Put on your Excitement Pants everyone, because the New York Times has one of its Scoops! “WASHINGTON — Well, that didn’t take long. Just 44 days into the job, and President Obama is going gray.” Whoa hey… whoaaaa… are there perhaps any historical antecedents for this, and might one describe Obama’s haircut in the black parlance of the 1960’s? Did Bill Clinton have hypertension? &c. &c. MORE »

Here’s celebrated pundit Tucker Carlson addressing CPAC, fresh after scoring some coke from his dealer under the St. Alban’s lacrosse field bleachers. He tries to convince the stingy crowd that the New York Times, for all its faults, still strives for accuracy and tries to break the major, important stories. He is roundly booed, heckled, bludgeoned, etc. He makes up for it at the end by suggesting that there should be 25 different Fox News channels, thereby ensuring his secure exit from the building. [Right Wing Watch]

Gather round, ducklings, for David Brooks would like to commence his Tuesday lesson: “When I was a freshman in college, I was assigned ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ by Edmund Burke. I loathed the book.” You’ll never believe this, but later in life, he grew to like the book. This bears all the trappings of a trenchant political column. MORE »

John McCain’s sexytime lobbyist friend, Vicki Iseman, has dropped her $27 million suit against the New York Times over a story last year which implied-but-not-really that she and WALNUTS! used to fuck all the time. Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet e-mailed the news to his staff in a rather pissy memo: “Vicki Iseman has dropped her lawsuit against The Times, just weeks after it was filed. We paid no money. We did not apologize. We did not retract one word of the story, which was a compelling chapter in the tale of Senator John McCain and his political rise.” If that clown lady has a problem, she can go suck an egg. [Michael Calderone]

• Proven untrustworthy Oath of Office-giver Joe Biden was sent to give the Oath of Office to Hillary Clinton. To no one on Earth’s surprise, he also sort of mocked this ceremony by giggling beforehand with reporters and the Clintons, again at the expense of Justice Roberts (the “Caroline Kennedy of Reading Properly.”) [Top of the Ticket]
• Oh Tom Daschle, you cad: Today is ironically the 96th birthday of when the government started collecting income tax! [RedState]
• Another Snow Day for DC school children. They will all spend the day writing letters to Barack Obama in the Washington Post, asking him to shake his Kenyan desert goddess statues for more precipitation. [Hit & Run]
• Obama’s stimulus bill contains secret preservatives that aim to fatten and hasten the ripening of America’s children. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi will wait patiently. [Politico]
• Bill O’Reilly has declared WAR on the New York Times after some editorial called his views on immigration those of “nativism.” But it was only after looking up the definition of “nativism” that he declared this war, for that was the final straw. [Crooks and Liars]

Oh goodness we spent all day yesterday saluting Bill Kristol, who had to leave the New York Times because he was TOO PERFECT TO GO ON, without noticing a gem of a column by his fellow token conservative David Brooks. He wrote about the profound reverence with which we should approach our professions because they are sacred “institutions.” David Brooks comes from a magical time when people could have a single profession or employer for their entire working life, and might feel like their personal sense of self-worth was related to how well they did their jobs. (This was long before the invention of men’s room attendants, debt collectors, and fryolater de-greasers.) MORE »

JUST GIVE US ALL OF YR MONEY NOW: Peter Wehner of America’s favorite blog, The Corner, soon will be either broke or a chickenshit: “Bill Kristol… is easily among the most intelligent, creative, and articulate conservative voices in America—a fact, upon which I would be willing to bet a large sum of money, is what troubled the Times.” Well we’re willing to accept that bet! Count your assets, put a number on the table. Then we can call the Times to ask if they fired Bill Kristol because his perfection scared them. [The Corner]

We were preparing to write something else fairly epic about the end of Bill Kristol’s tenure as the New York Times‘ “lightning rod conservative” columnist, a position he accepted one year ago for the sole purpose of annoying people during an election year, but… something’s happened! MORE »

Bill Kristol, the tragically dumb wingnut who wouldn’t be published beyond the Free Republic comments section if not for his famous conservative father who could actually write, was publicly fired from the New York Times this morning — ending a yearlong national comedy in which, each Monday, he would offer some banal nonsense that, if it wasn’t completely and indisputably wrong before he even typed it, would be proven to be utterly false within a few hours of publication. There’s only one way to improve a day like this, and the parody blog “Big Hollywood” has the solution: Offer $100,000 to the movie actor Matt Damon in exchange for, uh, calling Kristol a dipshit in public somewhere. MORE »

SO LONG, RELIABLE MONDAY POST TOPIC!: Sunday night news dud! Discreetly tucked away in italics at the bottom of this latest crap about Ronald Reagan and whatever: “This is William Kristol’s last column.” Jesus, New York Times, don’t get so excitable like that! FURTHER ANALYSIS IN THE MORROW… [NYT]

Hey did you all realize that DC is so zeitgetist-y now? It’s true! The New York Times, your new DC alt-weekly, totally went to this one club and it was so cool. And now Obama is the new sixth borough. Celebrate your city all weekend long, by engaging its many many activities. And then Wednesday, celebrate alcohol by disturbing David Denby reading selections from his new book about being respectful to one another. MORE »