Did you wonder who your favorite Slate contributor is voting for? Good news: now you know! Michael Kinsley instituted the quadrennial endorsement list in 2000—go back and read how wrong all the Bush people were!—and it's been a beloved feature ever since, the two more times they've done it, because everyone cares how a Slate copy-editor is voting (spoiler alert: for Obama). There is one McCain vote, a half-hearted endorsement from the conservative editor and Slate lady-blog contributor Rachael Larimore. But there are fewer third-party votes and abstentions than in either of the two previous iterations of the feature, even in divided anyone-but-Bush 2004. Because, duh, people like Obama more than Kerry. But one man, press critic Jack Shafer, remains relentlessly devoted to his utterly wrong-headed principles. Shafer, once again, is voting for the Libertarians! Shafer in 2000:

This economic downturn has, surprisingly, not killed the "branding" industry, which exists for the sole purpose of allowing graphic design majors to soak clueless corporate behemoths out of millions of dollars for what amounts to a few tweaks of a computer design template. We salute you, brand consultants! You are the hustlers of a new generation. Pictured is the inanimate, non-dynamic, old Pepsi logo; and after the jump, the "more dynamic and more alive" new logo that Pepsi just rolled out at a cost that will eventually total hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide:

The murders of Jennifer Hudson's mother, brother and 7-year-old nephew last weekend may be almost incomprehensibly tragic to you, us and most anyone with a functioning conscience, but we can't all sit around and just grieve over a trio of senseless deaths. There are products to sell and memories to exploit, as with this uniquely evil (and authentic) press release currently making the rounds — perhaps the single worst piece of PR ever to slither over the transom at Defamer HQ: COULD A BEDSIDE SHOTGUN RACK HAVE SAVED JENNIFER HUDSON’S FAMILY FROM TRAGIC DEATH?

Online shopping is now mainstream enough to be a solid barometer of consumer sentiment. So this news from Hitwise, the website-measurement research house, is disturbing: Traffic to e-commerce sites has been dropping for eight straight weeks.

[People in Chester, PA attend a cold, wet rally today for presidential hopeful Barack Obama, who gave his speech in the pouring rain, wearing jeans and sneakers; image via EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images]

Click to viewBoomp3.com Partially inspired by a recent late night viewing of the 1983 comedy Doctor Detroit and a string of doctor visits, hunky & quirky action hero Shia LaBeouf has started to practice medicine. While the Transformers star hasn’t visited a medical school, LaBeouf believes that he’s done enough research to perform simple house calls. LaBeouf said, “I’m not diagnosing major diseases, but if you got the sniffles or a headache, I’m the dude to call. My bubby has the best chicken soup recipe in the world. It’ll cure whatever ails you.” [Photo Credit: Splash Pics] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

♦ J. Crew is absolutely delighted Michelle Obama mentioned the brand on The Tonight Show last night. It's already the basis of an online ad campaign. [Jezebel, Politico]
♦ The Olsens celebrated the launch of their book at Barneys last night, after which MK celebrated into the night at Bungalow 8 and Lit. Today the duo signed books at Barnes & Noble, where they were greeted by PETA protesters in masks. [style file, OK!]
♦ Rachel Roy is just like you and me: She relishes going to vintage stores in small towns because "they aren't picked over by designers like New York is." As for whose style she most admires? Lauren Santo Domingo's. [FabSugar]
♦ You may have balked at Tom Ford's $9,240 otter fur boots, but you'll feel silly on the beach at St. Barts this winter without his $475 tanning goggles! [style file]

Joel Johnson of Boing Boing Gadgets is shocked, shocked that the team working on Google Earth, Google's 3D interactive world map, launched a mobile app for the iPhone before writing one for Google's Android operating system, which now runs on all of one clunky phone sold by T-Mobile, the also-ran of the U.S. wireless market. He calls the decision "inexplicable." I don't think it's hard to understand at all: Google Earth programmers actually want people to use their app, rather than have gadget bloggers write posts celebrating their clever strategery.

Hey, stocks are up again! The Dow jumped 900 points today, the second-largest point gain ever. The largest point gain ever came two weeks ago, when the Dow jumped more than 900 points, only to crater once again in the following days. This illustrates the classic stock maxim, "Buy low, sell lower a day or two later as you're gripped by irrational panic." Click to watch the market's closing seconds, as traders in the background erupt in cheers. Hey guys, wild speculation on short-term stock price swings is serious business.

On today's edition of The View, the political fireworks came not from Elisabeth Hasselbeck but from Richard Dreyfuss, who turned in a masterful bit of anti-promotion for his role as Dick Cheney in Oliver Stone's W. With little prompting, Dreyfuss turned on his director, branding him a "fascist" and, when asked what he was like to work with, declaring, "Imagine working for Sean Hannity." "I would like that!" Hasselbeck immediately chirped. We know, Liz. W. was already on somewhat shaky ground after an Oscar buzz-draining second weekend, but we're sure that Dreyfuss's deviation from his talking points won't help, either. Josh Brolin, it might be time to start vetting those Milk FYC ads.

When the celebrity weeklies unveil their new covers tomorrow, we can bet they'll be dominated by coverage of the terrible Jennifer Hudson news story, in which the singer and actress's mother, brother, and 7-year-old nephew were murdered on Friday. And we suppose they're right to, it being big news and all. Since the issues went to print yesterday, it's up to the websites to tease what each publication has in store (and to keep up with breaking developments). So what might each magazine be featuring? We took a look at five magazines' websites today to try to see if there were any hints of what their coverage will look like tomorrow. People, the longstanding classy version of the other tabloids, has a story (kinda far down the page, honestly) about Jennifer's bond with her mother, featuring recollections about Darnell Donerson from Jennifer's acting coach and from people in Donerson's Chicago neighborhood. It's the kind of sad human interest story that People has made their name doing. Expect sidebar reactions from American Idol judges (Hudson was a contestant on the show) and maybe one of the bigger gets, like Beyonce, Hudson's Dreamgirls costar. Us Weekly reports at a more breathless, staccato clip, giving us gory details about the number of times Hudson's young nephew was shot and quoting from Hudson's sister's MySpace, in which she mourns her lost loved ones and imagines them as her guardian angels now. In your face awfulness. InTouch, Life & Style, and OK! aren't giving the story as much prominence as Us (their older and more popular sibling). OK! does a small dissection of the dispute that lead to the whole tragedy InTouch covers Idol judge Randy Jackson's reaction to the sad news. And Life & Style has nothing about the incident on their sparsely updated site. So, once again, it looks as though Us Weekly leads the pack toward getting the scoop, though their hand at the necessary quiet, soft-touch pieces is not as nimble as People's. Us ought to get the early lead while People follows up in the coming weeks with a punch-in-the-gut Hudson interview. Or not. Maybe we'll get surprised with a big Exclusive. It could happen.

Never one to bow out of a party, just-folded Radar magazine simply re-tooled their planned Halloween event as a funeral-themed "Print Is Dead!" bash. Costumes are "strongly suggested," so attendees could simply wear their own clothes and go as recently laid-off writer-bloggers. Or just wear a bartender or temp worker's outfit.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison doesn't really live in his multimillion-dollar house in San Francisco; he mostly keeps it around for parties, like the rager of a dinner party PR schemestress Brooke Hammerling threw for the 10th anniversary of NetSuite, an online-software company which Ellison has backed since it was a startup. Kara Swisher did one of her let-the-CEO-yammer interviews with NetSuite's Zach Nelson. Videographer Richard Blakeley cut her clip down to just the real-estate porn. It works a lot better with the intro theme from MTV Cribs, doesn't it?

A research company is looking for volunteers willing to fly to Paris to evaluate the impact of jet lag on the human body. You'll get a free round-trip ticket and $2,500 in cash for your trouble. What could be the bad news? Did we mention you'll be confined to a research facility once you arrive, and you'll be pumped with a drug used to treat narcolepsy while you're there? [JetLagStudy.net, NYDN]

Former NBC news correspondent and possible "Next Katie" Campbell Brown somehow ended up a serious anchor on CNN, and... she's quite good? Brown (married to GOP strategist Dan Senor, because lol DC media) has become a convert to the popular new "hey, we are allowed to call bullshit" school of television reporting, which is quite heartening and will probably last until the Republicans reorganize and mount another offensive against the media. Anyway! She was on The Daily Show. They talked about Tucker Bounds, the poor McCain surrogate abused by Campbell, starting a national trend. She's had a good election!

The latest installment of Defamer's last-minute Halloween costume guide features an idea we guarantee you ladies will have all to yourselves come Friday night. Lucky you: This sultry get-up is in fact one of the hottest looks of the fall movie season, yet hiding in plain sight among action aficionados who will flock to see it next month at the multiplex. Don't let the opportunity pass you by, though — follow the jump to see how a cheap frock and a few other inexpensively obtained features can make you this year's overnight sensation.

♦ Just what you need in these lean times: a handy map of recession specials at restaurants across the city. [Eater]
♦ Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto went on a ramen tasting tour through the East Village and—surprise—gave David Chang's Momofuku top honors. [GS]
♦ Allen & Delancey chef Neil Ferguson has left his two-star home for "moral and personal reasons" to join Soho House as executive chef. [Eater]

Did you know Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen has joined eBay's board? Why yes, it's true — and it happened last month. VentureBeat editor Eric Eldon had gotten a belated tip about the hire, and published the story without checking the date. "I made a stupid mistake," he tells me. (He was more oblique in Twitter.) Eldon rapidly took the story down, but not before it was syndicated to The Industry Standard, where it caught the eye of Nicholas Carlson, my former charge at Valleywag who has landed at Silicon Alley Insider.See the hypercompetitive pattern? Hacks have always hustled to scoop rival papers. But tech blogs are being driven to distraction by the notion that they've been beaten by a story. In the rush to publish, they're not even stopping to check their own archives. Checking actual facts is far more cumbersome. Jordan Golson, another former Valleywagger who now blogs at the Industry Standard, made a stink about a report on TheHill.com about iPhones coming to Congress. TheHill.com's overly sensational headline topped a report that merely stated that Congress's administrative arm was testing some iPhones. Golson called the flack quoted in TheHill.com's story, who backpedaled from his earlier statement that "lots" of Congressmen had requested iPhones. Tom Krazit of CNET News, one of the guilty parties cited by Golson for reblogging TheHill.com, got to the bottom of things: Congressional IT administrators were testing a total of 10 iPhones, and all of two Congressmen had asked about getting iPhones instead of the standard-issue BlackBerry. This messy process shows the blogosphere at its best and its worst. Through a series of iterations, the horde of bloggers arrived at the right result. In the meantime, however, a lot of people got the wrongheaded notion that Congress is switching to the iPhone any day now. (I'd note that TheHill.com has yet to retract its initial report; it would not be the first time a flack has said something, regretted it, and then claimed he was misquoted.) There will always be a factchecking squad on the Internet. But I think the reblogging craze will fade over time, as the Web's writers learn the deep satisfaction of telling one's own story for the first time — not repeating someone else's for the nth.

A US Army report warns that terrorists could use Twitter to "organize quicker attacks." So ban it already. [Marketing Vox]

[Mogul Mary Kate Olsen at a Barnes & Nobles promoting her and her sister's new book, the unfortunately titled 'Influence'; image via Splash]