The Second of Our Coveted Between-Holiday Abridged Editions

• During this year’s holiday season and writer’s strike, it’s often been the funny people that fill the online newshole. For example, check out News Groper, which has been featuring blog posts from most of the presidential candidates. They’re not actually real, but who cares, it’s fun! With Fred Thompson writing posts like “Explaining the birds and bees to your 42-year-old son” and Hillary Clinton explaining why “All the cool kids show up fashionably late to the caucuses,” it’s a treasure trove of good fun.

• Newsweek’s Andrew Romano has a great piece about Ron Paul as the first “long tail” candidate. With his campaign generating “a whole new level of high-passion, low-polling politics,” Paul has exploited American voters’ increasing desire for something beyond two-party politics. So why does Paul run as a Republican? TechPresident’s Micah Sifry makes an appearance in the piece, explaining that “You will get further inside the primaries than you will ever get as a third-party candidate.” Paul may not win the nomination, but he’s helping to change politics anyway.

• Picking up on a two-year-old post from Hillary Clinton web honcho Peter Daou, OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers argues that due to “superior media manipulation by the right,” progressive media and the progressive blogosphere is “in the wilderness.” Bowers argues that “we will never have a progressive governing majority in America unless, when major legislative fights are on the horizon, progressive media is given a seat at the strategizing table with leading Democrats on those fights.” Do conservative bloggers have the same complaint? To my mind, conservative media has had a seat at the table for a long time, and conservative bloggers like Robert Bluey, Patrick Ruffini, and David All are trying hard to follow in their footsteps.

• Happy Kwannakuhmas! Jennifer Bogut writes on the Huffington Post that “Out of the now fourteen candidates for President of the United States, only one sent an email wishing their Jewish supporters a happy holiday.” That one candidate was… Mitt Romney. Surprised? Me too. Maybe Mormons and Jews — both people of the wilderness — need to stick together. Bogut rounds up the rest of the candidates’ holiday communiques, noting that Chris Dodd, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee didn’t send out emails at all (there was plenty of video to go around, however.)

In Case You Missed It…

It’s our top political videos of 2007 list! You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll caucus. Check out our picks, and add your own.

Hillary Clinton has become the first guest blogger on Glamour magazine’s Glamocracy blog using the opportunity to write a piece on women finding their voices. While it reads more as an editorial that a blog post, Jeff Commaroto thinks it’s a step in the right direction.

Last week Matt Bai evoked a vivid picture to describe how a candidate should, in his eyes, harness the internet by surrendering “his own image to the clicking masses, the same way a rock guitarist might fall backward off the stage into the hands of an adoring crowd.” It was a powerful image, but some pictures hold less than meets the eye. Colin Delany wonders if the presidential campaigns missing the boat, or do they know something we don’t?