Now that The Daily Mail is giving Obama the "Lindsay Lohan in 2005" treatment, Barack Obama has landed among the privileged few—along with Oprah and Kirstie Alley—whose weight fluctuations are cause for international headlines. How did the American president's girlish figure become a topic of international fascination, you ask? Five easy steps:

1. We See Obama with His Shirt Off Surprisingly defined pecs and debatable nipples lead everyone to recategorize the Illinois senator from "sexless political entity" to "objectified hunk of burning flesh" in their minds. Barry's body is now kitchen table conversation, and we see the glimmer of too-skinny judgment in The Wall Street Journal: "Too Fit to Be President?"

2. His Peers Express Concern Did you know that, after models and actresses and famous singers and high school cheerleaders and sorority sisters, politicians are basically the second most at-risk group in America for eating disorders? In the pressure-cooker world of ruling the nation, the line between intervention and bullying can become blurry:

He was even teased by Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger almost exactly one year ago for having such skinny legs.

I'm going to make him do some squats"' the former Terminator star told a campaign rally for Mr Obama's presidential rival John McCain.

He also teased the president about his "scrawny little arms."

3. Matt Drudge Starts Using Him for Thinspiration The right-wing rabble-rouser leads November 4 with photos of a slender-looking post-workout president, with the headline BARACK N BONES. Steps 1 and 2 have already primed us to see this story and evaluate it on it merit, instead of reacting with the appropriate "I don't care if he eats nothing but birch bark and mildew, as long as North Korea doesn't nuke Hawaii, let's roll with it." Besides, obsessing about weight is fun. Which leads us to...

4. Lindsay Is Healthy and Nicole Had a Baby. Who Else We Got? The noise over skinny models and starving starlets has died down a bit, leaving a hole in the tabloid press' A-list skinny-watch. Thus, the growing concern over Obama's waistline hits its peak at the most opportune moment possible, media-wise.

5. Michelle Is Obsessed with Health, Too. Could this be one of those cases of collective body dysmorphia, like how groups of teenage girls all go on obsessive diets together, like how all the female cast members of 90210 got super skinny all at the same time? We return to The Daily Mail:

Mr Obama is often pictured playing basketball or returning from the gym with aides, while Mrs Obama's infamous vegetable garden in the grounds of the White House promotes healthy eating on top of exercise.

The First Lady's gym-toned arms have also been the topic of much discussion.

And there you have it: From political powerhouse to pro-ana teen clique.

For years, Andrew Breitbart, second-in-command at the Drudge Report, labored in the shadows cast by his boss's legendary fedora. Now, he's known as a major media player in his own right, the architect of a burgeoning conservative news network that's far more ambitious than anything his boss has ever attempted. In 2005, he created Breitbart.com, a streamlined news portal that carries the latest articles from the Associated Press, UPI, and other major newswires. In 2008, he created Big Hollywood, a group blog that counters liberal bias emanating from a dangerous fifth column of Malibu gasbags, statist puppets, and singing schoolchildren. In 2009, he introduced Big Government, a group blog that counters the liberal bias emanating from liberals. And perhaps just in case it turns out prime numbers emanate liberal bias too, he's even registered Big23.com.

Breitbart has a reputation for ideological transparency. "At no point have I attempted to hide my political leanings as I have endeavored to create Big Hollywood and Big Government. There is a need for a checks and balance against the New York Times and the rest of the supposedly neutral traditional press," he exclaimed at Big Hollywood. In an interview with the Financial Times, he reiterated his commitment to openness. "I make no bones about coming from an ideological and partisan point of view. But at least I'm honest about it."

But he's not just outspoken. Taunting his own nipples on Red Eye, trash-talking Upton Sinclair at a Tea Party rally, he's entertainingly outspoken. Catch him in an especially playful mood, and he practically pukes candor. "This is the Abu Ghraib of Abu Ghraib," he exclaimed to the Washington Independent about his ACORN video series. "Abu Ghraibs for everyone! NEA Abu Ghraib! White House Abu Ghraib! ACORN Abu Ghraib! Journalism Abu Ghraib! You've all been exposed, you corrupt bastards."

NO COMMENT

When an interview subject delivers quotes like that, you pretty much just turn on your tape recorder and let the magic happen. So you can imagine how disappointed I was when I called up Breitbart, asked him about a long-term business deal he has with Reuters, and he declined to comment.

I was hoping he'd brag about how much money he's made from the deal. And fire off some zingers about how unlikely it is that he, a guy so conservative he once suggested to the New York Observer that it would "almost disgust" him to have sex with the liberal movie star Maggie Gyllenhaal, had hooked up with Reuters, an international newswire with a reputation for anti-American bias, anti-Israeli bias, and anti-conservative bias.

And maybe if I had caught in a particularly expansive mood, I figured he might brazenly exclaim that while Reuters is charging its MSM brethren thousands of dollars a month to license its content, it's paying him, the anti-MSM upstart, for editorial links he places on his two news portals, Breitbart.com and Breitbart.TV, and even on the Drudge Report.

At which point, I would have probably said something like, "Dude, you're living the blogger dream! Mainstream media's paying you to link to its content, and you're using the money you make from them to fund sites which, as you told the Wall Street Journal, aim to ‘attack the media and to expose them . . . for the partisan hacks that they are.' They're paying you to say they suck! I don't think it gets any better than that."

At which point, Breitbart might have replied, "It doesn't. It really doesn't. It does not get any better than that."



Unfortunately, Breitbart isn't talking.

Instead, he suggested I take my questions directly to Reuters. Reuters, in turn, is being tight-lipped about the deal as well. This isn't that surprising. Reuters is a major international news agency — it reports on either people's business, not its own. Finally, there's the third party in this odd menage, Matt Drudge. He hasn't responded to email requests for an interview either.

What are they trying to hide?

MATT DRUDGE: UNHERALDED WEB ALTRUIST

This particular story started in 2005, when Breitbart decided to create Breitbart.com, a streamlined news portal for hardcore information junkies seeking access to every single story produced by the major newswires.

The genius of this simple idea cannot be fully appreciated unless you understand how the Drudge Report works. To the average hard-working blockhead who's never figured out how to make millions of dollars simply for rewriting AP headlines, the Drudge Report may seem like little more than a lazy parasite. But it's actually more complicated than that. Because while Matt Drudge realized early on that the best way to make money on the web is to leverage other people's content, he's also one of the web's most generous sugar daddies, giving away tons of potential revenue to rather arbitrary beneficiaries in the newspaper industry.

That's because a large percentage of the stories the Drudge Report links to are newswire stories, which can be licensed by any entity willing to pay for them. An Associated Press story, for example, may be carried on literally hundreds of sites – and Drudge is free to link to whichever one of those sites he chooses, for whatever reasons. In turn, the lucky site he links to is rewarded with a huge blast of monetizable traffic through no reportorial work of its own.

In the early days of the Drudge Report, the Washington Post was a frequent recipient of Drudge's largesse. Take, for example, this Drudge Report screenshot from February 8, 2000. It contained eight links to the Washington Post's website, and yet to get all the traffic that resulted, the Post's reportorial staff didn't even have to investigate a press release, much less wear out any shoe-leather — every single link went to an AP story carried on the Post's site.

Over the course of a year, the Drudge Report links to thousands of AP and other newswire stories. At some point, Breitbart realized this was basically like pouring money down a drain, only worse. It was like pouring money down a drain that some random newspaper publisher was sitting under, cackling gleefully as the money poured down on him.

Why, Breitbart must have wondered, couldn't he be that cackling publisher? A newswire portal would require little investment other than the newswire licensing fees, and yet with the Drudge Report sending it a thundering river of traffic every day, it could potentially make millions of dollars in advertising too.

That Drudge didn't pursue such a plan himself is just one more reason he remains, like Morocco's tree-climbing goats, an inexplicable phenomenon of nature. Maybe he figured he was making enough money as it was. (In 2001, Drudge told a reporter that he first started earning more than "seven digits" a year in 2000.) Maybe he thought running AP articles on his own site would diminish his carefully cultivated persona as a renegade citizen journalist working outside the bounds of the traditional news media.

In any case, Breitbart.com officially launched in 2005. Over the years, both Breitbart and Drudge have maintained that Drudge has no financial interest in the site. In a 2005 CNET article about Breitbart.com, Drudge exclaimed that he had "never owned a share of any company that [he's] linked to." In 2007, Breitbart told the L.A. Times that Drudge has "zero creative or business interest in the site."

Breitbart, however, does have a business interest in the site, and as soon as it launched, he began sending Drudge Report readers to his new, extremely hungry baby.

On August 29th, 2005, for example, the Drudge Report linked to Breitbart.com 48 times. On the following two days, it linked to Breitbart.com a total of 82 times. Over this single 72-hour period, it linked to Breitbart.com more times than it linked to Slate, The Huffington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, The National Enquirer, Rushlimbaugh.com, AnnCoulter.com, Rolling Stone, and Rosie.com, combined, in six years.

These numbers come from a database compiled by Kalev Leetaru, Coordinator of Information Technology and Research at the University of Illinois Cline Center for Democracy.While the Drudge Report has never maintained an archive, DrudgeReportArchives.com, an independent site, has been taking snapshots of the Drudge Report's front page since 2001. In July 2009, Leetaru analyzed every snapshot taken between January 1, 2002 through December 31, 2008 — 171,717 pages in all — and published a report of his findings.

According to Leetaru's report, 25% of all links from the Drudge Report in August 2005 led to Breitbart.com. Needless to say, Breitbart.com flourished. In its first month of operation, the new site attracted 2.64 million unique visitors.

Incredibly enough, his good fortune was about to get even better.

CODE GREEN ALERT: PAID LINKS AT THE DRUDGE REPORT

In the early days of Breitbart.com, Breitbart licensed content from the Associated Press and Reuters, as this archived page shows. But according to documents generated in a 2005 legal dispute between Breitbart and two other parties, Reuters terminated its contract with Breitbart.com in late September.

In October 2005, however, Reuters approached Breitbart with the kind of offer that generally occurs only in the less believable tales in Penthouse Forum or when a Nigerian vicar is planning to rip you off. To wit, Reuters wanted to pay Breitbart "a fee for traffic to driven to Reuters [sic] own website."

Typically, newspaper sites pay newswires to license their content, and that's what Breitbart was doing until Reuters cancelled its original contract with him. Now, it wanted to switch things up.

Under the terms of the new proposal, Breitbart would not be able to publish complete Reuters stories on his own website. Instead, he'd merely publish headlines and summaries that would link to Reuters' own page.

Breitbart agreed to the new deal on October 14th, 2005. Six weeks later, on December 2, 2005, Reuters returned to Breitbart.com with a splash. Indeed, before December 2, Associated Press headlines occupied the most prominent position on Breitbart.com's home page. In the wake of the new deal, Reuters became the house brand.

At Breitbart.com, Breitbart's goal is to present the latest news stories as they break, regardless of their importance. If it goes out on the AP wire, or the Reuters wire, it goes on his site: Breitbart aims to carry every story the wires are producing, with the newest stories getting top billing. Thus, in his function there, he's not so much a news editor making judgements about what stories are most important as he is, say, a news grocer, assembling the widest, freshest stock of journalistic produce available.

In privileging Reuters stories over AP stories simply because the former was paying while the latter was charging him, Breitbart was merely bringing the values of the grocery store world to onlines news distribution. Supermarkets across the nation charge companies like Kraft Foods and Procter & Gamble a slotting fee to reserve the most desirable shelf space and floorspace for their products. At Breitbart.com, Breitbart was doing the same with Reuters. (Over time, the site's design evolved. In the current version of Breitbart.com, no one newswire receives favorable placement over any other. Stories from all newswires are combined into a single feed, with the most recently published stories at the top.)

At the Drudge Report, Breitbart isn't just a news grocer, however. He's a body double for the man the Daily Telegraph has dubbed "the world's most powerful journalist." Drudge enjoys this title because of his ability to direct millions of eyeballs to a specific story or issue. And since thousands of those eyeballs are attached to cable news producers, newspaper editors, White House correspondents, and radio hosts with hours of air-time to fill each day, Drudge can single-handedly turn a story into the story in a way that few others can.

Indeed, when Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza canvassed more than a dozen campaign strategists, communications directors, and other high-placed political operatives, each one agreed that "there is no single tool more powerful in the modern media for breaking a story or turning up the volume on a little-noticed comment" than the Drudge Report.

"[Drudge] serves as an assignment editor for the national press corps," Kevin Madden, former campaign press secretary for Mitt Romney, told Politico in 2008. "If he has a story up, you know the cable networks are going to cover it all day."

Thus, there are expectations – enormous expectations — that Matt Drudge and anyone working for him are not just amassing journalistic produce but are instead performing important editorial functions. Millions of readers believe the Drudge Report finds the most interesting, relevant, and entertaining needles of truth buried in the dull, biased, and sloppily reported mountains of journalistic hay the media dumps on us every day. Thousands of reporters and editors believe Drudge's nose for news is so sharp he can sniff out a scandal in the third paragraph of a story everyone else thought was so inconsequential they didn't get past the second paragraph.

No doubt Breitbart has a good nose for news too. After he made his deal with Reuters, however, a new scent began filling his nostrils-the sweet intoxicating aroma of easy money.

In a document arising from his legal dispute, Breitbart admitted that he had "at times, caused there to be hyperlinks to Reuters' website from the Drudge Report, and that some of those links have contained the same tracking code as links to Reuters' website from www.Breitbart.com."

Here, of course, would be a great place for Breitbart and Reuters to chime in with some specific information about the nature of their deal.

For example, were the Drudge Report links a formal part of their arrangement?

Was Reuters paying Breitbart a flat fee for the paid links he was placing on Breitbart.com and The Drudge Report, or was it paying him based on the amount of traffic he was driving to its site?

These questions, alas, remain unanswered, because Breitbart declined to talk about his deal with Reuters and Reuters has been nearly as silent.

If you examine the links to Reuters.com at Breitbart.com, however, you'll find that that they all contain a common feature — a string that reads "RPC=22" or "RPC=23."

On this single subject, Reuters did shed a little light. According to Erin Kurtz, PR Head of Thomson Reuters' Americas and Media Division, the RPC string in a Reuters.com URL is "a parameter that enables [Reuters] to track clicks from URLs on our newsletters, from/to partner sites, etc."

Examine the Drudge Report's links to Reuters.com links and you will see that the RPC string can be found in some of them as well. See, for example, the URL associated with the "Hope" headlines that leads The Drudge Report on December 15, 2005.

But how often, exactly, was this happening?

Kalev Leetaru's database of Drudge Report snapshopts reveals that before Breitbart agreed to his new deal with Reuters, the RPC string never appeared in any of the nearly 700 links from the the Drudge Report to Reuters.com that were published between January 1, 2002 and October 14, 2005.

After the new agreement, however, the RPC string began to appear, well, it was just like Breitbart said. The RPC string began to appear "at times." What Breitbart didn't say, however, was that the RPC string also began to appear at other times. And other other times. Which is to say, it basically started to appear in almost every Reuters.com link the Drudge Report featured. Meanwhile, the frequency with which the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com began to increase.

How much? The Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com just 29 times from January 1, 2005 to October 14, 2005. Then, Breitbart signed his new deal to drive traffic to Reuters.com for money. From October 15, 2005 to December 31, 2005, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 229 times.

In all fairness, it may be that this abrupt 2900% increase in Reuters.com links didn't have all that much impact on the Drudge Report's content.

Like most news outlets, Reuters produces a certain number of commodity stories — a summary of a White House press conference, a field report from a candidate campaign appearance — that numerous other sources are reporting on as well. If, suddenly, the Drudge Report started favoring Reuters' accounts over the Associated Press's or the New York Times', well, the Drudge Report's readers were still getting information about whatever events its editors deemed most important.

In addition, it's not as if Breitbart had struck a deal with a spammer or a lobbyist looking to promote a specific product or policy. The Reuters.com links led to news stories, not penis-enhancement ads or campaign talking points.

Still, it's pretty clear that with the new deal in place, Breitbart began to look at Reuters.com the way Sarah Palin looks at the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In his case, however, he had unchecked authority to drill, baby, drill!

In 2006, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 1888 times. At this point, it trailed only Breitbart.com as the Drudge Report's favorite destination. Meanwhile, 1852 of those links, or 98% of them, contained the RPC strings that Reuters was presumably using to keep track of how much traffic Breitbart was sending it.

Over the following two years, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 2368 times, with 82% of those links containing the RPC strings.

While Kalev Leetaru's database does not include data for 2009, the Drudge Report still regularly features Reuters.com links containing the RPC=22 and RPC=23 strings. See, for example, the link associated with the IT'S UNDER$900,000,000,000.00 headline that appeared on October 20, 2009.

At Breitbart.com, all links to Reuters.com continue to use those two RPC strings as well. From all appearances, the synergistic three-way between Breitbart, Reuters, and the Drudge Report remains in effect.

From 2005 through 2008, the Drudge Report featured more than 4000 links to Reuters.com that included the RPC strings.

How much money did Breitbart make from them?

Don't expect an answer any time soon. But when you're single-handedly taking on what Breitbart calls the Democrat-Media Complex, every bit helps. And any money that actually comes from the Democrat-Media Complex itself must be extra appreciated.

"Newswires are, I don't know, 70% of the action, and I wanted to begin my business based on that platform," Breitbart exclaimed in a recent interview at Technorati. He then revealed that he's planning to hire reporters for Big Government and Big Hollywood, and buying up numerous domain names to expand his network of sites. "I've spent way too much money these URLs. Those guys have to be living on an island the way they're able to sell crappy URLs for $20,000," he joked.

He didn't provide any details about where the money to buy crappy $20,000 URLs comes from, but maybe the world's most powerful journalist, Matt Drudge, will eventually break that story. In the meantime, if you can't wait to see sites like BigClimate.com and BigNannyState.com, you know what to do. Every time you see a Reuters.com link at the Drudge Report, click on it at least a dozen times!

Breitbart launched his news aggregator site as a way to monetize traffic generated by the Drudge Report. Why send all those ravenous Drudge readers to newspapers by linking to commodity-news stories when Breitbart could subscribe to newswires himself, start up a site, host the stories on them, and—as Matt Drudge's understudy—send that traffic to his own site? It's a smart idea. Another smart idea is to charge a company like Reuters for linking to their stories, which is what Breitbart started doing in October 2005, according to Beato.

Instead of charging Breitbart for the right to host their stories—an arrangement Breitbart has with the Associated Press and a variety of other wire services—Reuters started paying him to post headlines and summaries of Reuters stories with links to the Reuters web site. The downside is that Breitbart loses potential ad revenue when a reader clicks through to the Reuters stories, because they see ads served by Reuters. The upside is he gets paid.

All of which is an interesting business story, one that neither Reuters nor Breitbart would comment on. But Beato engaged in some internet forensics, and was able to draw the Drudge Report into Breitbart's little arrangement. It turns out that all the Reuters links on Breitbart's site carry the same bit of code in the URL—either RPC=22 or RPC=23. The only thing a Reuters spokesman deigned to confirm to Beato was that those codes are "a parameter that enables [Reuters] to track clicks from URLs on our newsletters, from/to partner sites, etc." So a Reuters story with a URL containing either of those codes, Beato deduces, is one that Breitbart gets paid for linking to. So do any Reuters stories linked directly from the Drudge Report contain the magic money code?

In 2006, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 1888 times. At this point, it trailed only Breitbart.com as the Drudge Report's favorite destination. Meanwhile, 1852 of those links, or 98% of them, contained the RPC strings that Reuters was presumably using to keep track of how much traffic Breitbart was sending it.

Interesting! Of course, as Beato notes, there's nothing particularly nefarious about the way such an arrangement might affect Drudge's, or Breitbart's, news judgment. Reuters is a purveyor of breaking and commodity news, and their stories are usually just as useful as the AP's or any other wire's. So the fact that, when Breitbart is at the helm of the Drudge Report, he gets a nickel for linking to a Reuters story about, say, a hurricane doesn't necessarily mean there's an ethical issue at stake. Still, it's...interesting.

And it doesn't really matter anymore, because Breitbart quit his side-gig as Drudge's alter ego more than a year ago—at least if you trust what you read on Gawker. Indeed, the URL to the Reuters story currently linked as the lead item on the Drudge Report doesn't contain the RPC code that's going to put Breitbart's kids through college.

Beato sources his information about the Reuters deal to "documents generated in a 2005 legal dispute between Breitbart and two other parties," which turns out to be a federal lawsuit that two of Breitbart's former partners in an advertising venture filed against him. In 2005, Breitbart got together with Bradley Hillstrom and Brian Cartmell, the producers of Michael Moore Hates America, to form GenAds, a company that was to exclusively sell ads for Breitbart.com. When Breitbart struck the Reuters deal, he cut GenAds out of the picture on the theory that the paid links were a content deal, rather than advertising. Cartmell and Hillstrom sued, and the case was settled in 2006.

We looked through the court documents, and here's the reason the trio thought GenAds would be a good idea—Hillstrom personally knew the folks in charge of the massive ad budgets at the National Rifle Association, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc.:

And here's an account of the night that the deal to create GenAds was sealed:

So, in case you were wondering, no—there is no vast right-wing conspiracy. Just a series of dinners with powerful GOP politicians at which ideas to make people like Andrew Breitbart wealthy beyond imagination are discussed. Move along.

Of course, 24/7 Wall Street has the advantage of being able to conjure made-up estimates out of thin air; that's how the site put a price tag on various blog networks back in February (PerezHilton.com: $32 million (ha); Gawker Media: $170 million (HA!)). Now the site's taken those made-up estimates and combined them with additional made-up estimates of how much each blog network would be worth without its iconic founder. In other words, it's estimating the economic worth of each blogging boss — not to be confused with their actual wealth.

Here are the numbers. Spoiler: Drudge is king, even in hypothetical death.

(Correction: This post originally said 24/7 Wall Street was an AOL property. It is in fact independent.)

Gawker Media's Nick Denton: $26 million. Sure, that sounds like a lot, but it's only 15 percent of his company's hypothetical net worth, since Denton doesn't do much writing or editing. "Gawker would miss the guiding hand, but presumably the company could get another skilled CEO." (Pic: Eliot Shepard via mednut on Flickr)

Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington: $23 million. Huffington is the face of her company, 24/7 correctly notes, lending it valuable "star power and relationships." But the site overestimates the extent to which Huffington has delegated control to "highly skilled editorial staff:" although she's made some promising recent hires from the likes of the Washington Post, Huffington has stocked the wide-ranging site with nepotistic hires willing to abide her detailed (headlines, story placement, story assignments) and wide-ranging orders. As such, she's probably at least twice as essential to the organization as 24/7 estimates (25 percent of HuffPo's $90 million net worth). (Pic: JD Lasica)

Drudge Report's Matt Drudge: $43 million. That's 90 percent of his site's estimated $48 million value. Sure, Drudge has in the past received help from swell guys like Andrew Breitbart (no longer working for him), but they hardly had the skill to open email messages containing Republican talking points and newsroom leaks: "Drudge obviously has editors working for him to gather the hundreds of links from other media but the scoops that run on the sites are almost certainly his."

PerezHilton.com's Mario "Perez Hilton" Lavandeira: $30 million. The jizz-doodling celebrity gossip blogger is obviously an irreplaceable genius i 24/7's eyes: Without him, says the website, "the $32 million value of PerezHilton.com would go to under $2 million." Right, except for the fact that Lavandeira's got his sister and probably others actually writing/doodling the damned thing on his behalf. And since 1> Perez Hilton isn't anyone's real name to begin with and 2> his sister doesn't go around calling people "fags" like Lavandeira does, she might actually be able to make the site more popular.

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington: $12.5 million. Sure, TechCrunch's flagship tech business blog has "more than 20 senior writers, editor and business staff," but Arrington is "a controversial and polarizing figure," so he's worth half the company's total imaginary valuation of $50 million. (Pic: Robert Scoble)

The rest: MacRumors' Arnold Kim, a onetime doctor is estimated worth $4.2 million to his $21 million site; GigaOm's Om Malik accounts for $2.9 million of his tech blog network's $9.5 million value; Mashable's Pete Cashmore is estimated worth $1.25 million, or half of his tech blog's $2.5 million value; Business Insider's Henry Blodget $1.5 million or two-thirds of the total value of his financial blogging company; Markos Moulitsas (pictured) $1.7 million of political blog Daily Kos' $2 million made-up value. (Pic: Steve Rhodes)

It's almost as if, by some miracle, Drudge suddenly understands the real, human cost of war, a war he tacitly cheered on during Bush's reign. But, no: it doesn't take a genius to see this for what it is: a not-so-subtle visual jab at President Obama, who's currently deciding our military's future in that country. (The line above the pictures reads "Obama clings to 50% approval...")

While Drudge doesn't offer an actual editorial on the matter, Sarah Palin does: the sorta politician took to her Facebook page today to join her Republican peers and ask Obama to add more troops to the region.

We can win in Afghanistan by helping the Afghans build a stable representative state able to defend itself. And we must do what it takes to prevail. The stakes are very high. The 9/11 attacks were planned in Afghanistan, and if we are not successful there, al Qaeda will once again find a safe haven, the Taliban will impose its cruelty on the Afghan people, and Pakistan will be less stable.

We wonder, however, whether Drudge and Palin's efforts, though ostensibly working toward the same goal, will nullify one another. Palin and the Republican set are explicit: more troops! The typically conservative Drudge, we're assuming, supports that message, but his anti-Obama bias has obscured the header's bellicose undertones.

What happens when impressionable readers see all the death on Drudge's and think, "Gee, maybe this war business isn't good for anything?" It's almost as if the conservative camp's having a Sybil moment. Not that we can blame them: pinning all this death and destruction on Obama must be hard while also calling for more death and destruction.

This means the various poorly dressed and oddly coiffed young terrorist hep cats who burned the Olympic banner on the streets of the Windy City have won. Presumably they are right now pausing the Crass albums on their "Disc Mans" just long enough to cheer the failure of America. And they will be joined in that cheer by Matt Drudge!

"WORLD REJECTS OBAMA," Drudge says! That is a hilarious and easily predicted distortion! Also wasn't it weird how suddenly the right-wing hated the idea of a President trying to get America the Olympics? Like, seriously, what the fuck was that about?

Some of us were against having the Olympics in America because the IOC is run by vile old bastards, the bidding process is staggeringly corrupt, and Chicagoans, like New Yorkers, did not particularly want the Olympics, all that much. We did not want the IOC to reject our bid because Chicago has too many black criminals and because the idea of Obama trying to boost an American city enrages us, though. Why does Matt Drudge hate America? (Note: Chicago is part of America!)

Here we have the forces of American Exceptionalism and unrepentant jingoism teaming up with dreadlocked anti-American anarchists. Maybe the Spanish fascist who used to run the IOC will win the Olympics for Madrid, or (most likely) they will go to Rio de Janeiro.

Also, from the New York Times:

American officials said that they had been tracking the covert project for years, but that Mr. Obama decided to disclose the American findings after Iran discovered, in recent weeks, that Western intelligence agencies had breached the secrecy surrounding the complex.

Surprise!

On Friday, Bill Maher accused Matt Drudge of hyping race because of this headline: "Poll Hell:? Obama Negs Rise." Maher discerned a resonance between Drudge's abbreviation for "negatives" and a certain other word that tea partiers use when they pray to God to strike down Obama, and used it to launch a comedy bit featuring other transparently race-baiting headlines. We found that somewhat silly—"negs" is a common enough bit of insider jargon, and though it appears to have been the only time Drudge used it in a headline, it's certainly not enough to hang an accusation of racial tomfoolery on.

But we were wrong. Drudge seems to have taken pride in Maher picking up on his little joke, because he linked to the bit and has spent the last two days trying to prove him right. Yesterday, as Daily Intel noted, there was the interesting juxtaposition of a photo of an enraged Serena WIlliams telling a judge she was going to "take this fucking ball and shove it down your fucking throat" with a photo of an angry-looking Barack Obama warning that "they can't stop us" on healthcare.

And today, we get a routine high-school beating cast as a newsworthy racial assault. We feel awful for the poor kid who got attacked in the video Drudge links to, partly because we got threatened and punched by a veritable racial rainbow of bullies when we were his age and partly because now it's on Drudge so a whole nation can see him looking hurt and defenseless. But kids get beat up by other kids literally every hour, and the newsworthiness of this case seems to rest solely in the fact that the victim was white and the attackers were not. And that it was caught on video. A local police officer makes the absurd claim that the attack appeared from the video to be racially motivated because "many of the students, most of whom were black, yelled their support for the beating"—which is the same thing as saying "because the students were black." Shouting out support for a beating is as common to high schools as acne.

But the important thing to remember is that Barack Obama is black, and there are angry black people, and they will beat you and steal your health care and shove this fucking tennis ball down your fucking throat and the negs are rising.

UPDATE: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has updated its story. The police official who initially described the attack as "racially motivated" is backtracking:

"After having reviewed the video, it doesn't strike me nearly as racially motivated," Sax said.

The about-face came this morning as the story made national headlines. Although, Sax said it was purely his review of the video that changed his mind.

The Observer's Gillian Reagan makes the case that Drudge is losing his mojo among his main constituency, the media. And she has a point—his influence seems to have shifted away from the pointy-headed self-loathing media types who worship him like some sort of magical animal and chase down his wildest speculations to a more direct-to-wingnut, populist beacon of craziness. He's still the assignment editor for Fox News, but Mark Halperin didn't even talk to Reagan for her story, so that says something right there.

But Keller and Edsall—who is HuffPo's political editor—did respond, and they both claimed that they don't even read Drudge.

Keller: "It's probably been a year since I looked at the Drudge report, or felt its impact in any way."

Edasll: "I don't check [Drudge] to speak of."

We're sure they don't masturbate, either. If Keller doesn't read the Drudge Report at least occasionally, it would constitute a professional incompetence of such proportions that we're confident he's lying in order to project a delusional fantasy of a pre-internet media environment in the desperate hope that it will come true. Matt Drudge exists—he is an engine of right-wing paranoia and launcher of 1,000 bullshit stories, and whether Keller likes it or not, he's a part of the political world that Keller's newspaper purports to cover. He's an unpleasant part of that world, but for Keller to even claim that he ignores him is like a pilot ignoring bad weather. More likely Keller reads Drudge and then smugly dismisses what he sees, which is why his managing editor just acknowledged being "a beat behind" on the Van Jones story that Drudge started hyping a week ago.

And Thomas Edsall? He's just lying. Tom Edsall reads the Drudge Report. Every day. If we were to walk into his office, go to his keyboard, launch his browser, and type in "D-R", it would autocomplete "drudgereport.com."

"Maybe he wasn't the phenomenon trend-watchers thought," Keller haughtily told the Observer after briefly pulling his head out of the sand. "Maybe he was just a fad-digital-age hula hoop."

Yes, Bill. A decade-long fad. Airplanes are a fucking fad, too, as you can see from the fact that railroads still exist and the airline industry is struggling. You know what really was a fad? About.com, which your newspaper paid $410 million for in 2005.

The diabolical alliance between Obama and his art-gangsters was struck in two shadowy conference calls last month, one allegedly hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the other by the NEA-funded Americans for Arts. Both calls invited artists to discuss ways to "make change happen" and featured representatives from the White House's Office of Public Engagement.

Drudge calls them "propaganda" calls, and hints darkly that someone lied or something about who sponsored them. It's unclear whether these were simply random conference calls hosted by artist-activists and nonprofits at which representatives of the White House and NEA appeared, or whether they were actual White House-directed efforts to get a bunch of artists on the phone. Patrick Courrielche, a blogger at Breitbart's Big Hollywood, thinks it's the latter: "What appears to be emerging is a concerted and deliberate effort by the White House and the NEA to encourage the art community to create issue specific art."

Oh dear. If Obama's way to ram healthcare legislation through is to convince artists—the group of Americans who collectively wield the smallest conceivable quantum of influence over anything, at all—to, um, do art stuff in favor of it, we are all screwed. If his idea of propaganda is a mixed-media show about the insurance industry at a community center in Deerfield, Illinois, then he's the least competent fascist in the history of fascism.

We should say that we are somewhat sympathetic to Courrielche's position. If this is indeed a White House-led effort—and there's no clear evidence that it is—it is wrongheaded. Even the suggestion that NEA money could be doled out to artists based on political criteria should be avoided, and any artist worth the name ought to feel uncomfortable about joining any conference call at all, let alone one that features Kal Penn in his duties as White House liaison to the arts community. Courrielche's initial post on the subject at Big Hollywood is actually thoughtful, well-considered, and largely devoid of hyperbole. His second post claims to uncover a thicket of lies and rants about propaganda. Hey! That's also the one Drudge linked to. What do you know?

Anyway, plenty of artists obviously support Obama's agenda, but because they are just artists and nobody pays any attention to them, they are powerless to do anything about it. Now let's hope they go back to taking pictures of urine-soaked crucifixes and men with whip-handles up their assholes, so crazy wingnuts will have more interesting things to be outraged about.

It seems 42-year old Drudge, who spent many of his early years publishing on AOL, misunderstood the fundamental technology behind iDrudge. He thought the app was reading a pirated copy of the Drudge Report running on someone else's server, app creator Joseph Nardone told iPhone Savior. When it was explained to him that the app just downloaded the Drudge Report from Drudge's regular servers, and neatly reformatted it, he emailed Apple and asked for the app to be reinstated.

At the moment, the app still has not returned to App Store; Apple's approval process can take weeks, so Drudge's initial email is probably seriously cutting into Nardone's income, considering that iDrudge was once the store's number one news app. Imagine: Something inaccurate, written by Matt Drudge, causing people grief. Unprecedented.

Apparently Drudge is not bothered by the lack of advertising on the iDrudge app; as Nardone wrote in a comment we just now saw and approved under our original post, Drudge himself offers an ad-free mobile version of his site:

Hi:

Thanks for the publicity. The intent of the iDrudge Drudge Reader app was not to remove advertising from the Drudge Report. The Drudge Report already has a version with no ads at iDrudgeReport.com. The intention of the iDrudge Drudge Reader was to allow people who would not otherwise be able to view the Drudge Report on an iPhone due to the inconvenience of using the Safari browser to view the site. This should actually increase the traffic to the Drudge Report site and increase it's ability to attract revenue. The iDrudge Drudge Reader is merely a specialized web browser that is preset to view the Drudge Report.

Sincerely,
Joseph Nardone

One would think author Joseph Nardone might have tried to incorporate some of the Drudge Report's advertising, as a nod to the blogger who made it possible for him to sell this piece of software for 99 cents a pop. But he doesn't; iDrudge merely provides an easy way to access the links Drudge so tirelessly culls from the internet. The notoriously reclusive blogger hasn't responded to an email asking if he plans to fight the app, released just a few days ago.

Whatever Drudge thinks of the app, we're already planning to uninstall, and wait for an app that can be configured to focus exclusively on Drudge's most blatantly gay content.

(And we need a break from absurd conspiracy theories about devious flacks, too.)

1. HOLY SHIT BARACK OBAMA THINKS HE IS ALLAH!!

Yesterday, on a conference call with rabbis about healthcare, Obama declared that "we are God's partners in matters of life and death," which is evidence that his messianic tendencies have merged with his hatred of the elderly into a potent tonic of cartoonish villainy. He was inspired by a Rosh Hashanah prayer—"On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed / And on Yom Kippur it is sealed / How many shall pass away and how many shall be born / Who shall live and who shall die"—and signed off the call with a hearty "L'shanah tovah," Hebrew for happy holidays (even though Rosh Hashanah's a ways off, but still). Politico's Ben Smith smelled Drudgebait, so he wrote it up without really drawing attention to how insane people would surely interpret the comments. Drudge smelled traffic from insane people, so he linked to it while only subtly drawing attention to how insane people would interpret the comments. Insane people saw the story on Drudge, and went insane: "You know who used to talk like this? Jim Jones and David Koresh." (Interestingly, Smith's source for the Obama quote was a rabbi who was in on the call and "live-Tweeted" it. That rabbi has since deleted all the posts—including the one about being "God's partner"—and apologized for publicizing it.)

2. HOLY SHIT JAKE "THE OCTAGON" TAPPER THINKS BARACK OBAMA IS MALCOLM X!!!!

ABC News' Tapper wrote a blog post yesterday in which he quoted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's spokesman saying, of the healthcare bill, "we are determined to get something done this year by any legislative means necessary." Malcolm X once strung together the words "by any means necessary," so Journalist Jake decided to add a video of Malcolm X to his post just to underscore the point that Barack Obama is a radical Muslim black separatist. We kid! While we've been perfectly happy to mock Tapper in the past for offenses big and small, we think this (crazy) conflation of Malcolm X and the legislative process is motivated more by a misguided attempt on Tapper's part to be cheeky rather than to remind terrified old people that Obama hates "working white people," or to get Drudge's attention. Poor Tapper has been furiously defending himself on Twitter, reminding folks that "President Obama not even mentioned," and the DailyKos says, "Seriously, WTF Jake?"

3. HOLY SHIT SOMEONE THINKS DYLAN RATIGAN SHOULD BE FIRED!!!!!!!!!!

That's right—the president of a group has written an angry letter to MSNBC, and Politico's Michael Calderone has it exclusively! Apparently MSNBC, like Fox News, cut its tape of the guys carrying assault rifles outside Obama's Phoenix town hall to make it look like it was all white guys, when the most prominent gun-toter was in fact black. Which means, according to Greg Gutfeld, that MSNBC is trying to start a "race war." And the president of Americans for Limited Government has written a letter to MSNBC demanding that Ratigan, Contessa Brewer, Touré (!), and "any and all others involved in any way with the fraudulent 'news'" be terminated immediately. Now that we think of it, we've got to get started on our item about the letter we just got from MindY0urOwnBiz demanding that President Obama immediately seek the resignations of "geitner and bernaki." (We don't blame you, Michael, we blame August.)

August is so dead it's not even suitable for ginning up a war, as former White House chief of staff Andy Card famously noted. Everything's in reruns, and without even an Olympics to distract us in an odd-numbered year, the most specious, pointless, specious stories expand to fill the empty afternoons and turn into cable-news wallpaper. Only in August could the preposterous notion of "Obama's death panels" get a full week to be chewed over, analyzed, rebutted, and generally taken seriously. Absent a dead white girl, we can look forward to at least two more weeks of faux-stories and false outrage as desperate cable-news producers cast about to find something for their fill-in talking-heads to scream about.

We decided to revisit some stories from Augusts past, using the Drudge Report Archives as our guide, to remind ourselves that it was ever thus and always will be. August is the time when the nuts come out to play.

2008: Well, Russia had just invaded Georgia, and the presidential campaigns were largely quiet leading up to their conventions at the end of the month. But it was on the Ides of August that we learned that bigfoot had been found:

Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, a pair of Bigfoot-hunting hobbyists from north Georgia, say they found the creature's body in a wooded area and spotted several similar creatures that were still alive.

2007: Drudge saw fit to link to, and Fox News saw fit to actually run a story about, a South Carolina prison inmate who filed a handwritten lawsuit against Michael Vick for $63 billion, claiming that Vick stole his pit bulls, sold them on eBay, and used the money to buy missiles to give to Iran because Vick had "pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda in February of this year."

"Michael Vick has to stop physically hurting my feelings and dashing my hopes," Riches writes in the complaint.

2006: It was actually an uncharacteristically newsy month, and the lamest story we could find that Drudge linked to on the Ides of that month was about woolly mammoth sperm:

BODIES of extinct Ice Age mammals, such as woolly mammoths, that have been frozen in permafrost for thousands of years may contain viable sperm that could be used to bring them back from the dead, scientists said yesterday.

2005: We learned that you could grow meat in a test tube, a story that crops up every few years (here's the same story last year) and proves to go no where, but which was wacky enough to entertain Drudge readers for a minute or two:

Once the cells have grown enough, they could be scraped off and packaged. If edible sheets or beads are used, all of it could be eaten.

2004: the Ides fell on a weekend, so the nearest weekday gave us this twofer of perennial Drudge favorites: Weird crime and robots. The links are sadly dead.

2003: We learned on August 15 that Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments, which were illegally placed in a state judicial building, were not going anywhere, g-dammit:

"I have no intention of removing the monument," he said at a press conference in Montgomery. "This I cannot and will not do."

The tradition goes back ages. It was on August 15, 1912, that the New York Times published this letter, which can imagine even as we write flashing across Sean Hannity's teleprompter tonight:

We can't wait for our vacation.

[Photo via Flickr by Chaval Brasil.]

Because people can't afford to eat, and cheese has nutritional value that can help sustain life. One of the stimulus contracts Drudge links to—the implication being that the expenditure is somehow inappropriate or wasteful or contrary to the stated purpose of the stimulus package—paid Bongard's Creameries, a Minnesota farmer's cooperative, $5.7 million for processed American cheese.

We called Bongard's to ask what the contract was for. Vikki Anderson, the company's sales director, said she wasn't 100% sure, but she assumed that it was for the USDA's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—food stamps. "I think it was for SNAP," she told Gawker, "because most of our delivery locations are food banks."

Losers! What a waste. We assume that the various swine products that Drudge has searched for on Recovery.org—"$2,531,600 FOR 'HAM, WATER ADDED, COOKED, FROZEN, SLICED, 2-LB'"—are similarly intended to feed people who can't afford to buy food because they don't have jobs. Still—the porkulus is being used to buy pork! We thought it was supposed to stimulate the economy. How does using pork to buy pork stimulate the economy? Sean Hannity will ask this question in roughly 11 hours.

Well, one way would be by preventing people from starving, so that they might survive the recession and get jobs. Another way would be to employ people who slaughter and package pork for a living. Because when people can't afford to buy food, they don't buy food. So the people who make food don't have anyone to sell the food to, and so they lay people off, and then the people they laid off can't afford to buy food, etc.

Also: The stimulus package was intended to help people buy food. It says so right here on the same web site that Matt Drudge linked to in order to ridicule the notion of spending stimulus dollars to help people by food:

UPDATE: Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has responded directly to Drudge. Which was a very bad idea, since a) all Drudge did was put up links, so there is no specific claim that needs a response, and b) now Drudge can put up a big headline bragging about how he dragged the secretary of agriculture into a fight about ham. Which of course he has. Also, Vilsack inexplicably zeroed in on the idea that Drudge is accusing the USDA of spending millions on one two-pound ham: "The references to '2 pound frozen ham sliced' are to the sizes of the packaging. Press reports suggesting that the Recovery Act spent $1.191 million to buy '2 pounds of ham' are wrong." It's crazy to think charges like that merit a response, and in doing so, Vilsack is just lending credibility to Drudge.

[Photo by Duncan Cumming via Flickr.]

Last week, University of Illinois researcher Kalev Leetaru plumbed the depths of the Drudge Report Archives, which has recorded a digital snapshot each time Drudge has updated his site since 2002, for data—including a ranking of each word Drudge has used in headlines for the last seven years—and published an academic review of Drudge's posting habits. Leeratu only presented a chart of ten most frequently used words on the site, and they were all conjunctions and connector words. But he graciously agreed to provide us with a spreadsheet of all 31,802 discreet terms Drudge has employed to construct the Platonically ideal tabloid headlines he writes so well, and we pulled out all the bold-faced names. Below is a chart of every person who was mentioned at least 100 times on the Drudge Report between January 1, 2002 and December 31, 2008.

George W. Bush tops the list, naturally, with 4,889 appearances on the report, an average of two per day. Next up is Barack Obama, who made his debut on the Drudge Report in 2006, with 2,387 mentions. Poor John McCain placed third, with half that number. Hillary Clinton is close behind as the top-ranked woman in Drudge's world—no surprise, considering he once said, "I need Hillary Clinton.... That's my bank." Speaking of women, there aren't many—10 out of a total of 56 people who rated 100 mentions—and they almost all share the drama-queen turbulence that Drudge lives to chronicle: Katie Couric, Sarah Palin, Madonna, Martha Stewart, etc.

Also notable is the large number of international leaders, a function both of Drudge's global focus and his tendency to fashion delicious villains out of our enemies. Vladimir Putin beats Rupert Murdoch, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, and Yasir Arafat all beat Michael Moore.

One curiosity: The high ranking of arch-conservative journalist and conspirator Robert Novak, who, at 150 mentions, outranks Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and many other higher-profile names. Many of those were likely in reference to the Scooter Libby affair, though Judith Miller just broke 60 mentions.

And where does Matt Drudge, the power broker to rule them all, rank on his own list? Number 38, with 139 mentions. He may be a near-recluse in real life, but in Drudgeworld, he beats even O.J.

A caveat: The data we drew from literally tabulated each individual word, which rendered some rankings impossible. How many times was Bill Clinton mentioned? We don't know: "Bill" could refer to legislation, and "Clinton" could refer to either Bill or Hillary. Similarly, we assumed each instance of "Jackson" referred to Michael, though that's probably not the case. So it's not entirely scientific. Though probably a lot more than all other power lists, actually.

Have at it.

Kalev Leetaru, the coordinator of information technology and research at the University of Illinois' Cline Center for Democracy, went back through seven years' worth data from the Drudge Report Archives—which has been taking a digital snapshot of the Drudge Report each time it's been updated since 2002—and mined it for clues as to how the elusive Junior Vasquez fan controls our media diet.

One of the many interesting datapoints unearthed by Leetaru's analysis is a curious drop in the total number of updates to the Drudge Report in 2008—an election year that should have seen a huge increase in the amount of stories, and therefore updates, that Drudge was covering. As a possible explanation for the drop-off Leetaru cites our reporting in March about the departure of Drudge understudy Andrew Breitbart from his operation. Breitbart left the site in mid-2008, and Drudge evidently had trouble keeping up the pace.

Leetaru saw another counterintuitive drop-off in updates during the Iraq War in 2003, which he explains by citing the overwhelming coverage that Iraq got in the news outlets Drudge relies on for stories. As newspapers focused their resources on Iraq and stopped writing about animal attacks, weather, and robot sex, Drudge had less to work with:

As major global events displace the news coverage that an aggregator relies on, that aggregator is forced to reduce its update cycle to accommodate the reduction in stories to link to.

As expected, Breitbart.com has been the chief beneficiary of Drudge links, netting 14,923 (or 14.5% of all links) since 2002, largely because Breitbart himself was doing the linking. Nice gig! The top newspaper beneficiary was the Washington Post with 6,471, nearly twice as many as the New York Times. And even though it was in existence for only two of the six years that Leetaru studied, Politico ranked 16th in terms of total Drudge links, catching nearly 50 in January of 2008 alone.

Leetaru also did a word analysis of Drudge's headlines—an undertaking that, given Drudge's facility as a headline writer, could serve as a guidebook for newspaper editors looking to save the industry—but decided not to filter out filler words and articles, so we only get the astonishing news that "to" is the most commonly used word in a Drudge headline. But the weird thing is the "Bush" outranked "a." Leetaru only charted out the Top Ten words; we've asked him for the full rankings and will let you know if he gives them to us.

[Via Politico.]

But seriously, is this not one of the best presidential photographs of all-time? Even Sarkozy looks like he's sneaking a peek, though he's French, so we expect him to do it. However, in Obama's defense, that is a great ass!

And naturally, Drudge is having some fun with this.

We can't wait to see Robert Gibbs try to spin this one.

Photo by Jason Reed for Reuters/Landov via TMZ