I tend to be pretty skeptical of the the whole "cost of a gallon of milk" question (mostly because, despite the fact that I buy milk at least once a week, I couldn't answer the question myself), so I've been glad to see that a lot of the response to Giuliani's recent bungling has been along those same lines. The best response I've seen, though, is definitely this one, in which Michael Tomasky suggests replacing the fairly arbitrary "price of milk" with a list of ten numbers that really would demonstrate political in-touchitude.

If any of my loyal readers (ha!) are BloggingHeads fans, riddle me this: why does Ann Althouse keep showing up?

The Onion solves a Masters mystery.

With all the other shenanigans going on these days (the U.S. Attorneys, the missing White House emails, the arbitrary lengthening of troop deployments [which the affected troops found out about by watching a Pentagon press conference]), I hope the Congress has the time to focus on this:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.

In an interesting experiment, the Washington Post's Gene Weingarten sent classical violinist Joshua Bell into the L'Enfant Metro station for an incognito street-performance. Weingarten's article on the result is well worth a read.

(And for more great long-form Weingarten, be sure to check out Doonesbury's War.)

Update: In the interest of fairness, it would appear that there are plenty of people who aren't quite as impressed as I am. To the extent that those people object to Weingarten's occasionally-purple prose ["Tall and handsome, he's got a Donny Osmond-like dose of the cutes, and, onstage, cute elides into hott."], they'll find no argument here. But to the extent that they attack the story's scientific bona fides and read into it a sanctimonious rant on the cultural cluelessness of Washington's Metro riders, I think their indignation is misplaced. To quote Weingarten's online chat:

[Generic Questioner]: Was this story intended to be an indictment of the soul of the federal bureaucrat?

Weingarten: The simple answer is, no. It was not my intent, nor could anyone reasonably draw that inference from the story. We didn't have a control group; we had only one shot at the experiment, and you just can't fairly generalize one way or another. I really believe this.

Former Bush campaign strategist Matt Dowd, er... changes his mind.

In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s leadership.

He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.

So this can't help his chances...

Asked by Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, about Mr. Gonzales’s statements at a March 13 news conference that he had not participated in any discussions about the dismissals, Mr. Sampson [Alberto Gonzales's former chief-of-staff] replied, "I don’t think the attorney general’s statement that he was not involved in any discussions about U.S. attorney removals is accurate."

I'm a bit distracted, so I've been paying only moderate attention to the Kyle Sampson testimony that's going on right now, but my ears perked up for a few seconds just now as I heard Sampson say to Sheldon Whitehouse, "Senator, the decision-makers in this case were the Attorney General and the counsel to the President." Not exactly falling on his sword, is he?

You know what's great about this blog? Its consistency.

Well that was... good? The gist of the Edwards press conference was that Elizabeth Edwards's cancer has returned, but in a very treatable (albeit not curable) way. She feels great, she's had no symptoms, and they were lucky to have caught it this early.

Oh yeah, and the campaign will go on. "Strongly."

A couple of things that I found odd:

• They didn't address the future of the campaign until they were asked about it. Maybe I can see the motivation there, maybe ("This press conference is about Elizabeth; that's what really matters here. Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth. ... Wait, you want to talk about the presidential campaign? At a time like this? Have you no shame? Have you no decency? ... Oh, very well, if you insist."), but come on. Give me a break.
• And speaking of breaks! (I am the segue master!) The cancer was discovered when Elizabeth, while seeking treatment for a broken rib, had a set of X-rays that happened to show an irregularity on the other side of her body. So, obvious question, "how did you break your rib?" "Well, see, I was moving this chest of drawers...." I'm not a journalist, and I don't have a journalist's instincts, but that explanation seemed awfully contrived. I don't mean to imply anything, but she's a near-60-year-old woman with two young children. How is the explanation not, "I was playing with the kids"?

This could be pretty big:

ABC News is reporting breaking news that John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, are holding a press conference Thursday at noon. No one yet knows why, but you don't mysteriously announce a press conference with your wife if it's good news. This comes on the heels of Edwards canceling a campaign appearance recently in order to attend a doctor's appointment with his wife, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004.

It's probably true that you don't mysteriously call a press conference to announce good news, but it's important to remember that sometimes you do mysteriously call a press conference to announce nothing at all.

Update: Ezra Klein hears rumors that Edwards is planning to drop out. Say it ain't so, Jo[hn]!

Update #2: The big papers have joined the party, with a somewhat disheartening message: the Times quotes one "close family friend" as saying that the announcement "would affect, at least temporarily, the future of the campaign." While I suppose that's better than nothing ("at least temporarily" clearly suggests, if nothing else, the possibility that the campaign will continue in the long-term), it does seem uncomfortably likely that we're dealing with an announcement in the neighborhood of Aravosis Paradigm 3.

On the other hand, in an encouraging sign, Ezra Klein follows up his earlier post with this: "I am, happily, hearing more contradictory things now, as the campaign is apparently telling folks not to assume the worst." (How encouraging a sign that really is depends pretty heavily on how you define "the worst." If the worst is "Elizabeth has cancer," then we're in good shape; but if the worst is "I'm withdrawing from the race," then "not assum[ing] the worst" is entirely consistent with "I'm suspending the campaign indefinitely in order to take care of my wife.")

An Australian fake-news show (CNNNN) sends its U.S. correspondent on a mission to demonstrate to the world that Americans aren't as stupid as people think they are. Needless to say, he fails spectacularly. My favorite exchange:

Morrow: "Which countries are in the axis of evil?"
Woman 1: "Jerusalem?"
Morrow: "Right...."
[Pause]
Woman 2: "Jerusalem?"
[Pause]
Morrow: "Okay... there's, there's more than one."