In the week between Christmas and New Years, national attention is rightfully directed to an obsession with summing up the year-that-was and formulating new year's resolutions. As a tribute to the former, the Media Research Center has published a categorized best notable quotables of 2009 and a compilation of the worst New York Times quote of the year. 

A sample of the latter includes Thomas Friedman's praise of Chinese Communism:

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.

The New York Times, for its part, has a year by year recount of the last decade. As the article for 2007 - the year of the housing mortgage meltdown and the surge in Iraq - is devoted to "blogs about food," one might undergo a lowering in expectations as to the substance of the Gray Lady's reflections. But the 2009 article proves quite touching in its charitable optimism.