While Barack Obama is doing Man’s Work at the fancy 10 Downing St. dinner tonight, with Angela Merkel, stay-at-home mom Michelle Obama will be segregated with the other G20 spouses and forced to sup with the beloved author of devil-fiction directed at children. Michelle will sit next to J.K. Rowling, famous gazillionaire and creator of the Harry Potter witchcraft craze. The Obamas are big fans of the 38 Harry Potter bibles, from which they taught their daughters how to cast magical spells to kill villains. [The SUN/LA Times/Telegraph]

Usually it’s not worth it to post about Maureen Dowd’s column. She just does her thing. Nicknames, gender stereotypes, alliteration, hackneyed jokes, hackneyed narratives, whatever, let her quill gush forth, just leave us out of it. But things have changed, and she needs an intervention after this shit. Wasn’t this column the first scene from one of the Harry Potter books, with Voldemort talking about evil? Also: we are not notable practitioners of the so-called “Journalistic Ethics,” but is it really worth a New York Times columnist’s time and writerly capital to make things up? Like, entire narratives and motives? This column wouldn’t make the cut at most high school newspapers. Because. The badness. [New York Times]

Did you know that Dumbeldore’s outing has serious implications for the originalist interpretation of the Constitution? Also, Dolores Umbridge is totally supposed to be fucking Chertoff, man.

Above, some rakish Wikipedia vandal erases the entire entry for Harry Potter and replaces it with “Snape is the half-blood prince and kills Dumbledore.” This hilarious prankster’s IP address was logged, as in all Wikipedia edits, and it turns out it came from the Republican Party of Minnesota. This is just one of the many little treats revealed by a new site that lists all edits made by any organization you can think of whose offices have internet access. Wired is tracking the better ones, and here are some of our favorites: MORE »

There is a teevee show about how to torture Moslem children called “Twenty Four” and apparently starring a “First Lady gone mad who is currently institutionalized at a mental health facility.” And there’s a newish Harry Potter movie featuring this cloyingly sadistic schoolmarm named Dolores Umbridge. And then a New York Times columnist made the obvious comparisons to our real-life creepy First Lady and the nuts went crazy. But we looked it up on the Internets and sure enough it is totally true, at least in the case of the Harry Potter lady. Ye who have eyes, see: MORE »