So I was on the Customs and Border Protection website today, trying to discern just how illegal it would be to bring some lovely raw-milk sheep cheeses or a few lengths of the peppery local pork sausage home for the holidays.

The answer is, not as illegal as this.

I would eat basically anything. But I don't think I would eat that.

Yeah, these ones.

And it breaks my heart that so many people think they don't.

It hasn't been a great week for the dead-tree press. But I hope people listen to Andrew Sullivan's reminder of why blogs never can -- or at least never should -- replace newspapers.

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy.

A perfect example is The Guantanamo Docket at the NYT. Way to make yourself servicey, Gray Lady. Now, what's the profit model that's going to sustain this kind of work on into the cybernetic future? It looks as though that's still to be discovered. It goes without saying that I am a big champion of the blogosphere and citizen journalism. But we're going to have to find a way to sustain the institutions of professional journalism, however imperfect they are (and oh could I go on about that), that produce projects like this one.

Hear hear, Dan Savage.

Dan points us to an NYT article that tells a story almost tragicomic in its absurdity. It disgusts me that this is even the kind of situation we are talking about. This. Should. Never. Happen.

I really despise the liberals-are-already-disappointed-in-Obama meme, as I think it's a) generally untrue, and b) some slick maneuvering on the part of the right in order to frame America as a center-right nation and to frame liberal America as fractured and whiny. (And god knows there are just enough progressives out there who fit the description to give them a soundbyte or two!) But I will be sorely and loudly disapponted if Obama does not give us a functioning single-payer healthcare system in the first two years of his presidency. We have had enough.

My family went through a situation analagous to the one described in the NYT article when my father retired. His company did not pay for retirees' healthcare, and as my parents were in the process of switching insurances, my mother discovered a lump in her breast. The story is long, but needless to say nightmares ensued, and it began to feel like the cancer diagnosis was the least of mom's problems. My parents are the lucky ones -- they had the spare time to fight the battle, and eventually achieved some modicum of victory over the system. And they weren't forced to go into debt to pay medical bills in the meantime. But you shouldn't have to be lucky, or retired, or have a nest egg, in order to coerce your medical insurance into paying for your cancer treatment.

Dan said it best: This doesn't happen in sane countries.