INTERN RILEY GOES LEGIT: Look, he’s writing for the esteemed Internet publication Matt Taibbi’s Still So Mad At Goldman Sachs. His beat: college and whoring, two topics upon which he is a National Authority. Check it out! [True/Slant: The Diploma Mill]

Let’s look at Commentary magazine, the famous neocon rag now edited by John Podhoretz, who can be easily analogized to Bill Kristol, I guess, for having a much more intelligent and talented father and then sort of soiling the family legacy in the name of pride and stupidity. Or hey, for a more zeitgeist-y example Ms. Meghan McCain is also a good comparison. So, John “Blogette” Podhoretz is the Meghan McCain in this situation and Commentary is his monthly Twitter. What has Meghan Podhoretz been tweeting about as of late? Foreign policy, the economy, and, what’s this, long-time New Yorker intern David Denby, whose first foray into cultural relevance has been an unmitigated disaster. MORE »

Chief McCain strategist Steve Schmidt spoke yesterday to NPR and made a variety of very interesting statements about how close his candidate is to finally putting this Obama guy away. [Hint: Super close.] “We’re proud of the campaign we’ve run, it’s been a positive campaign,” he says. And also, about the media: “We have ‘em just where we want ‘em in this race.” His campaign is “well within striking distance.” And blah blah blah, poor Steve Schmidt, with no hair on his wee bald head, and no prospects for the future. [Politico, NPR]

Watching Michelle Obama’s speech last night, you might have been struck by how deeply shameful it is that such an obviously smart and decent person must repeatedly assure the public of her patriotism so that a nation of suspicious and resentful idiots don’t think she’s planning to bomb their local scrapbooking club with a Socialist Black Muslim Virus. Or you might have looked at her dress and thought, well, whatever the fuck Leslie Sanchez was thinking. [CNN]

A completely anonymous Wonkette operative reports that fake dead people are taking over the city. “At the corner of 15th and K a little while ago, there were 10 or 15 people ‘playing dead’ on the sidewalk outside my office. I also saw a girl get a suit from (I think) Caterpillar Inc. to flip his shit on camera as she asked him why his bulldozers ran over a 23-year-old American trying to protect her home in Palestine. He came off looking like the ‘roid rage douche he probably is, while she was calm, collected and slightly hippie-ish. (Although idk why the US out of Israel group felt the need to protest something other than the war today….)”

Harrowing tales of masked anti-war crusaders and their expensive sandwiches, after the jump! MORE »

It’s hard to understand Bush’s stubbornness on embryonic stem cell research. I guess he just likes it when people get cancer! I know I do. But maybe there’s a deeper issue at stake for Bush, one that us peons can’t understand. In fact, there… isn’t. It’s because his early stem cell policy shaper, Jay Lefkowitz — who has written a tell-all account in the new issue of Commentary — read Bush passages from Aldous Huxley’s dystopian sci-fi novel Brave New World. And Bush got scared. MORE »

Like much of the rest of the media nation, employees at Wonkette HQ are still genuinely grieving the loss of Peter Jennings. But the depiction of the admirably plainspoken ABC News anchor as a fallen King Lear figure is getting a bit out of hand. In a psychologically, uhm, revealing remembrance, the AP’s David Bauder imagines a relationship between the nation and its network newscasters that seems just a tad too intimate: MORE »