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9:03

Spencer - OK so my avatar will have to remain generic, because my head is killing me and the exedrin doesn't work, and I blame the Huffington Post's Jason Linkins for bailing on you today and placing me in the replacement mode. Linkins, we presume, is off shining the shoes of his colleague Nico Pitney who asked the best, toughest and most poignant question of yesterday's Obama presser and got shit on for it, even if the shitter-on-er is our friend Mike C who normally doesn't do that.

9:06

Megan - Let me see if I understand this complaint correctly. Rather than a reporter asking one of 3-5 expected (and sometimes insipid) questions designed to elicit a canned response to plop into an already-written story, the White House reached out to the best-known reporter whose whole beat has been questions and stories from actual Iranians to get a question from an actual Iranian... And this is bad?

9:10

Megan - I mean, what a softball question:

“Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of the — of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”

9:10

Spencer - Because Nico missed the real story about how to get Obama to admit that he's only 95-percent smoke-free. These are the people who smell scandal over the prospect that the White House reached out to Nico -- he posted his own completely exculpatory explanation over on his HuffPost liveblog by the way -- in order to solicit... the toughest question of the press conference. Because this is what the White House communications shop does. Maybe now we'll get a process story about how incompetent they are or something.

9:13

Megan - I mean, our President is an addict. Obviously, that's a bigger story.

Also, I love how Howard Kurtz is all:

(For the record, while I can't say it has never happened, past administrations did not make a practice of telling reporters in advance who would be called upon.)

Yeah, I'll bet Fox News was quaking at every Bush presser, all, what, 3 of them in his 8 years?

9:14

Spencer - Who knew whether Tony Snow was ever going to call on his old Fox colleagues to fellate the ex-president?

9:15

Megan - And, since Calderone can name the normal order in which the President calls on people, obviously no one knows in advance what's about to happen.

Also, it was a departure from White House protocol by calling on The Huffington Post second, in between the AP and Reuters.

So, obviously, normally no one knows in advance who's about to be called on.

9:17

Megan - (For the record, not speaking for Spencer, I've met Nico Pitney once in passing at the Democratic Convention. I will admit he's cuter in person than he looked on TV.)

9:18

Spencer - heh I did not notice that. You'd think that Obama staged a fake presser right before he launched an invasion of a foreign oil-rich country on a pretext or something.

9:20

Megan - Don't lie, you know you were looking too!

Anyway, Nico aside, the Iranians are apparently taking a page from our criminal "justice" system and setting up special courts for protestors like they're enemy combatants, Mousavi's totes not involved in planning today's huge protest outside of Parliament, and Zahra Rahvanard is saying Iran's under the functional equivalent of martial law. So, good times.

9:21

Spencer - I don't know what you're implying but Nico is a tall and handsome man and I have never said or thought otherwise.

9:23

Spencer - Damn it, you beat me to that reference. This Crappy Hour-fu is returning to you like you're the Big Trouble In Little China villain. In additon to that, the Lede just reported that the regime is raiding Moussavi's office. And the Washington Times has an amazing piece about Obama writing a letter directly to Ayatollah Khamenei -- I think that's the first time in 30 years we've talked to the Supreme Leader -- in May about reducing U.S.-Iranian tensions, esp over the nuclear question.

9:24

Megan -

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2008-09-02-huffposandwich.JPG

That's Nico on the left, ladies.

9:26

Spencer - Byron York is watching his big hair deflate by proximity to the reportorial heat-and-humidity emitted by Nico and his colleague Sam Stein.

9:28

Spencer - You know what's my favorite Byron York story? The one where he says that Obama's positions are "more popular overall than they actually are" because some of the people who like those positions are black.

9:29

Spencer - Now that shit wasn't scripted. You need that kind of hard hitting truth-to-power white privilege in your White House press corps.

9:29

Megan - I'm not even sure what the fuck that even means. Is he saying white people pretend to like stuff 'cause black people do? Is Byron York projecting his own poseur-ness on the rest of us?

So, can we start the count-down to when the Republicans start accusing Obama of appearing too conciliatory to the Iranian leader? Because, obviously, the North Korean way works way better, what with them now threatening to wipe us off the map with their big, bad nukes.

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