• We are all tools of the 2008 campaigns' opposition research punks. (Yay! Gawker will so do your laundry, bring it on!) Also, Matt Drudge Hearts Mitt Romney. (Mini-Mitt Guide: Likes abortions, loves death penalties, no longer supports the gay marriages.) [Salon]
  

Barbra Streisand, Hillary Clinton, and a beard! We're sure Matt is creaming his screen in Miami right now.

You know, in addition to being BLACK.

We resisted for hours! Despite the hundreds of emails. Despite Matt Drudge just begging us to take note of this juxtaposition. But we wanted to have dignity! We wanted to be better than this. Now it's a little after 5 p.m. and our blood sugar is fucked and it got funnier, in that juvenile, armpit-fart-noises way. Thank you, Mr. Drudge. Also, short-haired O columnist and CNBC and QVC commentator and all-around money-lady Suze Orman is a lesbian. Could you die or what?

Get it? Because Barack Obama is a black man. Black. Also, Hillary is "waiting to exhale" after Obama's big declaration. Maybe she just needs to get back to her "roots" before Democratic voters give her the "shaft." We bet she wishes Obama was an "invisible man," because he seems much more "beloved" by the press.

We can't put our finger on the reason this headline has us oddly titillated. Wait, we're working from home, so we can. Oooh.

This morning we asked you to help us identify the mystery journalist who had the effrontery to start his own website in the early days of the Internet. While the general consensus remains fixated on Andrew Sullivan, there are a few other ideas out there. We present them after the jump.

• Guy who told Murdoch to buy MySpace quits. [Guardian]
  

But the other third of him cannot get enough.

• Felix Dennis will never see a broad as costly as a tree. Also, it takes a lot of dosh to get people drunk enough to listen to your doggerel. [Radar]
• On the other hand, anyone who calls Greg Gutfeld "Darth Vader," must have his finger on some kind of pulse. And, look forward to The Week on the web. [Independent UK]
• Judy McGrath is going to be just fine, thank you very much. Buying MySpace is not the be all and end all of running a media empire. Unless, uh, you're Tom Freston. [NYT]
• ABC News reports news that ABC Newsman considers Matt Drudge the Walter Cronkite of our era, excepting for that fact that Walter Cronkite never falsely accused a presidential aide of wife-beating. [ABC News]
• Bob Woodward saves the good stuff for himself and other newspapers who are willing to buy his book in advance of their sell-dates. [NYT]
• Yahoo! not sexy enough for investors, apparently. [NYP]
• Something is happening to press freedom in Canada. We'd be all up in arms if it weren't, you know, Canada. [NYT]

Geffen, DIC ready to get Party started [Variety]

Drudge Report

If you think of the media as a vast Ouroboros (or, more appropriately, a giant circle jerk) you'll find one more piece of confirmation on today's Drudge Report, where Matt celebrates The Way to Win, the forthcoming political tome from Mark Halperin and John F. Harris. What is it that Matt likes so much about the book? The "extended 15-page homage to the glories of this site." After Matt quotes reams of praise heaped upon the Drudge Report, the reach-around achieves its climax with a link to the book's Amazon.com page. We can understand Matt's appreciation of Halperin and Harris, but what makes him such an appealing figure to the pair? Well, Harris is the national politics editor of the Washington Post. Halperin is the poltical director of ABC News and principal author of daily newsletter "The Note," which is essentially dictated each morning by Karl Rove. So there it is: they're all tugged by the same string. Except for the hurricane stuff: Matt writes all that on his own.

As the story placement here shows, Matt Drudge clearly cannot stand Barbra Streisand. Well, you don't get any more hetero than that.

Eh, it'll probably be funnier than 30 Rock.

Oh, whatever, it's the last week of August. Like you're so highbrow.

We're not surprised; the guy's got a natural rapport with his audience, and, really, who doesn't want to hear nonstop news about Whitney Houston?

The quest for the highest profit margins: Matt Drudge's Drudge Report clears approximately $800,000 a year on a shoestring budget. By comparison, the New York Times Digital makes approximately $35,000 in operating profit per employee, and that doesn't include the cost of generating most of the content, which comes from the print side of the business.
The secrets of Drudge, Inc [Business 2.0 via IWantMedia]

Reality TV promoters have now duly earned their places in the ninth circle of Hell. Donald Trump is slated to star in new reality show called "The Apprentice"a sort of corporate "Survivor" wherein participants will work for Trump, who will fire one contestant a week. The winner gets a six-figure salary.
New reality show to feature tycoon Trump [via Drudge]

· Comedian Chris Rock's reaction to Matt Drudge's report that Rock had been instructed by DreamWorks not to badmouth President Bush while promoting their new film, Head of State: "I never met Matt Drudge, but if I see Matt Drudge, I'm going to take my red-blooded American foot and put it up his un-American ass for trying to disrupt the opening of my movie." [Page Six]
· Producer Scott Rudin goes sour on Paramount execs (including Paramount chief Sherry Lansing) planning an upcoming movie based on the Lemony Snicket children's books: "I found the amount of energy being poured into this circle jerk frustrating and debilitating and completely unrewarding and painful...These people can give you a lot of pain when they're trying to make a movie with you. Imagine what they can do when they're just trying to give you pain." [Page Six]
· Jon Stewart on Germany's refusal to join the U.S.-led coalition: "Poland wants to fight and Germany doesn't? That's crazy. It must be like the way an alcoholic doesn't want to go into a bar. They'd start bombing and wake up the next morning and say, 'Did I just invade Czechoslovakia last night?'" Richard Gere thinks that if Tibet were turned into a big spa resort, the Chinese government would allow the Dalai Lama to return to his homeland. [NY Daily News]
· The Word reports that CEO Steve Florio may be the next exiting executive at Conde Nast. [The Word