So the "National Press Club" allows anyone with the bucks to rent its room and then advertise her or his appearance as "at the National Press Club"?

That seems awfully mercenary. It seems--somebody with a journalism school degree help me out if I use the wrong word--unethical. That is, if I have the dollars I can go to the National Press Club and create a newsworthy (by which I mean "newsworthy") event, which the press (or "press") will thereupon feel obligated to cover.

Have you NOT been paying attention? You are not the first to point out the apparent gotcha.

Baby mama is perfectly correct grammatically--so long as you are employing the grammar of Black American English. Fox uses the phrase to remind you that the Obamas are black--that is, not like normal folks who know how to use an apostrophe to create the possessive.

I am a "grammar teacher," and, no, it ought NOT to be "babies' [whatever]."

The punctuation of "babies' mama" is Standard American English. That is not the target when it is used as a slang term: "baby mama" transgresses "good" grammar and identifies the speaker as (a) the member of an outsider group (West Indians, urban African-Americans) or (b) kinda sad hipsters and wannabes (sorry, Tina Fey) who are still stuck with the idea that colonizing another, usually socially dominated, group's language (in addition to other signifiers) equals cool cred.

What Fox, on the other hand, is doing is simple: Blackening Obama.

And, no, Salon should not have shut down the Russert comments so quickly.

It was cute enough when for the first 2/3. Then the little dog said, "Jealous?" in a way that made me think of how so many shallow dickheads use that particular locution to talk back when you call them on shallow dickheadedness.

Fuck it. Asshole are assholes, even if they're adorable little rat dogs.

In fact, ANY media-okay host is NOT okay.

Perhaps it would have been a little smarter to headline this somewhere other than right about the Movie Guy's "on vacation" headline.

Is there a Czar of Who-Gives-A-Fuck who trawls YouTube and the blogs for non-entities to celebrate?

Tricia, Lonely Girl. Lonely Girl, Tricia.

Did I miss the sounds of cheering crowds and a big brass band?

Plastic Bertrand!

The Patriot Guard Riders, whose maikn mission is to protect the grieving from that douche Fred Phelps and his hellbound "church."

http://www.patriotguard.org/

I was looking for the opportunity to write in that, despite its now iffy cultural coverage, Salon still beats its betters (say, the Onion's AV Club) in one regard: the intelligence of its readers' responses to said coverage. That is, following the Club's news note on Pollack's death, a couple of dozen firsties dove in to say the rudest thing they could about some (to them) random dead guy. But then the first response on Salon mistakes snark for toughminded critical acumen and goes for the oh-so-cute with a cretinous "Who dat."

Damn.

I am also partial to the tagline "Don't fuck with the Jesus." Therefore, I suggest that, for me at least, bacon IS the Jesus*.

And, yes, I am a good Episcopalian, which not only shows you how little the all-Xians-are-the-same crowd know, but also how low the Episcopal church has sunk.

*Unless, of course, you want to argue that Bacon was the Shakespeare.

It's spelled y'all, but we'll let you get by with it because you're so damned adorably bigoted.

An attempt--who knows why?--to drive a wedge between your city readers and country readers, between those on the coasts and those in the middle of the US? To see how many of the good, decent folk reading Salon will revert to slurs like hillbilly at the drop of the hat? If so, when will the experiment be ending?

On another front, I really appreciate the phrase "You don't fuck with bacon." I could use that on a t-shirt.

I apologize for the earlier insults to you. Thank you for conceding the argument.

"Still have no compassion for a group of people that were born into all the possibility in the world, chose not to keep up with the changing times, chose not to better themselves by reading books or taking a class at the community center every once in a while,but instead prefer to blame the success of peoples they used to oppress as the root of their lack of progress."

First of all, your sentence needs a subject. Buy a pronoun, sweetie.

You may also want to take a sociology class at some point in your life. "Better" your own damned self, that is.

Hey, how about this: you come to Hyden, Kentucky, and tell some folks I can set you up with that they were "born into all the possibility in the world"?

You don't have to get on a plane to see the Third World.