Thank goodness for grandparents — how else would Barack Obama connect to audiences?

Barack Obama on Memorial Day:

“I speak to you today with deep humility. My grandfather marched in Patton’s Army, but I cannot know what it is to walk into battle like so many of you. My grandmother worked on a bomber assembly line, but I cannot know what it is for a family to sacrifice like so many of yours have.”

Of course, you’re already familiar with Obama’s grandmother’s body of work:

“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.  I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe..”

For a kinder, gentler view of a candidate’s grandparent, let’s reference Hillary Clinton:

“Some of you know that my grandfather came to Scranton when he was 3 years old,” she said, recalling that he went to work in a local lace mill when he was 11 years old, spending his entire lifetime working in the mill. She remembered that before winning a football scholarship to Penn State, her grandfather played in the “Dream Game,” an annual all-star contest that pits players from Scranton high schools against those from surrounding communities.

So let’s raise a toast to legendary grandparents everywhere.  Prune juice, anyone?

Washington Post reports that Ron Paul has been …

…putting relatives in a slew of key positions and paying them a total of $169,063, according to the latest campaign finance reports.

Paul’s granddaughter Valori Pyeatt helps organize fundraising receptions and has been paid $17,157. Another granddaughter, Laura Paul ($2,724), handles orders for Ron Paul merchandise. Grandson Matthew Pyeatt ($3,251) manages Paul’s MySpace profile. Daughter Peggy Paul ($2,224) helps with campaign logistics. The candidate’s sons Randall and Robert and his daughter Joy Paul LeBlanc have all been paid for campaign travel and for appearing as surrogates at political events.

Who keeps track of all these finances? Paul’s brother and daughter, naturally, who have been paid a combined $62,740 to handle the campaign’s accounting.

Like most Americans, the Extreme Family spent Memorial Day — the most solemn of our nation’s holidays — in the traditional patriotic way, by buying a major appliance.  We bought a dryer, our small humble way of flipping the bird to the evildoers.  We even looked at mattresses, just to prove how serious we are about the global war on terrorism.

After those outbursts of America-love-it-or-leave-it-isms, we did take some time out from our one-family economic revival mission to take in today’s Nationals baseball game against the Milwaukee Brewers.  We cheered Teddy Roosevelt during the fourth inning presidential puppet race.  Teddy, alas, lost again, this time to Abe Lincoln.

We’ll let the Pulitzer-destined blog Let Teddy Win explain what happened:

On a sunny Memorial Day afternoon at Nationals Park, the Washington Nationals completed their home-stand with a bittersweet extra-innings loss to the the Milwaukee Brewers, failing to hold the lead after another great outing by pitcher Jason Bergmann who stretched his string of scoreless innings pitched to 19 2/3.

Teddy Roosevelt kept his less auspicious 145-game streak alive as he took a big lead into the final stretch of the presidents race for the second time this holiday weekend, only to collapse — literally — before reaching the finish line.

So sad.  Particularly because of its Memorial Day implications.  Certainly today, of all days, Teddy should have won, because even though George Washington was a general and Abe Lincoln was a commander-in-chief and Thomas Jefferson was really good at playing Battleship , it would have been nice to give the Rough Rider a win after his glory in the Spanish-American war.

Alas, even those memories don’t amount to a hill of beans on Memorial Day.  Makes us want to redouble our patriotism by buying a new stove.

Not to be confused, of course, with John McCain’s tryout…

From today’s Washington Post, a timely article on Dewey Beach’s rebranding efforts:

“Although some businesses in Dewey — particularly the Starboard and the Bottle and Cork nightclub — have made major efforts to sell themselves in the Washington, Philadelphia and New York regions, the latest effort is the town’s first marketing effort.”

and

“He [Starboard owner Steve Montgomery] frequently encounters married couples who met in Dewey group houses — a list that includes U.S. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — who want to return to town with their families.”

It’s hard to imagine future Chief Justice Roberts and his future wife Jane hanging out at the Starboard or the Bottle and Cork a decade or so ago.

But, then again, it depends on the entertainment selection…

Quite an article by Howard Kurtz in today’s Washington Post about Posties taking buyouts:

Let’s not bury the lead: This is a rough time for the newspaper business, a rough time for The Washington Post and a rough time for me.

And the culprit?  You guessed it — largely the Internet.

But here’s one interesting admission:

In one sense, the Web is a blessing. Daily circulation for the newsprint Post, now 673,000, may be down from 813,000 in 2000, but we are drawing an eye-opening 9.4 million unique visitors online each month, 85 percent of them from outside the D.C. circulation area. Those readers don’t bring in the cash that print subscribers do — given the gotta-be-free mentality of the Web — but they do expand our reach.

He’s right.  And interesting to add to that observation the case made in “Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles in Backroom Power,” the wonderful new book by John Harwood and Gerald Seib.  Check out page 165: “Today, the hot new political force is the Internet.”  And: “For both parties, such ‘viral marketing’ has largely supplanted inside-the-Beltway gossip among insiders as the engine of consequential ‘buzz’ on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Yes, there is a new model.  The web, blogs, the Internet.  Mourned by some, celebrated by others.   But it can’t be ignored.

The latest Capitol File arrived over the weekend, the “Late Spring 2008″ edition.

Fascinating cover story on Craig Ferguson.  It begins:

Craig Ferguson, host of The Late Late Show on CBS, will entertain at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner this year. The mercurial Glasgow-born comic, just weeks into his American citizenship, will address President Bush, along with First Lady Laura Bush and an audience of Washington, DC, insiders, at what Ferguson calls “the Oscars for politicians.” And there’s no telling what he’ll say.

Actually, there is some telling, because he said it a month ago.  As Ferguson would put it in his own unique patter: Tardy — there, I said it.  You’re welcome to see what we thought about him then (spoiler: quite favorable) before watching “Back to the Future” on cable.  We always thought that dinner was like the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance.

Here at the glass-enclosed nerve center of Extreme Mortman, we’re giving the staff the rest of the day off to get home in time for the showing of HBO’s “Recount.”

One thing in particular we’ll be curious about: the movie’s treatment of the infamous “Brooks Brothers Riot” from December 2000.

The Washington Post’s Al Kamen did a good job of telling their tale, and in January 2005 he did a “Where are they now” retrospective.

We’re curious: does anyone know of the main players’ whereabouts since?

This week’s Weekly Standard parody:

In her “Shenanigans” column in Politico, Anne Schroeder Mullins has this item about a spotting of Hillary Clinton booster Terry McAuliffe at the Palm:

Some guy approaches the table and Terry screams out “Where’s my movie?” to which the man produces a DVD and hands it to Terry. Terry then says at the top of his lungs: “No one does porn like me.” To which the guy replies “well, Terry, you have to be at least 6 inches to be in my movies.” …

So we asked McAuliffe about his lunch. He tells us that its “almost correct.” (Granted we didn’t mention the phone call to him.) He says he took his finance staff out for lunch “to celebrate the $22 million month” they had and that guy from point #2 above was Joey Pants! (Actor.) So he came over, Terry says, and gave him a DVD his of his new movie. Terry said “I thanked him and asked when I was going to be in a movie. Mac Cummings, our internet director said the only movie I could get would be a porn movie and my response was, ‘I would be great in a porn movie….as long as I kept my clothes on.’ Everyone roared.”

Sp what would Terry McAuliffe’s porn movie DVD cover look like?  Here’s what we’re supposing…