, not the movies—display ads for porn films actually ran in the Post right alongside the display ads for Smokey and the Bandit … That is inconceivable to us now. But it, and a score of cankers like it, used to be the reality in New York. Lots of forces combined to change that, but the biggest force of all was Rudy.

Here’s my latest Washington Times oped, on Joe Wurzelbacher’s questioning of Obama, and how it shows McCain’s limits. The closer:

“The ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not reason,” G.K. Chesterton mused a century ago. “The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it.” America’s electoral choice in 2008 is no longer based on reason, on the whys and wherefores of established fact, or on the citizen — the plumber — expressing his view. It is based on the new unshakeables of feeling and sentiment, on a state of mind expressed eloquently in Mr. Obama’s surprisingly honest slogan — no, not the ever-present affirmation of “Yes we can,” but the bastardized Latin of his hubristic presidential seal: “Vero Possumus.” Literally translated, it is an exclamation with all the balance and reason of a toddler stamping his feet: “I do it!”

And soon enough, barring a thousand more Joe the Plumbers brave enough to withstand the assault, he will.

Read it all here.

Past rumors are now confirmed as absolute truth in the wake of the slobberknocker comeback in Philly: Redskins Owner Daniel Snyder is, in all actuality, Michael Scott’s long lost twin brother. Well, but maybe with a little more of that John Henderson fire (from an old WaPo profile):

“Hey, turn on ESPN!” he says. “They got the Redskins! Turn it on!” I turn on the TV in my room so now we are both watching ESPN. “They’re showing us losing to Dallas!” he mutters. The Dallas Cowboys have now beaten the Redskins nine consecutive times.

“I hate Dallas,” Snyder yells. “. . . Would I cut off a finger to beat Dallas?”

“I don’t know, Dan,” I reply, “you might.”

“I would,” he says.

The original evidence is provided by Mr. Irrelevant.

For the fans out there: Artist Lou Romano shares some of his Pixar work for The Incredibles. It’s some fantastic stuff.