Cheat Sheet

Kevin Rivoli / AP

Questions over Caroline Kennedy's qualifications for Senate remain, but she seems to have learned already the political importance of schmoozing. In a questionnaire for Politico, Kennedy praised New York Gov. David Paterson, who will choose Hillary Clinton's Senate replacement, as "one of the first elected officials in the nation to sound the alarm about our fiscal crisis and he has led the charge to get Washington to give aid to the New York." Politico notes that her stances "seemed calibrated to appeal both to New York's governor ... who will choose the next senator, and its voters, who will have their say in 2010, and again in 2012." Notable among her positions is her support for "full equality and marriage rights" for same-sex couples—something that both Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer oppose. Her spokesman also said that she opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning and refused to say whether she would support the Democratic challenger against Mayor Bloomberg, whose senior aides are assisting her campaign.

Barack Obama's rescue plan is getting bigger: The president-elect now hopes to create or preserve three million jobs, up from the 2.5 million he named months ago. The increase comes after a meeting in which Obama's advisers told him that the economy could lose up to 3.5 million jobs and unemployment could exceed 9 percent in 2009. Economists are calling on the government to spend $800 billion to $1.3 trillion on stimulus, but an Obama adviser tells The Washington Post that the president-elect has settled on $775 billion as the highest figure likely to win congressional approval, which would still be, according to some calculations, the most expensive measure ever passed by Congress. According to Obama's top economic adviser, Larry Summers, the transition team is "scrubbing" proposals now for "basic soundness," and is trying to address concerns that the measure will be a grab bag for Democratic interest groups.

John Gress / Reuters

George Stephanopoulos has an early look at the Obama team’s internal review of its contacts with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, and the news is good for Rahm Emanuel. The incoming chief of staff, sources tell the ABC newsman, had only one “pro-forma” courtesy phone call with Blago, and only a “passing reference”—no deal—was made to Obama’s vacated Senate seat. Rahm also talked four times with Blago’s chief of staff, John Harris, about the seat, and made the case for picking Obama pal Valerie Jarrett, though he confirmed that all Blago would get was “appreciation” for it. The president-elect had expressed frustration over the US attorney’s request that he delay the release of his team’s review of its involvement with Blago’s alleged attempts to sell the Senate seat; it’s expected to be released this week.

Though the brutal weather slowed box office figures this weekend, one Hollywood titan can still bask in the glory of having triumphed over another. Jim Carrey’s comedy Yes Man topped the list, earning $18.2 million during the three days beginning on Friday, thumping Will Smith’s drama Seven Pounds, which made $16 million. Warner Bros., which released Yes Man, estimated that the weather knocked almost $3 million off the movie’s haul, and said it hoped to make the money back over the holidays. Both movies received negative reviews, though Carrey’s were mild compared to the drubbing Smith’s offering took. The mouse cartoon The Tale of Despereaux and the sci-fi remake The Day the Earth Stood Still rounded out the top five, earning $10.5 million and $10.2 million, respectively.

The members of the wealthy Fifth Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan, who suffered nearly $2 billion in losses relating to Bernie Madoff's alleged Ponzi scheme, are now going after their own president, J. Ezra Merkin. Merkin is reputed to have served as a key recruiter for Madoff. "Obviously, he will have to step down," an anonymous member told the New York Post. "He's being sued all over the place." The temple is a small group of influential jews, once call a "Who's Who" of elite world Jewry. Merkin attended Saturday's 9 a.m. service, where the paper says he was "warmly received". And his lawyers insist that, "Mr. Merkin and his family are personally among the largest victims of the massive fraud confessed by Bernard Madoff." Welcome to the club.

After investigators wrapped up the crime scene where the remains of three-year-old Caylee Anthony were discovered, they moved immediately to serve a search warrant on the house of her grandparents, George and Cindy Anthony. "It's never a good time for anyone who's lost a granddaughter--obviously we're going to treat them with respect," said Orange County Sheriff's Capt. Angelo Nieves. "But we have an investigation to conduct." Investigators spent several hours searching the residence and removed two large boxes and two large bags of items which Capt. Nieves said were of "evidentiary value". Caylee's grandfather George was visibly upset. The warrant was issued based on evidence discovered at the scene of her body, but Capt. Nieves would not clarify what that evidence was.

At a private meeting after the failure of Lehman Brothers, President Bush reportedly asked his advisors, "How did we get here?" Funny because, according to The New York Times, he helped chart the course. Early in his presidency, Bush promised to "use the mighty muscle of the federal government" to help make housing available to low-income families, offering tax incentives and forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to set ambitious lending goals. His reward? Mortgage bankers and brokers tripled their contributions to his campaign from 2000 to 2004 and the founder of the nation's largest subprime lender became one of the Republican Party's top 10 donors in 2004. Bush coupled this with a weakening of the SEC: His first chairman promised a "kindler, gentler" agency; his second was forced out for being too aggressive; and the third chairman has presided over the present catastrophe.

Rumors of Laura Bush's forthcoming memoirs have understandably generated a lot of buzz—after all, she had a front seat to her husband's disasters while somehow avoiding their taint. The New Yorker, however, has some bad news for readers hoping for the inside scoop. "She was not forthcoming about anything that I would consider controversial," said one publisher who met with her. "I considered it the worst, or the most frustrating, meeting of its sort that I've ever had." Another publisher hoped "that she's a closet Democrat, like in the Curtis Sittenfeld novel," but after meeting with her, "you got the sense she's just like him." A third publisher chose not to meet with her at all. "I got the impression that everyone was totally underwhelmed by her. That's why there's so little buzz."

Mark Bowden turned the chaos of Somalia into a book and hit film, Black Hawk Down. At that point in 1997 the country had already been without a firm leader for six years. "Unbelievably, in the decade since then, it has only gotten worse," says Bowden in an op-ed for today's Washington Post. "While the world has largely stood by, the Horn of Africa has served as a laboratory for anarchy--and the results aren't pretty." Somalia today, he writes, is on the brink of becoming an Islamist state, and already harbors terrorists who wreak their havoc around the region and the world. "Here we have a country that has been in crisis for nearly twenty years," said Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the U.N. special representative for Somalia. "And we say, well okay, we'll chase down some pirates and send some bags of rice. It is not enough." There are many things that the Obama Administration could do to help stabalize Somalia, write Bowden, but the simplest would be to stop the casualty ridden practice of missile attacks. "Whatever is gained by eliminating one murderous zealot," says Bowden, "is lost by turning entire Somali communities against Western aid efforts."

Ever since Muntader Al Zaidi threw his shoes at President Bush, Turkish shoemaker Ramazan Baydan, who has claimed, like several other shoemakers across the Middle East, to have made the famous pair, has been deluged with orders: 15,000 orders from Iraq, 18,000 from the United States, and an offer from a representative from Britain to sell 95,000 pairs in Europe. Baydan has renamed the Ducati Model 271 as "The Bush Shoe," and claims that he was surprised by the shoe's aerodynamics. Unfortunately, Baydan's claims to have created Zaidi's shoes cannot be checked because, as The New York Times mysteriously reports, "Explosives tests by investigators destroyed the offending footwear."

"Politics without buzzwords is like sports without clichés, math without numbers, or Blago without bleeps," begins a piece in today's New York Times. "Tough to imagine, in other words, especially in such a game-changer of a campaign year in which buzzwords were flying like shoes." So what words make this year's list? "Change," of course, as well as "Maverick," "Hockey Mom," and "Terrorist Fist Jab." Nonpolitical entries include "Fail" ("Largely used online, this is a verb turned into a mass noun, as in "A bucket of fail"), "Staycation," "Phelpsian" ("Excellent in the fashion of the swimmer Michael Phelps"), and "Sister Wife" ("a woman who shares a husband with another woman"). While it's fun to see all the words in place, let us hope that some of them—we have our eyes on "Joe" (as in Joe Six-pack and Joe the Plumber)—don't make it to 2009.

Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of Rod Blagojevich had a rather comic beginning: After Pamela Davis was denied a request to build a new medical office building because she refused to use a specific contractor, Davis called the FBI. "A few days later, three F.B.I. agents met her at her office, bugged her phone, and outfitted her with the wire to put in her bra." Five minutes into a conversation with the contractor and another woman, the FBI agents called her. "'It's extortion! It's extortion!' They yell, 'Get 'em out! Get 'em out!" Over the next seven months, Davis wore the wire in her bra, handing over tapes to the FBI of Chicago businessmen talking openly about how they hoped to profit off the city's hospitals. As Fitzgerald's investigation widened, it eventually snared Blagojevich. Davis, for her part, still hasn't built her office building.