DITKA: TANNED, RESTED AND READY

Suddenly, Albany's got some catching-up to do in the grand corruption race. Client #9, meet Senate Candidate #5. At this rate, they'll have a retired-numbers wall going up by Christmas.

OKAY, -NOW- CHANGE HAS COME

Because it's not truly change until you get...the commemorative plate:

ROMANES EUNT DOMUS

It just came to me:

Barack Obama is the Messiah, but the problem is he's the Messiah from Monty Python's Life of Brian and over there on the other end of Capitol Hill are a whole bunch of Biggus Dickuses who will be calling the shots. And you thought the original Jesus had it rough with Judas.

Wewease evwybody at Gwantanamo!

LOOK WHO'S BACK

Bow-chicka-bow-chicka-bow-bow. It's the Steamroller!

And third, as Eric R. Dinallo, the superintendent of the New York State Insurance Department, has wisely pointed out, we will have to step back from the current environment in which government has become a guarantor of all major risk.

So says the former governor of the state with the $60 billion Medicaid budget, the gold-plated pension system for government employees, and the ironclad incumbency-protection plan for members of the state legislature.

Although mistakes I made in my private life now prevent me from participating in these issues as I have in the past...

Mistakes? A mistake is when you use baking soda in the recipe instead of baking powder, not when you damn well know what you're doing is wrong on multiple levels and do it anyway.

I very much hope and expect that President Obama and his new administration will have the strength and wisdom to do again what FDR did.

What - extend the hard times?

HEY KIDS, GET OVER HERE AND START TYPING

Headline: 7-Year-Old Political Blogger Gets Obama Thank You Letter.

His name's Stas' for short, both parents are academics, so you can pretty much guess what his politics are like at this point. Now before you go tsking over parents pushing political dogma on their children, remember the old adage about what happens to one's political beliefs between the ages of 20 and 30. Take that concept to its logical conclusion, and so if he's a Obama supporter now at age seven he'll be a Fox News talking head by the time he's twelve, horrifying his parents with that Sarah Palin poster on his wall.

Heck, when I was Stas' age I was in the tank for George McGovern, and now look.

SECRETARY OF STATE CLINTON?

Hmm. She ain't talkin':

“I am not going to speculate or address anything about the president-elect's incoming administration,” she said. “And I'm going to respect his process, and any inquiries should be directed to his transition team."

Does anybody reading this ever remember a public figure actually stopping and giving a scoop to the press gaggle that shouts out the questions they know doggone well aren't going to be answered? What's the point? I've seen her at plenty of these wonky kinds of conferences, and this is where she's locked into full policy-geek mode - I doubt she'd answer these kinds of off-topic questions even if she was Senator Random Democrat who hadn't run in the primaries.

If Clinton were to join the administration, Gov. David Paterson would name a successor.

Nobody north of I-84 need apply. It's not like Pindars Corners is churning out any more Moynihans.

IF NOTHING ELSE...

...maybe our next president will be able to persuade the yoots of America to pull up their pants already.

O'ROURKE HOLDS FORTH

We Blew It is the title of P.J. O'Rourke's latest rant. He's beautiful when he's angry (and that's not a sexist observation):

We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

Mm-hm. I do have a quibble with:

People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County.

This is not entirely true. When you have kids you become half-conservative-firebreather, half-liberal-nancypants. So when somebody suggests that it might be a bit much to hire Padma Lakshmi for the grade-school lunchlady, we start in bleating on how They Don't Care About The Children^TM; on the other hand, some years down the road when the first young fellow comes to our doorstep calling on Noodle he will be greeted by me as Ted Nugent and my wife as Gunny Hartman, and woe betide any nanny-stater who dares challenge our right to make that boy dance to the tune of our combined weaponry.

Continuing:

And yet we chose to deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted.

Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes. Once upon a time, in September, New York was actually kindasorta in play if you go by the Marist and Siena polls that had McCain down between 5 and 10 points, and yet the McCain campaign never even bothered to open a campaign office in New York, let alone campaign here - their Jersey operation, such as it was, covered both states. Pathetic.

Here in New York was an enormous opportunity for McCain to really let both parties have it - after all, the state GOP establishment was in the tank for Bush back in '00 and tried keeping McCain off the primary ballot even, so it's not like McCain owed them anything even if the NYGOP were Republicans in more than name. And as for the state's Democrats, it's time to turn in your vast right-wing conspiracy secret decoder ring if you can't make hay taking swipes at the likes of Hillary, Sharpton, Shelly Silver, the departed Spitzer, and father and son Cuomo.

All these sharp operators at Camp McCain and not a one of them saw the parallels between Barack Obama and Mario Cuomo circa '82-83 - soaring oratory joined at the hip to a legislature gone flabby, locking in unsustainable gold-plated benefits for preferred constituencies. How'd that whole taking-care-of-the-base thing work out for you again, lads?

The whole thing, you go read it, yes?

SO MUCH FOR MY CYNICAL BUSINESS MODEL

I'm about the last one on this earth to get all gushy about Barack Obama's election to the presidency this week, and then I come across this Washington Post piece on a man who served in the White House kitchen under eight administrations and yet couldn't use white folks' bathrooms when he went home to Virginia at night, and remember why it is people still read newspapers.

Excerpting it wouldn't do it justice, so read it in its entirety.

Some more writing like Wil Haygood's and the newspaper business wouldn't be in the state it's in.