John Edwards: 1 down, 269 to go.

Silly robbers! It's just a game!

Problem 1: President Bush, reeling from the recent withdrawal of Rambo's name from consideration, is left without a Secretary of Homeland Security.

Problem 2: The Yankees are facing a trillion-dollar contract dispute with their admittedly-steroid-using first baseman.

My dreams were apparently more productive than usual last night, because I woke up with a two-birds-with-one-stone solution to both of those problems sitting on the tip of my tongue: Jason Giuliambi.

Very nice Bernard. You can't even keep your own house, and you want to run Homeland Security.

Jackass.

The Salazar brothers will be car-pooling to their new D.C. offices. How adorable.

The Democratic brothers have rented an apartment on Massachusetts Avenue and are preparing for their new jobs. "I think we can get along," John Salazar joked Thursday. "Maybe he'll give me a ride up to the Capitol each day."

You Might Be a (Bad) Redneck if...

Some of that whiskey, Johnson said, ended up in the hands of her grandson, who got drunk and vandalized his own truck the day before the election.

Britain's Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents releases a list of guidelines for hosting a safe office holiday party. Included:

"Resist the temptation to photocopy parts of your anatomy. If the copier breaks, you'll have Christmas with glass in painful places."

Sage advice.

Amusing back-to-back headlines on CNN.com:

"Rock guitarist among 4 killed in club shooting"

"Boxer Tyson arrested outside nightclub"

Great quote from Tommy Thompson last week:

"For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do."

Tommy Thompson makes it eight of fifteen. Who's left?

Agriculture	Commerce	Defense	Education
Resigned	Resigned	-	Resigned
Energy	HHS	Homeland Security	HUD
Resigned	Resigned	Resigned	-
Interior	Justice	Labor	State
-	Resigned	-	Resigned
DOT	Treasury	VA
-	-	-

Drudge for Democrats.

Buffalo alternative newspaper The Beast publishes their list of the Top Ten Election Campaign Hacks. My favorite: number four, James Bennet:

Take Bennet's wrap of the second debate ("In a Disguised Gym, Softballs and Political Drama," Oct. 9). Bennet's general argument in this piece was that there was a special "dynamic" to the debate that you missed if, unlike Bennet, you weren't there.

"Inside the hall, the scene was of a theater in the round," he wrote, adding that "Viewers at home were denied the peek behind the political and news media curtain that voters here received."

Bennet goes on to describe some of those elements of the "dynamic" that were invisible to TV viewers:

Those viewers did not see how the moderator, Charles Gibson of ABC, hammed it up with a colleague, Chris Wallace of Fox News, who was seated in one of the network boxes overlooking the hall.

"Hi, Chris," Mr. Gibson hallooed, before the debate began, to the delight of the assembled voters. "Hello, Charlie," Mr. Wallace called back with a grin.

In the hands of a mere mortal, this scene is written as follows: "Charlie Gibson said hi to Chris Wallace." But in Bennet's hands, this "hallooing" was a bit of "theater in the round," part of a "drama that mixed calculated stagecraft and moments of genuine improvisation," only discernible to those who were there to hear Charlie Gibson say "hi" to Chris Wallace.