Last year, former advertising executive Charlotte Beersresigned from her job as head of a U.S. State Department effort to improve America's image in the Middle East. This week she spoke to another group with image problems - direct marketers, the people who send you junk mail and other unwanted commercial solicitations. Beers gave them the same advice she gave "brand America": they should "tell positive stories about what direct marketing is about."

"Hardly a day goes by without someone sending me a link to a video, Flash animation, or MP3 file related to the U.S. political campaign," obsserves Steve Yelvington. "It's the first time that multimedia files have been so thoroughly woven through the national political conversation. JibJab's hilarious animations, "This Land" and "Good to Be in D.C.," have been widely covered, but there's much more.

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush," journalist Ron Suskind writes. "He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.