Yahoo’s Michael Calderone, formerly Politico’s Michael Calderone, shows how a professional wordsmith gins up controversy where none exists:

As was the case with the Beck event, commentators and critics are having a hard time trying to pin down exactly what Stewart is up to this week leading into the event. The Comedy Central host sat down with President Obama and has regularly touted the show’s effort to assemble (as Beck also claimed to) disaffected individuals seeking sanity from the hyper-charged political atmosphere and 24/7 news cycle.

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“Citing cases dating back as far as 1928, a judge has ruled that a young girl accused of running down an elderly woman while racing a bicycle with training wheels on a Manhattan sidewalk two years ago can be sued for negligence.” Juliet Breitman, the alleged perp, was 4. [NYT]

Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In these excerpts from today’s syndicated column, Mr. Goldberg imagines the murder of a political opponent.

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P.J. Crowley is Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.

Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer have been held on trumped-up espionage charges by Iran since July 2009, when they were captured near the Kurdistan border while hiking. Fattal is “an environmentalist who worked for three years at the Aprovecho Research Center in Cottage Grove, Oregon, which teaches sustainable living skills.” (Cottage Grove is near Eugene.) Bauer is a freelance journalist and photographer. Both are 28.

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Our guest columnist is a red-haired clown who offers delicious, long-lasting meals to the public, writing from Canton, Ohio.

As the election season is here we wanted you to know which candidates will help our business grow in the future. As you know, the better our business does it enables us to invest in our people and our restaurants. If the right people are elected we will be able to continue with raises and benefits at or above our present levels. If others are elected we will not.

As always who you vote for is completely your personal decision and many factors go into your decision.

The following candidates are the ones we believe will help our business move forward.

John Kasich for Governor

Rob Portman for Senate

Jim Renacci for Congress

Ohio McDonald’s Tells Employees To Vote Republican If They Want To Continue Receiving Raises And Benefits [ThinkProgress]

There are in politics, as well as in books, Unforgivable Curses.

On January 24, 1992, Ricky Ray Rector was executed in Arkansas.

By all accounts, Rector was a Bad Man. One night in 1981, he killed someone in a nightclub. He then shot a cop in the back. Finally, he shot himself in the head.

Alas, that last shot sort of missed. Rector was left alive, but brain-damaged. It was as that brain-damaged shell that Governor Bill Clinton made a point of executing him, just so primary voters would know he was “tough on crime.”

We’ve never forgiven Clinton for that. Whatever his successes, whatever his other high crimes, misdemeanors, and dry-cleaning bills, we’ve never forgiven Clinton for his capacity to fry a man in his pursuit of the presidency.

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“Until now she has declined to comment on whether the former housekeeper should be deported. But Wednesday, in an interview with Greta Van Susteren, Whitman answered the question head on. ‘Well, the answer is it breaks my heart, but she should be deported because she forged documents and she lied about her immigration status,’ Whitman said.” [LAT, via TPM]