Just how reluc­tant is the national media to let go of the Obama/Clinton unmend­able fence theory? Check the lede of USA Today’s A1 story on Clinton’s speech last night:

Hillary Rodham Clin­ton capped her con­ven­tion appear­ance here Tues­day by declar­ing “Barack Obama is my candidate,” a stir­ring and force­ful embrace of her formal rival that party lead­ers hoped would end lin­ger­ing divi­sions and coax dis­ap­pointed sup­port­ers back into the field.

1/ From Jeanette Winterson’s column in The Times [of London] this last weekend:

I love the speed and com­pact­ness of tex­ting, and the play­ful­ness of its zippy abbre­vi­a­tions. Yet tact, sen­si­tiv­ity, com­pas­sion, it does not do…. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­ogy is all about My Short­cuts, and that makes sense in the office. It doesn’t make sense in our per­sonal lives. Love and hap­pi­ness, worth­while rela­tion­ships, friend­ships, depend on time and effort, not the shortcut.

2/ From a friend’s email this last weekend:

This era of elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion brings many bless­ings to the articulate-in-print…. For my part, thank good­ness I went to col­lege when I did. I waged an aggres­sive charm cam­paign against X via ytalk (remem­ber that Pine func­tion?) when we were in W—. If our paths crossed in 1988 instead of 1998, it would have been a whole dif­fer­ent story.

Now that it’s offi­cial, we’d like to once again reg­is­ter our hope that Sen­a­tor Joseph Biden (D - Delaware) Is Thugged Out will return posthaste. The world is wait­ing, not least because–if the past is any indi­ca­tion–and, for the record, it always is–over the next few months (no, years!) we’re going to need some­one to remind us of this essen­tial doc­trine, first pro­mul­gated on the occa­sion of Biden’s def­i­nitely con­de­scend­ing and pos­si­bly racist appraisal of the man who now heads his ticket:

Joe Biden’s com­ments are crazy ill in the worst way pos­si­ble. Joe Biden says dumb shit on the reg­u­lar, but this is above and beyond in sev­eral regards. But Joe Biden is a major Amer­i­can polit­i­cal figure with crazy foreign-​policy intel­lect who likes to say insane things on the regular.

He’s also a great pick for Obama.

a/ Thesis:

I saw a Wash­ing­ton Post head­line the other day, “Who’s No. 2? Obama Keeps Every­body Guess­ing.” No—the “every­body” in that con­struc­tion is you. Imag­ine if you were cov­er­ing the base­ball play­offs and you wrote that there was mas­sive spec­u­la­tion about who was going to win. It’s man­i­festly moronic because you’re writ­ing about a sched­uled event that is going to take place on a known time­line. You’re con­tribut­ing noth­ing. It’s the oppo­site of news; any useful public infor­ma­tion is entirely missing.

(Chris Lehmann, in an inter­view with Ken Sil­ver­stein at Harper’s)

b/ Proof: