My favorite newspaper excerpt today comes from an article about an underhanded trick in the New Jersey Senate race between Bob Menendez, the Democrat, and Tom Kean, Jr., the Republican.

Kean’s Republican campaign spokesperson has apparently posed as a disgruntled Democrat and posted anti-Menendez comments on a Democratic blog. This was discovered after the computer used to make the comments was traced to Kean headquarters.

My favorite part of the article:

The Kean campaign’s technical adviser said that the Internet protocol, or I.P., address that linked the posts to the Kean headquarters was an old one, “from over a month ago.” But an e-mail message Ms. Hazelbaker sent to a reporter on Wednesday shares the same I.P. address.

D’oh. People are stupid.

Here’s a boffo piece from the New York Review of Books: Joan Didion on Dick Cheney. It’s not actually a book review, and there doesn’t appear to be anything new here, but it’s a nice synthesis of pretty much everything bad about Cheney.

He runs an office so disinclined to communicate that it routinely refuses to disclose who works there, even for updates to the Federal Directory, which lists names and contact addresses for government officials. “We just don’t give out that kind of information,” an aide told one reporter. “It’s just not something we talk about.” When he visits his house in Jackson Hole and the local paper spots his plane and the anti-missile battery that accompanies him, the office until recently refused to confirm his presence: “In the past, they’ve been kind of weird,” the paper’s co-editor told The Washington Post in August. “They’d say, ‘His airplane’s here and the missile base is here, but we can’t tell you if he’s here.'”

The origins of the legal pad.