How many times now has the New York Times columnist come away from a post-primary Democratic event having apparently only talked to the one insane Nobama PUMA lady in attendance? First there was, of course, the ear plug lady, who managed to get the attention of every journalist at the campaign rally. But one imagines the incomparable Dowd had to search a bit to find this nut in Denver, where the attendees are a little more carefully screened:

BusinessWeek wonders if American newspapers could learn anything from the success of Europe's biggest newspaper, Germany's Bild. Which, you may recall, is the paper for whom resourceful journalist Judith Bonesky (pictured, and "heh") staked out Barack Obama at the gym. (Attracting the attention of Maureen Dowd, who got to ask the politician she once described as "diffident debutante" [and a butterfly! -ed] if he thought it "creepy that she described his T-shirt as smelling like 'fabric softener with spring scent.'") "It's tempting to credit Bild's double-digit profit margin solely to sensationalism," concedes BW. How entrenched-old-media; we would never do something stodgy and dismissive like that! Instead we sought out someone German-speaking, who explained the subtler points of the Bildstyle:

Poor Maureen Dowd doesn't know how to make fun of Barack Obama. It's actually pretty easy! Everyone misses Bill Clinton because he enjoyed extramarital sex with interns and oddly unattractive women, he had a southern accent, and he was kind of chubby. Everyone will miss George W. Bush because he's stupid. Those traits are so, so easy to mock! But the problem is jokes about those traits were and are and always have been terrible. Have another Big Mac, Bubba! Then put a cigar in someone's vagina! Hey George Bush you look like a chimp! And, like a chimp, your grasp of complex concepts like grammar is often lacking! Jesus. Stop already. Obama's a godsend, because he lacks those easy buttons. So everyone has to be more creative with their humor. Allow us to help you!

Look, it's easy to make fun of Maureen Dowd. We do it all the time! Talk about nothing of substance, psychoanalyze pols, imply that male Democrats are effete and female politicians of all stripes are raging harridans, bash the Clintons, toss in some increasingly out of date pop cultural references, and stir with occasional tired Bush-mocking. What you shouldn't do is pretend Maureen wrote a column exposing the secret fact that all of Obama's donors are Muslims and Communists, or something. Which is what one enterprising Obama critic has done!

Times columnist Maureen Dowd is irrelevant, yes, but is she also insane? The Times public editor Clark Hoyt has a column about how everyone was sexist all the time to Hillary Clinton. Which is true! But oddly, the most sexist coverage at the Times came from Maureen Dowd, who is a lady. But! Dowd's defense! "'I've been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years,' Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns." See the funny thing about that statement is that it is amazingly wrong.

According to MediaMatters, irrelevant New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has a nasty habit of calling male Democrats fags and female Democrats mannish. Quelle surprise! [MediaMatters, Related, Related, Related]

Gawker, yesterday: "Anyway we can't wait to see what new way [Maureen Dowd] comes up with of calling Barack Obama a fag tomorrow." Maureen Dowd, today: "As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly, it's as though she's crushing the remnants of her own girlish innocence." Guess who the "butterfly" is. [NYT]

Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd sat down with the kids at the Harvard Political Review and discussed the important issue of "real news" verus "fake news." The debate has raged for years now, and it pits the network evening news against Comedy Central, basically. The New York Times counts as "real news," even though they publish Dowd's column. Dowd, obv, is unworried about this pretend news crisis. Because, she would like to remind you, she invented it! Sort of.

The annual White House Correspondents' Dinner was held in Washington this past weekend. The dinner awards some prizes and serves as an excuse for the corporations that own media companies to reward rich friends and B-list celebrities with seats at tables that are often within 100 feet of the President himself. Then a comedian does a little routine. This year's comedian was late-night talk show host Craig Ferguson. He was ok.

Times columnist and walking self-parody Maureen Dowd insists today that "Democrats are trying to sneak up on Hillary, throw a burlap sack over her head, carry her off the field and stick her in a Saddam spider hole until after the Denver convention." Yep, the party is through with Senator Hillary Clinton. "Democrats are coming around to the point Jay Rockefeller made 10 days ago after introducing Obama in West Virginia: 'Democrats always make a mistake by nominating people who know everything on earth there is to know about public policy. I introduced both Al Gore and John Kerry at their rallies. They knew all the policies, but people didn't connect with them. You don't get elected president if people don't like you.'" Plus, the ladies of The View find Barack Obama "sexy," so surely the race is over.

"It's impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up," Dowd writes. "Unless every circuit is out, she'll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama's wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams." The "Hillerator" image was created by Gawker's Richard Blakeley, who notes, "Yes, I'm that bored today and no it didn't take me THAT long." [NYT]

Can we just say, the day after, that we're still totally impressed with Barack Obama's speech yesterday? Jon Stewart, after a whole routine about it that fell 90% flat, suddenly summed it up quite nicely: "and so," he said, "on a Tuesday at 11 a.m., a Presidential candidate actually spoke to Americans about race as though we were adults." That is actually unprecedented—since the 1960s, at the least. It was so odd, in fact, that it melted the brains of the people whose job it is to trivialize everything about the campaign. Times columnist Maureen Dowd filed a column last night that only barely resembles anything she's written in a decade.

Less than a week after columnist Maureen Dowd was accused of confusing a black reporter for Barack Obama's wife, the Times' "humor" blog wondered aloud whether presidential candidate Barack Obama and rocker Lenny Kravitz were "separated at birth." What? "Um, Barack looks more like Judy Garland than Lenny Kravitz," the Huffington Post wrote on its own humor-challenged humor site. Larger Times comparison picture after the jump, plus one involving a picture of Obama that's not 30 years old.

The influence of Maureen Dowd, formerly important New York Times opinion columnist, is dead, at the age of 13. The Pulitzer-winning columnist is still blamed, in some circles, for killing Al Gore's shot at the presidency with her relentless, belittling, emasculating, and most importantly media consensus-shaping columns. She used to be inescapable—on the Times home page, on Sunday morning politics shows, in every political blog on Earth—but now it's hard to gin up outrage about her scrubbing negative quotes from columns or mistaking black women for other black women. In 2004, those stories would've been all Atrios talked about for days. (Maybe they still are, does anyone read Atrios anymore either?) In 2000, they wouldn't have been outrages at all, because everything she said was immediate conventional wisdom. So what happened?

From Maureen Dowd's column yesterday: "Even though Obama stopped smoking when he started running for president, he has lost five pounds racing around the country. Just like Hollywood starlets, he works out religiously and he can make a three-course meal out of a Nicorette." We'd link, except that it's not in the online version. Weird!

Damsel Dowd in distress! President Bush to the rescue! During Bush's eight-day trip to the Middle East, the titian-topped Times columnist caught a doozy of a stomach bug and was rescued by the White House, who gave Dowd access to Dubya's doctor and a ride home on Air Force One. Awww. Frankly, we're surprised the administration let MoDo anywhere near a Bush itinerary, let alone an invitation to come along. Interesting little side note? The Washington Post reports that news organizations could pay more than $20,000 per journalist along on the journey. [WP]

Writing in The Nation, Chris Hayes explains "why campaign coverage so often sucks": because reporters are terrified and confused and either keep entirely to themselves or else run in confused packs of other journalists to ensure that no one "misses" anything. Related: a poor Obama volunteer doesn't recognize and attempts to canvas the journalistic dream team of Ben Smith, Ana Marie Cox, and Maureen Dowd outside one Des Moines "media hangout." [The Nation via Crooks and Liars, Politico]

Forbes columnist James Brady's review of Times columnist Maureen Dowd's review of Camelot-era historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s terrible-sounding diaries IS A LITTLE BIT OF HEAVEN. The MoDo review is basically the longest blog post ever published in the Times, and Brady's LiveJournalling response is superb: "She drops in a wonderful reference to the fact in his later years he was 'perennially broke' and didn't even have a savings account. Gosh, just like most of us. Though whenever I saw Arthur out on the town (usually with his very tall, attractive and awfully pleasant wife Alexandra), he was impeccably (if tweed-ily) dressed and seemed to have cab fare." Yes. Broke, just like most of you! Anyway, adorable! I want to crawl inside this glimmering fantasy tunnel that these guys have dug into a mountain of non sequiturs and just live there all the time!

One of the things about being a stay-at-home writer is that you have perhaps a little bit too much time to peruse and write blogs! We were reminded of this by chick lit author Jennifer Weiner's rant in the comments of the Times' 'Paper Cuts' blog, which she continued on over at her own blog 'Snark Spot' (really). She has a bone to pick with an author who'd yearningly mentioned her books' consistent presence on bookstore shelves. "Be careful what you wish for, oh shelfmate o' mine! If you wrote chick lit—provided it was any good—you would indeed find your books on the shelf of most every store. But your books would not be reviewed twice by the Times."

The New York Times Company announced its August revenues today, and each of their divisions is trending pretty much as expected—though ad revenues for The New York Times Media Group were up very slightly over August last year, on the back of fashion, hotel and tech ads, as opposed to July, which was down nearly 3% over last year. But more of the same in general: internet ads up! New England ads down. About.com ads still up. Sort of related: stock in the toilet. Most interesting to us: In July, TimesSelect had 225,100 paying customers. As of August, it had 226,800. That is exciting growth of 1700 paying customers! That is somewhere between $7,076.25 and $13,515 dollars, depending on whether folks bought by the month or by the year, which is like half of Maureen Dowd's expense account this month.