We weren’t aware that Politico was in the business of contriving wingnut memes, but they took a Chrysler-worthy stab at the market last week with their report that the White House flack has a disturbingly healthy sense of humor.

Politico’s unassailable methodology: Count the number of times “[Laughter.]” appears in briefing transcripts. More than 600, apparently, dwarfing also-ran Tony Snow’s 217 larfs during his first four months.

We’ll grant that this approach has a glorious tradition behind it, from tallying Nixon’s expletives deleted on an abacus, to harnessing the latest supercomputer for a statistical analysis of Blago’s fuckfests. We’ll even allow a passing amusement in calculating Robert Gibbs’ Word/Chortle Ratio.

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BILL O’REILLY, HOST: In the “Impact” segment tonight, confronting the Kansas doctor known as “Tiller the baby killer.”

The Operation Rescue website is down, but from the Google cache we find this press release from June 13, 2007, touting OR’s involvement in an O’Reilly segment attacking George Tiller, including an ambush interview:

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At our childhood Lutheran church, the chapel was called the sanctuary:

George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning as he walked into church services.

Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. at Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation.…

Protesters blockaded Tiller’s clinic during Operation Rescue’s “Summer of Mercy” protests during the summer of 1991, and Tiller was shot by Rachelle Shannon at his clinic in 1993.

A 51-year-old male suspect was arrested about three hours after the murder.

George Tiller shot to death at Wichita church [Wichita Eagle, continuously updated]

Photo: Friend of Dr. George Tiller places flowers outside of Reformation Lutheran Church. [Wichita Eagle]

Update: Last Tuesday, Operation Rescue posted a news release titled “Tiller Abortion Worker Honored at White House by Obama”:

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Title: 5 Principles for a Successful Life: From Our Family to Yours

Authors: Newt Gingrich and Jackie Gingrich Cushman

Rank: 1,749

Blurb: “In these pages, Newt Gingrich and his daughter Jackie Gingrich Cushman — with the help of prominent people they know and admire, such as Bill Clinton, Rush Limbaugh, Mary Matalin, and David Petraeus — show how, by following just five principles, you can live life to its fullest.”

Review: “Of particular intrigue is the discussion of how winners have to be great at failing.”

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Remember how we couldn’t find any immediate wingnut reaction to Mancow’s waterboarding? Well, thanks to Gawker insisting on taking the word of a publicist at face value, they’re all over it now.

Earlier this week we stumbled across an interview with Nick Denton, proprietor of Gawker, a website we used to frequent back when it was interesting. That interview is now sealed behind paid access, but happily Google still has it in the cache:

If a good exclusive used to provide 10 times the traffic of a standard regurgitated blog post, now it garners a hundred times as much…

We’ve hired John Cook — formerly of Radar magazine and the Chicago Tribune — to Gawker.

And sure enough, John Cook’s byline appears on “Mancow’s ‘Waterboarding’ Was Completely Fake,” a Friday exclusive that tallied 34,776 views when we checked last night, almost three times as many as Mommy 1.0’s crossposted Jezebel piece regurgitating GQ’s Levi Johnston feature.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TiJNewpCnY

Instructions in male grooming from SNL Gillette, which shows the proper way to clear the weeds around your sapling brush from your towering redwood. There’s an old joke with the punchline “Could you pucker?”, but unfortunately it’s gender-inappropriate.

Gillette video teaches art of genital shaving [AdFreak, via Sully]