Wonkette

We sent Gawker videographer and resident evil genius Richard Blakeley to cover Sen. Hillary Clinton’s 60th birthday bash at New York’s Beacon Theater last night. Security goons wouldn’t allow video cameras inside, so Blakeley was forced to use words to explain the bovine press process, his Larry Craig moment and his own personal and deeply wrong lust for Chelsea Clinton. To give your peeps something to feast on, we’ve included a nice gallery of photos. After the jump, the story. MORE »

The Bush Administration’s preliminary reactions to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld are in — and they’re not terribly exciting or surprising.

At a press conference earlier today with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, President Bush got peppered with questions about the decision. Pretty much every non-Asian journalist in the room asked about Hamdan. Bush said that “we take them [the Supreme Court] very seriously.” Glad to hear it; so do we. He also stated that “we will conform to the Supreme Court.” Nothing controversial there.

Tony Snow’s PM presser wasn’t much more exciting. Every journalist present tried to get Snow to admit that the SCOTUS handed the White House its ass on a platter. But Snow didn’t take the bait, refusing to admit that the executive branch got housed by the judiciary. Quoth Tony: “You don’t sit around going, ‘Oh my gosh, the Supreme Court ruling!’ You try and deal with it.”

A few more remarks, after the jump.

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You’ve seen their names on countless press releases over the years. And now they’ve married each other, so they can make lots of beautiful media advisories together: MORE »

Last night, Team Wonkette rubbed elbows with the D.C. media elite, at the third annual presentation of the Michael Kelly Award:

The $25,000 award is given annually to a journalist whose work exemplifies a quality that animated Michael Kelly’s own career: the fearless pursuit and expression of truth. Kelly, who was the editor of two Atlantic Media publications, The Atlantic Monthly and National Journal, was killed while covering the war in Iraq in 2003.

It was a delightful evening, definitely one of the better parties that we’ve crashed attended lately. As media junkies, our heads were left spinning from all the star-spotting: Peggy Noonan! Adam Nagourney! Howard Fineman! Gwen Ifill! Matt Cooper! (But where was FROOMKIN???)

After the jump, additional commentary on the evening — plus fabulous photos, by Liz Gorman. Enjoy!

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Sometimes he gets into nasty little spats with them. But for the most part, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee just loves the news media. MORE »

This morning’s White House pool report is a real gem — and it’s short, so we won’t even put it on a jump page. Here it is: MORE »

Now we bring you some news from beyond the Beltway. Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, the fitness fanatic and likely 2008 presidential candidate, is in a spat right now with the Arkansas Times. And things have gotten ugly.

An Arkansas correspondent informs us:

[P]ossible presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has decided to purge the Arkansas Times from all of the governor’s office notification lists. He defends his action by saying the alt weekly isn’t a “news organization.” This is most definitely in retaliation to the Times’ criticism of Huckabee and his wthics transgressions, the latest of which is his abuse of a state-funded airplane.

Huckabee is a petty, vindictive little man who gets upset when you call him on his challenged ethics and his penchant for giving clemency to prisoners who claim to love Jesus and then go out and kill (look up the story on Wayne Dumond).

The saga continues, after the jump.

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Here’s the middle of Colbert’s speech, before the interminably long video and after the crowd-pleasing “Dick Cheney shot a guy in the face” joke.

Shall we discuss the dinner entertainment? Our analysis, after the jump.

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The mainstream media regularly decries the Bush White House’s communications problem. Much of the blame used to go to poor Scott McClellan, just replaced by Tony Snow as press secretary. Some of the attacks on Scotty were so harsh — e.g., Michael Wolff’s Vanity Fair article — that you couldn’t help feeling bad for the guy (at least a little). MORE »

(Actually, no one is predicting that; we just wanted to quote a Vanessa Williams song. And now it’s stuck in your heard — a bad case of earworm. Sorry about that!) MORE »