Times columnist and spinster Maureen Dowd showed up on NBC's Meet the Press this morning, the TV show where Very Important Things happen each week. Is she as sassily impish on TV as she is in newsprint?

10:51: She's via satellite from California! Sheeny blazer, kind of like a nice granite countertop.

10:52: Modo is strangely sticking her chin out as Russert reads back her Geffen columns.

10:53: She calls Hollywood "Tinseltown." Says everyone in Tinseltown is talking about Barack and Hillary, not, as per usual, Meryl Streep, whose name she pronounces "Meryl Strip."

10:56: Other roundtable members blabbing interminably. Pulitzer-returner and plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin brings some historical background with a mention of LBJ/JFK. Also, Andrew Jackson? Apparently a bigamist.

10:58: Back to Dowd. Why is she sucking in her cheeks like that? Russert reads more, this time from the "Hill Drill" story in the Post. He reads a lot.

10:59: MoDo uses the term "mau-mau." How old is she?!

11:01: Effete but effective National Review columnist Byron York is rocking some sort of bouffant today.

11:02: DKG quotes a platitude from "old Abe Lincoln." This lady's evidently been on Wikipedia.

11:05: Dowd again: "My bottom line is I tend to miss John McCain even when I'm with him...He's on the bridge of a ship with W. and Cheney on the warren and it's sinking." What?

11:09: Apropos of very little, Russert rolling a tape of Kennedy talking about Catholicism.

11:11: Whoops. Fell asleep a little bit.

11:12: They seem to be shutting MoDo out of screen time. Is Goody Goodwin behind this?

11:13: Back! The Dowd family "held their breath for a year" when Kennedy was running. Yeah, still taking about Kennedy.

11:15: She's sort of puckering at the screen now. Appears to be having some difficulty making out the words coming through the headset.

11:19: Russert seems taken with DKG, smiling at her with head cocked just so.

11:20: Russert, still smiling: "Who could have predicted 9/11 and the way people reacted to it?"

11:21: Dowd asked about a line from her Wednesday column: "Who can pay attention to the Oscar battle between The Queen and Dreamgirls when you've got a political battle between a Queen and a Dreamboy?"

What a crazy idea, remarks Little Russ, connecting entertainment and politics like that! (Incidentally, Dreamgirls is nominated for eight Academy Awards tonight; The Queen for six. The one "Oscar battle" between the two films is in the category of Best Achievement in Costume Design. All this information is available online.)

Dowd: "Maybe we want Helen Mirren, not Hillary Clinton." She's sashaying her head back and forth as she says this, quite pleased with herself.

And then we cut to commercial. Hey is there any cereal left?