Will Senator Oprah Winfrey Please Stand Up?

Today is the talk show tour of Governor Blagojevich, and though he’s not booked on Oprah, he’s still trying to get in her (and Obama’s good graces).

Blagojevich, sinking deeper into the Crazy, is skipping his own impeachment trial because he can’t call witnesses just because they’re famous, so he’s going and talking to other famous people instead. On Good Morning America earlier today, he told Diane Sawyer he’d considered appointing Oprah to the seat because it would make Obama happy. Yesterday, he compared himself to Nelson Madela, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. on NBC. So, basically, we can’t wait for the Blago Insane Train to hit the rest of the talk shows today — he’ll be on The View in an hour — because there’s nothing like some Schadenfreude to make that coffee taste even better.

Speaking of, today is Bill Kristol’s last New York Times column, in which he hangs the mantle for saving liberalism around Obama’s neck. It seems like it can’t have been a year since I first mocked his writing, and the quality of Kristol’s interns really has improved remarkably this semester, so I guess that’s why Politico‘s Michael Calderone says he may get a column at the Washington Post. Maybe Bill Kristol will single-handedly save liberalism by fucking conservatism up so bad there isn’t a choice.

Back to New York, Kirsten Gillibrand faced a ton of criticism this weekend — particularly in regards to her stance on gun control and the general criticism coming from New Yorkers that upstaters have more cows than people (note to New Yorkers: this is why people call y’all elitists). But Nancy Pelosi hit on David Paterson instead, noting — as I did last week — that Gillibrand’s seat is likely to revert Republican and erode Pelosi’s majority in the House. Not that Paterson cares: he’s got some budget headaches to deal with and is probably happy this is off his plate.

On the plate for everyone, though, is the stimulus package. John McCain’s decided to maverick-ly join the GOP in opposing it, while Rush Limbaugh admits he only hates it because he might succeed, GOP House leader Eric Cantor is opposed now that he wife got her piece of the first bailout pie and Nancy Pelosi is sick of explaining why cheap birth control is a good thing for the economy. Makes you wonder who’s behind the Darth Vader mask that the toy Obama now battles.