You know, I find the whole media frenzy surrounding Obama's vacation and shirtless photos laughable, but if I looked like that, I'd never wear a shirt. Ever.

I applaud him for setting a good example for the country in both mental and physical fitness.

Deep thought

When Cheney took office Halliburton was trading at 20.333. Today it closed at 16.6.

With the Palin grandbaby overdue since last Saturday the total media silence on the matter is a bit surprising. As ardent a public figure as Sarah Palin has shown herself to be, I figured she would milk the kid for all the attention she could get.

My bad. Now, what's going on with that kid again ?

As I said earlier, Bristol will give birth on Christmas day and the Father will be named as none other than The One, God, the Father. They will name the child Jesse and He will be wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. Kings and shepherds will visit with gifts and there will be wild life all around.

Happy Holidays,
peace,
st john

The best looking presidential bathing beauty until Obama -- and oddly not included in this slideshow -- was JFK. Being mobbed, not coincidentally, by female beach-goers.

There is the political drift that more is made out of this Blagojevich thing than will be admitted. MSNBC is ratcheting down from severe corruption to, Blagojevich as tainted. Likely Patrick Fitzgerald has nothing more than telephone gossip loaded with inappropriate comments to some one or some people and obviously Obama is not the one. CNN has mentioned even apologies maybe appropriate. Fitzgerald may very well regret the theatrics in the arrest of the Governor.

For me Fitzgerald botched the whole thing. All that is left is political grandstanding moving forward with an Indictment. If not Fitzgerald would be wide open for a law suit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Won’t that be a hoot?

Maybe will happen anyway, here the best of the best Fitzgerald gets bagged by Blago. Its not that I like Blagojevich it is that Fitzgerald is a smuck given far too much credit. Libby getting off with the perjury stuff is really a slime ball way to get corruption. Putting someone in jail for misstatements not having anything to do with the outing of most horrible secret service outings in history, Valerie Plame revealed as the core undercover agent for strategic counter nuclear limitations is for me the worst of the worst, a pile of dung the media is sitting on and steeping in complicity with Bush and Company.

According to SECTION 12. RIGHT TO REMEDY AND JUSTICE

Every person shall find a certain remedy in the laws for
all injuries and wrongs which he receives to his person,
privacy, property or reputation. He shall obtain justice by
law, freely, completely, and promptly.
(Source: Illinois Constitution.)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation could very well turn into the Pathetic Bureau of Investigation. With Patrick top of the list in the PBI. Have a chuckle with that one...

Who says Bush doesn't have a sense of humor:

Bush pardons mortgage fraudster who escaped restitution

Father gave $28,500 to RNC this year

President George W. Bush has characterized the recent US housing crisis as a product of greed and Wall Street excess.

But that doesn't seem to have been Bush's opinion when he pardoned Isaac Toussie, 30, of Brooklyn, the son of a New York real estate developer, who defrauded the Housing and Urban Development Department government for millions of dollars and pled guilty to inflating the incomes of at least 100 families to make them eligible for federal loans in the lead-up to the worst housing crisis the United States has ever had.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/23/kbr-indiana-chemical/

If KBR was doing it "knowingly" then, perhaps, it was also doing it "on purpose"? And, if so, can we now, officially, designate them as a terrorist organisation?

Festivus used to be a great holiday, but it's become much too commercialized. We've lost sight of the holiday's true meaning, I'm afraid. And if someone wishes me "happy holidays" instead of a "happy Festivus for the rest of us," I might just lose it....

The housing market will continue to look bleak, and will not hit a bottom until prices dropped even more.

The prices of houses/condos for sale are still at levels of 2004. Therefore, they are still overpriced (inflated).

To top it off, some of the homes are flips - people don't know what they are buying, in addition to the fact, these homes are not kept up by the lenders.

So yes, the housing market has not hit bottom.

The government could have bought some, not all, of these homes and used them as Section 8, some as witness protection homes, condos could have been used for travel expenses for govt workers instead of hotel expenses.... there's a lot of things these homes could have used to serve a purpose.

I think some places have hit bottom. I just bought a bank foreclosure for cash $39,000. This house last sold for $180,000 three years ago(way overpriced).

Houses in that neighborhood were 40,000 in the 1970s and not many are for sale now. The ones that are are occupied and are running about $85,000 which is where natural inflation would have had them I think.

I also read a report somewhere that excess inventory is being slowly snapped up by investors on the cheap.

Hyper-inflation is probably over, but that's a good thing.

Steve have you and Kevin actually raead a newspaper lately? The writing is atrocious. They pick stories for teh front page that make your head swim. Important news is buried deep in the paper. The local writers political slants rarely use facts of any kind to bolster their assertions. And they do virtually nothing to increase the reader base by trying to appeaal to all spectrums of society. Your take is the typical bean counter slant which seems to be the reason they're in the mess they're in.

yet more cranky 'war on christmas' stuff from the wingnutty Rutherford Institute -

here's the link

"Brett Baier will replace Brit Hume..."

Good riddance to biased rubish.

Yikes, "rubbish."

"Congrats to Dan Drezner on his new blogging gig."

really ? congrats ?

hmmmmmmmm

Torture ambivalence masquerading as moral and intellectual superiority

Back in June, 2004, Matt Stoller wrote a piece -- entitled "Daniel Drezner, the Mediocre Reasonable Conservative" -- that captured much of the mentality I'm describing here. Matt's focus was on Drezner's various apologist behaviors for the Iraq War (which, needless to say, Drezner supported, and which I, too, wrote about before -- here: see Item 6). Back then, Stoller specifically said this about Drezner: "The problem as I see it is the essential unwillingness of someone like Drezner to admit what he knows is true - Iraq is an attempt at empire perpetrated by deeply illiberal individuals."

In reply, Drezner wrote -- and, remember, this was in June, 2004: more than four years ago:

Oh, please — an empire that sent in fewer troops than was necessary? An administration that now seems hell-bent on getting out of the country? Where’s your evidence for empire?

"Hell-bent on getting out of the country": that's from a self-styled expert in international affairs in 2004. This is why I've become increasingly resistant to the notion that the abuses and destruction of the last eight years should be blamed exclusively on the Bush administration. It's undoubtedly true they are culpable in all of it, but -- as several commenters here pointed out -- most of what the administration did was, with some notable exceptions, either actively cheered on or implicitly justified via this type of obsequious apologetics by our elite institutions: Congress, the media, academia, etc. As demonstrated by the collective attempt now to prettify the "pure-at-heart" torture regime and thus relieve these elites of responsibility for it, none of these apologist efforts has abated in the slightest.

As always, it's important to emphasize that examining Drezner's comments here is worthwhile only as an illustrative endeavor -- not because his mindset is rare or unique to him, but precisely because it isn't. In fact, so appropriately and revealingly, this pro-war, torture-mitigating, "hell-bent-on-getting-out" academic is about to become, beginning early next year, the official blogger for Foreign Policy, the establishment journal of America's Foreign Policy Community.

That's a perfect microcosm of the last eight years: Support the Iraq War. Spout patently false claims to justify it. Rationalize and mitigate American Torture by insisting it's a complicated question and was authorized with good and noble motives. Have your credibility, visibility and establishment credentials enhanced.