Let's just put this one under "May I please be in the room the next time Maureen Dowd does an across-the-room spit take?"

Asked about an accusation on the Drudge Report that Clinton staffers had circulated a photo of Barack Obama wearing Somali tribal dress, Singer let 'er rip.

"I find it interesting that in a room of such esteemed journalists that Mr. Drudge has become your respected assignment editor," he lectured. "I find it to be a reflection of one of the problems that's gone on with the overall coverage of this campaign." He went on to chide the journalists for their "woefully inadequate" coverage of Obama, "a point that has been certainly backed up by the 'Saturday Night Live' skit that opened the show this past Saturday evening, which I would refer you all to."

-- Phil Singer, Clinton campaign PowerPointer, somehow managing to give a presentation to elite Washington opinion makers with his head entirely ensconced in his Klein-bottle-shaped GI tract.

Andy Rooney's Prescription

During yesterday's 60 Minutes broadcast, Andy Rooney was making a point about not knowing what a bond auction is, and being "pretty sure that [he] didn't have any because if he did he would have it in this drawer right here."

While rifling through papers in said drawer, making like he was looking for any stray bond auctions, he accidentally revealed a standard New York State prescription sheet.. which shows Andy's true secret to his madness: Percocet.

It also revealed the physician's name and DEA, which I've blurred because *I* don't want to get sued by Andy Rooney's doctor.

(click on link above for video)

Barack Obama is Your new Bicycle

Perhaps this is one of the things that are wrong with MSN.com

click for larger wrongness

somebody had one cup of coffee too many this morning

A bar's stroller ban has set off a turf battle in Brooklyn.

What do you think of strollers in bars?

February 11th, 2008 7:03 am

This is outrageous. Divisive issues such as this threaten to tear the Democratic party apart. We need to show a united front to the GOP, yet our very babies and being used as would be badminton birds. Anyway, why strollers? In my day, we lashed our babies to our bodies with rawhide strips. Babies could gnaw on the strips when teething time came around. When the strips rotted away, the baby fell to the ground and toddling time began. The toddler was given a crust of bread and sent out to make his way in the world, coming home for snack time and story time. Having a baby lashed to you means your body gets toned like no pilates workout would. As the baby gets bigger and bigger, you get stronger and stronger from the increasing resistance. The great world champion Bulgarian powerlifters of the 1970s pushed this technique to the limit in their training and kept their children bound to them well into their teenage years. We should not argue with their success. If these mothers would use these traditional methods, combined with a serape to conceal the baby, this would be a non-issue. For the sake of Democratic unity, I implore the mothers of Brooklyn to use the time honored method of rawhide strips and serapes, and let the healing begin. A ravaged nation awaits your decision and salutes your sacrifice.

— Contemplator, Kansas City

Torture Gets a News Icon

When I was but a wee tyke, or, as I was called at the time, "pendejo", the TV station that my mom worked for had this guy as the news anchor:

... think of him as the PR'ican Walter Cronkite.

Around that time (early 80s), the TV station hired some consultant to sell them the slides and the technology to go along with them so that as they were reporting, say, a bombing in Albania, or Gaza, or Tunisia, or a gas explosion in Ponce, they would have a ready non-contextual icon to put over the shoulder of the anchor related to something going "boom".

I was reminded of that multipurpose iconography when tonight on the PBS NewsHour this was the image shown over the shoulder of Jim Lehrer's (as always, dead, soulless) eyes:

News From The World

Greetings, from Naguabo, Puerto Rico:

A chart design I hadn't seen before

I'm a bit of a fan of charts. I think it is a worthy pursuit to, unobtrusively, include and layer as much information into a 2- (soon to be 3-, yeah?) -dimensional graphic representation as possible. Trivially proposed it is a "how quickly can you solve Rubik's Cube?"-type of information design challenge. More significantly, it can save lives in ways that a tabular/numerical presentation of statistical figures never could hope to.

So, this design of recent primary polls (courtesy of pollster.com) sort of grabbed my attention; the immediate situation (I'm talking about the next two days) does indeed need new thinking ... chart-wise. And somebody rose to the occasion:

(hint for the non-primary politics-oriented: the big circles are the big-ticket states).

The Day Anakin Died

Thursday, January 31, 2008 The Day Anakin Died Business/Location: Heath Ledger Apartment Address: 421 Broome St City: New York State: NY Zip Code: 10013 Phone: Website:

Posted by: Juan Molinari Photo: Juan Molinari

Heath Ledger Apartment When I first learned of Heath Ledger's death I looked away from my cell phone's news feed and turned to the person on my left, who was waiting for the movie to start along with me at the theater. "Heath Ledger is dead," I said, turning the phone to face him so he could read the headline on the Drudge Report . "Who's Heath Ledger?" he said. "He played Anakin Skywalker," I replied. It was only later, after I got home, that I realized that Heath Ledger had not, in fact played Anakin Skywalker; that that was Hayden Christensen. And I cried a little.