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This is a common problem when one gets involved with nerds:

I hope you’re all out partying; we only have three more new years before the Mayan apocalypse!

I’m having a wild night of playing Playstation 3 with friends, drinking beers, and occasionally taking a break for the Twilight Zone marathon.  All in all, a good start to the year.  Hope it starts well for all of you as well.

From The Editors, the best explanation of Bush’s shoe-dodging I’ve yet seen:

Judged as a display of alertness and ninja prowess, the President’s dodge is, indeed, impressive.  But George W. Bush has spent most of his life fucking things up horribly, and then escaping any consequences for his incompetence and indifference.  This is who he is.  What you have seen is not a moment of quick thinking, it was  the man’s essence.  He always escapes unharmed.

I’ve been wanting to put this song up for a while, but, amazingly, YouTube failed me for a long time there.  I’d do searches, but nothing.  Not even a poor quality live performance, or a high school kid covering the song!  It was mind-boggling.  But finally, they have it!  A video for “Night Vision Binoculars,” by Passenger.

Passenger is an indie-pop band from Britain, that I first heard on an indie feed podcast a while back.  Some of their songs are a bit too pop for me, but they’re all fun, and the ones I like I really like.  They’re also in need of some popularity- currently, when one searches for “Passenger” on wikipedia, this helpful image comes up:

Ohhhhhh!  So that’s what passengers look like.

And it’s a shame, because if you need a happy song about stalking to bop along to, I can’t think of a better band to turn to.

Passenger-Night Vision Binoculars/Walk You Home

The webcomic “Sheldon,” has been doing a series of strips called, “Questionable Moments from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’” which has been pretty good overall. (Sheldon is fairly hilarious overall-I encourage you to read it if you don’t.) Sadly, though, these series has now ended, and he has missed the most questionable moment of all: when we learn what’s happened to Mary.

Towards the end of George’s lesson, when he’s realizing how truly awful everything would be if he’d never been born, he has a horrible thought. Mary! What’s happened to Mary?! He demands to know from Clarence, who isn’t supposed to tell him. “You’re-you’re not going to like it George!”

And the suspense is killing us. What could have happened? I mean, we’ve already seen the entire town go to hell. His brother is dead, so are all the people his brother saved in WWII. The pharmacist he worked for is a criminal and a drunk, and Clarence doesn’t want to say what happened to Mary? Why? Is she dead? A destitute alcoholic? Married to a horrible abusive man?

But no! It is a fate much worse than all of those put together! Because George was never born, Mary is… an old maid! She-she became a librarian! The horror!!!1!

*screams and faints*

And that, my friends, that is the most questionable moment from “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Following up on the posts about economic bad news and our current lack of leadership, a great quote from the administration.  Why can’t we have foreclosure relief?  According to an anonymous White House official, “We’re done in two months. The next administration can try to find a way out of that maze.”

Yeah, no worries. It’s not like there’s a crisis or anything. (h/t TPM)

For the last couple months, many members of my generation (known as The Youth) have been feeling an odd sensation, correlating closely with Obama’s rise in the polls and subsequent election win. After being raised on a steady diet of Simpsons, irony and cynicism, and after 8 years of Bush, we’ve started to feel something I understand is called “Hope.” Hope for our future, hope that we may not be irreversibly screwed, even hope that there may be jobs available next year. It’s a really great sensation, and I’ve been really enjoying it. Marc Ambinder wants you to know there’s no reason for that to last.

It’s quite unsettling to talk to members of Barack Obama’s transition teams these days, especially those who are helping with the economics portfolio. Without going into details, the sense I get from them is that they are very worried that the economy will get a lot worse before it gets better. Not just worse… a lot worse. As in — double digit unemployment without the wiggle factors. Huge declines in aggregate demand. Significant, persistent deficits. That’s one reason why the Obama administration seems to be open to listening to every economist with an idea and is stocking the staff with the leading lights of the field. In one sense, the general level of concern among Obama advisers and transition staffers is reassuring; they get the magnitude of the problems, and they’re not going to assume that, just because the bottom has never dropped out before — certainly not in the lifetimes of most people doing policy these days, the bottom will never drop out.

Where the discussion isn’t going, at least in public,  (or the PR level ), is the possibility that the first foreign policy crisis the administration will face will be the complete economic collapse of a large, unstable nation. To be sure, Pakistan is nearly broke, and U.S. policy makers seem to be aware of that; but a worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine, Japan, Turkey or Egypt (which is facing an internal political crisis of epic proportions already). The U.S. won’t have the resources to, say, engineer the rescue of the peso again, or intervene in Asia as in 1997.

…

The question: what’s the administration’s policy in this area? Which countries can we afford to let fail? Which unstable states would concern us the most? Is there something the U.S. can do, in advance, should do, in advance, to forestall the collapse of other economies?

One of the problems, of course, is that whatever the US can or should do, we should probably be doing it right now, but instead we’ll have to wait two months to have real action. The Republicans can’t seem to find themselves willing to bailout three of the largest corporations in the United States right now, despite the fact that their failure would lead to thousands upon thousands of people in an economically marginalized area to be without jobs, and even more people to suddenly see their pensions disappear.* Our president has all but disappeared, and certainly isn’t doing much presidenting,† so I doubt we’ll be seeing anything done on a global scale. Being in the middle of the worst economic crisis most of us have ever seen, facing a global depression, a couple wars, and a growing environmental catastrophe, all while being without any actual government is enough to make the most Polly Ann-ish lose hope.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Barney Frank: “[Obama's] going to have to be more assertive than he’s been. At a time of great crisis with mortgage foreclosures and autos, he says we only have one president at a time. I’m afraid that overstates the number of presidents we have. He’s got to remedy that situation.”

*No matter what your position on unions, surely we can all agree that depriving a good number of people of their expected income when we’re in a recession and consumer spending keeps falling is a Bad Idea.

†Although let’s face it, Bush being MIA is probably for the best.

Attention all: I will gladly turn my back on my long-held faith traditions, stop going to Church, burn my Christmas tree, and join up with the radical, secular, homosexual agenda’s War on Christmas if it means I never, ever have to hear that song “Last Christmas” again.

Or any song played in the grocery store this time of year.

Let’s say you’re the Governor of a state which has, historically, had a somewhat loose relationship to political ethics. For the past couple years, you’ve been under investigation, an investigation that has even led to the indictment of a few of your colleagues. In fact, there’s a good chance that many of your conversations are being taped, and you’ve even dared the Attorney General to do so. Due to a recent event, there’s a great deal more national attention being paid to you then before.

Given all this, do you a) lay low for a while, and try very hard not to do anything illegal for the next few months, b) continue with your naturally corrupt ways, but in a very quiet manner, or c) talk to anyone and everyone about selling a senate seat, try to extort the president-elect, and pressure the local paper to fire reporters who have been critical of you.

If you chose (c), congratulations! You have what it takes to succeed in Illinois politics! Patrick Fitzgerald-who has now taken down two Illinois governors-had Blago arrested this morning for trying to sell Obama’s senate seat. He couldn’t resist, because, as he put it, “I’ve got this [seat] and it’s [expletive] golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there.” Brilliant!

Elsewhere in Fitzgerald’s statement we find Blagojevich is interested in the seat because of, “frustration at being “stuck” as governor; a belief that he will be able to obtain greater resources if he is indicted as a sitting Senator as opposed to a sitting governor; a desire to remake his image in consideration of a possible run for President in 2016; avoiding impeachment by the Illinois legislature; making corporate contacts that would be of value to him after leaving public office; facilitating his wife’s employment as a lobbyist; and generating speaking fees should he decide to leave public office.” (emphasis added) There’s something so adorable about a man who is so scandal ridden that he’s concerned about being indicted or impeached thinking that he could run for President in eight years based on performance in a seat to which he appointed himself. Because no one could possibly see anything inappropriate in that.

Update: whoops!  Will got to this first.  Sorry about that.

I missed this tidbit about the 2008 elections, but it’s pretty cool:

The presidential election was not the only historic political moment last week: In New Hampshire, voters elected 13 women — out of 24 total members — to the state Senate, making it the country’s first state legislative body with more women than men.

That is pretty awesome, and shows some real movement on the part of the country-or at least for New Hampshire, since nationwide legislative bodies are still only about 25% female.  Building up equal or near-equal racial and gender memberships in legislatures, companies and schools is more indicative of actual change in the nation than having one or two members of a group in a position of power.  I do not want to minimize Obama’s historical election at all, but it does not mean we’re in a post-racial society-not only have we seen the hardcore racists stepping forward, but now that Obama has resigned his Senate seat, there are no African-Americans in the US Senate.

Jeanne Shaheen became New Hampshire’s first female Senator, which is great for her.  But to me, I think the first female majority state legislature is an even better sign.  While the reactions to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy showed us some people still aren’t ready to contemplate a woman being President, this shows that in some pockets, we’re making significant progress.