A bi-centenary and the election of a certain President also from Illinois and with the same groundbreaking credentials has made Abraham Lincoln the man of the moment.

The social media project 21st Century Abe The Mist move is a perfect example.

Lincoln was born two hundred years ago. Happy birthday Abe! But why are we in the 21st century still obsessed with this 19th-century man? We find Abe everywhere from advertising to political punditry. What does this popular Abe have to do with the historical Abe? 21^st-Century Abe has six months to tackle these questions

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I’m smitten with Maira Kalman’s illustrations of the great emancipator. There are more on her wonderful NY Times blog.

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This one’s pretty obvious, but Sufjan’s nod to Abe makes me pretty happy.

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For most Canadians winter just doesn’t want to seem to end. So, for all of you in the winter doldrums, a little hit of beautiful light and the romance of the road.

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Flickr user f letter, a designer in Portland, has a few more in his account. Click on the thumbnails to see the full-size images.

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Cradle 2 the Grave film If you need a break from This American Life an alternative might be storytelling podcast the Moth. The creators of the Moth podcast

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draw on performances from their stages in LA and New York.

The stories they get, from ordinary people and celebrities alike, are at times astounding, funny, heartbreaking and sometimes just plain eyeopening. A recent one on a junkie and his dying girlfriend had me tearing up on the bus ride home.

Subscribe to their podcast here!

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Here’s a comparison.

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. Not surprisingly Government and America come up a lot!

But really. We all know that all of you just want to reduce this moment of history into another excuse to drink, smoke and yell things out at inopportune times (we call this playing Bingo). So, here’s the 2009 Barack Obama version of Inauguration Bingo.

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If none of this appeals to you, check out my boss, Kenny Yum’s round-the-clock live blog of Inauguration Day. From the streets of Washington, D.C.! Starting at 7:00 a.m.

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From the piece:

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Bai goes on to write that Mailer would eventually grow to be disappointed by Kennedy. JFK, it turns out, wasn’t the ‘hipster’ president that Mailer wanted him to be.

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Fatigue over the Bush administration, excitement over a transformational figure, anxiety over a very real financial crisis and the maturation of the internet as a news-gathering and political tool means that this Presidential transition has been the most one of the most scrutinized ever.

Bai, a political writer for the New York Times and the author of the very excellent The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, puts Obama’s transition into historical context and tries to explain why this time things are a bit different.

For extra credit, Mailer’s “self-indulgent” piece, “Superman comes to the supermarket” is reproduced here. While Esquire has been rapturuous in recent months about Obama, one of the best pieces on the Saviour-Elect is by Charles Pierce and isn’t nearly as cheerleady in tone. It’s here Indecent Proposal rip and was published back in June 2008, when the outcome of the election was far from certain. Both are worth reading.

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Yes, it’s a sad film. But it also gave me that feeling in the back of my head that if this film had come out just a couple of short months ago (say in the weeks before California voted on Proposition 8…) things might have gone a little bit differently.

Keith Olbermann’s moving monologue An American Tail movie about the Prop.8 vote has been zipping around the Internet, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg has a brilliant essay in last week’s New Yorker. The first paragraph lays out the Church of Latter Day Saint’s hypocrisy over Prop. 8.

In today’s Slate, Dennis Lim ponders the question that I’ve been asking for weeks, whether Gus Van Sant’s film could’ve swayed the vote.

The passage of Prop 8 transformed Van Sant’s film from a delicate, serious-minded period biopic into something altogether more urgent and emotional: a threnody, a catharsis, a call to action. Its hero, played by an unusually warm and giddy Sean Penn, is not simply a trailblazer who threw open closet doors; he’s a prophet whose words still matter and, what’s more, have gone sadly unheeded. There are moments in the film that now seem to traverse time and space, as if telepathically addressing the struggles of the present day. As the Prop 6 results start to roll in, Harvey tells his followers: “If this thing passes, fight the hell back.”

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Well, California’s progressives are fighting back. The photos of Prop. 8 protests are moving download Tunnel Rats dvd and will hopefully get progressives riled up. I’m also hoping that Gus Van Sant and those surrounding the film realize that they’ve got a chance to make things a bit more fair for those who just want a bit of love.

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when Josh Lyman ends up stickhandling Matt Santos (based on Barack Obama) into the White House.

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And then Gawker points out that, hey, Barack is distracting us from the economic death spiral with all of this talk on hypoallergenic dogs.

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But in the frantic last days of his nearly two-year second quest for the presidency, Mr. McCain has liberated himself from the irritable, edgy candidate of a month ago. He has, by all appearances, decided he will get to Tuesday by having a good time.

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Mr. McCain took the edge off some of his rhetoric and has in the last few days loosened up in his speeches, although he still lustily attacks Mr. Obama as the tax-and-spend “redistributionist in chief” who can not be trusted to lead the nation in crisis.

But the “get off my lawn” tone of the angry guy across the street has at times become a more neighborly “give me a break.”

It’s almost as if John McCain was… Darth Vader. He, of course, started the campaign as the Republican Maverick. Not unlike Anakin, bucking authority, a bit rebellious, impetuous. And then he got seduced by the powers of the Dark Side and warped into the Dark Lord of the Sith that we all know so well.

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But wait. Now near the end, is he turning back to the side of good? Rrrrr, probably not. But hey, if he throws George W. Bush and Dick Cheney into the reactor of the Death Star, I think all might be forgiven.

Of course, if you believe what the Washington Post is saying, these two are going to be jabbing at each other right up until one of them gives their concession speech. I also bet you some jackass in the audience will make a really bad comment about the other.

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