“IT WOULD BE A BUYER’S MARKET, if there were, uh, any buyers in the market.” A real-estate agent on My House Is Worth What? describing the market in a Milwaukee suburb.

UPDATE: Related item here.

THE HORROR OF DVR clogging.

HMM: Pentagon: 61 of those freed from Club Gitmo are back on the battlefield.

UPDATE: “Don’t they understand that Michael Moore loves them?”

SOME BIZARRE HAPPENINGS in the Tennessee legislature. Were the Republicans snookered, or betrayed? Or both?

UPDATE: A.C. Kleinheider has been blogging it. And Michael Silence isn’t impressed.

TAXPROF: Treasury Secretary Nominee Geithner’s Tax Problems. “Perhaps most surprising is that Mr. Geithner prepared his own tax returns in four of the years in question.” So, with Charlie Rangel, is this another argument for tax simplification?

IS OBAMA cooking the books on the deficit?

A NEW OPTICAL METHOD to trap and move molecules for nanotechnology.

SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY running rampant.

I have some related thoughts here.

IN MY DAY, WE USED BEER: Relieving college stress with pets.

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.

JENNIFER RUBIN: Obama’s Centrism Could Drive the GOP Out of Business. “The president-elect may end up pleasing conservatives more than McCain would have.”

MORE ON THE SAGA OF Barack Obama and his Blackberry.

JOE THE PLUMBER meets Chairman Mao in Gaza.

SHANNON LOVE: “California has followed the grim path of the Great Lakes states. As I wrote before, those states were once the industrial dynamo for the entire Earth, yet they destroyed that enormous economic dominance by political policies hostile to economic creativity. Likewise, California had a golden era as an economic and cultural dynamo. Well up until the late 1980s California was the place to go to make it big. People moved from other states to California. Now, internal migration has reversed. California looks less like a dreamland and more like basket case waiting to happen.”

RALLYING RESISTANCE to the antivaccine crusade. Some related thoughts of mine are here.

BLOG STANDS UP FOR laid-off employees.

IN THE MAIL: From Dr. Michael Ozner, The Great American Heart Hoax: Lifesaving Advice Your Doctor Should Tell You About Heart Disease Prevention (But Probably Never Will).

CHRIS DODD, DOING WHAT HE DOES:

Thanks to Sen. Christopher Dodd, Rep. Barney Frank and others, the lending industry spent years issuing mortgages to millions of Americans who had no hope of repaying. Sen. Dodd and Rep. Frank believe homeownership is a right unfettered by income or credit history, and over time, they were instrumental in forcing the industry to lend to some of the least creditworthy Americans.

As everyone knows, the results were disastrous. The housing bubble they helped create and inflate has burst, driving the economy into recession, the lending industry into chaos and millions of Americans into foreclosure, bankruptcy or both. (But at least Sen. Dodd got his millions in campaign cash from the financial industry and special rates on his mortgages from Countrywide Financial.)

Lesson learned? Don’t be silly. In December, GMAC got $5 billion from the government’s $17.9 billion bailout of the domestic auto industry, which Sen. Dodd supported, and immediately lowered its lending standards. No longer would buyers need a credit rating of 700 or higher. Now, people qualify with scores as low as 621, which is 2 points above “poor” and 102 points below America’s median. As columnist George Will put it, GMAC is using taxpayers’ dollars (more accurately, money borrowed against tax receipts far into the future) to issue subprime loans.

Subprime got us into this mess, and subprime will get us out! Er, well, possibly. I doubt it, though.

STEPHEN GREEN: Is Time Rooting For Israel’s Defeat?

But the real story is in the comments: “Stephen,you are beating a dead horse…I picked up a copy of Time a few days ago…light as a feather.” And thinner than a Macbook Air . . . .

HMM: AP: Clinton acted on concerns of husband’s donors.

WITH ALL DELIBERATE SPEED: Obama’s Plan to Close Prison at Guantánamo May Take Year.

THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS CORPS: An Army of Jeff Gannons.

A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE ON THE ECONOMY:

I’m sure they love calling it a Depression in Washington.

It’s sort of like my mother-in-law, who was a young single woman in New York City during World War II. While for many, World War II is remembered as a time of rationing, danger, death, or at least absent family members, my mother-in-law remembered it as a time when she had lots and lots of dates. (New York being full of young officers about to debark, or directing various war-related activities.) Really her golden era.

Likewise, though much of the country suffered during the Depression, for Washington, it was a time when complaints about taxes and regulation were discredited, other power centers were economically crippled, and legislators and executive officials ruled supreme. So I would expect that usage to thrive in Washington.

Related thoughts from Tim Noah.

TIN CUP OVERLOAD: William Beutler is tired of being asked for money, by everyone from Barack Obama to Wikipedia.

TRYING TO AVOID A COLD? Get more sleep.