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The phrase Obama’s Katrina will hopefully be retired after this weekend as we watch nonstop footage of failed lees and American citizens on rooftops. I would prefer instead to refer to political disasters as Sarah Palin’s “In What Respect, Charlie?” When you’ve lived through it, hearing anyone call a disaster someone’s Katrina is like hearing a pundit speculate on Obama’s That Time Your House Burned Down when you’re the one whose house burned down.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” A great sentence that could well have been written about 2010 and the world of book publishing. For Debbie Stier, a lifelong member of Publishing’s elite, it would be easy to see the glass as half empty. She was working as an Associate Publisher for HarperStudio, a forward thinking HarperCollins imprint that offered lower advances and more profit sharing with authors. But when Publisher Bob Miller announced he was leaving, HarperCollins pulled the plug on the HarperStudio operation.

Now that they’ve come out in support of Arizona’s “papers please” law, isn’t it time for the ringleaders of the Wingnut Circus to fold up that Freedom and Liberty Tent and retire the old “Stalinist Nazis” sideshow?

Although I usually write about environmental, food, and political issues, I have the wonderful opportunity to delve into a more emotional, complicated topic today: family. My cousin, Alden Ehrenreich happens to be a young, brilliant actor who stars as Bennie in Francis Ford Coppola’s latest gem, Tetro . Bennie journeys to Argentina to meet his long-lost brother, Tetro. The film is a timeless, brooding, sensuous exploration of the physical and emotional struggles between the brothers, in the backdrop of a sometimes absurd, comedic snapshot of an Argentine town.

If you saw Politico’s Jonathan Martin’s metaphorical mugging of President Obama on Thursday and then read his and Carrie Budoff Brown’s hit piece on him, perhaps you’re as offended as I am. Watch Martin’s body language and face from about 2 min 50 seconds into the above clip. After the President is finally able to move past him, Martin repeatedly looks Obama up and down. What I see on his face is the look of contempt especially given the disrespect he had just shown the new President on his second day on the job.

Can we declare 2008 over a few weeks early, before even more of the world economy collapses? If we hit the fast-forward button, maybe we can skip the plague of locusts, the slaying of the first-born, and the rain of frogs. But before we mumble a premature Auld Lang’s Sine, I have a suggestion. Every year Prospect magazine conducts a stock-take of the past twelve months, asking who - or what - we misunderstood. It should be part of everyone’s New Year routine to ask: who did we over-rate in ‘08, and who didn’t get their due?