My favorite piece of this story comes one week later, when NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me quiz show addressed the issue of sagging pants, and the audience and panel reacted, almost in total unison, in agreement with President-elect Obama.

This may not get the play the Will.I.Am video got, but the use of a Clinton (?) era ad campaign is interesting nonetheless, and really does show how Obama’s supporters understand the Internet and the “youth vote”.

Imagine this now: Barack Obama gets out at a rest stop, and is mobbed.

The Oregon primary is over, and Sen. Barack Obama (not surprisingly) won the Democratic race.

For reporters, like myself, it was incredibly stressful. In fact, afterwards I almost had to take a trip to the East Coast to give myself some rest.

The one redeeming thing about the primary season, was the opportunity it provided for me to provide some Oregon coverage to a national audience.

For NPR’s political desk, I covered the Oregon senate race for Morning Edition. And then this week, for the national desk, I got to report on a spate of Oregon political resignations for All Things Considered.

The especially fun part of both of those stories, were they were my first appearance on each show. As a professional aside, each new show a reporter can appear on is looked as an accomplishment.

Maybe its not a good idea for Barack Obama to be the next Chuck Norris.

I stumbled onto this via a posting on a newlist for a radio production consortium. Its a phone call that President Bill Clinton made to the crazy leftist radio show Democracy Now, on Pacific public radio stations.

Now, this post isn’t a compliment towards Democracy Now, it isn’t a compliment of the policies and politics discussed by President Bill Clinton, and it certainly isn’t a compliment of the previous Administration’s intelligence and thoughtfulness versus our current Administration (a mediocre and specious argument, if you ask me).

But it is a journalist’s fond remembrance of an era when our President would engage the electorate.

Photo: Time Mag/Wally McNamee/Corbis

Twenty years ago today, Ronald Reagan was in Berlin.

But a very different Berlin than the one I live in now, and that’s where TIME Magazine’s Romesh Ratnesar takes over:

He was scheduled to speak on the western side of the Brandenburg Gate, for years the city’s symbolic dividing line. His speechwriters had drafted an address intended as much for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom Reagan was forging a close relationship, as for the 20,000 people who gathered to hear him speak.

Ron Paul, the Republican-slash-Libertarian Congressman from Texas, is the Dennis Kucinich of the right.

An idealistically-pure, but politically-flawed, presidential aspirant that gets to stand on stage with the other, more-likely presidential contenders until Iowa or New Hampshire — and then get pushed out, as the fields get whittled to legitimate candidates.

Or at least thats what the MSM thought, until news rumors began circulating this weekend that Paul has raised close to $5 million in campaign funds.

According to Free Market News, a libertarian news site:

Now observers close to the campaign are revealing – with some astonishment – that donations to the campaign in recent weeks have pushed the total up to perhaps $4 or $5 million.

This photo has been spreading around Germany, as evidence that German beer is so good that it can kick recovering alcoholics off the wagon.

But a close-up image reveals that the President was drinking near beer, as in non-alcoholic beer, and in fact…wasn’t even drinking German beer at all. It’s the Dutch that get to brag.