In a story that’s not quite true but makes for a catchy angle that we’re happy to run with, a madcap old lady in Carroll County, Iowa, is selling her television machines, which now only have one channel, Obama Channel. Deloris Nissen, 78, clicks the damn clicker on these machines to try and find her Tuesday night programs, but all she sees is that same Obama in his golden halls or hamburger restaurants, doing god knows what. Enough! Sell them. MORE »

He hadn’t anchored the Evening News in nearly three decades, but Walter Cronkite set the standard for serious, authoritative network news. The stuff he covered was the biggest stuff of the 20th Century: from WWII to JFK, Apollo to Vietnam, Chicago ‘68 to Watergate and the slow rot of America beginning in the mid-1970s. MORE »

Silly Jon Corzine once abandoned his comfy job as a United States Senator in order to waste all of his money on a bid for Governor of New Jersey, that scorching slab of rocks and trash soundtracked to the din of furious rats screaming about property taxes. But as Corzine would soon discover, trying to balance the budget during a Great New Depression that your state’s top earners spent years engineering at their day jobs across the Hudson will make you VERY UNPOPULAR. And now that Corzine’s trailing by double-digits in his bid for reelection this November, his magic 8-ball of Despair has recommended selecting 38-year-old Randal Pinkett, winner of NBC’s The Apprentice, Season 4, as his running mate — “to energize the African-American base.” Politics is easy! [The Awl]

Lindsey Graham’s least favorite Mexican monster, Sonia Sotomayor, learned English when she was 45 years old, from large-print comic books about Satan. And now, thanks to illegitimate president Barack Obama’s affirmative-action hiring policies, Judge Sotomayor is the star of today’s super-boring Senate confirmation hearing! Thanks to Ustream, we’ve got a live teevee video feed right here, so go ahead and make fun of everything, in the comments.

OMG PEOPLE ARE TWATTING ABOUT REAL WORLD DC TWATS! First, MTV built “love sacks,” and we did nothing. Now, the actual cast of this program, well they are walking around DC! People are doing the Twitter about this! We may have to send Intern Riley over there to hand out some poop-tarts. [Washington City Paper]

And you know how we feel about Democrats, GRRR! [Media Matters]

Histrionic personality disorder heiress Meghan McCain joined Bill Maher and Friends on the Bill Maher comedy program last night. First Daughter, First Love remains mercifully unghostwritten as of yet, so why is beautiful young Meg McCabe such a commanding presence on America’s teevee programs and digital news traditions as of late? Verily, a mystery! The Bill Maher comedy show doesn’t know either, as evidenced by the producers’ exquisitely accurate description of our gal’s qualifications, pictured above. Dumb Matt Yglesias must be “in” with the HBO web interns! MORE »

Christ, it’s not like there’s any election going on, when this public celebrity nonsense sometimes can matter, for a few hours, but here we are finally getting all intrigued-like over some snit on Todd & Sarah Palin’s Facebook page about a baseball sex joke David Letterman made on television one night. What’s going on now. Letterman apologized again last night for making whatever joke, a monologue quickie, that Sarah Palin pretended to interpret as pervert code for “I’m gonna rape your 14-year-old Willow daughter.” Now Palin has “accepted” Letterman’s lengthy apology with one of the more obnoxious statements in her endless, vapid, snarling canon. MORE »

Certain loser co-editors tell your editor that this Shepard Smith video is “a couple of days old,” and apparently the entire nation watches the teevee at 3 p.m. on weekdays so yeah, OLD NEWS IS OLD, etc., but for maybe the last dozen dignified people in America who DON’T watch the fucking teevee all day, here is Shep calling the entire Fox News audience a bunch of stupid violent nitwits. MORE »

Since the early 1960s, there has been an annual rumor about the teevee program The Real World doing a season in Washington, which is a city known as the capital of America. And this year, FINALLY, the important MTV grunge “camgirl” show is really for real being videotaped right here in DC. But not everyone is thrilled beyond belief — one person, in fact, has bravely launched a free blog account about how maybe it would’ve been vv good had the entertainment cable show The Real World done a season in Washington maybe during some earlier year but definitely not this year because what is even up with that? [Anti-Real World DC]

NBC News is airing some thing tonight and tomorrow night called “INSIDE THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE: Brian Williams Reports.” It will be just like Jackie Kennedy showing American television viewers her French drapes and knowledge of French literature, but different! NBC wanted two things for this special: several minutes of Ted Kennedy’s Portuguese dog doing cute dog stuff in the hallways, and a few seconds of Rahm Emanuel being mean but not mean-mean. Here’s the latter! The camera crew just stands awkwardly in Rahm’s office, in silence, until finally he tells them GTFO. [MSNBC]