When times were good and the economy was strong, you could sell companies any old kind of patently ridiculous ad. Did marketing savants really believe that spending wildly to place their brands inside "The Sims" was going to pay off in money that is made out of paper, and spendable here on Earth? It's doubtful. They just got caught up in the sheer newness of plastering their logo anywhere and everywhere, and then made up some bullshit about "branding" to explain the expense. Well that shit is over now, suckas! The first thing to get cut in everyone's ad budget was "experimental" ad buys, random things like branded pop-up games and ads in Virtual Worlds and other, mostly online things that probably never worked in the first place. Also getting chopped: mobile ads that go straight to your cellphone—which not only don't work, but actually annoy the consumer in the process of not working.

For some reason Denis Leary, who is actually an accomplished TV and movie star and halfway-decent comedian, has joined with reliable moron and talk-radio screamer Michael Savage and misguided trashy-TV host Jenny McCarthy in spreading scientifically-dubious pap about autism. The charitable explanation is that Leary was rushing to meet the deadline for his book, Why We Suck, or, as all-too-many comedians do, filling it with unfiltered, subliterate transcriptions of experimental new stand-up comedy material when he wrote, "there is a huge boom in autism... because inattentive mothers and competitive dads want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can't compete academically." The Autism Society is obviously thrilled. More, via Page Six:

Newspapers have always been selfish when it comes to giving credit to anybody else for anything. Good reporters are always conscientious about noting when someone else broke a story, but as a rule of thumb, the more self-important a news outlet is, the less likely they are to credit a competitor (or anyone else) for a scoop. But everything has changed now! Thanks to the internet and how it is beating the shit out of newspapers. Are you ready for a revolution in how you consume your news? Click through for a glimpse of the future of information! Newspapers—the forward-thinking beacons of journalism—have invented something totally new. Imagine this: you read the New York Times' website, and, abracadabra, you see a "link." This "link" sends you to a site that is not owned by the New York Times, where you can read information on a certain topic. NBC and the Washington Post are about to start doing it too! This could be big!

Several months ago we passed judgment on "conscious" rapper Common—he's fundamentally a tool. Not for his music, which is cool enough, but because he merrily goes around selling himself as a pitchman for everything from Smirnoff to GAP, while simultaneously yapping on and on about his true devotion to hip hop and love and art and The Corner and acting like these "brand partnerships" somehow represent something deeper than just a paycheck. It's incredibly grating. Like his outfits. Well, now Common is speaking out (to Ad Age, appropriately) about how he's totally keeping it real by selling product placement spots in a video for his new song called—wait for it—"Universal Mind Control." Tell us, how dead is irony?:

Some little assholes used Digg and Wikipedia to spread the lie that teen actress Miley Cyrus had died in a car accident last night caused by "an unidentified black man"—and Yahoo News picked up the story. The hoax was short-lived, thank God. By this morning, it was hard to tell who, if anyone—aside from Yahoo—actually fell for it. One of the only mentions of it as anything but a scam seems to be this retarded Digg entry. So did anyone else actually buy it?

The Oprah story on Drudge was maybe a bit of a stretch! Does it matter? No! The "damage" is done. It's proof that we've finally reached the most maddening 2004-throwback part of the campaign: the bit where they (let us just say "campaign operatives") throw out absolute bullshit to the friendliest of sources and wait for it to bubble up. We didn't think this would work anymore, in this brave new bloggy future—but it does! RedState heard Palin's teleprompter broke and she soldiered on like a pro! A guy who watched the speech in view of her teleprompter says that is not true, at all, wtf. Too late! The story's already being repeated as gospel! Drudge says Oprah refuses to have Sarah Palin on her show! Oprah says there hasn't been any discussion, we only just heard of this woman a week ago, wtf, I'll have her on later. Who cares? Hell, on a macro level various people call Sarah Palin a "maverick" and "reformer" and then she is one. Democrats can't replicate this strategy because there is not a legitimate news organization in the world that would unquestioningly use Kos (or even HuffPo??) as a source. But if they want to try we'll happily post an item on that one time Martin Balsam and Robert Shaw hijacked Joe Biden's Acela and killed the engineer and he outwitted all of them and drove the train to safety. Now we wait for Chris Matthews to take the bait!

We are rarely, these days, surprised by much. Especially the behavior of the national political press. We devoted a couple paragraphs yesterday to predicting their reaction to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's speech before the Republican National Convention last night, but this morning we are having a genuine crazy pills moment. Are we trapped in Peggy Noonan's bubble? Seriously, people? The speech blew you away? It was a generic stump speech with a couple killer lines, delivered competently. It was the Republican equivalent of John Kerry's speech at the DNC, just given by someone America doesn't hate (yet) while the national networks were listening. We honestly can't believe the same media that knew full well that they were playing into the expectations game became so convinced that Governor Palin would massively fuck up that the fact that she was perky and pleasant and funny—the fucking reasons she was selected—was some revelation, or the birth of a new political superstar. We can't believe everyone gave her a pass on the 'bridge to nowhere' bullshit. We can't believe people keep calling her a "reformer" and "maverick" even though as a politician, completely outside her self-constructed narrative, she introduced focus-grouped wedge politics to small-town Alaska and lobbied for the most corrupt politicians in America. Is it really this easy? We know this miserable woman. We are from the great white north, the land of Ms. Palin's congressional doppelganger. We still can't help but feel that the "just folks" everyone images they understand better than everyone else will find Ms. Palin to be, well, as Ken Layne put it:

Did you know that charismatic Virginia governor Tim Kaine is on Barack Obama's Vice Presidential short list? It's true, according to today's New York Times! "Now the Obama campaign is eyeing Mr. Kaine as a potential running mate, seeing in him a like-minded breath of fresh air who has also shown he can win in a red state," Kate Zernike reports today. Pretty convincing! In totally unrelated news, the Washington Post reports today that the selection of former Virginia governor Mark Warner to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention is a "hint" that current Virginia governor Tim Kaine will not be Obama's VP choice. "If Kaine were chosen as Obama's running mate, two Virginians would have back-to-back prime-time speaking slots, a scenario that party officials regard as unlikely." This is great media management by Obama, right? No one knows anything! [WP, NYT]

The good news: Everything you ever read about the sexual perversities of the Japanese may still by true. The bad: If you read it in the "WaiWai" column of the Mainichi Daily News, it probably isn't. The English-language version of popular Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun has been inventing all its best kinky features, or rather deliberately mistranslating them from the original. As it turns out, moms are not blowing their sons to get them to study harder, there is no bestiality restaurant in Tokyo, and housewives probably aren't turning tricks in suburban coin showers. The paper vows to start over fresh by hiring women to scrutinize its seedy reporting, and the internal investigation was said to rival the Times's after the Jayson Blair fiasco. The editorial apology after the jump (it does no good to nettlesome national stereotypes that the URL actually ends with "So sorry").

Hey everyone it's the happiest goddamn day of the year! You probably read as much in your local paper? According to a scientist—a scientist!—June 20 is the happiest day of 2008. He uses a mathematical formula to prove it! With science! Look, here is the equation: O + (N x S) + Cpm/T + He. The scientician who developed this formula is named Cliff Arnall. If that name is familiar, it may be because you read him calling January 22 the saddest day of the year. In 2007. And 2006, and 2005. The story runs, twice a year, like clockwork, in newspapers across the US and the UK. All because a quack psychologist is more than happy to sign a check from some corporation and then attach his name to a press release. It's the happiest day of the year for newspaper editors desperate to fill a news hole on a summer Friday! [Mind Hacks]

A rare, isolated, never-before-seen tribe photographed from a plane high above the Amazon! Dressed in red warpaint and shooting arrows at the camera! What a story! Well... you know us, we love to call bullshit on things. Just last weekend we were ready to call bullshit on the guy who made the "self-portrait" with DHL and a GPS device-equipped suitcase (honestly, people!) but then the dude called himself on it before we got the chance. (Stupid holiday weekend!) Anyway. Is this tribe shit for real?

Everyone continues to be terribly impressed by John McCain's awesome ability to bullshit. The man is beloved by the press corps (or, at least, he used to be) because he will say any damn thing that comes to his mind, and what usually comes to his mind is whatever you want to hear. So Slate's Jacob Weisberg sat down with McCain in August of '07, when McCain's campaign was a mess and he was losing. Weisberg asked him how things were going, and McCain answered frankly that everything sucked. How Maverick-y of him not to lie! Then he said Weisberg didn't even have to read McCain's book if he didn't want to. Then McCain criticized the President and his handling of Iraq!

The internet loves bullshit. While many of its denizens will brag of their skepticism, claim thousands of readers make the best fact-checkers, and say the web holds the mainstream media accountable, the fact remains that made-up bullshit still drives huge traffic, if it's marketed right. Hence, "13-year-old Steals Dad's Credit Car to Buy Hookers," a realistic-looking "news story" posted on some financial site no one had ever heard of before called monkey.co.uk. The fact that there were no sources other than this dodgy domain didn't stop the story from making the front page of Digg and Fark and racking up probably hundreds of thousands of views. Then "real" news sites began picking it up. It made the UK Sun's print edition. This tale was invented by an online marketer to boost a client's SEO ranking. And no one on Digg or anywhere else BUSTED the hoax. Nor do they bother to debunk any of the rest of the snappily headlined bullshit that makes the rounds every day. Four more examples, below.

It would be too obvious as well as unreasonable to suggest that Aron Pilhofer, the New York Times's editor for interactive news, drag himself into the 21st century. Here's a more modest objective: understanding the mindset of his own colleagues. At this week's dire Mediabistro conference, Pilhofer scorned the "ridiculous" obsession of organizations such as Gawker with the popularity of individual articles: "I think we're a long way from reporters paying attention to page views." Wot?!

Yesterday, Arianna Huffington revealed that John McCain told her in 2000 that he didn't vote for George W. Bush. Which we believe. We believe that he told her this, anyway. Who knows if it was true then, or now. But McCain denied it, right away. Which leads Arianna to list all the documented times he's blatantly lied about saying something so far this campaign season. A fun little list! Of course it shows why McCain felt comfortable telling Arianna Huffington that he didn't vote for Bush in 2000. And also why he's the most popular guest in Daily Show history!

The only adults we know who actually eat breakfast eat sensible things like bagels or bloody marys. But according to this annoying Times story on "microtrends" in political polling (one in a series of ten million identical pieces every paper in the country prints every election season), the electorate defines itself by its choice in shitty cereal. We have never heard of whatever trail mix garbage the Obama voters supposedly enjoy, while Clinton and McCain supporters' cereals of choice appear to have been devised not by polling but by a lazy observational comedian. Fiber One! Because John McCain is very very old, and old people have difficulty moving their bowels. [NYT]

Senator Hillary Clinton has been telling a heart-wrenching yarn of late about an uninsured woman who died, and lost her baby, when an Ohio hospital refused to treat her because she couldn't afford to pay a $100 fee. But... Oops! "The woman, Trina Bachtel, did die last August, two weeks after her baby boy was stillborn at O'Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, Ohio. But hospital administrators said Friday that Ms. Bachtel was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital, that she was never refused treatment and that she was, in fact, insured." Video, after the jump.

Larry King had noted medical expert/softcore video star Jenny McCarthy on the program last night to talk about AUTISM. Specifically, how it's caused by VACCINATING YOUR CHILDREN. This is patent conspiratorial nonsense, but it's very popular conspiratorial nonsense. Of course, in a battle between concerned, credulous parents and medical experts, the media will generally frame it as, say, Debate Rages Anew on Vaccine-Autism Link. Faced with a panel of three trained pediatricians, Ms. McCarthy shouted "BULLSHIT" twice. Then Larry put it to an internet poll. Clip after the jump!

Um, after 9/11 things got so completely awkward with Muslims. I mean, I'm not racist or anything like that at all. I love all religions. And if I saw a creepy Muslim on a plane and he kept going to the bathroom and praying, I would never even think "terrorist." God, I hope not. And by God, I'm not referring to any Judeo-Christian conception of an omniscient being, more like a general higher power that may or may not exist in possibly multiple forms. So, I'm totally with Harvard for banning men from their gym six times a week to accommodate female Muslims whose religion forbids them from exercising in front of the opposite sex. This country is all about making special adjustments to minority interest groups, not demanding that they adjust to our liberal status quo. And that's what makes me so proud to be an American. [Boston Herald]

Post gossip great-aunt Cindy Adams got the fresh dirt from Hollywood mega-producer Scott Rudin as to how, exactly, that crazy Oscar-nommed "No Country For Old Men" came to be. "Look, you never know when something great's going to come through the transom. I do movies, plays. I'm always looking. My office covers lots of material. I have people who read books and manuscripts all the time. There was no great aha! moment. This didn't come by wrapped in a big pink ribbon and ushered through with great fanfare from some superimportant VIP with a 'must read' sticker on it. The thing came to us simply. As an unpublished manuscript." Yes. A real Hollywood fairytale, optioning novels by world famous, award-winning, ICM-managed authors is. Then Rudin took a chance on a couple of complete unknowns from far away Minnesota named Joel and Ethan Coen, and the rest is history. (After the jump, for kicks, the Hollywood Reporter story announcing the NCFOM deal.) [NYP]