Oh, hey, bitter Hillary Clinton supporters! The Barack Obama presidential campaign knows many of you are threatening to vote for Republican presidential candidate John McCain because supporting Obama would feel like swallowing insults to feminism and, I guess, the "popular vote" in the sham Florida and Michigan elections or whatever. To help you get over these irrational fears you are selling out, a triumphant Obama and a heavily-indebted Clinton would like to meet you personally, in Washington, at a hotel famous for bringing together powerful male politicians and desperate female whores. Bring your checkbook! Leave your uncomfortable analogies at home, please, kthxbai. [Daily News]

Well, you can't say the National Organization for Women didn't warn you: Barack Obama might be leading a campaign for change but, judging from a story in this morning's Times, Michelle Obama will be forced to bend to established patriarchy just as would-be-first-lady Hillary Clinton did 16 years ago. The Times writes about how Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer, is known for bridging racial divides with bold, frank talk. "Her style is still to say: 'Hey! I'm going to tell you where I stand, and you figure out where you stand,'" said a former illegal immigrant who started a Chicago school with Obama's help. But American is scared of smart, mouthy ladies, so the Obama campaign is giving Michelle a makeover to make her far less interesting:

When Bertolt Brecht said, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it," well, he was just being an egomaniacal auteur. But it's quite possible that he was right — if you're willing to classify network television as art, that is. Consider the case of two recent seemingly unthinkable societal shifts — Barack Obama's presidential nomination and the recent decision to legalize gay marriage in California starting today. Both were the plots of popular television shows before they actually happened. Could the paranoid social conservatives be right? Does what people see on TV actually change their opinions? Do Kiefer Sutherland's powers of persuasion extend beyond Defamer? Consider the evidence after the jump.

Big news on the "who will Barack Obama's John the Baptist" front! First: his Vice Presidential choice will not be Hillary Clinton, because he just hired Patti Solis Doyle as his eventual Veep's chief of staff. Which is odd, because she was incompetent as Hillary's campaign manager, but less odd when you consider that choosing her is just a "fuck you" to Hillary and her terrible people. Second: Al Gore is endorsing Obama tonight, so obviously that means he wants to be Vice President again so that Americans can go back to not liking him very much in 2016 when he runs for do-over president. But this is the most important VP-selection-related news of all: if Barry Obama chooses Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, the candidate will have to answer some very touchy questions about precisely how funny he finds prison rape. No, seriously.

Obama's newest flack is former journalist! It's cute when journos move to politicians' press offices and pretend they'll still give a shit about The People's Right To Know. "The thing that really made me feel at peace with the decision is this conversation we had about telling the truth," Linda Douglass says. (Obama's DIFFERENT he cares about CHANGE and TRUTHS.) And so, it begins. [WP]

In this week's New Yorker, Ben McGrath profiles Mayhill Fowler, the woman who became famous for fifteen minutes after crashing the private party at which Obama let slip his infamous "bitter" comment about angry white proles with guns (but she supports him!). She then doubled-down for a full half hour after she stealthily taped Bill Clinton calling Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum a "scumbag." All in a day's work for a plucky citizen journalist, "who is sixty-one, with frosted gray hair and gold jewelry, spent the previous three decades as an aspiring writer and the stay-at-home mother of two daughters." Three decades as an aspiring writer, you don't say. Well, tenacity's a dying virtue, as is full disclosure in business practices. A reader at TPM Cafe muckrakes the muckraker:

• Maybe Barack Obama surprised Scarlett Johansson with a bunch of long emails because her brother, Hunter, works for him. Uh, sure. [P6]

Clinton "reached out to Obama-backers, like vicious Clinton-basher David Geffen... [saying] 'We all have to get behind Barack now.'" [Daily News]

"A toy being sold over the internet by a Utah couple is causing an uproar from supporters of democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. It's a sock monkey wearing a suit with a lapel pin for Obama. Supporters of Obama have been filling online forums and blogs with angry words over what they see as the degrading depiction of a black man as a monkey." [abc4.com] News footage of the offending doll after the jump.

The Internet can change elections! Just not through Meetup and Friendster like some people thought. Okay, these five pictorial jokes about Barack Obama and John McCain won't be entirely responsible for Obama's imminent November victory. They're just mobilizing the base! Because Influential Thought Leaders don't join "One Million Strong For Obama On Facebook," but they do link to political jokes on their Tumblr blogs.

Fox News has been accused of being a house organ of the Republican party, though that's not entirely accurate. It follows the mostly conservative "what can you do for ME" ideology of its owner, Rupert Murdoch, with a bit of the faux-populist anti-elite Nixonian media strategy of Roger Ailes, its initial guiding force. But lately, cracks and strains have become evident. The network doesn't particularly like John McCain, the Republican nominee. And Rupert Murdoch seems to have developed a little crush on Barack Obama, the Democrat. But the network's airheaded personalities just aren't comfortable embracing the black guy with the funny name. The cognitive dissonance leads, over and over again, to terribly offensive slurs followed by half-hearted apologies. Let us examine the worst of their crimes!

• Denis Leary's wife, Ann, has for years been secretly not cool with the comedian having dining, hanging out with and getting diet and exercise makeovers from his knockout friend Elizabeth Hurley, so she sadly channeled her frustrations into a thinly-veiled "novel." Something tells me Denis, in a similar situation, would have just cussed and yelled about it for an hour or so until the situation somehow resolved itself. Not that there's anything wrong with different "communication styles." [R&M]

Did loutish talking heads on cable news networks ruin Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign with the magic of "sexism?" They couldn't destroy Barack Obama with incessant repeats of racially-inflammatory sermons from Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but this "sexism" is said to be extra strong. On the CBS Evening News the other night, Katie Couric pulled out her mystical "notebook" and read a fable about sexism in which a blonde lady has her career ambitions destroyed by sexist men in the television industry. Mistaking this for a story about Clinton, America promptly got very scared and upset, and the Times sent two reporters out to ask everyone in the media if sexism shouldn't be stopped with "outrage." Here's what they found:

Fox News had commentator Michelle Malkin on to talk about how Barack Obama's wife Michelle has not been the victim of unfair conservative attacks, and as she was speaking the network displayed the caption seen above: "Outraged liberals: Stop picking on Obama's baby mama!" The term "baby mama" is, of course, slang for the unwed mother of one's child (married ones usually just called "wives"). This is sort of like when Anderson Cooper of CNN misused the term "boo," except vicious and racist instead of adorable and funny. It also follows incidents in which Fox asked whether Michelle Obama did a "terrorist" fist-bump with her husband and in which it circulated unsubstantiated rumors that she used the term "whitey" in a speech once. Whoops! Fox News has "accidentally" injected another crazy defacto allegation about the Democratic presidential candidate's wife into the mainstream dialog. Disingenuous semi-apology to follow shortly. (UPDATE: Already happened.) Video after the jump.

Barack Obama's campaign made a good move with a new site full of Obama rumors and refutations, in the classic "Myth: X. Truth: Y" format. We think it looks pretty dramatic (or maybe creepy) and while it does remind me of a "Myth vs. Fact" page from a Scientologist or Christian site, it doesn't have that 90s all-in-Arial feel. And if it feels like a religious tract, isn't that perfect for the target demo?

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is much better at heroically rescuing orphans from warzones than he is at writing a regular political column, has a very great and original idea. He thinks that Barack Obama, who is now the Democratic nominee for president, should write and deliver a speech about gender, much like he did about race, that one time. What a great and original suggestion! We loved the idea when some HuffPo lady suggested it back in April, when Slate ladies suggested it for Hillary in March, when Ellen Goodman suggested it in May, and we love it now. Unlike all those ladies who suggested it, though, Kristof has manly suggestions for a manly speech on gender issues.

The high rollers who raised millions for Hillary Clinton's campaign are getting (another) visit today from the man who helped dashed their dreams—Obama's campaign manager. And guess what? He's going to be asking them for millions more. David Plouffe, one of Obama's closest advisors, will be stopping off at a Midtown law firm today to meet with a group of HillRaisers who oiled and operated Hil's vaunted money machine.

So. The bad Countrywide-related guy who just 'resigned' from the Obama campaign? He was at the Bilderberg conference, that fun meeting of the secret shadow government. And he's connected to sooo many other organizations that plot the global food crisis and control the churches, like the Brookings Institute and the University of Minnesota. We learned so much from this informative widget, courtesy Animal. We've embedded it after the jump.

Today, Barack Obama fired the guy he hired to pick his Vice President. The guy, Jim Johnson, apparently got some cash from Countrywide's controversial "real estate loans for friends of our CEO" program. Countrywide destroyed the entire nation, so Johnson has been criticized. Also he picked Geraldine Ferraro for Veep back in the day, so.... Anyway, Obama now needs to hire someone to vet the guy he hires to vet his Vice Presidential choice. We recommend the crooked NBA ref. (The stress of the campaign has driven poor Obama back to his precious, precious cigarettes.)