Liveblogging President Bush's Exciting State-Of-The-Market Press Conference!

Oh, so our president is giving a press conference, talkin' about the economies and offshore drilling and such? It's a slowish news day, so we might as well liveblog this dealy. Fix yourself a triple Wonkettini and join us after the jump for whatever jokes we can muster about the limp Dow, and smacking Fannie into a state of renewed arousal.

10: 19 AM -- Oh hey look it's that guy who wanted a tee shirt. 

10: 20 AM -- Exciting shots of various people milling around the Press Briefing Palace. Oh hey look it's the President! Joe Scarborough's guest totally stepped on his opening sentence or two.

10: 24 AM -- George Bush looks like he has been up since last Friday. Remember back when he ran an "executive presidency" and keep a strict 8-5 schedule? Ha ha ha, now he has to work. Offshore drilling, blah blah blah.

10: 26 AM -- More castigation of Congress for postponing appropriations bills, wonderful offshore exploration...He will probably get mad at Congress for postponing Christmas. High gas prices and the mortgage meltdown are blamed on Democrats' failure to act. Oh goodness. The older he gets, the more he looks like his mom: a tired, angry old scold, with a mean face.

10: 28 AM -- First question: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailout. What's up with that? We need stability and confidence in the mortgage markets, says Bush, which is why we let these massive lenders do whatever they wanted with no oversight, for years. Ooh did he just sort of admit that there might be a BANK RUN? Oh Christ he just said "Bank run." RUN FOR THE HILLS. Plant yourself a fucking vegetable garden and buy GUNS, people.

10: 31 AM -- Some question about stimulus checks. Didn't everybody spend them on porn?

10: 32 AM -- Your editor Jim Newell is awake at this hour, and remarks, "HAHA on CNN they have a screen-in-screen of the dow tumbling, as george bush says how great things are."

10: 33 AM -- Are there other entities besides mortgage lenders and banks that can count on the government to bail them out when they end up terrifically fucked, such as GM? Bush says "No, the government should not bail out private enterprises." Except when it is necessary to prevent bank runs. And the hoarding of vegetables, and firearms. George Bush says DO NOT RAISE TAXES.

10: 36 AM -- Question: what can you do NOW to address oil prices? Answer: Psychology...say to the world that we're going to use new technologies to explore...to help change the psychology. Ha ha, he brings up the magic wand again. There you go, Mind Tricks and Magic Wands are the only ways to save our nation from an oil-and-gas Apocalypse.

10: 38 AM -- Hmm, is this whole press conference just a stunt to keep the networks from covering Barack Obama's speech, which is supposed to start in ... seven minutes?

10: 41 AM -- Something about MoveOn.org and teevee shows, er, newscasts. This is a portrait of a man slowly losing what's left of his mind after eight years of exhaustion and failure. "This is just a transition period," he says, away from hydrocarbon techmologies. In the future, the internal combustion engine will be outlawed and everything will run on liquefied humans like inThe Matrix.

10: 44 AM -- Regarding Guantanamo, he has always said "either send them back home or let them have their day in court." Really? Also why the angry grin about Zimbabwe? "It's frankly unacceptable," he says, smiling. Shudder. We will miss his inappropriate facial expressions when he is exiled to Crawford.

10: 46 AM -- Somebody reads a bit of Barack Obama's speech, which he's supposed to be giving right now. "I am loath to respond to a presidential candidate," he says, "except when I'm speaking to the Knesset and calling the candidate a Nazi appeaser." The question is about Iraq vs. Afghanistan. "They have no disregard for human life." Get some sleep, dude.

10: 49 AM -- Apparently there is a troop surge going on in Afghanistan right now. Who knew? "I understand exhaustion." Indeed/heh, as Glenn Reynolds would say. Now he is just stringing together a bunch of old sound bites from old speeches..."we will make a determination based on the facts on the ground," a "brutal enemy," "they don't want us to succeed,"snooze.He has figured out that they kill because they want us to leave. He's learning!

10: 52 AM -- Why hasn't Bush encouraged people to drive less? Because the marketplace works. And because he does not want to look like Jimmy Carter. See how wonderful it is when consumers run the economy?

10: 55 AM -- Will he sign an interim agreement with the Iraqis and leave more permanent agreements to the next guy? Suddenly he looks like he's reading from a teleprompter, weird. Did he answer the question, about the interim agreement or about the oil companies? Not really. Bottom line: Oil exploration is good. Meanwhile, the Dow is back over 10,900 so there's that!

10: 58 AM -- "You don't have to drill on top of a reef. You can have a horizontal hole." Lips twitching. He is chewing his lips like a meth freak.

11: 00 AM -- "We're not members of the ICC," he says, which is good for him because otherwise in about two years he'd be sitting in the dock.

10: 02 AM -- Nobody here is an economist. Therefore, nobody is entitled to an opinion about the economy.

10: 04 AM -- We are bored/tired and our weak coffee is not making this any easier. THE END.