Who knew this weekend would turn out to be a festival of moles.

First this:

“Breach,” a superior account of the bring-down of the notorious FBI mole Robert Hanssen.

Then this:

President Bush had two moles removed from his left temple yesterday.

Makes me hungry for this:

White House press secretary Tony Snow, at today’s news briefing:

The President doesn’t have to park in front of C-SPAN and watch the debate all day. He knows what the views are.

From the Jewish Journal:

I haven’t seen Jews behave this badly toward each other since Al Franken said he wants to defeat fellow Jew Norm Coleman.  B’Shalom, Extreme Mortman

From today’s news briefing with White House press secretary Tony Snow:

Q Slides from a pre-war briefing show that by this point, the U.S. expected that the Iraqi army would be able to stabilize the country and there would be as few as 5,000 U.S. troops there. What went wrong?

MR. SNOW: I’m not sure anything went wrong. At the beginning of the Civil War, people thought it would all be over at Manassas.

Surely you remember when Lisa Simpson asked this of Montgomery Burns: “Mr. Burns: your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?”

Couldn’t help but think of that watching MSNBC’s Alison Stewart just now interviewing MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (Zowie! How’d Alison manage to score that huge “get”?) and witness her muster the courage to grill him with this stunner : “Why do you think [your] show has really caught fire in the past year?”

Olbermann responded by saying, in part, that everyday someone “stops me on the street and says something that’s cartoonishly nice.”

Cartoonishly nice?  You mean like this guy?

This Wall Street Journal story on credit cards and illegal immgrants …

In the latest sign of the U.S. banking industry’s aggressive pursuit of the Hispanic market, Bank of America Corp. has quietly begun offering credit cards to customers without Social Security numbers - typically illegal immigrants.

… sparked this entertaining graphic in a Free Republic thread:

First, last week’s answer — Nancy Landon Kassebaum — and the winning questions:

• Quinn: Whose father suffered the biggest loss by any presidential candidate after the final pre-election polls actually showed him likely to be a clear winner?
  Whose father set the standard for presidential campaigns that other Kansans, such as Dole and Specter, would try to emulate by losing badly?
  Whose father was a very decent guy who probably would have been a lot better for the country if he had won than FDR was?
  Who was herself a moderate but very decent, admirable senator from Kansas?
• Peter Roff: Connect former Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum to former GOP Senate Leader Everett McKinely Dirkson in six steps or less.
• DADVocate: What former senator from Kansas is married to a former senator from Tennessee?  (Answer this and you’ll be half way to the answer of Peter Roff’s question.)
• Lee Annis: By the way, when is Mortman going to start giving medals for right answers, say like the one Senator Kassebaum Baker is wearing?
• Joe: Who was the first woman to serve in the Senate witout either having first served in the House or been appointed on thje death of her husband?

Now, this week’s extreme trivia answer: Sen. James Buckley.  What’s the question?

Drudge and Glenn Reynolds were all over this hilarious irony:

“HOUSE HEARING ON ‘WARMING OF THE PLANET’ CANCELED AFTER SNOW/ICE STORM.”

Like a permalink to the permafrost, inside the icy and treacherous Beltway today this theme is picking up steam. Check out this graphic, now making the slushy rounds of Washington:

From today’s Boston Globe:

It’s been his foil, his punch line, and his source of political achievement, but yesterday Massachusetts earned just two passing mentions in Mitt Romney’s presidential announcement.

Not sure which you should read first:

Howard Kurtz making this observation today about John Edwards and his departed bloggers …

My sense is that candidates want the hipness infusion and netroots support that bloggers offer but would like to finesse being associated with online fire-breathers–in other words, they want it both ways. Edwards, as I’ve written, paid some bloggers to cover his announcement tour, and hired a TV crew to provide “behind-the-scenes” footage of the candidate. But the Edwards campaign has had almost nothing to say about this flap, often not returning calls or responding to e-mails.

… Or Stephanie Cutter, who was communications director for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004, writing this in today’s Politico:

Don’t let blogs drive your strategy. Blogs play an important role in the national political conversation, and their role continues to evolve over time. In 2004, they helped drive national story lines. In 2006, they held each party’s feet to the fire. The bottom line is that when the blogs agree, they drive a message faster than any other medium. When they don’t agree, they are an important gut check. They need to be talked with and listened to, but keep them in perspective; don’t get knocked off your message.

Seems to me that Kurtz nails it.  Since this is the 20th anniversary of Fatal Attraction, it might be time for political bloggers to quote Glenn Close’s character: “I’m not gonna be ignored.”