• John McCain is still tilting towards earmark windmills, and shaking and asking his magic Twitter, rhetorically?, if, um, hellooo? it’s ever heard of another type of Internet called the Wikipedia and if so, why should the government endow public arts programs? [Hotline On Call]
• Those purple ticket people, the ones whom you might remember were inhumanly inconvenienced during Barry’s Inauguration, have for whatever reason demanded and received commemorative Joe Biden sex pin-ups from Diane Feinstein. [Ben Smith]
• Huffington Post comedy site DemocraticCongressionalCampaignCommittee.com has created a fun novelty form in which users “role play” as one of the many Republicans who were forced to apologize to Rush Limbaugh recently. Meme! [Top of the Ticket]
• Gordon Brown, dauphin of the forgotten island nation of Great Britain, addressed our Congress this morning and gave a special English-accented hello to Ted Kennedy, who was just today crowned the Governor-General of the British East India Company. [CNN Political Ticker]
• Obama is keeping his promise to Nevada, and is probably not going to dump America’s nuclear waste in its mountains after all. [Washington Post]

A ha ha ha, we had to do a Google search to make sure nobody had put that crack in a headline yet. So anyway yes, Michael Steele spoke ill of Rush Limbaugh on late-night television, and then Rush Limbaugh said mean things about Michael Steele on the radio, and then Steele had to apologize because Rush Limbaugh makes a gazillion dollars a year putting cigars in his face and pontificating on the radio whereas Michael Steele is just some loser from Maryland. MORE »

BACHMANN TO ADDRESS NATION: Ah, this is a typical thing people do when they are UTTERLY FREAKING OUT about their entire careers: “Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has taped an advertisement apologizing for her televised comments calling Barack Obama anti-American, according to a Republican source familiar with her campaign’s decision.” It is still staggering that this one dingbat appearance on Hardball finally did the trick, after daily doses of such standard Bachmannia for the last two years. [Politico]

Ha ha ha Luke Russert, NBC’s Official Young Persons Correspondent, apparently made a terrible slip this morning and said “the smartest kids in the state go [to UVA], so it’s leaning a little bit towards Obama,” which was a terrible insult to all the remedial readers at the University of Virginia who will also vote for Obama. Naturally, an apology was in order. MORE »

Top McCain strategist Charlie Black — the one who lobbies for Iran — dominated this afternoon’s 2-hour news cycle by saying in an interview with Fortune magazine that if we had a terrorist attack right now, “Certainly it would be a big advantage” for John McCain. This line, of course, meant everyone had to feign shock over an accurate political truth, but voiced thus — that if there were a terrorist attack today, Barack Obama would be behind it, potentially hurting his electoral prospects. MORE »

In Heaven, a secret cabal meets every Shrove Tuesday to match up nutjob religious leaders with the presidential candidates they will embarrass the most. John McCain’s assigned kook is pastor John Hagee, an Evangelical preacher who loves Jews, the apocalypse, and long walks on the beach, and hates Mondays, broccoli, and Catholics. So it shocked everyone today when he acted like a complete hypocrite by refusing to stand by his crazy remarks about our papist brothers and sisters. MORE »

In a controversial address at Columbia University School of Law on Tuesday, the controversial contrarian and former Obama advisor Samantha Power admitted she was sorry about calling Hillary Clinton a monster that one time. However, she did not request backsies on any of the other shocking garbage she uttered in her tenure as Barack Obama’s foreign policy wonk. MORE »

Yesterday while filling in for c-list teevee host Tucker Carlson on the MSNBC program Tucker, David Shuster asked the following question: “Doesn’t it seem as if Chelsea is sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” He was referencing the way in which Chelsea has been calling various superdelegates asking for their support. As if the circumstances in any way matter, the answer to the question is yes. Or, more emphatically, YES! Lord knows what that Chelsea is offering these superdelegates. Either way, Shuster will apologize tonight after the Clinton people made some kinda fuss. Whores, all of them. [The Trail]

We apologize for our long absence today. We had to lie down for a few hours after witnessing THE CUTEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED ON THIS EARTH. We’re serious. Baby Jesus surrounded by kittens on rollerskates singing “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” that might come close. A puppy riding a pony in a cowboy outfit while pretending to rob a bank? Eh. We have seen The Stick in a bowl. Observe:

It’s been pointed out to us — rightly — that our calling attention the other day to the name of the author of the press release about “wasted fish” was inappropriate. This is correct. We were simply too amused by the idea boisterously drunken fish (”Who are you calling CHICKEN OF THE SEA, Harry? You want some? You want a piece of THIS?”) and thus forgot to black out the name of the person who brought this delightful image to mind. (The reason we didn’t finish reading the press release? WASTED FISH! Why go further? Too funny.) We also really should have included a link to the actual press release, which is not — sadly — about drunken fish, but about, uhm, some environmental issue that no doubt would depress us if we understood it. So, as it should it have been: