Still totally unelectable:

A month before his inauguration, Americans choose Barack Obama as the man they admire most in the world, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. It’s the first time a president-elect has topped the annual survey in more than a half-century.

Reading about this made me think about Obama’s incredibly charisma which, in turn, made me think of Matt Wright‘s cowboy photo that, I think, does the best job out there of capturing the Obama phenomenon.

Via Spencer Ackerman, this is definitely clever:

For some U.S. operatives in Afghanistan, Western drugs such as Viagra were just part of a long list of enticements available for use in special cases. Two veteran officers familiar with such practices said Viagra was offered rarely, and only to older tribal officials for whom the drug would hold special appeal. While such sexual performance drugs are generally unavailable in the remote areas where the agency’s teams operated, they have been sold in some Kabul street markets since at least 2003 and were known by reputation elsewhere.

“You didn’t hand it out to younger guys, but it could be a silver bullet to make connections to the older ones,” said one retired operative familiar with the drug’s use in Afghanistan. Afghan tribal leaders often had four wives — the maximum number allowed by the Koran — and aging village patriarchs were easily sold on the utility of a pill that could “put them back in an authoritative position,” the official said.

One especially neat thing about this is that unlike guns or money, our Taliban rivals have essentially no prospect of producing large quantities of advanced pharmaceuticals. So if Afghan elders decide they like their ED meds, they’ll really have no choice but to try to stay on our good sides. And conversely, if things don’t work out so well there’s much less potential for a “blowback” problem when you’ve been handing out viagra than when you’ve been handing out rocket launchers.

The Washington Post takes a look at Fannie Mae’s new board. Dean Baker takes a look at the Post‘s skewed priorities:

The remarkable part of this story is that the Washington Post reporter could not find a single person who thought that paying part-time workers $160,000 a year was a bad idea. There is absolutely no one cited in this piece who raised a question about the compensation levels for the board.

Keep in mind that this is a newspaper that is absolutely apoplectic over autoworkers getting $27 an hour. If we assume that the board members on average will devote 500 hours a year to their board duties, this puts their pay rate at $320 an hour.

Look, super-high salaries for the already wealthy equal necessary incentives for prosperity. Relatively high wages for the working class equals productivity destroying union malfeasance. That’s not really so hard to understand, is it?

Back in the 17th Century the shit was real:

During the Reformation, some Puritans condemned Christmas celebration as “trappings of popery” and the “rags of the Beast.” The Roman Catholic Church responded by promoting the festival in a more religiously oriented form. Following the Parliamentarian victory over King Charles I during the English Civil War, England’s Puritan rulers banned Christmas, in 1647. Pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several cities, and for weeks Canterbury was controlled by the rioters, who decorated doorways with holly and shouted royalist slogans. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 ended the ban, but many clergymen still disapproved of Christmas celebration.

I’d love to see Bill O’Reilly on TV shouting monarchist slogans.

I made The Spirit my Christmas movie choice. It’s a great technical achievement, but it’s been married to a bizarre storyline that ultimately makes this quite difficult to enjoy. The idea that this “should make comic modern-day fanboys happy, what with its dark undertones, its beat-it-to-a-pulp action and its sly winks at comic greats past and present” is true only if you have an exceedingly low opinion of fanboys. At the end of the day, technique is nice but the point of great technique is to bring a story to live. Mostly, this just left me wishing to see some more Sin City stories adapted for the screen.

Just a brief programming note: You should expect this blog to be on something of a reduced holiday schedule through the new year. There will continue to be posts every day come what may, and if something interesting happens I’ll find my laptop and write about it, but that probably won’t happen.