SORRY, FORGET THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS. Now I’m worried about the War On Festivus.

GOOD FOR THEM: Sony scraps the clamshell packaging.

JOURNALISM: Times City Room Will Not Mention Caroline Kennedy’s Special Friendship With Pinch Sulzberger.

GOOD NEWS: NASA gives space cargo contracts to start-up firms.

THOUGHTS ON THE AUTO BAILOUT from Bob Krumm.

HOW’S THE ECONOMY? Reader Ross Zelman writes:

If you want to get a picture of how bad the US & world economy are doing, ask your readers to describe their holiday travel abroad. I’m in Aruba right now (having a great family vacation). This is our seventh trip in eight years; we’ve been timeshare owners for half that time. We aren’t experts in any sense, but simple observation and inquiry shows that hotels are at less than 50%, hotel staff are reduced, planes are flying less frequently and at less than full occupancy, restaurant reservations are easy to come by and fellow travellers are looking at the empty lounge chairs next to them and all agreeing that things are even worst than in 2001. If optional travel is a leading indicator, the economy is going to retract faster than we even realized.

Just thought that with your blog, you could get a quick taste of locations that Americans are traveling to around the world. Or not.

Got anything to report out there? There were plenty of cars on the road today, and as I mentioned earlier, New York didn’t seem slow. On the other hand, we got extremely good deals on our hotel stays, and New Yorkers told me that things were, in fact, slower than last year.

UPDATE: Reader Matt Johnson emails: “Over Thanksgiving we stayed at a resort in Aspen that is normally $550/night. Our price on Priceline was $160. I asked the front desk and they said normally thanksgiving is booked six months in advance and Christmas over a year in advance (Christmas still had plenty of capacity at that time).”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Kingston emails: “Last week, I had breakfast at the Marriott in Philadelphia on Market Street. This is the chain’s main hotel in the city, and it sits right in the center of it all. On other visits, the lobby was always a beehive of activity. I sat down to breakfast with my guest, and we talked for about 10 minutes before the waiter came along. He asked us if we wanted to order. I said we’d just have the buffet. He said there was no buffet, and I commented that I’d never been to a hotel like that without a buffet. The reason? Occupancy the night before was 9%. Nine!! (This according to our waiter). And this was still in the middle of a relatively normal business week, not the week of Christmas itself.”

MORE: From Northridge, New Jersey, Fred Rabinowitz writes: “Went shopping at Garden State Plaza (Paramus, NJ) with my daughter the other night. The mall itself was very busy. Macy’s was filled with customers. Nordstrom’s had few.”

Reader Jason Mart emails: “My family is in Telluride for a long planned ski reunion trip. Telluride has the best snow in decades (7+ feet in December) and the town is at about 40 -50% of normal for Christmas week. Lift lines are never more than 30 seconds, restaurants that normally would require a week in advance reservation are available for walk ins with immediate seating, real estate deals abound, in short, many area business owners will simply not make it. This is their high season and it is a total bust.”

Reader Jeff Benkel writes:

I’m spending this week in a timeshare next to the Heavenly ski resort in Lake Tahoe. Before this year, trading for Christmas week in Tahoe would be absolutely unthinkable. The complex appears to be less than half full. Of the three poker rooms I’ve visited (my kids love to ski but I hate snow), two had only one game going, the other had three tables for a tournament they usually have to limit to 8.

Separately, as an alumni of THE Ohio State University living in Phoenix, I was worried about being able to secure a ticket to this year’s Fiesta Bowl to see the Buckeyes play Texas in my backyard. My family owns a restaurant where we have an OSU banner hanging. Seeing the banner, we’ve been offered tickets at least 5 times already, but it was no problem getting seats straight from the OSU box office. My friends in Columbus tell me that they’re hearing reports that Texas has sold only 1,000 of their 17,000 ticket allotment.

Ouch. Bad news, if true. Reader Dale Russelll writes:

I attended a urology meeting in Scottsdale recently. The organizers also put on a winter urology conference in Vail each year. The director of the conference in Scottsdale was encouraging attendees to also go to the winter conference as well, pointing out that the hotel that last year had cost $550
a night was offering a block of rooms at only $250 a night this year. The rack rate for that hotel is shown as $450 to $1790. (Still think it is expensive, even at $250)

And James Yeomans emails: “Every year my wife and I take the kids out of school for two weeks and go to the Caribbean right around Christmas. We both have long-term employment and actually had a good year earnings-wise (certainly not 401k-wise), but we are waiting until the end of the first quarter ’09 to make any vacation plans. This ‘wait and see’ approach has got its merits, for sure; I wonder how many others are in the same boat as us?”

Yes, travel seems to be hardest-hit — restaurants, etc. still seem to be doing fine as best I can tell from my unscientific survey. Makes sense: Travel’s easiest to cut back on, and they’ve made it more miserable every year anyway. At least, unless you’re Michael Bolton!

What does all this anecdotal reportage mean? Hard to say — there’s a slowdown, but how much of it is psychology and how much of it is fundamental? And how much is people holding out for better deals? I guess we’ll see.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Julie Carlson writes:

Hi Glenn – I live in a fairly prosperous suburb of San Francisco. Saturday night my husband and I visited an upscale Italian restaurant in a nearby shopping area and the place was packed. We noticed quite a few larger parties (20 people +) that looked like company holiday celebrations to us. After dinner we walked down the street to buy a gift card at Williams Sonoma. We had to stand in line for 10 minutes! And this was at 8:50 pm. Thankfully neither one of us believes the media’s “Great Depression” theme and clearly none of the shoppers did either. Yes, I know things are tough – we’ve definitely cut back on luxury-type purchases and are eating at home much more than in the past. But we are hardly at soup line status in the Bay Area.

Good to hear! Leora Amdur writes:

The oddest thing I’ve noticed is that many people are looking to rent apartments between Thanksgiving and Christmas – usually leasing offices are deader than dead except for folks planning to move after the New Year, but our company’s leasing offices have been getting a lot of folks who want to move in within a day or so. I have no idea what it means.

In my home territory of Long Island NY the parking lots are full at all the malls and the lines at MicroCenter are long with folks buying computers and big screen tvs. Best Buy seems a lot quieter than normal.

Well, Best Buy tends to suck. And Clark Mercer reports:

For what it’s worth, just got back from a 10 day trip to Belize. Throughout the trip, I was told that hotels, etc. were way down, in addition to restaurants and flights. One restaurant owner said over the past year, monthly revenue has been down about 25%, but the past two months down 50%. Not a lot of people on the beaches, tours of Mayan ruins, etc. which was great for us, but was told a few times in polite fashion that “my economy is not doing so well.” Apparently Americans makes up about 80-90% of the visitors to the country.

Well, they’ll be appreciaed more, now!

A HOLIDAY TREAT: Santas disable revenue-light cameras.

UPDATE: Bad Santa.

CAROLINE KENNEDY, nepotism, and the Grey Lady. Just saw Scott Johnson on Fox saying, “She seems to think that the relevant question is ‘Ma’am, what is your last name again?'”

EDUCATION PROBLEMS in Newton County, Georgia. “Tosha Ford says six Newton County, Georgia, sheriff’s deputies came to her home and took her 10-year-old son Alandis to jail where he was booked on charges of possessing a weapon on school property and terroristic threats and acts. The ‘weapon’ was a toy cap gun he took to school one morning.”

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “I am 45 years old. I swear to God when we went to High School in the fall most of the guys in my class would get up at four in the morning go deer hunting. hang their thirty-thirty in the back of their truck and drive to school. Leave the gun in the truck all day then get back in the truck and drive home when school was over. Was that against the rules? Probably. did anyone care? No. What the Hell has happened? Is it too many female teachers? What?”

HMM: U.S. needs to ‘Americanize’ immigrants, or face trouble, federal task force says. One difference between today and the previous wave of immigration a hundred years ago is that now the folks in charge of education, etc., are entirely unconvinced of the worthiness of “Americanizing” anyone.

MICKEY KAUS: Jennifer Palmieri is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life. “Palmieri, last seen helping John Edwards lie, owes Yglesias a published apology. I would think Yglesias could and should insist on it–he was a prestige acquisition for CAP, and it would damage them if he left. As things stand, he’s been semi-emasculated. Keep rockin’.”

HMM: Obama Interviewed in Blagojevich Probe. Much more at Hot Air.

UPDATE: Much more at Gateway Pundit.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Huffington Post: Emanuel Heads To Africa As Blagojevich Report Drops.

COUNTING cloture votes on card check.

SIGNS OF HOPE in the heartland?

THAT WOULD BE GOOD FOR THE COUNTRY: Obama may decriminalize marijuana. But I don’t think it’ll happen, because despite what the headline suggests, he can’t do it without Congress, and I doubt he’d have the votes, or the stomach to fight to get the votes. I’d be happy to be wrong, though.

BREAKING NEWS: Blogs are influential.

TALKING ABOUT prostate cancer.

RECIPE: An Unexpected Holiday Hors d’Oeuvre.

WASHINGTON, DC. In the PJTV studios. That’s Veronique de Rugy talking about midnight regulations.

RICHARD COHEN is unhappy with the Rick Warren pick. Dan Riehl is having too much fun.

NEWSPAPER SHUNS WEB, and thrives.

I LAUGH IN YOUR FACE, HA HA! Joe the Plumber Laughs at CNN Anchor Who Insists He’s Fair, He’s Not Pro-Obama.

Given John Roberts’ “we” slip, I’d say Joe was on solid ground. “John Roberts interviewing Paul Begala on CNN just now slipped and said ‘we’ when asking how Democrats should respond to Republican attacks.”

“SHOCKINGLY DISINGENUOUS:” Charles Johnson charges Rathergate revisionism at NPR.

And a reminder of what the fraud looked like, in this animated GIF of the Rathergate forgery vs. the same document created with Microsoft Word defaults. (Bumped).

CAROLINE KENNEDY declines to make financial disclosure.

UPDATE: “The arrogance of aristocracy.”

“CULT OF PERSONALITY 101.” If so, the results of Drudge’s poll suggest it’s not working yet . . . .