Image via the riveting YouTube productionCuttin' Crocs

MOE: Yooooo.
MEGAN: Hey, I am just sitting here contemplating how freakishly tan Joe Scarborough has gotten. I hope he has a good dermatologist.
MOE: I'm sure Charlie Crist has a recommendation!
MEGAN: Charlie Crist totally fake bakes. And/or does a spray-on tan. But now that he's totally getting married, I'm sure his wife will be running her hands all over his naked body regularly so she'll notice any changes in his moles
MEGAN: (I crack myself up sometimes)
MOE: Oh Jesus Christ, seriously?
MOE: (LOL)
MEGAN: I know, dude, wtf? I bet he's still mad at Scarborough for constantly mocking his ugly sweater, though.

“I thought that Fox’s coverage during the primary was comprehensive and fair and evenhanded,” Mr. Wolfson said Monday in a telephone interview from Liverpool, England, where he was vacationing. “It’s a huge audience, and it is important to have a strong, progressive voice on the network.”

MOE: Drudge, naturally, is so excited by this news his headline currently reads "HILLARY OPS: FOX NEWS FAIREST"
MEGAN: I love how, like, a year ago, Kos and that crowd were like "NO DEBATES ON FOX NEWS ARGH" and Clinton totally backed out and now her communications guy is fucking joining the network.
MOE: Speaking of, did you read the Carr piece recapping Fox's long history of, uhhh, "comprehensiveness"? To me their alteration of Jacques Steinberg looks less like Nazi propaganda than your basic Mr. Potatohead Garbage Pail antics. Do you think by "evenhanded" Wolfson meant "you have to credit them with keeping his features relatively symmetrical"?
MEGAN: I was totally wondering when someone was going to point that out about the alterations to the picture, because it's actually the first thing I thought when I saw them — like, um, does anyone else notice the anti-Semetic undertones of this? But being a card-carrying, weak-chinned, blonde-haired Anglo-Saxon-verging-on-Aryan type, I didn't feel qualified to point that out but now I do and so I say to Faux News: What the fuck, sirs? Please fire your Photoshop guy.
MEGAN: Also, even though I mentioned it last night, I feel like we should talk briefly about Webb dropping out.
MEGAN: Like, apparently there's hints it's some sort of skeleton? I mean, the man's a former Republican, former Reagan official whose written smutty books has a bunch of kids with 3 different wives... there's more??
MOE: Um, given what we know, is there any reason to believe there's not? Or do you think the reformed Hillary camp had something to do with it?
MEGAN: Ooh, that be some sort of awesome intrigue, wouldn't it? Because the HuffPo story just quotes an anonymous Democratic source that he dropped out after receiving the camp's veting documents to fill out, but that could totally be a Clinton smear job. In which case, Clintonistas,brava! Well done. Just don't do so much of that that George Allen can beat him, mmkay?
MOE:

A Democrat close to Webb confirms that a request for documents preceded his declaration to the Obama campaign. The Democrat said that Webb did not want to relive the vigors of a campaign so soon after his election to the Senate.

He keeps harping on that.
MEGAN: Which itself is kind of a shit thing to say about not running when the guy whose asking you wasn't elected that much before you, actually.
MEGAN: *who's asking you.
MEGAN: Also, I'm just going to put this out there, even if it's not true, this tale of homoerotic wrestling hilarity in the Deep South had better end up in Bruno.
MEGAN:

The audience, as well as local fighters drawn to take part in the show, became enraged. "It set the crowd off lobbing beers," Holland said. "They had beers in plastic cups. Those things can get some distance on them actually."

MOE: OMG did you cover Bruno's fooling of the ex-Mossad agent? Because that = why I read Drudge. There's a lot of Bernanke shit today because of the speech he's giving but I'm not sure I care to address it. Also: I am hungover physically and metaphysically. But I got new meds yesterday so I should probably take one.
MEGAN: I did see the Mossad thing, but because it's Drudge, I sort of ignored. Also, I thought we should mention the fact that Congressman Waxman is scheming to find a way to make Karl Rove's position illegal forever more.
MOE: You know what sucks? When Safari decides to make its Java stop working, and then you're forced to use Firefox, which uses like 100x the ram. Also, did you blog McCain's endorsement of Crocs? I love it when free-marketeers hold up pointless little companies that feed off nothing beyond America's neverending ability to buy into stupid fads as these inspiring success stories that invariably started with two guys and a "great idea." Yeah, plastic shoes, great fucking idea. But anyway, as much as I love that I had nooooo idea what a cringe-inducing public speaker McCain could be, not that I should talk.
MEGAN: The first big speech I ever gave to 200 people (including my boss), I was running 102 fever, I kept running out of the conference room to vomit, I burst capillaries around my eyes and only barely avoided puking on the podium. I've gotten better.
MEGAN: Anyway, I also know the answer to Crocs — not that this is AT ALL surprising, but the founder is a big conservative donor type..
MOE: I have to say, I don't often give them credit, but it looks like Access Hollywood nailed a powerful scoop here.
MEGAN: Also, he doesn't like shopping, he's one of those dudes who likes to walk in and just buy stuff. He's a real guy! Watch him drink beer! Watch him uncomfortably hold Michelle's purse.
MEGAN: Actually, this makes me want to tell a funny story about my dad.
MEGAN: When I was in high school, I needed some new bras, and my dad had a credit card and the availability. We went to Sears. As I'm walking around browsing, my dad's stuck in the middle of the bra department trying not to look anywhere, so he's focused on the sign above one of the racks, which says "underwire" in cursive over a picture of water. My dad says in the typical Carpentier-lacking-volume-control-voice, "What do you need an underwater bra for?"
MEGAN: The sales lady, on her way to rescue both of us had to leave the department she was laughing so hard and sit in the shoe section.
MOE: Um that is AWESOME. My dad would never in a million fucking years go near a bra. In fact, I don't even think I have ever heard him say the word bra. In fact my dad forgoes no opportunity to tell me my "cleavage" is showing, when you and I both know "my cleavage"…well there is no such thing.
MEGAN: I used to take my dad bra-shopping as revenge for all the embarrassment he caused me. It's oneupsmanship on embarrassment in my household, this is why it is really hard to embarrass me and why I do it to other people all the time. And your cleavage is fine but if you would like to trade, I would be happy to do so.
MOE: This is going to shock you, but I'm somewhat occupied with a certain comments thread right now.
MEGAN: Gosh, you think? Might as well let everyone get back to that one if they want.
MOE: My friend Marcus is in the news. He's the new executive editor of the Washington Post! This signals a "generational change." He was in Obama's class at Columbia! And used to co-own a nightclub in Shanghai. I'm hoping he won't be too disturbed by my conduct to give me a job moving his stuff.
MEGAN: Oooh, can he open a good club in D.C.?

• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed thinks the courtroom artist drew his nose too wide. He lost a bunch of weight on the Guantanamo diet and totally turns out to be one of those secretly vain terror masterminds. [USA Today]
• This will shock you: Bob Dylan is voting for Barack Obama. Okay, I was kidding about the shocked part. [Times]
• There was this whole movement afoot to strongarm Barry into picking Hillary over some of his other bros but I think Hillary took a step back and said, "You know, this is bullshit, I don't care anymore, if he wants me he wants me," and although the hardest part about doing that is always the realization that he's probably gonna be all "It ain't me babe," I'm glad she did that. [NY Times]
• You just have to accept that in the Catholic Church shit takes awhile, and that if a priest is accused of pedophilia it might take a few years or even decades to remove him. Now, if he mocks Hillary Clinton and it ends up on YouTube, on the other hand, now that is when you gotta sever all ties right away. [Chicago Tribune] [The Root]
• Well this is a new one: alcohol cutting your risk of arthritis. I pretty much always thought gout was arthritis, and that you get that from wine, so this is pretty awesome news, not that I would even notice I had arthritis what with the shakes and whatnot. [BBC]

• What drives the economy and technological innovation and stuff? In some countries it's known "industrial policy." But in this country since the Cold War it's pretty much been porn, so I don't know what this guy is talking about. [Miller-McCune]
• The recession has driven Saks shoppers to Nordstrom, American Eagle shoppers to Aeropostale and everyone else to BJ's and Costco. [WSJ]
• Black people think Obama needs to remember the Sisterhood. This is not a particularly revolutionary essay but I'm linking to it because I read through it the whole way. [The Root]
• The other day I got an IM from my friend. "Could Lehman seriously become the next Bear Stearns just based on fear that it's the next Bear Stearns?" she asked. "Yup," I replied, and told the fear and greed aphorism. But apparently $60 billion worth of "tough to value" securities is another big reason. [Economist]
• Anyway, the big problem is there's a lot of greed, and not enough fear. Let me explain: we are the Fed, and bankers are dudes. We control the population supply, which seems like a pretty powerful position, but they have more time on their hands and thus much more elaborate ways of fucking with us to the point where we're basically their bitch. Anyway, this is called "moral hazard", which is almost as good a name for an okay first novel as The Undatable. [Economist] [WSJ]
• I'm thinking of changing the name of this feature, to something like "Narrow Thoughts" or "Profundities" or something. Deep thoughts, anyone?
• There is probably something totally awesome and life-affirming about being able to scale skyscrapers but, like…nah, I can't really see the point. [NYT]
• Oh yeah and you fucking dykes have sent me some pretty little sums to help get those feminists out of Basra! Why did I never wait tables on bitches like you? That's right, because we were all waiting tables together.

• "He's obviously a well-educated, sincere man who has done good work in building Trinity United Church of Christ. But, to borrow a phrase that Wright might have used in one of his sermons, his rant at the Press Club demonstrates, that he is also a damn fool." [TheRoot]
  
• Surely I wasn't the only one who detected some philosophical ideological undertones to the Lauren Conrad-Heidi Montag feud, but both actually turn out to support bombing Iran. [NY Mag]
  
• Perhaps because Iran recently condemned Barbie dolls. [NYT]
  
• The Fed's bailout of Bear Stearns is the "worst policy mistake of the generation." Well, I mean, we pointed that out already, but when a former Fed head of monetary affairs says so it's apparently "news." [WSJ]
  
• It was a real delusion. It was like [former New York Gov. Eliot] Spitzer: "I am doing something dangerous, but because of who I am, and how smart I am, it is not going to come back to haunt me." -89-year-old financial manager and historian Peter Bernstein. [WSJ]
  
• And now we've got 18.6 million vacant homes on our hands! [Wonkette]

• Congratulations, Daniel Pipes. What a marvelous job you've done fearmongering and mobilizing public sentiment against a champion of pluralism and cultural understanding. I am sooooo glad we have you around to prevent our children from learning foreign languages. [NYT]
• An elite Korean boarding school recently turned off the surveillance cameras it was using to ensure students didn't fall asleep during late-night study sessions. [NYT]
• Two North Korean refugees in South Korea poured paint thinner on themselves and tried to set themselves on fire at the Olympic torch relay on Sunday to draw attention to China's inhumane policy of sending North Korean refugees like themselves back to North Korea, and Chinese students threw rocks and bottles and pipes at them in retaliation. [NYT]
• And speaking of the Democratic People's Republic a a 28-year-old military officer just defected to the South. [ NYT]
• An express train derailed and crashed just southeast of Beijing, killing 70 people. [NYT]

Tiffany reported "same-store sales" growth of 1% nationwide — boosted by a 10% windfall at its New York store, driven entirely, I daresay, by tourists harnessing the pitiful value of the dollar, not that anyone on CNBC is saying so. No, they are all asking one another what it really means. Could the American consumer be more "confident" than recent surveys have suggested? Could it suggest that the masses are paying no mind to all this crazy recession talk and spending their stimulus checks in advance on their mid-tier "aspirational" luxury brands? Will they save the American economy yet again? It doesn't matter, really; talk like this is just a salve to a jittery market, the sort of salve that will keep greater fools — such as, say, the US government — pumping the stock market full of dollars that will keep the whole thing sufficiently afloat that enough will trickle down that blah blah blah "soft landing." The difference between recession and its absence is, after all, just a trickle. It is manipulable, to understate. But we buy into it, in the same stupid irrational way we buy into the Tiffany "brand."

Look, the more our population grows the more GDP grows. Other countries understand this. Japan, for instance, has spent practically the past twenty years with the financial community moaning about its stubborn inability to lift itself out of recession, but in actuality, it turns out, as GDP per capita goes, the country has been faring a lot better than us, because we've pumped our numbers by welcoming new people all the time to tend to our chicken coops and tend to the thankless drudgery of engineering class. We've pumped them in countless other ways, as well, from devising elaborate schemes to sell and trade and resell the same old crap — mortages, sex, sterling silver — in more appealing packaging. In stubbornly clinging to nothing but that aggregate number we have fostered a dynamism that has America great, but it has also made a lot of us miserable and stupid. Miserable and stupid and also, I should point out, confused as to the exact source of our misery.

All of which is a complex and long-winded introduction to a story I wanted you all to read about Bhutan, a country that has appointed a man to oversee something called Gross National Happiness. Bhutan is the type of poor, Third World country no one really holds up as a model of anything, which is why no one who matters would probably care that they take their national happiness so seriously, except for the fact that their GDP is actually growing about 7% annually, which is on par with India.

About one quarter of the country lives below the poverty line, and an expanding population of young people are in search of jobs, says Mr. Tshitseem. "We must keep up with the aspirations of our children," he says. But he says fast growth should also not usher in a consumerist invasion that affects the national mood.
The Center for Bhutan Studies, a local think tank, has been devising a way to quantify that mood. It is developing a GNH index based on extensive public surveys. Researchers have fanned out across the country, interviewing more than 1,000 households, according to Karma Ura, head of the center. The sample size is considered large in a country with only 750,000 people and not a single traffic light.

Outside the government high school in Thimphu, 29-year-old researcher Karma Wangdi recently interviewed Bhanaan Humagai, a 16-year-old high school student.
Question: On a scale of 10, how happy are you?
Answer: 8
Question: How stressed are you?
Answer: Somewhat stressed. I am studying for exams.
Question: Have you ever thought of suicide?
Answer: No! (laughs).

Tiffany Net Falls, But Outlook Brighter [WSJ]
Smile Census: Bhutan Counts Its Blessings [WSJ]
Grossly Distorted Picture [Economist]
What Created This Monster? [NY Times]

Today the Federal Reserve, hot on the heels of saving Wall Street, elected to cut interest rates once again, by 75 basis points. And while the stock market had a screaming orgasm over this, I did not personally think it was such a great move. Herewith, a dissenting opinion.

And by "us," I mean Bear Stearns, because I personally have weighed the odds and I'm pretty sure I personally have nothing at stake here, no matter what you do, Ben Bernanke. My balance sheet, while admittedly lacking much in the way of assets, is also blissfully insensitive to short-term market and/or interest rate fluctuations.

Thanks to my industry, indeed, my own financial situation has been governed by a recessionary state of constant layoffs and downsizing for years and years — and I'm lucky enough to have one of those jobs they haven't figured out how to do better in Hyberabad. And I'll let you in on something, Ben Bernanke; my finances have zero correlation with those of the stock market. I'm not alone in this; most Americans are actually earning less than they were in real terms than they were in 1999. They can handle a few quarters of recession because they've been handling it.

Some of my morning commenters would have me believe bailing out JP Morgan is the only way to minimize "collateral damage on Wall Street and thus the economy," but really, whose economy are we talking about here? The buying power of the minimum wage employee is at a 51-year-low.

So fuck the Street, Ben Bernanke; just this once, just for, like, a quarter or something. You don't have to play rough; I'm not asking you to nationalize any industries or institute land reform or anything, just give them a little scare. They chose this path, you know. They chose to worship Ayn Rand and wear those Paul Smith shirts and pay zero money down on their Hamptons summer homes and obnoxiously, whenever confronted by someone like myself at a bar, claim that the Market Solves Everything. Let the market solve this one for them. People are eating dirt for dinner in Haiti, Ben Bernanke; you can let Bear Stearns go to bankruptcy court.

Sure, some financial institutions might get pissed for a minute. They didn't lend Bear Stearns all that money to leverage the shit out of their delusional bets that the housing market would keep going up up up only to spend years in bankruptcy court for the sake of reaping fifty or sixty cents on the dollar. But you know what? They probably also lent money to Goldman Sachs and Jeff Greene and John Paulson to leverage the shit out of the lucky hedge funds that bet it would all end in failure. They lent money to all those short-sellers who bet the price of Bear Stearns stock from $67 all the way down to $2. Sure, that's what makes our economy so "dynamic", Ben, but does that make it any more virtuous than a legalized Ponzi scheme?

What if there were some sort of cascading ripple effect? everyone wants to know. What of all that IRRATIONAL FEAR? But you just tell them, Ben Bernanke, that they should maybe sit quietly in their illiquid asses and reflect on what the fuck made them think it was rational to buy into all this fancy housing market bullshit in the first place. Just ask them, Ben Bernanke, what they thought was rational about people in Southern California taking out mortgages with monthly payments equivalent to five months' rent?

Because the housing market never made much sense to me, Ben Bernanke. I mean, there we were a couple years ago, with a war on, a slowing economy, oil roaring up toward $100 a gallon or whatever, skyrocketing energy prices sending other commodity prices through the roof... just where were the buyers who were supposed to keep bidding up those houses so everyone could continue pumping the economy with home equity loans? I'll tell you where a lot of them are now: sitting at home, watching network TV and avoiding opening their mail. Sort of like Bear Stearns with that portfolio of mortgages, mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities no one wants to put a value on just yet.

But you know? Eventually they'll open the envelopes, see what they've got, realize it's probably not the end of the world and start moving money around again. Assets are only "illiquid" till someone — the market? — figures out how to make them liquid again!

And if it is the end of the world, there's always the hope of an early death a la Ken Lay. Right?

MOE: Hey hi what's up shit is pretty fucked huh.
MEGAN: It makes me a little glad I never leave my house. Hooray for blogoraphobia.
MOE: Okay, first things first: there are violent protests in Tibet, and China has to quell them in a way that doesn't make Stephen Spielberg look good, and now the protests have spread to other provinces.
Tibet has long been a pretty sweet separatist province to have, what with the exiled leader advocating nonviolence and spending most of his time with Beastie Boys etc. etc.
MEGAN: And getting to meet practically every head of state in the world, albeit unofficially...
Except for, obviously, those countries in Africa rapidly becoming Chinese client states.
MOE: China has a whole other separatist province called Xinjiang and no one pays attention to those guys. Because they're angry Muslims. Hey Sudanese Islamofascists? How's about some CONSISTENCY??
MEGAN: Wait, didn't we care about that for like 2 seconds last week when Al Qaeda did a video of training there? I didn't realize that we'd forgotten to care about that.
MOE: Hey, look, a story about a recent thwarted hijacking attempt by a Uighur Al Qaeda girlbomber! I think the Chinese government thinks you should care again.
MEGAN: Oh, thanks nameless Chinese propagandists newswriters!
Anyway, so, how soon until they start beating monks in the streets and we issue some sort of vague milquetoast protest about it that in no way compares to our reaction to the monk beatings in Myanmar? Or did I blink and miss it?
MOE: Oooooh, think Laura Bush drop her cookie sheet again and get on the phone with Hu Jintao?
MEGAN: Maybe she could send him cookies? I'll bet some chocolate chip ones could go a long way toward repairing US-China relations
MOE: I
Yikes, that disappeared.
MOE: Okay yeah so, it's very tricky what is happening with Tibet, but either way, it led to an incredibly cerebral discussion of Bjork on the comments over the weekend, did you see? My father was impressed with Bjork's timing on that one, but perhaps if he knew Bjork's tears cure cancer (too bad she never cries) he wouldn't be so surprised. Interestingly, this week Taiwan is holding elections, and he's headed out there. Taiwan is interesting because, you know, they really have it best, as "splittist" provinces go. Elections, democracy, a decent standard of living, no painful shared history of, like, cannibalism or Cultural Revolution or any such thing. The pro-China Kuomintang party is supposed to win though.
MEGAN: Interesting. Wait, now, Taiwan's pro-China even though China considers them a rogue provice? Taiwanese politics are so hard to understand. Is it possible that China's financing the Kuomintang or something
MOE: hahahaha well China's financing the entire economy, sort of like ours. The thing is that the Kuomintang came from mainland China and fled to Taiwan, with numerous palace treasures and such, in 1949. There they found a happy population of ethnic Chinese who spoke another dialect and also, Japanese because the Japanese colonized it, and proceeded to pretty much subjugate them until the seventies, when a democracy movement began burgeoning and our relations with the mainland made it a lot easier for Jimmy Carter to pressure the Kuomintang to treat the "ethnic Taiwanese" better. Somewhere in there Chiang Kai-shek died, his much nicer son Chiang Chingguo took over, and a kind of slow, steady democratization took hold. The thing is that most Chinese, no matter what dialect they speak, are pretty pragmatic and rational and no one wants war with China, but while they have us around a lot of them also don't feel like taking shit from China. On the other hand, of course, Taiwanese control most of the factories in China. It's complicated.
MEGAN: [Awkward segue alert] As complicated at Dina Mattos McGreevey's sex life?
MOE: Hey, good call. That conversation was certainly venturing into prurient and meaningless territory so I'm glad we can now focus our attention on The McGreevey-driver threesomes. I think my favorite part is that they were described as "intense" "hard-core consensual sex orgies".That sounds so...cardio! It's a good thing too I guess if they all started with get-togethers at T.G.I.Fridays.
MEGAN: Like, taking a date to TGI Fridays is so Jersey and let us not pretend that it is not because it is. Also, their intense 3-way orgies (which, can an orgy really only involve 3 people?) always involved one of the guys jacking off while one of them fucked Dina.
But what's sort of really interesting to me is that in earlier publications, he's said not to have started working for McGreevey until 2000, which throws off his timeline I think, and that Dina's divorce lawyer wants financial records about financial records and correspondence with McGreevey's rich boyfriend. Also, apparently, they're due in court soon to litigate over the money McGreevey is hiding from Matos so that he doesn't have to pay as much in child support and alimony. Fucker. Like, aren't gay men supposed to be the good ones?
MOE: Um yeah they shared a room at the TRUMP PLAZA in Atlantic City. Here is what I have to say about that; okay, there is a hotel room shortage in Atlantic City, sure. But if if you are the governor you get the "casino" rate and that is seventy bucks. "It became almost laughable — I would never have my own hotel room," Pedersen said. Okay, so a few things: what does this mean about Silda Spitzer? How long has the New York Post been sitting on this story just waiting for everyone to remember that they once for a brief moment cared about Dina Matos McGreevey?
MEGAN: I'm personally hoping that Silda's sunning herself on a beach somewhere foreign and being served tropical alcoholic beverages by inappropriately young but attractive cabana boys.
And that she and Eliot didn't fuck around with 3rd parties because it's one thing imagining Gay McGreevey jerking off and another entirely grosser thing to have to picture Eliot Spitzer in a wide variety of sexual situations
Excuse my while I go wash my brain out with bleach. Maybe you could talk about the financial markets and i'll try to think of something to say that makes it sound like my summer interning for the Bank of New York wasn't a complete waste of time for everyone involved?
MOE: Okay, well, the government is going to have to print money to bail out the banks because they made the financial instruments so complicated no one has a fucking clue how much, if anything, they're worth, and everything is so interconnected that it could all collapse like in the Asian Financial Crisis unless the Fed steps in and offers a quarter trillion dollars to save it. Or something.
Here it is explained by someone named Dave Wilson who is on some email list that my ex-boyfriend is on.

There's currently a kind of cascade failure happening throughout the financial community, spurred
both by extraordinary levels of borrowed money that was used to speculate (it's like those mortgages that were issued for 110% of the value of the house, except that type of "investment" has, unbeknownst to most people, actually been taking place in pretty much every investment sphere you can think of); if those speculative investments go South, investors have to come up with lots of cash, fast, (this is known as a margin call) meaning they wind up selling everything they own to raise cash, which then depresses the value of the stuff the investors had to sell (as well as similar stuff owned by others) since suddenly there's a lack of scarcity combined with a suspicion on the part of would-be buyers that perhaps this stuff is being dumped for reasons other than a need for quick cash...

Last fall, the former Treasury secretary confessed to Fortune magazine that until the mortgage storms broke over his head in the summer of 2007, he was unfamiliar with the kinds of complex mortgage structures with which Citi's own balance sheet was packed. Almost certainly, the gulf between competence and compensation on Wall Street has never been wider.

"Why not set an example of Bear Stearns, the guys who have this record of dog-eat-dog, we're brass knuckles, we're tough?" asked William A. Fleckenstein, president of Fleckenstein Capital in Issaquah, Wash., and co-author with Fred Sheehan of "Greenspan's Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve." "This is the perfect time to set an example, but they are not interested in setting an example. We are Bailout Nation."

• The New York Post endorses Barack Obama — for the primary. [NY Post]
  
• Snoop Dogg and onetime ANTM contestant Kelle Jacob, meanwhile, remain undecided.
  
• From the tip jar: "FYI...I know why Paul Rudd wasn't at his crappy movie premiere last night...though I don't have any photographic evidence (yet!), I saw him with my own eyes at the Obama rally in Kansas City! He is shorter in person then one would expect..."
  
• "My advice: Make sure that your personal and tax records are secure. Also, get a shredder, and use it... Never assume your home is a safe haven" That's Kathleen Willey, offering her own form of support to Barack Obama. [ABC News]
  
• New polls say McCain would beat Obama or Hillary in a general election, though that is only slightly more meaningful than those polls that were saying the same thing about Rudy a few months back. You remember, when McCain's campaign was totally bankrupt/moribund/etc. [Rasmussen]
  
• Jesus Christ another rate cut? [Wash Post]
  
• On Meghan McCain's playlist right now: "It's A Shame About Ray." Less so about Rudy, eh? [McCain Blogette]

• Interested in McCain's abortion record? [Ontheissues.org]
• "The fact is the consumer is in a recession." That's Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz on his decision to offer $1 cups of coffee and close 100 stores. (He's opening 1,175 stores this year.) [WSJ]
• Also for Obama: Daniel Patrick Moynihan's widow, Charlie Rangel's wife? [NY Times]
• The Winograd Commission decides the 2006 Lebanon war was flawed but "inevitable" and not some cynical overcompensation on the part of Ehud Olmert. [NY Times]