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Yes, the Hardball host started a fundraising phenomenon in the 6th congressional district in Minnesota with his Oct. 17 MSNBC interview with incumbent Michele Bachmann. She called for a media investigation into members of congress to see which of them might be anti-American.

But, Chris, come on. Be a little generous to the internet effect. You implied on Monday night's show that it was entirely the power of your show that drove outraged viewers to contribute hundreds of thousands to Bachmann's opponent.

You did good, but what you did was to start a viral effect. Check out the blogs that helped spread the influence of your interview in the first few days. Factor in the rabid use among politics junkies of microblogging tools like Twitter that have replaced our RSS readers to pass around these blog and video links, and there you go.

A single interview in isolation would not have caused the Democratic National Committee to take notice of Elwyn Tinklenberg's campaign. Thank you for getting the snowball rolling, but individual contributions flooded in from the combined influence of your interview and the net effect. The DNC recognized the resultant phenomenon. There was a team at work here, and as quarterback it would be gracious of you to acknowledge the whole squad.

I was about to get all huffy, but no.

Hulu offers embeddable video. If you're trying it out with a local file, as I did, and thought it wasn't resizable -- that it was clipped rather than scaled from the 512-pixel width -- just publish it anyway. It actually does scale like YouTube or most other embeds, once you get it online.

For example here is last night's SNL Weekend Update.

I've limited the width to 450 pixels because that's the space I have available for it in the main column of my blog.

These days, to figure the proportion for such things, I fire up Paint Shop Pro. (I don't want to pay for Photoshop at home, and though I remember how to solve for X, I've grown too lazy to haul out the pencil.)

I think I threw away my proportion wheel 35 years ago right after I took a newspaper editing class. You'd measure a photo, then slide the wheel to match up the photo width with the column width. The wheel calculated the column height, so you could draw a box of the correct number of column inches on your layout, and a percentage, so you could scribble it on the photo with a grease pencil.

Who wrote the first two words that came out of Tamarin Hall's mouth this morning at the 9 o'clock hour?

"Running scared."

She was talking about the market. Hardly helpful.

Newspapers, magazines, politics blogs, network news and cable news: please don't be seduced by the controversy the McCain campaign is introducing into the race.

You know they're angling for wall-to-wall coverage on a Rev. Wright level in an effort to distract us from news about the economy. It can't work this year unless you enable it. Do you imagine we care about what some old hippie did 40 years ago when our personal economies are crumbling around us this morning?

If you must, give the latest smear four inches or two minutes -- the way you might treat whatever happened in Iraq or Afghanistan today.

Same goes for liberal bloggers and Olbermann and Maddow. Sure, you want to lead the outrage, but doesn't that only feed the beast? People are interested this cycle. They're going to watch and read anyway. You don't need to stoop to this.

Do the right thing. Don't buy into the contrived drama. You're better than that if you want to be. Thanks.

Maybe this widget has been around for a while but I only noticed it today at the bottom of a story about disputed war casualty counts. (You may have to log in to WaPo.) Made in Flash and served on the Clearspring widget platform. I'll check out Clearspring.

Patrick Radden Keefe story in The New York Times.

The Notre Dame physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi studied one obvious network -- the Internet -- and found that any two unrelated Web pages are separated by only 19 links. After Sept. 11, Valdis Krebs, a Cleveland consultant who produces social network "maps" for corporate and nonprofit clients, decided to map the hijackers. He started with two of the plotters, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, and, using press accounts, produced a chart of the interconnections — shared addresses, telephone numbers, even frequent-flier numbers — within the group. All of the 19 hijackers were tied to one another by just a few links, and a disproportionate number of links converged on the leader, Mohamed Atta.

Nice to see the former presidents on Larry King. They seem so friendly, I can't help but think it's good for bi-partisanship. How did 43 turn out so unlike his pop, who seems to be smart, has a clue, is his own man.

Wow. I'm home from work with a sore throat, and watching the news developing on the shooting of a terrorist suspect by an air marshall at the Miami airport.

As of this moment it sounds like the passenger was manic but not a terrorist, though he did say he had a bomb. He seemed to be reaching for something when the marshall fired. It's almost exactly like the scenario on the London tube, isn't it? Too bad for the victim, but you can kind of understand how it happened.