At the end of 2006 we brought you the funniest political quotes of 2006.

At the end of 2007 we brought you the funniest political quotes of 2007.

Now that we’re nearing the end of 2008 it’s time for the top ten funniest political quotes of 2008.

That’s the pattern and the premise. No further set-up required. Here’s The List for 2008, the top ten funniest political quotes of 2008.

10. Mike Huckabee, on what squirrel tastes like:

“It tastes like squirrel.”

9. John Edwards on cheating on Elizabeth Edwards:

“Can I explain to you what happened? First of all it happened during a period after she was in remission from cancer.”

8. Nancy Pelosi:

“I have always loved longitude. I love latitude; it’s in the stars. But longitude, it’s about time. … Time and clocks and all the rest of that have always been a fascination for me.”

7. President Bush, meeting with President Arroyo of the Philippines:

“I reminded the President that I am reminded of the great talent of the — of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House.”

6. Barack Obama:

“Can you imagine if you had your Social Security invested in the stock market these last two weeks? These last two months? You wouldn’t need Social Security. You’d be having a – you know like, what was it. ‘Sanford and Son,’ ‘I’m coming Weezie.’ It ain’t right.”

5. A tie …

Joe Biden, at an Ocala, FL, ice cream shop:

“Look at this! Man, this is a dangerous place. Holy mackerel! I’m an ice cream guy. Is ice cream down that way? Could I get a sugar cone and chocolate chip? … I’m getting plain old chocolate chip. That’s plenty, God love ya.”

And Joe Biden, hearing testimony from Gen. David Petraeus:

PETRAEUS: Senator, the vice president was in Iraq just a couple weeks after that, and he also had a very warm reception.
BIDEN: Did he get kissed? Get a kiss?
PETRAEUS: I believe he did get kissed when he was there.
BIDEN: I just want to know whether he got kissed, that’s all.

4. John McCain:

“We should be able to deliver bottled hot water to dehydrated babies.”

3. Sarah Palin, being interviewed by Katie Couric:

COURIC: And when it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?

PALIN: I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.

COURIC: What, specifically?
PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.

2. Chris Matthews:

“It’s part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”

1. Bill Clinton:

“The country is groaning and moaning and screaming for change.”

We learn that Harvard professor and former Obama campaign foreign policy adviser Samantha Power is now advising president-elect Obama on transition matters relating to the State Department — which Hillary Clinton might head.

Why is this significant?

Here’s why …

And yes, that’s not the Laffer Curve they’re talking about being written on a napkin…

Item:

Edna Parker, who became the world’s oldest person more than a year ago, has died at age 115.

No word on who will replace Parker in the U.S. Senate.

Back in March, the New York Times examined Barack Obama, the author.

The story contained this intriguing nugget:

When his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention sent his memoir soaring out of obscurity and straight onto the best-seller list, he untethered himself from his longtime literary agent in favor of Robert B. Barnett, the Washington lawyer who had gotten Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton an $8 million book advance and then landed Mr. Obama a $1.9 million, three-book deal.

Who was that longtime literary agent Obama abandoned, er, untethered?  Jane Dystel .. and the Times story had more:

Two weeks before Mr. Obama’s swearing in, Crown announced that it had signed a contract with him for three more books. The first would offer “a window into the political and spiritual convictions that propelled Obama’s recent U.S. Senate victory.” The second will be a children’s book about his life, and the third is yet to be defined. The deal had been initiated by Ms. Dystel, the announcement said, but “negotiated and concluded by Robert B. Barnett of Williams & Connolly LLP.”

What happened between Mr. Obama and Ms. Dystel is not clear. Ms. Dystel declined to be interviewed for this article. Mr. Obama said, “It really had more to do with the fact that by the time ‘The Audacity of Hope’ was written, I was going to be in Washington and was obviously now very high profile.”

Talk about a glowing self-evaluation.

That episode in Obama’s life is revisted in the December 2008 issue of The Washingtonian magazine, in a profile of super-lawyer Barnett:

In 2004, Barnett receieved a call from a new young US senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.  Years earlier, an enterprising New York agent, Jane Dystel, had discovered Obama and persuaded him to write Dreams From My Father, the story of how the son of a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.  She had gotten the idea for the book after seeing a news clip about the law student in the New York Times.

Now that Obama was a senator, Dystel wanted him to reissue his book and write another one.  But Obama ditched the agent who had discovered him and turned to Barnett to negotiate the reissue of Dreams From My Father and sell The Audacity of Hope.

OK, this time, instead of untethered, we get ditched.  Either way, sounds like when it came to Obama’s career and book ambitions, change really was the operative word.

It’s a Thanksgiving tradition at Extreme Mortman — our rerun of our blog post on the late great Art Buchwald that played off the Washington Post running his Thanksgiving column year after year after year.

Basically, every prediction we make in this rehash of our old gag proved wrong.  But why would that stop us from doing it again now?

If you remember Art Buchwald, please join us in raising a glass and making a Thanksgiving toast in his memory.  If you remember the Washington Post, please do likewise.

Here now, is a copy-and-paste repeat of our prior year salutes to Art Buchwald …

Washingtonians know that one of our longest-standing Thanksgiving traditions is the Washington Post annually serving up the same Art Buchwald Thanksgiving column that first appeared some time during the Coolidge Administration.

Buchwald, sadly, is no longer with us.  But will his ageless column still be with us on Thursday?  We can’t wait for the trucks to deliver that early bulldog edition.  We bet the Post runs the column.  Heck, free content is free content, right?

Either way, Extreme Mortman won’t be stopped from doing our annual response to the annual Buchwald column.

We started this family-friendly tradition it last year and continue now — word-for-word as it appeared during America’s glory days, 2006.  Here it is:

Chances are, after your guests finish extinguishing their cigarettes in the mashed potatoes, your Thanksgiving dinner will be marked by reading Art Buchwald’s Thanksgiving column, which was written in 1953 and feels like it has run in the Washington Post every year since 1952.  (If you missed last year’s, click here.  But not to worry, it’ll be the same this year.)

Inspired by Art Buchwald’s Thanksgiving franchise, Extreme Mortman years ago began his own special Thanksgiving joke.  I tell it to you now so you have plenty of time to steal it and practice telling it to others.  It provides the perfect opportunity to impress your family and friends at Thursday’s big dinner by showing that, like Art Buchwald, you’re witty, you’re on top of the news, you can identify important national icons, and you think great thoughts which may or may not have been inspired by the French.

Now, without further adieu, is the annual Extreme Mortman Thanksgiving joke:

For Thanksgiving, C-SPAN is providing gobble to gobble coverage.

Not necessarily for the good old days of Carter-era stagflation with high interest rates and high inflation.  But for the good old days of when you good provide Congressional testimony while chomping on a lit cigar.

With special guest George W. Bush.  Sarah Palin’s got nothing on this career-stopping turkey video.

Instead of bowling a turkey, and we don’t mean Paul O’Neill, maybe Bush could have tried his hand at, ahem, duck pins.

Barack Obama is getting mostly plaudits for his developing economic team — from folks on the right as well as the left.

But this exchange at his press conference today seemed a bit, well, lacking in substance.

QUESTION:  Do you have any shopping advice for nervous consumers? And are you planning to hit the malls yourself on Friday?

PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA: Well, we are going to do some Christmas shopping and Malia and Sasha have already put their lists together. It’s mostly for Santa. They send their letter every year. But we may do some extra shopping as well.

I — look, I think families understandably are nervous and concerned about their economic situation. We’ve seen job loss. We’ve seen flat-lining wages and incomes. The economic statistics have been bad and people are watching television and understandably are nervous about their future.

There is no doubt that during tough economic times, family budgets are going to be pinched. I think it is important for the American people, though, to have confidence that we’ve gone through recessions before, we’ve gone through difficult times before; that my administration intends to get this economy back on track; that we are going to create 2.5 million jobs over the next two years; that our future is bright if we make good decisions.

And what we don’t want to do is get caught up in a spiral where people pull back from the economy, businesses then pull back, jobs are reduced, and we get into a downward spiral.

What we want to do is to be sober, to be clear, to recognize that we’ve got some real adjustments that have to be made. That’s true with — in individual businesses. It’s true in terms of individual family budgets. It’s also true for the economy as a whole.

But we continue to have the best workers in the world. We continue to have the most innovation in the world. We continue to be in possession of extraordinary resources that, if we harness properly, will get this economy moving over the next couple of years but also over the next two decades or three decades.

So people should — should understand that help is on the way. And as they think about this Thanksgiving shopping weekend, and as they think about the Christmas season that is coming up, I hope that everybody understands that — that we are going to be able to get through these difficult times, but we’re just going to have make some good choices.

That’s a lot of verbage to get to the punchline, that “help is on the way.”  Then again, at least it’s more specific than, say, “hope is on the way.”

Assuming that Obama can’t spend too much time at the shopping mall this season personally rescuing the retail economy, here’s one specific thing he can do to help out the economic situation for everyday Americans — click on Google Ads.  Lots and lots of clicking, lots and lots of Google Ads.  We recommend he start with the ads on top of this page.