PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT: We are the Treasury Department. We deal with government funds. There are not many government funds. One of our divisions is the Bureau of the Public Debt. There is much public debt. Employees in the Bureau of the Public Debt analyze statistics about the public debt. They read and write forms about the public debt. They are losing productivity. There is just so much debt. They do not enjoy their lives. We seek (Solicitation Number: RFI-BPD-09-0028) to contract a professional clown to provide Humor In The Workplace seminars to Bureau of the Public Debt employees. The clown will draw comical cartoons to teach the employees about the benefits of humor. MORE »

One of the great pleasures of last year’s campaign season was seeing the consulting firm of Mark Penn, history’s greatest monster, end up millions of dollars in the hole for all the great work they did on behalf of losing candidate Hillary Clinton. How was Penn going to afford his lavish subterranean cave and the constant supply of virgins bearing Ho-Hos without Clinton’s subsidies? MORE »

• Michelle Obama is the spokeswoman for the new and groovy United We Serve initiative. But consider this: first we were asked to “stand” united and now the government wants us to “serve” united? That’s a big leap there, going from just standing around to “cleaning up a neighborhood park”, united. Baby steps Michelle, baby steps. [The Caucus]
• What? Matt Taibbi has posted some sort of odd video from Russia, which he claims is very funny if you are like him and understand Russian. But wait, before you assume Taibbi is some sort of bilingual Tolstoy-reading Cossack genius: he posted the video at 1:02 a.m.! Yeah okay Matt, everyone speaks fluent Russian — when they’re drunk! This is so unlike you. [Matt Taibbi]
• Some poor immigrant family had their door kicked in at 4:00 a.m by a SWAT team, which then proceeded to handcuff all the teenage girls in the room. Whoops, wrong door! And then Montgomery County generously offered the distraught family “a couple of movies passes” as compensation. And then the ACLU laughed and laughed and laughed. And laughed. [Hit & Run]
• RedState has expensive-looking Venn diagrams to show how every state is debt-ridden and practically foreclosed! Oh no, does this mean Mexico gets California back? [RedState]
• Every night our cultured, worldly President cooks a big pot of traditional Pakistani tuna casserole and then reads mystical Urdu poetry until it’s time for bed. Jesus Obama, why don’t you and Taibbi get married so you can speak Russian together? The rest of us will be watching television, like normal red white and blue-blooded Americans. [Politico]

Here is the known dingus, Governor Mark Sanford, saying some thing about why he doesn’t want to spend the stimulus money on stimulation. Instead he would like to use it to pay off some loans. President Obama told him no dice, so now Sanford is literally taking food out of the mouths of poor South Carolinians and shoving that food into a giant incinerator full of money. Literally. [South Carolinians for Reform]

Eliot Spitzer has a great idea for making college more affordable! Ha, not really. But he has an idea about how we can make it possible for people to pay back their $160,000 loans from undergrad without ending up in debtor’s prison. MORE »

Hey it’s Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on Thursday, so Barack Obama is giving a commemorative primetime news conference right now! (He would do it on Thursday, but that would preempt Survivor. It’s never too early to ruin one’s reelection chances.) Here’s Ken’s “pre-game blog,” but now let’s see what the man himself has to say. Will he promise us all gold, like Ron Paul did? MORE »

No one is investing in anything now — even in newspapers or crappy cars! — so it’ll be hard for every state in the country to lure short-term debt investors, since they’re all expected to become insolvent at some point(s) within the next few years. (Ha ha, sucks not being able to print money, doesn’t it STATES?) The state of Illinois, meanwhile, is having an especially tough time selling off its debt, because who wants to buy debt from a state that’s governed by an actual adult retard? MORE »

Good work, America! And all it took was 750 trillion mortgage/credit card/auto loan defaults, ruining everyone’s ability to take on new, “responsible” debt in the future, but that’s probably a good thing. Now: GET JOBS. [CNN]

If there’s one thing the Clintons have absolutely zero compunctions about, it’s raising money to fund their Presidential porn collections, nefarious parking-lot murder plots, and cynical seduction of “hard-working white Americans.” So it’s kind of amazing that Hillary Clinton isn’t just sending out her own goddamn fundraising letters and leaving our precious Barry and Joe out of her shameful shillery, but there you have it: Vice President-elect Joe Biden is issuing a fundraising appeal for the Secretary of State-to-be, who needs dollars to pay off the “hard-working individuals and small businesses” (read: Mark Penn and the Bilderberg Group) who helped her tour Florida and Michigan shouting about DISENFRANCHISEMENT long after she’d lost any realistic hope of winning the Democratic nomination. MORE »

For veritable days we have been racking our brains, trying to figure out why Hillary Clinton would be interested in a Secretary of State position. It ain’t exactly a stepping stone to the presidency, and in her beloved Senate she can be her own boss and work on all those domestic things she loves so much, like imposing a Canadian-Marxist healthcare regime on America. Well, now we have the answer! What might motivate Hillary Clinton now is the thing that has always motivated the Clintons: money. (And the desire to serve, of course! And cracklins.) MORE »

Let’s quickly recap the weird history of the Clintons and Barack Obama. Bill Clinton was the first black president, and then Hillary Clinton was going to be the second black president. Barack Obama came along and decided he should be the second/first black president, and Hillary Clinton spent millions and millions of dollars running against him. After she dropped out of the race, she campaigned tirelessly for the same person she had campaigned against, maybe sorta kinda hoping he would help with her campaign debt, but nope, Obama and his people aren’t helping at all. This is just a “mild annoyance” for her, that he won’t help her raise nearly $8 million she still owes to Mark Penn. MORE »