Politico's Ben Smith unleashed a vicious assault of "SPEED+POWER" this morning on Philippe Reines, Hillary Clinton's flack, in yet another round of successful Drudge-baiting.

Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple executive famous for popularizing the practice of "evangelism" in tech marketing, loves Twitter, like every good self-promoting hack. But how can you tell when a hack gets hacked?

Barack Obama has some distant relative from a place called "Moneygall," in Ireland. Maureen Dowd joked about that in an interview that ran on Monday. Days later, she couldn't come up with a better line.

It's a shame that someone went to the trouble of hacking Miley Cyrus's Twitter account, then eschewed the imaginative vagina prose of his forebears to merely imagine X-rated episodes of The Miley and Mandy Show.

The world's best pollster in history ever conducted a poll that found that Mark Penn's own "3 a.m. Ad" was the best political ad ever, and that is why Hillary Clinton is president now. [Wonkette]

Times columnist Bill Kristol went on Fox back in June and told the world that this governor from Alaska named Sarah Palin would be the best Vice President ever! He loved her, very much, because she was a maverick. Five months later, she is a national joke, and he is a sad, sad man, trying desperately to salvage his credibility. "I met her for the second time in my life. I know we're supposed to be such great friends, but the truth is I've met her twice... I've spoken to her on the phone once. For all our great closeness," he tells The Observer, "I barely know her." Too late, Bill. You're all washed up! Since time immemorial the New York Times has kept its rich old conservative readers slightly satisfied with some token conservative voices in the Op-Ed section. For many, many years there was reliable old Bill Safire, the Nixon speechwriter, a member of the smart old educated class of Republicans who were able to write up support for disastrous policy implemented by the corrupt and incompetent with smart, almost plausible-sounding arguments. He left, replaced with John Tierney, a libertarian-leaning sort who didn't last long on the op-ed beat and now writes "researchers say a counterintutive thing" features instead. And there is David Brooks, a quietly doctrinaire Republican who fancies up his usual party line with armchair sociology. But Brooks broke with the party this year, calling Sarah Palin a cancer, leaving only poor, dumb, Bill Kristol. Bill Kristol, who tried to sell America on Sarah Palin, and ended up repeatedly embarrassing himself, over and over again, and losing John McCain his election. Now he just mumbles about hating the mainstream media, to all his mainstream media friends, in the pages of the New York Times. Already the vultures are wondering who'll replace him—you can be terribly wrong and stupid and remain a Times columnist indefinitely, but you must be terribly wrong and stupid in the service of the conventional wisdom. So Tom Friedman's Iraq columns get a pass, as does Maureen Dowd's constant stream of nonsense. But Kristol is no longer merely just a hack, he's a failed hack. No one bought his line this year. So maybe someone nutty and anti-Palin like, say, David Frum is next for the Affirmative Action Conservative Slot?

Early Saturday morning I dragged myself to the New Yorker Festival in Midtown, to see media mensch Ken Auletta moderate a panel discussion with Times editor Bill Keller, Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates, Slate press critic Jack Shafer, and breathless WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan, the token conservative. I'll leave out the boring recap parts and distill the experience down to its key point: Peggy Noonan should go back to writing political speeches, because—even taking into account the fact that she's a Republican hack—her dishonesty is embarrassing to watch. Ugh. Noonan, remember, was caught on a live mic talking about how the selection of Sarah Palin as VP was "bullshit." A fact that was referenced repeatedly by Ken Auletta! So what did Noonan spend the bulk of her time on the panel (subject: "Covering the Candidates") doing? Defending Sarah Palin. It was far too early to take notes, but I'll sum up Peggy's arguments: "Sarah Palin, fresh, new, American, real, six-pack, women, sexism?, the American people." The experience was strange because every single person sitting in the room—the panelists, the moderator, the audience, the security guards—was well aware how dumb Sarah Palin is. But there was Peggy, gamely searching for some all-American Reaganesque prose to elevate Palin into something legitimate. The panel was about the media, so the bold political hackery was jarring and out of place, like when those crazy Christians wave signs at the funerals of dead soldiers saying God killed them because of fags. There's a time and a place for your brand of lying, Peggy. It's on the weekend talk shows, after you sign on as a speechwriter for the sure-to-be successful Palin administration. There are lots of political hacks writing columns; but Noonan always wants to pop up as some sort of spokeswoman for Middle America, in the most patronizing way possible to actual Middle Americans. You failed at the New Yorker Festival, Peggy Noonan. The contrast between Noonan and the other panelists was what made the entire ordeal grimace-worthy. Bill Keller has more political pressure on him than almost anyone in the entire media. But when Ken Auletta asked him how it affected him when the McCain campaign charged the Times with being in the tank for Obama, Keller said (approximately): "It makes me want to find the toughest, hardest story about McCain we have and put it on the front page the next day." That's called honesty, Peggy Noonan. Retire with your trademark false grace. [Pic via Startraks]

The Post gives newly retired hack Steve Dunleavy a fawning editorial, a news story, a video, and a photo gallery of his going-away party today—as you can see, Dunleavy and Rupert Murdoch still appear to be in better shape than Post editor Col Allan. The paper also gives Dunleavy space for one last column, in which he predictably praises Murdoch, but also pisses on Columbia J-school in the most convoluted way possible:

The Steve "Sex on a stick" Dunleavy reminiscences keep pouring in! And the rabid, drunken Post hack grows into an ever more sympathetic figure as his retirement party draws closer. Today, three more wistful remembrances of Steve; though all involve drinking, only the last one involves him walking around with his dick out:

Despite an absence of any "news," every political magazine and newspaper is rushing to publish special "St. Paul and Denver" editions for the political conventions. CQ, Roll Call, and The Hill are publishing on-site daily! Politico will be there! Local papers are throwing everything they have at the event! National Journal expects big things! Meanwhile, all the high-powered attendees will be getting drunk and occasionally checking the New York Times on their iPhones, and the smart reporters just stay home and make shit up. The real reason for the outpouring of journalistic effort:

An excellent analysis of bizarre racial thinker and hip hop hating intellectual John McWhorter traces his evolution from academia into neocon hackdom, and concludes, "We have admittedly now left the frame of legitimate criticism, but there is a sense in which McWhorter has never recovered from the shame and trauma of having been beaten up by a girl when he was four." [ebogjonson]

Hillary Clinton campaign site VoteHillary.org is vulnerable to a common exploit known as cross-site scripting (XSS), as demonstrated by Finnish security specialist Harry Sintonen. He says he's not particularly interested in American politics, according to Netcraft, which first reported Sintonen's research. He was just inspired by the attack on sites maintained by the Barack Obama campaign to see if Clinton's were also vulnerable to XSS exploits. This may redefine "political hack." But any hope that the electoral system itself might prove so pliable to technological alteration is too audacious to discuss.

Is CNN for real? The headlines on its website — "Minced onions force emergency landing" — cause some to wonder if its Atlanta-based producers aren't having a jape at the expense of news junkies. Now, an expansion into selling T-shirts confirms that CNN is laughing at us, not with us. Capitalizing on the trend of mass-personalized e-commerce, CNN.Shirt lets readers pick any recent headline and put it on a T-shirt. As blogger Andy Baio notes, the feature is easily manipulated, allowing users to construct any story they want and get it printed. But why bother making up the news when CNN shows just how much stranger truth is than fiction?

It seems someone has found another security hole in Twitter, as at least two acquaintances are complaining of direct messages being sent from their accounts but not by them. The messages trigger an SMS message and an email notification, but are not logged in either the sender or recipient's direct message archive on Twitter.com. I'm guessing someone's done a simply query-string hack of the form handler, or possibly using SMS to route around Twitter's authentication schemes. Either way, seems like every day is becoming Twitter as someone else day.

Here's the lead to Page Six's item today about Dr. Pepper's Guns N' Roses PR stunt: "TIRED of a world in which Americans idolize wannabe singers, and where musicals about high school students pass as rock 'n' roll, Dr Pepper is begging Axl Rose to finally release this year his 17-years-in-the-making album, "Chinese Democracy." Such powerful language! Now here's the lead to the press release announcing the same event:

On last Wednesday's The Tonight Show, Towleroad notes, Ryan Phillippe popped by to promote Stop-Loss. Host Jay Leno—a man being courted aggressively by studios and networks, with promises of eight-figure contracts and brand new theaters bearing his name—opened the interview with questions about Phillippe's first paying job on One Life To Live.

Captcha codes are designed to be unreadable by computers, only by humans, so they can be used to lock spambots out of websites. But Google and Websense have determined, by analyzing traffic patterns, that captcha codes are being cracked nightly — not by machines, but by third-world employees. Brad Stone at the New York Times blogs that one Russian-language set of instructions for captcha-cracking promises a minimum $3 per day for the work.

In what could accurately be described as a gross perversion of natural law, a PR firm is attempting to hold a cutesy karaoke mixer party entitled "Flacks, Hacks, and Friends." This phrase makes no sense. Hacks are certainly not friends with flacks, on general principle. Most hacks aren't popular or social enough to have friends at all, so I don't know what the extra "and Friends" is for. Also: karaoke, really? Red Branch PR wants to "put aside all the ruckus for an evening of harmony, or lack thereof." So feel free to go and start a bar fight. Full invitation—for YOU—below.

NICK DOUGLAS — Another year and the bubble hasn't popped! Sysadmins and C-level execs alike, you deserve something special, like a drink named after you or your latest achievement. And Yahoos deserve a drink all to themselves. So after the first champagne, order these official cocktails for techies in 2007!

As the Register's Andrew Orlowski flies back to England, it's time to check up on the other trolls of tech — the real journalists, fake journalists, and — ugh — bloggers.