* Larry Craig's first piece of advice as your new consultant: Don't listen to anything Larry Craig tells you to do.

* Never accuse Meghan McCain of not having a sense of humor! Never!! (She really hates it when people confuse her with her mom.)

* In Lou Dobbs's dreams, Rachel Maddow is his very own tea-bagging queen.

* The Lobbyists! There's just too many of them! Game over, man! Game over!

* Jesus Christ! Why is Joe Biden talking the godamned Lord's name in vain, for Christ's sake?

* And the winner for The Year's Most Idiotic Piece of Political Punditry goes to…

This has got to be the most delicious-smelling form of enhanced interrogation I've heard of since the infamous bacon rack…

Fascinating piece coming in tomorrow's TIME magazine. Reporter Bobby Ghosh writes, "The most successful interrogation of an al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or 'walling' and no waterboarding.

"All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies."

I cannot believe that in this day and age, we're actually still debating whether or not sugar-free snacks should be considered torture.

Have you ever tried Diet Dr. Pepper? Have you attempted to swallow it? I have. There is nothing about the experience that is any way similar to the senatation of eating food.

I still have nightmares from time to time.

Update: I've just managed to obtain photographic evidence of this new technique being used on one of those so-called terrorist monsters.

In a startling development that is surely rocking the Western, Eastern and Northwestsouthern worlds, Time Magazine has decided, in iyts wisdom, to name Barack Obama as its Barack Obama of the Year (formerly Person of the Year) for 2008, a year in which he did something cool or something.

In justifying its surprising choice, Time Magazine tells us some things that we had no idea about…

He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago — that even his campaign manager, at the outset, wasn't sure Obama had what it would take to win the election. He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order.

Understandably, you may be thinking Obama is on the cover for these big and flashy reasons: for ushering the country across a momentous symbolic line, for infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation, for showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one about boundless opportunity — has plenty of juice left in it.

But, you'd be wrong.

He was chosen because his face was already mocked-up on the cover, like, months ago.

I'm not sure what Joe Biden will need to communicate as vice president, other than "fetch," but whatever, he's gone ahead and hired himself a director of communications.

Where do you find one of those, I wonder?

Jay Carney is leaving Time magazine after 20 years to be Vice President-elect Joe Biden's communications director in the White House, astonished magazine and gleeful transition sources said.

At the liberal media elite hangouts! Of course. And in a minute we'll get to the part where the transition sources suppress their glee and pretend like this has nothing to do with the liberal media elites having been in the tank for Obama-Biden all along…

A Democratic official close to the selection process said Carney had already decided to do something different after the election, and Biden advisers believed Carney would bring "a fresh perspective" to their deliberations. [...]

The official added: "There are those on the right who will see this as the embodiment of their assertions about the media and Obama, and this is just making it official."

Ah.

So, it is official, then?

Voting has begun for Time magazine's 2008 Person of the Year award, and wow, they've assembled an impressive list of candidates. Comely swimsuit-wearers Sarah Palin and Michael Phelps are among this year's 25 contestants; so's Ben "Bailout Boy" Bernanke.

The suspense is excruciating. Who could possibly win this competition? Who?

My money's on Gordon Brown.

More talk of the supposed "dream ticket"…

U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is in formal talks with Senator Barack Obama's campaign about becoming his vice presidential running mate, CNN reported, without citing anyone specific.

Good thing they didn't cite anyone specific. Anyone specific is a notorious liar. He'll say anything just get his name in the papers.

For what it's worth, Time Magazine is saying pretty much the same thing…

In Bill Clinton's view, she has earned nothing short of an offer to be Obama's running mate, according to some who are close to the former President. Bill "is pushing real hard for this to happen," says a friend.

Well, if a friend says it… I mean, a friend is always reliable. And such a friendly guy.