Andrew Breitbart—the nicer half of the Drudge Report—has finally launched "Big Hollywood," his conservative Hollywood news site, which will end the stifling reign of Hollywood liberals. Let's take a look!

Drudge's latest awesome snap poll: who is hotter, Russian strongman Vlad Putin or sculpted hope-monger Barack Obama? The murderous ex-KBG officer is winning! Love it leave it, guys!

We had a feeling, when we saw this million-point headline at Drudge saying Iran will get a nuke during Obama's first term credited only to a mysterious "paper," that the "paper" referenced would be either the Moonie-owned Washington Times or the Murdoch-owned Times of London. More amusing: in order to stop the evil Iranians, the Times insists that Obama must engage in the direct diplomacy without preconditions that John McCain (and Hillary Clinton!) called so naive and foolish. A more reasonable assesment of the report from Brookings and the Council on Foreign Relations is here. [Times via Drudge]

The recount in the Minnesota Senate race between asshole comedian Al Franken and regular asshole Norm Coleman is underway! And the campaigns have lawyers standing by to challenge every vote. So Drudge has had this image up all day, with the headline "DRAMA: Franken Is Challenging This Ballot." Yes, bullshit, obviously. The voter intent is clear. On the other hand, the Coleman campaign is challenging this ballot, this ballot, and this ballot. The whole recount system is obviously broken, the well-intentioned voter intent laws are being manipulated by the campaigns, and this nonsense will not be over with by the end of the year. Or, you know, Al Franken is stealing the election, whichever one you want to believe. [MPR via Wonkette]

Hey, so, a little bit of news came out of the historic Bush/Obama handover transition secret White House surprise meeting. Details of what the president and the president-elect talked about were leaked to the press: apparently Obama tried to convince Bush to bail out the auto industry, and Bush said he might if Obama supports CAFTA. Hey, you know what the real news is, here? Someone in Obama's camp leaked this info to the New York Times, which led someone in the Bush camp to leak a "we're not very happy with that" story to Drudge! Whee! We think we know who's responsible, and he's a dreamboat. Let's closely examine these two paragraphs from the New York Times exclusive on the Oval Office meeting:

Poor sad Matt Drudge lost his influence this year, forever, and no one cares about him or takes him seriously anymore. This was his headline a couple minutes ago, until he lost the question mark. Still, the inference is there: this is an illegitimate win. Matt will now probably lead not the MSM but the crazier fringes of the opposition. Not so much the ones working to formulate a new, smarter conservatism, but the ones who just retreat further and further into conspiracy theories and nuttiness. Goodbye, Matt! We'll be back as soon as hurricanes threaten Florida! [Drudge Archives]

There are two "Black Panthers" standing outside of one polling location in Philadelphia. One of them has a billy club. It's kind of the most hilarious story ever. Fox is all over it. Below, raw live unedited footage of these two American Heroes, who just arrived from that Life on Mars show. Anyways! Race war, guys, let's all head to Ricky's and take advantage of these post-Haloween bargains on Manson Family costumes.

According to Drudge, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle have taken "more than 15 minutes to vote." Maybe they're undecided? His link goes nowhere. Ben Smith doesn't report anything about how long it took Barack Obama to vote. Meanwhile: "HILLARY POLITICKING INSIDE NY POLLING AREA, ADVOCATES FOR OBAMA, 5 FEET FROM BOOTHS... DEVELOPING..." Once again, no link! But this is really a "fuck you, too late to not vote for me" move by the Obamas. Look who else voted at their polling place:

Matt Drudge has lost it. Utterly, totally lost it. This is his headline, right now, the day before the elections. It links to a YouTube clip of Barack Obama scratching his face with his index and, yes, middle fingers. Just like he did to Hillary Clinton, once! Don't you remember? Now we know who the real Barack Obama is: he is a secret asshole. This is really the best anyone can do, because it turns out all those other secret things he is aren't true. Like, for example, Bill Ayers, radical domestic terrorist and respected professor, did not write Barack Obama's book. This was revealed when California businessman Robert Fox and his Republican Congressman brother-in-law paid an Oxford don to investigate similarities between Dreams From My Father and Ayers' Fugitive Days. The charges were "laughably unsubstantiated." But of course Obama is still a secret Muslim foreigner, right? He was totally born in Indonesia, right? Ha, the Director of Hawaii's Department of Health has actually bothered to respond to the lunatics. You may be shocked to learn that Barack Obama's birth certificate is real. So really all that's left is to basically accuse Obama of everything in the world, all at once, like in this 100% real robocall now being made in Pennsylvania.

FLASH: Original Blogger is 42 Years Young.... DEVELOPING [Wikipedia]

[Update: The hoax has been confirmed.] So poor Ashley Todd, right? She's the woman who says she was mugged in Pittsburgh Wednesday night (the wrong part of the Pittsburgh, with the Italians) by a black man. And the black man became incensed when he saw her McCain bumper sticker, on her car, and he carved a "B" into her cheek. What a terrible story! Oh but the police have re-interviewed Ms. Todd, and now the story is a little bit different, in that the car and bumper sticker part is out. After the jump, the new story of this terrible hate crime, and also, because we are assholes, selections from Ms. Todd's MySpace page! You will not like her very much, we're guessing.

[Update: Surprise! It's a hoax!] A woman in Pittsburgh was mugged and beaten near an ATM last night by "a dark-skinned black man, 6 feet 4 inches tall, 200 pounds with a medium build, short black hair and brown eyes." She was robbed of $60. This wouldn't be news except that, according to the woman's testimony, the mugger "became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter 'B' into her face." Even then this wouldn't be news beyond the Pittsburgh Metro Area except that Matt Drudge has broken out the 72-point red font. Because he wishes to press the narrative he's been trying against the odds to push all month: that Democrats are becoming violent. So there you go. Do with this information what you will. File it right next to the person whose house was shot at because (or maybe not because!) they had a McCain sign up. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the woman refused medical treatment after the Liberal Mugger attacked her. Update: Ok. Uh. We're just going to report this without comment: the 'B' appears to be backwards. (Drudge is currently leading with the same image, we have no idea where it came from.)

For years, one man controlled all the news: Matt Drudge, nutty conservative weather-obsessed Miami queen blogger. He "broke" the Monica Lewinsky thing, sort of, and then for nearly ten years his website drove news narratives and pushed stories to the forefront. Even as recently as the primary season, some years past his peak influence, Drudge helped destroy the Clinton campaign with relentless Obama-boosting. Then, of course, he had to switch back to being a straight-up GOP hack. We'd say he just boosted Obama because he felt McCain would beat the Illinois Senator, but the fact is, his visceral hatred for the Clintons probably drove him just as much as anything else. Since the conventions, though, he's been an embarrassment. He highlights completely misleading bullshit and can't get anyone but the dumbest of bloggers to pick up on his pet stories. As Eric Bohlert notes in Media Matters today, Drudge has become so divorced from reality that even the serious press people who've religiously trusted his instincts since the Clinton days can't square his headlines with reality. His cherry-picked poll results are plainly ridiculous, last week's Drudge-touted "McCain Comeback" never even pretended to materialize, and he's completely, completely missed, by design, the major narratives of the last month of the campaign: Palin's national meltdown, the increasingly crazed McCain rallies, and Obama's fundraising and ground advantages. Instead we get... Biden on Botox, a little ACORN, and feeble attempts at finding crazy liberals attacking McCain supporters. They all work like a charm on the Conservative Blogosphere, but back in the good old days, that was just the first step toward mainstream discussion. Now, no one gives a shit. Maybe after the election Drudge will buckle down, like Fox, and provide the voice of the embattled opposition. But a conservative crack-up and the apparent disillusion of the tacit MSM/right-wing noise machine cooperative venture is not great news for Matt. And it's a long time until the next hurricane season.

So every day during election season, campaigns release "talking points" to their media surrogates on the tv, friendly reporters, and, often enough, unfriendly reporters. Now, on the eve of a big important presidential debate, Barack Obama's campaign has—breaking!—"issued a set of debate 'talking points' to media on Wednesday morning, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal." Mr. Drudge adds: "The memo oddly mirrors much of the main press analysis and theme of the current campaign." This is because the point of talking points is that a) they reinforce what media people are already saying and b) they are usually repeated verbatim on TV within minutes of being disseminated. This is kind of an inexplicable DRUDGE EXCLUSIVE because even the people who still get their talking points from Republicans already know what the Obama talking points are? Anyway. The talking points are attached, because why not. It's kind of a neat peek into how all the bullshit artists on your cable TV get through the day.

Nationally, Barack Obama is between 5 and 10 points ahead in the polls. In the states defined by Rasmussen as battlegrounds, Obama ranges from a tie in North Carolina (North Carolina!) to slight leads in all the rest of them. Also Bush announced the nationalization of the banks or something today, prompting the Dow to jump in early trading. So Matt Drudge, who controls your news with an iron opera glove, is leading today with the news that ACORN registered Mickey Mouse to vote. Ha ha ha. Honestly, what the hell's the deal with the ACORN story and why are right-wingers already clinging to it like guns and religion? Sigh. We'll try to explain. What is ACORN?? An evil group that exists to organize poor people into a violent militia and overthrow the government via "voting." Or basically a lobbying group for low- and middle-income families, either one. Oh no, lobbyists! Right? ACORN is in some respects a lobbying group like, say, the oil or pharmaceutical lobbies. Except they represent poor people instead of profitable corporations so they're a much less successful lobbying group. What do they do? They started as a radical group dedicated to getting welfare recipients and underemployed non-welfare recipients together to demand socialist things like free lunches for kids and emergency room care. Now they lobby Democrats for terrorist things like raising the minimum wage and forcing the government to subsidize affordable housing. Also they organize voter registration drives. But what about all these crimes they're committing?? ACORN pays local losers in Florida $8 an hour to gather 20 voter registrations a day. So some of these losers are lazy, like all employees, and just make up the registrations. ACORN does try to find these made-up registrations and fire the employees who submit them, but, you know, sometimes they miss a couple. Also the law seems to say that ACORN has to submit all the registrations they gather no matter what, and even though the law is a little bit vague, they're still trying to follow it. Why do Republicans need to attack and delegitimize a damn voter registration drive?? Because a certain amount of passive voter suppression is built in to the Republican campaign strategy. If all the disenfranchised and disenchanted voters were organized and registered and informed, we'd probably be a crazy socialist 10-party country like Italy or something. The GOP engages in active voter suppression—voter ID laws and legal challenges—and the more passive kind built into the democratic process, like engendering cynicism about the democratic process. Obviously convincing the guys who disagree with you to not vote is part of any party's campaign strategy, but the GOP's by necessity targets poor people and minorities, and the vast history of suppressing the votes of poor people and minorities is way grosser than any history of disenfranchising white protestants. To us! Maybe you have some totally oppressed landed gentry in your family tree so you may feel differently. Quite honestly the very heart of the utter bullshitness of this anti-ACORN campaign can be found in one incredibly telling quote from a spokesman for the RNC: "Cairncross accused ACORN of engaging in a 'systematic effort to undermine the election process' through its voter-registration drives." Do you see the problem with that statement? And basically there is a CERTAIN CLASS of Republican voter that does not think that the poors, the Blacks, the homelesses, and so on honestly really deserve the same power to choose our rulers as a guy who's worked his whole life to get where he is. The politics of resentment are the last, most powerful weapon the McCain campaign has left this cycle. The details of the charges don't matter, actual proof of fraud doesn't matter, any evidence whatsoever of voter fraud being a real problem with a measurable effect on elections certainly doesn't matter, because the "fraud" is just that, you know, no-good hoodlum welfare recipients are being handed voter registration forms, and one type of person sees that as the point of democracy and the other type sees it as an utter perversion of democracy. Didn't McCain used to totally be in the tank for ACORN? Well Republicans have been bitching about ACORN and voter fraud for years now, but McCain definitely didn't used to be one of those Republicans. In 2006 McCain did give a keynote address, about immigration rights, at a rally co-sponsored by ACORN. Can you maybe use a little more false equivalence to explain this in a way I understand? Sure. ACORN's voter registration drives are to conservatives what Diebold voting machines are the liberals. The possibility of abuse is present and clear, but no one's yet convincingly proved that any abuse has occurred. OK so what's up with everyone suddenly talking about ACORN? As we said, nuttier conservatives have been on the ACORN-bashing bandwagon for years now. That it's finally trickled up to Drudge and Fox means they're scared they're losing the election and they need to preemptively delegitimize Obama. What are my talking points for when crazy relatives argue that ACORN stole the election? What we're dealing with so far is minor voter registration fraud. The questionable registrations number in the double digits in most states, and most of them have been flagged and caught by either ACORN themselves or election officials. Furthermore in many places the false registrations are required by law to be submitted anyway, so that ACORN isn't guilty of, say, tossing out the forms of Republicans they sign up. They do try to flag the fake ones as fake, but regardless, the fake ones are still being caught. Also: voter registration fraud does not coherently lead to voter fraud, because if you register one man 75 times, how will he vote 75 times, exactly? More importantly, the election can't be stolen if it hasn't happened yet, and voter registration fraud does not explain in any way a double digit lead for a candidate in national tracking polls. Like, wtf, how are you making this argument, are you slow? ACORN registering Mickey Mouse is why Barack Obama is up 12 in Pennsylvania? Ok, sure, whatever you say.

BREAKING: Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden is overly concerned with his appearance! The Delaware Senator's long been famous for his terrible embarrassing hair plugs, but a story out of the Washington Post today has it that Biden might have injected terrorist biological weapons into his forehead as part of some sick stunt to not look old and tired. Botox Biden! This is important hilarious breaking news, if you just arrived via time machine from one of the last two election cycles. In 2000 no one cared about anything because there were still jobs and stuff and no war and 9/11 was just a glimmer in Osama bin Laden's eye, so the Gore versus Bush campaign was mostly about how Gore was tricked into wearing Earth Tones by some emasculating feminists. Bush proudly kept dressing like a gay cowboy hustler, damn the focus groups, so he won (except he didn't but whatever). And in 2004 even though we had a war and shitty job creation it was still for some reason all about how Bush held a bullhorn on some rubble and John Kerry went windsurfing in a gay wetsuit and he looked French and also like Lurch. So! Bush won (for real for once). And honestly you can bitch about the sad end of this magical friendly bipartisan campaign we were supposed to have with these two DIFFERENT candidates who'd be so polite to one another but so far despite an amazing number of distractions the fact that people seem determined to care about "real issues" is semi-heartening. But of course "real issues" don't make for good column fodder, so a week after the New York Post floated the Biden botox story the Washington Post's gossip columnists (both of whom, it should be noted, are absolutely wonderful people) followed up with an "lol politicians are vain" piece and Drudge linked to it because the number of credible non-killer-storm items he can allow himself to link to every day is shrinking. The End.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider, "the biggest physics experiment in history," fired its proton beam down its 17-mile tunnel this morning. No miniature black holes resulted. (So far.) To learn everything you need to know about the news today, just click to see how Matt Drudge put it, in what is perhaps the single finest one-two-punch headline combination he's ever crafted. [Drudge, all posts tagged 'Science With Drudge']

The Oprah story on Drudge was maybe a bit of a stretch! Does it matter? No! The "damage" is done. It's proof that we've finally reached the most maddening 2004-throwback part of the campaign: the bit where they (let us just say "campaign operatives") throw out absolute bullshit to the friendliest of sources and wait for it to bubble up. We didn't think this would work anymore, in this brave new bloggy future—but it does! RedState heard Palin's teleprompter broke and she soldiered on like a pro! A guy who watched the speech in view of her teleprompter says that is not true, at all, wtf. Too late! The story's already being repeated as gospel! Drudge says Oprah refuses to have Sarah Palin on her show! Oprah says there hasn't been any discussion, we only just heard of this woman a week ago, wtf, I'll have her on later. Who cares? Hell, on a macro level various people call Sarah Palin a "maverick" and "reformer" and then she is one. Democrats can't replicate this strategy because there is not a legitimate news organization in the world that would unquestioningly use Kos (or even HuffPo??) as a source. But if they want to try we'll happily post an item on that one time Martin Balsam and Robert Shaw hijacked Joe Biden's Acela and killed the engineer and he outwitted all of them and drove the train to safety. Now we wait for Chris Matthews to take the bait!

Finally, a place where Hollywood conservatives can have their say. Andrew Breitbart, the friendly half of the Drudge Report link machine, is about to launch what we can only describe as "Sort of the conservative mirror of the original idea for Huffington Post, the one what was quickly abandoned." His new venture will supposedly become a destination site for Hollywood conservatives (like Jean-Claude Van Damme!) to speak out, and have their musing published on the World Wide Web. And, you know, good luck with that. But why does anybody care? Who is this awesomely powerful (but liked!) online agenda-setter? It's not like the man has to start something new. His own news site, Breitbart.com, does huge traffic because it's where all of Drudge's wire report items link to. He also has a video site, and he worked on the launch of the now-successful Huffington Post (though he's since divested—he's a true conservative believer). Breitbart works the afternoon shift at the Drudge Report. The two have remarkably seamless editorial styles, though some feel Breitbart has a lighter touch. More importantly, while Matt Drudge himself rarely speaks to the press or flits about in public settings, Breitbart is actually popular, and even a bit of a real-life schmoozer:

Graydon Carter and his team at Vanity Fair wisely, and not inappropriately, added Matt Drudge to their "New Establishment" list of important people readers should shamelessly imitate and pander to. The internet gossip ranks at 74, just above Donatella Versace and just below Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. More importantly, he posted the magazine's full list to his highly-trafficked website, thus encouraging his readers to go buy the magazine and figure out why, say, Vogue Anna Wintour has suddenly been added (mysterious) and why Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is entering the rankings this year at number (gimmick to generate buzz and boost sales). Other strange additions, and the full list, after the jump.