Hi! Billy Mays here for Amazing Barack Obama schlock
We had the greatest plans to do an item this morning on all the useless Barack Obama doodads now clogging the veins of political commerce -- on the Democratic side of the store aisle anyway.
We were gonna use the face of super-salesman Billy Mays, who can sell anything and holds the world record for simultaneously being equally enthusiastic on the most TV channels when hardly anyone's watching.
This commercialization of the presidency is only going to get worse before Jan. 20. By then, there may be just as many political button hawkers as tourists on the streets of our nation's capital.
And if you're one of the lucky 10 million on B.O.'s personal e-mail list, you'll no doubt be getting more offers from him and his fundraising cronies.
But then, before writing, as you too should do several times a day, we checked the Technology blog and that Son Of a Blogger David Sarno had already written his version.
They've even got a four-year (4!!) Obama calendar, so you can st
art counting down the days until the next Iowa caucus.
Sarno's saga is much better than anything we could produce. So we're just going to steer you over there for his contest on "Obama detritus."
Be careful with your answers though. He may have planted a trick in there. He's that type.
--Andrew Malcolm
But before you go, you probably need a cellphone alert on each new Ticket item; just register here. RSS feeds are also available here. And Amazon has Ticket Kindle feeds as well.
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Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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