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Barack Obama sure is loaded.

A quick plug: last night's episode of The Daily Show was one of the best episodes they've done in some time.  I encourage you to stick it out until the second segment, which is easily the best segment of the evening.  I look forward to seeing what Jon & Co. have to say tonight about Sarah Palin's speech.

I'm a few days late on this, but hey, I doubt I have the same readership as Daily Kos or The Caucus. I spent part of my day lounging around the house and reading my new copy of The Atlantic. The big story in this week's issue -- which is, mysteriously, nowhere to be found on the cover -- is about the downfall of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Not breaking news of course, but Joshua Green digs deep into leaked memos, letters and correspondence from various Clinton campaign staffers to piece together the campaign's biggest mistakes, as well as looking at how the campaign briefly found its stride toward the end of the process.

In addition to reading Green's article, I hope you'll take a moment to check out The Atlantic's index page for the article, which includes all of the leaked correspondence referenced in the piece.

Despite all of the cattiness and conflict in the piece, Clinton manages to come off in an even better light. It seems that, for the most part, she rejected her staff's push to go extremely negative against Obama. Mark Penn, meanwhile, is essentially a wrestling villain at this point. I didn't think the guy could come off as an even bigger jackass. Alas, I was proven wrong.

(photo via hillaryclinton)

If you've been checking in with my shared Google Reader items box to the right (dubbed "Carrots & Sticks"), you probably noticed that I love Dick Polman's American Debate blog.  In fact, I love it so much that I decided it was time for a little "main page" love.  If you haven't read the blog before, today's post is a good place to start -- Dick writes about Obama's "bitter" slip-up, and Hillary's over-the-top reaction.

Here is an editorial in Time from the writing staff of The Wire.  I'll be blogging about the show later -- probably this weekend, since the series ends on Sunday night.  But, this is an interesting op-ed for anyone interested in the war on drugs, let alone The Wire.

Who knew ad analysis could be so amusing?

This has been blogged everywhere, but it's cool enough that I'll post it anyways: Obama baseball t-shirts. They're all pretty rad ... except, of course, the Phillies one. OK, so it looks fine, but I'm a stickler -- it looks weird to me. Can't tell if the font is wrong, or if I'm just not used to seeing that font say anything but "Phillies."