DAN CLEARY: Keep an eye on Bob Corker.

UPDATE: A Corker spokesperson emails: “As I’ve told Fox, we were invited late yesterday to a meeting in Sen. Ben Nelson’s office and were surprised to learn by reading the news this morning that by accepting the invitation we had joined a gang. That’s not accurate and we did not attend the meeting.”

WAY OUT IN FRONT: China tops list of foreign visitors to ORNL.

NOT THE JUDICIARY’S FINEST HOUR:

The setting is Pennsylvania coal country, but it’s a story right out of Dickens’ grim 19th-century landscape: Two of Luzerne County’s most senior judges on Monday were accused of sending children to jail in return for kickbacks.

The judges, Luzerne County President Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., 58, and his predecessor, Senior Judge Michael T. Conahan, 56, will serve seven years in jail under a plea agreement.

They’re alleged to have pocketed $2.6 million in payments from juvenile detention center operators. . . .In asking the court to intervene in April, the law center cited hundreds of examples where teens accused of minor mischief were pressured to waive their right to lawyers, and then shipped to a detention center.

One teen was given a 90-day sentence for having parodied a school administrator online. Such unwarranted detentions left “both children and parents feeling bewildered, violated and traumatized,” center lawyers said.

“Very few people would stand up” to the Luzerne judges, according to the law center’s executive director, Robert G. Schwartz.

Obviously, we need more people willing to insist on their rights. These guys should be tarred and feathered.

UPDATE: Various readers point out that this is another case of Name That Party! Reader Paul Risenhoover adds: “Since they didn’t name it, I knew they were Democrats.” Ouch.

ANOTHER UPDATE: “I wonder why the Inquirer didn’t tell us this?”

TARGETING BRAIN CANCER CELLS with nanotechnology.

JUDD GREGG FOR SECRETARY OF COMMERCE? Dan Riehl thinks it’s just a trick to give the Democrats another Senate seat. Also, it gives them a Republican to blame if the economy continues to get worse. . . .

A DISMAL TRACK RECORD OF “do as I say, not as I do.” And it’s still January!

7 OUTDOOR GEAR PICKS for 2009.

HAS THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS CORPS BEEN GANNONIZED?

STICKING IT TO RAHM. “Rahm told the president that he can take care of Congress . . . He said, ‘These guys will roll over, they’re afraid of being called the party of No. Believe me, I know them. They’ll be easy.’” Plus this:

“We gave the president what he asked for, a temporary stimulus bill,” said a senior Republican, “at half the cost of what the Democrats wrote. He knows it. They handed him a monster of spending. Rahm did this, and now he takes this to the Senate. Does Rahm want to be an honest broker, or does he want to be the guy who socks Republicans in the face? He isn’t helping with the Democrats, and he’s hurting with the Republicans.”

Obama couldn’t control the House Democrats; why should he expect to do better with the House Republicans?

WHO WANTS ELECTRIC CARS? Rich people!

IN THE MAIL: From Don Brockette, America Falling.

OBAMA’S LOBBYING RULES: Destined to fail? “This culture has created multimillionaires and provided a grand style of life to thousands. It has helped moneyed interests protect their status and privileges, undermined government regulation of business and turned our elected officials into chronic money-chasers.”

REPUBLICANS AND THE STIMULUS VS. THE DEMOCRATS AND IRAQ: “If Republicans in the coming months fear public backlash and begin softening their position, they face the threat the Democrats did when they voted for the Iraq War in 2002.”

I think the stimulus is objectively a bad idea. But politically, opposing it seems like a no-brainer: If it passes and the economy gets better it’s old news, and who’s to say the economy wouldn’t have gotten better on its own? If it passes and the economy doesn’t get better, it’s an issue for the GOP.

WAIT, I THOUGHT URBAN LIFE WAS AUTHENTIC AND SATISFYING, and suburbia was sterile. But look what this Pew poll found:

“City residents disproportionately are more likely than people living in other types of communities to say they would prefer to live in a place other than a city,” Morin says. “Fewer than half of all city residents say there is no better place to live than in a city.”

A smaller proportion of women express the desire to live in the nation’s largest cities. “Women are less drawn to big cities,” says Robert Lang, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. “It could be safety.”

It could be. Also, the larger the urban area, the worse the local government tends to be.

HOPE AND CHANGE: Clyburn scoffs at Iraq withdrawal timetables. “Rep. Jim Clyburn, one of Obama’s key allies in Congress, waltzes away from Obama’s commitment to a 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. This doesn’t displease me, of course, except for the rank hypocrisy of Democrats like Clyburn during the campaign. . . . Talk about sunshine patriots! When Bush was in the White House, Clyburn did everything he could to undermine the war effort. Now that his ally has the job, Clyburn suddenly wants to play Wise Old Man. Feh.”

JUSTICE DELAYED: Jules Crittenden writes: “It’ll be interesting to see how people who previously applauded dissent in the Pentagon, and military insubordination, refusal to follow orders, desertion, etc., respond as this case develops.”

READER MARK LITTLEHALE WRITES FROM MADISON, KENTUCKY: “Please let everyone know that we have been without power since Tuesday. We have over two thousand poles down. My hospital has been on backup power since tuesday . Send generators and gas cans.” But he can still communicate via iPhone.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Who’s undercutting Obama? “This might be the simply the problems of a new administration struggling to cope with a flood of calls and perhaps the complex machinery of the modern office. But it might also indicate that President Obama’s messages about open government have not reached press secretary Robert Gibbs and his staff. While it is too early to judge just how this will work out, the early signs are troubling. And interviews with a dozen Washington reporters indicate that the Obama press operation tends to embrace friendly questions, while treating skeptical questions as not worth their time or, worse, as coming from an enemy.”

KNOXVILLE CHEF CAROL SCOTT is on “Hell’s Kitchen.” I liked her restaurant, Edison Park, and was sorry it closed. Glad she’s landed on her feet.

VOLCANO FEVER: Alaska’s Mt. Redoubt looks set to erupt. Some people think the interest goes beyond the scientific.

WIL WHEATON on the Roku Netflix Digital Video Player. “It’s a tiny little box that streams anything from Netflix’s on-demand library straight into your television, and that’s all it does.” More bad news for broadcast and cable networks, I’d say.

UPDATE: Reader Stephen DeMaura writes: “My girlfriend and I got one for Christmas and it has been the best gift in years. The picture quality is fantastic and the only issues we have experienced have been with Comcast not the device.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hiawatha Bray wrote on the Roku.

HARTFORD COURANT: National Review Needles Dodd Over Mortgages. “One flaw in the NRO piece. It seems to be written from a Washington point of view. In D.C., it does, indeed, seem that the mortgage flap has dropped off the screen. But there is no evidence that Dodd’s constituents are forgetting about his favorable mortgage terms from Countrywide. His approval ratings are at an all-time low, and Dodd is at the most vulnerable juncture of his latest six-year term — the two years before re-election.”

Meanwhile, will someone with website design skills go over and offer the folks at DumpChrisDodd.com some help? It’s like they’re stuck in 1995.

WAIT, I THOUGHT EVERYBODY HATED HIM: A standing ovation for George W. Bush.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Six Degrees of Alan Mollohan.

On March 22, 2004, Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) collected just over $300,000 for his re-election campaign, more than half the total that he spent for the two-year election cycle.

Of the donations he collected that day, at least $100,000 came from individuals tied to companies that have addresses in the office park built around the Alan B. Mollohan Innovation Center and operated by the West Virginia High Technology Cooperative, a foundation that Mollohan helped create.

The list of tenants in the office park reads like a who’s who of Mollohan campaign donors. But the connections between Mollohan and the building named after him don’t end there.

The office park is at the center of a web of relationships among a dozen or so individuals and companies that support Mollohan’s campaigns, his local booster organizations and the Robert H. Mollohan Family Charitable Foundation Inc. Mollohan has provided many of these same companies with millions of dollars of federal earmarks, and announced millions more in grants to these companies from government agencies and larger federal contractors.

Read the whole thing. Somehow I don’t think that Nancy Pelosi lived up to her promise to “drain the swamp.”

OBAMA CALLS WALL STREET IRRESPONSIBLE, but look at what he’s doing:

Eight hours of debate in the HR to pass a bill spending $820 billion, or roughly $102 billion per hour of debate.

Only ten per cent of the “stimulus” to be spent on 2009.

Close to half goes to entities that sponsor or employ or both members of the Service Employees International Union, federal, state, and municipal employee unions, or other Democrat-controlled unions.

This bill is sent to Congress after Obama has been in office for seven days. It is 680 pages long. According to my calculations, not one member of Congress read the entire bill before this vote. Obviously, it would have been impossible, given his schedule, for President Obama to have read the entire bill.

For the amount spent we could have given every unemployed person in the United States roughly $75,000.

We could give every person who had lost a job and is now passing through long-term unemployment of six months or longer roughly $300,000.

There has been pork barrel politics since there has been politics. The scale of this pork is beyond what had ever been imagined before — and no one can be sure it will actually do much stimulation.

Wall Street didn’t have Obama’s chutzpah. And it didn’t do nearly the damage to the nation that this bill will do. (Via Dan Riehl).