Barack Obama has cleverly seized control of our nation’s crossword puzzles by having so many alternating vowels and consonants in his last name. Meanwhile, John McCain gets no love anywhere from anyone, although he might do OK in one of them Jumble puzzles, where you have to unscramble four words and then take a bunch of random letters out of them to spell “FIVE AND A HALF YEARS, ALAN.” [Politico]

Today’s Washington Post crossword features an unusually meta pair of consecutive clues (16- and 17-Across). We’re anxious to see if the sudoku world will respond by encoding the 1 through 9 matrix to make fun of Oral Roberts. [WP Crosswords]