Jane is right to dog this one. We put our leaders in an insulated, privileged bubble and then wonder why they lose touch with us, the people sweating out the paychecks from week to week, hoping no one gets sick. There isn’t a waiting ambulance outside my door, though Obama’s got one in the Senate.

Nowadays my first thought when I see newly-elected Congresspeople is that they’ve won the employment lottery. And after a term or two or more, that pension will start to kick in. As a taxpayer, I take better care of them than I do of myself.

“On the positive side, Obama is finally ready to take a position on something controversial. Good to know.”

Please give me a post when Obama takes a moral stand on somthing other than window dressing for the mainstream media. A good speaker; a hollow man.

I sent his fundraising letter back to MoveOn (I think it was MoveOn), saying he needed to be more vocal on the positive side of GLBT rights before I’d consider responding to fundraising pleas from him. And, I meant it.

We didn’t elect them so they could profit from their new-found fame, and if they do, then they should return that money to the taxpayers who have paid their salaries, and made them “famous.”

When they tackle ethics (yuh, right) in Congress, they’ve got to do something to eliminate, or at least limit, an elected representative’s ability to personally profit from his position by “writing” books, receiving honoraria to make speeches and the like. If they can’t make ends meet on their Congressional salaries, they ought to find another line of work.

Am I the only one out here confused? The Democrats have had a tenuous one-vote majority in the Senate for less than a week, and FDL has attacked two Democratic Senators for corruption?

Isn’t there a Republican you could put in your sights? Or some DINO? (Hadassah Lieberman’s Big Pharma client list would be far more interesting to me. Ditto the real estate activity of 49 Republican Senators.)

Or, if you want to criticize Democrats, how ’bout some lists of campaign war chests that could be sending a check to Karen Carter (LA-02) who’s running against truly corrupt William Jefferson (he of the $90,000 cash in the freezer) in a December run-off.

I don’t have any patience for the circular firing squad.

Would you rather go through another Whitewater? Because unlike the popular opinion among Democratic partisans, Whitewater WAS an inappropriate business deal for a state attorney general (as Bill Clinton was at the time) and it was intended to be a sweetheart deal. Didn’t pan out that way but that was the intention. Lets hold them accountable at all times, no matter who. This land deal of Obama’s stinks on ice. Its not the way people buy houses in the normal course.

(As an aside, the thing that bothered me most about Whitewater is that the Clintons and MacDougals intended to sell those lots as “contract” land sales, which is a form of land sale that takes advantage of the least informed people. If you miss a payment, you lose your whole investment.)

His wife’s salary getting tripled looks bad and the book deal looks bad. Why are these people SOOO willing to cash in? The Obamas are greedy people; lets not hear any more about them being inspiring.

I’ve never caught more than a few minutes at a time of Oprah. I don’t get her popularity at all. But one little bit I did see was when she had the cast of Friends on and she’s telling David Schwimmer – with tears in her eyes – how much it meant to her that the show had him dating a black woman at some point. I think Oprah has a few screws loose on the subject of race. Friends was a broad comedy show about a bunch of nincompoops and she thought it was a great step forward for black people when one of the nincompoops dated someone who was black. So now she’s in love with the idea of Barak Obama running for president because he’s black.

Before the start of the auction, Slokumb had estimated 100 people would attend the event, but more than 200 showed up, with 58 registering to bid. Many chose to hang on to their bidding cards, and those who did bid were cautious. Absent were “bidding wars” with people vying back and forth for the highest bid while the price climbs higher and higher. Instead, most were content to let the property go to someone else for a lesser “bargain.”

None of the asking prices were met. The closest bid fell $149,000 short, while bidding on the most expensive property, located at 1411-1415 South St., fell more than $2.5 million shy of the almost $6 million asking price.

Some of the properties previously had been listed on the open market, but for others, the auction was the first showing.

Victor Heymann, a broker with Resort Realty & Appraisals Inc., had one of his own properties in the auction. He said he was “somewhat disappointed” that his three-bedroom Azalea Street home appraised at $985,000 only went for $820,000.

The market is softening up, let’s hope Obama has learned his lesson.

The lesson is if you need to keep your nose clean, keep all deals at arms-length (i.e., people you don’t know or synthesize the arms length by using professional advisors — and for god’s sake, get an objective professional opinion of fairness).

BTW, I have a friend who called me today because he is trying to buy a 5,000 SF house listed for $1.8m for $1.5m in a Kenwood-adjacent community. These things do actually happen.

Real estate deals. This is my professional field. Chances are that if the guy was shady, and was looking f