I present to you Senator Al Franken.

The anthrax case continues to get stinkier and stinkier. In this installment, we learn that one of the FBI’s most dubious theories about the case came from the person who first pitched Ivins as a suspect.

It is Wildcard Saturday in the NFL! First up are today’s games; i will update later today with Sunday’s games. Oh, and due to dismal performance by my boy, it is no longer the “National Favre League”, but is just back to NFL. Sadness. Dirty Birds at Red Birds and Colts at Bolts.

Thursday I described The Ugly Legal Optics Of Harry Reid’s Burris Battle. There is a new cloud dimming the already ugly optics. An article that just hit the website of the Chicago Sun Times reports Harry Reid already had his heavy ham fisted hand deep in Illinois state politics well before Blagojevich was arrested.

Maybe the most appropriate way to deal with the Burris appointment is to refuse to seat him on any committees.

Remember just a few days ago when SEC Chairman Chris Cox was doing his best George Bush imitation and trying to write his history before his term of shame was over and how he was saying that Madoff was “just an asterisk”? Turns out there is much more Madoff style

The fire sale by the Bush Administration in a last gasp to coddle corporate polluters, crooks and malefactors (i.e. friends and family) is on at the Department of Justice. The Justice Department has reached more than a dozen business-related settlements since the presidential election, with more in the pipeline for January, prompting lawyers and interest groups to assert that companies are seeking more favorable deals before Obama gets inaugurated.

Just poking my head in to wish you all a Happy New Year!

Thanks to bmaz for holding down the fort today–though I guess the shellacking USC gave another Big Ten team today made it all worth it for him…

I’ll be driving back to MI all day tomorrow (unless the weather gets bad).

Earlier this morning, Jane wrote a fantastic post, “Burris and Blago: What Happens Now?”, that lays out most all of the concerns with the obstreperous position taken by Harry Reid and the Democratic leadership. I would like to follow up on a couple of legal points inherent in the discussion. The Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White doesn’t have the power to refuse certification of Burris and Harry Reid is making an ass of himself in belligerently fighting Burris.

Hey, it turns out we have a New Year going here! Happy New Year to yours, mine and 2009. 2008 basically sucked on a lot of important fronts, but it did lay the groundwork for hope. But that is the serious stuff, right now we got some college football to play.