It's August 20th: our RSS feeds have slowed to a crawl and everyone else is at the beach. But the political-media outrage machine carries on. ABC's Jake Tapper, MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan, Touré and Malcom X all need a vacation.

Tomorrow is August 15, when we wade into the thickest weeds of summer, sleepy and slow. Everyone's on vacation (or sad they're still working), media B-teams helm the control rooms and Page One meetings, and bullshit stories blossom like gladiolas.

Matt Drudge is pointing out that the stimulus package actually went to purchase pork and other crazy things like food by linking to some contracts on the Recovery.gov web site. We spent $5.7 million on "process cheese"? Crazy! Why?

The DC-NYC-LA power nexus craves lists that rank the politico-media elite, and we've got the most important one of all: Matt Drudge's favorite personalities/targets, ranked by the number of times their names have appeared in his headlines since 2002.

A numbers genius—not Nate Silver!—has pored over the 171,000-plus recorded updates of the Drudge Report since 2002 and put it all into chart form. Most stunning-yet-not-surprising statistic: two-year-old Politico ranks 16th among sites linked to by Drudge.

Uh oh. Somebody's sleeping on the White House sofa when he gets home from the G8 Summit in Italy! And Matt Drudge is never going to let this die.

A Puerto Rican legal advocacy group on whose board Sonia Sotomayor once served just handed over some documents to Congress. Or, as Drudge puts it: "Document Dump: Group sends 350+ pages on Sotomayor to Senate — 10 days Before Hearing!"

Matt Drudge linking to a story about Obama's personal doctor criticizing his healthcare plan, which is funny and fits perfectly into the right-wing anti-Obama narrative of the terrors of "socialized medicine." Except Obama's doctor actually wants socialized medicine. Whatever.

George W. Bush spoke critically of Barack Obama in a Washington Times story being pushed hard by Drudge tonight, a story so big and important that the Times didn't bother to insert quotation marks before posting it to their website.

Michelle Obama has a green thumb. Matt Drudge has a rotten, black thumb, so he doesn't buy Obama's garden-harvesting photo-op, because she only planted it 89 days ago and what kind of garden grows that fast?

A third murder committed by a right-wing extremist? Eh, worth a link, sure. Obama administration takes a "half step" to let shareholders have a say in executive compensation? Fire up the siren.

ABC News' Jake Tapper, seemingly bored silly on a flight to Riyadh, or maybe just experimenting to see how many links he could get from wingnut websites, published perhaps the most imbecilic article in the history of journalism on ABC.com.

Days after Matt Drudge popped up to tell New York magazine about how he doesn't enjoy having sex with men, The New Republic looks into his descent into Howard Hughes-like isolation.

It turns out the Out magazine's item on Matt Drudge, which got the internet publisher so riled up last week, was sourced to a onetime gay stripper's memoir. The ex-stripper has more stories.

For years, internet publisher Matt Drudge has responded to questions about his reported homosexuality by obfuscating and dodging. It would appear he's still at it.

Andrew Breitbart has been Matt Drudge's little helper for more than a decade. But now he's all growed up, and Drudge is back on his own—or is he?

Politico is in the business of writing stories that Matt Drudge "NEEDS and WANTS" and that their reporters' mothers would read. Today they turned a couple of chuckles on 60 Minutes into a "developing..." story.

Oh no! Not the Swedish model! Look carefully at that terrifying blue and yellow Nordic Cross; it is our generation's hammer and sickle.

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!

Is Matt Drudge completely over in the wake of his ill-advised hyping of pro-McCain propaganda?If you're even bothering to ask the question, the answer is self-evidently "No," it can always be argued. It was thus inevitable that someone — Slate's Jack Shafer, it turns out — would emerge to swat down the greatly exaggerated reports (from Media Matters and so forth) of Drudge's demise as an influential blogger. He works too hard and has drawn too much traffic to go away so easily, Shafer argues: