Past performance is once again no guarantee of future results:

Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them.All it takes is one “Macaca” incident to transform a race or create one where one didn’t exist. As the Montana incident blogged earlier today showed, a video can knock out prospective candidates before they even enter.

And this is no longer about finding one big blunder to put on a campaign commercial. It’s about using video and (free) technologies like YouTube to build narratives about opponents, using their own words, at their own events.

– Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, from May of 2007. Plenty on the right would also take him up on the offer beginning in 2009, although one of the most lethal “gotchas” by that rarest of birds, the enterprising Huffington Post journalist, who captured Obama with her cell phone video in 2008 delivering his Bitter Clingers speech, the very definition of a Kinsleyesque gaffe.

Which brings us to this item at BuzzFeed yesterday: “Cell Phone Ban Keeps Obama Fundraisers Secret:”

Former aides to presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Rick Perry, and Jon Huntsman all expressed surprise at the practice, and they’ve never seen an instance where a campaign asked donors to surrender their cell phones.

The former Clinton aide called the Obama policy “absurd,” suggesting that the Obama policy is almost certainly a response to the infamous 2008 fundraiser where Obama described voters in rural Pennsylvania as “bitter.”

“They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Obama told donors in San Francisco, in a gaffe that breathed new life into Clinton’s campaign at the time.

“What is he hiding? Candidates should be for and against the same issue in private as they are in public,” said former Perry campaign manager Rob Johnson. “This shows just how uncomfortable the Obama team is with their message an their candidate. And in addition to religion and guns, voters like to cling to their cell phones.”

Presumably this ban is valid in all 57 states, and Obama will dispatch the necessary corpse-men to enforce it, even if they have to confiscate every cell phone in Cominsky Park.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

• “THE PUBLIC EDITOR: Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? — OF course it is.”

– Daniel Okrent, then the Times’ ombudsman, July 25, 2004.

• “Obama campaign: New York Times poll is ‘biased’”

– Headline, the Washington Examiner, today.

Hey, to be fair, Mr. Obama himself declared yesterday that you couldn’t trust the same media that dubbed itself Obama’s “non-official campaign” back in 2008.  This is one time we’ll take the president at his word.

Update: The cocoon remains the same, though: “NYTimes Published Poll Showing Bad News for Obama on Gay Marriage Stand, Romney Matchup…on Page A17,” Newsbusters reports.

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The Huffington Post reports: “Mitt Romney: Obama Spending Has Fanned ‘Prairie Fire Of Debt:’”

Republican Mitt Romney says President Barack Obama’s reckless spending has fanned a “prairie fire of debt” while portraying himself in a speech in battleground Iowa as the defender of fiscal responsibility.

The likely GOP presidential nominee is trying to frame his campaign against the Democratic president as a contest of fairness versus irresponsibility.

In a speech Tuesday afternoon in Iowa, Romney will say that, in his words, “a prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve.”

A “Prairie Fire,” you say? Could be a coincidence, or it could be a reference to what my fellow PJ Columnist Zombie dug up in October of 2008 — “William Ayers’ forgotten communist manifesto: Prairie Fire:”

As Zombie noted back then, this was the title of one of Ayers’ Weather Underground manifestos. Click over for numerous scanned pages, including:

The following snippet is taken from the book’s dedication page, and shows that the Weather Underground dedicated the book to Robert F. Kennedy’s killer Sirhan Sirhan, among many other now-obscure ’60s-era radicals, criminals and revolutionaries:

Anybody told Ethel and Caroline of this book’s existence, or Ayers’ relationship to Obama?

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Wow, when Obama wrote in 2006, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” he wasn’t kidding — six years later, an Atlantic writer dubs him, “Barack Obama: Our First Gay-Female-Hispanic-Asian-Jewish President,” running down the various encomiums Obama’s received from Andrew Sullivan, Kathleen Parker, Geraldo Rivera and other incredibly cheap dates fawning acolytes, including:

In June 2010, The Washington Post‘s Kathleen Parker took the question mark out of the way.  “Obama: Our first female president,” her headline declared. Her column made the case that his crisis management style was more typically female.

First Jewish President: Like this week’s issue of Newsweek, New York magazine went big on their Morrison reappropriation. Former White House counsel Abner Mikva told John Heilemann  “When this all is over, people are going to say that Barack Obama is the first Jewish president.” The magazine made it their cover.

First Asian-American President: In 2009, Associated Foreign Press ran with the headline, “Obama the first Asian-American president?” As evidence, the article notes that in his first hundred days,  “Obama appointed a record three Asian-Americans cabinet members and quickly focused his attention across the Pacific. He invited Japan’s prime minister as his first guest and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to Asia on her maiden trip.”

First Hispanic President: Geraldo Rivera spoke in March 2009 about the hopes the Hispanic community had for Obama’s immigration policies, alleging “Barack Obama is the first Hispanic president the same way Bill Clinton was the first black [one].”

My God, he really is the second coming of Peter Lemon Moodring, isn’t he?

Related: Perhaps he’s Zelig as well: Seth Mandel of Commentary notes that Obama has had his name shoehorned into every White House presidential biography beginning with Coolidge, with the exception of Gerald Ford.

More: Chicago machine politician hyped to mythopoeic status by media at the start of his presidential bid cautions college students not to believe the same media that created his legend.

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Noting that “One of the things you become conscious of when cover or write about news every day is how uninformed and/or disinterested the average person is concerning news,” Peter Ingemi, who blogs as “DaTechGuy” ponders “Will the Newsweek cover make people think Obama has come out?”

Quoting Glenn Reynolds’ joke that “If I were a GOP operative, I’d distribute thousands of those Newsweek issues to black barbershops in key precincts,” Ingemi responds:

How many people are going to see this cover in passing? How many doctor’s offices, waiting rooms, barber shops, (Black and otherwise) and other places where free copies of Newsweek go to die will this cover sit for months, perhaps all the way to election day?

And How many of those people who are too busy to read the story inside will see this cover on a magazine called NEWSWEEK without reading Andrew Sullivan’s piece and think Obama has come out as Gay?

I’m betting an awful lot.

If you think that is going to have a positive net effect on the president’s re-election effort, then you just might live in the MSM media bubble.

It seems like a long shot to me — this supposition assumes that people actually read Newsweek. (Although plenty of people with the good sense to avoid buying Newsweek have already seen the cover via Drudge and a zillion other Websites embedding its image.)

On the other hand, consider how lucky it is for Obama that Newsweek’s cover broke in May rather than October.  How many low-information voters assumed that John McCain temporarily suspending his campaign in late September of 2008 at the height of the financial markets’ meltdown meant that he was permanently suspending it?

Speaking of Newsweek, a columnist there “Likens ‘Insufferable’ Ann Romney To Hitler, Stalin,” Real Clear Politics reports, with video from — where else? — MSNBC:

Goldberg found Ann Romney’s glowing praise of motherhood in a column she wrote for USA Today to be “kind of creepy.” During an appearance on MSNBC’s weekend program “Up with Chris Hayes,” Goldberg said the phrase “the crown of motherhood,” which Ann Romney used in her column, reminded her of “authoritarian societies” that give out awards for large families.

“In a lot ways, the column was totally anodyne, right? She’s, you know, yes, motherhood is beautiful. I found that phrase, ‘the crown of motherhood’ really kind of creepy. Not just because of it’s somewhat — you know, it’s kind of really authoritarian societies that give out like a Cross of Motherhood. They give out awards for big families,” Goldberg said on the program’s panel.

“You know, Stalin did it, Hitler did it,” she said.

Oh, you mean International and National Socialists. Newsweek seemed to believed that such concepts were universal, only a few years ago.

Or as blogger “Irish Spy” tweets, “Does the Romney campaign have double agents inside Newsweek? It’s the only explanation.”

Update: Welcome Hugh Hewitt fans!

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I shouted out who played the Kennedys, when after all, it was Barack Hussein. At the Blaze, Jonathon M. Seidl writes, “Despite endorsing Obama in 2008, JFK’s daughter Caroline now considers Obama a ‘liar,’ according to a family source in Edward Klein’s new book on Obama called ‘The Amateur.’ After spotlighting numerous examples of bad blood between the Kennedy family and the man Teddy and Caroline designed as JFK’s successor in 2008, Seidl concludes:

Ethel Kennedy, “the matriarch of the family,” similarly felt scorned, according to Klein. He tells a story of her invitation — extended to the First Family — being ignored by the Obamas. She got so upset “that she went on a rampage inside her house, cursing the president and turning over furniture.”

And to top it all of, Caroline, the family source tells Klein in the book, believes “that as a loyal Democrat, she has nowhere to go, no one else to possibly support except Obama.”

(Related: Explosive New Book: Bill Clinton Thought Obama an ‘Amateur,’ Urged Hillary to Quit and Run in 2012)

And guess what: “the Obamas know that she has nowhere else to go, so they see no point in being nice to her.”

That “really pisses her off.”

Wait, the Obama administration is cruel to a prominent female Democrat — I’m shocked, shocked!

But really, where else can Caroline and the rest of the Kennedy clan go?

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Found the Rhetorican, George Lucas has a little fun with his fellow One Percenters in posh Marin County, after they rejected his proposal to build a movie studio (which would bring jobs, revenue, and additional taxes into the area). First, his PR department issued a statement that reads:

The level of bitterness and anger expressed by the homeowners in Lucas Valley has convinced us that, even if we were to spend more time and acquire the necessary approvals, we would not be able to maintain a constructive relationship with our neighbors.

We love working and living in Marin, but the residents of Lucas Valley have fought this project for 25 years, and enough is enough.  Marin is a bedroom community and is committed to building subdivisions, not business.  Many years ago, we tried to stop the Lucas Valley Estates project from being built, but we failed, and we now have a subdivision on our doorstep.

Next — well, we’ll let Movies.com take it from here:

[Lucas] wants to transform the property into low-income housing, naturally, ending their official statement with this zinger, “If everyone feels that housing is less impactful on the land, then we are hoping that people who need it the most will benefit.”

He’s working with the Marin Community Foundation to instead construct affordable housing for either low-income families or seniors living on small, fixed incomes. In order to smooth along the development, he’s already given them all of the pricey technical studies and land surveys Lucasfilm spent years conducting. And we think that’s just great. Because if there’s one thing rich people will hate more than having movie magic made in their backyard, it’s poor people moving in.

Mr. Lucas, we may hate you for turning your back on the original trilogy, but our hat is off to you on this one. Well played.

Heh. Incidentally, the press release from Lucasfilm’s PR department that Movies.com quotes goes on to note:

While we managed to build on Skywalker Ranch after one year master plan approval and another year PDP approval, it took over 10 years for the Master Plan approval on Big Rock and Grady Ranches. It took us three years for a PDP on Big Rock and now we are four years into trying to get a PDP permit for Grady Ranch with no end in sight.

As the company grew we realized we needed more space than what we were building in Lucas Valley at Skywalker Ranch, and it could not accommodate the whole company. We then worked to find more land on which to expand our corporate headquarters, our video game enterprise LucasArts, and our visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic. We were told there was no way we would be able to build a facility of that size in Marin County and therefore we moved the majority of our employees from Marin to the Presidio in San Francisco. We’ve had a great partnership with the Presidio Trust and created a low impact facility which offers great benefit to its surrounding community

How out of touch is Marin? They make San Francisco look like a pro-business city — at least from Lucas’s perspective. On the other hand, it’s a rather distorted perspective. Considering Lucas thinks of communist Vietnam as the good guys, why should he be angry at a local government that attempts to thwart his business plans — or be surprised at “The level of bitterness and anger” expressed by his fellow California leftists, simply because they’ve aimed their rancor towards him?

Found via The Rhetorican, who goes on to note, “Now all they need over there is a state prison and Marin County will finally be representative of California state government’s three main constituencies: ‘the very rich, the very poor, and the public employees.’”

Update: Will Smith gets mugged reality, decides not to move to France anytime soon. Don’t miss the video.

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“4-Year-Old’s Overdue Library Books Returned After Police Sent To Family’s House,” CBS Pittsburgh reports:

The case of the four overdue library books and the little girl who borrowed them is closed, thanks in part to local police who were sent to investigate the case.

Four-year-old Katelyn Jageman’s books were due back to the Freeport Area Library on Oct. 19, 2011. Until Thursday, they were still in her possession. Library officials said after several attempts to retrieve the books, the case was turned over to police, who made a courtesy call to the child’s home.

“It’s a rare incident, but it does occur,” said Donna Michael, President of the Freeport Area Library Board.

After phone calls and letters to the family, Michael admitted she alerted authorities and put the problem in their hands.

“I did turn the file over to the police department,” she said.

Here’s exclusive video of how the arrest went down:

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Update: Welcome readers clicking in from:

• Instapundit.com
• Lucianne.com
• Neo-Neocon
• Rand Simberg
• The Week
• Yahoo News
• The PJM homepage.

Original post follows below.

Well, this happened:

To make sense of the strange Time and Newsweek covers appearing at your supermarket news stand recently — Newsweek seemingly going from cover stories on light S&M one week to Obama as “The First Gay President” the next; Time magazine concurrently featuring a breast-feeding three-year-old(!) boy – it helps to understand the history of newsweeklies.

Time began publishing in 1923 as the first weekly news magazine; Newsweek debuted a decade later as a copycat publication. (It was bought by the Washington Post in 1961, and in 2010 famously unloaded by the now-ailing newspaper for a dollar.) As Alan Brinkley wrote in The Publisher, his 2010 biography of Time founder Henry Luce, Luce and his then-business partner Brit Hadden (who died at age 31 in 1929) were originally going to call their publication “Facts” when they first conceived of the notion of a weekly news magazine in the early 1920s. One night in 1922 though, as Brinkley writes, while Luce was riding the subway home, he came across an advertising card above the windows of the subway car that used the phrase “Time for a Change” or something similar in its copy, which convinced him that “Time” was the correct title for his nascent magazine idea:

Hadden immediately agreed, and they never reconsidered. “Time” was attractive to them because it captured something of the dual purpose of their enterprise—to chronicle the passage of time and to save readers precious time. “Take Time—It’s Brief,” was one of the early slogans they attached to their announcements of the new publication; “Time Will Tell” and “Time Is Valuable” were others.

It also helps to understand what a novelty a weekly news magazine was in the 1920s, by comparing it to the competing information mediums of the era, as Brinkley goes on to do. The first radio networks, the direct precursors to today’s NBC, CBS, and (slightly more circuitously) ABC, were formed in that era. Movies were extraordinarily popular, though they still lacked sound until the end of the decade. That was the media culture in which Time was born, Brinkley writes:

With the exception of the national wire services, whose stories were filtered through local newspaper editors with their own interests and tastes, Time—which even in its early, frail years had subscribers in every state—was for a while the only genuinely national news organ. No newspaper had a reach very far beyond its own city. Radio news in the 1920s consisted of an announcer reading headlines a few times a day. Newsreels were not yet prominent. Even with its relatively modest circulation in the 1920s, Time established itself as an important force in journalism if for no other reason than that it reached men and women in all parts of the country and promised to rescue them from isolation and provincialism and prepare them for the cosmopolitan world.

As John Podhoretz wrote in 2009, recounting his experiences at Time in the early 1980s, until the World Wide Web arrived in the early 1990s, newsweeklies were still hugely influential, through the eighties and nineties, with its top journalists receiving limousine service and tony expense accounts:

Time Inc., the parent company of Time, was flush then. Very, very, very flush. So flush that the first week I was there, the World section had a farewell lunch for a writer who was being sent to Paris to serve as bureau chief…at Lutece, the most expensive restaurant in Manhattan, for 50 people.So flush that if you stayed past 8, you could take a limousine home…and take it anywhere, including to the Hamptons if you had weekend plans there. So flush that if a writer who lived, say, in suburban Connecticut, stayed late writing his article that week, he could stay in town at a hotel of his choice. So flush that, when I turned in an expense account covering my first month with a $32 charge on it for two books I’d bought for research purposes, my boss closed her office door and told me never to submit a report asking for less than $300 back, because it would make everybody else look bad. So flush when its editor-in-chief, the late Henry Grunwald, went to visit the facilities of a new publication called TV Cable Week that was based in White Plains, a 40 minute drive from the Time Life Building, he arrived by helicopter—and when he grew bored by the tour, he said to his aide, “Get me my helicopter.”

Once Matt Drudge blew open the story of Bill Clinton’s dalliances with Monica Lewinsky, a story that Newsweek attempted to suppress, the walls quickly began to fall, and savvy news consumers quickly began to receive their news elsewhere — including from news aggregation sites such as Drudge and Instapundit, which can be and are updated numerous times a day, unlike the increasingly lethargic schedule of the newsweeklies.

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Hmmmmm: Stacy McCain writes that “the revelation that an ex-girlfriend in Dreams was a ‘composite’ or ‘compression’ of several women — as President Obama reportedly told biographer David Marannis — has focused new attention on [Jack] Cashill’s argument that [Bill] Ayers was Obama’s ghostwriter.”

The so-called “New York girlfriend” in Obama’s memoir bears specific resemblance to Ayers’s ex-girlfriend Diana Oughton, one of three Weather Underground members killed in 1970 when a bomb the terrorist group was building accidentally exploded.

Like the girlfriend in Obama’s memoir, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes, and came from an affluent background. Furthermore, Oughton’s family estate in Illinois is strikingly similar to one described in a sequence in Dreams when Obama and his “New York girlfriend” visit her family.

Read the whole thing, and decide for yourself. Though as fellow Bay Area blogger Bookworm Room adds, “What are the odds that you’d combine a whole lot of different women in your life, and then come up with Bill Ayers’ girlfriend?”

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For his newest composite girlfriend, couldn’t Obama and his ghostwriters have chosen a name that wasn’t prominently featured in George Orwell’s 1984? (Cool song by the Eurythmics though.) As David Steinberg writes at the Tatler:

The Obama 2012 campaign released the epic government-fueled travails of “Julia” today, a slideshow supposedly relating how an Obama presidency can benefit the life of the average American woman. “Benefit”, as in pay for each of her progressive-approved hipster doofus life-choices (“Age 22: She starts her career as a web designer”).

Right off the bat, “#Julia” trended to the top of Twitter as the second-most popular current hashtag in the United States; to the horror of David Axelrod and the increasingly dated tacticians of the Obama campaign, virtually every mention of #Julia was a conservative mocking the slideshow. Our Vodkapundit nailed it with:

“#Julia is a #composite of all the ways @BarackObama would like to buy the women’s vote.”

“On my count, the last five hashtags introduced by Obama’s campaign have been instant public relations disasters; another smear tactic backfired into the legendary #ObamaEatsDogs,” David concludes. (Read the whole thing.™)

Not to mention, serving, as the original Julia did, as a reminder of the horrors of a Nanny State run amok:

There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden microphones: besides, they could be seen. It did not matter, nothing mattered. They could have lain down on the ground and done that if they had wanted to. His flesh froze with horror at the thought of it. She made no response whatever to the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself. He knew now what had changed in her. Her face was sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way, had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone than flesh. Her body felt like that. It occurred to him that the texture of her skin would be quite different from what it had once been.

He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As they walked back across the grass, she looked directly at him for the first time. It was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike. He wondered whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it was inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept squeezing from his eyes. They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side but not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak. She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig. Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.

‘I betrayed you,’ she said baldly.

‘I betrayed you,’ he said.

She gave him another quick look of dislike.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘they threaten you with something — something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, “Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so.” And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.’

‘All you care about is yourself,’ he echoed.

‘And after that, you don’t feel the same towards the other person any longer.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t feel the same.’

There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind plastered their thin overalls against their bodies. Almost at once it became embarrassing to sit there in silence: besides, it was too cold to keep still. She said something about catching her Tube and stood up to go.

‘We must meet again,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we must meet again.’

Related thoughts on “The cradle-to-grave, government-supported existence of ‘Julia,” from Morrissey, Ed 655321, an Outer Party member who blogs via a two-way telescreen located in one of Oceania’s more frigid climates.

Update: “Alas, Team Obama has omitted a few milestones from the life of Julia.” Actually, Julia should be pretty comfortable working the Memory Hole by now.

More: Heh, indeed. Just click.™

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At Power Line, John Hinderaker spots this telling passage regarding “Barry’s Imaginary Girlfriend” from his college days:

It was striking to me that when Genevieve met Obama he was a 22-year-old college graduate, but hadn’t yet figured out what his name was. In high school, he had generally been called “Barry,” but by this time he apparently was looking for something more formal:

She called him Bahr-ruck, with the accent on the first syllable, and a trill of the r’s. Not Bear-ick, as the Anglophile Kenyans pronounced it, and not Buh-rock, as he would later be called, but Bahr-ruck. She said that is how he pronounced it himself, at least when talking to her.

I find that very odd. Think how fundamental a part of you your name is: when you were in elementary school, did you have any doubt about what to call yourself? At 22, Obama was still trying out names.

And even as late as age 37, he may have still be trying them out. Note that in the 1998 poster and press release for the “World Premiere” of “The Love Song of Saul Alinsky,” uncovered in Andrew Breitbart’s last article, the future 44th president was billed as State Senator “Baraka Obama.”

Was that a typo, or was Barry/Barack/Baraka still taking new names out for a spin?

Related: “So What Else Did Obama Fake in his Memoir?”

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Will Rogers once said that there are three kinds of men…

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From Lileks’ latest addition to his Website, “News and Ads of ’70s Radio,”Confused young hippies: see the world with the new mod Navy:”

I’m pretty sure that post-dates the original ad for recruits looking to serve on Her Majesty’s Psychedelic Service:

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Back in 2010, in an essay titled, “Our Puritanical Progressives,” George Will flashed back to the days of the toughest Super-Villain Batman and Robin went up against in the 1950s, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Today, many comic book fans likely think of Wertham as some sort of arch-conservative member of the biblical Moral Majority; Will reminded readers that he was nothing of the sort:

In 1954, Fredric Wertham brought science — very loosely defined — to the subject of juvenile crime. Formerly chief resident in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, he was politically progressive: When he opened a clinic in Harlem, he named it for Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law who translated portions of “Das Kapital” into French, thereby facilitating the derangement of Parisian intellectuals.

Without ever interviewing the convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg, Wertham testified on her behalf concerning what he called her “prison psychoses.” Since 1948, he had been campaigning against comic books, and his 1954 book, “Seduction of the Innocent,” which was praised by the progressive sociologist C. Wright Mills, became a bestseller by postulating a causal connection between comic books and the desensitization of young criminals: “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.”

Wertham was especially alarmed about the one-third of comic books that were horror comics, but his disapproval was capacious: Superman, who gave short shrift to due process in his crime-fighting, was a crypto-fascist. As for Batman and Robin, the “homoerotic tendencies” were patent.

Flash-forward to today, and this headline at the Huffington Post, hard at work on solving the pressing issues of mankind: “Batman Is Gay: Comic Writer Grant Morrison Says Concept Of Superhero Character Is ‘Sexually Deviant:’”

Action Comics writer Grant Morrison, who is best known for revamping DC Comics’ family of Batman titles, spoke at length about comic superheroes in an interview with Playboy magazine, confirming maybe those Batman and Robin rumors aren’t so far-fetched after all, because the title character is “very, very gay.”

“He’s very plutonian in the sense that he’s wealthy and also in the sense that he’s sexually deviant,” Morrison told the magazine. “Gayness is built into Batman. I’m not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There’s just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he’s intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay.”

To paraphrase Moe Szyslak, Jeez, where ya been, Homer? The whole Man of Steel industry has gone gay. But then, who hasn’t, as Kathy Shaidle writes:

Well, as most of you have noticed at this point:

Stuff you used to joke about as a kid = now a “serious” thing

And never forget (or else):

Everyone is secretly gay — except Hitler and other bad people!

Speaking of which…

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Ride the postmodern recursion!

Barack Obama’s new interview with mouth-breathing fan Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner is most notable for his gooey praise of the “brilliance” of Daily Show host Jon Stewart.

“I don’t watch a lot of TV news. I don’t watch cable at all,” he said, very unconvincingly. “I like The Daily Show, so sometimes if I’m home late at night, I’ll catch snippets of that. I think Jon Stewart’s brilliant. It’s amazing to me the degree to which he’s able to cut through a bunch of the nonsense – for young people in particular, where I think he ends up having more credibility than a lot of more conventional news programs do.”

In actuality, as Jim Geraghty notes, the Obama administration seems positively obsessed with MSNBC (when they’re not watching Stewart), so much so that it’s distorted how they view the news cycle. As Geraghty asks, before quoting a passage from Jodi Kantor’s book The Obamas, “why would President Obama have the erroneous view that the media was obsessed with his birth certificate? What could he be watching that would give him such a skewed perspective that his birth certificate was the “dominant news story”?”

Aside from the one-man birther extravaganza that was Donald Trump, who pushed the birther story hardest? According to data from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism reviewed by the Poynter Institute’s Julie Moos, MSNBC had the most coverage, far ahead of Fox or CNN. “While MSNBC’s coverage may have been devoted to questioning or debunking the president’s citizenship issues, that network spent the most time discussing it,” said Moos.

According to the data, MSNBC devoted ten percent of its airtime last week to President Obama, and fully 92 percent of that was “airtime coded ‘citizenship and religion rumors’ and ‘birther’ coverage.” By comparison, CNN and Fox devoted just five percent of their airtime to the president. Of that, PEJ says CNN’s coverage of the president was 100 percent devoted to “citizenship and religion rumors,” while Fox’s coverage was only eight percent.

As we dubbed Mr. Obama in 2010, he really is the Commander in Chief of MSNBC.

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Barack Obama, egoist in chief:

Obama had always had a high estimation of his ability to cast and run his operation. When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to give up control when that’s all I’ve known.” Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign’s political director. “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Jimmy Carter, micro-manager in chief:

Carter attempted to compensate for his stiff personal skills and bad relations with Congress by adopting a crushing routine, working as much as 80 hours a week and reading as many as 300 pages of paperwork every night. It is doubtful that such a heroic workload was either productive or helpful in guiding his staff. It took six months before Carter would give up personally reviewing all requests to use the White House tennis court. (Carter denied supervising the White House tennis court at a 1979 press conference, though his denial confirmed the perception that he was the Micro-Manager-in-Chief: “I have never personally monitored who used or did not use the White House tennis court. I have let my secretary, Susan Clough, receive requests from members of the White House staff who wanted to use the tennis court at certain times, so that more than one person would not want to use the same tennis court simultaneously, unless they were either on opposite sides of the net or engaged in a doubles contest.”)

To be fair to the 39th president, to history’s knowledge, he never ate the killer rabbit.

Update: “Amusing Headline of the Day: ‘Barack Obama: An Underdog Story.’”

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You know all those people who thought that the Titanic was simply a movie that James Cameron dreamed up 15 years ago, and that Mike Wallace’s death at age 93 would really wreck the Pittsburgh Steelers’ upcoming season?

Spelling isn’t one of their strengths, either.

(H/T: I Hate the Media.)

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Last Sunday, David Axelrod told Chris Wallace, “The choice in this election is between an economy that produces a growing middle class and that gives people a chance to get ahead and their kids a chance to get ahead and an economy that continues down the road we’re on.”

Whoops, he did it again, this past Friday:

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin (D) announced he wasn’t sure whom he would vote for in the November presidential election. Today, Obama top campaign advisor David Axelrod stated on CNN that he understood how Manchin would be wary of endorsing Obama. “Right now in West Virginia,” he said, “these first three and a half years haven’t been that good to West Virginia. So, then you look [at] what the options will be, who will be on the other end.”

Perhaps the above video will help to explain one reason why “these first three and a half years haven’t been that good to West Virginia,” and why change needs to come in November.

Related: “George Will Asks Donna Brazile, ‘If Obama Can Stop the Seas From Rising, Why Can’t He Bring Down Gas Prices?’”

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“Three-Minutes Of Reporters Saying Things They Shouldn’t:”

(H/T: JG)

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