So. As we noted this morning, blog mistress Arianna Huffington didn't weigh in on the unexpected death of departed Meet the Press host Tim Russert until well after everyone else, and once she did, she didn't have much to say. Because of the old axiom about how much one should say when one doesn't have anything nice to say. (HuffPo's regular feature "Russert Watch" has gone blank—technical glitch or archive-scrubbing?) As anyone who's read Arianna's media writing over the last couple years knows, she never liked Tim. And we only just recently wandered into the fray, when we learned that Russert's unappreciated lapdog Chris Matthews hated Huffington for her years spent bashing his idol. And why did she hate Tim? This book excerpt might explain it all!

Much as there would be no Gawker without Spy, there apparently would be no Barack Obama without I Spy. Interracial buddy cops invented tolerance! [Slate]

Today, the Associated Press announced that Barack Obama is officially the Democratic nominee for President. Which means that the Hillary Clinton campaign is finished. It's been a long, long time. Two years, actually! We first tracked the history of the Clinton campaign back in April, when it was just probably doomed. Now it's time to revisit that history, this time with a big fancy chart. The data points are Barack Obama's closing prices on political futures betting site InTrade. The higher the closing price, the more likely investors think his nomination is (with 100 being dead-on certainty). Click to enlarge the chart, and to re-read our April history explaining the significance of the dates mentioned. Now updated with relevant "May" and "Early June" information!

Newspaper and magazines are maybe dying because they are simply not as awesome as they used to be. The American Antiquarian Society has put together a book called The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, and those sporting male weeklies make our modern-day tabloids and lad mags look like they're put together by a bunch of kittens and marketed to little girls. They are called The Flash Press after The Flash, a weekly founded by a drunk Bostonian named William Snelling. He wrote a poem about how much he hated all the other poets in the nation, then moved to New York to spend more time at brothels. Eventually he founded that four-page weekly paper, dedicated to "Awful Developments, Dreadful Accidents and Unexpected Exposures." Was he the original blogger?!

Book-writin' Bush traitor Scott McClellan is not well-liked by anyone these days, but it was a different story back in Austin High School in the mid-1980s. As a classmate tells Joshua Stein: "He was a senior when I was a sophmore and there was a golden light bathed around him at all times. He was sweet and smart and all the things that senior boys should be (when you're a brace face sophomore)... He was also on the tennis team (HOT!)...." Hey, he's on the Daily Show tonight for what we're positive will be one of those terribly awkward Jon Stewart interviews, and not one of the funny or fawning ones. [My Memoirs]

Lovable media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp, has been going around predicting a landslide victory for the Democrats this November and also big-upping Senator Barack Obama—he called Obama a "superstar" and a "complete phenomenon" at a conference yesterday. He apparently nudged his pet tabloid the New York Post toward an Obama endorsement in the New York primaries (despite his early attempts at making friendly with the Clintons). And as the Post goes, so goes, well, other News Corp holdings. So maybe Fox News will let up on Barry a bit? They've never been terribly friendly to McCain anyhow. But why would this noted conservative tyrant endorse Mr. Liberal Hope? He's done it before—with a friendly little weasel named Tony Blair.

How much did President Bush drink? When did he quit? Did he quit? And what else did he do? There are absolutely no definitive answers to any of those questions, and most of the witnesses and parties involved are suspect or worse. Still, with the publication of former press secretary Scott McClellan's book, complete with re-airing of those old cocaine rumors, it might be fun to investigate the out-going president's drug history, as found both in the public record and the fever dreams of conspiracy artists.

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was the doughy, ill-informed punching bag the press needed after a couple years of smarmy wise-ass Ari Fleisher. But now he's getting his revenge, as all big dumb doughy dudes must after they realize their "friends" just pretended to like them. He wrote a book. It's called What Happened, and it's about how everyone in the White House was a stupid idiot, especially President Bush, who is so stupid that he just convinces himself of bullshit so he doesn't technically have to lie. "The media won't let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors," McClellan heard Bush say in 1999. "You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don't remember." Ha! So maybe he tried cocaine, but if so he was already mid-blackout and who can recall between all the homosexual encounters, animal sacrifices to pagan gods, and stripper-raping that they were doing! After the jump, Karl Rove complaining about how Scott McCellan sounds like a raving DailyKos liberal. Just because Karl Rove misled him regarding the Plame affair, leading McClellan to blatantly lie to the press, destroying his credibility and career!

Reggie Love is Senator Barack Obama's amusingly named "body man." He's a 26-year-old former college football and basketball player. Also he's really cool! The Times has a total crush on him, and they tell us all about how Mr. Love is totally good at sports and got Obama into hip-hop and fist-bumps reporters. (Or, as they put it, he "offers closed-fist high-fives to members of the news media.") He's with Barry all the time, and has pens and Sharpies and nicotine gum and stuff. He also makes sure no one ever tries to give the senator mayo or a second beer. And they play basketball! Soooo cool! No, seriously, he's really really cool.

Kevin Kelly, Wired's past in-house futurist, has given an interview in which he makes the seemingly ludicrous claim that Wired could have been Google. The New York Observer has a giggle at Kelly's statement that "from the very beginning, Wired believed in 'search.'... I believe that had Wired not been divided and sold that we might have actually arrived at the same place that Google had." But was Kelly really that far off? Watch the whole video and see

The Lower East Side is changing! You blink once, and the neighborhood has gone from an immigrant-packed hovel of tenements to a rich jerk-packed hovel. Of condos! The National Trust for Historic Preservation has just named the entire freaking neighborhood one the nation's 11 most endangered places:

Much as Spy invested sarcasm, Suck invented blogging sarcastically. Or something. It was an internet magazine, like Slate and Salon except it didn't make you want to claw your eyes out, which is why it's defunct now. But everyone remembers it, and its glorious heyday. Greg Allen still has a bottle of Suck Soda. Which is tragic. He would like to know if anyone else has one. [Greg.org via Kottke, natch]

Old Man John McCain will appear on Saturday Night Live this weekend. Just a cameo, of course. Though he hosted in 2002, back when was still a maverick beloved by liberals and elite coastal types. Details of the sketch he'll appear in are scarce, though it will probably be toothless and unfunny, as all SNL political material tends to be. McCain might be funny, though! Presumably less wooden than Obama and Clinton were in their toothless, unfunny cameos. McCain's a natural comic (have you heard the one about how Chelsea Clinton is ugly?). Which, as we all know, is utterly unpresidential.

Recount, the HBO film about the 2000 presidential election mess in Florida, premiers on HBO soon. It looks fiendishly entertaining if you are a nerd, like some of us. Primarily because OMG Laura Dern as Katherine Harris. The make-up! They even recreated the horse photos. Some people, though, are not so excited about this movie. Because they are characters in it. Specifically Warren Christopher, a respected elder of the Democratic party, who is portrayed as a spineless pussy. He is played by John Hurt in goofy (but accurate) prosthetics. Christopher was the "public face of the Gore team" and the film basically shows how he played fair while Bush's fixer, James Baker, waged war. All of this is public record, but Christopher's pissed anyway, saying the filmmakers distort the story. Baker, on the other hand, is hosting a damn screening of the film at his think tank. He says the film makes him out to be "a little more like Don Corleone" than he really is, but that is actually a dark and depressing joke. He's worse than Don fucking Corleone, because Don Corleone was pretend. Oh hey, the trailer's after the jump.

Drug-stealing charity-defrauder Cindy McCain, the lady John McCain left his other wife for and is now forced to stay with because she's fantastically wealthy, is not particularly well-known by the American public. The McCain campaign insists they're trying to change this but obviously they'd be fools to. The less people know about the biography of either McCain—besides the torture thing!—the more likely they'll be able to pull off a victory against Barack Obama, whose biography Americans are largely content to make up themselves out of things they find around the house, like suspicion of people who are different from them and racism. After the jump, John McCain refuses to even deny that he called his wife a cunt. (Which he did, in 1992.)

In 1960, American author and member of the designated ruling class Gore Vidal wrote a little play about how his good friend John Kennedy managed to fuck over intelligent wimp Adlai Stevenson and gain control of the Democratic party (and eventually the presidency). The play was called The Best Man, and it was made into an entertaining (and out of print) movie of the same name in 1964. It's the story of a hotly contested fight for the nomination that goes down to the wire, and all the smears and dirty tricks that make this country great. Do you see the parallels? DO YOU SEE? Well, they're actually kinda tenuous and not that informative, but it's a gripping little movie. Here's a clip, taken from a '90s BBC documentary on Vidal.

Computing pioneer and author Howard Rheingold has jumped on the buzzword bandwagon with a vlog, and the two most recent entries are a peek back into the pre-Web days when "geek" was still a term of scorn. Possibly because of some astounding fashion choices — Rheingold's taste in vibrant colors and eye-splitting patterns pictured here seem to have influenced Marissa Mayer's taste in couture. That said, as an early BBS dialer myself, I find this footage of a party at the Sausalito offices of The Well in 1989 fascinating. For a list of the people in the videos, the comment thread on BoingBoing's post gives the details. Watch and learn, you kids, after the jump.

It's May Day! International Workers' Day! When we get together and march with our working brothers and sisters in memory of lost comrades. Sometimes there are sing-alongs! And riots! Let's all hold hands and sing The Internationale, then march on Union Square! Of course, we won't—Americans (outside of some hippies in Minneapolis) don't really celebrate May Day anymore (well, some immigrants do too). Have we forgotten the Haymarket affair already? (Yes.) In 1958, by the way, Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 to be both "Loyalty Day" and "Law Day." Subtlety was not particularly prized then (nor now). President Bush's annual Law Day proclamation always brings tears to our loyal eyes. Now we prepare for Cinco de Mayo, the holiday that celebrates when the Mexicans out-drank the French.

When selecting a mate, Barbara Walters did not limit herself to utterly reprehensible closet cases. She also liked Senators! Walters revealed on Oprah today that she carried on a torrid affair with Edward Brooke, the first black man elected to the Senate after Reconstruction (no one ever remembers Hiram Rhodes Revels!), "for several years in the 1970's." It was never revealed publicly because Brooke was in the process of divorce and a re-election campaign (he lost the latter). Brooke is still alive. Fun fact: he had breast cancer! Well, maybe that's not very fun. Still. We certainly are learning a lot about the love lives of our elder ladies of journalism, aren't we? It was just last month that Liz Smith revealed that she's slept with 20 people (divided more or less evenly among ladies and gentlemen) in her 2,000 years on Earth. She didn't reveal if any of them were Senators, though. [AP]

While adolescents and adolescent-at-heart adults across the nation anticipate Grand Theft Auto IV and its slightly skewed New York, we pause to remember the richly detailed and intriguingly off-kilter New York of the 1984 Activision classic Ghostbusters. A New York where Park Avenue runs alongside Church St, and they both go crosstown. A New York where Zuul may be found on the corner of Union and 3rd (3rd Ave? Street? Who knows!). More intriguing video game visions of New York, courtesy The Bowery Boys, below.