• 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]

Oh here’s John Hodgman, author of the weird and hilarious The Areas of My Expertise, who is apparently also a “minor television personality,” who knew?! And here is his very sly “roast” of the president, Barack Obama, at some event covered by C-SPAN. Worth watching just to see Obama cracking up over the hinjinx of the Birthers. Also, there are hobbit jokes. Basically, EVERY WONKETTE MEME OF 2008-2009 is in this John Hodgman routine. [C-SPAN/YouTube]

In the ninth circle of Hell, just between the usurers and the winged demon Satan flapping his wings in that frozen pond, lies a self-important little coffee house full of nerds who vote on each other’s poetry, which is universally awful. The Obamas will bring a slice of this Hell to their own home tonight, when they host the first-ever White House Poetry Slam. Why does Barack Obama hate America so much? MORE »

So no less than three (3) Richmond people told us that we just HAD to go visit the Hollywood Cemetery, where Jim Morrison is buried, because nowhere else will you see such an outstanding specimen of pastoral cemetery design. Of course we had no time to visit this ghoulish wasteland of cadavers, so we saw the next best thing: a monument to George Washington, located just outside the Virginia State House. This monument included a little door in the bottom to put Washington’s corpse in, but then obviously Washington was too big to fit through it (he is at the top there). Plus he was already dead and buried up at Mount Vernon, so now they use the little hobbit-door for storing wine and ripe cheeses. MORE »

Look at these fools. They are the Leaders of Earth, for real! These are great meetings, because all the leaders get to wear some ridiculous native-garb costume so they look like a bunch of nerds at a Star Trek convention, in Iowa. Oh wait, that’s the other World Leader Meeting, right? Ha somebody forgot to tell the guy up front, today is not funny Arab headdress day. Oh and whoops, somebody forgot to tell Ol’ Mushmouth in the middle row that today is not turban day, either. So hard to coordinate! Remember that one time Dick Cheney showed up at a Holocaust memorial service at Auschwitz and thought it was “dress like a snowmobile mechanic” day? [White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy]

Hey Obama’s gonna be on the teevee in a few minutes to read Das Kapital from his TELLYPROMTARRS, all 40 of them. We’re commemorating this occasion with some classic racist Internet art from the campaign. What a schmuck, this guy! We’re watching CNN analyze the “goals” with this conference, and it’s already paralyzing. First thing we hear are the words “sell the American people.” Who cares about the American people? They voted already. Anyway… MORE »

Hey so what’s going on with our old chums in crazytown these days? Oh how convenient, a reader e-mail: “Someone put TeamSarah on the Pumasphere.com blogroll. They also link to this incredibly stupid video.” Ha ha you MUST watch this magnificent film! It’s a standard recruitment tape for a suicide cult or the Dharma Initiative or whatever. TRUTH: “The PUMA movement was thought of as a bunch of disgruntled voters when in reality, it was the Taj Mahal of consciousness reforming political mathematics.” [VodPod]

Even though we live in pretty amazing times, what with the technology and magic and all, we generally just complain about it. And by “we,” we mean “you,” because your Wonkette is very cognizant of the fact that there’s no way this particular operation could exist — across four time zones, simultaneously, with no offices — without the wizardry of Gmail and IMs and WordPress and, obviously, Blingee. So we fully support Barack Obama’s choice as Chief Information Officer of America, this dude Vivek Kundra, who was the tech guru for Washington D.C. until just now! MORE »

We read somewhere, here, that Obama’s transition website, Change.gov, was getting pretty Internettish these days. This is Obama’s thing, he does it all the time: using standard Internet crap — stuff that other politicians somehow haven’t discovered — to help his readers connect and engage one another on the issues important to them (and possibly sometimes donate $$$$…) (and also maybe plan to fuck in a motel.) This is all to say that Change.gov suddenly looks a lot like Fark or Digg — long comment threads where you can “tell Obama” your thoughts and respond to each other and even rate each other’s comments. So we headed over there to witness the hilarity one sees on every Internet comment board in the world. But as with all things “Obama,” the discussion is well-written, informed, polite… it is terrifying. This is not the Real American Internet. MORE »

• HEY GEORGE LUCAS, IS OBAMA A SPACE JEDI?: “I would say that’s reasonably obvious.” HOYVIN-GLAYVIN! [Yeas & Nays]

Republican hero Dr. Congressman Ron Paul struck another blow for freedom and the gold standard last night when his supporters frantically sent text messages to Fox News so he could win the text-message poll of who won the Fox News Republican debate last night. Paul’s supporters sent so many text messages at an average cost of 25 cents per message that he won the text-message poll with 33%. MORE »