• Senate Minorityi Leader Mitch McConnell doesn't think it's his place to stop or chastise prominent Republicans who are running around screaming, "Racist!" at Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Of course, McConnell doesn't think a lot of things are his place, up to and including holding the Republican Senator majority. [ThinkProgress]

• Newly minted Ranking Member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeff Sessions, wishes Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan would shut the fuck up, because he'd like to screw up Sotomayor's nomination without going down in history as yet another unreconstructed racist Southern Senator. [ThinkProgress]
• South Carolina Senator and John McCain fanboy Lindsey Graham managed to ask Sotomayor for an apology for being prejudiced against him as a white man, earning himself some praise and showing his colleagues how this racism shit is actually done. [The Hill]
• His predecessor, newly minted Democratic Senator Arlen Specter, finally got his lines right and backed Sotomayor's nomination. [AlterNet]
• President Obama thinks the Republicans should shut the fuck up about all of it already. [Washington Post]
• The Chinese government wanted House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi to get with its propaganda program during her visit to China, but she's Nancy Pelosi, so she didn't. [Politico]
• Norm Coleman's getting his hearing in Minnesota's Supreme Court today over his efforts to overturn the electoral will of Minnesotans and stay in the Senate. [Politico]
• The Obama Administration is asking the Supreme Court to uphold lower court rulings that families of 9/11 victims can't sue the Saudi royal family over the attacks. [NY Times]
• GM will file for bankruptcy today in exchange for $30 billion dollars. Where can I sign up for that deal? [The Hill]

• Dick Cheney, the king of classifying every action he ever took while in office, wants President Obama to release the memos that supposedly show torture occasionally provided operational intelligence. [Politico]

• He wants this because he fails to understand that there are consequences of torturing prisoners above and beyond the occasional piece of intelligence we might obtained elsewhere, and because he thinks most Americans will agree that the ends justify the means, at least insofar as it comes to brown people who practice Islam. [The Times]
• Let us not kid ourselves that Dick Cheney is incorrect about that last part.
• Until then, though, Americans feel that we should punish the people who did the torturing. [NY Times]
• But Obama CIA chief Leon Panetta publicly papered over his differences on the release of the memos, not that Panetta would be prosecuted because he didn't work there at the time anyway. [Reuters]
• Playboy reporter Mike Guy, to whom I'm strangely attracted, had himself waterboarded in an effort to prove that Christopher Hitchens is a pussy. He failed, but I am more than happy to comfort him. [Huffington Post]
• Hillary Clinton's pissed that NATO forces let some pirates go, since apparently she does believe pirates when they promise to, like, totally never do it again. I think maybe NATO forces need to watch Pirates of the Caribbean. [NY Times]
• A bunch of European diplomats walked out of a UN forum on racism that the US is boycotting because Iranian President Ahmadenijad predictably called Israel a racist state and accused it of genocide. Then Israeli President Shimon Peres used the term "Ahmadenijad the Persian" and compared him to "Hitler the Nazi, Stalin the Bolshevik " with no acknowledgment of the irony behind referring to a racist by his ethnicity instead of his politics. [CNN]
• Norm Coleman is appealing his electoral loss to yet another court because it's more important that he be Minnesota's Senator than that they have one at all. [Politico]
• Then the party of small government derided the Administration for its budget cuts. [Politico]
• And another Republican was forced to felch stale jizz out of Rush Limbaugh's fetid, shit-stained asshole for daring to suggest that Rush Limbaugh is something less than a towering intellectual stalwart of the GOP. [ThinkProgress]

• Sarah Palin is taking time off from her busy schedule not pushing legislation in Alaska to headline an "anti-abortion banquet" in Indiana, because that's way more important than her (current) job. [UPI]

• Speaking of jobs, Palin's dad thinks Levi Johnston ought to try getting one so he can buy diapers; Dad is conveniently forgetting that quitting school to get a job Palin's behest was what got Levi fired from his last gig in the first plae. [Us Weekly]
• Palin's best buddy, Joe the Plumber, swears that saying, "In God We Trust" will get you shot in some places in America. Oh, Joe, if only. [Washington Independent]
• Some Republicans are finally admitting that Norm Coleman's pursuit of a shady legal OP has about judges enforcing rather than making laws again. [Huffington Post]
• Another Republican, Dick Armitage, says he should've resigned from the Bush Administration over its love of torture. Too little, too late, bucko. [Huffington Post]
• Former GOP Representative and current Washington conservative "think" tanker Pat Toomey announced he's going to challenge Arlen Specter in next year's primary. Expect Specter to head right, Toomey to win, Specter to pull a Lieberman and the Democrats to still mess it all up. [NY Times]
• Rick Perry wants Texas to secede because it's the only way his dumb-ass will attain higher office. [Time]
• If you're black and live in Florida, don't plan on moving because Republicans there plan to use that to throw out your ballot. [NY Times]
• The NSA continues to spy on everything and everyone without a care in the (legal) world. They've even taken to spying on Congressmen. [NY Times]
• If you're a terrorist, now's the time to get a passport from the State Department, before they stop fucking up. Just kidding! They're not going to stop fucking up. [Washington Post]
• President Obama is in Mexico today, but it's not a vacation. He's not George Bush, after all.) [CBS News]
• Obama is going to keep some of the CIA torture memos classified. [Wall Street Journal]
• And he's rich, beeyotch. [Reuters]
• The Bidens aren't doing too bad, either. [UPI]
• By the way, unemployment is at 8.5%. [Wall Street Journal]
• In foreign news, Vietnam seeks to ban dancing in karaoke bars, India is having an election and Spain isn't going to prosecute Bushies for the whole torture thing. [Huffington Post, Huffington Post, MSNBC]
• Aw, but Michelle Obama sent a kid who offered her a free puppy a nice letter. [UPI]

That whole idea that if these guys just understood the public outrage, they'd voluntarily give their bonuses up? Ain't gonna happen. Even their big boss pronounced himself disappointed that he can't rescind the payments because they are a contractually-obligated "retention payment," though New York State Attorney General Andrew "Shucking And Jiving Is Not A Racist Term" Cuomo found out that 11 of the dudes who got "retention payments" weren't actually retained. Oh, and TPMMuckraker discovered that, once upon a time, AIG used to just fire assholes who demanded their contractually-obligated bonuses. [Crooks & Liars, The Hill, NY Times, LA Times, TPMMuckraker]


Dana Perino thinks everyone's just being mean to hard-working, middle-class Americans when we crap on the AIG executives' multi-million dollar bonuses. [ThinkProgress]


Oregon Senator Ron Wyden wants to know who stripped out his provision from the original bailout bill that would have capped all bonuses at $100,000. I'm curious about that myself, given that everyone is swearing that no one really knew these massive, contractually-obligated, gonna-cost-the-taxpayers-$1-billion-to-forego bonuses were coming. [Huffington Post]


And although the new rage in Washington is taxing the shit out of any AIG exec stupid enough to take a bonus (Cuomo says we'll know your names soon!), House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel is having none of that. He says that the tax code shouldn't be used for political purposes. Now who is going to go out and investigate how much money AIG execs have donated to Charlie's precious CUNY building honoring Charlie? Bueller? [Huffington Post]


George W. Bush is keeping it classy: he says that Obama deserves to not be criticized by him. That's why he's having Dick Cheney, Dana Perino, Ari Fleischer and Karl Rove do it for him. [MSNBC]


Obama, meanwhile, is about to sign off on the UN declaration that LGBT people shouldn't be jailed and killed for their sexual orientation that Dubya wasn't a fan of because he was worried it might keep us from discriminating against LGBT people here. Duh. It is sort of the point. [Huffington Post]


The new Washington rumor is that Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher may be headed to the State Department to become the Undersecretary for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. But how will she host awesome holiday parties? [Washington Post, Wonkette]


Arlen Specter may run as an Independent so that people in Pennsylvania forget he's a Republican and vote for him anyway. Hey, it worked for Joe Lieberman. [The Hill]


Al Franken wants Norm Coleman to pay his legal bills when he becomes the second Democratic Senator from Minnesota. It's funny to think that all the Republicans who donated cash money to Norm Coleman will see it end up in Al Franken's pockets. [Star-Tribune]


Kim Jong Il has decided he doesn't need our stinkin' food. His people, well, that's another story, but when did he ever give a shit about them anyway? [Newser]

(Confidential note to Bristol: guys will pretty much say this "I'm not ready yet" thing to you the rest of your dating life.) Also, Sarah Palin didn't pressure Levi to marry her daughter, at least not any more than she pressured people to buy some damn Girl Scout cookies this weekend. [ABC News, People]

Dick Cheney thinks that Rush Limbaugh is totally awesome. Dick from Cheyenne, a proud Dittohead. [AP]

Everyone just noticed that AIG took its bailout money, sent it abroad to other banks and paid huge bonuses to people. And by "people," I mean the government that was supposedly providing oversight and the media, which is supposed to provide a check to the government. Nancy Pelosi's vowing to get the money back, even though she probably can't, and Barney Frank thinks people should be fired, but he doesn't have that power either. So, you know, business as usual. [Politico, Politico, Politico, Huffington Post]

Obama reassured the Chinese that they will definitely get the cool trillion we owe them. Then he banned downer cows from the food supply. There's totally a joke in there about buying any more Treasury bonds in this downbeat economy. [NY Times, MSNBC]

Dana Perino says the recent resurgence in the Dow is all because of the Bush Administration. The downturns in the Dow in the last 2 months since Obama took office are still Obama's fault though. [Huffington Post]

Norm Coleman will continue protesting the results of Minnesota's Senate race, at least until the now-muzzled Michael Steele is ousted from his perch at the RNC and Coleman can take it over. He never really wanted to go back to Minnesota anyway. [The Hill, Think Progress, Marathon Blog]

Mama Biden is in the hospital. [AP]

And former eBay CEO and McCain adviser Meg Whitman is running for governor of California by dressing up like Ronald Reagan. [Fortune]

Hillary Clinton just finished making rounds in Indonesia, being serenaded by school children, waxing eloquent about how she wants to change the world and possibly signaling a shift on U.S. policy toward Burma which resembles our policy on Cuba in effectiveness but is broader and deeper in scope. Oh, and she appeared on television and says that she likes the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Meanwhile, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius' name keeps cropping up in discussions about who will replace Tom Daschle as the nominee to helm the Department of Health and Human Services and, reportedly, shepherd Obama's health care reforms through Congress. Of course, her named cropped up half a dozen times after the election as a potential nominee and she never actually became one, so I'm not holding my breath.

The boys, on the other hand, aren't having as good a day of it. Illinois Senator and crazyperson Roland Burris gave a press conference yesterday asking for his constituents' forbearance and bizarrely claiming that former governor Rod Blagojevich had never considered nominating him for the Senate seat to which Blago appointed Burris. Basically, dude's going nowhere, but he also doesn't exactly remember how he got there. Oh, and all the Dems who once supported him won't touch him with a ten foot pole in the hopes that the taint he swore he didn't have won't appear on them, either. Americans for a taintless Washington!

In other news, Norm Coleman has a snowball's chance in hell of retaining his Senate seat in Minnesota, though he'll keep arguing that he ought to despite what the legal votes say. Rich people (probably mostly dudes) are about to be exposed as tax cheats by Swiss bank UBS since they've been, you know, cheating on their taxes like half of Washington. And all those Republicans who pissed and moaned about the stimulus and how bad it is now want their piece of the pork-y delicious pie, and are being called hypocrites since, after all, they are.

Obama's got some mortgage bailout plan thing going that they'll probably eventually oppose, too, since it will cost $75 billion or something or because it doesn't help people with mortgages over $400,000 since they're obviously middle class families who need a break.

• Oprah Winfrey is talking her show on the road to D.C. during the Inauguration. Let the speculation begin about which members of the new Administration will be appearing. [Access Hollywood]
• Congress is going to pass a law to reduce the salary of the Secretary of State to block Republican efforts to keep Hillary Clinton from serving on Constitutional grounds. So much for pay equity in an Obama Administration. [Talking Points Memo]
• Al Franken says he's pulled ahead of Norm Coleman in the Minnesota Senate race. [Politico]

• Bill Richardson didn't win any points with Barack Obama when he showed up at the presser announcing his appointment sans beard. [Washington Post, CNN]
• But could the Commerce Department just be a stepping stone on Bill Richardson's path to his beloved State Department? [Washington Independent]
• Barack Obama told all the ambassadors appointed by Bush to be out by January 20th.There's no word whether the ambassadors to India or Pakistan might be staying on. [Washington Post]
• By the way, the Mumbai terrorists were high as shit on coke and LSD the entire time they were killing people. [Boing Boing]
• Possibly also high as shit was Karl Rove, who told a roomful of New Yorkers that George Bush is totally not the worst President in modern history. [Washington Times]
• Eliot Spitzer will begin penning a finance-and-government column for Slate. It won't talk about financing high-end sex with prostitution while being in government. [New York Observer via Attackerman]
• The anti Prop 8 folks get every actor you've ever seen to act in a musical. [Funny Or Die]

• Hank Williams Jr., who we started studiously ignoring after he murdered our national anthem during a Palin rally, has decided that he's not quite done with being part of a losing campaign and will challenge Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander in the primary for the 2010 race. [Politico]
• Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman today threw out Florida's 31-year-old law prohibiting LGBT Floridians from adopting children, noting that there was no scientific evidence to support the ban and Florida allows LGBT people to foster children. The state plans to appeal. [Wall Street Journal]
• Barack Obama is adopting, too, and not just a puppy — he's adopting current Defense Secretary Robert Gates for his own Administration. [ABC News]

• Obama also named David Orszag, currently head of the Congressional Budget Office, to head up his Office of Management and the Budget. He will be the first blogger to join the Administration. [The Hill, Washington Post]
• One person who won't be part of the Administration is former CIA official John Brennan, who took himself out of the running for any Administration position after being pilloried on the blogosphere for stuff he wasn't a part of. [Washington Independent]
• If you were missing Sarah Palin, she's all over the news today, between receiving an award from Field and Stream, heading to Georgia to campaign for Saxby Chambliss and being laughed at by South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. [Politico, New York Times, Huffington Post]
• Joe The Motherfucking Plumber is back on the teevees, too, hawking digital converter boxes. When will those two crazy kids ever get it together and admit they belong together... and out of my field of vision? [Wonkette]
• Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal hopes it's soon, so he can kick his Presidential campaign into high gear at last. Yeah, we're turning into that kind of political system. [LA Times]
• Not that this election is actually over yet, as Al Franken's just a little concerned that some officials are squirreling away valid ballots to keep Norm Coleman in office. You'd think it was a paranoid fantasy, but he's got video. [Politico]

• The California Supreme Court this afternoon granted a hearing to the Prop 8 opponents' challenge to the ballot measure that eliminated same sex marriage rights in the state. It did not, however, issue a stay that would have allowed same sex marriages to continue. [Equality California, California Supreme Court (pdf)]
• Missouri finally finished counting its votes and has narrowly gone for McCain. Obama still gets to be President, though. [Politico]
• A judge has ruled that Al Franken's campaign is entitled to written reasons why certain absentee ballots were rejected, which is expected to help his efforts to oust Norm Coleman. I'd bet the voters whose votes were rejected would like to know that sort of thing, too. [Politico]
• But the Dow fell again, so we're all pretty well screwed for now no matter what. [Huffington Post]

• Not as screwed as the automakers, who aren't going to get their piece of the bailout pie, a quest that was not helped by Mitt Romney— the primary candidate who won Michigan by kissing their asses earlier this year — saying that they should be allowed to go bankrupt. [NY Times, NY Times]
• And the auto industry's favorite Democrat, Michigan Congressman John Dingell — who has been chairing the Commerce Committee to their benefit for 2 years — lost a preliminary vote to keep his Committee chairmanship to upstart Congressman Henry Waxman. So it's really been a shitty week for them so far. [Politico]
• But they are definitely not as screwed as Republican crackpot John Ziegler, who decided to give an interview about his crappy new poll that says all Obama voters are poorly informed to Jezebel Crush Object Nate Silver and ended up, in the face of Silver's superior brain, telling him, "Go fuck yourself." Don't mess with our man, John Ziegler. [FiveThirtyEight]
• In a fit of crazy, Michelle Bachmann blithely declared that she never said that thing about investigating Congress members for being un-American that everyone heard her say. [Politico]
• Even crazier is Joe the Motherfucking Plumber, who has an enormous crush on Sarah Palin. Hustler, are you listening? [Huffington Post]
• Nearly two weeks after it was first reported, Obama's people have confirmed that strategist David Axelrod will join his Administration as a senior adviser along with Greg Craig as White House counsel. [Reuters]
• Dick Cheney has been indicted — along with former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — on state charges in Texas that his financial interests in Vanguard Group (which runs some prisons there) are tantamount to participating in that company's abuse of power. Don't get your hopes up: prosecutor Juan Guerra "has a history of launching eccentric court and political battles," as though that needed to be said. [The Telegraph]
• Republican Senator Arlen Specter announced today that he plans to fuck with presumed Obama AG nominee Eric Holder about his role in the Marc Rich pardon at the end of the Clinton Administration, as though any of his constituents care. Apparently, Specter is fully prepared to hop on the train to Crazy Partisan Town with the rest of the Republican Party and ignore his many years as a moderate that have helped him get reelected. [Politico]

• Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid has decided that the entire Democratic caucus will vote next week whether Independent Senator Joe Lieberman will keep his seat as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee after having back John McCain and gone negative against Obama. [TPM Election Central]
• How negative did Lieberman really go? There's a video to count the ways. [Politico]
• And both the Clintons swear that — despite leaked reports that rather obviously came from Lieberman's camp — they aren't pushing to keep Lieberman at Homeland Security or in the caucus. [Politico]
• Racist Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss, who, according to the Constitution represents all the citizens of Georgia regardless of their race, knows the reason he didn't avoid a run-off election because not enough of "his" people turned out. You know, white people. That always vote for the white guy. Because they're white. [Think Progress]

• In the meantime, the Bushies are mad that the Obama folks leaked that Bush will only support an auto industry bailout if the Dems pass the Colombia FTA, as though that wasn't a legit assumption given that the Bushies already told the Hill that exact thing the day before. [Politico]
• Obama released his guidelines covering lobbyists' activities for his transition team and good government types think he is, like, so cool. [The Hill]
• And if the fact that he was able to outspend John McCain by crazy margins wasn't reason enough, it turns out that skipping public financing means Obama's campaign won't face a crazy audit. Raising tons of money means that if they did get some unlawful contributions, they would be so minor the FEC doesn't really care, either. McCain, though, gets the full accountant treatment, which is not as sexy-dirty as it sounds, sort of like how fucking an accountant isn't. [Politico]
• And Latino groups expect that Obama will appoint Latinos to the Cabinet. They are, apparently, pushing for Governor Bill "McGrabbyhands" Richardson, but I'm throwing my completely inconsiderable weight behind New York Congresswoman (and Small Business Committee Chair) Nydia Velázquez for the top spot at the Small Business Administration. LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is supposedly on the list for something (and is, strangely, one of Obama's economic transition advisers), but I think he's more likely to get a sub-Cabinet appointment than a Cabinet slot. [Washington Post]
• Alaska's verified 50,000 of its early and absentee ballots and will start counting them this week to see if convicted and corrupt Senator Ted Stevens will actually win re-election and thus give Governor Sarah Palin a shiny new Senate feather to add to her political cap. [CNN]
• The GOP has started smearing Minnesota's Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie in a misguided attempt to provoke peals of laughter from every Democrat that ever dealt with Katherine Harris and stop the legally-mandated recount in Minnesota because the margin separating Coleman and Franken is still teeny-tiny. Apparently, since 3 people heard him speak at a non-prime-time spot during the Democratic convention, Minnesotans don't need a recount. [TPM Muckraker]
• Noted cursing afficianado Joe Scarborough has earned himself a 7-second on-air delay for saying "Fuck you" earlier this week. My momma would've washed my mouth out with soap, but I could run faster. Not 7 seconds faster, though. [Politico]
• John Edwards has decided to give make his first public appearance following his admission that he fucked around on his wife. What do you think the odds are that audience members will ask him how he's coping with having cuckolded his wife the way that people seemingly insist on asking Elizabeth how she feels about it? Slim to none? [Time]
• Hopefully, the odds are better that the next Congress really will examine Bush's abuses of power next year. [Washington Independent]