Santa Baby,

Since Eartha Kitt died on Christmas Day last year, she can only ask you to put a sable under the tree in spirit. But I have decided to step in and ask for a few things that we all could use during the holiday season and all year long.

1. Santa Baby, would you please bring us meaningful health care reform so that all Americans can have access to medical personnel, services and products? Health care should be a right, not a privilege.

2. Santa Baby, would you please bring us financial regulatory reform that will protect American consumers while still allowing for the innovation and investment that will anchor economic growth? If you put lipstick on a regulatory pig, it’s still a pig. Current financial regulations are a pigsty—they are that big a mess.

3. Santa Baby, although it’s interesting that layaway is back in the mainstream, would you please make sure that credit card issuers stop toying with us? What the credit card companies have done, as consumers wait for new laws that should make them deal with us more fairly, should be outlawed. Wait…it has been.

4. Santa Baby, would you please give America a way to limit the impact of special interests and lobbyists on our political system. The US Constitution begins, “We the People,” not “We the Lobbyists.”

5. Santa Baby, America needs peace. Please send the diplomacy and the courage to get us out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And just as important, please keep our Armed Forces safe and bring them all home.

6. Santa Baby, would you make the New York Knicks an excellent team that has a real chance at getting LeBron James as a free agent at the end of this season? No explanation necessary…New Yorkers are ready to rock the Garden with a championship team again.

Finally Santa Baby, please bring happiness and health to my faithful readers…and to my most faithful reader of all, my mom, make her holiday season as filled with love and joy as she has always made mine. I wish you and yours the very happiest of holidays! See you in 2010!