Wonkette

Look at their sweet coordinated dance moves! It’s like that “Thriller” video, only at the end, everybody has to give them 39 billion dollars. [NPR]

Oh dang! Rumor has it that Tim Geithner, our Treasury Secretary-to-be, does not care for our beloved Sheila Bair and her maverick ways. Bair is the chairman of the FDIC and one of the few high-profile Bush administration appointees to very repeatedly and publicly bang the drum about how if our financial crisis is ultimately due to people’s mortgages going south, maybe we ought to work on fixing those bad mortgages. She’s a working class hero! So naturally, Giethner hates her guts. MORE »

Florida Republicans are a very special breed of morons. They will pay you $20 to give you a blowjob in the bathroom, they will keep you up at all hours on the Instant Message Blonker if they think you are a hot pimply teen, and they will hang up on you if you are the President-elect. Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen got a call from Barack Obama and hung up on him, twice, because if she learned one thing from Sarah Palin it’s that world leaders will never call Republicans in earnest. MORE »

• The bombs used in last week’s attacks in Mumbai sat undiscovered in bags in a pile of luggage for a week in the city’s main train station. Indian security authorities make the Bush Administration look competent. [Guardian]
• Holy wow, rates for 30-year fixed mortgages might go down to 4.5 percent. [San Jose Mercury News]
• Central banks in Europe and overseas are all cutting their rates hugely. [Reuters]
• The UAW said they would make “concessions” regarding employment security and retiree benefits for members in order to help with the Big Three bailout, but voter opposition to any kind of government rescue of Detroit is growing. [New York Times]
• Vladimir Putin’s widespread popularity in Russia is suffering now that all the oil barons are going broke. [Bloomberg]
• Lawsuits have been filed in Hawaii, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, Georgia and Mississippi alleging that Barack Obama may not have been born in the United States. [Honolulu Advertiser]

The silly DNC spent all of its cash on loser Jim Martin’s 800 losses in Georgia this year, so what do they do, right, they go to Obama and ask for a damn check, and then he e-mails us to hawk some more junk. “Obama for America” writes, “This holiday season, celebrate the historic accomplishment of our movement for change. Treat yourself or a loved one to a limited edition Obama fleece jacket.” It’s really the only appropriate celebration for such an historic accomplishment. They are $50, and if you do not buy one then you hate black people. [Barack Obama]

SPITZER TO EDIT SLATE’S NEW LADY BLOG, XX FACTOR: Or something! The Observer reports that human penis Eliot Spitzer will be writing a column for the online Slate magazine, starting tomorrow. Oh that Slate, always keeping us on our toes! The column “will appear every other week and it’ll be about government, regulation and finance.” In other words: just softcore. And… uh… just imagine that this post had clever sex jokes in it, k? [Observer]

Loveable Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell has opened his fat trap yet again, this time on a hot mic, to celebrate the selection of Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Security. He tells a friend that she’ll do well because she’s a fucking unmarried childless loser: “Janet’s perfect for that job. Because for that job, you have to have no life. Janet has no family. Perfect. She can devote, literally, 19, 20 hours a day to it.” Because what the hell else does she have to do, cry all day like a baby, which, again, she’s never had? Does she even have one friend, anywhere?? Also: what is this “thing” that Campbell Brown is doing now, “Cutting Through The Bull.” CNN has no business Dobbsifying this nice lady. [YouTube, Philly Inquirer]

• Police are going to use truth serum (probably just pinot noir) on the only surviving Mumbai terrorist. [Daily Beast]
• Harvard is in a recession too! The elitist madrassa where Barry spent his formative years managed to lose 22% of it’s $36.9 billion endowment in four months. [HuffPost]
• According to Jonah Goldberg, the real victims of Proposition 8 are the Mormons, who were in no way affected by Proposition 8 or any of its outcomes. [Andrew Sullivan]
• Obama loved his new boyfriend Bill Richardson better when he did the whole bear thing. “We’re deeply disappointed with the loss of the beard,” Obama said at a press conference, which was probably held in some art gallery in Providence. [CNN Political Ticker]
• The forgotten territory of Oklahoma is celebrating the completely irrelevant fact that John McCain won the state with a dumb Christmas card. [Ben Smith]

This sign apparently hangs in a ladies’ room at the Department of Veterans Affairs. But is this a standard thing in all ladies’ rooms, everywhere? Ladies? [Endless Simmer]

According to some Philadelphia CityPaper blog post we don’t really believe and can only half comprehend because the HTML is all broken because a million people must be trying to read this same important scandalous story right now, Barack Obama was seen in a gym somewhere using the failed Microsoft music player called “the Zune” — instead of the Apple Mac iPod, which is what fancy people use, because they are so classy with their taste and money. UPCOMING REVELATIONS: Obama wears Old Navy jeans, likes Coldplay, loved The Da Vinci Code, and thought Return of the Jedi was the best of the original trilogy, because of the Ewoks. [CityPaper & CityPaper]

Can you even believe this George Bush. While all of you people and everyone else are having your homes foreclosed by the Subprimes, PRESIDENT MONEYBAGS over here and his smoker wife “Laura” are going to *buy* a home, to *live* in. “Laura Bush confirmed that she and the President are buying a house in Dallas, about two hours from his beloved Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas.” Superfluous! MORE »

Since it’s the Depression and all, get ready for skyrocketing educational costs! State governments have no munnies for their public schools, and all the private schools wasted their endowments on AIG stock, so increased tuition costs get passed along to you, the consumer! And since there are no jobs waiting for you at the end of your fancy four-year degree anyway, why bother? Soon it will cost approx. 14 kajillion dollars to get your diploma from some middling liberal arts school, so that you can send literally two-thirds of your take-home pay to your student loan consolidator while you work behind the counter at Enterprise Rent-a-Car, a job you could have easily gotten with a high school diploma and half a brain. MORE »

The Al Franken team announced today that under its special recount tracking methodology, Franken’s ahead by 22 votes over that cock Norm Coleman! The maths here seem rather terrible: “The Franken camp’s methodology involves taking down the opinions of the local election officials regarding the challenged ballots, and assuming that all the challenges will result in those local officials being upheld by the state canvassing board.” Nah, they just read Nate Silver’s projection and shaved off a few votes, to make it look authentic. [TPM Election Central]