Wonkette

• WELL OK THEN: The McCain campaign issued a creepy memo today about how awesome Obama’s speech will be and that they expect it to give him a 15-percentage point bounce in Polls. Oh the expectations! Remember when Hillary’s campaign people kept moving the goal posts, as they say, for Obama’s performances like every few hours? That was a comical way to go about LOSING. The Obama team, of course, has responded to the McCain memo with some barb about McCain’s “dozen houses.” He’s up to a dozen now! He must’ve bought five more fancy condominiums in San Diego overnight, buyer’s market and all. [WP/The Trail]

For the last few days, the folks at the Atlantic magazine have been hyping a piece from senior editor Joshua Green about the (not so) mysterious inner workings of Hillary Clinton’s terrible campaign staff, claiming Green had procured 200(!) internal e-mails and memos. Such teases! This is sort of like waving crack in front of John Edwards’ crack baby, but then saying “you have to wait for the September issue of crack to come out in three days.” But it’s out now, and we read it, and there’s not much you haven’t already known for months or couldn’t have predicted. It has its moments, however. Wait until you read about Mark Penn’s “FUN” invisible people button for the website! MORE »

Hillary Clinton’s team of hard-working white Americans wrote a memo today. It is all about the importance of her winning the primary in the “key swing state” of West Virginia, which John McCain will win in a landslide in November. Read the memo in full after the jump. MORE »

Anything the Hillary Clinton camp says these days on teevee, to reporters, to anyone who is a human being, rapidly erodes the entire campaign and her legacy. In their latest memo, which must have been written in crayon and targeted at the Cro-Magnon community, Team Clinton says that since Obama has done everything correctly, any loss in the future would finalize his defeat. MORE »

Earlier this week, Hillary Clinton hopped on a jet plane and peaced the eff out of South Carolina, where she’ll probably lose because of all the black people, to get her national campaign ready for Super Tuesday on February 5. This is called “lowering expectation,” although she did abandon her co-candidate husband and mute daughter in South Carolina to continue fake-campaigning. Yet today, the psyched-out Obama campaign sent out a memo outlining Hillary’s apparent strategy to “win” South Carolina. MORE »

Due to everyone in Iraq wanting to kill him, the White House is demanding that the news networks stop saying where Dick Cheney is staying in Baghdad. We won’t say it either, because we don’t want to be the next dead animal on Cheney’s lawn, but we will say that he’s obviously at that one place where U.S. officials go when they go to Baghdad — and we aren’t talking about that market where Walnuts McCain caused so much death and destruction.

Read the nervous memo floating around CNN, after the jump.

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You ever wonder what David Bradley thought about Andrew Sullivan? Or about David Bradley? Here’s a hint: he loves them both! An operative sent us one of David’s periodic rambling company-wide memos, this one announcing the (here’s the news, by the way) hiring of Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic, and the moving of his blog there from Time’s NEW AND IMPROVED website.

My Colleagues:

Probably lifting the thought from someone else, though I’ve long forgotten, I’ve spent my adult years believing that life is a sine curve of inevitable highs following inevitable lows. What is new to me, in this second career, is that the highs are much higher in journalism and the lows much lower. I had not understood, before, how wide could be the band of emotions.

This afternoon is one of the high highs for me. Andrew Sullivan has accepted James Bennet’s and my offer to join T he Atlantic as Senior Editor. Andrew will publish his blog, The Daily Dish , exclusively on The Atlantic website and contribute longer-form pieces to the magazine. To say this is a lift to our internet work hardly honors what Andrew has accomplished. Ranked in that highest priesthood of American bloggers, Andrew has a monthly following of over two million readers.

The entire crazy letter, including baked bribery, after the jump.

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These people …. Here’s the executive summary of the White House plan for Iraq:

The Consequences Of Failure In Iraq Could Not Be Graver — The War On Terror Cannot Be Won If We Fail In Iraq. Our enemies throughout the Middle East are trying to defeat us in Iraq. If we step back now, the problems in Iraq will become more lethal, and make our troops fight an uglier battle than we are seeing today.

First, how wonderful that the White House is announcing a plan tonight for a war they started four years ago.

Second, we’ve got the whole stupid White House document, after the jump. Come on in, glance over the thing until your eyes get heavy — it takes about two minutes — and then go to dinner and don’t bother watching the speech, because it’s all here except for the nervous rat eyes, comical mispronunciations and telling malaprops.

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The Navy’s crazed researchers can only perform “severe or unusual intrusions” on human brains and bodies with approval of the undersecretary of the Navy, according to a new Pentagon memo — and that covers the usual “consciousness-altering drugs or mind-control techniques,” too. MORE »

Wonkette operative reports: DNC karaoke in full effect, Howard Dean apparently not paying his bills: MORE »

No one ever won a war with a bad attitude, guys.

The U.S. Embassy in Iraq, demonstrating an admirable unwillingness to aide in the President’s PR blitz, sent a memo to Condoleezza Rice last week on the day of Bush’s surprise Baghdad trip detailing just how much fun everyone’s having in the Green Zone these days. It raises the question: Why doesn’t the U.S. Embassy ever tell the State Department the good news from Iraq? (Will we ever get tired of that line?)

Our exclusive hungover and cranky analysis, after the jump.

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Still no sign of the Xylophone. (Photo by, you guessed it, Liz Gorman)

Typ-i-cal. As soon as The Atlantic moves to Washington, suddenly no one there knows how to dress. So here comes management with a friendly list of guidelines.

Per the New York Observer’s Gabe Sherman:

“Our policy is intentionally vague and does not specifically exclude certain articles of clothing or types of shoes,” Susan Lavigne, Atlantic director of benefits and compensation wrote. Lavigne then went on to specifically exclude certain articles of clothing and types of shoes: “Flip-flops, crop tops, tank tops, spaghetti-strap tops, and shorts (to name a few) are not appropriate.”

Full memo after the jump.

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* Rep. Cynthia McKinney hits a Capitol Police officer with her cell phone. We’ve been all over this one — our coverage is collected here (scroll down). MORE »

Oh, Media Matters. This was almost too much even for relentless sadists like us: MORE »