Wonkette

Cast your mind back to late October, when $150,000 still seemed like a lot of money. That’s how much the Republican National Committee reported it had spent to date on Sarah Palin’s silken royal costumes and tastefully selected haute couture for her rapidly multiplying hillbilly brood. It turns out that, in the final tally, the RNC did not spend 150K after all — they spent $30,000 more than that. MORE »

• Barack Obama raised $750 million in a little over 21 months, which means he won’t qualify as “the first billion-dollar President” until he runs for re-election. (By 2012, rampant hyperinflation will mean that a billion dollars will buy you a candy bar.) [ABC News]
• Big Three auto executives made no progress yesterday pleading their case for a bailout with recalcitrant Senators. Maybe they’ll have better luck today with the House. [Washington Post]
• Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has shut down Parliament, which makes him a despot and also a huge dick. [International Herald-Tribune]
• Happiness is a disease … and, like tuberculosis, you tend to get it from people in close geographic proximity to you. [Los Angeles Times]
• Retailers who didn’t offer crazy discounts in November saw the worst sales figures in decades. And retailers who did offer big price reductions kept sales volumes barely afloat, but at the expense of their profit margins. [New York Times]
• Tom Daschle wants you to hold a “holiday health care party” and discuss over egg nog and gingerbread cookies how we are all doomed to starvation or diabetes or both. [Wall Street Journal]

• PREPARE FOR ULTIMATE RIGHT-WING BLOG HILARITY: “Barack Obama told a group of donors in California early last year that his first international trip would be to Muslim Indonesia, a supporter who was present recalled today… He then said when he got off [Air Force One], he would say ‘xxxxxxxx’ - which we, of course, didn’t understand,’ Leary emailed. ‘He said that it was Indonesian (which he speaks) for, “I am back, dudes.”‘” Free Republic will be gold tonight. [Ben Smith]

When did it get so cold? It is just miserable out, in the mid-Atlantic anyway. Here are some things this weekend that will keep you warm besides mittens and sex. They include: Bill Murray, Nada Surf, Ne-Yo, and ballet. MORE »

George W. Bush did indeed buy a house for himself and his wife Laura and his two rat dogs as well! It is in the rich area of Dallas, which is probably a suburb! Look! MORE »

Gas will soon cost less than a buck a gallon, as nobody has a dollar, and nobody has a job to drive to anyway. Even Wal-Marts are closing down. And now Knut the cute polar bear, who was photographed topless by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair just last year, is an unwanted and unloved victim of the global economic meltdown. MORE »

We read somewhere, here, that Obama’s transition website, Change.gov, was getting pretty Internettish these days. This is Obama’s thing, he does it all the time: using standard Internet crap — stuff that other politicians somehow haven’t discovered — to help his readers connect and engage one another on the issues important to them (and possibly sometimes donate $$$$…) (and also maybe plan to fuck in a motel.) This is all to say that Change.gov suddenly looks a lot like Fark or Digg — long comment threads where you can “tell Obama” your thoughts and respond to each other and even rate each other’s comments. So we headed over there to witness the hilarity one sees on every Internet comment board in the world. But as with all things “Obama,” the discussion is well-written, informed, polite… it is terrifying. This is not the Real American Internet. MORE »

Hey if any of you far-away losers want to visit Washington D.C. on “vacation” soon, to teach your brat kids about America, now’s the grandest time of all! Because thanks to your $621 million in appropriated taxpayer funds — yes that’s right, 6, 2, and 1, glued together, a million of them, in dollars — a fancy new UNDERGROUND VISITOR CENTER at the U.S. Capitol finally opened on Tuesday. It is underground so you don’t get too cold or hot — depending on the season! — as your fat ass waits in line for a tour. One Senator, the very conservative Jim DeMint of South Carolina, despises this new visitor center — but not because of its completely inappropriate cost, of course! No, he’s just concerned that the center’s exhibits don’t praise God quite enough, and that the exhibits themselves are “left-leaning,” which is common D.C. slang for “gay.” MORE »

MSNBC blabbermouth Chris Matthews has been running around Washington and Philadelphia like a horny debutante, meeting with fancy Democrats and buying Pennsylvania real estate so that (maybe, possibly, allegedly) he could run for the Senate in 2010. His opponent would be Arlen Specter, a venerable Republican who has been a senator for nearly 30 years, a man who had CANCER, for God’s sake, and still showed up to WORK, without any hair. Will Chris Matthews be that awesome to the people of Pennsylvania? MORE »

A transition of power, combined with the crumbling economy, leaves America very vulnerable to the Terrorists. It is very clear to them, the Terrorists, that we do not have our shit together, at all. We have three presidents and 42 cents of real wealth; we grow a lot of corn. If you were a Terrorist looking at this, you’d just want to fucking bomb it, right? This is why we should have elected Republicans, America, because they know two things: (1) camels are from the Middle East and (2) filthy Mexicans are always sneaking into our country and then giving AIDS to our children. And yesterday two camels were seen wandering around a Mexican border city, trying to blend in, acting all cool, keeping it real discreet-like. It’s pretty clear, then, that the Arab Terrorists are coming from Mexico to, uh, eat yr brains. MORE »

NONE OF YOU PEOPLE DO ACTUAL WORK, DO YOU? Click the little picture here and you will see something remarkable: More than 500 of you nuts are playing this little EcoDriving game widget deal, and you’ve accumulated nearly 15 million points. The closest competition doesn’t even have a half-million points, while losers who read Talking Points Memo and Power Line and, presumably, fivethirtyeight.com (Nate’s EcoDrivers?) actually have scores lower than any human math can represent. MORE »

Money-printing liquidity trapper Ben Bernanke has been a Local Loser in recent months after rapidly cutting the federal funds rate to negative 1,000% to no effect whatsoever, except national embarrassment. He’s had to print Master Paulson’s money, alone, every night, as punishment. He is not allowed to shave. But as Paulson and his flack Neel “Chump” Kashkari refuse to do anything right, Bernanke’s had enough and he’s just going to sing it from the rooftops of America! Today, in a big speech, he declared that the “government must step up efforts to prevent home foreclosures, with options including buying delinquent mortgages and providing bigger incentives for refinancing loans.” Meanwhile, back in their lair, Paulson and Kashkari are discussing what evil they must next bring to the global economy. MORE »

How do you “sex up” your latest middlebrow conventional-wisdom financial column in Slate, which is the U.S. News & World Report for people who have learned the computer? You hire a disgraced New York governor now only known for paying far too much money to have sex with a hooker! And that is worth one (1) morning of goofy New York tabloid headlines such as “Slate hot for Love Gov Eliot Spitzer as online finance guru” and two (2) posts on Wonkette. Let’s review Spitzer’s debut as yet another Web freelancer typing zero-research op-eds on the Internets! MORE »