Comparison shopping is big this time of year. As a consumer, you want the best value for your money, so you tend to compare different businesses and see where your dollar will go further. I'd like to apply this commonsense notion to the two most recent bailouts that all of us -- the American taxpayers -- have just "purchased" with our tax dollars.

The first was the bailout of Wall Street (known to wonks as "TARP"), which will cost $700 billion, half of which has been allocated by Congress and subsequently spent. The second is the bailout of the auto industry, which could wind up costing a little over $17 billion for the next few months.

I've been waiting for someone to intelligently compare the two, and finally read the article I've been looking for this weekend. It was written by Bruce Raynor for the Los Angeles Times. Raynor is the head of a union, and is also the chairman of the board of the only union-owned bank in America (according to the Wall Street Journal). So I would assume he'd have a pretty good perspective on both bailouts.

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Welcome to our annual awards! For the past three years, this column has paid homage (translation: "ripped off their gimmick") to the McLaughlin Group television show by handing out our own year-end awards (while using the same categories). This will be a two-part column, with the second installment appearing one week from today. And feel free to watch the McLaughlin Group on your local PBS station this weekend, to compare my picks with theirs.

Also, just for comparison's sake (to see how many things I got wrong, in other words), here are the previous two years' columns:

[2006, Part 1] [2006, Part 2] [2007, Part 1] [2007, Part 2]

Without further ado, let's move on to the awards!

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We haven't done one of these in a while, but between working on tomorrow's column (don't miss Part One of our annual awards show!) and all the usual holiday stuff, I don't have enough time for more than a few short items here. Oh, I did want to say thanks to everyone who has donated so far to the "Send Chris To The Inauguration Fund" as we have just topped halfway towards our giving goal. I sincerely appreciate the support.

But let's get on with today's tidbits...

...In England, they actually spell it "titbits" but it got bowdlerized in America long ago. This isn't even really "news" but it was such a good segue I simply couldn't resist it...

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The Illinois Supreme Court has just, without comment, rejected what was in essence a coup attempt by the state Attorney General, which would have installed the Lieutenant Governor in Governor Blagojevich's place. Attorney General Lisa Madigan's legal reasoning was, to put it mildly, unique. She tried to make the case that the Governor was "unfit for duty" and therefore had to be replaced so the state could continue to function. The entire episode raises a bigger question: could this ever happen to the President of the United States? The answer turns out to be: "Yes, but... it'll probably never happen."

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This is not a follow up to what I wrote last Friday, because this isn't about Illinois Governor Blagojevich's "crude" language. Instead, I write today about Blaggy's crude tactics. Because I'm kind of having a hard time condemning him for doing almost the same thing as what other politicians do more successfully (and completely "legally") with a wink and a nod. There's a game, and there are certain rules to the game. Blaggy went a bit too far, and was caught. He is now paying the price. But what he "got caught" at isn't that all that different from what many (if not most) politicians -- of both parties -- do.

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I know it's a lot more interesting to talk about two shoes getting thrown at President Bush in Iraq, but two more important stories are getting ignored as a result. These are two metaphorical "shoes" thrown at Bush, by the Senate and by Bush's own Inspector General in Iraq. And they're going to have a much more lasting impact on how history sees our Iraq adventure than one video clip of a guy hucking his footwear at President Bush. Because they deal with torture, and the failure of the Iraq reconstruction effort.

Last Thursday, Carl Levin's Senate Armed Services Committee released a report which basically called Bush and his entire National Security Council war criminals. Of note was the fact that the Senate committee voted for the report unanimously. Every single Republican (led by John McCain), along with all the Democrats, voted for this report. And the language the report uses is not the usual vague "mistakes were made" sort (which is often a necessity forced upon the such committees as a whole, by one party or another).

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The history of profanity in American political discourse is an untold story out there just waiting for someone to research and write about -- although finding a willing publisher might be a bit of a problem. Because it seems we're back to the Nixonian days of "[expletive deleted]."

I speak not just of Rod Blagojevich, but also of those who speak of him. In other words, all who bowdlerize or otherwise sanitize his direct quotes. Quite literally -- in other words.

One of the more amusing historical stories of bowdlerization in American politics is John Nance Gardner's description of the Vice President's office being "not worth a bucket of warm piss." Gardner was F.D.R.'s veep for two terms, so it is assumed he knew what he was talking about. But this quote was changed (and misquoted for decades) to "... a warm bucket of spit." Gardner himself reportedly called one writer who used the cleaned-up version a "pantywaist," proving that he was probably one of those politicians it would be fun to have a beer with (he also sounds like he would kick your ass if you called him by his middle name).

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With slightly less than a month and a half to go before Barack Obama's inauguration, Washington, D.C. has officially reached the "freakout" point on the Richter scale of event planning. This may indeed turn out to be justified, if the predicted crowd shows up. Even so, some of what is quietly happening in background of the planning process is worth drawing attention to.

The estimated crowd size for the event varies (depending on who you ask), from a low of one million people to a high of four or five million people. That would be seven or eight times as many people actually live in Washington, it's worth pointing out. George Bush pulled a crowd of around 300,000 the last time around, but the record Obama will likely beat is Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 (one year after Kennedy was assassinated) who saw from 1.2 million to 1.7 million on the District's streets (estimates vary). Such numbers began overwhelming D.C. shortly after Obama won the election (as this hilarious Toles cartoon from 11/13/08 shows). Upon reflection, though, the District got caught up in a "boomtown" mentality -- which is only going to get more frenzied as the event draws nearer.

Of special note in the thick of this lunacy is Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCCIC), who is leading the charge against the prospect that D.C. could turn in to some sort of freezing-cold Mardi Gras. Two out of the following three "Inauguration News" items involve Senator DiFi's recent actions. In keeping with her "tablets handed down on the mountaintop" theme, I hereby present these as "Inauguration Commandments."

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[Note: This is the second of a two-part series. The first installment ran yesterday, and covered the first half of the Iraq SOFA in detail.]

The Status Of Forces Agreement ("SOFA") between Iraq and the United States covers wide-ranging and significant issues between the two countries.

It also covers the trivial and insignificant as well. I don't know why, but this paragraph in Article 18 -- "Official and Military Vehicles" -- seemed to me to be about the most trivial in the entire document. So we start today's look at the SOFA with a very small-bore issue.

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There has been a lot of ink spilled over the ramifications of the agreement recently struck between the United States and Iraq on our presence there for the next three years. The Status Of Forces Agreement ("SOFA") was passed by the Iraqi Parliament and signed by all three members of the Iraqi Executive Council, meaning it will have the force of law come the first of January, 2009. President Bush has decided that his signature was enough for America to enter the agreement, so Congress never got their say on the document. But with such commentary flying left and right, I thought I would go to the document itself to see what it actually says (versus how people are interpreting it).

What I found is that the Iraqis got almost everything they had pushed for, and the Bush administration got almost nothing of what they wanted. This agreement was tailored for Iraq's political situation, and not America's. The Iraqis used a combination of a ticking clock and their own public pressure to insist on several points that must have horrified the Bush people. Actually, two ticking clocks -- our own elections (and Bush's lame duck status), and the fact that the United Nations authorization for us being in Iraq expires at the end of this year. Neither country, for their own individual reasons, wanted to extend the U.N. mandate, and Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki used this as a giant lever to get pretty much everything he wanted from Bush.

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