Download the eight card designs here and be the first to yell “bingo!” Thursday night as Sarah Palin explains how the “small-town values” she learned in “Wasilla, Alaska” taught her that “off-shore drilling” will help us avoid future “$700 billion” bailouts when she and “John McCain” are in the White House. (That’s a winning sentence on card #7).

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Speaking on “Face the Nation” on August 10, Karl Rove made some insightful observations about a presidential candidate selecting a VP for political reasons. It just so happens that the criticisms he was launching at Barack Obama for considering Governor Tim Kaine are now precisely the reasons John McCain’s actual VP pick, Sarah Palin, is such an irresponsible choice.

Using language typical of the publication, the anonymously written “Shadow” column called Circuit Clerk Mariano Favazza a “fat bastard” and charged that he’d been popping off at the mouth about how he’s thinking about taking a shot at Room 200.

Untrue, Favazza tells PubDef — at least on two out of the three charges.

First, “I can prove my parents were married at the time of my conception,” Favazza told us, laying to rest the “bastard” claim.

Second, as for the “fat” label, anyone who has seen the ten-year Circuit Clerk knows that he looks dramatically different in the last year after losing an astounding 143 pounds! “I am formerly fat,” says Favazza, who now boasts a 36-inch waistline.

But as for that last and most serious charge of possibly taking a run at the city’s highest office, how does the court clerk plead?

“I don’t rule anything out in my life,” says Favazza. “People have asked me to run. To date, no one has showed up with any money.”

Well, don’t expect a check from “The Shadow” or The Evening Whirl.  (It would probably bounce anyway.)

The film features interviews with dozens of young street soldiers, the men and mentors who try to teach them a better way, and lawmakers and community leaders, including State Sen. Jeff Smith and State Rep. T.D. El-Amin.

Integrity and journalism have been on a mutually exclusive path since the birth of Fox News and the further shrinking the 24-hour news cycle and the American attention span. Today, though it seems we have wall-to-wall coverage of the Presidential candidates, try to find any meaningful discourse among the hours of talk. Try to find a reporter who actually knows what he or she is talking about and is able to slow down the spin machines long enough for us to see who we’re really voting for, what we’re really talking about.

But there has at least been one hour a week, one news show with limited commercial interruptions that we could count on. “Meet the Press”.

Meet the press, indeed. “Remember the Press”, is a name just as fitting. Remember what the press used to be. A symbol of wisdom and institutional knowledge. The Fourth Estate, able and needed to stand toe-to-toe with the most powerful people in Washington, as equals, and demand answers on our behalf. Few other institutions could command that respect from both Presidents and viewers like Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press”.

For all my adult life, if it was Sunday, it was “Meet the Press” and Tim Russert. Today is Saturday. What will I do tomorrow?