Oh god, thank you to this commenter for directing us to a mole’s account of Peggy Noonan’s class at Harvard. These Noonanisms speak to the heart and soul of a nation: “I wasn’t sure I could wear mascara every day. One should dress. One should wear mascara when one can.” One should. It is Proper. But hey HARVARD MOLES? HELLO? Don’t send this stuff to Gawker. Be a friend to your Wonkette: tips@wonkette.com. We have more “iPhones” to give out to our best operatives. [Gawker]

“Royal wordsmith Peggington Noonington, a columnist famous to children, noticed through her eye-vision powers a faint speckle of Light atop her oaken chiffonier. This perturbed her, for she had been in a trance, considering Modernity. She ordered her house slave, Mister Winston, to deliver her the object aglow at once, for Inspecktion. What was this Object? What magickal powers might it possess! Manyfold powers, to be sure, for ’twas a Capsule of Medicine Drugs, seventy-and-five Milli-Grammes…” MORE »

• IS NORM COLEMAN DEAD YET? Surprisingly, no! He is alive! And he’s doing the most liberal thing since the French Revolution this fall: being a teaching fellow at Harvard. His course will be called, “How To Litigate A Losing Case For Months, Just For The Fuck Of It.” (This is actually the topic of every corporate law course offered at Harvard.) On a side note, one of Coleman’s fellow fellows at Harvard this fall will be Ms. Peggington Noonington. More on her in a bit… [CNN]

• SKIP GATES CLEARED OF CHARGES OF LOUDMOUTHING TO COPS: “Disorderly conduct charges filed against one of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American scholars have been dropped, local media reported on Tuesday.” And for all you people who have been saying, “Well maybe Gates was just being an abrasive dick to the police and he should know better,” you are encouraged to read his lawyer’s version of events. [Reuters]

One detail in the “famous Harvard professor whom even non-academics may have seen on that TV special with Oprah looked like scary intruder to neighbor” story that did not make sense was that part where the neighbor — the lady who called the cops was a neighbor — did not recognize the famous Harvard professor trying to get into his own house. Well, now we have our answer: sounds like the scary intruder she spotted may have been his cab driver. MORE »

• Police are going to use truth serum (probably just pinot noir) on the only surviving Mumbai terrorist. [Daily Beast]
• Harvard is in a recession too! The elitist madrassa where Barry spent his formative years managed to lose 22% of it’s $36.9 billion endowment in four months. [HuffPost]
• According to Jonah Goldberg, the real victims of Proposition 8 are the Mormons, who were in no way affected by Proposition 8 or any of its outcomes. [Andrew Sullivan]
• Obama loved his new boyfriend Bill Richardson better when he did the whole bear thing. “We’re deeply disappointed with the loss of the beard,” Obama said at a press conference, which was probably held in some art gallery in Providence. [CNN Political Ticker]
• The forgotten territory of Oklahoma is celebrating the completely irrelevant fact that John McCain won the state with a dumb Christmas card. [Ben Smith]

Did you know that Barack Obama is packing his economic advisory team with known communist associates? It’s true! Larry Summers, Obama’s likely head of the National Economic Council, had to resign from the presidency of Harvard University in 2006 for the grievous crime of being an asshole. After that he went to work part-time for the D.E. Shaw Group, a big fancy hedge fund run by intellectuals. D.E. Shaw “was founded in a small office over a communist bookstore in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1988.” COMMUNISTS EVERYWHERES, Q.E.D. When will Barack Obama apologize for this latest unseemly association? (Thank you, Thomas, for the tip!) [Wall Street Journal]

Barack Obama’s first major administration appointee was the biggest dick in Washington. How can he top that with his second pick? Why by picking the biggest dick in various academic and economic circles, of course! All of the “murmurs” surrounding Treasury Secretary possibilities center around Lawrence “Larry” Summers, who held the post under Clinton from 1999 to 2001 and then ran off to be President of Harvard, where everyone hated him for his awful management style and overt disgust for all ladies. He was forced to resign. But now he might get a shot at redemption! MORE »

Way back in 1990, our future president wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review about fetal rights. It asked the very important question of whether a fetus should be allowed to sue its mother for neglect, and answered the question with the long, boring legal equivalent of “Oh, brother.” Or something like that. The article was so boring that we couldn’t even bring ourselves to read the article about the article. [Politico]

New York Times “lightning rod conservative” columnist Bill Kristol’s youth and young manhood was exactly this: Manhattan prep school, Harvard, more Harvard. Since then, he has devoted his career to sending other young people to die in catastrophic wars based on a false ideology of pre-emptive regime change. But as he notes in his column today, despite these great achievements, he can’t write an adequate commencement speech! MORE »

Being a “college journalist” is impossible. You, a hot-ticket Harvard teevee anchor, cheat the system and land some big interview, thinking your ultra-famous star subject will expect softballs from the college kid. Defiantly, you plan to ask some tough, racy questions to hit your subject offguard. Then you get to the interview and realize that you’re talking one-on-one with Karl Rove and are going to ask him about John McCain’s black baby. Awkward! [YouTube]