LORNA SORE

Q: Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?

A: Because her father is Janet Reno.

- John McCain, 1998

“Today CBSNews.com informed its staff via email that they should no longer enable comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The reason for the new policy, according to the email, is that stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments…”

“…There has been a fierce debate about how news outlets should handle reader comments. Washingtonpost.com’s Jim Brady, whose site, like CBSNews.com, does not have the resources to filter comments in advance, told Howard Kurtz that he’d ‘rather figure out a way to do it better than not to do it at all.’

But Post reporter Darryl Fears told Kurtz that comments should be eliminated if they can’t be pre-screened for offensiveness.”

“On that first night, he and Ms. Kohns left the Ear Inn on their motorcycles (he on a Bultaco, a Spanish make) and rode to a Spanish tapas bar, where they dined and talked until it closed. Mr. Rathe escorted Ms. Kohns home, and they shared a goodnight kiss. ‘We were committed to each other from the moment we met,’ he said. He called the next day and they met for coffee. That weekend, they rode their motorcycles up to his family’s weekend house in Cold Spring, N.Y.”

“The 24-year-old VMAs have, for some time, been shedding viewers faster than a bulimic tosses calories. As recently as 2002, its first telecast was clocking 12 million viewers. Last August, fewer than 6 million bothered to tune in to its live telecast; subsequent replays picked up only about half the crowd it once copped.”