(Crossposted at Veritosity.com)

NOTE: For an explanation of what Blogrolling for Change is and how to get involved, click here.

When I was a senior in high school, The Nation had a contest where they asked high school and college students across the country what the most important issue facing young people was. In writing my response I deliberately chose to misread the question - rather than telling The Nation what I thought young people cared about the most, I decided to tell them what I thought the most important issue was, period. The answer? Undue corporate power and influence, particularly when it comes to the American political process.

(Crossposted at Veritosity.com)

On the ground floor of NYU's Kimmel building, there's a totally hilarious prank going on right now.

I apologize for importing music onto my iTunes library from CDs I legally purchased. I did not realize that this was, in fact, completely illegal. All the offending music has been deleted, and for good measure I smashed my iPod with a hammer. But I have other illegal backups of select music, and that's a little trickier to get rid of. For example, the song "Umbrella," performed by Rihanna. Although I have never purchased the song, I have heard it, and while it's not particularly good, it is very catchy. Check out the visual evidence.

Since Jonah Goldberg seems so eager to jump into that discussion. As one blogger points out (via Andrew Sullivan) a guy who works at the National Review really has no right to be throwing charges of fascism around willy-nilly. After all, it wasn't the Nation that was publishing love letters to Adolf Eichmann and Francisco Franco in the 60's and 70's.

But since we're on the topic of the history of fascism in the United States, let's talk about the Business Plot - an incident that is curiously absent from the current dialogue about the history of American fascism.

A lot of people have been pointing out the stupidity of the New York Times' recent decision to pick up the tab for Bill Kristol's career life support. But it's a decision too patently ridiculous for me to not throw in my two cents.

You've really got to feel sorry for Mitt Romney right now. This is the guy who is [probably] going to be the Republican nominee and yet he is beset on all sides by indignities within his own party.

(And Andrew Sullivan in particular)

In the spirit of the season, everyone needs to chill the hell out. As Matthew Yglesias points out, people have a tendency to overstate their case when it comes to supporting or knocking down candidates during the primary season. Everyone's guilty of it, including me. But for whatever reason, that seems to be particularly true of the Obama supporters of the Internet. So here are some things to keep in mind:

That are rumors swirling that McCain and Edwards might be doing stronger in their primaries than current polling indicates. On the GOP side, Greg reports that McCain is trending upwards and could possibly get a strong second-place finish in New Hampshire. That would be potentially embarrassing for Romney, considering, as one McCain staffer points out: "no Massachusetts candidate has ever won in New Hampshire by less than eight points."

Mike Huckabee on torture, late November:

For the most part, Huckabee told reporters after speaking in Cedar Rapids on Thursday morning, U.S. policy ought to be to "never support anything done to others that we would not want done to our own soldiers."

...

Huckabee would leave decisions about the appropriateness of the technique "because of a unique situation" to commanders in the field.

Yesterday's TPMtv electoral roundup was definitely a keeper. Take a look.

(Crossposted at my own blog.)

Nobody's ever really properly demonstrated to me the importance of Jonah Goldberg's opinion to the wider electorate, so I guess unless you're either a politics nerd like me and most of the people on my blogroll or a pretentious conservative self-styled pseudo-intellectual (which is really just one of the more detestable subgroups of your run-of-the-mill politics nerd), there's really no reason for you to care who this guy is. And that's why I haven't made much mention of him here.