Princess

Madeleine this morning complains of a back-ache (and "I don't want to go to yoga" she adds). I look at her shocked: "Do you really have a back ache? Do you?" She is a bit taken aback and I inform her incredulously: "Last night while you were asleep I put a pea under your mattress!" Madeleine turns to her brother for confirmation that she is being had: "Is it true Eitan? Is it?" Of course he is grinning and we all crack up at the joke. At yoga, Eitan tells everybody he can that I put a pea under Madeleine's bed. Photo from July '05.

Me: how many words in ice cream?
Madeleine: One
How many in "jump"?
Two?


John McCain, are you in there?

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called "liars." They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

The errors in McCain strategist Steve Schmidt’s charges against Obama and Sen. Joe Biden were particularly notable because they seemed unnecessary. Schmidt repeatedly gilded the lily: He exaggerated the Biden family's already problematic ties to the credit card industry; Obama’s embarrassing relationship with a 1960s radical; and an Obama supporter’s over-the-top attack on Sarah Palin when — in each case — the truth would have been damaging enough.

"Any time the Obama campaign is criticized at any level, the critics are immediately derided as liars," Schmidt told reporters.

But as he went on to list a series of stories he thought reporters should be writing about Obama and Biden, in almost every instance he got the details wrong.