Greetings from somewhere over Oklahoma. Much thanks to AirTran’s working WiFi service for bringing you this roundup. I had basically no inclination for matters Internet over the holiday sojourn, and whatever glimmer of inclination existed ended swiftly, when my wife answered the question “So what’s the password to the MiFi card?” with mostly a smile and an arching of the eyebrow. Using the hand-crank Internet at the ‘rents was a nonstarter.

I’m in the midst of some catch-up myself, so this will be a highly incomplete sampling, but here’s what I’m looking at as Congress returns for the last of the lame duck session tomorrow:

• So, Wikileaks. I’d have a lot more sympathy for the disclosure of confidential communications of the US government if they didn’t assert a right to monitor every confidential communication I ever have made or will make. I don’t think this is necessarily the real protest among the Wikileaks folks, but I’d have little problem with them if it was. The selectivity of privacy into a two-tiered setup, where individual privacy is routinely abrogated while government privacy cannot be breached without much wailing and outcry, is part and parcel with the two-tiered system of American justice and accountability. Stop acting as if our privacy is a mere trifle, and maybe we would shed a tear for the sensitive disclosure of whatever normal conducting of foreign policy exists within the documents.

• The New York Times penned a note to its readers on the decision to publish the State Department cables from Wikileaks. The Times redacted some names of those whose disclosure would put them at risk; the White House asked them for additional redactions and they only took their advice partially. Importantly, while stories are out from the Guardian, Der Speigel, El Pais and Le Monde in addition to the Times, I don’t think that the full documents have been released by Wikileaks, at least not as of Sunday night. The release will apparently come in stages.

• This will be a big problem for Yemen, I suspect:

For instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has sought to cover up the American role in missile strikes against the local branch of Al Qaeda. But a cable’s fly-on-the-wall account of a January meeting between the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the American commander in the Middle East, is breathtaking.

“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Mr. Saleh said, according to the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting Yemen’s deputy prime minister to “joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament” that Yemen had carried out the strikes.

Mr. Saleh, who at other times resisted American counterterrorism requests, was in a lighthearted mood. The authoritarian ruler of a conservative Muslim country, Mr. Saleh complains of smuggling from nearby Djibouti, but tells General Petraeus that his concerns are drugs and weapons, not whiskey, “provided it’s good whiskey.”

• Elsewhere, the State Department ordered its diplomats to spy on others at the United Nations. Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General, has also been the victim of spying. Der Spiegel summarizes the leaks as a political meltdown for US foreign policy, but that’s mainly because of the compromising of the documents.

• It was Elizabeth Warren after all: her influence helped get the Robo-Signer Bailout Act of 2010 nixed by the President. In so doing, she’s already priven her worth.

• Darrell Issa is in ur government agencies, bolstering the oversight of ur Inspector Generalz.

• Next time I’m in Austin I’ll be sure to visit Tom DeLay in the hoosegow.

• Jon Kyl remains a one-man roadblock on new START. As if US foreign policy needed another setback.

• Iceland allowed their banks to fail. They are in better shape than most of their counterparts in Europe. Pay attention, world (although their job description insists that they don’t).

• Nobody wants to go back to Baghdad.

• People like to talk about California’s fiscal nightmare, but the prison nightmare is actually far more acute, with an inmate dying from lack of medical attention every eight days.

• The Florida rocket docket is appalling.

• Lots and lots of environmental exemptions in the Administration’s doling out of stimulus money.

• Shopping! Sadly enough this matters, and it looks like the stores were a little bit busier this year.

• The bigger question is whether 49 year-old weekend warriors should be on basketball courts at all at their age, right?

• Damn LeslieNielsen was funny. RIP.