* 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…

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 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.

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?

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

My money's on Gordon Brown.

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.

You know who's good for that? Joe Klein over at Time Magazine…

"Let's say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable…

Okay. Let's say that. I don't know exactly how or why these "elders of the Democratic Party" would come to such weird conclusion, but I read a whole bunch of fantasy novels when I was kid, so I'm cool with this line of thinking. What then?

All they'd have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their superdelegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton.

Hmmmm… That's an interesting idea. But, what if instead, the "elders of the Democratic Party" — who I'd like to imagine wear cloaks and spend a lot of time chanting — used a mind-controlling potion on the superdelegates. Yeah, and it can be harvested from the brain stems of illegal immigrants.

No, illegal immigrants are so last year. How about the brain stems of typical white people? Yes! Go with it!

What if they then approached Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party-and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate?

Oh, I didn't see that twist coming! I like! But, wait, let's do a double-twist. What if Al Gore declines — just like he's been doing for the past year — so the Democratic elders murder him with their combined psionic powers and then replace Gore's brain with the brain of John F. Kennedy which they've been keeping on ice in their underground lair? Imagine that! A Gore/Obama/Kennedy ticket!

This could be a very interesting election cycle indeed.