By the Comics Curmudgeon
Remember the good old days of American wit when our nation’s cleverest sat around an elitist table at a fancy New York City hotel and made cutting remarks so subtle and erudite that nobody within earshot could tell what the hell they were talking about? And also, they were drunk? Well, those days are over (except for the drunk part). David Denby has informed us that, thanks to the awful blogs, we now just essentially hurl the verbal equivalent of feces at each other all the time, except when we are hurling actual, literal feces. Just so, our political cartoons have similarly devolved, from intellectual, high-art pieces that reward long-term study and contemplation to the current things that you are about to read, which are for the mouth-breathing morons who only like creepy pictures. Unfortunately, those morons only watch TV, which is why the newspapers that run these cartoons will soon be bankrupt. MORE »

• JUDD GREGG IS DESTROYING OUR CONVERSATION: Only a few more hours until Jonah Goldberg steals the news by being named Commerce Secretary, so we better get all of our “Judge Dredd” posts in. We’ve entered the second phase of this nasty story, where the various anonymous partisans go crazy with the leaks: “WASHINGTON (CNN) — A Democratic source close to the Obama White House said Thursday that Judd Gregg ‘campaigned for the job’ — that the New Hampshire senator had asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to approach the president about the Commerce post.” A Republican source has responded that in fact Barack Obama kidnapped Judd Gregg’s children and threatened to feed them arugula until Gregg accepted the position. [CNN]

Is this even possible, the lameness of this? Here we have a screenshot of this gal’s Twitter feed, on a college Republicans’ site called “Life In The Field,” presumably about GOP volunteer kids. All 50 of them! Oh and then one of her Twitter buddies says, “i hope @atodd gets caught in her lie.” MORE »

It really depends on what you mean by “suspend,” doesn’t it? John McCain’s maverick move to suspend his campaign so he can grandstand on something he knows literally nothing about — the American Economy — isn’t actually a suspension of anything. It’s a stupid stunt to get more campaign press coverage. And nothing is suspended at all. Go to McCain’s website, and you’ll see he’s still collecting campaign contributions and still running his trashy anti-Obama video spots. He’s still doing interviews (just not Letterman!) and he’ll almost certainly still do the debate on Friday. Also, he pulls this crap all the time. MORE »

Sarah Palin barely survived Charlie Gibson’s interview, but she did survive, and now she’s in much safer hands for her Second Interview, this time with Sean Hannity. Part one airs tonight at 9 p.m., so be sure to not watch that at all. Fox has released some excerpts from the interview, and there appear to be many questions about this “terribly fucked economy” that average Americans like Ken Layne are losing their minds over. So let’s check out the canned answers that some McCain intern programmed Palin to rattle off. MORE »

According to many billions of emails received today at Wonkette Headquarters, intrepid Internet sleuths from “a former New York Times reporter” to “my librarian mum” have discovered the True List of books that wingnut creationist anger-bear Sarah Palin tried to ban when she was mayor of a strip mall in rural Alaska. Well, we have sleuths of our own, and they are called Legion but also all called “Google,” and you libtards have been had, again. MORE »

Thieving drug-addict beer heiress Cindy McCain can’t even keep her Third World Orphan Hunting stories straight! Both Cindy and the McCain campaign have repeatedly put out this story about Cindy traveling the world to laugh at poor people but then Mother Teresa said “Adopt these orphans you must,” and then Cindy adopted a couple of orphans, forgetting one on the plane and raising the other as Meghan’s unwanted little sister. But this, too, is a lie, as Cindy McCain has never met Mother Teresa. [Crooks and Liars/AMERICAblog]

So David Brooks wrote an annoying little column today about this: “McCain started out with the same sort of kibitzing campaign style that he used to woo the press back in 2000. It didn’t work. This time there were too many cameras around and too many 25-year-old reporters and producers seizing on every odd comment to set off little blog scandals.” Those 25-year-old reporters and “little blog” rats should be proud of themselves, wouldn’t you think, if they were the ones not whorish enough to buy John McCain’s offers of friendship and let him get away with everything? MORE »

Everyone should thank CNN today for thoroughly debunking the “rumor” that Barack Obama is the Antichrist (seriously, this is somehow classified as a “rumor,” that Obama may have magical powers). The big headline, “OBAMA THE ANTICHRIST?” along with the subhed claiming that this is a real “debate” online and thousands of other images of ANTICHRIST ANTICHRIST EVIL SATAN were very necessary for the viewers watching said debunking. Raw Story has the video. Oh and let’s thank CNN for covering this same thing yesterday, too. [Raw Story]

Do you have the Summer Olympic Fever? No? Neither do we. But now we sort of regret missing the Opening Ceremony, which was apparently done completely with the computer game The SIMS. MORE »

Wonkette Curseword-Monitoring Operative “Jared” sends us this screenshot of CNN’s Political Ticker from yesterday, back when Joe Biden was saying “bullshit” all over the place. The click-through is properly figleafed with a double asterisk, though. MORE »