Wonkette.com

During tonight's debate, at the back end of the media room, far away from the mainstream press (and cut off thereby from reliable wireless internet service), sat a bunch of young writers. They wore ski caps, flannel shirts and had a healthy dose of acne. They also had a nickname for themselves: the Backseat Bloggers.

"Hi, nice to meet you, and yes, we can speak," said Brian Lawson, a 22-year-old, who runs the blog New Hampshire Presidential Watch. "This is the fifth debate I've been to and they're still saying the same thing," he said.

In the background, TVs and speakers showed Republicans were trading barbs. But with wireless internet on the fritz, Lawson said he was making up the time by playing solitaire. He was also making new friends.  read more »

Great Scot! At Plaid Party, Mrs. Mortimer Gets Frisky With Lucy Sykes’ Hubby    read more »

Great Scot! At Plaid Party, Mrs. Mortimer Gets Frisky With Lucy Sykes’ Hubby    read more »

John McCain has a new website up, featuring some more of that straight talk we've come to love from John McCain.

"We forgot where we were and who we are. We came to Washington to change government; government changed us."

Wonkette says the site is terrifying. Maybe it's the music.

-- Azi Paybarah

Once upon a time—actually, eight months ago!—Vanity Fair published a spread on Gawker Media and its star bloggers. Honcho Nick Denton posed with the editors of Gawker, Gizmodo, Wonkette, and Defamer.

Since so much time has passed, The Transom thought it might be fun to investigate just where those youngsters all ended up!  read more »

Today, Newsweek entered the political blogging arena with The Gaggle.

The weekly magazine's reporters will write the daily items, according to senior editor Weston Kosova, who is one of the blog's editors.

"We've been kicking it around for a while," said Mr. Kosova. "With the elections, it seemed like a good time to do it."

But was Newsweek's decision motivated at all by developments over at Time? Over the past year, Newsweek's rival has hired star political bloggers like Andrew Sullivan (Daily Dish) and former Wonkette editor Ana Marie Cox (Political Bite).

"It really wasn't," said Mr. Kosova. "It seems like such an obvious thing to do. Everyone in the universe has one. We didn't feel a push from [Time]."

And the name?

"It's kind of a Washington expression for reporters," said Mr. Kosova. The idea was "to come up with something that said 'politics,' was catchy, and hadn't been used by someone else," he said.

- Michael Calderone

Ana Marie Cox, the former editor of Wonkette.com and the author of Dog Days, has signed to be a columnist for Time and Time.com. She will file a weekly column on politics for the Web site and a monthly column in the magazine. Her first deadline is this week; this past Thursday, at the D.C. bureau offices, she had the photo taken that would accompany the column.

A press release will be issued by Time early this week, for which Cox submitted a quote. It is: "My only regret about selling out to Time is that it didn't happen earlier. I hope to put the 'stream' in Mainstream Media."

Cox will be joining fellow mainstream-journalist-turned-blogger-turned-mainstream-journalist Andrew Sullivan, whose arrival at Time was feted by managing editor Jim Kelly earlier this month.

Over the past week, Ana Marie Cox's debut novel, Dog Days, has netted three -- count 'em! one-two-three -- articles in The New York Times. And none of their authors seem to be on quite the same page. Janet Maslin (1/3): "Dog Days manages to be doubly conventional: it follows both an old-fashioned love-betrayal-redemption arc and the newer, bitchier nanny-Prada chick-lit motif...Any smart Web site would mock her [protagonist's] final gesture: turning on her laptop and writing the opening lines of this book." Christopher Buckley (1/8): "...if this sparkly, witty - occasionally vicious - little novel is any indication of Wonkette's talent, then Cox ought to log out of cyberspace and start calling herself Novelette." David Carr (1/5): "Dog Days is like a lot of first-time novels in that it takes the author's day-to-day existence and heats it up a few notches...the plot is on the hoary side." [He also calls Cox "a Katharine Hepburn with a severe case of potty mouth.") If the Times continues apace, its writers may just exceed the book's own word count with alternate expressions of praise and political piñata-whacking.  read more »

The woman formerly known as Wonkette is doing a reading in New York tonight.  read more »

On a typical afternoon, Abbi Tatton and Jacki Schechner take their place on the set of CNN’s T  read more »