Tis the season to get ugly

The "ugly sweater" seems to be the "it" item this Christmas season with the Presidential candidates hoping to cash in on the fad. Ted Cruz once again has beaten his opponents to the punch by coming up with the ugliest sweater of them all. You probably won't find Ted wearing his own sweater, but for 65 bucks you can make Ted a part of your Christmas. The Carson campaign offers the best price. All of them cheaped out by making them sweatshirts.

There's quite a bit of symbolism in Ted's shirt from the "Don't Tread on Me" rattlesnakes, an obvious Tea Party reference, to his flame logo and the ultimate prize of this presidential campaign -- the White House -- which he lords over with a Santa cap as if the spirit of Christmas himself. Given his religious proclivities, it seems odd there are no explicit Christian reference unless one considers his flame the "burning bush."

After all, the Republicans are so adamant about protecting Christmas from the "Holiday Season" crowd, having already jumped on Starbucks for their generic red cups. Rand Paul offers this holiday mug that looks as suspiciously non-committal as the Starbucks cup. In fact, you might even think he stole the idea. Jeb definitely deserves a lump of coal for these awful Christmas ornaments, one for each state plus a few selfies thrown in for good measure.

Ted's sweatshirt is certainly much more imaginative than Donald Trump's now iconic red trucker's cap. There is a Trump Christmas hoodie, but it isn't officially licensed by his campaign. You have to go through a "security check" to get into his official campaign shopping site, which I don't care to do, as I'm sure it will only serve to put me on his mailing list. Can't have that.

However, others don't seem to have gotten into the Yuletide spirit at all. This hasn't stopped enterprising supporters from peddling their own designs on spreadshirt, where you can find the Trump hoodie. Bernie fans can get a Christmas sweater in a range of colors but surprisingly not red. The burning logs fit the "Feel the Bern" moniker well, but here too it is an independent effort sponsored by imgur. As they say, to each his own.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

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Dispatches from Vilnius

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