The gummint already owns 80% of AIG (which today reports that it’s lost an additional $62 billion), but NYT and WSJ say that it’s going to shovel another $30 billion into said gaping maw — and on looser terms, too. For background, read Joe Nocera (and my post on William K. Black‘s explanation). They won’t improve your mood, only your understanding.

No sooner did KS Gov. Kathleen Sebelius

Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

become Obama’s nominee to head HHS than the conservative-Catholic bloc started threatening trouble over her strong pro-choice stance. Well now: it’s hard to find a more conservative Catholic than Sam Brownback — and he’s backing her. (Does the fact that this takes her out of the race to succeed him in the Senate figure in his calculations? Hmm.)

In ToL, British PM Gordon Brown divulges (after quite a long buildup), “President Obama and I will discuss this week a global new deal, whose impact can stretch from the villages of Africa to reforming the financial institutions of London and New York– and giving security to the hard-working families in every country.” Alas, the comment thread ain’t pretty.

In Politico, Ben Smith begins, “Bill Clinton had the Vince Foster ‘murder.’ George W. Bush had 9/11 Truth. And the new administration has brought with it a new culture of conspiracy: The Birthers … devoted to proving that Barack Obama isn’t eligible to be president of the United States.” Conservative Michael Medved describes their leaders as “crazy, nutburger, demagogue, money-hungry, exploitative, irresponsible, filthy conservative imposters” who are “the worst enemy of the conservative movement. It makes us look weird. It makes us look crazy. It makes us look demented. It makes us look sick, troubled, and not suitable for civilized company.” Very true.

Politico’s Jen DiMascio notices that SecDef Bob Gates and JCOS head Mike Mullen are on different pages as to whether Iran has enough nuclear material to make a bomb, Mullen believing it does, Gates thinking it doesn’t. DiMascio says they might both be right; lotus says Huh.

Mississippi-wise, C-L Washington correspondent Ana Radelat observes the locals’ widened eyes and sweated palms over the billions of dollars heading your way if the U.S. Senate this week approves the spending bill the House passed last week.

The Melton prosecution and defense were to meet today, but now that’s been put off until Thursday. John Reeves told a reporter that the gag order prevents his splaining why.

Here’s a special for Daemon from the DJ and me: Tishomingo County finds hope again. Seems to me Tish has more to crow over than Lee, with only a new (old) Elvis tour bus and pink-and-black ’57 Cadillac to report this mawnin’.

Meanwhile, the Sun Herald‘s lede story is about the high prices for these li’l babies:

JOHN FITZHUGH/SUN HERALD

What’s (mud)bugging you today?

The headline and lede sentence of Jimmie Gates’ story on recently-heightened activity of the Mississippi Commission on Judicial Performance come close to wrong-footing the reader. After quoting JPC executive director Brant Brantley talking about “an increase across the board” in complaints (due, he suggests, to Dickie Scruggs’s scandals), Gates says that actually 265 of the 322 filed in 2008 (54 more filings than the previous year)

were dismissed as matters for appeal or for insufficient evidence of judicial misconduct.

But the commission initiated 23 formal complaints against judges in 2008, meaning it recommended some action against the judges.

The commission made six recommendations to the high court for punishment against judges, including one to remove then-Leflore County Court Judge Solomon Osborne from office. …

In addition to actions against Osborne, the commission sought suspensions of Warren County Justice Court Judge Richard Bradford and Lee County Justice Court Judge Pat Carr. Two other judges faced public reprimands.

Justice Court continued to generate the most complaints (though the same number in ’07 and ’08), but

From 2007 until 2008, the largest increase was in the number of complaints against state Supreme Court judges. The number of complaints increased from three in 2007 to 36 in 2008.

But Brantley said the figure could be misleading because most of the complaints were based upon rulings made by the justices, not misconduct.

Also, the number of complaints against Circuit, Chancery and County court judges increased.

[JPC member Rankin County Justice Court Judge John] Shirley said it should be remembered that anyone can file a complaint, but whether it has merit is the key.

Maybe if they’re all catching more grief, some public apathy is breaking up?

The C-L also runs a brief AP item about what may be an “Erin Brockovich situation” developing in Greenville — any of y’all know more about this groundwater-contamination claim against Platte Chemical? Bears watching.

This is three-day-old news now, but the Sun Herald still has up its announcement that Haley Barbour appointed Ocean Springs attorney G. Charles Bordis IV to the Chancery Court seat that Bubba Pierce vacated upon his election to the state Supreme Court. Have you views on new Judge Bordis’s fitness for office, favorite tie-color, or whatnot?

The DJournal has a little bitty AP story quoting Haley doing his best Bobby Jindal imitation on the stimulus money (which of course is just posturing, since Billy McCoy has a say in the matter too) — but its more interesting story is Emily LeCoz’s profile of Allen Stanford co-defendant Laura Pendergest-Holt. She’s said to have “a killer combination of beauty, brains and connections” — and note in what order.

Daily Journal

Many teefies too.

If you hurry (well, in a Mississippi sort of tempo), you can prolly catch Alyssa Schnugg’s story about the upshot of ADA Tom Levidiotis’s “if the grand jury says he needs killin’” idiocy in Christian Bonner’s murder case. I guess the grand jury just decided he needed two more charges that might tack 18 years onto his (potential) life sentence. A funnier part has to do with where jailers found Bonner’s cellphone . . .

Bring anything else that interests you, and I’ll browse the wider-scope news a bit after me breakfast.

We might start with Arlen Specter’s op-ed in WaPo, Why I Support the Stimulus.

Or Holbrook Mohr’s preview of U.S. v. Melton.

Or let’s just drop everything and pull for Rodney’s daughter, in labor with a baby who apparently prefers the womb.

I am glad these traitorous leaders of the Republican Party appointed this Black racist, affirmative action advocate to the head of the Republican party because this will lead to a huge revolt among the Republican base. As a former Republican official, I can tell you that millions of rank-and-file Republicans are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore! We will either take the Republican Party back over the next four years or we will say, “To Hell With the Republican Party!” And we will take 90 percent of Republicans with us into a New Party that will take its current place!

I want to thank Jack&JillPolitics for supplying that quote so I don’t have to link Duke’s site.

As NYT calls the whole Tom Daschle-and-his-taxes thing “a peek into Washington,” WaPo says Daschle’s Senate ties account for the yawns there, with “little need for much of a fight” to get his nomination passed. Steve Benen offers the example of Bob Dole’s comment: “The one thing I feel certain about is Senator Daschle’s honesty and integrity…. I read the record about the tax issues raised, and while mistakes were made they were innocent ones which have been corrected primarily by Senator Daschle himself.” Whatever. It still creeps me out — even more so now that I’ve watched Glenn Greenwald take as his text Matt Taibbi’s maxim “In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle” and run with it.

Running myself just now (to the store), I heard NYT’s David Leonhardt interviewed on NPR about his long Sunday article The Big Fix, which I’ll now read. It begins:

I. WHITHER GROWTH?

The economy will recover. It won’t recover anytime soon. It is likely to get significantly worse over the course of 2009, no matter what President Obama and Congress do. And resolving the financial crisis will require both aggressiveness and creativity. In fact, the main lesson from other crises of the past century is that governments tend to err on the side of too much caution — of taking the punch bowl away before the party has truly started up again. “The mistake the United States made during the Depression and the Japanese made during the ’90s was too much start-stop in their policies,” said Timothy Geithner, Obama’s choice for Treasury secretary, when I went to visit him in his transition office a few weeks ago. Japan announced stimulus measures even as it was cutting other government spending. Franklin Roosevelt flirted with fiscal discipline midway through the New Deal, and the country slipped back into decline.

Geithner arguably made a similar miscalculation himself last year as a top Federal Reserve official who was part of a team that allowed Lehman Brothers to fail. But he insisted that the Obama administration had learned history’s lesson. “We’re just not going to make that mistake,” Geithner said. “We’re not going to do that. We’ll keep at it until it’s done, whatever it takes.” …

Meanwhile, some Republicans continue to say stupid things like Jim DeMint’s “[It's] a spending plan. It’s not a stimulus plan” (what else is “stimulus” but “spending,” Senator?), while some Democrats say smart things like Barney Frank’s “I never saw a tax cut fix a bridge. I never saw a tax cut give us more public transportation. The fact is, we need a mix.” (UPDATE: Here’s a clip of the Barney and Jim Show.)

I’m very relieved that Rodney still has power to send us this video (of a monkey in India defending its temple) — because what happened to Kentucky is also happening to Britain (though Blighty’s version is heavy snow rather than ice).

A death toll of “only” 191 civilians, soldiers, and police in January means Iraq just had its most peaceful month since the U.S. invasion six years ago. The turnout to vote this weekend seems to have run around 51% — lower than expected, except in Sunni areas such as Ninevah province, where it probably reached at least 60% (compared with 14% four years ago), the BBC reports.

I may be sort of quiet today, the fifteenth anniversary of my mom’s death. My mind will mostly be on her . . . and the many things I’m glad she didn’t live to see.

UPDATE: The Cincinnati police have released the video of Coach Andy Kennedy’s arrest, here, embedded in a TV report:

Click here to view the embedded video.

NMC’s take on it:

1) Kennedy is evermore on the losing end of the home court advantage on that story.

2) I didn’t realize that Kennedy had been ejected from the bar by cops before getting in the cab. Is that right? (The reporter just says it).

3) Kennedy is being very measured and careful in what he says on the tape, trying to defuse the situation, although the reasons he was giving weren’t really helping. Does cop training involve telling them to always be assholish when making arrests? Armstrong (the information director) on the other hand was, uh, not exercising the best judgment to talk to guys with tasers, guns, and handcuffs that way, and was basically inviting that arrest for disorderly conduct.

Best I can tell, “assholish” is, universally, arresting officers’ default mode.

As the Israelis briefly eased up on air-strikes a bit, NYT describes Egypt’s (especially) and Jordan’s freak-outs that, with the Gaza war so endangering the hope of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, they may end up again “pressed to absorb” the populations of Gaza and the West Bank. If you’ve paid any attention to Hosni Mubarak-as-national-manager, you know what further disaster that’s apt to produce. And a former Jordanian official warns, “This kind of formula means a Palestinian loss of their land and a Jordanian loss of their identity.” Or as Ben Cole would say, “Trouble brewing.”

As for trouble-already-brewed, WaPo ledes “President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in [seven] decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation’s thorniest fiscal challenges.” The chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers may believe “It does look like a great eight years, aside from the last quarter … ,” but all other interviewees (the single non-Republican among them not quoted here) say things like “It was all Band-Aids,” “we really went nowhere for almost ten years,” and “It’s almost a lost economic decade.”

Bush’s DoJ has made such a habit of foisting off its immigration-crime cases on overwhelmed border-state and -county court systems, the whole thing’s become a clusterf*ck

while white-collar prosecutions have fallen by 18 percent, weapons prosecutions have dropped by 19 percent, organized crime prosecutions are down by 20 percent and public corruption prosecutions have dropped by 14 percent, according to the Syracuse group’s statistics. Drug prosecutions — the enforcement priority of the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations — have declined by 20 percent since 2003.

“I have seen a national abdication by the Justice Department,” said Attorney General Terry Goddard of Arizona.

Egad, if only it were mere abdication. But back in Mississippi . . .

“Some of those involved,” reports the C-L, “say the heated relationship between the Jackson City Council and Mayor Frank Melton’s administration has reached an all-time low” — mostly because Council members can’t question city department-heads directly but have to submit all questions in writing to the chief administrator instead. And of course they get nothing until some C-L FOIA request pulls it out of Melton’s minions. Frank Bluntson’s bleat that everybody should be sweeter to Melton while he’s sick and indicted is worth the price of admission here.

According to the AP,

The Mississippi Department of Public Safety is willing to pay about $250,000 a year to hire a new medical examiner at the state Crime Lab, but the money lawmakers approved to help cover the salary isn’t guaranteed long-term. …

Though DPS head Steve Simpson wants to make the funding permanent, budget-crunched counter-arguments may prevail. Meanwhile,

The state has signed a contract with Forensic Medical Inc. of Nashville to conduct autopsies in Jackson, and so far there’s been no backlog.

“The changes that we made after Dr. Hayne was no longer performing services have worked well,” Simpson said.

So if everything’s that peachy now, what’s your excuse, MS Lege?

Aberdeen’s school board president got arrested on animal cruelty charges after a Nettleton alderman found on the guy’s property the chained-up corpse of a mare he’d taken there for breeding. While he went to call 911, Alderman Brandon says, the horse’s body was moved and property owner Jackson disappeared. The DJournal adds, “Brandon had attempted to have Jackson charged with a felony death of an animal charge, but he said the value of the animal could be disputed in court.”

Sorry, but I just find it amusing that the DJ asked Ole Miss’s vice-chancellor for university relations, a professor of communicative disorders, to comment on Khayat.

Finally, making up a Saddy Animals tardy, I proffer the Sun Herald‘s WWII farce The war dogs of Cat Island.

Nu?

Recall that in August the mayor nearly lost his Jackson house for unpaid taxes. Now kingfish, who has mightily tried to peer through the murk around his personal finances, has emailed me this theory: “Remember, I reported he had a balloon note on his house come due last month that was probably 190K with Bancorp South. Has a second mortgage due in full in APril with Omnibank. Unless release was not filed by BS, he’s facing foreclosure right now. meaning I’m wondering if he doesn’t expect to live.” As to that, who knows; all I can tell is that on the C-L’s mp3 of Melton’s fascinating most recent presser, linked here, his voice is a lot stronger than his ideas (which, he owns, have been “a failure”).

New justices David Anthony Chandler, Jim Kitchens, and Randy Bubba Pierce join the Mississippi Supreme Court today, with oral arguments in three cases rescheduled from November-December set to begin on the 12th. Though I call the court poorer for the loss of Oliver Diaz, surely losing Jim Smith and Chuck Easley must improve the quality of justice it dispenses. (Betcha the remaining members are >whewing< that they got nutball Easley offa there before the bench literally melted under them.)

NMC wrote about efforts to save the Delta Queen a few days back, and today’s Sun Herald reports a new tactic: the steamboat’s nomination as an endangered historical site (which nomination needs a second).

In other national news . . . ABC’s Jake Tapper says Team Obama has some complaints about Bill Richardson’s forthcomingness to them.

WSJ has a stunner (at least it is to me): “President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are crafting a plan to offer about $300 billion of tax cuts to individuals and businesses, a move aimed at attracting Republican support for an economic-stimulus package and prodding companies to create jobs. …” I’ll say more after reading more, but for now: YIKES — especially when I see Paul Krugman writing, “Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.” Bipartisanship is great, but if Obama goes very far in courting these wrongheaded Republicans, we’re killed.

Nate Silver has an intriguing thought about the Illinois Senate seat, now that the Minnesota situation has pretty much resolved. (Intriguing but, I think, wrong.) And while the idea of “Sen. Al Franken” makes our friend afotl a leetle crazy, tell me what other pomposity member of the United States Senate could do this (or even could have 20 years ago) in tights:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(h/t TPM) Pick one to visualize. For some ungodly reason, Jeff Sessions jumps immediately into my mind’s eye, and though what I did to deserve that I don’t know, other-Alabaman Richard Shelby would be even worse. Oooog.

— Do you want to keep the nested replies or no?

— If yes, do you prefer them indented or flush with the margin?

— If you see them in different font-sizes, do you like that?

Tomorrow morning we’ll tally the votes and change things or not accordingly (remember, though, some foloers’ ISPs’ caching schedules may hide changes for up to 48 hours).

As Israeli forces mass on the Gaza border, Egyptian soldiers fire on fleeing Palestinians, and across the Middle East protests blossom, The Independent‘s Robert Fisk counts up 20 Israelis killed by Hamas over the last eight years versus the 300 Palestinians Israel has killed in two days, summarizing what’s to heed:

… Yes, let’s remember Hamas’s cynicism, the cynicism of all armed Islamist groups. Their need for Muslim martyrs is as crucial to them as Israel’s need to create them. The lesson Israel thinks it is teaching – come to heel or we will crush you – is not the lesson Hamas is learning. Hamas needs violence to emphasise the oppression of the Palestinians – and relies on Israel to provide it. A few rockets into Israel and Israel obliges.

Not a whimper from Tony Blair, the peace envoy to the Middle East who’s never been to Gaza in his current incarnation. Not a bloody word.

We hear the usual Israeli line. General Yaakov Amidror, the former head of the Israeli army’s “research and assessment division” announced that “no country in the world would allow its citizens to be made the target of rocket attacks without taking vigorous steps to defend them”. Quite so. But when the IRA were firing mortars over the border into Northern Ireland, when their guerrillas were crossing from the Republic to attack police stations and Protestants, did Britain unleash the RAF on the Irish Republic? Did the RAF bomb churches and tankers and police stations and zap 300 civilians to teach the Irish a lesson? No, it did not. Because the world would have seen it as criminal behaviour. We didn’t want to lower ourselves to the IRA’s level.

Yes, Israel deserves security. But these bloodbaths will not bring it. Not since 1948 have air raids protected Israel. Israel has bombed Lebanon thousands of times since 1975 and not one has eliminated “terrorism”. So what was the reaction last night? The Israelis threaten ground attacks. Hamas waits for another battle. Our Western politicians crouch in their funk holes. And somewhere to the east – in a cave? a basement? on a mountainside? – a well-known man in a turban smiles.

George W. Bush probably isn’t much concerned about any of this now (not that he’s ever been): in three weeks, it’s Obama’s problem. But maybe (suggests The Guardian) he’s got a nastier-than-expected January waiting for him too — when Dan Rather’s lawsuit against CBS goes to trial. Russ Baker’s new book Family of Secrets (see excerpt at HufPo) might provide some interesting fodder there, you never know, and all this as ToL wonders whether Dubya’s Liberry isn’t about to become Dallas’ biggest white elephant (“So far, fundraising has been ‘very modest’”).

Speaking of fundraising . . . I didn’t see it that day, but somebody alerted me to this interesting letter to the Clarion-Ledger. This Willliam Bova chap makes a good point, doesn’t he?

The W’s new-name committee meets next month, and if they seriously consider “Mississippi Magnolia U,” verily I shall, as proxy for my mammy and her sistah alums, frow up.

Doggone, I sure meant to do a Sunday Dinnah post on NYT Magazine’s Eula Mae Doré story yesterday but got distracted and forgot it, so big h/t to duckweedpond for reminding me (bet you’ll thank her too).

Now the story here is that this friend of Juanita Jean‘s so wanted to go to Key West for the holidays, and when he had to stay home in Michigan instead, it so upset him, the poor thing took to sleepsnorkeling . . .

Don’t worry, though, he’s okay. The picture was taken from the deck of the Coast Guard cutter he also dreamed got to him before any voracious Great White could.

Whew and Good Morning!

Click here to view the embedded video.

In default of the NOPD, New Orleans reverted to state-of-nature — the armed and the unarmed, the white and the black, losing civilization right before their eyes, right in their souls. But despite Thompson’s and others’ efforts to document this horror, I’m not expecting anything much in the way of official follow-up now that the Age of Bush is ending. For, of course, three years on, destruction and existential fear have become general, and our current challenges dwarf even Katrina.

In this economic hurricane, NYT columnist Nick Kristof has discovered a fact that makes him unhappy: as between conservatives and liberals, who’s personally stingier? Alas, liberals.

I don’t know Ted Gup’s grandfather’s politics, but the letters Gup found in an old black suitcase his mother recently gave him solved a 75-year-old mystery in Canton, Ohio, and give context to our hard-times holiday season like nothing I’ve seen.

All I know to add is “God bless us, one and all.”