Gibbs rebukes CNBC's Santelli  —  White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs jumped at the chance Friday to rebuke a CNBC reporter whose attack on President Barack Obama's anti-foreclosure plan caught fire on the Internet.  —  Gibbs took on CNBC's Rick Santelli in unusually personal terms …

BREAKING: Darrel Thompson Jumps Off Burris Ship  —  Acting Chief of Staff to Senator Roland Burris, Darrel Thompson, has resigned his position, according to senior staffers in the US Senate.  —  Darrel Thompson, a former Senior Adviser to Senator Harry Reid, had been dispatched by Senator Reid …

Jindal Rejects $90 Million In Recovery Funding That Would Have Benefited 25,000 Louisiana Residents  —  When President Obama signed the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act last week, it included three different provisions to benefit unemployed workers.  The first provided funding to states …

Schumer: Failed ‘Zombie’ Banks Should Be Nationalized  —  Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) believes that failed “zombie” banks, no matter what their size, should be taken over by the government, which should then wipe out shareholders, fire management, clean up the banks and quickly resell them into the marketplace.

Jeffrey Goldberg's gasping, dying smear tactics  —  (updated below - Update II)  —  The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg — in a paragraph he entitles “Where the Left and Right Always Seem to Agree” — writes (emphasis added): … His link to “Israel-bashing” in the penultimate sentence …

Obama Administration Shoots Down LaHood Mileage Tax Idea  —  Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood floated the idea to tax motorists based on how many miles they drive rather than how much gasoline they burn.  —  FOXNews.com  —  President Obama's transportation department slapped down a suggestion …

Obama's Supine Diplomacy  —  The Biden prophecy has come to pass.  Our wacky veep, momentarily inspired, predicted in October that “it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama.”  Biden probably had in mind an eve-of-the-apocalypse drama like the Cuban missile crisis.

John Gibson Did Not Compare Eric Holder To Monkey With Bright Blue Scrotum (UPDATED)  —  UPDATE: The Huffington Post has learned that the below video has been doctored.  We regret the error and apologize to Mr. Gibson.  John Gibson never compared Eric Holder to a monkey with a bright blue scrotum.

Laissez-Faire Capitalism Has Failed  —  The financial crisis lays bare the weakness of the Anglo-Saxon model.  —  It is now clear that this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the worst economic crisis in the last 60 years.  While we are already in a severe …

Report Finds Guantanamo Prison Meets Standards of Geneva Convention  —  A Pentagon review of conditions in the Guantanamo Bay military prison has concluded that the treatment of detainees meets the requirements of the Geneva Convention but that prisoners in the highest-security camps …

Prince of Darkness Denies Own Existence  —  Listening to neoconservative mastermind Richard Perle at the Nixon Center yesterday, there was a sense of falling down the rabbit hole.  —  In real life, Perle was the ideological architect of the Iraq war and of the Bush doctrine of preemptive attack.

CHU JUMPS IN ‘DEEP END OF THE POOL’  —  From NBC's John Yang  —  Energy Secretary Steven Chu may be a Nobel laureate Ph.D. in physics, but his first forays into energy policy suggest he's a neophyte when it comes to the ways of Washington.  —  At a forum with reporters on Thursday …

Obama Bans Gimmicks, and Deficit Will Rise  —  By stopping accounting gimmicks that make deficit projections look smaller, the budget will appear $2.7 trillion deeper in debt over the next decade, according to administration officials.

More Darwin  —  Update: 2pm CST: (I've rewritten most of the post so that it reflects the current state of affairs.  Many comments below were made before the storefront was open, so that is why they say what they do)  —  So, I made some Darwin artwork that parodies the famous Shepard Fairey Obama poster.

Poll: Obama rating slips, but still high  —  CNN Deputy Political Director  —  WASHINGTON (CNN) — A national poll indicates that two out of three Americans approve of the way Barack Obama is handling his job as president of the United States.  —  The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey …

Washington Post Stands By Climate Change Denialism  —  For those who are late to the party, recently George Will wrote a column claiming, most broadly, that in the 1970s there was a scientific consensus that the world was suffering from “global cooling” that was as firm as the current consensus about global warming.

Land of a Thousand Liebermans  —  The jungle primary isn't just for Louisiana anymore.  —  In fact, it isn't for Louisiana at all, which has phased out the system for federal races.  But the practice was recently adopted by Washington State.  And if a State Senator from San Luis Obispo gets his way …

RNC sends $250K for Coleman recount  —  The Republican National Committee has transferred $250,000 to the Minnesota GOP to help pay legal fees in Norm Coleman's ongoing recount battle against Al Franken for the Minnesota Senate seat.  —  A spokesman for the RNC, Alex Conant …