Michael Calderone, Politico: “Barack Obama hasn’t yet made a statement on the death of Michael Jackson, which was confirmed around 7 p.m. last night.”

Susan Davis, WSJ: “Obama, a music aficionado, has not released a written statement since news of Michael Jackson’s death broke late Thursday afternoon.”

Katie Connolly, Newsweek: “And he was black, so it seemed reasonable to expect the first black president to have a few heartfelt words.”

Jocelyn Vena, MTV: “Although President Obama held a press conference on Friday (June 26), no one asked him for his reaction to the news of Michael Jackson’s death on Thursday in Los Angeles.”

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So we’re telling the neighbor Thursday night that the only official without popular legitimacy in Iran is Ahmadinejad: He did not win the election, he has no right to continue as president. Everyone else, including Supreme Puppetmaster Khamenei, still has legal authority to sit in their comfy chairs.

Which suggested a solution: Throw Ahmadinejad under the bus. Expose an anti-revolutionary cabal at the Interior ministry that rigged the election, fire the scoundrels, discover the “real” vote count that shows Mousavi the winner, everyone goes home happy. You still have the Guardian Council to veto everything Mousavi or the parliament does, after all. And that “divine blessing”? Dropped cell connection with God. He called back to clarify.

All nice and tidy. And then Khamenei spoiled everything at Friday prayers.

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Mir Hossein Mousavi and his wife, not-Michelle Obama, vote Friday.

So we’re talking about Iran with our neighbor, who has family in the region, and we try out our line about how if you’re going to steal an election, at least make a good show of it.

And then as he expresses his fear about what will happen if so many hopes are dashed, we recall that this week is the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen — the iconic tank photo was taken June 5.

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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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When we heard that Chicago right-wing shock jock Erich “Mancow” Muller had himself waterboarded Friday morning — and immediately declared it “torture” — we thought it was significant. Not that we need Mancow to instruct us on the Geneva Conventions, American law, or centuries of jurisprudence, but we figured that a former frequent flyer on Fox & Friends might reach corners of the electorate that even Shep Smith can’t rouse.

We were wrong.

We looked — hard — for examples of wingnut reaction to post here, but of the pages and pages of Google links, everyone excited about yesterday’s video seems to have “blue” somewhere in the title.

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“First Historic Public Burning of Social Security Cards”

Thanks to JNOV’s scouting, we’ve become rabid fans of rexcurry.net, which reads like a Talking Heads album cover come to life, it’s so full of adorable crazy-ass folk politics:

Rex the iconoclast is the first person to publicly burn his social security card in protest to end socialist slave numbers and the first and only person to organize the public burning of SS cards against Nazi numbers and the only place on the web with the historic photographs.

Rex comes to our attention because, well, we came to his. Last November we observed the passing of the man who added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and Rex saw fit to include our post on his site. That’s where JNOV discovered it — and after some chitchat here about her discovery, Rex updated his page to include the Google-bait phrase SWASTIKA STINQUE.

Which all makes sense, provided you waste enough time piecing it together.

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Like our President, we’re all about finding common ground with our enemies. And we think we can now agree that the decline in our nation’s values began in 1965.

That’s the year “Kimberly” entered the top five names for baby girls. The downward spiral of Decorator Names had begun.

Consider the popular names leading up to that annus horribilis. Lisa. Mary. Susan. Karen. Linda. Plain names. Utilitarian names. Democratic names that underscore how we’re all created equal.

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