Oh hey here is a novel idea: in order to save our tragically beleaguered financial system, we must 1) replace the management at failing banks and 2) liquidate the banks that are completely hosed beyond repair. This makes sense to pretty much everyone, and our new boyfriend Simon Johnson said something like that a while ago on NPR so it must be true. MORE »

Barack Obama missed out on the much-ballyhooed Gridiron Dinner this weekend, an event in which journalists and politicians sit around very expensive tables with long white linen tablecloths and quietly give each other handjobs. Instead the president stayed at Camp David with his family, blah. Fortunately, Joe Biden attended the dinner and brought home the larfs. MORE »

Barack Obama once again demonstrated his callous unconcern for the American people by signing a major book deal right before he was sworn into office. Obama received a $500,000 advance for a middle-school reader’s version of Dreams From My Father on January 15. This obscene amount calls for a congressional investigation, and harsh words from Christopher Dodd! It also suggests that the only way to secure a decent book advance these days is to get elected president — a process that is only slightly more difficult than getting a publisher to look at your manuscript. [Washington Times]

Poor Eddie Liddy has to work for AIG for $1 a year and spend all his time defending the doofuses who thought it was a good idea to pay their employees hundreds of millions of dollars to fail. Watch him squirm in front of the House Financial Services subcommittee in just a few minutes, as our dumb elected officials attempt to make it look like this was all his fault even thought they could have done something about this mess last year. In lieu of the usual liquor and guns, please bring to this liveblog a cheap over-the-counter cough medication of your choice and a rusty switchblade. You’ll need the real stuff when the revolution comes. UPDATE: Well bah, Liddy isn’t due to testify until the “second panel,” whatever that is, so in the meantime we will find some funny YouTubes or something else to write about.

Oh hey it’s that mob rule and class warfare we’ve been told so much about! A SEETHING MOB of, uh, peaceful protesters who were not arrested by police visited the homes of two “financial predators” over the weekend. Financial predators are like sexual predators, only without the sex perversions. Instead, they like to lure youngsters into the backs of windowless white vans and force them to sign zero-percent down no-interest ARMs with a $400,000 balloon payment after five years. MORE »

Ok let’s see what sort of DRACONIAN MEASURES Barack Obama has proposed for our nation’s permanent underclass of persecuted corporate CEOs, whose only sin was caring so much about their companies that they continued to happily accept record pay and bonuses while their businesses lost literally billions of dollars and had to be bailed out by the government. MORE »

Let’s take a breather from presidential politics for a moment and reflect on this glorious advertisement from the Jim Slattery campaign, which shows Kansas Senator Pat Roberts growing into a fifty-foot monster who urinates on people. This is amazing. ["Hosed"]

Here’s a new thing from MoveOn.Org, which links vaguely troubled North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole to that bastard John McCain, who is leading in North Carolina. They give money to oil companies! And in case someone saying “in the pocket of Big Oil” is not stark enough of an image, this ad actually shows a man in a suit whose tie says “Big Oil” carrying photographs of each John McCain and Liddy Dole in his hanky pocket. The image would’ve been much stronger (and more adorable!) if it was an actual Fat Cat wearing the suit. [YouTube via The Plank]

Presidential trophy wife Cindy McCain, who already has 20 or 30 million bucks, is going to get another million — from the sale of an American corporation! Cindy’s fortune comes from her inherited beer distribution business, of which Anheuser-Busch is a major client. Now that Anheuser-Busch is being sold to hippie Belgian giant InBev NV, Cindy will most likely pull in $1 million from the buyout and be able to keep her business connection. This should fund at least 20 of her famous Pills ‘n’ Pools parties (for journalists) in Sedona. [WSJ]

Hey everyone, what are you having for dinner tonight? Ha ha, we already know the answer and it’s NOTHING, because there is no longer any food in the world. As you may have heard in the news, the world’s most powerful leaders are convening this week for their annual G8 summit, which is being held in Japan this year. Among the top items on this year’s Agenda is devising a plan to combat the global food shortage. And that is why the leaders and their spouses yesterday ate a fancy six-course lunch and 18-course dinner, the highlight of which had to be the chef’s vinegar jelly. How insensitive! Vinegar jelly is the most endangered of the world’s basic foodstuffs. [Daily Mail]

Rather than risk the wrath of the all-powerful Fourniers, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal vetoed a bill to double the salaries of state legislators. As a result, the state will have literally hundreds more dollars to spend on ball-withering chemicals and maps of the planet Earth showing Adam and Eve riding dinosaurs in Spain. [Times-Picayune]