Linda McMahon, who runs a friendly wrestling company out of Connecticut with her husband, Vince, will run as a Republican for Chris Dodd’s Senate seat in 2010. Whatever. Here she is in a wrestling video getting struck with a move called, “The Standing-69 Gone Wrong.” [MoJo]

• Tonight is Big Health Care Speech Night. History’s least cohesive gang, the Gang of Six, has until 10 am this morning to come up with ways to improve the bill and then it will be SET IN STONE until it is killed completely. [Washington Post]
• Yesterday the value of America’s currency, the dollar, hit a yearly low. There are many complicated numerical and Chinese reasons for this. [HuffPost]
• The UN will be investigating allegations of fraud in Afghanistan’s recent fraudulent presidential election. [Guardian]
• China will soon be home to the world’s largest solar power plant. It will be able to power 3 million Chinese households, roughly the equivalent one high-rise apartment building in Beijing. [Reuters]
• Chris Dodd will not be America’s newest Kennedy, as he has chosen to keep doing the Banking Committee thing and not fill-in for Ted Kennedy full-time on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions panel. [Politico]

We will tread lightly here, lest we fall beneath the Malignant Eye of Denby, but: Christopher Dodd has early stage prostate cancer. The good news: if you had to have your pick of cancers, “early stage prostate” would probably be right up there on the list, as it is highly treatable and pretty much every human male, if he lives long enough, eventually gets prostate cancer anyway. So fear not, Connecticut! You will likely have a Senator Dodd for many years to come, particularly if you re-elect him. [Washington Post]

Sorry, Denby, but your boyfriend Ted Kennedy has written the most awful piece of proposed legislation since Mitch McConnell suggested ending state funding for robotic goat-dildoes back in the Gingrich Revolution. What is so terrible about Kennedy’s healthcare proposal? The Congressional Budget Office NO LIKEY. MORE »

Really, this rigmarole about Chris Dodd being the lyingest liar of liars who is responsible for the AIG bonuses because he took money from their contributors before the company broke down is… weak. Trite even! MORE »

• THESE GODDAMN PEOPLE: Chris Dodd admits to writing the bonus loophole that allowed AIG to give out all of these bonuses, but uhhh the Treasury made him do it, which he wouldn’t have done otherwise, but hey it still happened. OPEN THREAD. [Huffington Post]

In a calculated move designed to insult America, Senator Chris Dodd has signed a book deal. His book will be out in June. Not that he’s actually penning a single word of it — it is “By Sen. Christopher J. Dodd with [random writing slave]” — but c’mon Dodd, save the heroic legislative deal-cutting memoir for when the unemployment rate starts going down (in 400 years). Worse yet, the working title is Thirteen Days: How the Financial Crisis Changed the Politics of Washington. Fuck you, Cuban communists! MORE »

So has any candidate from either party come away from this presidential election with more than Ron Paul? Many dumb failures from Congress run every four years and then, after losing terribly, slink back to whichever invisible subcommittee it is that lets them hold the #3 ranking based on seniority, sure. But did Chris Dodd score lucrative book deals after his quite pointless campaign? No. Ron Paul’s failed campaign, on the other hand, brainwashed just enough hobos to guarantee that he can write multimillion dollar bestsellers, about ANYTHING, for the rest of his life. Earlier this year his book Revolution: A Manifesto, became a #1 New York Times bestseller. And now he’s signed up for an Important Follow-up, the comical title of which will be Revolution: A Memoir, about the psychological import of his early masturbatory experimentation. [New York Observer]

CHRIS DODD ENDORSES OBAMA: So, funny story: some senator called “Christopher Dodd” apparently ran for president this time. He had beautiful thick white hair and loads of experience, and nobody cared about him until he endorsed Barack Obama and singlehandedly threw the election to the freshman senator from Illinois, the end. [Hartford Courant]

Did you hear how there’s this really tight Democratic majority in the Senate that isn’t really enough to allow them to do very much? Gosh, it seems, then, like losing 4 Democratic Senators (and 1 “maverick” Republican) to the Presidential campaign might be problematic, especially if two of those 4 chair Committees! But now that Biden and Dodd are slinking back to D.C., they might actually get some of the work done that we’re all paying them to do! Dodd’s going to get back to maybe doing something about that ongoing mortgage crisis thingie, while Biden is going to weigh in on Pakistan and then get around to re-authorizing international AIDS eradication programs. So, don’t cry any longer, Dodd daughters! Daddy’s got other ways to save the world! [CQ Politics, The Examiner]

THE DODDPOD GOES SILENT: Chris Dodd is out, as we all assumed. Good-bye, Chris. You really never gave us a reason to hate you, even if you dragged your children to Iowa.