Barack Obama: "I Am A Huge Clint Eastwood Fan"

Once again, Barack Obama redefines the term "class act" while maintaining his sangfroid.

(Yeah, I know, it's pretentious to use a French term in this context. But I also know that just annoys the Obama-bashers even more, so I can't resist. It's even more fun than mentioning Journeys with George to a Bush hater.)

When Mitt Romney Came to Town

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reports that supporters of Newt Gingrich hope to swift-boat Mitt Romney before the upcoming South Carolina GOP primary by releasing a documentary that, judging from this trailer, appears to be a hatchet job concocted by someone to the left of Michael Moore. Not that there's anything wrong with that, you understand. It's just that I never thought I'd live long enough to see conservative Republicans attack another conservative Republican by condemning the latter for... for... well, making too much money.

Confession of a news junkie

I keep telling myself: OK, tonight I'm not going to watch all those freakin' news shows. No Keith, no Rachel, no Hardball or Last Word. I'm not gonna plant myself at my dining room table and divide my attention between MSNBC or Current on my HDTV, and Talking Points Memo or Daily Kos on my laptop. I'm gonna go out to a screening, or watch a movie on my HDTV -- hell, I still haven't caught up with all the Harry Potter films! -- or write something for this blog or some other venue, or connect my new Blu-Ray player so I can downstream movies, or even try to organize the piles of magazines and stacks of DVDs in my home office. But then a story like this breaks, and I know -- I just know, dammit! -- what I'll really be doing tonight. (Hat tip to Kelly for the above illustration. You can check out her other work here.)

Today's edition of Stuff I Wouldn't Dare Make Up -- "Give us your cash, bitch!"

As William Goldman told me several years ago during the Toronto Film Festival junket for The Princess Bride: It's very hard to be a satirist at a time when the real world has loonier stuff than you would ever dare make up. To be entirely honest, even after I was alerted to this astonishingly over-the-top and beyond-the-pale campaign ad by Talking Points Memo, I thought the damn thing was a put-on, a joke, a Saturday Night Live sketch. But no. Geez, this makes the infamous "Daisy Ad" look positively subtle.

More bad news about newspapers

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, daily circulation of print newspapers in this country fell an alarming 10.6 percent year over year in the period between April to September As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo puts it: "A ten percent decline year over year is the rate of a mode of distribution going out of existence."

Last 'Inconvenient Truth' posting until Oscar night (maybe)

Over at the Talking Points Memo Cafe, Eric Kleefeld reports that Al Gore has been nominated for a Nobel Prize -- largely, though not entirely, because of An Inconvenient Truth -- and notes: "This makes Gore to our knowledge the only movie-maker who's been nominated for both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar on the strength of a single movie."