In the race to see which would be discounted more quickly, Cheney’s freedom won out over cheap Chinese toys at Christmas season: the final price for Cheney’s freedom is $35 million.

It seems like the value of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s freedom, like all other goods, declines the closer you get to Christmas. Cheney better hope that Nigeria ratifies this deal soon though, because you never know what happens to goods left on the shelf after the holidays.

It’s $500 million or three years in Nigerian prison if former veep Dick Cheney is convicted on bribery charges in Nigeria. I wonder how much Cheney or his former employers woul’d pay to avoid imprisonment on torture charges?

After the news about charges against Dick Cheney relating to the Nigerian bribery scandal it may be worthwhile to sip some coffee and swap clues on what the heck might (or might not) be going on.

It’s hard these days to keep faith in a progressive American future, but a lonely Mississippi ship’s whistle and Albert Camus’ advice that we “must imagine Sisyphus happy” help show the way.

A chief executive whose mental gears were engaged might have thought to himself, “Hmm, wait a second. Why would Scooter lie, to the point of obstructing justice, if he wasn’t involved in the leak to Novak?” He might have been even more suspicious when his vice president compared Libby to “a soldier on the battlefield” — implying that Libby’s crimes were committed on behalf of the administration.

The fox isn’t guarding the henhouse anymore; corporate foxes have outsourced the hens, leased the henhouse in an interest rate swap to Dubai, collateralized the egg stream in a CDO with Singapore traders, and re-hired the egglayers into at-will employment.

Today’s news will be dominated with Bush’s admission that Cheney was mad at him for not pardoning Libby. As the press is distracted with a rehashing of the successful cover-up of one of Bush’s crimes, we ought to remember that today marks the successful cover-up of a more horrible crime.

Now, Scooter seems uninterested in relitigating his conviction for lying to protect his boss, Dick Cheney. Interestingly, though, a key point of his appearance — given its focus on Iran’s purported nukes — was to suggest that back in 2003 more could have been done to prevent Iran from getting nukes. You know. 2003. The year he outed a CIA spy trying to prevent Iran from getting nukes?

Apparently, the Poodle’s memoir (the tour for which got a little messy in Dublin) confirms something that was blatantly obvious: Dick Cheney wanted to conquer the entire Middle East, country by country.