I’ve been writing regularly over at The New Ledger — you can find my archive of posts here. Additionally, the fine folks over at CBS News have been regularly featuring our content. They’ve seen fit to feature my latest piece, which is on Barack Obama’s JFK connection:

For all the forced comparisons to the other man from Illinois, when it comes to domestic policy, thus far there is no presidency that Barack Obama’s resembles more than John F. Kennedy’s. Kennedy won the 1960 election by a narrower margin, but was still swept into office in Washington as a history making figure beloved by the intellectual elite. Both were (and are) young, inspiring politicians, who broke political lines once thought impregnable — the one religious, the other racial — buoyed toward the White House by the adoration of the press. On Capitol Hill, both found themselves the beneficiaries of large, filibuster-proof Democratic majorities. And both, when it came to getting things done with those majorities, failed dramatically.

You can also find it at TNL, along with the rest of my work.

My friend Tom Bridge over at WeLoveDC asked me for a Redskins preview, and I gave him this:

Football teams have windows of opportunity in the NFL. They have a handful of years to make a run, usually tied to the tenure of an established quarterback paired with a solid defense. Pittsburgh is in the middle of their window right now, as is San Diego and Baltimore — for the Colts, the Eagles and New England, those windows may be closing. Looking at the Redskins of 2009, it’s hard to feel like this is a team that has several good years ahead of it. While the defense is young and solid, the offensive line is one of the oldest groups in the league, and it’s thin to say the least — young talent like RT Stephon Heyer and RG Chad Rinehart look more like backup quality players than starters. Stud running back Clinton Portis likely has only two more years of life, if the 30-year mark for RBs in this NFL holds true, wideouts Santana Moss and Antwaan Randle El are aging, and last year’s crop of second-round pass-catchers has failed to impress thus far. Once again, this looks like a team that will hold opponents to low scoring outputs, but be frustrated from putting points up on the board.

Prediction: Mediocrity! But at least it’ll be entertaining mediocrity.

I’d never heard of this Chris Brown fellow, but I like the cut of his jib:

I bring all this out to show the parallels between sort of post-modern (for lack of a better term) sports writing on the internet, twitter, blogs, and the like, and the greatest sports writing ever, which has very little to do with the alternatively obsequious or bellicose 800 word columns and maddening boilerplate recaps we have become accustomed to.

“The Four Horsemen” would not have been published by a reputable institution anytime in the last fifty-years. By modern standards, it is not a very good sports story.

It is merely the greatest sports story of all time.

Follow him on Twitter here.

Over at The New Ledger, Senior Editor Francis Cianfrocca and I have been doing a daily podcast called Coffee & Markets for the past four weeks. You can listen to the latest edition here.

Francis is a brilliant venture capitalist and old Wall Street hand who’s now a tech businessman in New York, and his insights are particularly valuable in this kind of economic climate. I’m just asking questions, but I think it’s fast becoming a must-listen Podcast, and the reaction we’ve gotten from readers has been fantastic.

The RSS Feed for the Podcast is here. It goes up every morning at 9 AM, give or take a few minutes. If you prefer to subscribe to Coffee & Markets via iTunes, you can do that too.

Benjamin Kerstein has an excellent piece at The New Ledger on the much-maligned genius of Michael Bay:

In short, whatever Michael Bay’s sins may be, the sum of his talents definitely adds up to a kind of cinema. This cinema is what Sergio Leone referred to as “cinema cinema,” that is, cinema for its own sake, cinema in and for itself, cinema that exists for no other reason than to be cinema. Cinema as cinema is best expressed by the famous quote from Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou: “A film is like a battleground. It has love, hate, action, violence and death. In one word: emotion.”

Michael Bay’s entire cinematic language consists of nothing but love, hate, action, violence, and death, and every one of his films is self-evidently a battleground. They are pure visual pageantry, possessed of an élan that seems to be nothing less than a cry of love for cinema as cinema. And this is precisely why the critics hate him.

Some of the most eloquent writing is in defense of what some view as indefensible.

Is Iraq unraveling again? Nervous Iraqis worry that the new spate of violence is a sign of what could happen when the U.S. begins pulling its troops out in June (the complete withdrawal is slated for the end of 2011).

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).