• Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is Fiscal cliff funnies:
  
• Be part of our first War on Christmas fund-raising drive:
  

  We’re closing out the best year of our existence—whether in terms of traffic or actual results. We’ve got insanely great things planned for 2013 and then it’s on to 2014, when we buck history and retire John Boehner. But with changing web economics, we’ll need you more than ever to help fund our efforts.

  Please subscribe or gift a subscription or donate a few bucks. Thanks for everything you do, and have a great holiday!

• Craig Silverman offers up the best and worst media errors of 2012. The list includes the “Correction of the Year”:
  

  Correction: An earlier version of this article claimed that journalists at Bloomberg Businessweek could be disciplined for sipping a spritzer at work. This is not true. Sorry. We must have been drunk on the job.

• Selling Snake Oil to the States is a report from Good Jobs First and the Iowa Policy Project that vivisects the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Rich States Poor States studies that for five years have “urged states to cut taxes and suppress wages in order to create jobs and raise incomes. But the states ALEC rates best turn out to have actually done the worst.”
• Will this be the next attorney general of Virginia? Blue Virginia’s lowkell interviews A.G. candidate Mark Herring.
• A nonchalant widow at the polls. A West Village, N.Y. pollworker encountered a widow and her adult daughter casting ballots on Nov. 6:
  

  Each signed the roll book, one under the other. The mother then told me that her husband, whose name was listed just below her own, could be removed from the rolls: he had died just a week earlier.

  Stunned, I expressed how sorry I was.

  “Oh, don’t be” she instructed. “He already voted absentee.”

• Jon Husted admits voter fraud is “very rare.” (That is not a typo). Leonidas at Plunderbund writes of the Ohio secretary of state’s Dec. 10 comment to the Cincinnati Inquirer that vote fraud “is a very rare occurrence”:
  

  On September 17, we wrote, “Secretary of State John Husted—with help from the Columbus Dispatch—continues to repeat the Big Lie in this election, that voter fraud is an issue in Ohio.” At that time, Husted, in response to lawsuits filed by a right wing group called Judicial Watch seeking to remove inactive voters on the voting lists, said, “Common sense says that the odds of voter fraud increase the longer these ineligible voters are allowed to populate our rolls.”

• Vatican astronomer says not to worry about Mayapocalypse: The Maya didn’t say the world would end on Dec. 21, 2012, as so many charlatans have made money claiming. They merely saw it as the end of a cycle. But so widespread is the belief that The Rev. Jose Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory, recently wrote that doomsday isn’t on the agenda and referenced the Big Bang theory of the universe’s expansion that he said will go on for billions of years. The Maya would likely agree. But Bryan Fischer and Glenn Beck, who apparently think the stars are painted on a giant backdrop, now have one more reason to engage in a public conniption.
• In other Vatican news, Pope Benedict XVI now tweets: And though the old pedophile protector has only been on Twitter less than a day, he’s already collected more than 860,000 followers. Which cardinal will dare tell him half of them are spammers?
• The fungus in your cheese is having weird sex.
• At Eclectablog is a riff on how union busting in Michigan is another huge win for the billionaire rights movement:
  

  If you’re like me, you want to turn green and climb to the top of the Empire State building to swipe at planes when you hear average, non-billionaire Americans telling you what they heard on Fox News: “Right to work” is a victory for “choice.”

  These newly minted right-wing “pro-choicers” are proud to say that this attack on unions is a way to give workers “freedom to associate,” as if anyone in America is forced to take a job, as if people in Michigan wouldn’t line up for the chance to take a union job.

• Here’s a great idea for a holiday gift, to yourself or your favorite travel companion. Netroots Nation is offering a special holiday rollback rate to attend the 2013 convention in San Jose, June 20-23. But you only have until Thursday, Dec. 13, at midnight Pacific time to get this special rate, $ 245. If you’ve been to previous conventions, you know what a great deal this is. If you’ve been sitting at home or work during previous conventions, jealously watching the livestreams and the diaries from your friends who are there, now’s your chance to join in at a great price. Register now at the special holiday price.
• Paraphrased, truncated quotation will be removed from Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin with polling on Fiscal Thingy issues, and who we trust to deal with them. Armando notes some commentators are making the case that Republicans actually do best by conceding on taxes. And if modest tax hikes plus sequestration’s cuts is a “fiscal cliff,” then it’s no better to replace them with social safety net cuts. Finally, tired of hearing that majority vote rules change is a “slippery slope?” Well, how about some historical data that says it’s not really all that slippery after all?

Daily Kos