Poor Ex-Congressman William “Dollar Bill” Jefferson of Louisiana! All the man did was use his seat on the Ways and Means Committee to secretly broker a deal between a Virginia telecom company and the Nigerian vice president, the $90,000 bribe for which he laundered in emptied food wrappers in his home freezer, and now some do-gooder activist Alexandria jury has found him guilty on 11 of 16 corruption counts for a possible sentencing of 115 years in jail. What’s the point of being a congressman, then? [Times-Picayune]

Good Lord. When Joe Biden talks about growing up in Scranton with all its hardscrabble charms, is he referring to its feces-scented apartments full of food-hoarding ex-cons or its large population of grifters who parasitize the child welfare system? MORE »

First of all, Sarah Palin, go to HELL for ruining your editor’s day of patriotic rest and BBQ. Second, why did you really quit, crazy lady? We admit to “jumping to conclusions” (trying to hurry up and get back outside to our cocktails and friends), but the story may be more complicated than “Sarah Palin is a sociopath who will just quit being governor of Alaska THREE-AND-A-HALF YEARS before the next presidential election, just to show her, uhm, Leadership Credentials, which means constantly yelling at David Letterman about a joke she couldn’t comprehend.” But there are so many more crazy theories about America’s craziest Alaskan Anger Bear, the snowbilly grifter and strip-mall Ice Queen of Wasilla. Let’s examine them, together! MORE »

Who says nobody needs yesterday’s news and a bunch of old wire stories and couch ads thrown in your neighbor’s bird bath at 4:15 a.m. every day? The Chicago Tribune, one of our nation’s leading bankrupt newspapers, today offers this Roland “Pinocchio” Burris paper doll, so your poor kids can have something to play with — it’s kind of like a Star Wars action figure, but it’s free! And it teaches kids an important lesson about black senators from Illinois. [Chicago Tribune PDF]

As periodic as the Indian monsoons are the indictments of Rudy Giuliani’s best friend, Bernie Kerik. He was nearly made the Secretary of Homeland Security in 2004, but then he had to withdraw his nomination on account of “nanny problems,” which is DC slang for “a closet so full of skeletons and crookery that he should rent out a storage unit, paid for by unsavory corporate interests.” MORE »

ANNNNND HE’S OUT: Michael Martin just became the first Speaker of the House of Commons since uh SIXTEEN HUNDRED AND NINETY-FIVE to be forced out of office. Now Parliamentarians will have to go back to paying for their own goddamned moat-cleaning or else Barack Obama will nominate them all for Commerce Secretary. [GlobalPost]

Rod Blagojevich, you are a hero — you are still giving to us, in the form of comic material, months after you’ve been removed from the Illinois governor’s office. (Not that you ever actually went to the Illinois governor’s office, but you know what we mean, you fuckin’ guy.) And today, a new scheme, or at least new details on an old scheme: the bankrupt media operation Tribune Co. was riding Blago hard to get Illinois to buy Wrigley Field from Tribune. And when current Tribune owner-weirdo Sam Zell and Blago discussed the scam, they referred to it as “Project Elwood.” MORE »

Forgotten hairball Rod Blagojevich thought he could finally cash in big with Barack Obama’s Senate seat, but that didn’t work out too well. Then Rod went on every talk show and cable-news program to jabber hysterical bullshit, and that really didn’t lead to riches, either. Now, at the end of both his political career and his brief stint as America’s Diversionary Joke, Blago has signed a very modest “six figure” deal to write an idiotic book. (”Six figure,” in this case, almost certainly means exactly $100,000 — a lot of money, to most people, but a lot less than the $155,600 he used to make as governor of Illinois.) [AP/WBBM]

Republican never-was Michael Steele just barely managed to beat a South Carolina segregationist for the GOP chairmanship on January 30, and it only took a week for the Washington Post to run a front-page story about the current FEDERAL INVESTIGATION of Steele’s latest campaign-money scandals. MORE »

Brooklyn fraud king Isaac Robert Toussie got the gift of Innocence from George W. Bush on Tuesday. But just a day later, on Christmas Eve, mean old Grinch W. Bush’s heart shrunk three times. Even thought Toussie’s dad sent the GOP a $28,500 “reminder” that his convicted felon son really needed a presidential pardon for running an elaborate and cruel housing/mortgage scam that pretty much defines the amoral real-estate boom & bust of this miserable decade, the White House suddenly decided they really didn’t fully understand how this famous crook screwed over hundreds of working-class and low-income minority families. MORE »

• BLAGOJEVICH CALLED OUR BARRY A ‘MOTHERFUCKER’! Jesus, show a little respect for the president-elect! From the Politico: “He also appears to think little of the president-elect, whom he calls a ‘motherf***er’ at one point.” [Politico]